Whether or not Q is real, whether or not the military will save us, it cannot change your actions today. You have control over what you control, and no control over what you cannot control. You will be held to account to God for how you decide to act within the realms where you have power to act. Thus, you must focus exclusively on what you can do and should do, and how best to execute on it.
At the top of the priority list should always be your devotion to God. God demands we worship him and him alone. This means you must study out who God is and how to properly worship him. This is not for the faint of heart -- even studying and practicing for a lifetime is not enough to understand what this means. Every thought must be directed to him. Every prayer to him. Every action to him. Every offering to him.
From here, all things branch out. The Two Great Commandments, available both in the Old and New Testaments, is to "Love God" and "Love your neighbor". How to love God? With all your heart, might, mind and strength. How to love your neighbor? As yourself. What does love mean? We in modern society think of love as a feeling, but it is an action, and act, something you do and not feel.
The Ten Commandments branch from these, and cover the most basic elements of proper actions. It is clear from these commandments that God values honesty, fidelity in marriage, family life, and property ownership. Of course, we can go through the Old and New Testaments and find multiple explicit commandments or punishments for disobedience. Again, a lifetime of study is not enough time to learn how to act rightly before God.
Let's bring this home to our modern times and our modern understanding.
- Get married, stay married, and practice sexual activity only in marriage. Any extra-marital sexual act is forbidden. That means no porn, no adultery, no pre-marital sex. No divorce! But on a higher level, this is a devotion to family life. No greater happiness exists than fulfilling your duty in your family. And the reverse, No greater sadness exists than failing your duty in your family. Bear lots of children, more than you can handle. No one ever said, "I wish I didn't have so many kids!" Spend all of your efforts teaching and raising your kids. No physical treasure compares to well-raised kids.
- Get rich. This isn't optional. How do you get rich? Write a budget. Spend less than you earn. Earn more. Build an emergency fund. Get out of debt. Acquire investments assets -- real estate being a major one. Become truly self-sufficient with a garden and animals you raise and eat. Dave Ramsay has a lot of advice on how to get rich and how to behave as a rich person.
- Get educated. The idea that the purpose of education is to learn "practical skills" is absurd. Real education is about developing the proper and right character and attributes. Real education starts with the Bible and a whole lot of time praying and seeking truth. Of course you are going to incorporate other methods and materials.
- Get strong. "Physical strength is the most important thing in life" as Rippetoe says. It doesn't matter what you have if you are physically incompetent and require a wheelchair or medicine just to cope with life. People bound to wheelchairs and who require medicine just to live know what a great gift it is to have a body that works -- so keep your body in the best physical condition you can get it!
When we have enough people living rightly, with strong families, personal and familial real wealth, and a true and real education, physically fit, then we can talk about become self-governing. Until that point, however, we are far to weak in one way or the other to matter, and easily manipulated or controlled.
The first goal is to learn to govern yourself, then to govern your family, then to govern your community and finally your nation. If you cannot govern yourself, you cannot govern your family. And so on.
I'll add some advice for those who still haven't found God - become a seeker. Look for Him, speak to Him, open your heart and mind to Him. He loves you and wants a deep and personal connection to you, but it's something that you must choose to seek out. Faith starts as a small seed and can grow into a mighty tree, but it's your job to nurture it and make it grow.
I could never find God and also I never wanted to call out his name in public, the way people were telling me how to find him.
Someone told me you can call out his name and ask for guidance in private. I loudly called out for him when I knew no one was listenting. I won't go into details but the guidance was almost instant. I quickly knew the answer to my problem in a way I had never thought of. If I ever go out into a stressful situation I now know that I can always call on God and he will keep me comforted. I still have to deal with my problem, but I can feel his presence like a suit of armor or a cloud of love as if to say "you're not alone, you're never alone."
Because I was allowed to call out to him in private, I feel way more confident in talking about him in public or asking for his protection aloud.
Same here. I tried church and it just didn't connect with me. I tried listening to other people, following their advice, and still, didn't get it. I got frustrated and gave up.
Years later, many years actually, I tried a different approach. I spoke to God privately. I told him that I wasn't sure what to believe, but that I wanted to believe in Him and His love for me. I spoke to Him as a man who was lost and looking for guidance. Much to my surprise, He listened. I didn't hear any words or anything in my mind, but a profound sense of peace and calm just washed over me. It felt like a huge weight had been lifted off me.
Now, I speak to God privately all the time. Most of the time it's just casual grattitude or asking for a bit of guidance. This private, deeply personal relationship is, in my opinion, the ideal one. I need no church or congregation to worship Him. He's with me at all times and I have a direct connection to Him that I can use in any situation or moment in my life to ground me and give me strength. It's truly a blessing and it's changed the way I see everything.
This is what I’m currently going through, I’m in the process of purging some demons out of my life and for the first time about two weeks ago you can say I “prayed”. I asked for guidance and the drive to finally conquer this thing.
Two weeks later I haven’t watched any porn, coincidence I think not.
That's great, glad to hear you're on the mend. You have way more power and control than you think, you just need to learn how to use it and leverage it towards good things. Keep up the good work, you're doing the right thing for yourself.
I couldn't have said it any better. Almsot thought I replied to myself for a moment because our stories are so similar. I think one problem is that too many people see their interpretation of God as the only one allowed, when God speaks differently to each person.
On a side note/rant, I got a little heated with a YEC the other day because he accused me of thinking God is worthless simply because I believe that genes pass down through procreation and that if too many people affected by something die, they won't procreate and therefore that gene will slowly disappear. I was very calm and listened to his opinion, well, he couldn't explain himself so he just played a Kent Hovind video making jokes about people coming from rocks (from dust were ye made), and he almost wouldn't let me get a word in. He said I must be worthless since there will be a human better suited for his environment in the future, to which I (not too proud of it) threw a gotcha back "well then God must be worthless since the devil roams the Earth even though the bible says one day he will finally be defeated." That's when I got shouted down with "Nu uh thats what YOU BELIEVE" I realized then we were probably never gonna see eye to eye because, honestly like those lefties on Reddit, he twisted what I said into what he believes people like me believe in order to prove to himself that I believe that ridiculousness. It reeked of cognitive dissonance and was honestly like trying to debate an atheist who only argues in bad faith and who takes counter arguments like personal attacks.
I finally got to explain over his shouting how, if anything, I think God is more glorious for setting in motion all of the events of our universe and he said "well you should have just said that in the beginning", you know, when he kept interrupting me and subtly accusing me of blasphemy.
Basically I would say the same to many on this board of what I said to him, "don't go around accusing people of heresy just because they see God in a different way if they have an equal level of faith as you." Matthew 7:22 probably applies there, it's worthless to declare God and Jesus as one's savior if they then go around doing the devils work of dividing the church to make themselves feel superior.
It's odd tribal behaviour that people seem to instinctively engage in. People will create an "us vs them" mentality even when they believe in the same general thing.
I personally believe that science and religion in no way contradict each other. The idea that they can't co-exist is a modern secularist idea that has only been around for a couple hundred years. Western science got it's start in Christianity and for centuries it was viewed as a way to understand the deeper workings of God's universe and our place in it. The church funded and promoted scientific study and a lot of the great scientific minds were also theologians.
The atheist idea that the church has always been against science and persecuted scientists is nothing more than modern propaganda. Science has always been the slow realization of God's workings in the physical realm.
That's also why it's laughable when atheists demand empirical evidence for God. How are you supposed to produce evidence that's based on the natural and material laws of the universe for a being that exists outside of those laws? You simply can't, God exists outside the scope of that knowledge. Science and human reason have hard limits and outside those limits is the realm of faith.