aaa
2mo ago
Original gMark ended mid-sentence, which seems to me to indicate it was not finished because the author or scribe was interrupted
The endings of manuscripts get lost, it's quite common. What this means in this particular case has been debated for centuries with different scholars arguing for various interpretations (including the long ending being the original intended ending). Jumping directly to "the scribe was interrupted mid sentence" is quite the stretch.
aaa
2mo ago
Are you getting that from Ehrman or somewhere else?
I'm getting it from reading the thing.
Even with a "late" gMark date of 73ish, the author would have been in the temple as all male Jews
The author of Mark wasn't a jew. What kind of line of argumentation is this? 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.
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.
A prediction coming true is not supernatural, people predict things all the time. The problem is that correct predictions only become relevant after they become true. Suppose Mark was writing in the 50s, some guy said "the temple is going to be destroyed" 20+ years ago and it never happened, are you going to bring that up? And it's not just the prediction, it's how it's treated. 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.
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.
Or possibly because Paul dramatic death hadn't been invented yet. You are trusting sources written hundreds of years after the fact on this, farther from the facts than the most pessimistic estimates of acts. The ending of acts is truncated whichever way you look at it. Supposed it really was written while Paul was still in Rome you wouldn't say "it preached in rome for two years" you would also say "and he's still there" or "and he's now moved to spain" or "and then they arrested him again a second time".
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
What's causal power. Make me an example of causation. Feser makes arguments like this and I'm convinced that his idea of causation doesn't exist outside of his brain.
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.
LIght travels at finite speed so at most there would have had to be, at some point, a face. 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, with efficient and final causes, but those things don't exist. Suppose the universe was nothing but a single atom travelling forever at constant speed, is that impossible? Our brain wants to say no because everything that we experience moving is moved by something but actually there's nothing logically impossible in it. If the universe was nothing but an infinite series of mirrors reflecting a face infinitely in both directions that's just how it would be.
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2mo ago
You have to have the credit card (one factor) or the credit card and the ccv (two factors) the smartphone app connected to the bank account (one factor) and the pin number (one factor).
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2mo ago
I wonder what we believe today that those in the future will find laughable.
PS. I don't think those arguments were laughable btw, I probably would have been convinced by them.
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2mo ago
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
Cute, however the world is not 6000 years old, Moses is a probably a fictional character and certainly not the author of the Deuteronomy, there was no widespread captivity in Egypt, etc etc
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..
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.
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
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. But beyond that it's how it's treated, as inevitable rather than a menace. And beyond that it's the lack of references to the gospels from other sources, 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.
The Gospels tell their readers to do things at the Temple, and that is a weird prescription if the Temple is already destroyed
The offering to the Temple was a big part of jewish religion, rabbis continued to debate the proper temple practices for centuries after the temple was destroyed under the assumption that it would soon be rebuilt. It is no surprise that christians, which at that point were a jewish sect, would do the same.
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
You should re-read the last chapter of Acts:
Brothers, I was arrested in Jerusalem and handed over to the Roman government, even though I had done nothing against our people or the customs of our ancestors. 18The Romans tried me and wanted to release me, because they found no cause for the death sentence. 19But when the Jewish leaders protested the decision, I felt it necessary to appeal to Caesar, even though I had no desire to press charges against my own people. (...) 30For the next two years, Paul lived in Rome at his own expense. He welcomed all who visited him, 31boldly proclaiming the Kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ. And no one tried to stop him.
Which proof do you think relies on actual infinity being logically contradictory?
All versions of the cosmological argument and all of the five ways of St. Thomas.
Cosmological argument does not require the universe to had had a beginning
Irrelevant.
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2mo 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.
This is disingenuous. Yes, the church generally didn't execute heretics however heresy was also a secular crime everywhere. This is like saying that judges never imprison anyone because they don't personally run prisons.
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.
The standards of "truthness" in a manuscript society, pre-enlightenment society were just very different from our own, it was underpinned by authority. When books were very expensive you had to believe that if something was copied by everyone it was good and that the objection that you found had been addressed by someone somewhere, you had to be the one that was equivocated but you had no way to verify it.
