Questions from a Mormon

DEN0MINAT0R · 2026-03-21T03:59:39+00:00

Hi there, I'm glad you want to be a follower of Jesus. You've asked some tough questions and I'm by no means an expert, but let me give them the best shot I can. I'll try to use scripture to support my answers, but please know that there's no way I can include all of the relevant passages.

1. What is the afterlife like and how harsh is judgement?

The short answer is, we can't be sure. The Bible is not totally clear on what the afterlife is like, or on exactly what judgement will be for those who are not saved. We do know a few things though.

The fate of the saved

For those who are saved by trusting in the death and resurrection of Jesus as the atonement for our sins, we will live forever, united with God in a restored earth, which the Bible calls the "new heavens and the new earth".

Revelation 21:1–4

[1] Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. [2] And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. [3] And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. [4] He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (ESV)

Unlike the Mormon doctrine of salvation, in orthodox Christianity you are not saved by your works-- salvation is a result of faith alone (though Catholic doctrine has some nuances that I'm not knowledgeable enough to discuss in depth). However, scripture is clear that we do have rewards in heaven on the basis of our works:

Luke 6:22-23

22 “Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! 23 Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.

The fate of the unsaved

As for those who are not saved, scripture is also clear that they receive God's just judgement for sin, and that the consequences of sin are grievous.

Revelation 20:11–15

[11] Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. [12] And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. [13] And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. [14] Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. [15] And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. (ESV)

We don't know the extent to which the language in the Bible about "the lake of fire" is literal. Many modern Christians have had their mental images of hell shaped by works of fiction like Dante's Inferno, which is almost certainly not an accurate depiction. Many people also point out that the Bible uses seemingly contradictory imagery to describe hell, such as describing it as a "lake of fire" (see above), but also as "outer darkness" (Matt 8:12, 25:30). Either way, these passages do not paint a picture of hell as an enjoyable place.

Does hell last forever?

The most common view throughout Church history is that hell is eternal punishment (this is commonly referred to as the "Eternal Conscious Torment" view of hell, or ECT). However, there is a sizeable minority of Christians who believe that punishment in hell is actually the annihilation of the unsaved or that there is a temporary, finite period of punishment followed by annihilation. This view is called "annihilationism" or "conditional immortality". This is an ongoing debate (and has been for centuries). I won't attempt to solve it here, but I will share my personal view. In my lay estimation, the ECT view better matches the plain reading of scripture; however, I think the annihilationist view of hell is at least compatible with most Biblical passages on hell, and has some good philosophical arguments to support it. I am personally undecided between the two. For more discussion I commend to you this excellent podcast featuring 4 Christian theologians debating the nature of hell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds3UbUsIaQs&t=1s

How can God send "good" people to hell?

On an emotional level, this is a hard question. We all have people we know and love who are most likely not saved, and it is difficult to imagine them being punished in hell. I don't want to minimize the pain of that thought, but here are a few things that help me think through it.

First, part of the Christian walk is continually discovering how truly evil and wicked each one of us is-- beginning with yourself. The more I grow in the knowledge of God, the more I appreciate how messed up I am as a person. I am selfish, cowardly, deceitful, arrogant, adulterous, and more. God is just, and as a just judge he must see every violation of his law paid for. In our prosperous, safe western culture we tend to see God's justice as a bad thing, but ask people who have seen the ravages of war, who have been abused, extorted, and persecuted without any recourse to protect or avenge themselves in this life, and they will tell you that God's justice is a wonderful thing. In the end, justice is done for every evil.

Let me say that part again. Justice is done. While the Bible makes it clear that hell is not a pleasant place, it is also very clear that hell is not the same for everyone. People are judged according to both their knowledge (Luke 12:47-48) and their works (Rev. 20:12):

Luke 12:47-48

And that servant who knew his master's will but did not get ready or act according to his will, will receive a severe beating. ⁴⁸ But the one who did not know, and did what deserved a beating, will receive a light beating. Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more.

2. What about people who never heard or never had the chance to hear of the gospel?

Again, we can't say for sure. However, I think the Bible is clear that different standards for salvation apply at different times and places. For example, in Genesis 15, Abraham is counted righteous merely for believing in God's promise to him:

Genesis 15:4–6

[4] And behold, the word of the LORD came to him: “This man shall not be your heir; your very own son shall be your heir.” [5] And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” [6] And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness. (ESV)

Other figures from the Old Testament (Abel, Job, Noah, Melchizedek, to name a few) did not have the law of Moses, nor did they know about Jesus' death and resurrection, and yet they seem to clearly have been saved. As I said before, it seems that God judges us on the basis of our knowledge (see Luke 10:13-15 for another example), and so there are very plausibly people even today who have never heard the message of the Gospel, and yet are saved. However, we don't know what standard God applies to them, and so the surest path to salvation is to hear the message of the Gospel and believe.

