Many times when I see "Christian meanness" online, I see variations of the following in a bio: Reformed Baptist. Sola Scripture, Sola Fide, Sola Gratia, Sola Christus, Soli Deo Gloria.
Make of that what you will.
@johnpauldickson@WWUTTcom Reading @PrestonSprinkle 's latest book and that fact hit me. I knew it, but the gravity suddenly came home: "pastor" just isn't a title used much in NT. I've no issue w/ it, but some hang a lot of weight on a tiny nail.
@WWUTTcom Apart from Jesus, there are no named “Pastors” — male or female — in the New Testament. Not Paul. Not Peter. Not Timothy. Not James. Not Silas. Not anyone.
Esau came in from the field famished. The text says he saw the stew, asked for it, and traded his birthright on the spot. Then it adds the line that should haunt every reader: “thus Esau despised his birthright”. The Hebrew is bāzâh. He did not only barter. He scorned. He treated as common what God had set apart for him.
This is what most spiritual disasters look like. Not the dramatic Faustian signing in blood, but the moment when present appetite eclipses covenantal future, when relief from this hour weighs heavier than promise across generations. The rule of the belly is older than philosophy and quieter than scandal. It is the voice that whispers, what good is the inheritance if I am hungry now.
The question is not whether the appetite will speak. It will. The question is whether someone will sell the holy thing to silence it.
@ShaneRaynor I like the “five alls” as a good summary of doctrine. I’m convinced accountable discipleship is the defining piece of Wesleyan spirituality.
Most debates about Calvinism vs. Arminianism get stuck at the level of salvation mechanics, did you choose God or did God choose you? That’s the right question asked at the wrong depth. The real disagreement is ontological. It’s about what kind of being God is trying to produce.
The more I read from 18th and 19th century Methodist theologians and from Christian theologians in the 1,700+ years before that, the more I realize how much ground modern Christianity (especially evangelical) in the west has ceded to Baptist theology and practice. That’s why so many of us say that non-denominational churches are effectively white-label Baptist churches. Don’t get me wrong, Baptists have contributed much that’s good to the church, but Christian culture defaults to a Baptist approach without even realizing it.
@LuanaGoriss@Mark_Wilson_25 There may be an Aramaic translation of the Greek but there is no Aramaic source behind the Greek. That’s unsubstantiated speculation.
@ShaneRaynor I have never understood the Methodist hand ringing about the quantity of water in baptism. Same goes for remembrance of baptism.
I’ve been repeatedly told that you cannot make a remembrance look like baptism, which is impossible if you don’t fuss about the quantity of water
@ShaneRaynor A ministry colleague was hiring for a staff position. When candidates heard "Methodist," they ran. Didn't matter if they said, "No, we're not UMC!"
This is the part that keeps getting buried under the raw numbers.
Hegseth spent months pressuring Army Secretary Dan Driscoll to remove four decorated colonels from the one-star promotion list. Two Black men. Two women. Driscoll refused, because their records demanded it. So Hegseth pulled their names himself… which legal experts say he likely had no authority to do. The defense secretary is supposed to approve or reject the entire list, precisely to prevent this kind of targeted discrimination.
Then Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George - the Army’s top officer - asked to meet with Hegseth to discuss the blocked promotions. Hegseth refused to meet. Refused to discuss his decisions at all.
Then he fired George. Whose term wasn’t supposed to end until September 2027.
Nine U.S. officials across all four branches confirmed the NBC reporting. “There is not a single service that has been immune,” one said. The officers’ attributes being cited for removal include past support for Covid vaccine mandates… and association with Mark Milley.
The Pentagon’s response to every outlet that asked: “fake news.”
They didn’t dispute a single name.
🚨BREAKING: Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now.
Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible.
Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it.
They fine tuned GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.1 on a simple task: expand a plot summary into full text. A normal use case. The kind of thing a writing assistant is built for. No hacking. No jailbreaking. No tricks.
The models started reciting copyrighted books from memory.
Not paraphrasing. Not summarizing. Entire pages reproduced verbatim. Single unbroken spans exceeding 460 words. Up to 85 to 90% of entire copyrighted novels. Word for word.
Then it got worse.
The researchers fine tuned the models on the works of only one author. Haruki Murakami. Just his novels. Nothing else.
It unlocked verbatim recall of books from over 30 completely unrelated authors.
One author's books opened the vault to everyone else's. The memorization was already inside the model the whole time. The fine tuning just removed the lock. Your book might be in there right now. You would never know it unless someone looked.
Every safety measure the companies rely on failed. RLHF failed. System prompts failed. Output filters failed. The exact protections these companies cite in courtroom defenses did not stop a single page from being extracted.
Then the researchers compared the three models. GPT-4o. Gemini. DeepSeek. Three different companies. Three different countries. They all memorized the same books in the same regions. The correlation was 0.90 or higher.
That means they all trained on the same stolen data. The paper names the sources directly: LibGen and Books3. Over 190,000 copyrighted books obtained from pirated websites.
Right now, authors and publishers have dozens of active lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights.
This paper says that is a lie. The books are still inside. And researchers just pulled them out.
The 2025 Cooperative Election Study is out and there's even more evidence now that the rise of secularism has abated.
Maybe even reversed.
A new paid post on my newsletter today where I try to figure out why that's happening.
Some really surprising data on Boomers and Gen X.
"Inertia still rules American religion. Despite decades of change, most Americans remain in the same broad religious group they were raised in. Switching gets attention, but stability is still the norm."
A new paid post on the newsletter today.
https://t.co/ffNcJR8QnB