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"Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom.
And in all your getting, get understanding." (Prov. 4:7)
How do you get wisdom?
1) Be humble.
If you're not willing to acknowledge that beliefs you held in the past were wrong, none of the means of wisdom-getting will help. ("The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, But fools despise wisdom and instruction." - Prov. 1:7)
2) Read the Bible. All of it. A lot.
Apart from the attitude of humility and submission we bring to it, knowing Scripture is THE principle means of growing in wisdom. In order to think biblically, you have to know the Bible. In order to easily and effectively measure things against the standard of Scripture, you have to be heavily familiar with it. Familiarity is developed with usage. Just read it -- again and again. Study is good, but it's also slow. Not everything has to be study; just READ it. And don't ignore portions you find difficult, uncomfortable, or boring.
3) Develop a habit of asking, "What does the Bible say about ____?" "Is this thing I'm reading/hearing consistent with Scripture?" Practice this until it's as natural as breathing to do this *automatically* every time you take in information or ideas.
(This is much harder to do if you don't have much familiarity with the Bible, which is why #2 is so important.)
"And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God." (Rom. 12:2)
4) Ask God for wisdom.
Maybe this should have been first. But it only helps so much to ask for wisdom if you're not going to live in a manner that leads to wisdom. The primary way God gives us wisdom is through His Word.
"If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him." (Ja. 1:5)
5) Seek out the wise. Keep company with them, and seek their counsel when called for.
"He who walks with wise men will be wise, But the companion of fools will be destroyed." (Prov. 13:20)
I'm seeing a concerning trend of advertising from conservative companies claiming to be providing education "without ideology."
Folks, education without ideology doesn't exist. Thinking you can separate the two is what got us into the mess we're in, in the first place.
*Everyone* has bias. *Everyone* has a worldview. The only real questions are "which one?" and "are you AWARE of yours?"
Perhaps these companies are just trying not to trigger censorship bots by specifying *which* ideologies their products are free of, but I'm concerned they've fallen into the trap of simply being *unaware* of their *own*.
And that's dangerous, too, even if the ideology itself is a sounder one.
You just omitted half of the definition you, yourself cited.
YOU CHANGED the definition.
Balance.
Integrity.
Glory to God.
This is the kind of BIG impact we, as Christian homemakers, want our lives and homes to have. Yet all too often we're too busy being overwhelmed by all. the. things.
Learn to strip away all the outside expectations and be effective at what really matters, by learning to use who you Are, what you Believe, and Conduct-driving Concepts to take dominion over your life, to-do list, and your own little corner of the world.
I think this is the key. Techy people can get around a LOT. Non-techy people are limited to what's made available in user-friendly format.
Case in point: several Bitcoin wallet providers are unavailable in the US due to "regulations." Are there other options? Sure. Are they practically accessible for newbies or non-developers? For the most part, no.
So in one sense, Bitcoin is unregulable, but in another sense it's HIGHLY controllable.
I think Nostr is a similar thing. Fundamentally, it might be accessible to everyone and resistant to censorship. But whether or not ordinary people can access and use it in censorship-free clients is an entirely separate question.
(For context, I'm mid-level tech-wise. I can write HTML from scratch and do some basic troubleshooting of simple script languages. Back in the day, I did some simple BASIC programming and have worked a little with Linux. But I'm not a developer or programmer and don't know any real, modern programming languages. I'm not even fluent with CSS. So not super-techy, but probably more knowledgeable than your average Joe.)
Help a total Bitcoin newbie out, please. I had an Exodus wallet, but they use Wallet of Satoshi, which stopped serving the U.S. due to "regulations."
I'm apparently thoroughly tech-stupid where Bitcoin is concerned, so I need something pretty dummy-proof to get started. Blink or Strike? (Or is there a better option?) And how do I go about getting my current funds transferred from a non-Lightning Exodus wallet to the new wallet?
Maybe. Bitcoin's actual usage is complicated and confusing and I'm not a developer, so I'm doing my best. But I'm also not computer-STUPID, and if I can't get Bitcoin to work with reasonable accessibility for real-life purposes, then the average masses can't, either. All I know is that Exodus used Wallet of Satoshi as the API provider for its Lightning Wallet, and Wallet of Satoshi said that "due to regulations" they no longer serve the U.S. 🤷
Which highlights concerns I raised several years ago. Bitcoin itself may be decentralized, but as long as the means people have to use to *access* it, either for storage or payment, are regulated, that doesn't necessarily mean that much. (I had in mind internet and cellular access, not the actual wallet access, but that possibly makes this even worse.)
Fiat money is problematic for being disconnected from any concrete standard, but there's also something to be said for being able to hold physical currency in your physical pocket and hand it over physically to the owner of a physical business to procure a product or service. Cryptocurrency, by nature, will *always* require a "middleman," even if that middleman is only a device.
