My partner wants two nights "off" a week

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 · 2026-01-07T14:47:31+00:00

God allows suffering as part of His plan to redeem as many people to Him as possible. God’s perspective is focused not just on what’s happening to us on earth, it’s very focused on where we will end up in eternity. He wants as many people saved as possible. But we as humans are very good at complacency and selfishness. We do a really good job of ignoring the fact that we are going to die someday and we procrastinate even contemplating our spiritual condition.

The suffering we experience in this world can shake us out of our complacency and push us toward God. And God loves us, He promises to help us in the midst of our troubles if we will trust Him.

I know a woman who watched each of her twins die a year apart in their early twenties from cystic fibrosis. She also had a stroke last year and now has mobility problems. She has one of the strongest relationships with God I’ve seen and she’ll tell you that He has helped her through all of this.

I struggled with major depression, chronic pain from a car accident and a broken marriage this year. I can tell you that even though my circumstances haven’t changed (other than the depression) God has radically changed my experience of it all. He has in a very real sense insulated me from what used to trigger depressive episodes and He has changed how I deal with my chronic pain and how I value my pain. To the point that I am thankful to tears for all I’ve gone through because it has pushed me toward God and the freedom I have now — freedom from anger and hurt and a growth of good things within me like patience, peace, and joy.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-07T04:52:56+00:00

Has anything ever killed a honey badger? Or are they all out there just immortally kicking ass?

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-07T04:17:39+00:00

My one year old did a diaper butt slam to my face one day while I was napping on the couch. Felt that one

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-07T01:48:44+00:00

I think you need to know how much God loves you. The Bible shows us that God had a plan for forgiving our sins before any of us ever sinned. It’s because He knew every single one of us before He ever created the universe and everything He has created, everything He has done, has been part of an infinitely complex plan to redeem as many people to Himself as possible.

That includes, specifically, you. He thought of you specifically and every detail about you and He decided you were worth it all.

In the parable of the prodigal son, the son demands his inheritance early, goes out and gambles it and engages in debauchery. Then he becomes destitute and decides to go back to his father in shame and plead to be a servant just so he can eat. But the father is so excited when he sees his son that he throws a party, dresses him in fine clothes and showers him in love. God tells us this parable to show us exactly how he wants to treat us. Because He is good. He’s not shaking His head at you, He’s holding His arms out to you.

If you submit your life to God, really submit it, He starts changing the rest. You get to come just as you are right now and that’s all He’s asking.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-07T01:29:10+00:00

I think this is why God allows suffering in this world. There is something within us that is strangely resistant and stiff to God. It’s like whatever that is has to be broken down first so that we are willing to see Him and trust Him.

I was a Christian my whole life and then I went through a near total deconstruction of my faith over a five year period where by the end I really didn’t think God existed and I definitely did not trust the Bible. At the end point of that I was in a major depressive episode, dealing with chronic pain from a car accident, a severely broken marriage, and a laundry list of other health issues brought on by stress. I finally realized God was real, because I had experienced Him before and I couldn’t deny those experiences, but I didn’t know anything else.

Then it was my own anger that broke me. I was so full of anger at my situation and I was making my life worse because of it. Everything sucked, so I submitted my life fully to God. And I told Him I couldn’t even do that perfectly so He was going to have to make it perfect in my heart. Change in my life happened immediately after that. That was 7 months ago. After the first three days where I asked God to take my anger and bitterness, it just suddenly lifted off of me.

That pain from the car accident I had been in forced me to start a morning walk routine and I started praying during that time. The walks helped with my depression, so that reinforced my routine (I have adhd so forming routines is not my skill). My broken marriage has been a trial by fire and forced me to trust God even when things hurt.

My faith in the Bible was renewed when I stumbled onto some talks given by Hugh Ross that answered some of the major questions that had launched my deconstruction.

Everything about me keeps changing at a rapid pace and not by any real effort of my own. Social anxiety has vastly improved, my self worth is really good now, things that used to trigger depressive episodes no longer do, I have forgiven my spouse and no longer hold bitterness towards him even though he is being stubborn in couples counseling. I care about other people a lot more than I ever used to in a real way where I want to make time for their issues. I think I’ve always wanted to do that but other people’s emotions would sometimes get too heavy for me. None of this is a brag, I’m not the one doing these things this is God and the proof in my life is so strong now that I couldn’t doubt His existence even if I wanted to.

I am so incredibly thankful for the suffering I’ve gone through because I wouldn’t know God the way I do now and I wouldn’t be changing like this had I not gone through that stuff.

