N D McPike

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

gennaó: To beget, to give birth, to bring forth, to produce.
Original Word: γεννάω
Part of Speech: Verb
Transliteration: gennaó
Pronunciation: ghen-nah'-o
Phonetic Spelling: (ghen-nah'-o)
KJV: bear, beget, be born, bring forth, conceive, be delivered of, gender, make, spring
NASB: born, father, became the father of, begotten, bear, bearing children, became father
Word Origin: [from a variation of G1085 (γένος - kind)]

1. (properly, of the father) to procreate
2. (by extension, of the mother) to conceive
3. (figuratively) to regenerate

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

It should pay for itself?
Deportations starting in Minnesota would knock out billions in waste, fraud, and abuse—mainstream outlets already documented the industrial-scale billing schemes. Next stop California, where the Medi-Cal tab for people here illegally runs into the high single-digit or low double-digit billions a year; cutting that loose would be even bigger savings. Then the rest of the states do their own house-cleaning.
Senate, Congress, and the usual lobbyists built the incentives that made the programs easy to loot and hard to police. Reverse the incentives, stop writing the checks, and—viola—the ledger looks a lot healthier. Not magic surplus overnight, but the recurring drain stops.

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

Here's a fun fact: There are ~45,000–50,000 Christian denominations worldwide (Center for the Study of Global Christianity). The fragmentation is mind-blowing and can sow real confusion. Yet the core Good News—Jesus’ death, burial & resurrection—remains simple and is widely affirmed across traditions. Most splits arise over secondary issues, history & culture, not the gospel itself.

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

I've thought about this as well. Here's a detail that sharpens the point even further. In Luke 23, the exchange happens while Jesus is still hanging on the cross—alive, suffering, not yet dead, not yet buried, and certainly not yet risen. The criminal turns to Him and says, essentially, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And the reply is immediate: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” No waiting for the resurrection to validate the promise. No requirement that the man somehow survive long enough to be baptized or join a community or demonstrate a changed life. The declaration of grace is spoken in the very hour of the crucifixion itself. The work that secures paradise is already being accomplished in that moment, and faith simply receives it. That timing undercuts any notion that the decisive saving act was something that happened only after the cross—whether three days later or in some subsequent institutional process. The cross itself is where the scandalous grace is extended and received. The rest of the gospel story (death, burial, resurrection, ascension) confirms and completes what was already decisively underway there, but the thief is given the promise on the cross. It’s one of the clearest windows the New Testament gives us into the nature of that grace: it is not earned, not delayed, not contingent on religious performance, and it is offered freely to the one who looks and trusts.

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

Interesting pivot. An atheist is now gatekeeping other atheists for not applying a sufficiently sophisticated “Hudsonian” literary reading to the whirlwind speech—while the original challenge remains unanswered. You’re correct that Job 38 doesn’t merely flex power; it dismantles the epistemic frame in which the complaint (and the modern demand for a stopwatch-compatible definition) was even intelligible. Yahweh does not locate Himself inside temporal categories; He shows those categories are downstream of the act of laying the earth’s foundations. Call it radical reframing, phenomenological shift, or game-theoretic move—the text still asserts a reality that exists prior to and outside the temporal order it creates, while possessing knowledge, intention, and agency. That is exactly the claim the original post demanded be defined. You can spend all day distinguishing the Sunday-school flattening from the high-stakes literary version. It still leaves you with a God who is not a temporal object. Which is where this started—and where the definitional challenge still sits.

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

No one claimed Job 38:4 is a dictionary entry that “defines God.” It answers the actual demand you made: how can a being possess knowledge, intention, choice, and action while existing without temporal location, duration, or succession? The text’s point is precisely that the One who laid the foundations of the earth (i.e., who brought time, space, and succession into existence) is not Himself located inside the framework He created. You are demanding a creaturely, time-bound definition of a reality that, by definition, precedes and grounds time. That’s why the whirlwind question lands: “Where were you…?” It’s not dodge; it’s the recognition that finite minds inside time cannot fully map the ontology of the One who is not. You asked for an explanation of timeless divine existence. The Bible’s answer is that such existence is the precondition of time itself—not something that needs a temporal address to be real. If that doesn’t meet your standard of “define,” fine. Just don’t pretend the question was ever going to get a stopwatch-compatible answer.

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

@DennisMJordan @McClureShawn Laughing and saying ‘cope’ isn’t a counter-argument. If the text is as simple as you claimed, show where the reading fails.

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

Job doesn’t depict a petty bet for sport. It stages the hardest question in the Bible—why the innocent suffer—and then refuses to give a comfortable answer. God’s reply is less ‘shut up’ and more ‘you’re standing inside a reality whose scale you can’t map. Whether that satisfies is left to the reader.

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

@Maximumatheist 1 Corinthians 1:27 (KJV):
“But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.”

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

@McClureShawn Job 38:4 (God speaking to Job out of the whirlwind): “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.”

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

@McClureShawn How exactly is a rainbow made? How exactly does a sun set? How exactly does a posi-trac rear-end on a Plymouth work? It just does!

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

@17QStorm "Check out the nametag Grandma, you're in my world now"

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

@Atomsmade Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing. The phrase comes from Matthew 7:15: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves"

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

@UgoCannon “Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.”

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

Flavius Josephus (c. 37–c. 100 AD), the Jewish historian who wrote under Roman patronage, mentions Jesus twice in his major work Antiquities of the Jews (completed around 93–94 AD).

The Testimonium Flavianum (Antiquities 18.3.3 / 18.63–64)

“Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.”

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

Flavius Josephus (c. 37–c. 100 AD), the Jewish historian who wrote under Roman patronage, mentions Jesus twice in his major work Antiquities of the Jews (completed around 93–94 AD).

The Testimonium Flavianum (Antiquities 18.3.3 / 18.63–64)

“Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.”

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

@D_Preacher_1 If serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve... But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

Archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656) produced the most famous and detailed such chronology in his Annals of the World. He calculated the creation of the world (beginning of time, per Genesis 1:1) as the evening preceding Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC (proleptic Julian calendar), near the autumnal equinox. As of June 30, 2026, this places the age of the world at roughly 6,030 years according to Ussher (commonly rounded in young-Earth discussions; precise day-counting across calendar changes yields ~6,028–6,030 years depending on exact starting point). Ussher cross-checked against secular histories (Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman) for the later periods where the Bible’s data thins out, and he adjusted for things like overlapping reigns.

[N D McPike @d_mcpike]

“Pretty much the same way we know about Socrates, Pythagoras, or most ancient figures. No writings from Jesus himself (or from Socrates), but we have multiple independent early sources:
Absence of contemporary notes isn’t unusual for a 1st-century itinerant teacher in rural Judea. The question is how early and how multiple the sources are — and on that score the New Testament material is actually better than most comparable ancient figures.”
One of the more striking historical contrasts. Jesus’ public activity is generally dated to roughly 1–3 years (the Synoptic Gospels read more like one concentrated year; John’s Gospel implies closer to three with multiple Passovers). He operated almost entirely within a small region of Galilee and Judea, attracted crowds but never controlled territory, held office, or left any contemporary official records, and was executed as a provincial troublemaker by a local Roman prefect. Yet within a few decades his followers had formed communities across the eastern Mediterranean, and within a few centuries he had become the central figure of the dominant religion of the Roman Empire and, later, of Western civilization. No other figure with such a short, localized, and (at the time) obscure public life has achieved remotely comparable long-term recognition.