OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
No bio...
User ID: 359
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
6d ago
I'm bringing this as proof that the authors are far removed from the events and your response is "well, under the assumption that they are not far removed from the events this is impossible". You are making my point.
No, I'm not. Unless you hold to a later Mark date than most scholars today. And many scholars belive Mark was Jewish, such as William Arnal and Julie Galambush who are hardly Christian Fundamentalists.
You wouldn't write the parable of the fig tree if the destruction of the temple hadn't already happened: the jews have already failed to deliver and god has already punished them.
Jesus is clear that is goal is to create a new Exodus and a new covenant. Will the Son of Man find faith when He returns? He came the first time, no faith, predicts destruction of the old practices. Establishes a new covenant, says he will return to see if it goes any better.
But just looking at events in the 40s, they match to the predictions better than the full Temple destruction? Atheist New Testament Scholar Maurice Casey argued that Jesus’s prophecy about the “abomination of desolation” where it does not belong is obviously a reference Caligula ordering a statue of himself be placed within the Temple around 39 CE. The portion about the destruction of the Temple is largely taken from Jeremiah 7, and Casey doesn’t see it as a reference to the historical destruction of the Temple by the Romans, but rather an eschatological threat of sorts about God destroying the Temple if it’s desecrated.
What's causal power.
The ability to bring an effect into something else. Right now I do not have boiling water. If I were to fill a pot with water and put it on a stove and turn it on and heat made the water boil, all that chain of events was required to make the water boil. It's also clear that there was something about that chain of events that caused the water to boil, when otherwise the water would have stayed in my pipes without boiling. The heat of the stove had the causal power to change the water from liquid to gas.
But I don't think this is the case, I think there's actually nothing logically contradictory in an infinite series of mirrors you are tricking your brain into thinking there is because the brain thinks in aristotelian terms,
I am not arguing that there is something logically contradictory in an infinite series of mirrors. The argument is, even with an infinite series of mirrors there would be no face if there was nothing imparting an image of a face.
Suppose the universe was nothing but a single atom travelling forever at constant speed, is that impossible?
Yes! The thing impossible isn't the speed of the atom, but the fact that the atom exists at all.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
7d ago
Charlie Kirk was asking for someone to bail out the Pelosi attacker specifically to ask the guy questions about his motives. Not because he supported the attack, but because he wanted to learn more about it. And then compared how easy most violent criminals are let out on bail compared to this attacker.
That is 100% different from thousands of people gleefully saying, "Finally! I hope they do Matt Walsh next." Sure, it's not as bad as Obama saying, "Finally! I hope they do Matt Walsh next!" But it's still pretty bad! If Obama made a similar statement to what Kirk said about the Pelosi attacker, something like, "I hope someone on the left gets the opportunity to talk to the assassin and find out his motives before the corrupt Trump DOJ gets their hands on him!" I don't think you'd see a problem with that statement.
I um.... I admit that he does seem to rack up half a million views, which is impressive. But I started one of his streams and it's all - jumping around, random cartoons, it's making me queasy. So I jumped forward, and forward, and forward, and at the 2 hour mark he actually shows up on camera. He's just talking to the camera about headlines, like Tim Pool or Viva Frey, but they at least have the sense to show screenshots and videos of what they're discussing. Fuentes is just his face and a camera. His demeanor is honestly not as entertaining as Matt Walsh.
Some of his videos have a ton of views, but his channel has half that in subscribers, and only 5k likes on the video. Don't know what is good for Rumble but the ratio seems weird to me. Comment section also wasn't super supportive of him, which is surprising I assume because most people on Rumble sought out that kind of content. Viva Frey and Tim Pool have many more subscribers but fewer views per video.
All I can say is that he does seem fairly popular and I still have no clue why.
Edit - Three years ago his videos were getting less than 2k views. His first video to break 50k views was this one and I don't know why. Then he goes back to less than 10K for a while. He starts to get consistently 50k views around October 7th, 2023 and it increased rapidly from there. So his shtick seems to be the anti-Israel right.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
7d ago
He was pro assassination of murderers. What deadly attacks on innocents did Charlie Kirk plot?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
7d ago
Fuentes has actual talent and social capital.
I genuinely don't understand what you mean by this. What is Fuentes' main ideas that differentiates him? What has he done? All I know is his name is associated with an equally odd "Groyper" term, and I think he's anti-Israel while still being on the right. Does he have a blog or youtube or onlyfans? I've Googled his name a couple times and saw nothing that really looked noteworthy except for him being an obvious fed for not being indicted like the rest of the Jan 6ers.
