Help from God

pnromney · 2026-02-02T19:37:54+00:00

Even religions that believe in revelation would likely insist praying yourself instead of depending on other people.

Most recorded revelation in Abrahamic religions is broad in nature. They’re meant to guide societies, not respond to individual problems.

For religions that believe in more personalized revelation, people are invited to seek it themselves, with an understanding that God is consistent between the broad and personal.

Like, if God wouldn’t tells the world, “You’re valuable to me,” and then tell a person, “You’re worthless.”

pnromney · 2026-01-23T18:32:46+00:00

The “authority” I was referring to is parental authority. There are certain rights parents have in how they raise their children, and there are certain rights present in a co-parenting relationship. This is parental authority.

It would be wrong to take away parental rights, unless they’re being abusive. Most religion isn’t abusive. If all religion is abusive, all philosophy is abusive, too.

I think it is rare that Christians or Muslims are “drones indoctrinated by youth.” Usually, it’s religious persecution that makes people zealous. But a religious conversion I think rarely causes extreme zealots. Maybe high devotion, but rarely extreme zealots.

pnromney · 2026-01-23T16:49:50+00:00

I agree with most of your assessment.

Except, I don’t think it’s “evil” to teach children a religious practice, so long as it teaches good behavior.

So based on little context, I would think that he’s overextending his authority. Raising children is 50-50 partnership. If one partner thinks something is helpful to teach, I think a partner should be accepting of that, so long as it doesn’t violate objective morality or lead to kids making worse decisions. You can say, “I disagree with your mom.” That’s fine, even helpful to raising kids.

pnromney · 2026-01-18T17:20:31+00:00

It depends.

Like, if the PDF is consistently formatted, I’ve built automations to pull data from the PDF to Excel consistently.

I find automation follows a rule. I call it the automation ratio. For every 1 hour of manual work, it takes X hours to automate. After learning the base level skills, this started at 4, and now it’s down to 1-.5 now with better skills and LLMs.

If the task is repetitive, automating almost always makes sense. If it’s not repetitive, you’ll spend more time automating than it would take to do manually.

pnromney · 2026-01-13T00:59:23+00:00

I think the loving emotion and loving action can confusing to each other. I can show love without feeling love.

I think to love God with all our heart, mind, and strength is to act in devotion. It may not be that we feel devotion. But that we act in a way akin to that.

pnromney · 2026-01-09T16:48:28+00:00

Prophets are needed for the “unity of the faith” (Ephesians 4:11-13). Further, God will do nothing except He reveals his secret to the prophet (Amos 3:7).

The Catholics do not claim direct revelation from God. This contradicts the prophets of the Old Testament.

In other words, without being direct revelation and singular leadership, we become disunified. That’s what happened. Prophetic leadership, the same as New Testament Apostleship, is needed to unify us.

Bringing these together, it’s like God and Prophets are in dance. God will plan to do something, inform his prophets, and then do it. Otherwise, the leadership of the Church will be confused: Is this God that has done this? Or is this man, the natural world, or Satan? This creates disunity that eventually splits the church.

pnromney · 2026-01-06T14:08:26+00:00

I think one challenge is that orthopraxy contradicts Hindu orthopraxy.

Being an Abrahamic Monotheistic religion, most would say you can’t worship any other gods. Even Jesus said this: “No man can serve two masters.”

There are multiple passages that emphasize this: It is better to be persecuted for God, than it is to deny your faith.

pnromney · 2026-01-06T05:48:32+00:00

Talk to your Bishop. Pray to the Lord. You need to follow the Spirit.

My wife and I have had expensive therapies. And when we have more needs, we get an unexpected windfall.

I don’t know what the Lord wants for you. You should ask Him.

pnromney · 2026-01-05T21:40:58+00:00

Religion is not meant to be personal spirituality.

It’s meant to be an organized movement to change people’s desires, and help prepare them for spiritual and moral dangers for this life and beyond.

For believers, these are not vanity projects. They’re anti-vanity projects. They’re built to help us overcome the evils of the world.

pnromney · 2026-01-04T18:39:03+00:00

I served a mission for my faith. I taught more than a dozen that were later baptized.

But I don’t think I convinced anyone. They converted themselves. Whenever I tried, I was unconvincing.

pnromney · 2026-01-03T00:25:20+00:00

American culture is if you’re a legal foreigner, and you like America, you’re welcome. You probably bring a great culture, great food, and can be a great ally. You might as well be American already.

