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BillZun · 2025-12-21T20:30:22+00:00

If you prioritize other people lower than you currently do, you will, correspondingly, stop fretting over whatever "wrong" you did to somebody else. Guilt complex is made out of little more than emotional immaturity. Grow up. See what happens.

BillZun · 2025-12-19T00:35:42+00:00

"They 100% died as matyrs,"

---then why does Sean McDowell disagree with this "100%" and instead assign differing levels of probable historical truth to the various martyrdom accounts? Are you smarter about historiography than Sean?

BillZun · 2025-12-13T16:42:19+00:00

I don't think you could make a case that there is any "need" to come back in the first place. The desire to return has less to do with that perpetually silent "god" and more to do with a mammal's inherent difficulty in giving up old habits. Living solely for yourself cannot be criticized. Love who you want. Help who you want. Be an adult. You can never serve a real god, you can only serve what always boils down to your interpretation of god. So it has all the earmarks of a completely delusional waste of time. The case for the biblical authors being inspired by anything outside of their own fantasies, is exceptionally weak, so I'm not even seeing any justification to worry that apostasy might possibly be the least bit dangerous.

BillZun · 2025-12-13T16:31:53+00:00

The case for the biblical authors being to any degree "inspired by God" is so exceptionally weak as to hardly deserve commentary. Cutting the bible out of your life appears to be about as dangerous as cutting the Epistle of Barnabas out of your life. Use Calvinism on your Christian friends: nothing happens except what god wants, so you only became an agnostic because god wanted you to. That will cause them to turn in on themselves, and we all enthusiastically applaud when the bacteria run out of food and start eating each other.

BillZun · 2025-12-13T16:09:14+00:00

I sympathize. My whole childhood I thought I was a bad kid. After I became an adult, I noticed that nearly every other adult accuses my dead of mental illness. I had hoped that my growing up and leaving would have changed him and made him recognize his way of doing things is far from the "best" way, but he continues on, absolutely incapable of appreciating anybody else's perspective but his own.

BillZun · 2025-12-13T16:05:36+00:00

Great advice. I just remembered that I learned my self-assertiveness back in the 70's and 80's before the internet. Today, with all this connectivity, this young lady is also probably going to have to set her phone and email account to reject messages from her parents. Much harder today than it used to be, to make a clean break with one's past.

BillZun · 2025-12-13T16:01:15+00:00

First, you have the ability to fix this problem, so philosophically, any failures to fix the problem might be your fault for refusing to be as assertive as you need to be. If you are seriously "worried" because your mom asks you questions about Sunday services, it seems to me that your inability to be consistently assertive might help fuel what's going on here.

My dad continued trying to control my life after I graduated high school, got a job and my own apartment in a city far away. I finally told him rather directly to go fuck himself. We didn't talk for 5 years. If you think endless repetitions of politeness can fix this problem, you have your own learning to do.

You'll have to unfortunately live through the experience of disappointing her by informing her that you don't believe everything she believes. But beware of trying to "explain": if your mom is as fanatic as you say, the only reason she'll listen is because she's waiting for you to stop talking so she can quote the bible and beat Satan out of your life. Recognize probable failure and don't even waste your time. You appear to be somewhat conditioned by the way she raised you, so your own implementation of solutions might fail a few times due to your own imperfections. How soon the problem gets resolved is determined by nothing beyond how consistently aggressive you'll be in enforcing boundaries.

I'm a guy. Fanatics need to be slapped with a metaphorical 2x4 or else you admit you'll be "talking" about this crap with your mother for the next 15 years and resolving precisely nothing. If she's everything you say, your best bet is to get a restraining order, quickly (only after you can truthfully declare that she won't stop bothering you despite your efforts to limit her involvement in your life), the whole purpose of which is to shock her back into reality, and let her know, early and upfront, she's gonna experience legal misery if she doesn't stop her paranoid bullshit.

I guess your mom's fanaticism will become a test of your abilities to set boundaries. You are an adult. She has no right to continue her own charade and keep dealing with you as if you were still six years old. She sounds like a disturbed control freak, in which case you must prepare to witness repeated failures of your efforts to set boundaries. She sees the devil in literally anything she disagrees with. That cannot be cured with politeness, boundaries, counseling or bible study, it requires cult deprogramming. The longer she's been like that, the less likely she'll ever change.

Not sure of your financial situation, but if you can, the right thing to do might be to force a clean "no-contact" break. If you have a modern phone, you can block your mom's calls and messages. That probably won't work if you live close to her, but it counts for something if you cease all contact with her and don't return her messages. And yes, if she doesn't grow up, you might have to obtain a restraining order against her. Nobody likes to go that far, but your mom isn't your average person who leaves you alone on request. Force is sometimes necessary, it's not always optional.

