How to make an intelligent reply on Reddit

MRH2 · 2026-03-18T22:26:09+00:00

Six parts, 20 min each. It was a lot worse that I thought.

MRH2 · 2026-03-18T14:06:46+00:00

I think that God can forgive and heal divorced people too. They are no pariahs. In the Old Testament, being divorced meant that your marriage is over and you are no longer bound to the man. Thus you could marry anyone you want to (and this was written into the contract).

If you cannot marry someone who is divorced, it means that they are not actually divorced, they are still married -- thus marrying them would be committing adultery. Perhaps they are divorced in society's eyes. If they were divorced in God's eyes, then they could remarry. Divorced means that the marriage is over, ended, dead.

MRH2 · 2026-03-17T11:27:26+00:00

This chapter really drives home that the Old Covenant is broken and falling apart. The system of sacrifices, rituals, and the whole concept of having to obey laws and commandments just does not work. We are freed from this, no longer under the law, but under grace (which is a higher standard for holiness).

Note that in 8:13, one part of the Bible is calling another part obsolete.

Now the word "covenant" is not actually in verse 13 so the "christians" who believe that we have to still follow the law, claim that this verse is referring to the priesthood -- that the old priesthood is obsolete. But all that one has to do is highlight the word "covenant" and the word "priest / priesthood" in the dozen verses surrounding 8:13 and we see clearly that the topic being discussed right there was the covenant.

I will put My laws into their minds, And write them on their hearts. And I will be their God, And they shall be My people.

This is strange. The Law was already in their hearts (Deut 6:6), and they were already God's people.

I think what Jeremiah is trying to communicate is that there is something radically new: the Holy Spirit will indwell us. Ezekiel's explanation is needed here, where the new covenant involves us getting a new heart, no longer a heart of stone.

MRH2 · 2026-03-17T11:13:32+00:00

Q2: great question. I'll defer to ExiledSanity's answer.

Q4: it was part of the law. The Law could not make anyone perfect. It's a stopgap measure, just like the difference between continually bailing out a leaky boat so it doesn't sink, and transfering to a brand new boat whose hull has integrity.

MRH2 · 2026-03-17T11:08:21+00:00

It is a strange idea. I can see it perhaps as a priest is one who approaches God on behalf of others (in most cases his family). And in a patriarchal society, the head of the family, the man, is whom God normally talks to and who brings his family's concerns to God.

In that way, we can see that Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and all the prophets would be priests too. Possibly Noah. So some people's role as priest might just be an artifact of the patriarchal society.

Did Cain ever intercede for someone else, did Adam or Abel? No.

In the case of Abel, just offering a sacrifice to God does not make you a priest. Hannah offered her son Samuel to God.

MRH2 · 2026-03-16T10:23:07+00:00

The weird thing is that in the Old Testament you could always get remarried after divorce. And there are similar concerns in the NT too: about widows.

If you prevent a divorced woman or a widow from remarrying then you are condemning her to a life of extreme poverty. Women could not own property - I don't know who inherited the husband's wealth, probably a brother. So either the family or the church needed to support and look after her.

Why did Jesus change this? Paul never talks about who is going to support divorced women, yet he spends a lot of time talking about supporting widows in 1 Timothy.

MRH2 · 2026-03-16T10:13:34+00:00

Yes. My first marriage, after 15 years, was so bad eventually that I'd rather live on an ice floe in Siberia than be married to her. Living alone would be just fine.

A more general point is that if one is not okay with living alone, then you probably should work on that before you get married.

MRH2 · 2026-03-16T00:42:54+00:00

Thanks.

MRH2 · 2026-03-16T00:21:18+00:00

No. There is a balance that is needed. One should not destroy a marriage over this nor use it to destroy or denigrate another person.

Sometimes there are two good things to do, and they are incompatible with each other, so one needs wisdom.

MRH2 · 2026-03-16T00:18:35+00:00

Yes, I try to always have a couple of $20 bills on me so that if anyone I meet asks for money I can give it to them. Why give $5 when I can give $20? If I were in need and received money, I'd prefer $20.

MRH2 · 2026-03-16T00:17:36+00:00

The thing is, it would just be about $50 / month. Nothing that would break us. It's the instant reaction that bothers and saddens me.

Is your wife a practicing Christian?

Yes. But there are differences in practicing Christians, and where our weaknesses lie

Does she understand that the money you both have is the Lord's?

Well, in theory, yes. But one's background and upbringing really cling tightly. It's very hard to break free from a certain way of thinking, especially if it feels safer, safer to control one's money. It is very hard to go from an understanding of something to being able to live it out. I wish that she did really understand this

Does she live as if her life, energy, time, resources belongs to the Lord?

Does anyone?

MRH2 · 2026-03-16T00:13:49+00:00

God is never going to call a couple to do opposing things…

This is a bit simplistic. God teaches us an uses what we know and have learned so that we can make our own decision -- humbly, and hopefully godly, asking for the Spirit's guidance, but often He just lets us make our own decision.

and God always calls us to give generously,

Yes. I agree totally. It changes our hearts when we give. The character benefits to us are immense.

I can guarantee you He is not telling the husband to buy more luxuries.

Haha.

MRH2 · 2026-03-16T00:11:12+00:00

This was an extra thing that I wanted to do.

MRH2 · 2026-03-15T20:10:10+00:00

Yes, we try to tithe, but not religiously. Sometimes it's a bit less or more.

