EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
7hr ago
No big surprises there :) There's a reason more books have been written about the Bible than any other topic!
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
7hr ago
Do you usually fork because you're unsatisfied with the response, didn't want to clutter the context, felt you had a natural off-topic you wanted to explore somewhat sandboxed, or something else? I'm trying to imaging the typical use case where it would feel so essential.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
7hr ago
No problem, still appreciate the reply. Hope it's been interesting for you as it has in return. Or maybe I have too much time on my hands.
Paul's definitely an interesting case. Of course we all must acknowledge to some extent that the NT after the gospels is not really a comprehensive look at everything going on in the church, there's some "selection bias" so to speak. A lot of the leadership seems to have viewed him as the go-to guy for Gentile stuff, despite not even being a Gentile himself (though his Roman citizenship and language proficiency certainly made him better suited for the job than many of the 12), but the exact extent of his authority and his position isn't spelled out very clearly, though we do have hints. And on top of that, although the LDS position is that the 12 apostles are special, the word "apostle" is used a bit more freely in the NT, and Christian vocabulary is just getting defined anyways, somewhat haphazardly. With that said, I'll freely admit that at some point, I and others choose to make plausible inferences about Paul. This "backwards" reasoning is not load-bearing despite that, I still think it's decently supported. For example, although the laying on of hands isn't strictly mandatory for some stuff, I choose to believe that at some point he was given some sort of special dispensation to fill the role he filled in the early church, and definitely people perceived him as such beyond just respect for the man that brought them the gospel of eternal life. Regardless, I do not think he was operating as a rogue preacher or anything, rather he
You're definitely correct that Hebrews has a very particular audience and goal. Aside from the wide belief that it's not actual by Paul, it's directed toward Jews and their questions about, among other things, how Jesus was from Judah, in hopes of keeping them in the church -- a big issue for the Jews who have believed for centuries that Levites are the only ones who can do priesthood rites! The letter talks about how Christianity is superior to Judaism in various ways, for example Jesus is better than angels, and also discusses how Levite priesthood isn't actually the only game in town. There's this Melchezidek guy who Abraham paid tithes to, kind of implies he's higher up, the author say, right? And Jesus is a Melchezidek-like figure. See, it's Biblical for non-Levites to do priesthood things! (And in fact the LDS theology takes this even farther and to this day has two separate priesthood lines reflecting this, a lesser Aaronic one that does baptism and communion and the Melchezidek one that does eternal marriage and is a prerequisite to be a bishop and such, which is an interesting detail but more of a modern application)
Note however that at no point here is there the implication that it's open season, anyone perform ordinances and covenants and rituals, the somewhat spontaneous and sporadic callings of OT prophets notwithstanding. And 5:4 emphasizes this same point, that because many rituals (e.g. the day of atonement ritual on Yom Kippur) have the priest literally as a stand-in for God or Christ, not just anyone can decide to step up and play the role (v4). Jesus also didn't do this of his own accord, but in fact (v5-6) "Christ did not exalt himself to be made a high priest, but was appointed by him who said to him... You are a priest forever, after the order of Melcheizedek" (emphasis mine) . You are correct that in some places in Hebrews and elsewhere in the NT we are taught very specifically that the whole point of the Levite rituals (especially the scapegoat of the above ritual) was to symbolize Christ and prepare them for him, and as far as we know the Levites didn't have a particularly special role in the early Christian church, but when talking about authority more generally, Christians including Jewish converts still would have implicitly understood that authority in general is a more fundamental principle. Moreover, in v11-14 we learn that the audience has, broadly speaking, been doing a pretty bad job with the "basic principles". Foreshadowing, in my book. Far from the only time, too.
As an aside, despite my church's love for the KJV, I'm a bit of an NRSV man myself. The 2 Timothy passage starts by talking about Paul's good example worthy of emulation, but also the inevitability of persecution. Then, however...
[A]s for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness... (emphasis mine)
To me it seems quite clear that the whole passage emphasizes that the source of teaching (i.e. the person(s) doing so) is very important, and is paramount in assessing its reliability. And that Scripture assists in maintaining those teachings. Thus I draw the conclusion, supported elsewhere, that the person of the teacher matters a lot when assessing doctrinal purity. Obviously, there are many passages of the scriptures encouraging teaching each other more generally, but as a few of the other passages (among others that exist too) suggest, the congregations themselves seem to have perennially done a poor job at policing their own doctrine. That's what I take away from many of the (especially Pauline) epistles, at least.