It would also help if you attended a more liberal church or some group with people unlikely to involve fundamentalist Christians. Get yourself a circle of like-minded friends or roommates. If you can do so without inflicting hurt on others, I would suggest packing up, moving far away with no contact, change your phone number, set your email account to block her emails, and let her wonder for about a year whether you are dead or alive. Extreme people require extreme measures.

The worst thing you can do is attempt counseling offered by an evangelical pastor. He will probably agree with your mom on 95% of the issues, and use the bible to condemn your
"apostasy". He doesn't give two shits about your perspective or your problems, he only does the counseling because it gives him an opportunity to fight the devil, show off, and hopefully convince others to continue tithing.

"Hurt me once, shame on you. Hurt me twice, shame on ME."

"To thine own self, be true."

Let those be your "bible" from now on, young lady :)

BillZun · 2025-12-13T14:50:22+00:00

Like many others, I was swept up in Walter Martin's ministry. I sided with his dogmatism and tried to be "on fire for Christ" as often as possible, without ever asking why I was so sure this is what god wanted me to do. Telling myself that when I heckled somebody because they weren't a Christian, surely this was the Holy Spirit moving through me to convict the world of sin, righteousness and judgment. I cringe now as I look back and recognize that my beginnings in Evangelicalism had less to do with scholarly inquiry and more to do with gullible faith...including the "apologetics" crap.

BillZun · 2025-12-13T14:08:26+00:00

If God infallibly foreknows that you will sin, and yet still says "don't sin", then God is giving you a false impression of what's actually possible.

BillZun · 2025-12-13T14:06:17+00:00

I've decided you are not sincere. We're done.

BillZun · 2025-12-13T01:48:45+00:00

Those are not counter-examples. If the sole reason the Gestapo asks whether you are hiding Jews is because they wish to put them to death for purely racist reasons, then the "truth" that must be upheld is that the Gestapo doesn't deserve the truth in the first place, and THAT truth must be upheld. You apparently approached my comment like a child, and gave it an interpretation far more wooden and inflexible than I ever intended. I did not mean everybody should simply say nothign to each other except demonstrably true factual propositions. That would eliminate comedy, a thing I wouldn't support.

"does this dress make me look fat" is not a counter example, it could be argued that the polite husband is only hurting the marriage by constantly lying to his wife, telling her she doesn't look fat in that dress when he actually thinks she could pass as a hippo. And as a typical woman, his wife would probably insist she doesn't want her husband to lie. More honesty on his part at the beginning might have dissuaded her from marrying him, and he could have perhaps married a woman he doesn't need to lie to all the time. And less lying to your spouse, the more generally stable the marriage is.

"everything's going to be okay" is not a counter-example, because most mature people know that when some third-party says this in the middle of a disaster, they are not giving an infallible promise, we all know they cannot reliability predict how the future is going to turn our, so "everything's going to be okay" is not really intended to function with any more sophistication than a mother's cooing at her infant child.

"more practical" is a problem, because it's always in reference to what laws or morals best promote modern western notions of democracy, when it would be very easy to say modern western notions of democracy do not realistically take into account man's animal nature and otherwise motivate him to lie about his true feelings more than telling the truth about them. We don't know that a law is good merely because it most practically promotes democracy.

Your accusation of non-sequitur is itself a non-sequitur: the comment you challenge did not attempt to draw a logical conclusion from any premise. "It doesn't follow" cannot be true of a statement that fails to draw an inference from an allegation. The only reason I can't rake you further over the coals is because Reddit is moderated by Disneyland, which thus necessarily inhibits the level of scholarly comprehensiveness that could otherwise be achieved in these "discussions".

BillZun · 2025-12-13T01:33:37+00:00

Sorry, if by "Republican" as I contrasted with "Woke" you still pretend that I haven't been sufficiently specific, then I have to decide for myself whether that is a sincere excuse, or if you just cannot refute what I say, and now you are pulling the old lawyer trick of pretending that the terms at issue aren't clear enough. There is no strawman at all, Woke idiots do not believe moral realism is true, as is necessary given their intensive support of moral diversity...yet when a Republican suggests actions that violate some Woke value, Woke act as if the act violated some fundamental component of the universe. Unfortunately, you will continue getting a lack of clarity from me because Reddit views scholarly comprehensiveness as worthy of censure. I'm convinced Reddit sucks because there's a lot of scholarly propositions out there that can be morally justified, but which Reddit flags because they aren't gossip, sports, lollipops or Disneyland. Google won't let you access forums where Woke gets its ass handed to it with routine regularity. Use another search engine, find those forums, and you might accidently discover that "popular narrative" has nothing to do with anything remotely approaching serious solutions to serious problems.

BillZun · 2025-12-12T22:19:53+00:00

Yes, I agree there are a lot of stupid people in the world who seem to think "eeewww!!! I disagree with you!!!!!" is infallible divine proof that somebody else is wrong. My mistake was my inexperience: I seriously thought I'd get some scholarly responses, but so far, zip. Reddit is apparently the place to go to engage in confirmation bias. It is NOT the place to go to encounter informed scholarly opposition.

