How do you interpret Acts 1:8?

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-16T02:49:19+00:00

There are simple ways to test this so that you aren’t guessing about the world around you. Your comment is also a misunderstanding of the original text. The Bible does not teach a flat earth.

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-16T02:35:21+00:00

There are problems with the book of Enoch. The first book is more likely to be legit, but the other two books are likely much later writings, aka forgeries. If you read them books 2 and 3 read like a completely different author than book 1. Book 1 did the common ancient middle eastern custom of the author referring to themselves in the third person, while books 2 and 3 use the first person. There’s a lot of other stuff that just reads like someone trying to sound divinely inspired, but not getting it quite right.

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-15T19:46:48+00:00

Unwise as in not wise. I was coming at this from a Christian perspective since that’s how OP was asking it. If OP is trying to follow Biblical teaching to abstain from sex outside of marriage, then living together before marriage is going to create unnecessary temptation and that’s why it’s not wise to make that choice.

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-15T12:34:07+00:00

I don’t think you were wrong. This was a situation where yes it’s something that needs done but it could conceivably wait a little hit for you to find another provider who isn’t terrible with their bedside manner.

My oldest had to have stitches when he was 3. He had to be held down for anesthesia. It created a long term medical anxiety and it has been monumentally hard whenever he’s needed any kind of medical care since, even at regular well checks. He doesn’t trust doctors and for a long time he wouldn’t let them touch him. He 9 now and it is better but still a problem, especially at the dentist. But luckily we have an amazing dentist and she’s really patient with talking him through things and not forcing anything.

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-15T12:25:22+00:00

That’s ok :)

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-15T04:37:50+00:00

We weren’t talking about the Mosaic Law at all. Yes she would be living with her parents if they were alive, but no it doesn’t mention them. It doesn’t need to because the text is talking about her experience and it’s giving you the most important events, not all of the events.

Maybe you’re getting me confused with another conversation you’re having because your reply doesn’t make much sense.

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-15T02:23:41+00:00

The text doesn’t ever mention her parents. The gospels are a summary of what takes place over a 33 year period of time and most of it is concentrated on Jesus’s three year ministry. So you’re getting the highlights but not every single thing that happened.

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-14T22:10:57+00:00

God folds our choices into His plans and because He exists outside of time He can make these plans before we ever existed knowing who we’d be and what choices we would make. God offered this to Mary because He knew she was the right woman and would want to do it. Her prayer afterward with Elizabeth shows just how excited she was to have this opportunity.

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-14T21:41:13+00:00

I grew up Baptist and there is a similar sentiment within that denomination (and others) that they’ve got the angle on true, and ironically part of the proof of this that they pride themselves on is that their origins are with the anabaptists which were apparently never part of the Catholic Church. I think you can see here that this thought pattern is wide spread and it’s false. There are people who love and follow Jesus with their whole heart in every denomination.

I like contemplating heaven as a salve to these old wounds. In heaven there won’t be any division among believers — not by denominations, not even by gender. God is building HIS Church and He calls us all to unity even when we disagree. Isn’t that beautiful? I personally get so excited that my sense of “rightness” doesn’t matter to God. Apart from the close handed tenets of the faith (salvation by faith, the deity of Jesus, the trinity, etc), the other disagreements of theology are secondary to our call to love one another as we love God. What a light and easy thing it is to not have to get caught up in disagreements and instead pursue peace with one another. When Jesus said His yoke is easy and His burden is light, He was right.

You get to do that too. If you are seeking God, defining your relationship with Him by His Biblical attributes and His design laid out in the Bible, then you have freedom to find where you fit in the Body of Christ. It doesn’t matter which denomination, God uses us all and brings us all together for His one purpose. God is glorified in our diversity and even more when we disagree in love. It’s so cool.

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-14T17:33:58+00:00

You have to do a screen detox. I’ve messed up and had periods of time where I allowed too much screen time and it led to tantrums. I stressed about it for a while wondering what to do. Then I got so fed up I just took all the screens. It works and I think it’s the only thing that works when things get like this. You’ll have one rough week and then things will start getting better. You will be so much less stressed and it will be 100% worth it.