Plenty of falsehoods that could be trivially proven false proliferated. The most important textbook of the middle ages, the etymologies of st. isidor, told you that diamonds were made soft by goat blood and garlic demagnetized magnets, mathematicians studied and believed the aristotelian cosmology despite it being incompatible with the ptolemaic model which they also knew and employed day to day or, for that matter, didn't match geographical knowledge (see for example Alighieri's Questio de Aqua et Terra) or even phisicians who believed in the existence of a rete mirabilis in humans and a spermatic duct connecting the brain to the penis (as Galen said, sperm is stored in the brain) despite presiding over cadaver dissections that had no such things.
I don't think you could convince many people today with medieval arguments because they went like this:
- It is true because every civilized society believes it or is muslim, a chistian heresy (i.e. argument from universal assent). This wasn't true back then, they just didn't know about china, and it isn't true today.
- It is true because the bible, the best historical record through eyewitness account that we have, says it is. This was true back then but now we know the bible is trash when it comes to historical accuracy.
- It is true because [various arguments from classical theology]. Most of these don't hold because we proved actual infinity isn't logically contradictory.
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2mo ago
The "snowflake" insult conservatives used around 2012 for woke people complaining about representation of blacks or gays in movies
That's not what "snowlake" was making fun of, it was making fun of people who easily claimed offenses (at "microaggressions", "cultural appropriation" the word "retard" etc) and asked for "trigger warning".
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2mo ago
I actually meant "Antman and the Wasp: Quantumania" (Antman and the Wasp would be the second of the trilogy and came out in 2018). It's one of those movies where the putative male lead in an action movie is in actuality sidelined by the strong female costar, think Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (which also came out in 2023 and also flopped and it's probably a better entry from this list than Antman).
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2mo ago
I'm pretty sure I brought up that woke was naturally antisemitic before october 7th either here or on the subreddit and was told "nah it'll never happen". The thing is, there have been a lot of firmly antisemtic people on the extreme right for a long time, which made woke people take the opposite side reflexively, that made it seem like the safer bet.
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2mo ago
I stick with my previous hypothesis that the woke movement its own period of dealing with failed prophecies and that's why it's currently declining. The impulse behind woke was that everyone wanted it except for a few backward people on the internet. But look at what happened in 2022 ~ 2023:
- March 2022: The interim report of the Cass Review is published lending scientific credibility to argument against "trans kids"
- August 2022: the woke Saints Row reboot bombs
- 2022 in general: a lot of democratic cities have to quietly walk back the "defund the police" messaging they had pushed
- November 2022: Twitter is sold to Musk, an outcome the wokes had cheered on for months, they suddenly realize it is actually a bad outcome for them and immeditely predict Twitter will collapse within weeks, which didn't happen
- February 2023: Forspoken is realesed and bombs, nobody defends it, Antman and the Wasp bombs, the "pandemic" cope can not be used
- April 2023: Bud Light makes a co-promotional campaign with Dylan Mulvaney which kickstarts a boycott which depresses its stock price for months
- November 2023: The Marvels bombs, nobody defends it.
- November 2023: SF cleans up the streets for Xi Jin Ping simultaneously showing both how poorly the city had been kept and how easily this could be reversed
aaa
2mo ago
I think this is all bullshit at this point. On average to make a credit card purchase I have to enter the credit card number, the CCV, open the bank app on the smartphone and enter the PIN. Depending how you count it's either 3 factor authentication or 4 factor authentication.
Once you have a system like this in place you can just say "no" to chargebacks, there is no constitutional rights to chargebacks on pornography. I don't know how things are in other countries but I strongly suspect that the "we have a lot of chargebacks" has been a fake excuse for around 20 years.
I don't have anything to add about Fuentes irrelevance besides what everyone else has already said, I wanted however to comment on this:
Expect the Republican consensus on Israel to crack at least a little bit over the coming decades, again thanks to the Groypers.
I think the opposite is more likely to happen. Yes, it's true that the boomer evangelical constituency will die off in the next decade and they were rabidly pro-israel. However the rest of the republican base is more or less indifferent to this question, the pockets of antisemitism are truly small. OTOH in the Democratic party Hassan (who is actually influent, unlike Fuentes) can go full anti-zionist and face no repercussions, anti-zionism and even anti-semitism make a lot of sense within the internal logic of progressivism (jews are a market dominating, overrepresented, minority, black people hate them because they screw over rappers and israel is the last colonialist project) and disliking palestinans makes a lot of sense on the right.