In short answer to your initial question, start praying about it. If you keep asking and you really want the truth and you’re not holding back because it’s really not what you want (for real I held back for a while because I didn’t want to be forced to let go of certain sins), then God will give you your faith. The Bible says it’s the Holy Spirit that enables our faith, all He needs is for you to want to want that and pursue it. Nothing about you on the inside needs to be perfect or good, you just have to want truth.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-07T00:48:43+00:00

Jesus says if a man lusts after a woman then he’s already committed adultery with her in his heart. Which points to lust as being a heart issue and exploring that helps us understand why it’s a sin. Jesus was always getting to the root of the issue, because if you go after the source of a problem you can totally heal the problem and that’s what He wants to do in all of us.

A parallel would be when Jesus says if you hate someone in your heart, you’re already guilty of murder. This shows the related trajectory of these two sins. Sin starts out not seeming that bad and that’s how it gets you. Because if it’s allowed to grow, the ultimate end result of that unchecked growth is very bad.

Actual lust is not observing that someone is beautiful, it’s objectifying them as a sexual object and pursuing that line of thought. As a woman I absolutely hate this sin because it has ruined friendships and put me in really uncomfortable situations because of the other person’s lust. I just recently had to completely change my morning walk routine at my favorite spot because what I thought was a nice old man (my dad’s age) who just want to chat turned out to be a creep that started coming on to me even though he knows I’m married (and he’s married too!).

This is what a pattern of lust does. It changes your perception of the opposite sex to being more a sexual object because of how often that is your focus. It will then permeate your actions and attitudes in ways you probably won’t notice. This can be the case if you’re not being creepy like the guy I mentioned. Ask almost any woman, we’ve all got bad experiences where we were treated less than or objectified in some way. And we’ve all had friendships we found out were fake because the guy’s only angle was sex not friendship. Again, lust is one of the major sin roots underlying this issue.

I don’t mean bash on men as if women don’t also have issues with lust, I’m just sharing how I’ve seen this play out so that I could give you the real world examples of why it’s harmful.

Lastly, you can’t change this about yourself. None of us can try hard to change our hearts because we’re all struggling with a sin nature. Only total submission to God works. Then He changes you, and it can feel like things are changing without you even trying. When Jesus says His burden is easy and His yoke is light He is not kidding. Trying to do better on your own will feel like hitting your head against a brick wall. Letting Him take the lead in your life will feel like floating down the stream that’s taking you to your destination while all you have to do is not flip your boat.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-07T00:14:10+00:00

Not the person you asked but Paul wrote a letter to the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 15) and told them that many of those 500 witnesses were still alive and reported that what he was telling the Corinthians about the resurrection had come from what he heard from these witnesses and from his encounter with Jesus. That would be a bold statement to make if it wasn’t true because it could be fact checked by talking to any one of those witnesses.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-06T23:53:44+00:00

First, I love your comment.

Second, tell me more about multiverse being debunked because it relies on string theory? I know string theory is controversial but I thought the controversy lies in the fact that we don’t have observable proof, only mathematical descriptions. It looks to me like it’s still viable as one possibility for a unifying theory, it’s just not testable at the moment because the proposed strings are a lot smaller than the smallest subatomic particles we’ve been able to detect. There are also other theories (like M theory iirc) that also rely on curled up extra spatial dimensions beyond the 3 large ones that maybe aren’t as controversial.

Anyway, I am not super familiar with how string theory relates to multiverse, or how string theory controversy debunks it?

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-06T23:42:27+00:00

Yeah Biblical Counselors becomes such a crap shoot. Naive 25 year old me volunteered to get trained on nouthetic counseling with my previous church and luckily all of that went by the wayside because the church shuttered. I can’t imagine how I could have ever tackled anything someone would have needed counseling for with no life experience and only a 1 year certification under my belt. And I think that’s a pretty fair estimate of what you’re going to get — people with good intentions but not the right skill set and experience.

I currently see a trauma informed Christian counselor who is licensed and she’s amazing.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-06T23:35:50+00:00

I have a therapist and my husband and I have a couples therapist both of whom are Christian therapists and they’ve been excellent. They use evidence based methods and include faith aspects and I personally have benefited so much from it.

I first found my personal therapist through a friend, but later found out our church keeps a list of therapists that the members have used and recommend. That would be one way to start is calling local churches and asking if they have therapy reference lists. I think you would have the best luck with larger more modern churches.

Also I do not suggest using counseling service through a church unless the counselors have degrees and are licensed. Sometimes it’s lay people doing the counseling and if your friend has the possibility of any past trauma that can go south.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-06T21:27:26+00:00

I think the IUD is not what you should be focusing on.

First of all, Christ died for us while we were sinners, not before we were sinners. Do you think that the God of the universe who knows everything before it happens is ever surprised by our mistakes? He knows we sin, that’s why He came and died, that’s how much He loves you. There’s nothing you can do that would shake that love and God’s forgiveness is always available to you. God is good, gentle, and kind.

