LeviF

Rightly or wrongly, I don't doubt that at this point.

He made Jay Cutler cry. I'd give him a job just based on that, though.

Google "sundown town" and try to tell me that places like Tonawanda, Brighton (suburb of Rochester), and Niskayuna (suburb of Schenectady) don't fit the description to the letter. Then there's that whole bus incident in Buffalo...in 1999 for chrissake.

I drink Brooklyn Summer nowadays. Out of a can. Come at me.

So it's now 6:46. How long did that temptation actually last?

Yet there are Malcolm X schools all over the damn place.

Diversity + proximity = war Diversity + proximity = "white flight" They won't ever learn.

I went with Spieth as well. He could have weekends of his life at the British and the PGA and still not win one or the other because someone else had the weekend of their life. Serena can beat any other female tennis player on any given day; they just can't play on her level when she's at her best. Lots of guys can play on Spieth's level, and to beat them all out for all four major championships requires as much luck as it does skill.

Funny you should say that...

I thought that was what I said. I wasn't trying to say that fundamentalists on the whole have an interpretation in the same way that the Catholics on the whole do. Though it is important to point out that many fundamentalist denominations do have copious statements and papers on the "harder" topics in the Bible that they impress upon the churches they cover.

Right. Well now we're taking it back to the Reformation and the concept of sola scriptura; that interpretations of the Bible are also subject to the Bible and the Bible serves to interpret itself in many areas. A literal interpretation of the Bible is no less an interpretation than what the Catholics tend to hold - it's just, well, literal.

His nutritionist kept telling him it's all about smaller portions.

I'm assuming you're talking about infant salvation. I guess the answer would be that the Bible doesn't directly speak to it in general. They can point at examples of children that were saved in infancy or in the womb (John the Baptist, David's first child with Bashsheba) and hope, I guess. I haven't met someone who claimed to know for sure.

From what I understand about modern evangelicalism is that, in those churches, typically, only adults (or those who have come to what I'll call a "mature faith") are baptized because it's representative (that is, not required for salvation) of the new life they have committed to following God. Since babies cannot make that commitment, they do not baptize babies. Additionally, after the ascension of Jesus there is no record of babies/infants/toddlers being baptized by the apostles. Instead, adults were only baptized by immersion after they had demonstrated saving faith in Christ. When it comes to issues with literal interpretations of John 3 (water and the spirit), there are answers to be had, though I won't speak as to whether they are convincing. Ezekiel 36 speaks of the promise of the New Covenant and promises a cleansing water for those under it (as a Pharisee, it is highly likely that Nicodemus had memorized Ezekiel's prophecies, and certainly knew of them). John 7 refers to the Holy Spirit within believers as living water. Though it may simply state the obvious, we do appear to come from a sack of water at birth. As far as whether an unbaptized infant (or even a stillborn or miscarried child) is denied heaven, I suppose that depends on who you talk to. Most of my friends in the evangelical community appeal to the goodness of God and his demonstrable affection for children in the Bible in believing that babies who have no concept of God are admitted into paradise.

I think you're on to something with the superman mentality. People that came of age in the 1960s and 70s were also very skeptical of religion (maybe not to this level, but still) and now we're seeing that age cohort flocking to church again. Maybe this will be the new pattern: teens, 20-somethings, and 30-somethings having little to no religious convictions and 40-somethings and up having much more religious conviction on the whole. Time will tell.

I thought it was quite a good attempt, actually (explained below). Teens, as well as people in my generation (for those of you who don't know, that would be 20-somethings), are "fleeing religion" for a number of reasons, two I think being principal: 1. They don't see the need for something to worship. This is because they have filled this void with two things: sex and themselves. The extreme vanity and promiscuity that exist in these age cohorts is stunning when compared with previous generations. This is where Greg's joke comes in: Tinder is the perfect combination of the two trendy gods that teens and 20-somethings love to bow to. You craft an image of yourself in such a way that not only are you lying to the people you're advertising to, but you're also lying to yourself about how wonderful you look and are. Then you shop around for people who have done the exact same thing; swipe right to try and bone them, swipe left to dispose of them. Teens and 20-somethings dislike prudence, self-restraint, and humility, so they worship the things that are opposed to them. 2. Teens and 20-somethings suffer from a way of thinking that C.S. Lewis brilliantly coined "chronological snobbery": the "uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited." Ask your typical teen or 20-something atheist why they believe there is no god and they will not give you even a coherent response, much less a well-reasoned one. Atheism and its various forms are trendy and popular among internet warriors and give the teen and 20-something the false sense that they are much more common and much more intellectually grounded than any sort of theism. They reject theism, then, not because they have reasoned there is no god, but because they have decided that that is what their generation thinks and therefore they should think it also. It is worth pointing out that chronological snobbery gives birth to all sorts of leftist thought and the like, but that is a topic for another thread.

Because that's not how vaccines work.

Sorry, but I'm all in with the statists on this one. Home school your kid if it's that important to you.

Regular lemonade is my choice. Never seen anybody actually buy a pink lemonade one.

p// I once woke up next to a girl who was over 120 pounds. end// Phew. Feels good to let go of the shame.

C'thulhu fhtagn.

Yeah, reasoning didn't die in the SCOTUS on Friday; it died on Thursday.

See here's my issue, and maybe it is just me, but if you're going to say, "lots of things in the Bible are subject to interpretation and could be allegory or symbolism but the resurrection and the virgin birth most definitely happened and are literal" then I can't deal. Who's to say that many things in the supposed life of Jesus aren't also symbolism?

How do we know the basis for God's judgment, then? How many things in the Bible are symbols or literary devices and what's actually true?