If europe didn't exists you'd maybe have a chance to keep muslims as a fargroup and push the "muslims are actually based" idea through, but I the european right is going to make available too many examples of muslims being non-based for that to be possible.
I think what's more likely to happen is that one of the democratic candidates will eventually break anti-zionist and then the republican party will either consolidate into pro-israel as a reflex or at best remain indifferent.
For your prediction to come true the relationship between israel and palestine needs to normalize and stay normal for a long time.
aaa
2mo ago
In any with strong religious norms, a childless woman was seen as beneath a woman who had many kids. Religious communities do a good job at redirecting social status
In any place with strong religious norms children were also very cheap, nearly free, or possibly even negative cost. The two things correlate that one wonders if it isn't religion that produces high fertility but the reverse: high fertility produces a religion that promotes high fertility. If you look really hard at christianity, for example, there's a lot of antinatalist messaging in there that almost nobody uses: yes be fruitful, yes onan but also "For there are some eunuchs who were so born from their mother’s womb, and there are some eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it".
Are religious communities redirecting social status or getting bent around by what people consider social status anyway? Look at how many churches display pride flags despited that being a far more clearly condemned practice than just not having children.
In America you have the enormous problem of capitalism / consumerism which will need to be fixed for any national solution to occur, because you have some of the smartest people continually telling women that their social value is determined by buying and experiences things
Yes, but surely we can agree that buying and experiencing things, and that having lots of free time, is something that is pleasurable in itself, that it isn't all just a big psyop.
with universities (effectively all of them behaving as businesses) telling them they need to be educated
But do they go to university because they are told to do so or do they go because it's not their money (either it's coming from mom and dad or from a loan) and they get to party for 5 years? Are they doing it for the status or are they doing it because they expect to be fun and they are correct?
If you’re at a party and there’s a poor artist, a prestigious academic, and then a plumbing company owner who makes $400k yearly
Being a rich owner of a plumbing company is not so much a job as it is a wish. It doesn't matter if you think something is beneath you if it's also unavailable to you. What's available to you is being an employee of a plumbing company and that makes little money and is phisically draining on top, hence nobody wants to do it.
Their leaders are engaged in a holy war but the average member is just a normal person doing what their culture says to do, and in this culture the number of children is prized over everything. Both men and women are judged harshly or celebrated strongly based on their fertility. It’s seen as both a commandment and a blessing. The average member isn’t having kids for a nefarious reason, they are just taught through custom that it’s prized.
I think the Haredi are in a position similar to the lifelong Seaorgers: the community is so closed and dependent upon itself that leaving is not just discouraged socially but it's also economically very difficult. Nevertheless the percentage of people that leave that lifestyle is growing.
Unlikely now that Gypsies are forced into schools in Europe.
You're overestimating the mighty power of europe here.
And look at historical figures: Ben Franklin’s father made candles, was his 17 children necessary for the candle business in an era with slaves and indentured servants? Of course not. Albrecht Dürer‘s parents were goldsmiths, did they need to have 18 children?
Some people are just weirdos.
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2mo ago
judge the social value of girls and women exclusively by their aptitude and progress in motherhood
As if you can snap your fingers and just do it. As if you can make women incapable of looking around them and seeing every large family poor and miserable. How many instances throughout world history can you find where social status was not tied to material wealth?
The reason the Haredi female TFR is so high regardless of country or income is because they do this
Is that the cause? Or is it that they are a welfare class engaged in a holy war?
The reason the Gypsy TFR is 1.5 to 2x the national average of whichever country they live in, despite being urban-dwelling, is that they do this
Is that the cause? Or is it that gypsy children are an economic resource to gypsies?