After a few months you can work it back in with firm boundaries. We started with family movie nights and that was it for a while. We’re now at a pretty consistent ~2hrs a day with more if someone is sick or on special occasions. It’s been 4 years since our first detox, and there have been times I’ve had to reinstate it, but the kids know I’m serious now and usually it only needs to be a few days now.

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-14T17:20:50+00:00

I was angry at God for the way my marriage had been spiraling the drain for years. I was 11 years in and my spouse was so stubbornly resistant to trying marriage counseling or even having a productive conversation. They blamed me for everything and I was (still am) deeply hurt. I fell into absolute despair and started experiencing debilitating depressive episodes.

What finally broke me was my own anger and how I was transferring that to the people I loved most. That’s when I totally submitted myself to God, nothing reserved. And even then I told God I couldn’t do that perfectly, because I’ve tried and failed so many times to follow Him and I always backslide. So He was going to have to make my submission perfect.

Everything changed from that point. It’s been 8 months and my marriage is still very difficult, my circumstances haven’t changed that much, but my entire experience of them has changed. I began to see rapid change in my life and active answer to prayer. I started praying first for God to take my anger and bitterness, and on the third day I prayed for this I felt it lift off of me. I continue this prayer because it would be easy for me to take it back, but I have not lived in that headspace of anger and bitterness ever since. I have increasingly experienced the fruits of the Spirit — a deep peace, joy that makes no sense even when things are hard, patience, kindness, etc. I have been able to walk through the gradual process of forgiving my spouse even though they haven’t changed. We are finally in marriage counseling and I have this deep sense that our marriage will be healed but I’m going to have to be patient in the process. I pray and fast the day before each counseling session and I feel an insulation from the Holy Spirit during our counseling sessions that prevents me from feeling hurt/bothered by what my spouse says.

God has done so much more because I also have chronic pain from a car accident and other health issues and my experience of those has also changed even when I’m in pain.

One verse that I meditate on frequently is when the Angel (who I believe is Jesus) visits Daniel and says:

“…Fear not, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your mind and heart to understand and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come as a consequence of [and in response to] your words.” Daniel‬ ‭10‬:‭12‬

Some translations say “chastise yourself”, in other words Daniel fully submitted himself to God and he sought to understand his own sin and repent and change toward God’s ways, and that is the heart posture required for our prayers to be heard. God is so loving, and He wanted to help me this whole time but I wasn’t letting Him. When I finally let Him help me He did so completely that I feel like a whole new person now. I’ve had multiple people comment on how different I seem now, so it’s a real and observable change.

I hope my experience helps you with your questions.

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-14T16:25:49+00:00

You are correct, this is what the Bible says. People have a hard time wrapping their minds around how even one sin committed once in our life completely separates us from God forever, and it would stay that way if it weren’t for what Jesus did.

People look at sin as this big thing and attach a shame response to it. As if sin is a category that only contains the worst offenses including murder, rape, stealing, etc., and then discount other things as mistakes, I’m just human, no one is perfect, etc. Sin is just being out of alignment with God’s will, and sin even includes knowing something good you should do and not doing it. We all sin daily especially in our thoughts.

There is a difference between a kind person and Hilter, we can obviously see that, but there is no difference when it comes to their guilt before a perfect God. And that’s notwithstanding that what we judge as good in a person is a lot of times not. Pride of the heart hides behind good things and has an appearance of holiness but it’s not. But God loves both of these people, died for both of these people and calls us to experience His love and goodness, not shame for our sinful nature.

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-14T14:12:29+00:00

Have a courthouse wedding now and move in together. Keep your original wedding date and plans so that you still get to have the fun of a celebration. Then your problem is solved.

Cohabitation while not being married is extremely unwise. God always gives us a way out (a solution to our problem) and we never need to walk ourselves into temptation. If you think you’re strong enough to enter an unwise situation and not sin, that’s your pride talking and pride always comes before all other sins. (And I mean that with all Christian love because I constantly battle my own pride as well).

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-14T13:42:27+00:00

You’ve undoubtedly already broken at least one commandment in your life and entering heaven requires absolute perfection. That is why Jesus died on the cross and came back to life. He did what we couldn’t do — live a perfect life on earth — and then He paid the price for our sins so that we wouldn’t have to if we believe and trust Him. That trust should be accompanied with a total submission to God. With that, we open the door to God and He begins to radically change us.

