I do.

I was raised by a drug addict and I'm caring for her now.

I grew up a drug addict and everyone I knew was a drug addict or alcoholic (same...exact...thing...BTW).

I committed my first FELONY when I was in elementary school and it only got better.

I beat my dad to prison by one year. He was 21. I was 20.

I've been to jail more times than I can remember.

I lived in my car and slept on the streets.

I shoplifted to eat.

I put all that behind me and changed my life got married and lived happily until we learned my wife had inflammatory breast cancer as she was nursing my newborn daughter.

For 6 years she fought a form of cancer that k**ls many within 10 months and I watched her lose little bits of herself...

Parts of her body...

The ability to do things she loved, like ride horses. We had three once...

Losing other things, maybe even more personal and vital...

And then I lost her...

And then I went back to what I knew to hide...

And then I ended up in prison again...

And then I went to the Salvation Army, which you ignorantly and unfairly disparaged...

And then I got my daughter back at 11. We lived in an apartment and I worked in a hardware store and went to college full time at 40...

And then she went to college and I went to Dutch Harbor and worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for 4 months straight with a bunch of youngsters and kicked ass for 4 1/2 years...

I'm a LOT more practice and a lot less theory than you're used to.

That mega-churches need mansions on earth more than in heaven?

rumitoid, Many times I don’t agree with you. This time I’m all in.
A study was conducted by two “Born again” Christians. They dressed in rags and didn’t bathe. Than they started attending churches. EVERY large church asked them to leave, some kindly some not so kindly.
It was the small churches that seemed more willing to help.
Please don’t confuse those that call themselves “Christian” ( joyce behar of the view) and those who are representative of JESUS.
False teachers abound everywhere to lead the flock astray.
Even JESUS stated this, Matthew 26:11 For ye have the poor always with you, but me ye have not always.
Mark 14:7 For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always.
We will always have the poor and the Christian is commended to take care of the children and widows.
Please don’t assume that all of those in the “glass cathedrals” are the same. We each are responsible to GOD for our own actions.
If you truly want to know JESUS pick up GOD’S WORD ( King James) and start reading.

Most Christians I know have no problem caring for the truly needy. What we have a problem with is encouraging people to become dependent on the charity of others and being unwilling to help themselves become better people. The soul destroying state of dependency that eats away at all that is human in our very being is a tool of the devil. Unfortunately the "progressives" know that those people who have lost their self worth become pliable and easily controlled, are tools to be used for the destruction of the human race. Instead of lifting themselves up to the glory of God they loose their very being in drugs, alcohol , and deviency.

Wish that were true, my friend. Yes, loving acts are what we are judged upon, as I see it. Read Revelation and see what you think. Care for the least of these is the major criterion.

I am not sure how familiar you are with Buddhism or The Tao but there are amazing similarities between Christ and those views. I do not fit Christ into the Buddhist perspective yet see they agree more that disagree. Buddha, in the ideal of his state, had no earthly image. Neither did Christ. Why not? To put the suffering of humanity above all things personal, at any cost. Even life.

MIT announced today (April 2) that it has severed a subcontract with Nectome, a company that says it will preserve the brains of dying people in order to revive them in the future.

MIT's announcement stated that it is cutting off a subcontract that involved the university in Nectome's grant-funded research through MIT neuroscientist Ed Boyden's lab. Nectome has received more than $915,000 in grant funding from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Live Science reported on the company's "100-percent-fatal" brain-preserving service in March. Neuroscientists Live Science interviewed at the time were deeply skeptical, saying that there is no reason to believe the deadly service would actually make it possible to revive a person in the future. [Top 10 Weird Ways We Deal with the Dead]

Remarkably, MIT's announcement also includes a detailed critique of Nectome's research, beginning by stating, "Neuroscience has not sufficiently advanced to the point where we know whether any brain preservation method is powerful enough to preserve all the different kinds of biomolecules related to memory and the mind. It is also not known whether it is possible to recreate a person’s consciousness."

The university also said that Boyden "has no personal affiliation — financial, operational, or contractual — with the company Nectome."

Nectome's plans sounded outlandish, but its MIT-graduate founders boasted of the involvement of high-profile MIT neuroscientist Ed Boyden. As MIT Technology Review reported in a flattering profile of the company published March 13, Nectome has already won a prize for successfully preserving the nerve network, or connectome, of a dead pig. And the company later tried out its process on the 2.5-hour-old corpse of an elderly woman. In the future, Nectome plans to preserve the brains of living people, as a means of physician-assisted suicide.