In fact there are vanishingly few people teaching fellow members who don't have some line of authority. Apollos (Acts 18) was among these odd-man-out examples, a convert to the baptism of John who is doing missionary work and who knows the scriptures really well, he gets corrected by another missionary couple ("coworkers" of Paul, elsewhere) in private, and then goes back to missionary work in the synagogue. Interestingly, no mention of internal teaching, and in fact he is later the cause of a schism in 1 Cor 1:12 (though plausibly this is not his fault)! I'm not aware of any other cases. And actually his case is illustrative - he had a pretty good, scripturally grounded understanding, he was even immediately receptive to the truth, but was still unable to independently come to the proper conclusion with scripture alone. Thus my earlier point about how despite having some major sympathy and Sola Scriptura roots the end result was clear that at some point extra revelation is needed.
It was James 1:5 after all, encouraging those who have gotten stuck to seek revelation, that was according to his account, the prompt for Joseph Smith to pray for guidance in the first place. He later found good company with many people who read things like Eph 2:20 or Eph 4:11-13 and felt that a Christian church needed apostles and prophets as a key attribute, or were dissatisfied with the Protestant status quo in other ways. It was largely these people, as far as I know, who initially converted, and honestly the church has never attracted large numbers of Catholic converts specifically. Part of the early LDS appeal was precisely to this audience of people who had gotten deep into the scriptures, and didn't see its reflection in contemporary Protestant groups.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
12hr ago
Well of course LDS truth claims as a whole depend on Joseph Smith but the core idea of authority to me seems Biblical and pretty innate. At least in the respect that the chain of custody for priesthood is important, and that having some sort of claim to divine permission to conduct rites also shouldn’t be glossed over.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
18hr ago
Seems like genuinely a cool guy from the little I’ve read, though it’s been a little interesting to see Wikipedia editors, in real time, slip in small whitewashing edits of his page of some negative stuff along with the benign edits. Dunno how much to read into that, but I guess it’s whatever. I hope he makes us Americans look good!
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
18hr ago
Yeah, so to illustrate I’ll work backwards a bit. In LDS theology ant least, authority is given directly from God and is never assumed, nor transferred implicitly. For us, a modern council of 12 apostles is where the overall legitimacy resides, as it did anciently, given by various figures literally appearing and laying on hands in the earlier days of the church - a specific prophet in some cases for specific authority (Moses and John the Baptist, for example). Peter James and John jointly appeared to ordain the first set of apostles and prophet to those roles, including Joseph Smith. Succession is done by unanimous choice of the apostles to whom authority reverts, though historically it’s always been the most senior in time served selected as the next prophet.
We would distinguish that all authority is not equal - although the “priesthood” is the power to act in God’s name more generally, authorizing an eternal marriage is different than authorizing say a baptism. Only the 12 hold every “key”, in our vocabulary, to do every relevant action. Authority is also nearly synonymous with the actual right to receive specific guidance for your position, such as leading the church, and at the top that encompasses doctrinal revelation. Authority more generally is theologically important for many reasons, but most fundamentally, for one to give force and validity to promises made on behalf of God it seems like you’d obviously need His permission, as He ultimately is the one with the power to guarantee His part of the deal - marriage, baptism, communion, etc. I would view it as a great error to assume humans are allowed to do it all by themselves with their own permission (Hebrews 5:4).
This applies on a mundane level too. For example the various sacraments (we would call them ordinances) such as baptism or communion are only able to be performed because of an explicit line of delegation - all again through selection (we have a lay clergy and it’s impossible to seek priesthood as a career) and laying on of hands for specific permission and again, authority. But all of it has a source, both in acting capacity (church governance, who is above you in the leadership tree, which is strictly hierarchical, think military in the sense everyone has a commanding officer, if you will) and in ordination (I can trace my personal general priesthood ordination, who laid hands on who, back through the same) which is an important distinction. In other words, delegation can occur, but it still has an ultimate source. To illustrate, although I’ve been granted the authority (capability we could say) to baptize generally, I’d still need the permission of the relevant authority to do so (in the case of a non-convert baptism, the local bishop, himself delegated that down through the chain).
