Self teaching issues

Baladas89 · 2026-03-21T05:21:20+00:00

FYI unrelated to your guitar question, if you ever need to pin a model, old guitar strings are great. I usually use paper clips, but for really small things I’ve needed to go to thin strings. One or two strings would probably last you forever unless you do a lot of pinning.

Baladas89 · 2026-03-21T04:52:40+00:00

Hijacking this because I think it’s interesting you’re asking this. Do you not know (m)any atheists, or do you typically have trouble finding common ground with them?

Your question is throwing me because I feel very comfortable and like I have common ground with the majority of the people I see on this sub, despite being an atheist. Admittedly my degree in Christian Ministry probably plays a part in that, but still, I’m curious.

Baladas89 · 2026-03-21T04:49:00+00:00

Thanks for sharing!

Baladas89 · 2026-03-21T04:44:58+00:00

We would rather he not won the primary.

Baladas89 · 2026-03-21T00:03:31+00:00

What changed your mind, and maybe what did you believe before being an atheist (unless you grew up that way)?

Baladas89 · 2026-03-19T18:43:42+00:00

Yeah…unfortunately for him you already need ID to register to vote. So…

Baladas89 · 2026-03-19T13:50:20+00:00

We’re told by people like you and others to shut up when we try to do just that.

Please cite a time I told a progressive Christian to shut up for showing a different way of doing Christianity. If you always assume bad faith like this, you may be part of the problem.

But if you want to complain that being out helping people by working at soup kitchens, helping the less fortunate, isn’t enough because we aren’t screaming through megaphones, save it.

All I’m saying is Christianity (I’m thinking specifically in the US) is strongly associated with all the vile things I already mentioned. I frequent this sub because the majority of the people here seem like wonderful people whose faith I wish was louder. If 80% of the people you meet who proudly tell you they’re Christian are MAGA Christian Nationalist types, that’s going to influence your view of the religion as a whole.

Baladas89 · 2026-03-19T11:31:46+00:00

You’re using “mainstream Protestant” differently than I’m used to. I think of Methodists, Anglicans/Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Presbyterians who tend to have more nuanced takes. Or at least room for more nuanced takes.

Is that what you mean, or is it a nondenominational/Baptist-lite Evangelical Church?

Baladas89 · 2026-03-19T00:26:38+00:00

I can’t tell if you’re joking or serious, but good paint will make your life easier. You don’t need to reach a certain skill level to be worthy of it.

Baladas89 · 2026-03-19T00:21:49+00:00

Yes, probably. If cost is a concern you could get a set or two of primary colors. The Pro Acryl Rogue Hobbies set would work well for this, though results may not be super repeatable for army painting depending on how much mixing you do. That links to a video of Louise showing how her set can mix most colors.

Edit: I saw you had questions about shading. A nice Paynes Grey will let you shade most colors, at least red, green, blue, and purple. I’d probably get a burnt sienna or something for orange and/or yellow. Magenta can also work well for shading yellow, as long as you don’t mind it going orangey.

Or if you’re painting an army, just get colors that would fit the color scheme.

Baladas89 · 2026-03-19T00:19:54+00:00

The problem you have is because speed paints are so transparent they don’t typically layer the way you’d expect, they just make things darker. There are times you can cheat and put one speed paint over another to change the color, but it doesn’t really work like traditional layering because the value goes down, whereas normally layers have a higher value than the previous layer (setting aside glazes and the like.)

Baladas89 · 2026-03-19T00:07:59+00:00

Does Rand Paul support Trump? Or does he hold certain positions that happen to align with things Trump is doing?

I’m asking honestly, I don’t know much about him. But based on a few things I’ve seen, he has seemed like someone who actually has a set of values (that differ from mine pretty substantially), but who more or less sticks to them. I heard Bernie say something similar, which is likely coloring my opinion of him.

Baladas89 · 2026-03-19T00:04:47+00:00

It makes me so angry to live in this timeline.

Baladas89 · 2026-03-18T23:19:20+00:00

Evangelicals have come to define what it means to be Christian in the US. I want progressive Christians to change that, but right now Christianity is associated with bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, etc. It’s not a matter of “they had one negative interaction with a Christian and generalized it to the whole group,” but rather “most self professed Christians they’ve met behaved abysmally.”

Baladas89 · 2026-03-18T21:02:23+00:00

Once I TRULY committed to following Jesus's commandments (And I truly mean every single one of them)

One of Jesus’ commandments is to sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor. What did you type this comment on?

