Art Powell

Open Thread for discussing the Evidence of God. My Rules of Engagement: link.medium.com/gLxrcoUuf4 There are 8 rules. Violation of #6 will get you blocked. Each response to this tweet should be a new thread. You may start new discussions without me. Do not clutter the top level.

@tommy_alderman We demand that God invoke justice, just not on ourselves.

Also, when people ask, "Why does God allow evil," what they really mean is "Why does God allow evil other than mine?"

Probably both.

@NancyRPearcey When I hear news like this, I long for Jesus to return.

Christians are being killed in Syria.

@michaelmalice Lord have mercy, ain't that the truth.

It seems like both political parties are competing to run on their worst aspects

@RealPatSawyer Word

Satan is constantly trying to cause people to have sex outside of marriage. To the great hurt of their souls. Satan is constantly trying to cause married couples to not have sex. To the great hurt of their souls. Sexual intimacy is reserved for marriage. Within marriage it is to be free and frequent.

@ferrismattic This is also caused by not understanding that the old covenant has been replaced with a new one.

I saw a pastor say that his church has started invoking curses as part of their worship service. “Each week we are praying for God to curse, oppose, and destroy someone in particular.” That is, by name. This is what you arrive at when you flatten redemptive history to make it one big mono-covenant. You take what was appropriate at one time and in one land, and apply it at all times in all places. Recall how Jesus greeted the imprecation of the disciples. “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” But he turned and rebuked them. Could Paul be any clearer? “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” Or how might we understand cursing some in light of 2 Tim 2:24-26? “And the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.” “Oh, we're not cursing, we're asking God to.” Such a defense is vacuous. Paul says our warfare is not against flesh and blood—people. So when you curse someone by name, you stand opposed to apostolic truth.

@Drone_Wars_ Bus Dev: We want a robot for multiple dangerous environments with great flexibility and dexterity. Engineers: Here you go. Bus Dev:

U.S. company Satyress is developing threehalves, a centaur-style robot designed for dangerous environments such as wildfires, rubble searches, toxic areas and confined spaces. The system combines a humanoid upper body with a quadruped mobility platform. #USA #Robotics #UGV #AI

@jimdtweet @thescottbarber It's really how you slice the data. There are other factors. The idea that this was a blue-state vs. red-state result is damn nonsense.

@savebyj @thescottbarber Worst ten on worldometer. Arizona, West Virginia, New Mexico, Mississippi, Tennessee, Michigan, Florida, Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky. Best ten. Hawaii, Utah, Vermont, Alaska, DC, Washington, Oregon New Hampshire, Maine, Nebraska, Colorado.

The cumulative COVID-19 death rate was lower in Democratic states than it was in Republican states, and it was substantially lower in Canada than it was in the states. And that is the fault of people who did not want to participate in life saving public policy, not the fault of Anthony Fauci.

