The reason the shadow is gray is because light is bouncing off the other surfaces in the environment. The shadowed area isn’t receiving direct light, but it is receiving reflected indirect light.

In the video game Helldivers 2, ⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️⬇️ is the code to summon a 500kg bomb, one of the most destructive weapons in the game.

The issue is that Mormons and other Christians seem to have differing views on who counts as a Christian. Most Christian sects use the Nicene Creed, which includes the basic set of beliefs all (or almost all, depending on your view ofc) Christian sects adhere to. Mormonism diverges from the Nicene Creed:

• they don’t believe in one God (Mormons believe that humans have the capability to become Gods, and that God was mortal at one time and had His own God),
• they don’t believe that God made the universe (they simply believe that He organized it),
• and they don’t believe that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are one substance (they believe that They are three distinct beings).

Mormonism, on the other hand, seems to believe that Christianity is simply accepting Jesus as a prophet sent by God and the Bible as holy scripture…but by that logic Muslims would also be considered Christians.

Neopagans, Zoroastrians, Jews, Middle Eastern Bahá’ís, Muslims outside the Middle East, followers of indigenous religions, Sikhs:

Not necessarily; try Bottles first and see how that works for you.

The response I gave was not necessarily for you; it is for anyone who is genuinely interested in answers to the questions you posed. This is a public forum, after all, and God knows I’ve struggled with some of those questions before. I would be happy to discuss these questions from my Baha’i (not Christian) perspective in a good-faith conversation, but if you are not interested, I will not bother you.

I’m afraid I don’t understand some of your questions, so I’ll attempt to answer the ones I do understand.

…why do you believe in any of your statements?

I don’t know what religion YappyMonotheist subscribes to, but I can confidently say they believe in the God of Abraham so I’ll provide some supporting citations from the scriptures of the Abrahamic religions.

Why would god […] favor the righteous?

Believers in God believe that God is the source of all good (James 1:17, Qur’ān 4:79, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh 26:2). Being righteous brings you closer to God (Hebrews 10:22, Qur’ān 41:30, The Hidden Words (from the Persian) 69).

Why would he care that you live by the ever subjective moral code of an age and culture?

Consider the influence of religion on society, and how fundamental its ethics are to our culture’s ethics, even if we’re not aware of it.

Being endowed with something means being given, I assume you means created with?

“Endowed” can mean “created with”, as in Article 1 of the UDHR (“They are endowed with reason and conscience…”), and it is used this way here.

I am sure your god cares about your personal growth…

God created us because He loves us (Ephesians 1:4-6, Qur’ān 2:29, The Hidden Words (from the Arabic) 3). As a being that transcends physical limitations, space, and time (1 Kings 8:27, Qur’ān 2:255, Prayers and Meditations 69:1), why would He not care about every one of His creations personally?

Playing devil’s advocate here: most websites are generated by programs, so it’s possible it could be a coding error. That said, for it to plausibly be a coding error in whatever generator they’re using, they’d have to store the Constitution with each paragraph in a separate file. That’s the only way I could possibly see a “coding error” exclude the stuff that was excluded.

Edit: That is to say, obviously it is not a coding error. The text of the Constitution would be stored in one file because 1. that makes sense, and 2. storing per paragraph would add to overhead. And stuff in the middle of files doesn’t just get deleted by a coding error.

(Autistic person here, working on expressing my emotions too) You could try a feelings wheel. There are a few different designs that work on different principles, but the general idea is that they show the relationships between different emotions. I attached a few here so you can see which one works for her best.

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TREE is an extremely fast-growing function in set theory. TREE(1) equals 1, TREE(2) equals 3, and TREE(3) equals a number so large that its lower bound easily dwarfs Graham’s Number.

What neurotypical people don’t get is that autism affects literally everything about us. From how we perceive and interact with the world to how we experience emotion to how we think to our self-awareness and self-perception. To cure autism would be to cause a death of personality. We would be fundamentally different people, if we remained at all

I’m not a Christian or an atheist, but I am a practicing Bahá’í. I’m not going to pretend my perspective is unbiased or definitely applicable to your situation; I offer it in the hope that you find it helpful, but I will not be offended in the least if you choose to disregard it 🙂

It’s a good sign that you’re troubled by the behavior of your fellow Catholics. You have a conscience and you know that they are disregarding Christ’s teachings for…what, really? A sense of fleeting satisfaction that comes from having an enemy they can try to feel superior to? True faith is not looking to other people for what to believe, but reading your scripture and learning the teachings of your religion for yourself. Jesus Christ preached love for all people, no matter what. You know this, and you know that the behavior of the other Catholics you know is in direct conflict with what they claim to believe, and that’s why you’re posting here.

Bahá’ís read their scriptures every day so that they can come to their own understanding of Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings. I personally read scripture in the morning after I wake up, when my mind is still clear and I haven’t gone full tilt into the day yet; and at night before I go to bed, so that my subconscious can think about it while I’m asleep. Perhaps this is something you might want to do: read the Bible for yourself, critically and without preconceptions, and come to your own understanding of what Christianity means to you, so you may make your own informed decision on whether you want to stay a Catholic, or a Christian in general, based solely on your own conscience. You can stay Catholic and practice on your own, if that is what you want! What matters is that you find the way to practice your faith that feels right to you, and you find people that share your values.

Someone else in this thread mentioned Unitarian Universalism. Before I converted, I spent some time with my local UU congregation, and if you’re concerned about finding community, it might be good for you to meet your local congregation. Unitarian Universalism is not really an organized religion, but a community around a shared set of principles that include unity in diversity and the responsible search for truth and meaning. In my experience, though the services were quite…general, the sense of community and camaraderie that you would find in a church (or a mosque, or a temple…) was very much there. If you end up deciding to look for other places to go, a UU congregation is a good choice, at least from my experience.

Different people don’t like it for different reasons. Some people don’t like it because they think it has CIA financial backing (nope), and some people don’t like it because it requires your phone number, therefore it is not private (the privacy it provides is more than sufficient for anyone not actively being persecuted by a Five Eyes state), and some people don’t like it because it feels corporate (it’s a 501c3 nonprofit, and how corporate it feels is subjective).

If the situation was hopeless, their propaganda would be unnecessary

I get distracted/overwhelmed fairly easily, so GNOME is a godsend. minimalistic top bar + on demand workspaces to throw my extra windows into = I can actually get stuff done.

The Greek Bible uses the word αιών, which (confusingly) refers to either a duration of time with a beginning and end, or eternity. When the Bible was translated into Latin, αιών was translated as aeternam exclusively. However, that sense may not have been the right one to use. The earliest writings of the church, before the 5th century or so, described Hell as an ultimately temporary place of purification, rather than an eternal destination.

it is psychosomatic, but can still be debilitating. i knew a Navy veteran who could not drink straight water at all because while in the Navy, he had to drink several gallons of the stuff every day. as soon as he was discharged (honorably), he found he couldn’t have water without anything added to it simply because he had so much of it in the service. of course, he still has to drink water, so he carries around a bottle of flavoring

I looked up the Open Technology Fund on Wikipedia and it has no relation to the CIA. well, except that its parent agency (Radio Free Asia) is part of the US government like the CIA is. they don’t seem to work together at all, and they’re under the purview of two different branches of government

besides, as other commenters have said, they’re open source and they’ve been audited. anyone can build the client themselves (with any potential backdoors removed) and set up their own server. would the CIA allow for that?

nothing better than Signal