Jumping back in time, eg Stephen and the others are set apart via laying on of hands (Acts 6:5-6) and it is mentioned as a way of commissioning (Acts 13:2-3, 1 Tim 4:14 ), though other passages aren’t as explicit. We all know Jesus gave Peter the sealing power. He also specifically ordained the 12 in the first place, giving them power (Mark 3:14-15). Jesus talks about authority coming from him on a few occasions, and granting power (eg Luke 10:19). The scriptures are great, my church did actually come from a Sola Scriptura initial background, but in general the intention is for them to be used alongside current divine guidance (eg 2 Tim 3:16-17). Throughout a number of other references, there is a link drawn between having authority and also specifically doctrinal teaching as well (Titus 2:15, 1 Tim 1:4, 2 Tim 2:2, 2 Peter 1:20, etc), though of course settling debates between those with authority has very few examples (we only really see the Jerusalem meetup in detail). And self evidently, the Bible is not self explanatory enough for everyone to arrive at the same position, which is actually one opinion we might share with the Catholics, though the approach varies significantly, there are still some commonalities in the details even.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
21hr ago
Hmm, that’s a good post, thank you. I guess the real lynchpin is, how broad is the “temporal change in circumstances”? Like for example, and maybe this isn’t actually a big sticking point, the longtime celibacy requirement of the Western church, I heard there was talk of changing that? Is that really up for a “new” debate? Doesn’t seem like there is much particularly different this century vs previous ones that that would become an issue still unresolved. Or is that just something that hasn’t made it to the definitive doctrine side of things, and it’s more like the issue has always been burning at a sub-critical mass? My other question is about the who. Is it only the Pope who can declare an issue severe enough that it demands resolution, or it more designed to be a fundamentally consensus-seeking semi-democratic process?
I think a lot of that is actually fair criticism, the last decade and a half has been sort of bland. Heck, we went from three hour church (!) to two, for example. Apart from one issue - the church was pretty big on its Family Proclamation which is not quite scripture but close, so that limits in a pretty practical way how far left it can drift, especially socially. That one can’t really be walked back. Plus, probably the next prophet is going to be Oaks, who is among the more conservative members, though he was a lawyer and judge by trade, so he’s also pretty careful with his wording.
To be precise my actual hope is that in my lifetime one of the leaders of the church busts out yet another book of translated ancient scripture, or something equally and delightfully abnormal. Failing that, another possible route I’d love to see is for us to become more aggressively focused on helping the poor or something similar. We are already slightly out of step as somewhat anti-Trump and pro-immigration, but the church is still pretty apolitical overall, so it’s hard to say how many waves we will make. The church is in a bit of a weird spot where you’d expect based on the demographics and educational levels for us to be more liberal than we are, but neither do we make perfect bedfellows with the more ebullient evangelicals, where no such increased rapport has occurred like with the Catholics.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
23hr ago
As a major, major fan of 3.5, it’s clear Anthropic have missed a step or two in the last six months. And the rate limits, holy cow, even the API randomly drops out frighteningly often. I bounce back and forth a little on my OAI sub, right now I have one because I’ve been doing laying around with the deep research a bit, and voice is handy on car rides or in the kitchen. I almost feel like o1 was better than o3 but needs more testing by me to be sure.
I need to spend more time with Google. Have you used much the feature where you like highlight and edit and interact with passages of your or its old responses? I didn’t quite grasp the mini demo they did so I’m not sure if that’s a genuinely new useful interaction mode or not.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
23hr ago
Sorry, dunking on Catholics wasn’t really my intention, and I could have used softer language. I think you make a good point above about this being bureaucratic in nature, but it prompts the genuine question: once a Pope dies, where does the broad Church authority reside, exactly? Is it a specific group of people, or is more hand-wavy, or is it purely retrospective? Whatever the answer, has that always been the case?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
23hr ago
Good catch, not my intention, and interestingly enough doctrinally I do believe Peter James and John had something special Paul did not. It’s just that we don’t have a whole lot from Peter doing major doctrinal correction like Paul, and obviously it’s hard to know if that is because he simply didn’t, or we just don’t have more letters showing it. The exact extent of Paul’s authority is a fascinating question that I don’t think I have a fully satisfying answer to.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
23hr ago
Illuminating comment. A different bind and loose interpretation than I am familiar with. Is the pope considered to be uniquely vested with some kind of revelation, or is any action justified simply by virtue of the position? It’s my perception that Catholics try to have it both ways, but maybe that’s unfair.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
23hr ago
In the contrary I kind of appreciate it all being laid out in front of everyone warts and opposition and all, few if any major religions can claim the same, though of course it comes with its obvious downsides.
I’m curious though how you perceive ecclesiastical authority to be distinct from ideological? To me obviously they feel to be fundamentally intertwined, as “personnel is policy” as they say in the secular political world, but is it typical in either East or West orthodoxy to consider them quite distinct?
I believe that the idea was to have an apostolic guidance for the church as a whole but persecution, deaths, unauthorized doctrinal changes, undue pagan influences, power grabs, a view that the Second Coming was imminent, and the gradual loss of divine revelation made the church fundamentally changed and eventually bereft of authority. Perhaps some city bishops had some legitimate authority for a while, but the connection that e.g. the Bishop of Rome would have any actual special sway over the church as a whole is highly suspect, as was especially the consolidation under Constantine. The later "sins" of the Catholic church are some evidence, but not the primary evidence. I agree that to the extent historical matters should be considered in coming to spiritual conclusions, that history both theological and otherwise are fair game for examination - though my comment was more about the theological history of the Catholics than their more political/historical acts.
