The best way to prepare for a godly marriage, the best way to have a godly marriage and the best way to live a godly single life are the same: put God first.
Oh how easy to say but the trouble with being a living sacrifice is that we keep crawling off the altar.
There is ultimately no objective way we can know reality, because all reality is filtered through our senses and our minds, and both are limited and able to be deceived.
Have you read "Sophie's World" by Jostein Gaarder? In it, he refers to the ontology of an Irish Bishop whose name eludes me at present, but who thought that reality all emanated from God's thoughts and that its existence depended on God upholding it; if I'm remembering/ interpreting it correctly. George Berkley (Berkeley?), that was his name.
"What is reality?" is the ultimate question that ontology seeks to answer, but epistemology ("How can we be sure?") won't let it. As _everything_ we believe finally comes down to faith, we can only be sure that (1) thinking exists, and (2) someone/ something exists, as thinking is a process that requires an entity with the capacity to undertake that process. (Thinking is an abstract noun that only exists as a process and therefore something concrete must exist in order for thinking to exist.)
For everyday living, we must assume that what we see is what we get. Reality (as we believe society defines it) is both external to us and internal, as far as we process what is external to us. The problem is when a person's internal interpretation goes haywire and they start to believe in flying spaghetti unicorns or what you will. We usually assume that someone is off the rails if they start to believe something that is alien to the experience of the rest of us. So people believe in gravity because we all experience it. Not all people believe in flying spaghetti unicorns because they are an uncommon sight.
But experiencing something unusual isn't (it shouldn't be) enough. If someone is experiencing psychosis (ie an experience of their perception being separate from our [and their previous] common reality), they will also be emotionally agitated - but again this isn't enough to prove they're wrong - and also they will refuse to admit they could be wrong. They believe they are right but they are uncomfortable: something isn't "right". Their beliefs may be demonstrated to be incorrect by logic and practical evidence, but they refuse to believe that they are wrong. This would be about as close as we can get, on a practical level, to knowing that someone is away from reality.
Their is a lot more to be said (much of it between the lines!) but that can do for a starter.
This is a monstrously difficult issue, but I think Phoenyx dealt with it well.
I don't have any answers, only questions to think about.
We have the technology to keep someone alive, but should we use it? Are there any parallels in the Bible? What about at the end of (I think) 1 Kings? King Saul's armor-bearer who, at Saul's request, killed the king - who already had a (fatal if memory serves) injury so the Philistines wouldn't be able to further hurt him? The Bible doesn't give any judgment as I recall, it just describes what happened.
I pray God gives you the wisdom to know the best action to take, the courage to do so and peace about it all.
In fact, I heard of a brickie's labourer who took an entire year off work to read the dictionary (The Oxford I think). Not much of a plot but very descriptive.
Since my words usually come out wrong - I often can't recall everyday words (the trade-off for knowing what words like 'pulchritudinous', 'refulgent' and 'obstreporous' mean), I'd choose the first.
I think wanting someone so much you can't think straight can be dangerous: you might make decisions too quickly that you'll regret later.
Whatever we believe about the cosmological debate, (1) neither can be scientifically proven. Scientific proof requires repetition and measurement, and we can't repeat something that happened in the past. We can study and measure its effects and theorise about the causes, but the best we can do is use scientifically-obtained results to support - uh, sorry, develop - the most likely explanation.
(2) Traditionally, Moses wrote Genesis when the Israelites were in the Sinai wilderness. God has told them to go into the land of Canaan, kill the people and take possession of the land. In that situation, would you be wondering, 'I wonder if God created the world in six literal twenty-four hour periods of time or over billions of years'? Or would you not instead be pondering 'What sort of God is this, who does all these miracles, rescues us from slavery, gives us laws about no visual representations of Him, and commands us to go and commit genocide?'
We might use the first few chapters of Genesis as a guide to investigate how God created the world, but that isn't their primary purpose, which is to reveal what sort of deity God is.
The in / on is probably in the dative/ locative case, meaning 'at, on, with, in, near or by'.
I've looked at this in a series of miconceptions about what the Bible teaches. Essentially I think it isn't referring to a physical mark - it's similar to Deuteronomy 6 (I think), which talk about God's commands controlling all we think (head / forehead) and do (hand).
People with the mark are those who aren't Christian. In the first centuries of the Christian church, Christians wouldn't throw a dash of incense on the Emperor's altar, and they were persecuted - people refused to employ them, et cetera, because they were marked - known - as Christians. What they believed affected their actions.
(That's only a brief regurgitation though; I'm just about to go.)
The statement is telling the truth, even when it says that it itself is a lie.
However, a lie needs a referent and the sentence is self-referential. But what is it particularly lying about? The fact that it is a statement? No, because it is a statement about truth (a proposition): therefore, the statement is false (referring to the question the questioner posed) - this statement is not a lie, it is a proposition.
So as the statement is self-referential - the predicate 'is a lie' refers to the subject 'this statement'; but as the subject is merely an object (!), it doesn't make a proposition which can be be called true or false.
So either the sentence is false - because it is a proposition not a lie - or meaningless, because the predicate refers to an object, not a proposition.