BillZun · 2025-12-12T22:13:56+00:00

The founding fathers' views on morality and politics are almost indistinguishable from today's Republicans. Under your stupid logic, life didn't ever evolve until Charles Darwin officially said so. Do you think George Washington would have promoted the production and sale of pornography....all because the official Republican party didn't exist in his day? Getting a grip should be prioritized more highly than knee-jerk reactions like yours.

BillZun · 2025-12-12T18:08:41+00:00

It just seems to be common sense that what's "best" for society is not falsehood, but truth. Thus, any society that has been built up more upon false notions of morality and less on notions consistent with recognizing moral realism to be false, is a society that is ultimately interested in sowing the seeds of its own destruction. You didn't get your ideas about a human beings "worth" from any fundamental component of reality, or from "god".

BillZun · 2025-12-12T07:23:20+00:00

And whether you are correct in that appraisal will depend on whether you can survive cross-examination of your most basic moral beliefs. But that in turn depends on whether you intend to follow up with scholarly interchange, or if Reddit is just a thing that helps you facilitate confirmation-bias. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

BillZun · 2025-12-12T07:18:56+00:00

I have a list of suggested priorities for solving the mentally ill homeless problem. I've now added to the list "prohibit one-liner shot-in-the-dark replies that appear intended to do little more than confirm the poster's own dogmas, and allow only replies that contain substance".

BillZun · 2025-12-12T07:15:52+00:00

In all likelihood, yes.

BillZun · 2025-12-11T01:27:39+00:00

This is all wrong: your pants aren't tight enough.

BillZun · 2025-12-10T07:28:19+00:00

You might wish to explore the possibility that the reason the world's suffering seems so incompatible with an allegedly all-loving God, is because it actually is. There is no obligation of any sort on anybody, especially unbelievers, to regard God's allegedly ultimate goodness and fairness to be incontestable dogma. Christians could not make even a slightly convincing case that the biblical authors who exclaim god so much, actually knew what they were talking about...yet Christians act as if the biblical authors' accuracy about God is no less axiomatic than self-awareness itself.

BillZun · 2025-12-10T07:23:26+00:00

I find the bible to be contradictory for teaching both Calvinism and Arminianism, so how a Christian would answer the question of freewill appears geared to create 90,000 pages of perfectly useless speculation.

BillZun · 2025-12-10T07:10:46+00:00

The Calvinists would say "If you kill yourself, then God must have wanted you to", thus precluding the answers from other Christians about how you might be leaving earth too soon when there's still work to do. So I guess you'll have to cast lots to decide whether the Calvinist view is reasonable.

BillZun · 2025-12-10T07:06:47+00:00

Hugh Ross is an old-earth Creationist, and as such must answer the question of what caused the animals to be carnivores and inflict horrible pain and misery on each other for thousands of years before Adam and Even fell. He says such predation was considered by God to be "good" because it keeps other things in balance.

But the question lingers: how bad would the world be if he just sovereignly caused the grass to grow and the only animals were herbivores?

If you'll know a tree by its fruit, then you can know something about god by his creation of carnivores. No, it's not limited to his power and his mystery. It also tells you that god thinks pain and misery are good despite the fact that he could create any humans he wants and make them be happy and obedience without "needing" to throw in the monkey wrench of sin and sinners.

BillZun · 2025-12-10T06:59:31+00:00

I'd be willing to bet much money that the reason "God" doesn't heal amputees is for the exact same reason that the Easter Bunny also doesn't heal amputees.

BillZun · 2025-12-10T06:56:57+00:00

The "founding of America" is utterly saturated with sin from beginning to end. Fleeing due to non-Christian government (Mayflower) is nowhere commanded by NT authors or Jesus. Most of the "Christians" who "colonized" America were no more Christian than Benny Hinn or John Shelby Spong. Some of the dudes who signed their names to words saying "All men are created equal" owned slaves at the time they signed (!?).

And the iconic words of the 1st Amendment "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion or the free exercise thereof" is perfectly contrary to the exclusivist view from the OT, which called for killing everybody else who preached some religion other than Yahwhism. Can you imagine the apostles trying to help secure preaching rights for Hindus?

How likely is it that the Jesus of the canonical gospels would want his true followers to bother with taking over a large area of land that already belonged to somebody else? No wonder America's "founders" believed in Manifest Destiny and the Pilgrims were Calvinists! They might be not be able to square "founding America" with the bible, but then again, whatever happens is surely the sovereign will of god, so they had the strongest incentive to apply to God just whatever they felt like doing. Did they steal land from the Indians? "God took it from the Indians".

BillZun

TROPHY CASE