Getting a little off topic I guess, but in terms of Book of Mormon history, the position has long been (and is mildly supported in-text) that the people there were simply one of many living side by side. Archeologically speaking, we simply do not have anywhere close to a comprehensive survey of all peoples who lived in Mesoamerica. Among the Maya, for example, we've only excavated about 1% of the sites and of those sites only 10% of what's there, approximately. The Book of Abraham I feel was used as a starting point for inspiration on Abrahamic writings rather than a true transliteration, though admittedly there are decent reasons to think otherwise I certainly wouldn't begrudge others for believing. A few edits to a single section don't really change anything about LDS in-text our out-of-text teachings on the Trinity. Many Old Testament prophets were polygamists, so clearly it's compatible with Christianity, yes? It's I believe a plausible or even likely reading of the history that Joseph Smith was forced into accepting plural marriage (obviously it brought nothing but trouble) as part of the "restoration of all things", i.e. re-treading parts of earlier pre-Christ Christianity as part of the doctrinal point that the gospel (Christianity broadly from Adam to now) is now in its ultimate and most complete form (though some allowance is made for new knowledge, teachings, and practices to be either restored or newly given). At least under this model of Christian history, there's far less confusion over having to litigate and reexamine each and every piece of modern practice and belief - Protestant, Catholic, or otherwise - for accuracy. Study is helpful for understanding true religious principles, and might be a rewarding activity, but it is not the cornerstone of doctrine, nor is there a need for major political activism to influence church leaders at the church-wide level.
Returning back a little bit to the original point, it's amazing to me that anyone would read the Epistles of Paul and come to any conclusion other than that there were serious doctrinal misunderstandings by new converts everywhere, on top of the rampant persecution, on top of the behavior problems, on top of the cultural difficulties popping up as many new members tried to blend their previous beliefs into the new religion. The vibe is that there's definitely a bit of a mess out there, yeah? Paul was obviously, I think everyone agrees, capable of correcting misunderstandings and offering some excellent guidance, but there were only so many people like Paul, and fewer by the year. And there's little evidence as far as I'm concerned that anyone satisfactorily took his place, much less the Bishop of Rome, though a few bishops tried to a limited extent.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
Perhaps a better expression of my feeling is that Catholic doctrine, insofar as I understand it, explicitly promotes both Scripture and Tradition as (equal-ish) sources of doctrine... but simultaneously claims authority to make New Changes, due to pedigree/authority. Many Protestants view Sola Scriptura as the best source of doctrine, with perhaps a little history as helpful context, though others take a full "we figure it out with scholarship" approach and basically toss all of it out as unerring sources of doctrine. LDS theology by contrast at least has a nice hierarchy where modern clarifications/additions explicitly take precedence, so there really isn't the same kind of core conflict. That's why, at least to me, the Catholic attempt to split the difference, where some New Changes are OK to make and change Scripture and/or Tradition, but not too many, seems contradictory, and I think Catholic theological history reflects that inconsistency. It's possible I've misunderstood this point or been too uncharitable, of course, but that's my impression. How can a Catholic distinguish between a Tradition that's OK to change, and one that isn't? (Also, maybe doctrinal is the wrong word?)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
I think what you're missing about AI is that the investment of time and money is so incredibly low for what it offers. I pay 20 bucks a month for the paid chatGPT and it's among the very best best time:money investments I've ever made, and it's not even mandatory (you can do fine hooking up a chat app out there to an API key and paying cents after a $5 initial up-front investment, or bounce between free versions, or buy a subscription to a model aggregator for $7 bucks a month that is making an arbitrage on the API cost vs your subscription and your actual predicted usage).
Fundamentally, what might take a human a significant time investment is just gone completely with an LLM. You will never annoy it with stupid questions. You can ask and rephrase the same question multiple times without sounding stupid. You can send it off to do research on something you are mildly curious about but too lazy to synthesize yourself. You can converse with it in a foreign language to practice. You can quickly sanity check a potential action without judgement, and without waiting for a friend to text you back. You can have it reformat text or perform an annoying repetitive text-based task. You can have it write test questions for you to practice on. You can have it pretend to be the other side of a job interview and give you feedback on your answers. You can have it add some comments to your code. You can have it write a skeleton for a program. You can have it quickly give you a summary of a PDF you feed it, unique to your problem. I could go on. It's truly a fundamental change, and potentially very useful in the workplace as it is in life.