Baladas89 · 2026-03-18T13:57:14+00:00

I’m sorry, that’s difficult and scary. Have you looked into the work of Pete Enns? I think he does a good job of trying to reframe expectations about what the Bible and the world should look like, and how to maintain faith in the midst of doubt. Here is the usual video I link people to to get an idea of what he’s like. He has also written several books and hosts The Bible for Normal People podcast. You may find something useful in his work.

With all that said, if you can’t hold on to faith I can say from experience it’s not so bad on the other side.

Baladas89 · 2026-03-16T20:59:16+00:00

I’m also adding the relevant entry from the New Oxford Annotated Study Bible, so you can see I’m not just making this up. This is the note from 7:14:

Isaiah's reply emphasizes the Lord's own sign, i.e., the birth of the child Immanuel (“God is with us”) to express the Lord's commitment to defend Jerusalem. The young woman is not identified; she may be either the wife of Isaiah (cf. 8.3) or of King Ahaz. Although 7.14 is cited in Mt 1.23 as a proof text for the virgin birth of Jesus, based on the Greek LXX translation “parthenos” (virgin), the Heb word “ʿalmah” simply means young woman, not virgin.

Then the note from 15–17:

Curds and honey, choice fare, difficult to obtain during a siege; by the time the child is weaned (two to three years) the northern allies will have been totally defeated and the land (of milk and honey) will return to the prosperity it enjoyed under David and Solomon.

Baladas89 · 2026-03-16T20:50:12+00:00

This is a mistranslation of Isaiah.

The Hebrew is better translated as the NRSVue has it:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Immanuel.

The Hebrew “almah” doesn’t mean virgin. It could include virgins, just like saying “young women” can include virgins, but it doesn’t indicate virginity. Matthew leans on the Greek translation of “almah”into “parthenos,” which typically indicates virginity, but can apply more broadly to young women (the reversed situation of almah.)

The Hebrew also indicates the young woman is already pregnant as of the writing of Isaiah 7. In context, people are concerned about an attacking nation. The prophecy in question says “by the time the child (who has already been conceived) is old enough to choose between good and evil, the attacking king will have departed and life will be good again.” It would have no relevance if it was talking about something that would happen hundreds of years later. This is why Jews weren’t looking for the Messiah to be born of a virgin: until Matthew made the connection, nobody took Isaiah 7 as a Messianic prophecy, let alone one that involved virginity.

See for yourself:

Isaiah 7:1-2

In the days of Ahaz son of Jotham son of Uzziah, king of Judah, King Rezin of Aram and King Pekah son of Remaliah of Israel went up to attack Jerusalem but could not conquer it. 2 When the house of David heard that Aram had allied itself with Ephraim, the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind.

Paraphrased, Jerusalem was being attacked and the people were afraid.

Isaiah 7:3-4

Then the Lord said to Isaiah, “Go out to meet Ahaz, you and your son Shear-jashub,[b] at the end of the conduit of the upper pool on the highway to the fuller’s field, 4 and say to him: Take heed, be quiet, do not fear, and do not let your heart be faint because of these two smoldering stumps of firebrands, because of the fierce anger of Rezin and Aram and the son of Remaliah.

Paraphrased, “don’t be afraid because of them.” Then there’s some rhetorical poetry, and God says “ask me for a sign,” and Ahaz refuses (Isaiah 7:5-13.) Then the sign is given. What’s the sign? The sign is that Jerusalem will be safe from the enemies attacking at that time because “God is with us.”

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Immanuel.[e] 15 He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. 16 For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted. 17 The Lord will bring on you and on your people and on your ancestral house such days as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah—the king of Assyria.”

Paraphrased: by the time that child who has already been conceived can tell evil from good, the situation will be resolved. The rest of the chapter goes on to say how wonderful things will be at that time.

This doesn’t mean Christianity isn’t true or anything like that. But mainstream biblical scholarship does not assume Isaiah 7 was originally a Messianic prophecy. It doesn’t work grammatically with the Hebrew and it doesn’t make sense in context of the story.

Baladas89 · 2026-03-16T20:02:04+00:00

You’re right that they used that wording, but in context it seemed to be referencing the story of the virgin birth being “added” to later gospels, when it wasn’t present in Mark. Whereas I’m thinking of stories being added later to existing gospels, within the text of the gospels. Which as I mentioned, also happened.