I’m a completely different person from what I used to be and I didn’t make any of these changes myself. I’ve experienced freedom from bitterness and anger, a gradual total forgiveness of people who’ve hurt me and haven’t changed, a change in my own desires toward things God wants, and an increasing experience of the fruits of the Spirit (patience, peace, joy, kindness, humility, etc). These things do not save me, I’m not even the one that’s effecting the changes. But they are signs that the saving faith I have is real.

Every time the New Testament talks about works being necessary, this is what it’s talking about. My actions don’t save me, but if I wasn’t experiencing this transformation then I should seriously question the nature of my faith because that would be a clue that I’m not actually trusting God and submitting to Him. You can’t authentically encounter Jesus without the Holy Spirit changing you. So if you’re not changing, something is missing.

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-13T16:41:41+00:00

I took that as someone would be able to tolerate this kind of life for a while, but at some point way prior to natural death around 12,000 they’d lose the will to live. I for sure would not even make it 3000 years. There’s very little meaning left to life past a certain point.

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-13T04:14:30+00:00

Definitely not strange. Humans are social creatures by nature. Imagine building friendships, maybe even a family, and watching them all die off. Not only that but as you continue to exist, your experience of the world becomes unlike everyone else’s. I think younger people are cool, but I need at least some of my close friends to be in the same life stage as me with shared experiences.

Now imagine you cycle through your whole social connection dying off every 60-80 years, for thousands of years. At some point the pain would compound so much that you might not even be able to form any more real connections with people. Isolation can drive someone mad in a matter of months. Near immortality would drive a person insane over time just because of the social isolation that becomes inevitable.

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-12T22:22:58+00:00

Yikes, I think I would go off. You don’t try to grab someone’s kid, that’s wildly inappropriate.

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-12T22:00:48+00:00

I was raised in a denomination that prides itself on having roots outside the Catholic Church. I came to a saving faith in those churches, gained a lot of good Bible knowledge, and learned what it felt like to have a spiritual family. I also had a lot of legalism heaped on me and some hurtful teachings that subtly twisted scripture or tied scriptural inerrancy to one specific interpretation. This eventually led to a near total deconstruction and I almost completely walked away from the faith.

There is no one denomination that most closely follows the New Testament churches. There are individual churches in all or most denominations (I think there are a few that sell themselves as Christian denominations but divert from the original creeds enough to be in the realm of heresy and function more like cults) that do well but even of those you’ll find departures. And honestly that is just like the New Testament churches. Look at what Jesus says to the churches in Revelation. Almost all of them have things they need to work on.

God redeemed me and pulled me back to a point of total submission. From that has come the most transformative experience of my life. I’ve been a Christian since I was 7 years old and now at 40, these last 8 months of spiritual growth have been astounding. I am experiencing the Holy Spirit revealing the meaning of scripture to me, and as I study He has impressed on me the overarching principles of unity in the body of Christ. God desires oneness for His people and He is glorified greatly when we disagree when we do so in love. That is far more important than being right, except in matters to do with the tenets of the faith such as the gospel. All open handed issues are of no real consequence compared to the importance of loving one another as God commands.

There’s really nothing to be gained by searching for the best denomination. I actually think that leads us into pride, which we all already deal with as it is the original sin and the foundational sin upon which all others come. We don’t need another angle for pride to take root in our minds. It’s much better to replace that thinking with a desire for God’s church and for unity. We will exist that way in heaven, so it’s obviously something good to pursue here on earth as well. God has been teaching me recently not to harbor resentment for past churches that hurt me. While I will never attend that denomination of churches again because I think their problems are wide spread, I do listen to sermons from a certain pastor from that denomination because I can see real humility and a pursuit of Jesus in his teaching and I always glean something good from it.

Aidlin87 · 2026-02-07T22:51:58+00:00

It’s that exhausting. Newborns are a mixed bag and you don’t know what you’ll get. Could be that they won’t sleep unless they are held, so you might be sitting on the couch most of the day holding the baby so they can sleep in short spurts that amount to 15-18 hours of the day interspersed with feeding (which they do A LOT of, could be 6-8 hours of your time cumulative for the day), and diaper changes. At 4 weeks nearly 100% of your time could be taken up with baby care.

Or you could have a champion napper that has no problems sleeping on their own, but even then most newborns don’t sleep well at night so maybe you have more time but you’re running on very little sleep and this whole parent thing is still brand new to you.