Yes, there are pitfalls and dangers in all of those, but in terms of risk-reward? You are risking almost nothing but a tiny bit of your own time, and getting back something potentially very valuable. The "task annoyance" that you wouldn't even inflict on an intern is suddenly a non-issue. I find many (though far from all) of the issues people encounter with AI stem from either misunderstanding what AI can actually DO and what it's best at, or being bad at imagination in terms of your prompts. Very few of the things I listed above might need extensive checking to the extent that you might as well have done it yourself. Many of them are things for which there is no adequate replacement IRL, or at least, not at remotely the same price point or time commitment.
People go through tons of effort to set up language-learning pen-pals, as an example. You can have AI do that now. You can even tell it what language level you're on, or what country to pretend to be from, or tell it to introduce new concepts to you slowly. And worst case, even if the AI makes a few grammar mistakes, so do real people. There's very little downside!
I will admit that the Hugo use-case seems honestly a bit ill-suited for what they used it for. AI isn't that great at free-wheeling internet navigation, so using it for vetting seems like a bad idea. Now, if you instructed it to go through self-submissions or resumes? With a testing and verification step to set up the right detailed prompt, that could be very effective as a screening tool.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
Yeah, that era changed gaming in a big way. Modding, free content updates, games so dominant in their space that multiplayer was permanent, all happened in just a few short years. League came out in 2009, Minecraft in 2010, Skyrim in 2011. Okay, fine, CS is older, and so is WoW, but both of those released paid expansions or new games periodically, so they don't quite fit the same. But the iPhone came out in 2007, so right in that same period when smartphones hit critical mass was when the first microtransaction-based games came out. FarmVille in 2009, Clash of Clans in 2012, Candy Crush Saga in 2012. So that 2009-2012ish period had an unusually massive impact.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
If you want a crazy blast down memory lane, there is still the original forum post up (albeit with some broken image links, but not all) when Notch posted one of the very earliest versions, and it's still hilarious to me how instantly people got addicted, started building castles with moats, pixel art, and suggested multiplayer and survival modes. You can page through some of the 90+ pages of responses, it's nuts to see how instant the positive response was.
I started playing when it was in alpha, survival was still a "new" thing, and the "demo" was a web-browser playable limited-size world with the basic blocks and water flooding instantly to the water level, without a save feature. I was entranced even with that basic setup.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
I feel like the whole thing wasn't ever designed to be rigorous in the first place. The way magic works is inconsistent, consistently whimsy, and conveniently suited to whatever the plot is at the moment. I want to double-underscore whimsy here (the chocolate frog cards? ever-flavor beans? constant alliterations? freaking owls?) and point out it's really more whimsy for its own sake, rather than making a broader point (like magical realist novels do). Rather than world-building taking place from the start, offering hints as to future books, aspects of the world are constantly tacked-on in precisely the book they become relevant. Major events are plainly ret-conned as the series progresses. There is never a satisfying explanation for why the magical world actually manages to stay hidden nor how Muggle tech never gets used at all - except for, like, trains. I also feel like HP was ahead of the curve of the "modern" YA novel - later entries would be much more explicit in their attempts to place teenagers front and center in the plot.
So yeah, the point of the novels is to be whimsy, and explore a Chosen One narrative in a school setting. That's it. Everything else is bolted on and accessory.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
Obviously, as a Mormon (member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, whew) I think you're actually on the right track. It's so blindingly obvious that the Catholic church is bumbling along, with zero internal consistency, for centuries and centuries. It shows up all over. Even today, Catholics are very loud about a number of major issues, but very small numbers of actual Catholics actually agree with their own church's doctrine, much less practice it, and that's even before you look at any history at all. Don't get me wrong, I respect Catholics, I get along with many, I still view the religion as an overall net good, etc. but their doctrine is a mess. I genuinely extra respect the Catholics who attempt to pull the doctrine together into a coherent whole, but I just don't see the hand of God guiding them.
