Yeah, it's only technically Hell. I mean, Buffalo and NYC are both parts of New York, right?

If you're exposed to the Gospel but reject Jesus anyway, do you lose the Righteous Pagan option?

Yeah, rejection of Jesus pretty much ruins your Limbo qualifications. And no amount of dancing will save you.

How low can you go? Lower than that, apparently.

Oh, last class of the day, how I have grown to loathe and fear you. Every initiative falls apart under the weight of your apathy and anarchy.

Curses.

Trudy, that link took me to "Stars Ups and Downs"

Agh! It woulnd't link directly.

Up and Down star #22 is his missus. And he thinks she looks lovely both ways.

Gris, please know that didn't intend to be a lecture, though it sounded like one.

Never thought you were. If I came off defensive, not intended. I appreciate getting wake-up calls, even when I'm all like "Yeah, cool, now I'm gonna go back to sleep for another while, k?" And it forces me to really analyze whether it makes sense, which is nice since I keep coming up "yes."

I'm glad Shir's sister is home!

The religion discussion is interesting, but my brain is WAY too much in the off mode to contribute or even boggle. I spent my day trying to work out our new class schedule for next semester.

Most math isn't so bad. 4-d logic puzzles with an uncertain number of constraints (which this basically boils down to) are hard. I'll give Barbie that one.

Oh, sis is back in the army by now. But she was at *my* place, where I could really make her feel comfortable. And we talked for about 90 minutes before she collapsed to sleep, and she even let me hug her and pet her hair few time. Big win, by our book.

And now, really, I'm off to bed.

While I obviously don't know if it's existentially true, I love what C.S. Lewis said on this topic: "Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him."

Yeah. The Bible says a lot about salvation. Peter said repent and be baptised, Paul said it was about faith in Jesus, James said faith without works is dead, Matthew 25 mentions only works and rejects faith, John says no one comes to Jesus except God draws them.

Pretty much any church trying to parse the Bible's position on salvation does much the same thing: assume the passage(s) they find most congenial are clear and simple and really mean what they say, and interpret the other passages to fit that framework.

C. S. Lewis, I think, is quite sensibly cautious in treating the matter as neither clear nor simple.

In "What is wrong with my students?" news: Today, we were doing an in-class activity. The class split up into groups, and I gave each group a formula to prove, with instructions that they should pick one group member to write up their proof and one to present it to the class. One student immediately took out his laptop and looked up the proof online.

Coming in slightly late in this, but the song lyrics. I would say the song writer was Southern Baptist, just guessing based on the terminology because when I heard that song I knew exactly what it meant.

In fact there's a song "Washed in the Blood of the Lamb" (lamb here = Jesus)-- you can find the lyrics here - [link]

Well lyrics to the version Alan Jackson did.

Seems to me that phrasing is meant to be are you Saved or not with the "washed in water" not necessarily refering to other Baptism from other denominations but the "washed in water" more akin to being washed in regular worldly water.

But that could be just my own take on it. Jesus' Blood and being Washed in It or His Blood being on Things is a recurring theme in Southern Baptist hymns.