Meanwhile Charlie Kirk has viral debates on college campuses and started a media company whose reporters cover leftist riots on the ground among other things mainstream media ignores. I know who this guy is and what his shtick is just through osmosis. He's the reasonable voice on the ground pointing out hypocrisy and extremism on the left. Can someone else do that role? Sure, but he did it well and didn't deserve a bullet for it.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
7d ago
Could have been an inside source jumping the gun because Kirk's heart was stopped, but then he was revived so not dead-dead yet.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
7d ago
You thought the week was boring? We had NATO jets shooting down Russian drones last night and you thought it was a boring week?
I'd hate to see what you think is exciting.
But agreed that this feels like a shift to the week. I've seen conservatives in an outrage over the killing of the Ukrainian girl, and now this. I think we're close to some kind of flashpoint but I have no idea what it will look like. If it were the left, I would know - riots, some larceny, eventually everyone will go inside for winter. With the right, I really don't know what's going to happen next. Not larceny. I know everyone's hoping it's going to be like the Ents waking up, but I don't know.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
7d ago
No, my comment wasn't really directed towards you but towards the woman, who of course wouldn't read it. You are correct that it's weird for the woman to think she's traditionalist. I'm pointing out that she jumped to a conclusion very quickly, and it's probably the wrong conclusion. A bit of a Freudian slip.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
7d ago
I'm not very sympathetic to what some consider contradictions between Galatians and Acts 9. It only seems to be a contradiction if you think each is supposed to include, step by step, everything Paul did right after his experience. But in the same source, Acts, you have two descriptions of the events internally, Acts 9 and Acts 22. It's clear that each depiction does not contain an exhaustive list of what Paul did immediately after his conversion. Instead, in Acts 9 we find phrasing like, "after days," and "after many days" leaving lots of room for Paul to make a trip.
Meanwhile, Acts has very detailed descriptions of Paul's travels and how long it took to get between each places, information that would be very hard to get without the author traveling from place to place themselves.
If we assume an early date than Acts is attempting to chronicle "the story of Christianity up until now" and I just don't think it does that.
It's more like, gLuke is what Luke could gather about Jesus from those he talked to and Acts is the history of the people Luke spent time with - Peter, Priscilla and Aquila, and Paul.
Original gMark ended mid-sentence, which seems to me to indicate it was not finished because the author or scribe was interrupted. Acts has an ending, just one that places it before Paul's death. "And no one tried to stop him." That's just a lie if it is written after AD 70, and an obvious one. It definitely was written to a Roman (or Gentile more broadly) audience and the selection of what stories to include reflects that, but that does not mean it was faked.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
8d ago
We probably are convinced by a bunch of bad research, given the replication crisis.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
8d ago
That where one scholar is going but not where scholarship in general is going, that would be the other direction. And no eyewitnessess, whoever wrote the cleansing of the temple probably didn't even have a passing familiarity with the temple, for example.
Are you getting that from Ehrman or somewhere else?
Even with a "late" gMark date of 73ish, the author would have been in the temple as all male Jews were expected to travel to the Temple several times a year. Assuming the writer is older than 18, he would have familiarity with the Temple before its fall.
If you don't discount scholars just for being religious, arguments for early dating is becoming more acceptable. The arguments make sense. They made sense when critical historian Adolf von Harnack did the math in 1911, and they still make sense today. The historical investigation has the fatal flaw of needing to presuppose that nothing supernatural happened. If you approach without that presupposition, then the evidence points elsewhere.
consider how many times the authentic letters of Paul could have quoted Jesus from the gospels but didn't. That means they were written after.
I would not dispute that the letters of Paul were mostly written without the Gospels as reference. There are some parts of Paul's letters that have a certain rhyme with the Gospels, particularly in 1 Corinthians. But I think they were written separately, which isn't exactly a bad thing from an evidentiary-stand point. All that tells us is that the Gospels were not wide-spread reference material at the time Paul was writing and perhaps he did not have access to copies himself. He was an wandering preacher/tent maker. It's not the weirdest thing for him not to have had an extensive library.
It doesn't matter when the prediction was made, it's that predictions only become relevant after they become true, it wouldn't have been written about.
Or it mattered because it was a warning to the Christians to flee Jerusalem for the hills, which they did. And not all the predictions came true by AD 80. And some things that would probably be critical details embedded in their memory, like that the Temple was melted to SLAG wasn't mentioned at all.