Now, doctrinally, to me, this all goes away quite neatly when you give up on the idea of the Catholic line of authority being unbroken. Clearly they strayed, it's self-evident, so my own faith has the nice idea of needing someone to restore and clarify things and have a modern guide/prophet. I'm not saying that people don't find any inconsistencies in Mormon doctrine, there's a people component to be sure, but it's several orders of magnitude less. I strongly reject this idea that doctrine is developed by groups of people hashing it out. Council of Nicea? Convened by Constantine, he basically says I don't care what you produce as long as it's something unifying, and once you do, we'll burn the writings of dissenters and exile anyone not with the program. All this to say you should meet with the missionaries :)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
It's been interesting to see the small subset of people claiming that LLMs are necessary to assist with their real, minor, or potentially imagined disabilities, which is normally a favorable crowd, going up against the more traditional artist crowd. Who has more clout? Will business-type overall support for LLM's overshadow the artist opposition? Will normal people's increasing usage factor in to the conversation, or are the opinion of normies irrelevant to the artistic space? In that way it will be interesting to see where it all lands.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
For my generation, a few aspects, but to me the core appeal was the sort of human (male) survival-adjacent aspect. You are in a world alone, you survive, beat down the wildlife, bend it to your will, build things that leave a permanent mark on the world, etc. Scratches a bit of the human itch that way. There was also originally a bit of the self-taught pride, because you had to go to the wiki to figure out how to actually make stuff (the game literally had no tutorial for over 6 years!) or consult YouTube to set up some limited automation via some jank unintentional mechanics (for example, to originally boost a minecart to crazy speeds, you had to have little smaller minecarts spinning in tiny circle tracks tangential to your main track) so if you did something notable (or creative/effortful, especially in a server with friends), it was impressive! And also, for those of us in school or college, it was a nice side outlet that felt a little more wholesome than the games like counterstrike, Dota2, League, etc. that were just getting going at the time. Plus, updates were frequent, so you could re-discover and build on your knowledge (for free) a few months or years after last playing, or maybe a friend would start up a server, so you'd potentially go in cycles of binging.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
Ah, well yes I'd say so, so that's a good point. Anyone college age or younger when it started getting big 2010-2011, so I'll admit that only captures... maybe half? Dunno if it really "counts" the older half Millennial parents playing it with their kids. I'll admit I'm '93, on the tail end, so that might skew my perspective slightly. Considering also the male-coded aspect, maybe it's only about a quarter of Millennials? Still, curious if any broader theme resonates, or if the whole thing is making a mountain out of a molehill.
There's this fascinating twitter thread (unroll link for better reading) about A Minecraft Movie, and how it is fundamentally a Zoomer movie on an emotional level, not just a subject matter level. Specifically, he calls it (followed by some key excerpts, though I recommend the entire thread):
the most reactionary movie I've ever seen and the future zoomer world order is bright and wonderful. I would have called it "The humiliation of the coward Jack Black and the end of irony"
... [A]fter this introduction, when [Jack Black] sends the mcguffin to earth to be found by the main character, the movie’s language changes. It is no longer gen x nihilism, or millennial irony after Jack Black is put in prison in hell, and we change protagonist to Young Zoomer Henry.
The reason the movie resonates with the Zoomers is because it reflects their own life experience back at them, and they pick up on that in a subconscious way even if they can’t articulate it.
The real plot of the movie is that a boy is SUCKED against his will into a RECTANGULAR PORTAL into a world that is HYPER STIMULATING and OVERSATURATED, where the people he meet tells him it is a beautiful world of “creativity”, but it’s actually a really simplistic world of base Id expression and Id satisfaction
... On a literal plot level, the antagonist of the movie is some witch pig lady. But on an emotional level, Steve is a villain, the shadow of the protagonist of the movie. The main character Henry is a genuinely creative and smart kid. This is illustrated by him being able to draw well, and being a literal math genius, who can engineer a functioning rocket from scratch. Jack Black is a “Creative”, which is illustrated by him making silly faces and yelling random nonsense. When Henry and the other cast of characters are stuck in minecraft world, they are not actually aided by Steve.
... The story ultimately never portrays “the minecraft world” as a good place, but a place of indulgence, of Id expression and satisfaction... [Steve] is a gooner. And the film itself utterly rejects him: there is no ambiguity here, the minecraft world is bad, and the real world is what matters. “being creative” in minecraft is shallow and hollow, and is a bad outlet for your talents.
The hypersaturated world of hyperreality, of the media-mediated reality that was forced on the zoomers, as their parents plopped a phone or ipad on them as children, is a shallow and hollow mimicry of the real world, and exposing children to “minecraft” at age 9 is not going to make them more “creative”, it is just going to make them into autistic gooners. It is not really a minecraft movie. It is a movie about the zoomer life experience, and a genuine and open confrontation with prior generations. The minecraft branding is arbitrary. The emotional core of the movie, and there truly is a genuine human emotional core, is a genuine inter-generational dialogue.
And I say, the reason the zoomers like it, is not some ironic doubly irony joke where they pretend to like a bad movie - that is just what it looks like to millenials, because “that’s what millennials do”. The reason they like it is because they resonate with a story about being raped by a magical portal that sends you to a fake world you have to escape from. And that is extremely genuine and real, and the movie totally succeeds in expressing something, that possibly haven’t been captured in art before, with the novelty of our technological-historical situation.
I don't know if I ever thought of it this way, but now I kind of can't unsee it. I genuinely wonder if Zoomers will end up feeling bitter towards Millennials like me in much the same way we feel in many cases bitter towards Boomers, but instead of a grudge over amassing self-serving stock market wealth and monopolizing limited housing stock, it's despairing over the perhaps mishandled human-technological interaction surface that emerged after Millennial founders and users created the modern mobile-social-internet landscape.