The theory behind Nectome's ultimate goal is that a well-preserved connectome, or map of all the links between a brain's nerves, might contain enough information for future scientists to digitize and use to re-create a dead person's consciousness. When Technology Review published its article, a number of tech and science publications jumped on the story, repeating the grisly, fatal service's most ambitious claims.

However, neuroscientists Live Science previously spoke to were deeply skeptical.

"The important question," Harvard neuroscientist Sam Gershman said, "is whether the connectome is sufficient for memory: Can I reconstruct all memories knowing only the connections between neurons? The answer is almost certainly no, given our knowledge about how memories are stored — itself a controversial topic."

Florida State University neuroscientist Jens Foell previously told Live Science that key information would be lost in preserving the connectome.

"It's true that synapses are where all the action happens," he said. "But cell firing behavior is determined by other things, including processes within the cells that are determined by proteins that are much smaller than synapses — and some of them are short-lived)."

A number of neuroscientists publicly criticized Nectome, as well as other researchers who had worked with them or implicitly supported them.

It's worth noting that not every neuroscientist agrees that Nectome's promises are total bunk.

Following the earlier article, Sebastian Seung, a connectome expert at Princeton University, wrote an email to Live Science offering some support for Nectome.

"I agree that the Nectome route is far-fetched," he wrote. "But I can see someone making a rational judgement that Nectome is better than the alternatives: 1) normal death with zero probability of revival and 2) Alcor with no demonstration of connectome preservation."

(Alcor is a cryonics company that freezes bodies after death.)
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My first thought, what of the soul? Once the soul flies, no amount of firing between synapses can reconstuct, the person, created in the image of God. Sounds like a first step in euthanasia of elderly. When my time comes, I trust the hands of God to catch me. Only a Godless man, terrified of his maker , and rightly so, could attempt to avoid death. Only God offers life eternal. I can see it now, "Ok, grandpa, time for your brain preservation ceremony"


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Neither MIT nor Nectome immediately responded to questions from Live Science about the parting of ways.

The problem isn't guns, it's what our society is turning into. Arrogantly narcissistic fault finding malcontents who are being indoctrinated with Marxist ideology which also makes them ripe for Luciferian ideology. The parents and the school system and the school system need to stop trying to ensure that the kids have plenty of self-esteem (mostly unearned -- gang members have plenty of that) and start to employ some discipline and teach their kids self-control. Quit trying to remove the Christian God out of the home, the school and the country (remove Allah instead) and start teaching morals, ethics, values, personal responsibility, personal accountability, personal reliability, honesty, discipline, and why personal integrity and character is important to the individual and to the society in which we all live. The more prevalent the Marxist indoctrination becomes, (as it is designed to do), the more the moral fabric that is the backbone of our nation deteriorates, and the more the family structure continues to break down, and the more hedonistic and dependent on the government the people become, the more crime and murders you're going to have. It's just as simple as that.

We are equal under the law and born equal but not meant to stay that way. Only under the cleverly deceptive ideology of Marxism are we forced to stay that way. What these Marxist indoctrinated people of the left fail to realize is that there is a God and in his wisdom. he gave us free will, so that we will have the opportunity to make of our lives what we will, through our own incentive, hard work and talent, Not Become Dependent On Government So They Can Have More Power. But to the left, that's what it's all about -- The Acquisition Of Power, under the guise of being for "The Greater Good"
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Or even church. We are judged solely by what we do for "the least of these." Nothing else matters. But caring for "the least of these" is not a commandment, an obligation of faith, or a duty for salvation. It isn't covered by tithing to church functions for the poor or disadvantaged. It actually has to come from love or it is nothing. Being a missionary is not directly about the Great Commission, of converting souls, but a heartfelt need to alleviate suffering of any sort. It is in that grace the world is overcome. Yet American Christians seem mostly concerned with "the letter of the law and not the spirit." An Inerrant Bible, the "letter," is more important than the "spirit," which is love. Many Evangelicals in this country betray the Gospel in their support of Trump for political reasons. We are not of this world, we are strangers in a strange land, aliens, foreigners. Set apart from this world by acceptance of Christ. A total trust, or rest, in God's love over reason, instinct, self-interest and -protection, desires, wants, or ambition, is our path. Fools for Christ. If we are not mocked or shunned by society, we are missing the point. Christians can never be pillars of society. Like Billy Graham or his son. Or Jerry Falwell Jr. To do so means friendliness with the world, which is enmity with God.