There's also the reality that Nostr has a higher barrier to entry at the moment. That has a natural filtering effect. Consequently, I suspect that currently the average IQ of Nostr is higher than the average IQ of Twitter.
I think it's the lack of algorithm that does that, more than anything else. I've noticed that Facebook seems to show my posts primarily to those most likely to be angered by them, rather than to those most likely to appreciate them. And then because the algorithms are also built "the rich get richer" style (those with more interaction stay higher in the feed) that feeds into itself.
I miss the time-based feeds (esp. on Pinterest) that allowed little-known content to be discovered if you logged on at the right time to see it.
To say I was "offended" by the Last Supper depiction would be the wrong word. I was grieved by it. It's not something I have any interest in supporting. But God doesn't need me to take offense on His behalf; He's God above all gods and He can handle Himself.
What I *am* offended by is so-called friends gaslighting us over that depiction, and communicating that we don't have a *right* to be bothered by it.
We're not stupid. We recognized the bacchanalia. We also recognized that it intentionally used Da Vinci's Last Supper as a focal point for that, thus turning our Lord's sacrament -- that focal point and remembrance of the self-sacrificial very heart of our faith -- INTO a pagan orgy of self-indulgence. The fact that it portrays a bacchanalia isn't a substitute for its being a portrayal of The Last Supper; it's WHY the portrayal of The Last Supper is a mockery.
#olympics2024 #paris2024 #lastsupper #christianity #davinci #mythology #paganism
Lightning wallet has stopped working in Exodus due to *regulation*. So much for freedom from regulation being a key benefit of bitcoin.
#bitcoin #government
Being black and/or female doesn't make someone competent any more than being white and/or male makes someone competent.
Being capable of doing a job well is independent of skin color and (usually/mostly) independent of sex.
#Primal content filters seem to be broken. For everyone, or just for me? Seeing highly pornographic material when browsing, which is especially not cool with kids at home. If #nostr is to be practically usable for me, I need content filterng to work with at least moderate reliability. (I know nothing's perfect.)
In both instances, it depends entirely on who you're following.
The Church has adopted a lot of worldly thinking.
We keep telling women they should invest their time and money preparing for a "backup career" which, theoretically, they plan to never have (except that it is, in fact, THE thing they're "planning" for).
Because it's our expectation that they should be required to protect and provide for *themselves* should they never marry, or be widowed or abandoned. And that if they can't, they should beg the secular government to take up the slack.
If a woman in such a situation has the means to provide for herself, that's great. But it's not biblical to lay that weight on them? The Bible teaches that *families* and, in their absence, *churches* are to provide for widows. (It also teaches that a woman is under her father's headship until she marries, so an unmarried woman should still be provided for by her family of origin.)
The fact that everything is not always ideal doesn't mean we should just ditch biblical thinking altogether and replace it with worldly "wisdom" as our starting point and default.
The net result is that thousands of women are living their "backup plan" *because that's what they set themselves up for.* And families are suffering for it.
#christianity #biblicalwomanhood #biblicalmanhood #thechurch #biblicalworldview #christianfamily #patriarchy
Yep. Had one, in fact. Are you aware that an ectopic pregnancy does NOT involve a baby "in the womb" and treatment for ectopic pregnancy is NOT abortion?
(An ectopic pregnancy is also not, in the days of modern medicine, the automatic death sentence we're told it is.)
Abortion advocates have intentionally muddied the waters on this, in order to mislead people like yourself into helping support the baby slaughter they delight in, but these have always been understood to be distinct. Even Planned Parenthood's website used to acknowledge this distinction:
"Treating an ectopic pregnancy isn’t the same thing as getting an abortion. Abortion is a medical procedure that when done safely, ends a pregnancy that’s in your uterus."
Nate's right that you're asking a completely different question. It's also total nonsense.
It's NEVER medically necessary to murder a child in the womb to save the mother's life. Occasionally it's necessary to deliver the baby early, with the unfortunate consequence that the baby dies. But it's never necessary to intentionally kill the child.
So this is easy to use for a newbie? This seems like it addresses some of my biggest objections to/frustrations with bitcoin in general. And also, I have no idea how to access my bitcoin for practical purposes right now, since Exodus's Lightning wallet is no more, so I need to get it moved to something more compatible across platforms, etc.
How chunky is it? Like, could you store it in an actual wallet (the kind people carry ordinary currency in), or is it too bulky for that?
That's helpful; thank you!
In fairness, after probably 8 hours of attempts to get set up with Nostr, I almost gave up. As much as we hate censorship, there's something to be said for the closed centralized platform you can *get to work* over the decentralized protocol you can't.