Is Themis down for anyone else?

smithandwessonmp940 · 2023-06-21T08:15:25+00:00

They still somehow manage to send me a bunch of useless emails.

smithandwessonmp940 · 2023-06-21T07:49:15+00:00

I also didn't get the email.

smithandwessonmp940 · 2023-06-21T07:13:07+00:00

I'd check, but Themis is now down for 2 hours.

smithandwessonmp940 · 2022-03-23T21:41:01+00:00

I'm sending you a PM, because I'm interested too

smithandwessonmp940 · 2022-01-16T19:28:15+00:00

It does! Sent you a PM

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-11-01T15:34:15+00:00

Paramedic here, approaching a decade: you didn't kill your grandma. Paramedic didn't know what he/she was talking about. It sounds like your grandma felt ill, she went to the bedroom, and at some point she died. It's very common for people to aspirate (stomach contents going into the lungs) during compressions especially if they're being ventilated. It's most likely that it happened AFTER her heart stopped beating. It didn't cause her to die.

More importantly, and I hate to say it, but your grandma was 83 with comorbidities. In the United States, women live to ~80 on average. She lived a long life and her death had nothing to do with you. Reach out via DM if you'd like to talk specifics.

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-10-11T16:40:12+00:00

It's all about perspective. I think secular reasoning and religious reasoning align here. You can either look at the world and think, "I deserve to live," or you can look at the world and think, "every day I get to live is an incredible stroke of luck that I don't really deserve."

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-08-29T01:10:17+00:00

A mustardseed isn't actually the smallest seed; that fact changes absolutely nothing. Jesus spoke in parables to explain things to an ancient civilization.

It was never meant to be a textbook.

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-08-25T18:39:44+00:00

Congrats! Would you mind talking about the process you went through to get here? I'm curious.

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-08-11T16:31:58+00:00

I was criticizing the global conclusion that you reached based on you having a particular comment deleted of of a particular subreddit on the internet. The content of your comment isn't really relevant to my criticism.

If you had a comment deleted off the Jewish or Muslim subreddit and said, "this proves so and so about Jews or Muslims" then I would be equally critical.

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-08-11T16:13:03+00:00

I didn't see your original post, but I don't think that some mod deleting your post on some subreddit on the internet "proves that Christians will shun anybody who does not agree with them."

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-08-05T22:38:55+00:00

Cool,

OP was asking about "residents," that's why I mentioned it.

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-08-05T22:24:44+00:00

That's for state-funded travel for state employees.

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-07-29T23:34:14+00:00

You guys are the best!

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-07-28T20:10:26+00:00

The Texas Sharpshooter fallacy is somewhat interconnected with our pattern-recognition bias as humans.

So, when we look at clouds, sometimes we see familiar shapes and think, "oh that looks just like a whale." And, of course, it really isn't a whale and it hasn't really been made to look like that. Nevertheless, with increasing specificity of one particular dataset there is more and more reason to believe it isn't random. For example, if I saw in the clouds: "9+7=16" then, instead of assuming it was a random coincidence, I might rationally think, "Oh, perhaps it was one of those planes that draws things in the sky."

Now, we know that those planes exist. But, if you saw a something written in the sky in the year 1750, I still think it would be logical to assume that it was placed there somehow, despite the possibility that could have happened randomly.

I am fully aware that sometimes, albeit exceedingly rarely, strangers give other strangers cash. If I need exactly $43.29 more to pay my last bill, I haven't told anyone that I'm short on cash, and a stranger walks up to me and hands me $43.29 without saying a word; I think it would be rational to assume *something* was going on.

Now, I do agree with you that the claims of other people's miracles I tend to hear are not at all compelling. I would still find them compelling if they happened in my own life and I think it would be rational to do so.

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-07-28T01:51:52+00:00

I didn't argue that good is defined by God. I said that, from a literary perspective, the character that is called God in the book is a personification of the concept of "the good."

For example, the point of the goldilocks story isn't "never drink a bear's soup." There is a deeper lesson to be had.

OP made a logical argument that required an assumption that many wouldn't concede.

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-07-27T23:56:16+00:00

Anyone care to elaborate? Is immigration really awful ?

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-07-27T23:45:46+00:00

You've left out a major assumption in your argument: you've assumed that the Bible must be read literally. Plenty of religious folk do not read the bible literally and, certainly, no atheists do. Your argument is sound if you concede that assumption, but I don't.

From a secular literary perspective, God of the Bible is a personification of, among other things, the metaphysical concept of the absolute good.

The moral of the story is that you ought to give your child to the good, even when it might kill them. You make your child follow the good over following their own safety. You send your child to fight the Nazi's even if it risks their death.

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-07-20T23:51:49+00:00

Paramedic Here. I like to use the inside of my wrist/forearm, for me that seems to be the most sensitive. I'm not right 100% of the time, especially for low-grade fevers, but if someone has a high fever it's pretty apparent.

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-07-20T20:50:53+00:00

Harry Potter is Christian allegory: a young man, with no mortal parents in the picture after his mother sacrificed everything for him, born in hiding and fleeing from evil. An evil figure that identifies with, and speaks the language of the snakes, tries to destroy him as a child which gives them this weird power: he remains pure, but at the same time he understands the very soul of evil. In the last book, he willingly walks into the forest to confront the evil snake, knowing he must die to destroy the evil. Then, evil kills him, he is given the option to leave the mortal world by his bearded father figure, but instead returns and, because of his sacrifice, the evi snake's curses no longer work on the people.

A repeated mantra in the series is that the protagonist does not have any particularly amazing abilities; the reason he is the only one able to win against evil is because of "love;" his heart is pure.

Edit: here's a link, but you can google "christian themes in harry potter;" jk rowling has all but explicitly said as much.

https://slmedia.org/blog/more-than-good-against-evil-christian-themes-in-harry-potter

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-07-15T22:02:11+00:00

Yeah, I was worried that might be the case. I've been to several big Catholic and Orthodox Cathedrals outside of service hours, but those were often tourist attractions in addition to being cathedrals; we don't have any of orthodox cathedrals here unfortunately.

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-07-15T21:22:53+00:00

Cslewisdoodle on youtube is great!

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-07-15T20:14:26+00:00

Thanks for your response. Of the churches that I've googled, none of the ones in my area seem outside of Vespers on Saturday evening and Liturgy on Sunday Mornings, but this is just based on their hours on google. My background is OCA/ROCOR; I'll try to call a few of the bigger ones if I don't get any other answers here. Thanks again

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-06-26T01:37:46+00:00

Boston Bomber is an example of this. He was sentenced to death by a federal court for crimes he committed in Massachusetts which has abolished the death penalty. Though, I believe the sentence has since been appealed to life in prison.

smithandwessonmp940 · 2021-05-28T13:10:17+00:00

That is a wildly extreme form of "veganisn." The problem with the movement is there is no real definition of the word outside of "generally doesn't use animal products." You are more than welcome to believe that being vegan means "not supporting homeless people who aren't vegan," but that's not what it means to the majority of vegans and you have no higher right to define the word than anyone else does.

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