You should re-read the last chapter of Acts
Yeah, and then Paul died. He died during Nero's reign, in AD 64/65. He arrived in Rome in AD 60. Acts ends saying, "He spent two years in Rome preaching." Then there is a gap of another couple years, and then Paul died. If Paul died before Acts was written, Luke would have included Paul's dramatic death. He did not, because Paul's dramatic death didn't happen for another two years.
Since gLuke is likely written before Acts, and Acts was likely written before AD 65, and gMark was written before gLuke unless you're crazy, gMark is older than AD 65. Give them each a couple years to write each book, and gMark is in the late 50s. Paul's letters were written in the 50s and the part of the 60s where he was alive, which goes to your point that he didn't have a copy of a Gospel to reference. It's all very nice and neat like the truth tends to be.
All versions of the cosmological argument and all of the five ways of St. Thomas.
No they don't. This is just silly. If for the sake of argument we allowed that there could be an infinitely long hierarchical series— D actualized by C, which is in turn actualized by B, which is in turn actualized by A, and so on in infinity, there would still have to be a source of causal power outside the series to impart causal power to the whole. Consider a mirror which reflects the image of a face present in another mirror, which in turn reflects the image of a face present in another, and so on ad infinitum. Even if we allowed that there could be such a series of mirrors, there would still have to be something outside this infinite series— the face itself—which could impart the content of the image without having to derive it. What there could not be is only mirror images and never any actual face.
The argument does not rely on the non-existence of actual infinity.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
8d ago
Yeah, I'm more sympathetic to the view that the word for "thousand" meant something like "platoon" of indeterminate size. The link in that paragraph goes to a book where five different scholars argue five different positions on when the Exodus happened: early dating, late dating, no exodus at all, exodus as a cultural memory of multiple migrations from Egypt, etc. It was an interesting format, something like a long-form Reddit argument or written debate-brawl. I recommend the book if you are interested in the topic.
I wonder what we believe today that those in the future will find laughable.
This was true back then but now we know the bible is trash when it comes to historical accuracy.
If you checked out of scholarship in the 80s, I can see why you would think so. That is a less defensible sentiment today. Fifty years ago, people got away with saying that King David is a myth, now we have his coins. Excavations have revealed architecture described in the New Testament that has been hidden since the 2nd century. Where it gets hazy is where you would expect it to be hazy - what archaeological evidence would you expect the Exodus to leave behind? There is some evidence, nothing conclusive, but I wouldn't expect there to be given the short time length of the event and the amount of evidence nomadic peoples typically leave behind.
But that doesn't hold many problems for the Traditional Catholic, as the traditional view has viewed the Joshua and Conquest in an allegorical sense. Joshua as a Christ figure, demonstrates the importance of eradicating evil entirely and giving it no quarter. A large part of reading the Bible is knowing what the genre is of the book you're reading.
To the Christian claims, the important thing to get historically accurate is the Gospels, and the Gospels were written in the genre of Ancient Biography. They at least tried to get it right, and there is increasing evidence that they were written early and by eyewitnesses..
All attempts to date the Gospel after AD 70 rely in the logic of, "Well, we know Jesus wasn't God, so He can't have predicted the fall of the Temple ahead of time (never mind there were other people predicting the fall of the Temple in the decade leading up to it,) and so the Gospels all had to be written after AD 70." And dating the Gospels before AD 70 is more like, "The Gospels tell their readers to do things at the Temple, and that is a weird prescription if the Temple is already destroyed. And Acts leads up the climatic trial of Paul in Rome but doesn't cover it, which would seem to indicate that it was completed before his execution. And look here, and look there, at all these weird coincidences that only make sense if they were written in the 50s and 60s."
Most of these don't hold because we proved actual infinity isn't logically contradictory.
Which proof do you think relies on actual infinity being logically contradictory? St. Thomas famously believed we couldn't prove the universe was finite through just philosophy, and his Cosmological argument does not require the universe to have had a beginning. Maybe you're most exposed to Kalam's argument, which is impossible to defend on pure philosophical grounds, though people try to defend it still with a combo of scientific evidence and philosophy.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9d ago
That's kind of a different matter. Yes, they're bumbling idiots, but they're my bumbling idiots!
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9d ago
She was going through pre-marriage counseling with her local Catholic priest. She was bemoaing the fact that, on a questionnaire she had her fiancee had to fill out, it asked "who will be handling the household finances?" "Tollbooth!" She steamed, "What am I supposed to do? Just stand barefoot in the kitchen all day with a baby on my hip?"
Am I supposed to read something prescriptive in the question? It seems just common sense to ensure a couple has a plan in place on how to handle finances before getting married. Catholics have a systematic marriage prep for this reason - to make sure that the common causes of divorce are at least discussed prior to making a life-long commitment.