This is where I love AI. They just assumed more Republicans were not vaccinated. In addition, this study was widely criticized for many reasons. That NBER working paper (Wallace, Goldsmith-Pinkham & Schwartz, 2022) was later peer-reviewed and published in JAMA Internal Medicine in July 2023 — and the critiques cluster around a few themes. The numbers shrank considerably in peer review. The working paper you linked reported the excess death rate for Republicans as 5.4 percentage points, or 76%, higher than for Democrats, with the post-vaccine gap widening to 10.4 pp (153%). The published version reported 2.8 percentage points, or 15%, higher overall, with the post-vaccine gap at 7.7 pp — a 43% difference. The 76% and 153% figures are what got amplified in the press coverage, and critics reasonably pointed out those came from a paper NBER itself flags as not peer-reviewed. yaleNBER Party affiliation was measured differently in the two states. In Ohio it was defined by whether someone voted in a party's primary within the preceding two years; in Florida it was based on actual party registration. Ohio has no party registration, so the proxy captures only relatively engaged partisans and drops everyone else. This matters because the difference was primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio — the state with the weaker measure. That's the substance of the letter from Patrick O'Mahen (VA/Baylor) published alongside the article, which credits the study's contribution while raising measurement concerns. aolnih Cause of death was unavailable. The authors concede this themselves: their mortality data covered roughly 83.5% of US deaths and did not include cause of death, and it's possible the missing deaths disproportionately fall among one party's registrants, potentially biasing results. So "excess deaths" could include deferred care, overdoses, or other pandemic-era causes, not just COVID. Yale The vaccine mechanism is inferred ecologically. The paper's whole premise was that prior county-level studies may be subject to the ecological fallacy — but while deaths and party were linked at the individual level, vaccination status was not. The Yale paper still used county-level vaccination rates. The vaccine explanation is therefore an inference from timing and county correlation, not from knowing who actually got a shot. NBERNBC News Residual confounding. Adjustment was for age, county, state, and seasonality — not income, education, rurality, comorbidity, occupation, or healthcare access, all of which correlate with party. Even a competing study's author noted vaccine uptake explained only about 10% of the partisan gap in one analysis, with masking and distancing likely contributing. NBC News There's also a critical letter from Dasaro, Haslam, and Prasad (UCSF) in the same January 2024 issue, which states they see five limitations — it's paywalled, so I can't give you their specific five. Separately, some commentators (Alex Berenson notably) argued the excess was concentrated in the oldest age band, but I'd treat that claim as unverified without the subgroup tables in hand. Worth saying: the authors' core finding — a gap that appears only after vaccine availability and is larger in low-vaccination counties — survived peer review, just at roughly half the effect size. It's an association study, and the authors are careful about that. The critiques are mostly about magnitude, measurement, and mechanism rather than a claim the pattern doesn't exist.

@savebyj @thescottbarber How about the peer-reviewed scientific literature, which shows that "since the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines, the excess death rate among Republicans was 10.4 percentage points higher than among Democrats" pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10…

@DanielvsBabylon Yes, and Samson trusted that person because of the sin pattern in his life. Another valuable lesson.

Samson was destroyed because he trusted the wrong person, not everyone close to you is loyal and can be trusted. Guard your heart and who you bring into your circle.

@nzmkroberts @limitandmind Please explain how only the Universe can just exist but nothing else. Because now your Universe is sounding suspiciously like God.

@limitandmind That the universe exists (this is self-evident) doesn't mean anything can exist.

If the universe just exists brutely, then anything can exist for no reason If anything can exist for no reason, then existent things can also change for no reason If anything can change for no reason, then the physical laws of the universe can change for no reason If the physical laws of the universe can change for no reason, then your ability to understand the universe is undermined, because you have no reason to trust the evidence of your senses. A posteriori evidence of regularity is no reason to affirm intelligibility, because it is consistent with both an intelligible world and one that is not. An unintelligible world could look regular for no reason. You need something a priori like the PSR to have confidence that you can understand what you see in your everyday experience and in science.

@limitandmind Exactly. If the Universe "just is," then you've destroyed science.

@SouthernKeeks God is good+

We’re busting out of the hospital! Just got discharged. I can’t even begin to express how thankful I am for those who saved my husband’s life and cared for him these last ten days. 🥹 Life is so precious, so fragile. Please take care of yourselves.

Anthony Fauci is getting run through the wringer for what he did during the pandemic. He censored politically and professionally people who disagreed with him, destroying them publicly and their careers. He lied about his financial involvement with the Wuhan lab and tried to suppress any evidence that the virus originated there. (The FBI concluded that it originated from the lab under the Biden administration and has never backed off that conclusion.)

I have no idea where you're getting this data. Many blue states were in the top ten in deaths per capita. Texas was in the bottom third. Florida had the lowest per capita death rate among the elderly. Also, good records were not kept on what counted as COVID-related deaths until after 2022 (per admission by the CDC). And thanks for politicizing what was already over-politicized. COVID overlapped two administrations, Trump and Biden. And btw, this is how our government works. States have rights that the federal government cannot overwrite. And despite what you said, the States that did not fully follow what the Federal government recommended did as well, or better in some cases, than those that did. 247wallst.com/special-report…

@DivinelyDesined Information of specificity has never been shown to be produced except by a conscious mind.