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3mo ago
I have this half formed theory that woke is currently undergoing its own Failed Prophecy event. They expected diverse casts to improve movies and games and they are accumulating blunder after blunder, MCU is in shambles, dragonage and concord cancelled, etc... That big landmark study that said diversity is good for business has been found to have used manipulated data. Biden really turned out to be senile, they lost the US presidential election badly (they lost the popular vote!) and studies are coming out of denmark proving immigration to be net negative. Empirical reality caught up to their escatology.
It's normal than in this context people are going to peel off.
What this is going to mean long term remains to be seen, plenty of religions survive failed prophecies.
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4mo ago
I see that you've been answering like this, but to me this means absolutely nothing. How is moving beyond a "mechanicistic paradigm" going to help us? What are you suggesting in concrete terms?
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4mo ago
Are you suggesting that this proves souls exist and they are also subject to evolutionary processes?
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4mo ago
The only religion that I am aware of that has a thriving secularized branch is judaism. I think it works for judaism for two reasons: 1) it was always more rule-following focused than other religions, 2) they have the (very recent) memory of the holocaust to help them form a sense of community.
Belief in christianity is very important, how are you going to reconcile all the passages that say something along the lines of "salvation only happens through faith" with "actually it's all a bunch of baloney"? More broadly you will encounter two problems.
The first one is theological. You have started cutting things off the bible and off tradition, where do you stop? Christianity had an answer to this: you stop when the church tells you to stop, only they have the power, through apostolical tradition, to know what to cut.
The other problem is more practical, how do you get people interested in this? This thing has already been invented, it's called the Church of Humanity, it was invented in 1859. Nobody cares. People like to think of the societal benefits of religion but to be adopted and spread, just like genes, it needs to be useful to the individual here and now. The "magical" aspects of religion give real, immediate returns on investment in psychological terms. Saying "trans women are women" gives real, immediate monetary returns in the right career. What's your cultural christianity going to provide? What's your church going to do for me tomorrow?
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4mo ago
I think my favourite anecdote of the liberal Christian "explain it away" is the "Jesus was ice skating not walking on the water",
In all of the years I've spent following the mythicist discourse I have never encountered this explanation. Usually what is offered as an explanation is that it was a magic trick: walking on a submerged plank of wood (maybe a deck or something). The criticism on Peter falling is not really biting, since a single gospel has it and you wouldn't expect a detail such as that to be omitted or forgotten, if it had happened. A much better one is that they are clearly supposed to be too far from the coast for it to be a trick of that sort.
Explaining away the virgin birth is fun, too.
I've never heard this one either. To be onest they both sound like strawmen to me. Usually the explanation for the virgin birth is that it wasn't even there in Mark, the explanation for the "specialness" of Jesus was initially his Davidian genealogy and the virgin birth was developed later, when the story moved into the hellenistic world, where people didn't care about David and stories of vigin births abunded.
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5mo ago
It's a little counter-intuitive how cars are far more likely to kill us, but we get more angry at cyclists.
Why is it counterintuitive? A car weights 175x the weight of a bicycle, of course it's more deadly.
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5mo ago
You can go on his channel and judge yourself, this is his last pre-hiatus video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mVGRAD10cYs.
The "I've been a taliban prisoner for 17 months" beard goes a long way but I think he'd still look aged without it.
aaa
5mo ago
The first step towards walking in h spiritual path is reducing stimulus substantially. Luke Smith release a good video on this perspective yesterday.
Tangent, but if I ever wanted to make a meme about "religion bad' I would pick Luke Smith, he's gone orthodox and has aged 15 years in the space of 2. It's the kind of rapid aging that I've only ever seen in vegans before. That copypasta about falling for every meme needs to be updated.
Mark is far removed from the events that he's narrating, either in time or in space or both. The belief that he was jewish is a minority position. Unfortunately like many things plagued by apologetics you can't even tell when some people are just mistaken or deliberately lying.
The water boils because of a transfer of energy not because of causal power.
The face is irrelevant? It's just light in some arbitrary pattern being reflected, are you saying that you can imagine infinite mirrors but not infinite light? That you can only imagine light in a pattern if there is something giving it that pattern (but the same isn't true of the atoms of mirrors)?
An infinite series of mirrors can exist but not a single atom? I'm not following. I don't find this persuasive at all, I think there's nothing impossible in imagining an universe comprised of a single atom.
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