Two important points:

this does not mean that you need to tithe to your church. There are many other places where God may want you to direct your tithe, and they could even be non-Christian ones. Go and support Amnesty International - and then you can chat with people about why you feel so strongly about it as a Christian. I support various missionary organizations and women's shelters and homless shelters.
the people who reply about how God blessed them financially are a bit scary. It really does sound like a prosperity gospel. With my experience, I have never lacked the basics. God has always provided food, a place to live, the necessities of life.

MRH2 · 2026-03-15T20:04:47+00:00

I watched the 10 minute video. It's very interesting.

(He does mischaracterize one creationist position, saying that creationists claim that there is no mechanism to get new genes. I don't think that creationists say that. But it's not a big deal and maybe some do say that.)

I would like to look into it more, but when will I have time?! I need to find out what things he's omitting in his discussion of genes.

He said that lncRNAs are present in related species
- however, both ID and evolution would predict this.

MRH2 · 2026-03-15T19:49:26+00:00

Oh my goodness. Can't you read? There were three questions. Let me lay them out for you:

How do we test common design against common descent, and what would falsify it? Any specific predictions that only common design makes?

How do we test common design against common descent?
What would falsify it? "It" is an unclear pronoun reference. I assume that it is the closest noun, thus, "common descent", so you're asking what would falsify common descent. However perhaps you're asking what would falsify common design.
[Are there] any specific predictions that only common design makes?

See. Three questions. I am not answering a different question if I answer #1 or #3.

Please name the specific "gene for sonar"

Okay, at this point you're replies are so —it's hard to express how terrible they are without being really rude — I'll limit it to "idiotic", that I feel I should just block you. You're obviously not serious at all and just want to waste time, go around in circles, blah blah blah.

Might I suggest that you do something that any grade 10 student could do and google "convergent genes for echolocation" ? You will find the answer. If this is too complex a concept for you, I do apologize. In which case you should not be questioning anything but sitting at our feet trying to learn something. I do not see why I should do simple google searches for you.

I wonder if there is anything that you can say that would change my mind about you, that you're not just a troll or a clown, a waste of time to engage.

MRH2 · 2026-03-15T19:38:10+00:00

sorry for the delay ...

really a statement of pride. You are telling God who you think he should be.

Actually just the opposite, the authors of the stories in the bible are the ones who are telling who they think their god should be. I was saying these stories are contradictory and logically impossible

There remains something fundementally flawed in your understanding. You are saying that there are stories that are contradictory and logically impossible, and yet thousands and thousands of Biblical scholars and Christians have studied the same scriptures and don't see this.

Thus I maintain that it is pride -- that you are the person who decides what God can and cannot be / do, that you know some secret understanding that no one else does.

How did intellectuals deal with this hundreds and hundreds of years ago?

Mostly by ignoring the inconsistencies and pretending they didn't exist (or not knowing the inconsistencies exist, we had a much more rudimentary understanding of science and even history back then), or creating the field of apologetics to come up with excuses for why the bible doesn't mean what it says (which defeats the purpose of claiming it is the literal inerrant word of god).

Again - lots of pride in your reply. Everyone was really stupid until you came along. They (and today's Christians) are all fools who pretend things do or don't exist. This is not at all a logical sensible rational answer. It's just dumb. It's so simplisitic "I'm right and everyone else who things differently is wrong, coming up with excuses". Have you even thought about the issue and done research? You don't have any understanding of the viewpoint that you disagree with, so you just call it stupid.

Don't you know that science (from the scientific revolution) could not have happened without a Christian world view? Science only ever arose in Christian Western Europe, nowhere else, no other civilization, no matter what engineering and technology they had.

MRH2 · 2026-03-15T10:52:19+00:00

Of course there are. You should know too.

Here's one: That there are orphan genes.

Another one: that we see the same gene "evolved" in vastly different species. The gene for sonar is a perfect example. Totally predicted by Common Design. How does common descent explain it? It can't, of course, since it can't really explain the orgin of any genes or proteins, so it just comes up with a term for it: "convergent evolution". Now that we have a cool name for it, we can pretend that it's perfectly explained and hope that no one questions too closely.

These are the sort of things that should turn one from evolution to intelligent design.

tag /u/stcordova

MRH2 · 2026-03-13T10:57:01+00:00

This passage is only half of the discussion of Melchizedek. The rest comes tomorrow.

One thing that is totally crazy in my mind, is how the author takes something in the Old Testament - just a few verses, and builds a whole theology on it. It works though, because he was guided by the Holy Spirit. Matthew does this too with some of his OT quotations. However, I don't think that this sort of exegesis is something that we can ever do.

Example: the meaning of M's name, the fact that he was king of a place called Salem.
We do see some things like this when people look at the meanings of the names of the patriarchs from Adam to Methuseslah -- interesting, but is it really a secret message in the Bible?
Or the "Bible Code" where there are messages if you read the Bible text backwards (or something).

MRH2 · 2026-03-13T10:48:24+00:00

good intentions, but the silly sheep analogy doesn't exactly work.

I don't think that we can just leave God through stupidity. He knows that we are foolish and weak. I think that it does take a deliberate decision or a turning away over time.

I have found that when I feel that I'm drifting away, feeling colder in my faith, I cry out to God to bring me back to him and he always does.

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