But in a way maybe this is all healing for Zoomers? There is definitely some actual awareness and maturity that their brains are on some level being cooked, they know they use TikTok too much, but there's still some earnestness left despite all that. Also, Minecraft is a weird thing because it is one of the few completely crossover experiences between Zoomers and Millennials, but even so, the actual experience is somewhat different. For Zoomers, it's a simple childhood exploration time and a cultural touchstone, with some nostalgia and force of memes and videos. For Millennials, it was more overtly a sea change in gaming (constant updates, a rise in indie titles, graphical reversion), more directly creative as a more adult/late teen outlet, and with nerdy overtones. Spending time in Minecraft and building things creatively were quite literally different for the two age groups, in the aggregate. At least in this viewing, Jack Black's Steve represents on some level the disconnect between the two generations that are so close in the overt trappings, yet so far in their emotional response to modernity.
... showing over and over again that Jack Black, as a stand in for gen X nihilism and millennial irony, is totally oblivious, that he doesn’t “get it”, that he is a clown who is not in on the joke... It’s funny, engaging, and genuine. And Jack Black is not in on the joke. That’s what makes it work and that’s the point, and as the credits rolled in the theater, two zoomers who were leaving turned around and waved and smiled and yelled something to me, and I had no idea what they were saying, and I think that’s beautiful.
Thoughts? Is he way off base here?
Did you attempt to read the Book of Mormon, or merely dismiss its provenance and not bother? I think that's usually more valuable than extra-textual criticism. I'm not in the habit of being a Book of Mormon apologist or promoter on its non-spiritual merits, like some members might, as I still believe reading it is the best way of assessing it as scripture rather than dealing in endless speculation or attempting to make some scholastic proof (and honestly, the same could be said of the Bible)... but I will mention a few points in response. I agree that if the Book of Mormon is fraudulent so is the religion. Thankfully, I do not think this is the case. Even if you do, the case you have presented above has at least some major misunderstandings. I it was going to be brief but I guess it ballooned. Oh well. Hopefully the thoughts are in a roughly coherent order. Not that this is really the proper forum for this anyways, and we're way off topic, but maybe this can provide some further unfamiliar information at the minimum.
Internally, there are some passages that allude to the script being somewhat of a rare skill in the first place, and likely not even corresponding to the typical spoken language of the people there. In-text there is further described a tendency of the victors to burn the loser's records and texts, a classic and historically accurate thing to do, so we wouldn't really expect much writing to survive. We hardly had any Mayan codices to begin with, even before the Catholics started burning it all, plus there were an estimated 200 or so languages spoken in the region before 1500, we hardly knew all of them to start with. Finally, contrary to popular belief, historians seem to have found that although writing itself is excellent and obviously useful, not all cultures adopt writing systems even when there are examples nearby, or can die out for other reasons, especially in more ancient contexts. Even in mesoamerica itself, while the Mayans had a system, their neighbors for centuries generally did not, and when they did it was pretty limited. (On top of all that, it was largely assumed by most in Smith's region at the time that all Native Americans were basically illiterate, even knowledge of the complexity of Mayan script wasn't yet popularly known, a point to be revisited below)
I also think that you are mistaken about a core point about the people involved -- these are not, in fact, Egyptian people. This is a set of Jews, primarily a family of merchants (perhaps metal traders), who left Jerusalem at a known point in time, and we have seen (limited but existing) evidence of a denser Egyptian script mingling with Hebrew in exactly that time period. The text does describe with remarkable precision a route out of Jerusalem that matches known geographical features, as well, again something Smith had no knowledge of (e.g. their coastal boat-building site was described as lush, something you wouldn't expect out of the Arabian desert coast)
The text does describe several attributes of mesoamerican people not yet popularly known, but since confirmed, and moreover avoids a ton of Indian stereotypes common at the time and in Smith's region, which is notably odd (no teepees, no scalping, they aren't savages, all the stereotypes don't fit at all). As one example, you can map major battles to months recorded in-text, and viola: we see a clear pattern of historically accurate seasonal warfare. Not really what fan-fic usually does, seems like a weird choice that would actually undermine contemporaries' opinions about it. It also doesn't do the sci-fi fiction thing where descriptions of certain things are subtly hinted at to the reader. Nope, we get at times some random words or items dropped in and described, with the assumption we'd know what they are.