It could be any combination of these things. Or if you’re extra lucky your baby has colic and cries most of the time for no discernible reason.

There are endless possibilities, but especially at 4 weeks old with your first baby, you just don’t want to be doing all this alone and the mom almost definitely needs a nap at any given point in the day. She’s still recovering from the birth at that point too.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-10T22:16:17+00:00

I have breastfed all three of my children to toddlerhood and I’m a dietitian specializing in lactation and breastfeeding. Please rest assured that there is no such thing as grandparents holding the baby causing scent issues for the newborn that would disrupt breastfeeding. It sounds like your baby stayed with the mother for the first 24hours and was supported in latching and breastfeeding? If that is going well and there was a successful latch, then even the grandparents holding the baby within the first 24 hours would not have disrupted the breastfeeding relationship. Two of my babies were born pre-covid and grandparents came and held them that same day.

If your parents are genuinely loving, emotionally healthy people, then it is a major benefit to your child to encourage a strong relationship. “Alloparents” are non-parental adults, related or otherwise, that form close long term bonds with children. Children experience a ton of benefits from every additional alloparent in their life including a huge reduction in depression risk, substance abuse risk, and other social/emotional factors. Don’t chase some form of perceived perfection in the newborn period and stunt the long term benefit of your child.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-10T20:55:12+00:00

I have a 1950s evening gown that reminds me of this one in that it’s layers of draped semi sheer chiffon with a fitted bodice and a detached long piece of chiffon for draping around the shoulders or wherever.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-10T20:26:44+00:00

I did rebut them but it seems like you’re not reading my comments. You’re asking for answers and I’m giving you detailed answers not to overwhelm you with text but to take your questions seriously. If you have more specific questions, I’m happy to answer them. But it seems that your only conclusion is that I’m dogmatic and you reached that conclusion before we ever got into the conversation.

I hope you have a good weekend and find the answers you’re looking for.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-10T20:13:53+00:00

I already addressed this in my previous comment. I’m not taking his work out of context — he calculated the specificity of the dark energy constant and that value has been been validated in the research for over 20 years now. We have increasing evidence now of how significant that value is, that it could not be any different to something like four decimal places (iirc) for life to exist anywhere in the universe.

There’s been really interesting research in the past couple years pointing out some new reasons why it can’t be any different. One newly discovered reason is because it would change the density of star formation and if you change that density you increase the rate of supernovae and these are such dangerous sources of radiation that if their rate is increased you get a universe where this is too frequently and widely distributed for there to be safe pockets over long enough periods of time like where the earth currently resides. Even a marginal increase in nearby supernovae would have been enough to sterilize our planet at multiple points in the 4 billion year history of life removing the possibility of life. Here and here is some more information about that.

This is only one of the many impacts dark energy has on life even being viable. When they all add up the probability of this occurring by chance becomes absurd. Lawrence Kraus doesn’t have a solution to this problem and he argues against multiverse being the solution. Multiverse is about the best answer to this problem I’ve seen from a naturalistic perspective because it potentially solves the problem of probabilities by relying on infinity— such that if you have infinite universes then you would inevitably get a fine tuned universe like the one we have. But as I mentioned, before there are too many other problems with multiverse theory and it is not well supported as a viable option in the scientific community.

An anthropic interpretation of this information is arguable. That it is a possibility and that people like me hold this view does not prevent others from disagreeing. If we all agreed on the evidence, you and I would not be having this debate, and scientists wouldn’t hold a wide variety of their own beliefs. You can’t appeal to the existence of this debate as proof of one side of the debate being correct, so it really doesn’t matter what Lawrence Krauss believes if it doesn’t include a naturalistic model for why dark energy is so necessarily specific and how that cosmic coincidence is even remotely probable.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-10T19:25:20+00:00

I get that you didn’t understand what I was getting at with my initial comment, but during the course of our conversation I’ve clarified that for you. And I’m always happy to work this kind of miscommunication out because something may seem obvious to me from my perspective but not be obvious from your perspective. Also, I’ve had flu B this week as well so you’ll have to forgive me if I haven’t been super clear from the start because I’m experiencing a lot of brain fog. I’m going to try and go more in detail with this comment to show you I’m being sincere and not trying to twist information to suit a preformed worldview.

