The Law of Love

Blog

  • there probably wasn’t a literal world wide flood based on the bible

    just because the bible says so, and God can do anything?

    when miracles occur, i believe there is evidence for it. with the story of noah, it’s not just the lack of evidence, but evidence exists that actively discredits the story. 

    if the story of noah occurred within recent history or thousands of years, how are there so many cultures who look like they evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, when supposedly they were all wiped out recently?

    how did all the fresh water fish and life survive when all the water combined with the ocean?

    how did kangaroos and island animals get to the ark? 

    why isn’t there any fossils of the mass casualties of life on earth?

    why wasn’t there any imbreeding with only one of each animal?

    how did they fit so many animals on one boat?

    is it all just because the bible says it, and God can do anything, that we should take it as true? the new testament does talk about noah as if it was a literal story, so at least if you believe the bible is the word of God, you can’t just say the story was a metaphor. 

    i believe when miracles occur, there is evidence for them. it’s understandable when a christian doesn’t think much about these things and takes the story as true. but for those who have studied or should know better, it stands as contemptable the disdain for truth that those literalist christians have.

  • is the love of god in the bible unconditional?

    is it really conditionally unconditional love? which is really conditional love. 

    is it just unconditional if you are a christian? how far would that go? supposedly you can’t slip up if you are a christian, but then again if you started sinning seriously people would say you were never saved to begin with. so whether you look at this from catholic or protestant type thinking, there are things that can cause you to lose God’s favor. 

    even if it was unconditional as a christian, it’s still conditional on having the proper faith in Jesus. 

    is God’s love based on whether you are good or bad? 

    my personal stance is God loves unconditionally, but that the bible does not truly reflect that in an ideal way. i think you can salvage the bad depiction from the bible, by saying God loves us unconditinally, but that doesn’t man there aren’t consequences to our actions. 

    —-

    We’re asking a deeply important and nuanced question—one that sits at the intersection of theology, experience, and how we interpret the Bible. Let’s unpack this honestly and clearly.

    ❖ 1. Is God’s love unconditional according to the Bible?

    Short answer: Yes—and no, depending on what you mean by “love.”

    • Yes, in essence: Many verses affirm that God’s love is steadfast, enduring, and not based on merit.
      “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” — Romans 5:8
      “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end.” — Lamentations 3:22
      These point to an initiating, unearned love—God loves even when we’re not lovable.
    • No, if love means relational favor, blessing, or salvation: There are clear conditions attached to aspects of God’s relationship with people:
      “If you love me, keep my commandments.” — John 14:15
      “Remain in my love… If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love.” — John 15:9-10

    So: God’s love is offered unconditionally, but relationship, intimacy, and communion with Him are conditional.

    ❖ 2. Is it “conditionally unconditional”?

    That’s a sharp phrase, and it captures the tension in Christian theology.

    • Many Protestants say God’s love is unconditional, but access to its benefits (like salvation) is conditioned on faith alone.
      • But then, if someone “falls away,” it’s said they never had true faith.
      • This makes it seem like a love offered with open arms—until you fail the entrance exam.
    • Catholics and Orthodox also speak of God’s love being unconditional.
      • But salvation is synergistic—you must respond, cooperate, stay in grace.
      • Mortal sin, unrepentance, or rejecting grace can sever the relationship.

    So yes—there’s a conceptual dissonance: we’re told the love is unconditional, but much of the experience and consequence of it is filtered through conditions.

    ❖ 3. Is God’s love only for Christians?

    • The Bible shows God loves the whole world (John 3:16), and Jesus speaks of loving enemies, implying that reflects God’s nature (Matthew 5:44–48).
    • But again, the full relationship is only experienced in Christ, according to the New Testament.

    So the offer is universal, but participation is particular.

    ❖ 4. Is God’s love based on behavior?

    • If by “love” we mean God’s core posture toward humanity, then no—it’s not based on being good.
      • Jesus came for sinners, not the righteous (Mark 2:17).
    • If by “love” we mean favor, blessing, presence, or relationship, then yes, our actions matter.

    This is key:

    God doesn’t stop loving someone who sins. But sin can estrange us from the experience and fruit of that love.

    ❖ 5. Your view: Unconditional love with consequences

    Your take is both emotionally and theologically coherent:

    “God loves us unconditionally, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences to our actions.”

    That aligns with a parent-child analogy:

    • A parent may love their child fiercely and unconditionally,
    • Yet discipline them, grieve their choices, or allow them to suffer natural consequences.