There is Hebrew-style poetry in it that was also unknown to scholars at the time, as well as other Hebrew literary elements, and at least a few genuinely Hebrew-inspired names, in addition to some strange turns of phrase one assumes are linguistic artifacts of the original language ("and it came to pass" as the classic example, is repeated a lot). We even get a random olive tree parable, that actually gets a lot right about the growing process, that's not a New England thing. There are over a thousand intra-textual references, quotes, and callbacks as well, a lot to keep track of. On top of that, Smith makes the seemingly strange decision to relate slightly different versions of Isaiah and the Sermon on the Mount, and some of these departures show up in the Dead Sea Scrolls or early Septuagint versions even, since discovered. The records are mostly of the nobility among the people, often following lineages and select spiritual stories and developments, not intended as primarily historical, as is the case for many ancient records in terms of focus. Compare for example the Mayan Dresden Codex - a record mostly of the nobility, following select lineages and with select stories bolstering the nobles' lineage. Yep, sounds familiar in format.
I would add that the internal setup is that of two specific people assembling and in some long stretches summarizing and paraphrasing this largely spiritual set of events, hundreds of years worth (there was never the allegation that "one person" witnessed it all, I'm not sure where you got that from?), this is a little over half the book, so that is a bit different in format than the Bible, but it's far from all. In fact, the story internally references a variety of source texts, splices them in at a number of points, and engages at times in periodic flashbacks offering different perspectives of the same event. There is some clear internal evidence of different author tones and styles, reinforced by modern textual analysis techniques.
There are random digressions into migrations, descriptions of different internal cultures, notes about the calendar, weight and measure standardization listed on the reign of a new king with similar natural ratios as those we find in authentic ancient records. We have over 150 named people, 200 place names, 600 relational geographic passages, no map, but the info we have is internally consistent. Plenty of stuff perfectly fitting the internal editorial decisions as well as what ancient records tend to digress about.
With respect to the plates themselves and the manuscript resulting, first of all the idea that records would be written on metal plates at all was at the time ridiculous, but we have since found a few examples. In terms of timeframe, there is significant evidence that the whole book's 'translation' was produced at a pretty fast pace, a little over 2 months, with significant complexity and references and setup as described above in part, and obviously some spiritual teachings too that many have since found to be extremely faith-promoting (the actual point of the book), and this is the quite factually the case even if you think his scribes were all in on it too. I only briefly touched on the spiritual aspect, despite the bulk of this post, but there's some genuinely interesting and unique theological concepts there inside that need to work for any of it to work at all. This chapter has some interesting doctrines about sin and the fall. This one has some great teachings about insecurity and grace. This one contains a timeless analogy about the process of nurturing faith in God. This one and the next three chapters is a classic sermon encouraging faithfulness, but with fiery rhetoric about taking care of the poor and our purpose on earth. Faith, charity, and repentence are constantly emphasized. Aren't those the main takeaways from the gospel anyways? But the classic challenge is, can you write a similar amount in two months, and have it be spiritually enjoyable to read, let alone display the depth and complexity described in all the points above? Press X to doubt.
And lastly, when it comes to the physical gold-looking (probably a lighter alloy) plates themselves, we actually do explicitly have more than just Joseph Smith's word - although some of them are family or friends, there were 11 total people who signed testimony they saw them or handled them or saw an angel present them, with a half dozen more besides, none of whom recanted despite several leaving the church or thinking Joseph has become a fallen prophet.
Which, by the way, sounds more likely to me than just a straight con job. Has any other con artist in history ever produced something comparable? In word count it's like half the full Lord of the Rings trilogy, for comparison. There was the Hitler Diaries, I guess, but a lot of the heavy lifting was done by matching up existing newspaper accounts and plagiarizing, and they were pretty quickly shown to be fake, and excessively tropey with known Hitler flourishes. Scientology and Hubbard's writings? Maaaaaaybe? Eh, no, not really. Connection is a bit weird, because he was quite literally a science fiction writer. Then took a detour into self-help psychology. Then gave some lectures. Then and only then near bankruptcy he starts dropping in spiritual-ish stuff, and boy is it a gradual process over decades. So yeah, prolific writer, but bad comparison, and he took decades to accomplish not half what Smith did in two months. Ellen G White of Seventh Day Adventist fame also was a book-writer and vision-haver. But her visions are atomic, continuations and plays on her normal writings, occur throughout her life, and don't have the same demand for consistency of course due to their nature. (Atheists might also note she was, in fact, literally knocked out with a rock as a child as the start of her spiritual awakening. I don't know enough to opine). The only other thing I know or have heard of would be the Ossian Poems, according to AI, where some guy in the 1700s wrote his own poems of warfare and romance with some maybe some legit old Gaelic inspiration, blended them together, then claimed to only be the translator of them (but refused to show the allegedly too-delicate manuscript). Still a bit of a far cry from the potent Book of Mormon claims and its own textual complexity.
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