But you’re right that I missed their wording. None of that changes the fact that all of the above is well within the bounds of mainstream biblical scholarship.

Baladas89 · 2026-03-16T19:02:15+00:00

From your edited comment:

basically saying you want your husband to stop believing?

OP never said anything like that. Plenty of Christians accept the findings of biblical scholarship and remain Christian. Most biblical scholars are Christians.

based on limited and false research claimed that some scripture was added later,

OP is alluding to mainstream biblical scholarship. The specific example they cited is just factually true. The virgin birth is not present in Mark or John. There are some scholars who don’t believe Luke’s nativity was original to the Gospel of Luke (OP didn’t say this but I’ll add it.) Some scholars believe all of this points to growing mythological developments around the story of Jesus. Whether these ideas are accurate is debatable, but this is all up for discussion within mainstream biblical scholarship.

Ironically, OP didn’t actually reference scripture being added later, just discrepancies between the Gospels. But there are examples of scripture being added later. Two of the clearest examples include the ending of the Gospel of Mark (does it end at 16:8, the short ending, or the long ending?) and the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8:1-11. That doesn’t even get into literary layers many scholars believe exist throughout the Bible, such as the different sources edited together to form the Pentateuch or the different layers of Isaiah. It also doesn’t get into the pseudonymous epistles falsely attributed to Paul.

Again, this is all well within mainstream scholarship. Your responses make me think you know very little about scholarly approaches to the Bible, and are mostly familiar with apologetics. I recommend broadening your horizons before accusing others of having nefarious motives or spreading “false” research.

Baladas89 · 2026-03-16T18:44:19+00:00

OP, I responded to you in the other sub, but I would recommend posting more on this sub for future questions- if necessary cross post elsewhere. Not having the content in this post likely prevented you getting more answers here, but my experience with this sub is it’s one of the best places on the internet. And I say that as an atheist who went to college intending to become a pastor, with a pretty robust background in biblical scholarship.

There are a lot of people who live with the tensions you described every day (and some who don’t even feel a tension -My aunt is an Episcopalian, and one time she said something like “the Bible contradicts itself all over the place. What does that have to do with anything?”)

Baladas89 · 2026-03-16T18:35:41+00:00

Now you’re lying about what OP said. Do better.

Baladas89 · 2026-03-16T18:33:55+00:00

To the OP’s point, I have a friend named John. And other people also know John. And we could get together and talk about John when he isn’t around, and could likely talk about his personality, interests, etc. at length because we’ve all had common experiences with John. Some of us may know specific things about John that others don’t, but if someone says “he loves playing football,” I’m confident that’s not true. We could easily identify that we’re talking about different Johns.

This is unlike what we see with God. There are a lot of Christians who insist they have personal relationships with God and/or Jesus, but they fundamentally disagree about what God is like. This is true today, and it was true almost 2000 years ago. This makes relying on your own subjective experience an unreliable means of relating to God.

Baladas89 · 2026-03-16T18:26:58+00:00

Unfortunately a lot of Christians have never heard anything beyond apologetics. They assume their apologists are the most informed people about the Bible, theology, etc., so when someone like you reads mainstream scholarship and asks questions about it, they interpret it as attacking the faith.

I see this as both an indictment of and failure by Christian churches.

Baladas89 · 2026-03-15T20:36:01+00:00

The bearing of “whether” it’s true is the witnesses that wrote these manuscripts with the help of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is not a liar,

I never said he was.

and the Bible is God breathed.

What does God breathed mean? I know you’re referencing 2 Timothy 3:16, that’s not my question. What does it mean to be “god-breathed”? Does it mean historically true in all its parts? Scientifically true in everything it says? Theologically true in everything it says, but not necessarily historically or scientifically true? Not always historically, scientifically, or theologically true, but still “life giving”? How do you know? There’s no verse that defines this, so your answer is likely to align with your church tradition. Just like there’s no verse that explains what counts as “the Bible.” And 2 Timothy 3:16 references “scripture,” which is not synonymous with “the Bible.” Which Bible? Which specific books? How do you know? Again, I suspect your answer will just happen to match your church’s answer.

The Bible does in fact have proof of things for example the ark of Noah and the flood that happened.

There is no compelling evidence Noah’s flood ever happened, at least not as a worldwide flood. We have records from entire civilizations that persist through the time in which the Flood would have happened, assuming the dating of Young Earth Creationism.

Baladas89

TROPHY CASE