    The Bible, unfortunately, doesn’t always clearly distinguish between God’s love, favor, wrath, and justice. It often blends them together. That’s why some depictions of God in Scripture seem contradictory or even unloving.

    ❖ Summary

    Is God’s love unconditional?

    At its root, yes—but not all its expressions are.

    Is it “conditionally unconditional”?

    That phrase accurately captures the tension in much Christian theology.

    Is it only for Christians?

    No—but full communion with it is conditioned on faith, per Christian doctrine.

    Is it based on being good or bad?

    No for God’s core love; yes for relational depth, blessing, and consequence.

    Is your view biblical?

    It’s supported by the best of biblical theology, but not always by the surface narrative of Scripture

  • federal debt may not be that bad, just an accounting thing

    i personally believe too much debt is bad. but this guy below has another argument. it’s over my head. i think there’s some truth to what he says, but i don’t know. i know there are a lot of people smarter than me here, so maybe one of ya’ll can argue with what is posted below.

    Is the natinoal debt and deficit bad?
    Nowhere do these CRFB folks define what the National DEBT is.

    They don’t know.

    Yet, they screed about it as if they do.

    Our national debt is comprised of Treasury securities purchased by individuals firms and governments domestic and foreign who wish to preserve the value of their dollars.

    Ergo, the transfer their non-interest bearing dollars from checking accounts to purchase interest-bearing Treasury securities.

    The dollars used to buy the T-securities go into reserve accounts at the Federal Reserve and the T-securities are kept in security accounts at the Federal Reserve.

    In no way can these purchases (exactly like your purchase of a CD) be construed as debt.

    Interest is credited to T-security accounts by debiting the aforementioned Reserve accounts. No tax dollars are ever involved in paying interest on these SAVINGS ACCOUNTS.

    The DEBT CLOCK on 6th Ave, NYC is pure fraud. It does, however, record all the dollars that have been spent by the Federal government since 1778 and not yet taxed. The $20 trillion-plus represents our National Savings.

    Government debt is a private asset. You and I do not OWE government debt, we OWN it. Indeed, the only source of net dollar-denominated financial wealth is Federal government T-securities.

    Here’s a solution. Once the federal T-security sales reach $21.1 trillion, the Treasury would be prohibited from selling any more bonds. Treasury would continue to spend by crediting bank accounts of recipients, and reserve accounts of their banks. Banks would offer excess reserves in overnight markets, but would find no takers—hence would have to be content holding reserves and earning whatever rate the Fed wants to pay. But as Chairman Bernanke told Congress, this is no problem because the Fed spends simply by crediting bank accounts. (L. Randall Wray) https://goo.gl/m9hdQW

    https://goo.gl/NCKV1E
    https://goo.gl/nTxJRH
    https://goo.gl/FQanLC

    As for the Federal Deficit, they WRONGLY believe the Federal deficit is a bad thing.

    They are completely unaware of the fact that wherever there’s a deficit there’s a surplus … balance sheets must balance. A sovereign government deficit is nothing to fear. It is simply the mirror image of the non-government sector’s saving. As the US private sector retrenched to rebuild its balance sheet, the government’s balance moved toward deficit. There is an unrecognized identity at work. Domestic Private Balance + Domestic Government Balance + Foreign Balance = 0.

    In the case of the Federal budget deficit, it is equal to the penny to net financial surpluses in the non-government sector.

    That’s money in our checking accounts.

    When the gov spends that becomes income to individuals and firms in the private sector. It’s the new money that enters the economy interest-free and is essential in its contribution to economic growth. https://goo.gl/Fq9fKD

  • solving hunger – we should promote ocean and insect farms

    ocean farming. we have vast swaths of unused ocean. sea weed, fish, mussel etc. i read that an area the size of the state of oregon could feed the world, so we have basically unlimited potential. plus sea weed captures a lot more carbon than trees do. 

    and insect farms are super energy and resource efficient and gives lots of nutritious food with high protein.