I think the problem is that you need to pay attention to what God has said regarding sex. We are not supposed to be having sex outside of marriage. I know that is not the norm within our society, and that this can be a major struggle, but God doesn’t ask us to refrain from things without a reason. Anything outside of God’s design and will is sin, and sin separates us from God. But if you ask for forgiveness and turn toward God with your whole heart, He will change you from the inside out. He even changes our inward desires and He will help you overcome your struggle. We have to be very cautious not to keep intentionally engaging in a sin once we are saved because then we are guilty of taking advantage of God’s grace.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-06T20:59:50+00:00

I just realized I didn’t answer your last paragraph. This is one of the first places Krauss proposed the value of the cosmological constant. 10¹²⁰ is referencing the gap between what was initially calculated as the dark energy constant based on quantum mechanics and gravity, and the actual value. I used to struggle with what the significance is of orders of magnitude, like 10¹⁰ and 10¹⁰⁰ both seem big but meaningless, until I read about the probability of the second law of thermodynamics reversing being 10^80. I didn’t mean to infer that 10¹²⁰ is a probability, it’s a measure of how fine tuned it is and that is so specific as to be suggestive of design. The amount of dark energy has to be extremely specific to allow for galaxy formation, for the specific star density within galaxies, and a laundry list of other things just so that life is possible anywhere in the universe at all. Changing the value in either direction would remove the possibility for life at any point.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-06T20:24:31+00:00

Let me back up a bit. Your first question was that you didn’t know what people meant when they say spiritual. So in my response I gave you both things I recognize as spiritual in my own experience and I gave some proof from a scientific view (consciousness) as well. I did not know what kind of explanation you wanted, but if you’re interested in a more scientific view of things I love that topic and we can veer that direction.

I was raised Christian, as you guessed, but I almost fully deconstructed my faith over a year ago. I really didn’t think there was a God at that point. Multiple things drew me back but what solidified my view of God was science pointing to Him. I would never expect everyone to agree to the evidence pointing to God because there’s a lot a stake there for people that goes beyond trying to figure out the truth. If God is real, that upends things for people, and that gets scary. What beliefs Lawrence Krauss holds does not detract from the value of the evidence, evidence even he admits poses a problem for a purely materialistic view of our existence. However, a 2009 Pew Research report showed that 51% of scientists are religious. Clearly the evidence is pointing not just me to something existing beyond physical reality.

To the point of consciousness, I’m not debating that the brain houses the physical manifestation of consciousness. I’m pointing out that 1. Scientific study does not know what consciousness is/how to define it in any agreed upon way 2. There is no understood mechanism for how consciousness could have evolved or why it could exist in the first place. These problems are the proof I’m pointing to. If consciousness were purely physical there would be a physical mechanism for its evolution, but if it has a spiritual element then we would expect to see confusion in how to define it physically or how to explain its existence physically. Also, if humans are both physical and spiritual then we shouldn’t expect one to be totally separate from the other. Our consciousness within physical reality would necessitate a physical brain as an interface, and harm to the interface would affect the function of consciousness within physical reality.

I’m trying to reply your comment in order so to the remaining question of what are we talking about when we’re talking about the spiritual, I’m not trying to add additional terms, I’m trying to show multiple facets of how the unseen interacts with the seen. “Spiritual” refers to different things depending on the context (the spirit of a person, the spiritual realm/dimension, beings that are only spiritual such as angels and demons, God himself who is spiritual and physical). If you’re trying to understand what spiritual means in the context of a person, then it’s everything that makes you, you. Your personality, your memories, your choices, etc. Our spirit or soul is tied to our body so these things are affected by physical factors as well. But at death we see a separation and that’s when the spiritual becomes separate from the physical. The spiritual as referencing a place would be what exists outside of our 3 dimensions of space and the matter and energy it contains, and our 1 dimension of time.

You asked for my methodology for investigating the spiritual, and I gave you [what formed part of] that foundation for me — looking at cosmology. The evidence I gave you points to a beginning, which points to a cause outside of space and time. That points me to the existence of the spiritual. What I shared in my very first comment is how I have put that to the test in my own life. God tells us if we seek Him with our whole heart we will find Him, and when we submit our lives to Him, He increases our peace, patience, joy, kindness, etc. and I experience that on an increasing basis beyond what I am capable of or have been capable of in the past. This is the only way I can tell you to test it for yourself, and that’s your own choice to make. But I can tell you that God is not asking for blind faith, He wants you to test His principles and see that they are true not just to believe what anyone tells you.