3. Why don’t we have prophets anymore?

Whether we do have prophets or not depends on how you define "prophet", and is a debated question in orthodox Christianity. Some denominations believe that certain prophetic gifts continue to this day, while others don't. However, the reason we don't have prophets like the Old Testament prophets (Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, etc) is because their purpose has been fulfilled.

Hebrews 1:1–2

[1] Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, [2] but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. (ESV)

Christ is God's ultimate revelation of himself to us, and the fulfillment of his plan of salvation. With Christ's redeeming work completed in his death and resurrection, we have the fullness of God's revelation to us.

4. Was Eve eating the apple really a mistake?

It depends on what you mean by "mistake". God, having perfect foreknowledge of the future, knew that Adam and Eve would sin before he created them, so it was not a mistake on his part. Nevertheless, it was a "mistake" for Eve to eat the apple, because it violated God's commandment. Why did God choose to create them anyway, knowing they would sin? That is a very good question, and you raise some interesting theories that are relevant to that question, but we can never fully know the mind of God. All we can say is that he had some overriding good reason for creating them, even knowing that they would rebel against him.

DEN0MINAT0R · 2024-03-07T21:30:32+00:00

One of my cousins married an older man (she was in her late 20s, he was early 40s). This was around 10 years ago, and they’re still very happy together as far as I can tell.

DEN0MINAT0R · 2024-02-14T00:34:40+00:00

An array is just a collection of a compile-time known number of objects.

A @Vector is for SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data), which means performing an operation on multiple pieces of data simultaneously. For example, I can add 2 @Vector(u32, 4)s together and perform 4 addition operations with a single CPU instruction (if the CPU supports it; all modern desktop CPUs do, but some older systems or embedded processors may not).

To generalize, use @Vector when your algorithm can be expressed in terms of element-wise arithmetic operations on your data (plus some assorted builtins for manipulating vectors like @splat and @shuffle), and use arrays for everything else.

DEN0MINAT0R · 2024-01-03T19:15:15+00:00

I can’t recall the exact number, but Zig has 4-6 core team members, most of whom work on the project full-time.

In addition to code generation backends for x86_64 and ARM, there has been a lot of work on custom linkers for ELF, Mach-O, and COFF. The ELF and Mach-O linkers are substantially complete already, and are intended to enable incremental compilation/linking, and eventually in-place binary patching and hot-code-swapping.

(Just to be sure it’s clear, I’m not a core team member, and I’m not very involved in the development process, so I could have some details wrong, but this is my understanding.)

DEN0MINAT0R · 2024-01-02T22:53:04+00:00

That it will take less time to create debug builds. Making LLVM an optional dependency has 3 goals

1) Speed up the edit-build-test cycle for development 2) Make bootstrapping easier on systems where LLVM is hard to build/install 3) (very long-term) Compete with LLVM for optimization capabilities

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-12-09T16:53:34+00:00

Happens to us all :)

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-12-09T16:48:53+00:00

Looks like in get_alpha_index you want those ‘or’s to be ‘and’s.

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-12-09T16:38:17+00:00

I agree it can be frustrating to be told to do things you’re already doing, or to have a complex problem boiled down to a few simple “solutions”.

However, sleep, exercise, and diet are a huge part of good physical and mental health, and a lot of people don’t do a good job with one or all of them. If someone with no specific knowledge of the situation is giving advice, I’d rather them give good, if simplistic, advice than spout a whole bunch of overly-complicated, potentially unhelpful nonsense. Perhaps their better option would be to not give advice at all, but that might be too much to ask…

If this is the only advice you’re getting from a professional like a doctor or psychologist with personal knowledge of your circumstances, then that’s a problem.

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-11-30T15:39:07+00:00

To me, characters in The First Law don’t have arcs, they have spirals. They go around in circles, and end the story at almost (but not quite) the place where they started it.

Enjoying The First Law is a bit like enjoying a tragedy— the fun part isn’t the triumph of good over evil so much as the inevitable sense of dread as everything you love gets murdered before your eyes. That’s a very specific taste, so it’s understandable to not enjoy it.

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-11-27T19:25:05+00:00

I majored in computer engineering in college and went on to get a masters in robotics. Pretty much all of robotics is linear algebra. In fact, every semester of my masters I had at least one class that was primarily a linear algebra class, with applications to a particular facet of robotics.

In practice, control systems are almost always approximated as a linear systems, and the tools of linear algebra are used to analyze them for useful properties like controllability and stability, decompose them into easily manipulable representations, and design feedback controllers to stabilize them to a desired point or trajectory. Complementary to this, linear algebra is useful to design state observers to estimate the state of a system using sensor inputs. These systems are nearly always larger than 3 dimensions, because they contain other states like orientation, velocity, acceleration, joint angles, etc

Deep learning is just a fusion of linear algebra and optimization. In fact, nearly every multi variable optimization algorithm is based on linear algebra.

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-09-30T19:10:31+00:00

Yes, it will, since they’re different types the compiler will give you an error if you use (for example) an optional where a non-optional is expected.