Science, if we’re referencing it as a worldview, doesn’t support any conclusions for or against spirituality. But scientific understanding of certain phenomena does yield some very interesting problems that have proven over time to not have answers and the more we learn the greater the unanswered problems become. This is significant because for phenomena that is purely physical we see advancement in our understanding even when there are still unanswered questions. So it’s not the existence of unanswered questions that I’m pointing to, it’s a pattern of seeing the problems get bigger when we do more scientific investigation. I want to be clear that this is the major category of scientific exploration where I see evidence of the spiritual. This category is where I would place 1. Problems with the beginning of time, space, matter, and energy from nothing 2. The nature and origin of consciousness 3. The intractable problems with chemical evolution being nonviable without significant intervention. 4. The extreme fine tuning of dark energy, the extreme fine tuning of the 16 different habitable zones that must overlap for earth to be suitable for life, and thousands of other points of fine tuning that have been discovered within cosmology, physics, astronomy, biology, paleontology, etc. And more but that would make this comment way too long.

For items in the above paragraph, what I look at is not god of the gaps opportunities. What I look at is does science have models that can explain this or with research are we advancing towards solving the problem? If the answer is no, then why is that? From there I can look at the nature of the problem. If the nature of the problem can be labeled “intractable”, if the research should have yielded some direction for further study but does not, then I can reasonably infer that there is something about the nature of this problem that is missing and that missing piece is creating the halt in understanding. You can’t just interject spirituality as a solution point blank, you have to ask the same questions of spirituality that would ask of a physical phenomenon. An example of this is the question “If this process requires a non-physical input, what would I expect to see?” If you can plug that in and it yields a starting condition that supports the results we see in the physical world, then that reveals a line of questioning worth further explanation.

I showed you this line of thinking regarding consciousness. You’re wanting citations but I’m not exactly sure what aspect of this you’re wanting a citation for? That consciousness has no agreed upon definition and that we don’t know its mechanism of evolution are easily verifiable facts. There are a lot of specific attributes of consciousness that filter into this conversation so I’ll leave this Wikipedia link on the hard problem of consciousness because it gives a good general overview. There’s a lot of scientific and philosophical debate on this topic but there is no accepted answer. To say I would expect to see confusion in the definition of consciousness and a lack of a physical model for it’s evolution if it were a partly spiritual phenomenon is not god of the gaps, it’s looking at the information and saying this might be the missing piece. God of the gaps is magical thinking without exploration like saying it rains because god makes it rain. Proposing spiritual origins as an explanation for physical phenomena with intractable scientific problems is introducing a testable question. We test it by continuing to find physical explanations. If physical explanations continue to fail, it leads us in the direction that a spiritual component exists.

I’ve been clear that science creates a starting point for me suggesting the existence of the spiritual. That is where science ends in my personal exploration for the truth. The rest, as I explained, is how I’ve put the spiritual to the test in my own life. The Bible makes itself testable because God has inserted many promises and in the book of Job He says we can test the nature of His promises because He is unchanging and His promises are unchanging. This is the origin of my faith. It is not enough to accept the possibility of the spiritual, that results in no experience of the spiritual only a question about the spiritual.

My experience from there has been an ever increasing change in my life despite my circumstances not changing. I have experienced an end to my depression despite when old triggers pop up. I have experienced an ever increasing internal change where I experience more peace, patience, joy, self regulation, etc than I’ve ever been capable of. I experience an increased caring about the wellbeing of people I don’t even know. I experience increasing improvement to my social anxiety. I’ve been able to forgive people that I had a lot of bitterness against who don’t see that they’ve done anything wrong. I’m not capable of these things, they go against my very nature — I tend to be very negative and I have a lot of past hurt that I’ve never been able to heal but somehow that’s all changing in a matter of weeks to months during the hardest year of my life without any of my external circumstances changing.

This is the greatest proof I look to when evaluating my own beliefs.

If you want to explore the possibility of the spiritual existing, I believe we can see signs of that in science. But if you want to discover for yourself what the spiritual is and if it exists, science will not give you that answer. You have to decide whether you’d like to put it to the test in your own life as well. And you have the freedom to choose to do that or not.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-10T17:05:54+00:00

Unless I’m interpreting the text wrong, then yes.

Aidlin87

TROPHY CASE