Is she assuming the priest was expecting a response of "husband works, I drag toddlers to supermarket?" Because normally they don't care, as long as you have an answer and you've talked about it with your betrothed. Also (at least for me) we didn't have to share the questionnaire with anyone, we just filled it out and talked with each other.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9d ago
I'd like to push back on the idea that crossing ecclesiastical authority risked death. I feel like that's a model of the Middle Ages that is more conceived on 18th century propaganda instead of the actual historical record. Even when the Papal States had an executioner, he was part of the civil courts, not the ecclesiastical courts. He executed thieves and assassins, not heretics. Ecclesiastical courts were not allowed to kill anyone at all, and there is good reason for that. That's not to say they were infallible bastions of perfect goodness and mercy, but they aren't the opposite either. They were courts.
People accused by civil authorities of crimes begged to be tried by the Inquisition because the Inquisition had a higher standard of evidence. And so on and so forth.
What you might object to most strongly crosses over into the other aspect of your comment - forcing people to believe via authority. So I will touch on that first before a deeper discussion on persecuting heretics.
In the Middle Ages, people were not forced to believe via authority. Forced baptisms are illicit, and pagans converted in droves without threat of force. Rather, people believed because it was the air they breathed. Not being a Christian would be like being a Flat Earther today.
Taking the analogy further, lots of people today believe the Earth is round because that is how it is depicted in art. Maybe they were lucky enough to be exposed to a globe as a child. They heard stories and have seen relics of people going to space and seeing the round Earth. They are not forced to believe the Earth is round under threat of torture. It'd be frankly bizarre for them to think the Earth was Flat.
Any American today had the opportunity to take high-school level Trigonometry and be able to prove that the Earth is round based on measuring shadows and traveling 100 miles, a trivial feat compared to how difficult it would be to prove to oneself in the past. But why would they? Who is suspicious enough to do so?
And moreover, basic facts about the world, like the shape of the Earth, shouldn't be accessible only to those with above-average intelligence and a car. It would be bizarre to make a society that is agnostic about the shape of the Earth because we wouldn't want to unduly influence belief.
The Medieval mind was as convinced about the truth of Christianity as we are about the roundness of the Earth. Those with the intelligence to prove it made sure that this important knowledge was accessible to all. And I believe they did prove the existence of God and that there is more proof today than there was in the past. And that anyone smart enough who goes through 4-6 years of specialized education and spiritual formation (that is very hard to get these days) will agree, if we could just get them to take the opportunity cost to get there.
Here is where the analogy is inadequate - the problem of heretics. Because it doesn't really matter to a functioning society if there is a group of people who think the Earth is flat. We pity them, we ignore them, even if one of our own children became a flat Earther we would still harbor a vague hope that they could still life a good life, even if you stop trusting their judgement on other things.
But in the case of Christianity, there is a huge emphasis on Orthodoxy (right belief) and Orthopraxy (right practice.) And if you tip the balance so that the ignorant masses are now divided in belief, they are going to believe all sorts of things, very few of which are results of a systematic fact-finding methodology. And if you have midwits choosing beliefs randomly, you have disagreement and dissension and civil wars and that is why the CIVIL authorities executed heretics and waged crusades against them.
Because the Cathars had beliefs that were society-ending and spread them at an alarming rate to people who didn't know better. Because if you're a Protestant Lord and some of your subjects are Catholics then they have an obligation to defy your authority at times, and you can't have that.
The problem the Medieval were trying to solve wasn't that everyone is by default agnostic and they needed to be forced at knifepoint to be Catholic. The problem they were trying to solve is that people all too easily believe whatever their slightly-smarter neighbor tells them is a good idea and this can upend society. Like "marriage and sex are evil" and "men and women are interchangable."
But wait, didn't we enlightened Americans figure out a way for multiple people with a plurality of different ideologies and religions to live together in peace and harmony without society collapsing?
...I certainly hope so. But I think only time can tell.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9d ago
I very much don't feel like a LARPer. I don't think Feser - one of the staunchest modern defenders of Scholastic Metaphysics - is a LARPer.
I also wouldn't describe myself as a Trad, because that means something very specific in my religious tradition. I attend a normal mass at a normal parish.
But I also 100% believe in all of it. Heaven, Hell, the way of Illumination, Theosis, Divine Simplicity, Trinity of Lover, Beloved, and the Love that Unites, submission to local bishop, souls that are the form of the body, demons, etc. These things are more real to me than the Declaration of Independence and I have had as much personal experience with the governance of the Church as the governance of my civil authorities.