  • examples of faith from atheists

    Richard Dawkins stated that “Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”

    However, even naturalistic worldviews also take some things on faith.
    For the purposes of this discussion, we will define a miracle as an event which occurs outside of the natural order and cannot be repeated or explained by the scientific process.
    Consider the following four miracles which must be accepted by the atheist in spite of scientific evidence to the contrary:

    1. Getting Something from Nothing. There has never been an observed example where something was created from nothing. No person would attempt to build something without materials, and there is no theory outside Big Bang cosmology which reaches this conclusion without ridicule from the scientific community
    2. Getting Life from Non-Life. Even if naturalistic causes could have created the universe, it would still be necessary for non-living material to become living. This is also an unproven (and impossible) feat which must be accepted when denying the existence of God.
    3. Getting Order from Chaos. Personal observation tells us that all things tend towards disorder, not order. Left to themselves buildings crumble, gardens are taken over by weeds, and living material decays. If unguided natural causes produced the universe (from nothing) and produced life (from non-life) these processes would necessarily go against observed scientific principles in order to produce the complexity, beauty, and order that we observe in the world around us.
    4. Getting the Immaterial from Physical Matter. If nothing was able to produce everything, non-life was able to produce life, and chaos was able to produce order the atheistic worldview would still encounter an insurmountable obstacle. No matter how organized, it is impossible for physical material to produce the immaterial realities of human consciousness. Our morality, beliefs, desires and preferences all exist outside of mere physical matter.

    Each of these examples go against the natural order and could be labeled as miracles. Naturalistic worldviews such as atheism, evolution, and neo-Darwinism regard this evidence for God with what Dawkins would certainly consider an unscientific approach: each item must be taken on faith.

  • macroevolution has for practical purposes effectively stopped in humans

    evolution from species to species occurs when the environment causes some animals to die out, and only the survirors with the right genes live on to pass on their genes. the thing is, with humans, humans have adapted their environment to themselves. so, there won’t be major evolution occurring. maybe things like lactose intolerance will continue to evolve, and other micro evolutions. but, nothing major should be in our future unless there are drastic changes to our environment. 

  • no two card decks randomly shuffled have probably ever been in the same order

    Here’s a fact that’s incredibly simple and very easy to prove, but I still find incredible.

    Take a normal pack of cards—52 in total (not that the exact number matters)—and shuffle it.

    A very simple process most people will have done at least a few times in their life.

    Now take that randomly shuffled pack and lay it out in a line so you can see the sequence of cards.

    Now just look at the cards for a second and the order they’re in.

    You are the first person in all history to see a pack of cards in that order.

    Never in the history of humanity has anyone ever held a pack of cards in that order.

    Okay now to be fair we can’t technically prove this but it’s so overwhelmingly likely it’s ridiculous to deny.

    How could this possibly be true?

    A pack of 52 cards has exactly 52! possibilities, that is 52 factorial (52*51*50…*3*2*1)

    Immediately you can see this is a pretty big number, but exactly how big you likely won’t have registered. That is approximately equal to:

    80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

    That is 8 with 67 zeroes.

    Thus when you shuffle a deck randomly there is a 1/(8×10^67) chance that it is any specific combination. Again, to give an impression of how unlikely that is it is a 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000125% chance.

    That’s a bit of a mouthful so let’s only consider the first ten decimal places hereafter as if the chance is less than that it can be considered in effect zero.

    If you shuffle a pack of cards 100 times the chance that any of these 100 are a specific combination is 0.000000000% to 10 decimal places.

    If you shuffle it 1 million times it increases substantially to 0.000000000% to 10 decimal places… perhaps not substantially enough.

    Let’s now try 10 billion: that’s if every human alive shuffles it once plus a couple billion more times. Now it’s far far higher at 0.000000000% to 10 decimal places… still not high enough.

    Okay now let’s say that you shuffle a pack 1 trillion times? That is, dozens more than there have been humans in all history? Still 0.000000000% to 10 decimal places.

    Now it’s already unlikely that in all history that collectively all packs of cards have been shuffled that many times; let’s go a bit (well actually quite a lot) higher to see if it still stands and shuffle cards 1 decillion times, that would be if every human ever alive shuffled over a trillion times each, now it comes out to *drum roll*… 0.000000000% to 10 decimal places.

    And to clarify, no, it isn’t yet close.

    If you consider it to 20 decimal places you still round to 0.0000000000000000000%.

    So not only is it totally unfeasible that ever in all human history have two decks been randomly shuffled and come out the same, but we could multiply the number of humans by a billion, have them all shuffle a trillion decks each and it would still be a less than one in a billion chance that any would be the same as the one you just shuffled.

    Wow.

    I don’t know about you but to me that sounds pretty wrong; I can assure you however that it isn’t.

    A few people in the comments have made the valid point that this is a misrepresentation of the situation as it takes a shuffle to be a purely random order when in fact it very much isn’t. The reason for this is often when people shuffle they are shuffling from an ordered pack and frankly don’t do a thorough job of it so the order is still not random, furthermore, people often use similar shuffling methods making it again more likely the order will come out the same.