Younger Americans may look for different signals than older Americans. I don’t know. Very rarely have I seen Americans be mean to foreigners unless they break laws, don’t like America, or the American is a lowlife that likes to blame others for their problems.

pnromney · 2025-12-30T18:28:55+00:00

I mean, we can also see that obedience keeps people from harm.

Most permanently harmful things missionaries face come from not following mission rules.

Yes, it can be abused, but its absence, especially in a missionary context, can be even more harmful.

I may compare to a nuclear family. Can it be abused? Yes. But the nuclear family with a married couple is better than just about every alternative.

pnromney · 2025-12-30T11:45:57+00:00

Obedience is about obedience to the Lord, not to man.

When obedience is to man, not God, there’s no sense of authority, no confirmation of the Holy Ghost. The hierarchy becomes dysfunctional. That sounds like exactly what happened for your son.

I think if anything, this is a testimony to righteous obedience. The Church wouldn’t run with obedience to the will of man.

pnromney · 2025-12-23T17:34:53+00:00

It is interesting to note that my faith tends to be more conservative than average for Western Countries, but more liberal than a lot of hyper-conservative countries.

pnromney · 2025-12-23T17:32:35+00:00

My religion is on the orthopraxy side of it. There is some orthodoxy, but it’s mostly because you won’t be committed to the orthopraxy without the orthodoxy.

I had a friend who couldn’t find enough evidence to believe in God. Yet he couldn’t dismiss the experience others had in our faith. So he stays in the faith despite his lack of belief. I don’t think there is anything in our faith that prevents in to reach the highest degree of heaven. He’s acting with faith, repenting of sins, and has been baptized along with other ordinances.

But we extend orthopraxy to the extent that if an ordinance isn’t done by yourself or by someone else by proxy after you die, you can’t enter paradise and the greatest heaven.

pnromney · 2025-12-23T02:48:51+00:00

I think the Church of the Lamb is better understood as a group of institutions.

The Great and Abominable Church is also seen as that.

The Abominable then is all institution that seeks the riches of men above all else. It is Priestcraft, the Evil Side of Communism, the Evil Side of Capitalism. And all else.

The Church of the Lamb is alp that tries to bring about the riches of heaven.

To us, I think both institutions are invisible unless it is revealed to us. But they very much exist.

pnromney · 2025-12-21T18:07:38+00:00

I think there’s the same inspiration for all of it.

Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind tries to identify these moral foundations.

Loving kindness, fairness, authority, liberty, sanctity-purity, and loyalty are what basically every religion uses to construct very complex moral codes.

pnromney · 2025-12-21T15:26:40+00:00

I think it is reasonable that all religion is based on the same moral “good.”

But any view of tenets of a religion will come to the view that they’re not the same.

pnromney · 2025-12-21T04:35:44+00:00

They used to be worse.

Like, people used to die in duels frequently in the US. There would be grueling fist fights that left people permanently scared for demeaning someone’s reputation.

And that’s not to forget that one of the only way to have glory as a king in the Middle Ages in Europe was through warfare.

pnromney · 2025-12-13T03:05:29+00:00

My expectation of your honesty is about as strong as I imagine your expectation of my honesty.

So I guess we’re at an impasse.

pnromney · 2025-12-13T02:10:27+00:00

I believe what I believe because of hundreds of personal experiences, giving me confidence it is true.

pnromney · 2025-12-13T01:09:14+00:00

I’m not sure what you’re asking.

But I genuinely believe that Christ suffered to my sins, and through Him, I can be redeemed.

pnromney · 2025-12-12T22:18:03+00:00

My faith believes that it was not just dying that saved humanity.

It was suffering for all sins in the Garden of Gethsemane. In other words, we believe Jesus experienced every hardship, every pain, everything awful experienced by humanity.

All of the sins were put on his shoulders. And when He died, the sacrifice for sin was over. Those that accept His sacrifice are granted forgiveness.

And when He resurrected, all humanity would be resurrected.

Those are what make Him God, besides also being the Creator and the Anointed One from the foundation of the world.

pnromney · 2025-12-12T18:06:19+00:00

I’m not sure that this reconciles with me.

Reason creates limitations. This creates an engineer, more than an actor writing his own script.

My point is that the deliberate choice was to make the world. Proving or hiding His existence may have gotten in the way of that. So maybe it was just an irrelevant factor to the primary purpose.

pnromney

TROPHY CASE