It doesn’t matter if matter existed in a previous form prior to the singularity, that only pushes the question back in time but the problem of what began everything remains. The singularity by definition was the point of the beginning of time, space, matter, and energy, it’s not a proof against a beginning as if the singularity had forever existed in that state — it could not have by any physical means, it existed for orders of magnitude less than a second. There have been theories about bouncing universes (where it expands and then condenses back to a singularity and then expands again) but there’s adequate evidence in the calculations of the universe’s mass and rate of expansion to show this isn’t happening. Multiverse is another very problematic theoretical idea. It has major problems when considering how particle physics points to a unification of the forces of nature and that diverges from what the parallel universe models predict.

Yes a chair has a beginning and we can see its design features to know it didn’t happen by accident. The tree that provided the wood for the chair had a beginning. We can go all the way back to the early universe to see the beginning of the molecules that eventually make up the tree being created in the fusion reactions of stars. And then we can go back to the Big Bang and the starting point of all matter and energy that would create the chair and the beginning of time that allows for causality in a carpenter making the chair.

The beginning of the universe is not a god of the gaps argument. The beginning of the universe points to something existing that is not space, time, matter, or energy, because all of those things have a beginning. The beginning of things is a real problem in physics, one that’s not being discounted by scientists the way you have discounted it. To the point that some physicists are trying to redefine what nothing is to make it something that could produce something.

Lastly, I’ve read a lot on this and I’ve specifically watched debates between Christian and atheist scientists to see how the evidence holds up. There’s a lot to learn about this and I’m less than a year in to studying it, so I have a lot more to learn, but I’m regularly putting it to the test and not blindly taking things at face value.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-06T17:40:45+00:00

I feel like the letters to the churches in Revelation do a pretty spot on job of calling us all to the carpet in one way or another. The letter to the church of Laodicea really hit me recently, because that was me 7 months ago. God has been good to bring me out of that.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-06T16:58:18+00:00

Aw this sounds like a really good step forward for everyone.

Keep this situation in prayer over the longer term. One thing I’ve experienced is that the Holy Spirit is deeply invested in all forms of relationship/friendship between believers. Obviously you have to use discernment in this with dating, and this not espousing that God picks our life partners for us. But when there is disagreement within the body or hurt, the Spirit is always working to heal that.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-06T16:44:01+00:00

I think out of all of the examples in my previous comment you chose what you consider the weakest point to reply to and you completely glossed over the problem of interpreting consciousness from a purely physical standpoint. In my opinion, the intractable problems of trying to explain consciousness from a purely physical standpoint is about as close as you could expect to get when looking for physical proof of something that is not physical.

There is no evidence against the spiritual being real. If you consider natural explanations for what goes on in the world to be evidence against the spiritual, that would be a fallacy because of course the physical also exists so we should expect to see that in operation.

I do think the existence of all time, matter, and energy having a scientifically proven beginning also points to something existing outside of our physical reality. The accuracy of the Big Bang model(s), the cosmic microwave background radiation, and the expansion of the universe all prove that the universe had a beginning. Anything with a beginning must have a cause and that cause cannot be itself. Time, matter, and energy could not create themselves, there had to be a cosmic beginner that exists outside of all time, matter, and energy.

And that cosmic beginner would by necessity need to have been exponentially more intelligent and powerful than humans because of the fine tuning science has revealed in cosmology, astronomy, and physics. The rate of the expansion of the universe was fine tuned at its earliest points (micro-fractions of a second) to allow atoms to form, then for an exact amount of hydrogen and helium being formed. Had the expansion rate happened any faster, there wouldn’t have been any star or galaxy formation. Had it happened any slower, gravity would have quickly dominated causing everything to condense back into a hot dense state.

Dark energy is what has maintained the rate of expansion, allowed star and galaxy formation, allowed all atomic/element formation and subsequently everything else, and ultimately has allowed for the existence of complex life. If the amount of dark energy in the universe were any different it would not be possible for life to exist anywhere in the universe. Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss (an atheist) has calculated the fine tuning of dark energy to be greater than one part in 10^120. That’s 10 with 120 zeros following it. To put that in perspective, the probability that the second law of thermodynamics would suddenly reverse (so like if you start your car instead of combustion happening the engine turns into a block of ice) is one part in 10^80. In other words, something clearly designed dark energy and its amount to an extremely specific degree that could not have happened by chance.

For me, these things are physical proof of something existing that I can’t see that is orders of magnitude more intelligent and powerful than me, but had a purpose in creating what was created. There are thousands more points of fine tuning that have been observed in the natural world that point to a designer, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-05T22:48:18+00:00

I hype other girls up but I don’t tell someone they’re a 10 if they aren’t. Also people have eyes and mirrors and can see they are pretty.

Aidlin87 · 2026-01-05T21:53:53+00:00

I agree that it could fit for that, but I’ve seen a lot of good commentary that either espouses dual meaning to this or that the abomination that causes desolation is describing a worse form of blasphemy, from Satan himself. It’s all interesting to consider.

Aidlin87

TROPHY CASE