I believe true freedom is the freedom that comes from discipline and learning how to work within a system outside of my experiences. The freedom of playing a piano well is not the same as pressing keys as the whim takes me. Enlightenment conceptions of freedom seem to me more like a toddler banging on a keyboard "freely."
I'm sure there are some LARPers somewhere, but there are still many people who were born into these traditions. If both mother and father or just father attended church weekly, their kids have a 1/3 likelihood of attending church weekly as well. Converts are a small group compared with those who are hereditary Christians.
Ultimately if conservatives try to force a return to pre-modern times, not only may we lose technological advances, we also don't even have the living traditional to fall back to anymore.
Those who are Amish are already Amish. I don't know where the idea comes from that we will lose technological advances if we start having a more pre-modern outlook on usury, for instance. The rate of acquiring new advances might decrease, but some total collapse back to the bronze age isn't necessary or desired by anyone I'm aware of.
You can test qualia inside a single person's experiences, but you can't compare qualia between persons.
Edit: In your hypothetical, Red and Blue "magically" switched. I don't feel like your comparison to "conceivable test" is fair if it relies on Magic.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10d ago
Well yes, I would notice if suddenly everything that was blue suddenly turned red.
Why do we care about qualia? Because it's weird. Because it's part of being an observer. Because it seems to point towards that information and experience are different. It affects how doctors need to assess pain, for instance.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
13d ago
There were three girls, one of them concussed (according to the girl's family) and maybe unable to move quickly.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
13d ago
I suppose one thing to check - do you agree that two identical-to-the-atom clones observing identical-to-the-photon sensory inputs would have identical qualia? Or do you think even that is not something we can have high confidence in?
I don't think we could have high confidence in. What if it's assigned randomly, like the first thing you ever see is assigned what I see as "red?" There's just no way of knowing, no conceivable test to find out.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
13d ago
According to the GiveSendGo:
While walking in their local community. Lola (12), Ruby (13) and Mayah (13) were accosted by two adult foreign nationals. The foreign nationals were directing inappropriate sexual remarks at Lola. When Lola and her sister told the migrants to leave them alone and go away Ruby was viciously attacked by the adult female, yanked to the ground by her hair and both migrants proceeded to kick Ruby in the head on the ground. Seeing her sister being beaten senselessly on the ground, Lola retrieved an axe and a knife and bravely scared off the attackers, saving her sister.
I don't know if it changes your opinion if Lola wasn't walking around with the weapons, but retrieved them during the attack.
Of course, how on Earth does one retrieve weapons fast enough to return before the end of a scuffle between a 13 year old girl and two adults? How long does it take to attack a 13 year old girl?
I think the statement was carefully written to avoid further legal trouble and Lola "retrieved" the axe and knife from somewhere on her person.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
13d ago
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm not talking about color associations or being able to distinguish between shades. I'm saying, when you look at an object, your brain seems to translate that into a "color" in your mind. This "color" is how you perceive that wavelenth to be, but there's no rule that says that I see the same "color" as you. All of the colors I see might be completely foreign to you. 100% of my colors might be ones you don't see at all ever. They all appear to gently blend together for me in shades and hues on a spectrum. We share the wavelengths together, but not the effect they produce in our minds.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
13d ago
Do you and I see the same red?
If we both look at the same object, which is red, we have the same wavelength of light reach our eyes. Our eyes are both human eyes and process this wavelength the same way. We both recognize that we are seeing what we commonly call red.
But, what if I am seeing what you would call "blue"? I would recognize it as red - all red objects were this "blue" to me my whole life (and all blue objects were something you don't have a concept of at all.)
These are the kinds of things I pondered as a kid and it's why I don't scoff at qualia. There are some things that we can't in principle measure, and these things are the most foundational to our subjective experience of the world.
You're assuming that the Road to Damascus is the only time Paul had a vision of Jesus, while Acts itself contradicts this (Acts 22:17 has Paul seeing Jesus.)
The rest are likewise things that I don't see a contradiction with, but I'm not going to argue exhaustively each one.
Regarding Luke's stated process, there are two things he says to indicate sources. The first is that they were "fulfilled among us," something that seems to denote that he is a witness. The second is, as you highlighted, "those who from the first were eyewitnesses."
This statement is at the beginning of gLuke, not gActs. No one argues that Luke was an eyewitness himself of gLuke. It makes sense for gLuke to start with him indicating that it's a collection of eyewitness accounts passed on to him. In Acts he doesn't reiterate this. He just launches into it.
More options
Context Copy link