Exactly. There's a growing technique called the Mittleider method. It's been around for decades, but I've only just discovered it. The claim (backed up by a lot of history, experience, and science) is that plants need 16 different nutrients (not just NPK). So you start with NPK and add in the other trace elements. In his system, you put the same measured amount of fertilizer on the plants every week. They adjust for different uptakes from different types of plants by adjusting plant spacing. You can grow in anything with this technique. But they recommend 3:1 sawdust to sand. The results are incredible, and don't taste like hydroponics vegetables. Just plug mittleider into youtube to see dozens of ordinary not so smart people getting amazing results.

You should stop calling him Al. Albert is much more respectful.

They should give him no quarter.

fixed.

Who gets to decide what my children should be taught at what age? You? Maybe I should demand that your children get religion classes at a young age.

When my son (now 12yo) was less than a year old, he received the usual MMR vaccine. What happened that night was the scariest night of my life. Imagine a 12 month (iirc) old baby, clenching his fists and teeth, rigid body, high fever, while screaming through his teeth. This went on non-stop for several hours. The emergency room staff could do nothing. It eventually went away on its own. The doctors later blamed the MMR vaccine and told us not to give him the next round which was due a few years later. Interestingly, he has Asperger's Syndrome. But he got that from me, not the vaccine.

"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice!" Rush - Free Will

Christianity is nearly identical in this respect. As a human, you have free will to do whatever you want. That thing you do may be God's will for your life, or may go against God's will and serve your selfish interests instead. And even if you do evil, God may still use your actions as part of his plan, for his glory. But God knew from the foundation of the world who you would be, what you would do, and whether you would have faith in christ.

All of them. And yours too. Does the pot tell the potter that he doesn't exist? That the pot spontaneously sprang into existence and is an awesome bit of pottery all by himself?

I would argue that the school, and the earth where it sits, and the teachers, and the people who taught the teachers back to the beginning, and the laws of physics that govern everything from the science you study to the curing process in the concrete used in the school's foundation come from God. You could use the intelligence and curiosity given to you by God to work hard and toil to learn whatever you want and earn your titles and degrees. And with them, maybe you can even do God's will and participate in God's plan for your life. But without God, it's all for nothing. Hell is full of doctors and scholars, as is Heaven. So, as it is in this world, it must not be the piece of paper that makes you who you are or qualifies you for an afterlife that doesn't suck.

Human pride.

The bible, the holy spirit, and prayer. This is probably impossible to understand without being a christian.

That you can save yourself.

I once talked with a naitive chinese speaker about learning english vs learning chinese. The guy was very smart and had a good vocabulary in english, but he had real problems with his accent. He says that while learning to read and write chinese is a nightmare, actually speaking chinese is surprisingly easy for americans. He says the major cities are full of foreigners who can speak chinese, have great vocabularies, and nail the pronunciation, even with the crazy intonation. But they may not be able to read it very well at all.

This matches my own experience with Japanese. I'm not fluent, but I get by well. For example, on my last visit to Japan, I managed to navigate customs entirely in Japanese. I can read and write hiragana and katakana well enough. But I only know maybe 100 kanji. Speaking japanese really is not as bad as it sounds. I found it as easy to learn as french for example.

English on the other hand is a nightmare to learn to speak and to read/write. The spelling system is screwed up. There's 600,000 to 1,000,000 million words depending on who you ask. There's a dozen or more dialects, each with their own exclusive set of idioms. The south africans are almost unintelligible. We have crazy grammar rules. We have 273 irregular verbs. (only latin and italian have more iirc) And native speakers abuse the language like you wouldn't believe. Even our grandparents often use different idioms and pronunciations than we do. I'd hate to have to learn english as a second language.

This feature will flop in florida et al. No engine, no a/c.

Yeah, this is the consensus. That christians will have to find other ways to get what they need. I suspect it will be a lot like nazi germany. There were some non-jewish germans who helped the jews. I think a black market will be a lot harder with a modern surveillance society, but certainly not impossible. The bible clearly says that there will be christians who make it all the way through the tribulation alive. This means 3.5 years on the run. They must be eating something, even if it's been provided supernaturally.

Of course you're right. There's no way to be sure. But I've seen an interview with the pastor who met him in prison. It was his opinion that his acceptance of christ was sincere. And I have no reason to doubt that.

The christian community has the exact same problems that the non-christians have. There's divorce, incest, child molestations, theft, lying, cheating... everything. If you look at the statistics, there's really not much outward difference between christians and non-christians.

There's a lot of reasons for this. There are huge numbers of people who call themselves christians, but really aren't any different from other people. Maybe they believe. But they don't go to church, and more or less behave like they're not christians. But everyone looks at people like that and says, see? The christians are hypocrites! Is this person really a christian?

Then there's the christians who really are making an effort to behave in a christ-like manner. But this is spectacularly difficult. So difficult that no one can really do this 100%. So people make their best effort with varying degrees of success. They make mistakes, some small, some big. They recognize what happened, apologize to those affected, repent, and do their best to not repeat the mistake, which sometimes happens and sometimes not. When these people make mistakes, the reaction from non-christians is the same. See?! Hypocrites! Christianity is BS! But what these non-christians should be doing is indicting the person and not the religion.

Christianity isn't about never sinning again, although that is the goal. In fact, it's safe to assume that never sinning again is impossible. In the end, it doesn't matter who has sinned how much, if this person has sinned more or less than that person who got into heaven or who didn't. In the end, all that matters is faith in jesus. You either have it or you don't.

To drive the point home, I believe that Jeffery Dahmer is in heaven. This is because he was saved shortly before he was killed in prison. Some people would react with shock and indignation to this. After all, why would someone so awful be allowed into heaven? But christians have a different perspective. If even someone as bad as Jeffery Dahmer can be forgiven, then so can I.

I think it's reasonable to make an attempt to line up today's technology with the prophecy. If you simply passed a law, what's to stop people from circumventing the law? When it says "no one can buy or sell, I read that as no one is able to buy or sell. In other words, it's impossible.

I think christians approach this from a different angle. Rather than say that anything in the left hand is ok, I think we say that it's going to be in the right hand (or forehead) because that's what's written there. In other words, you can speculate that somewhere along the way, we might be offered something in the left hand. But I doubt that will happen at all. But this tends to be a touchy subject for most (real) christians, hence the aversion to anything that even remotely looks like the mark.

There's a lot of debate in christian circles what the meaning of the mark is. Some say it's some sort of tattoo or barcode. Others say that it's purely a spiritual mark and not really something that is manifested here in this world. But I think it would be impossible to control commerce with a purely spiritual mark. So I take a more pragmatic approach. The goal of the antichrist is to flush out the christians so that they can be killed. What better way than to deny us the ability to eat or work or have a place to live? The problem with all this isn't so much the actual mark or participating in the beast financial system. The problem is that you have to swear allegiance to the antichrist. At that point in time, you'll have to make a choice between Jesus and the antichrist. And there will be no middle ground. You're either in our you're out. And being out is really bad news for eternity.