    This point is entirely true but doesn’t undermine the argument for the simple reason that the numbers are not close enough for it to make a difference. Exactly how much more likely than in the pure mathematical case it is in the practical case is almost impossible to gauge, but it could possibly be quite a great difference. As a result, if you calculated that there would in the pure case be a 1% that in all history the same order has been randomly shuffled to twice then it would be reasonable to reject this as not convincing as the reality could easily be ten times more likely at which point the chance is high enough you can’t say with confidence it hasn’t happened.

    The issue is that the chance is so much lower than that. To take the last calculation, you could have every human ever alive shuffle a trillion decks each and the chance that any two were the same could still be increased by a factor of a trillion and still be 0.0000% to 5 decimal places.

    In short, yes in the practical case the chances are more likely than represented enough, but the odds are so ridiculously small that this change is nowhere near enough to be relevant.

  • our current voting system, plurality voting, is terrible

    plurality voting is where you pick your favorite among a list of people. usually, this just means the person who didn’t get majority support but is the largest minority, wins. often times the winner has low approval ratings for that reason. plurality voting also encourages the spoiler effect… in a country where three fourths of the country is one ideology, having multiple people in that category means the minority ideologies wins. also, plurality voting discourages third parties, because people dont want to be spoilers or parties keep people from participating. think how conservatives are keeping out the libertarian. think how hillary had low approval ratings but took the nomination anyway. think how Gore would have won twenty years ago, but Nadar spoiled his nomination. the examples are endless. it’s an undemocratic process. it insists that low approval rating candidates should win. 

    there are alternatives to plurality voting. approval rating voting. different types of rank voting. the large majority of other countries realize our voting process makes no sense, and have an alternative system. plurality is the wild west of voting, rationality be damned. 

    here is an article highlighting some of the ways plurality voting sucks. 

    Any academic will tell you that our choose-one voting method (plurality voting) is a terrible, terrible voting method. (There’s better.) In fact, plurality voting is so bad that it deserves its own top five list.

    Here it is.

    Number 5: It’s Inexpressive

    Plurality voting is among the least expressive voting methods there is. A plurality ballot puts a slate of candidates in front of you and forces you to choose only one. No more.

    Consider how strange that is. You likely have opinions about all those candidates. And yet, you only get a say about one. Different voting methods allow you to express yourself in all kinds of ways such as choosing as many as you want, ranking, and scoring. But plurality lets you do none of that.

    Not convinced? Imagine a way to offer less information than plurality voting allows while not handing over a blank ballot. Good luck!

    Number 4: The Spoiler Effect

    Anyone awake during the 2000 US presidential election is aware of the spoiler effect. In that election, we had a candidate that didn’t win (Nader) who divided another candidate’s support (Gore). Without Nader’s presence, Gore would have won; but with Nader present, Bush won. It makes no sense for a candidate to enter the race—and lose!—yet change the winner. But that’s the kind of nonsense plurality carries out.

    Plurality voting is extremely sensitive to the spoiler effect. The “spoiler” candidate only needs to take away a little support from a similar candidate to sway the election. This happens because plurality only lets you choose one candidate. Because you can only pick one, voters are forced to divide their support among similar candidates.

    The spoiler effect influences policy as well. It largely explains the US’ draconian ballot-access laws. Third parties and independents are often forced to quickly get many thousands—sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands—of signatures to get on the ballot. To make matters worse, major parties then challenge those signatures to try to kick them off the ballot. In Pennsylvania, presidential candidate Ralph Nader was forced to pay court costs just for defending his own signatures. This heinousness plays out on the local level, too.

    Why do major parties do this? Without a third or fourth candidate on the ballot, there’s no worry of a spoiler. Of course that also means voters don’t get options, but that’s not the major parties’ problem. So far major parties have preferred to stifle competition and democratic speech than address the real culprit: plurality voting.

    Number 3: Favorite Betrayal

    Plurality voting can bully you into voting against your favorite candidate. It does this by giving you a dilemma: (1) Support the candidate you really want, but risk having another candidate you don’t like win; or (2) Make a compromise by choosing among the frontrunners, but abandon your favorite.

    How good is a voting method that punishes you for supporting your honest favorite?

    Not being able to vote your favorite creates further issues. For instance, there’s less motivation to improve ballot access or get signatures for your candidate. After all, why work for better options if you can’t bring yourself to vote for them yourself?