Proteins, the building blocks of all cells, prove Life is Intelligently designed. I'll prove it to you using an analogy. Look at the letters that make up these sentences. They are arranged into a specific pattern that gives the final arrangement functional significance. Letters don't convey any real meaning by themselves - it's not until they're arranged into a sentence that function arises. Proteins are very similar - they achieve functional significance in cells via specifically arranged amino acid sequences. Just as a single letter doesn't do anything by itself, a single amino acid is useless outside a full protein sequence. Evolution is supposed to build new proteins step by step, one amino acid at a time. But think about this: A Is that a meaningful sentence? A B How about that? A BALL BOUNCES. There we go. See, building the sentence one letter at a time provides no functional benefit - it's not until we have the full sequence that function emerges. It's the same with proteins. ...which means evolution can't build them one step at a time. They are all or nothing sequences that requires specific arrangements to be known and created immediately, or they don't function. Evolutionists will argue novel proteins can be evolved from already existing functional proteins. So they simply grant themselves the existence of proteins and claim random mutations can build new ones. Wrong again. There is only about 1 single functional protein fold - the shape an amino acid sequence makes when it becomes a functional protein - in about 10⁷⁷ possible amino acid sequences. That's a 10 with 77 zeroes. Those odds are overwhelmingly prohibitive. Tinkering with amino acid sequences destroys function after not too long, just like randomly changing letters in a word would destroy its meaning. Evolution cannot build novel proteins. No evidence exists showing how it can be done. Proteins exhibit what is called 'specified complexity.' That is, a complex arrangement that is enormously unlikely, unable to be explained by any repeatable pattern, and whose specifity grants function. Natural processes have never been observed to be able to create specified complexity. Only one cause is known to create such information: Intelligence. Life was intelligently designed. Proteins prove it.

@politicalmath Which would probably have led to some level of mass violence and/or civil war.

Here is what would have happened: There were multiple vaccines available. Media figures (who need controversy and strife) would have latched on to one vaccine as the "good vaccine" that left-wingers take and the other one as the "bad vaccine" that only stupid science-denying right-wingers take. It probably would have run along some fault line like "2 dose vaccines are for smart people" or "mRNA vaccines are better / worse" There would be a LOT more news about vaccine harm, but largely centered on the "bad" vaccine. And when I say a lot, I mean NYT profiles, ProPublica insider exposes. Instead of just vaccine cards, deep blue cities would have required you to get a specific vaccine because that is the only one that "counts". There would be a Reddit page mocking the vaccine harm and deaths of the people who took the "wrong" vaccine. There would be pressure on the FDA to revoke authorization of the "right-wing" vaccine. There would be infographics on how many people the "wrong" vaccine killed. That is what would have happened.

Sure, Scott, because the scientists themselves didn't do any damage to their credibility with sloppy science, bad calls, and rushing a vaccine that obviously had side effects they never wanted to discuss. And it couldn't possibly be that they lost credibility when they suppressed dissident scientists, many more qualified than the ones making the calls, and any public information they disagreed with. Scientists demonstrated during COVID that they are sinful humans. And they blew this. If no one trusts science any longer, they get to look in the mirror for the cause.

I’m just pretty certain one of the long term consequence of Covid will be literally no one sane going into public health because of the way public health officials were treated generally by the public and specially by the conspiracy theorists, leaving us at the mercy of whatever virus emerges down the road.

Are you talking about a species mutating to adapt to its environment, or about one species, through random mutations and natural selection, becoming another species? And did you really equate scientific knowledge with Google and High School textbooks? Those high school textbooks also use to say the Universe was eternal and static, both which turned out to be false.

@savebyj @darwintojesus Uh... it's actually explained in every biology course in both K-12 public school and college. It can be explained by a google search or AI prompt You're simply delusional.

Evolution is a theory proposed by naturalists in an attempt to get around the obvious design inference we see by instead appealing to vast amounts of time and chance mutation/natural selection as an alternative explanation for all of the complexity and engineering we see in living creatures.

@DaytimePubSmell @darwintojesus I don't believe the Earth is young. Please give me the step-by-step mutation path that artiodactyls took to become whales. I need the number of genetic mutations that needed to occur.

@savebyj @darwintojesus Have you never heard of Hox genes or something? Your Young Earthism is as retarded as Flat Earthism.