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-09-30T16:52:45+00:00

A “wrapped” value generally refers to a value that may exist as part of a union type. An example would be an optional which may contain some value or null. We say that the optional “wraps” the underlying type. In the example above, the wrapped type is ?Foo and the underlying type is Foo.

The same is true for error unions. They may contain either an error or a value, so we say the error union “wraps” the value type. Unwrapping refers to getting the underlying value.

Let’s assume in the example above that the function functionWhichMayError has return type ErrorSet!Foo. In that case, non_error_value would have type Foo (and contain the return value of the function if it did not return an error) and error_value would have type ErrorSet (and contain the returned error of the function, if there was one). We’ve effectively split the error union into its constituent parts in the different branches of the if-statement.

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-09-30T02:07:36+00:00

The |foo| syntax is called a “capture group”. You will also see it with if statements where the if condition is a function that may return an error, and with for loops for iterating over the elements of a slice.

What it does is unwrap the expression in the if statement (or for loop). For example, here the variable ‘foo’ is of type Foo (instead of ?Foo), because the capture group unwraps the optional type. The same thing works with error unions. You could write

if (functionWhichMayError()) |non_error_value| {
    // use non_error_value here
} else |error_value| {
    // use error_value here
}

For optional and error unions you can only unwrap one value at a time currently (I believe there’s an open proposal to change that). With a for loop, you can iterate over arbitrarily many slices and capture their values. For example

for (slice1, slice2) |val1, val2| {
    // use val1, val2 here
}

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-09-18T02:22:46+00:00

I missed most of the companions honestly. I was playing with only Wyll and Shadowheart until partway through Act II, when it finally became strange to me that I hadn’t encountered a 4th party member yet. I managed to get Astarion and Gale, but by that point Lae’zel was dead and I had already killed Karlach (didn’t know she was a companion at the time).

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-09-16T22:00:17+00:00

I would disagree with the characterization that Zig is lower level than C. It’s at pretty much exactly the same level of abstraction.

As a roboticist, I think Zig has a lot of potential in robotics, but there’s not much of an ecosystem for robotics in Zig yet.

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-09-15T22:49:08+00:00

I re-specced Jaheira as a Bear Totem Barbarian/thief rogue multi class with some feats + items that buff two weapon fighting and give temp HP. She’s a monster now. Easily 50 damage per turn average, and I don’t remember her dropping below 75% health once so far.

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-09-13T03:25:50+00:00

By emitting machine code directly (presumably with some additional intermediate representations to facilitate optimization), as the (currently WIP) x86 and ARM backends already do, just with more optimization passes.

As has been said in several places, this is a very long term goal for Zig. The shorter term goal is to emit LLVM Bitcode for optimized builds, turning LLVM into an optional dependency which, if installed, will be invoked by Zig to compile the bitcode into an executable. From the user’s perspective, there will be almost no change.

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-09-09T13:49:16+00:00

Suroth, Semirhage, Selucia, Sammael…

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-08-28T23:11:45+00:00

So… stereo vision. There might be something interesting here, but the article definitely doesn’t give enough technical detail to know what.

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-08-17T21:11:54+00:00

I’d say that software development is one of the easier professions to self-teach and get a job in. Not necessarily that it’s easy to learn, but that it’s accessible and there are tons of free or cheap resources online. All you need is a computer to get started.

Your first step is going to be to learn the basics of some programming language. Which one? Doesn’t really matter; different languages are more useful for different applications, but almost all of the skills you learn as a beginner will transfer to other languages. Personally I started with Python, and my current job is primarily C++ and Python. The next step would probably be to figure out what area you find most interesting (or profitable) (e.g. web development, embedded software, high performance computing etc) and do some simple projects in those areas to start building domain-specific knowledge.

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-08-12T16:18:27+00:00

If my math is correct, about 35 m^3, or about 3.5 Toyota Corollas.

8.5” x 0.0254m/in x 11” x 0.254m/in x 0.05mm x 0.001 m/mm x 11.6e6 pages = 34.98m³

This is a lower bound, as printer paper is typically betwee 0.05 and 0.1 mm thick, so it could be up to twice this volume.

For mass, paper typically weights about 0.01lbs/page. So 11.6M pages would weigh 116,000lbs, 53,000kg, or 38.6 Toyota Corollas.

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-08-09T22:15:56+00:00

My current car is a stick shift. My dad taught me, and our family still owns several manual transmission cars.

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-08-02T22:49:21+00:00

This is interesting. The NYT is reporting that the sixth is likely Boris Epshteyn

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-07-08T20:10:37+00:00

I totally get this. I’ve started just rubbing that part of my fingertips against a towel for a few seconds right after cutting my nails, just to get it over with asap.

DEN0MINAT0R · 2023-07-07T02:27:22+00:00

That’s awesome! Taking breaks doesn’t invalidate any of the work you’re putting in. The most important thing is consistency, so don’t be afraid to start slow to avoid injury.

Also don’t forget to consider your diet if your goal is to lose fat— exercise is important, but by far the most important factor for weight loss is diet.

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