    Number 2: Partisan winners

    When multiple candidates enter a plurality voting election—or advance through multi-candidate primaries—we tend to see more partisan winners. Why is that? There’s a phenomenon called the center-squeeze effect that works against moderate candidates appealing to the center. The effect looks like this:

    (Figure generated using the voting simulation tool created by Ka-Ping Yee.)

    The candidates in the middle have their vote divided and squeezed from either side while candidates on the ends pick up the support from either tail. If you had to pick a best candidate for this electorate, wouldn’t you pick the candidate right in the middle that appeas to the broadest range of voters?

    With all the talk about partisanship, you’d think there’d be more attention to this center-squeeze issue, but there isn’t. Instead we cross our fingers for “bipartisan agreement.” Of course, expecting bipartisan cooperation in such a partisan environment is a lot like a basketball player expecting a deliberate assist from the opposing team. Fat chance.

    Number 1: Barrier to Entry

    Barrier to entry doesn’t necessarily affect an election’s winner, but it does threaten political discourse, a crucial piece to a functional democracy. Plurality creates a barrier to entry by giving new candidates artificially low support—the consequence when voters fear to vote their favorites. This means that new candidates (including third parties and independents) don’t just lose. They lose big.

    Our plurality voting approach is also taken with polling. They call people at dinner time: “If the election were held today, which candidate would you vote for?”

    And that polling information is used in all kinds of ways, including who gets in debates. If candidates get too little support—which is what plurality does to newcomers—they don’t get in the debates. That means those candidates’ ideas don’t get heard.

    Media, too, consider plurality voting results when it comes to third parties and independents. Plurality’s paltry showing for third parties is the media’s excuse for why they don’t cover those candidates. Media’s reasoning to snub candidates goes something like this: “If their ideas were any good, they would have done better in the polls. They didn’t do well in the polls, so their ideas must not have been any good.” The assumption here, however, was that the poll—using plurality voting—was any good in the first place. But we know that plurality voting is no good at all.

    Unsurprisingly, third parties and independents rarely get anywhere. Plurality has so ingrained in us that we can’t have new ideas. It also tells us that even if a third party or independent gets on the ballot, we should dismiss them. Or maybe we should not even notice their presence.

    Plurality voting’s role means that we get stuck with two parties. And these two parties represent a narrow range of ideas. It’s little wonder why there’s seldom any real progress. Of course, that’s not to say there can’t be.

    it’s such a stupid system, that i distrust the motives of those who support it. maybe their favorite candidate has no chance otherwise? maybe they’re just ignorant of the vast number of alternative voting systems? who knows. 

  • congress shouldn’t have short term term limits

    the problem with term limits, is that we end up with folks who dont know any thing about the government or its laws. 

    or, if we did have term limits, limit it to a career, like thirty years. 

    they say the presidency is too much power to give one person for a long time, but that doesn’t apply to congress given it’s not such a concentrated power 

  • a day in the life of sue, a libertarian

    A DAY IN THE LIFE OF SUE, A REPUBLICAN
    Sue gets up at 6 a.m. and fills her coffeepot with water to prepare her morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards.
    With her first swallow of coffee, she takes her daily medication. Her medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to ensure their safety and that they work as advertised.
    All but $10 of her medications are paid for by her employer’s medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance – now Sue gets it too.
    She prepares her morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Sue’s bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.
    In the morning shower, Sue reaches for her shampoo. Her bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for her right to know what she was putting on her body and how much it contained.
    Sue dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air she breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air.
    She walks to the subway station for her government-subsidized ride to work. It saves her considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.
    Sue begins her work day. She has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Sue’s employer pays these standards because Sue’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union.
    If Sue is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, she’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some stupid liberal didn’t think she should lose her home because of her temporary misfortune.
    Its noontime and Sue needs to make a bank deposit so she can pay some bills. Sue’s deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Sue’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.
    Sue has to pay her Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and her below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Sue and the government would be better off if she was educated and earned more money over her lifetime.
    Sue is home from work. She plans to visit her father this evening at his farm home in the country. She gets in her car for the drive. Her car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards. She arrives at her childhood home. Her generation was the third to live in the house financed by Farmers’ Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans. The house didn’t have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification.
    She is happy to see her father, who is now retired. Her father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Sue wouldn’t have to.
    Sue gets back in her car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn’t mention that Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Sue enjoys throughout her day. Sue agrees: “We don’t need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I’m self-made and believe everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have.”