OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
2d ago
The Mu'tazilites denied predestination, I believe, but they ceased to exist a long time ago.
To make a very broad generalisation again, I think the three Abrahamic faiths all have a different 'main character', in a sense. For Jews the main character is a specific people - the story is about the Jewish people and their collective relationship with God. For Christians the main character is often an individual person - it is about your relationship with God. For Muslims the main character is all people - it's about humanity's relationship with God. Anecdotally when I have spoken to Muslims, by far the main criticism they make of Judaism is that it is particularist, focused on a single people and distinguishing between peoples, and by far the main criticism they make of Christianity is that it compromises the absolute oneness of God.
Anyway, in that broader context, it is perhaps understandable that free will is not as important in Islam, and Muslims are less inclined to go to lengths to rescue the principle. Islam is, in a sense, the most theocentric of the Abrahamic religions. Islam is about God, and it is comparatively less interested in anthropology. (Since Christianity's most basic claim is that God became man, Christianity must wrestle directly with the meaning of both 'God' and 'man'.) The human fades into the background before the absolute majesty of God.
If I think about the most beloved verses of the Qur'an, they're all about God. 1:1 is regularly cited; the Throne Verse is immensely popular as well. It is about the majesty of God. By contrast the most beloved verse of the Christian Bible is, what, John 3:16? It is about Jesus - about fathers and sons and salvation. It's also about what God has done rather than about who God is. I think there is a significant difference of emphasis between the traditions, even though Christians would surely agree that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, and Muslims would surely agree that God deeply loves the world and has compassion towards humanity.
Funny; that's actually how I understand Christianity itself to be, including the concept that "God does not torment people by requiring of them more than they can do".
There are definitely passages in the Bible that point in that direction. Jesus famously says "my yoke is easy and my burden is light", and 1 Cor 10:13 reads, "God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it."
Even so I think there is a tension here in Christianity. God does not test you beyond your strength, but at the same time, it is impossible for you to achieve true righteousness under your own power. Everyone is a sinner.
The latter is kind of Christianity 3:16 101. I agree that lots of Christians never really make it past that part, which is why doing things like writing the law on one's heart is a meaningless statement, for the answer it gives would always be wrong. Why even tell us to put on the armor of God when no man could even begin to don it? Why imply that one might even expect to understand what the Lord's will is? How could we even have been created to do good works, and how could they have been prepared in advance for us to do them?
Certainly it would be a gross misunderstanding of Christianity to say that, because true righteousness is impossible to achieve unaided, we therefore need not strive for it. That would obviously be a perverse position, and as all the passages you've just alluded to indicate, Christians are exhorted to constantly strive for righteousness.
In your opinion, what is Islam's relationship with that law?
Islam is fairly straightforward, I think. In most matters like this, I find Islam tends to be more straightforward and common-sense than Christianity.
Depending on your perspective, this is either because Islam has the simple clarity of God's true and final revelation, whereas Christianity is such an incoherent, hacked-together set of false assumptions that it requires endless paradoxes and epicycles just to fit together; or it's because Islam is a simplistic creed inadequate to either life or God, whereas the paradoxes of Christianity speak to its deeper truth.
Anyway, Islam is simple. The divine Law is true, obligatory, and binding on all people. It is Sharia. The Law as it is understood in Judaism is a kind of distorted funhouse mirror of Sharia. Ancient believers like Abraham were Muslims and followed Sharia correctly, but at some point their descendants got confused, mixed up records, and so their Law, through a decent approximation of the true Law, nonetheless requires correction. Fortunately God has provided that correction. The next step is obvious - all Jews (and for that matter all people full stop) should become Muslims.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Beyond that, there is a clearer sense of the whole picture that can be gleamed. The example that comes to mind is in Principles of the Creed (book 2), where the theological differences between Islam and, say, Christianity become apparent very quickly.
One of the interesting tensions in Islam, it seems to me, especially as compared to Christianity, is that Islam tends to emphasise firstly that everything is absolutely foreknown and determined by God, and secondly that also human free choice is absolutely vital. Compared to Christianity, Islam has a much stronger teaching on predestination, but also claims to uphold free will to a greater degree. On the face of it this seems like a contradiction.
The latter is probably easier to grapple with. Christianity says that human freedom or human will is in some way blunted or damaged. The Fall happened and so we are either unable to independently choose good, or our ability to choose good is in some way constrained. As such the believer is wholly dependent on the grace of God. While Islam agrees that the believer is always wholly dependent on God (as all things are, at all times, for only God is self-sufficient), within that overall framework, it is much more confident about the ability of people to freely choose the good. Islam assumes from first principles that God would not set before us any task that we are not capable of accomplishing. God asks nothing of us that we cannot do. To do otherwise would be unjust of him.
Christianity tends to say that God asks of us more than we can do. Jesus commands his followers "be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect" (Mt 5:48). Throughout the gospels Jesus is constantly asking people to do the unreasonable or the extreme, like sell all their possessions, or die with him. He says that if the disciples truly had faith they would be able to ask a mountain to move, and it would. It seems as though, for Jesus, even the very best that a human can do is not enough. The usual interpretation of this is that Jesus wants to challenge people beyond their own capacities so that they realise they radical dependence on God - that they come to understand their own finitude, and therefore are able to wholeheartedly cast themselves upon God's mercy.
Through Islamic eyes, this is unjust. God does not torment people by requiring of them more than they can do. Christianity comes to this conclusion in past as a response to the failure of the Law - Paul spends a long time agonising over the fact (as he sees it) that the Law failed to produce righteousness. Islam, however, is much more positive about the Law, and in fact tends to see Christianity as a retrogression, a kind of civilisational backwards step in abandoning the rigour of divine Law. (Judaism is in principle correct about the Law and its value, but it goes wrong firstly by applying it to only a select people, rather than everyone, and secondly by getting muddled up about some details.) You can see that Islam is thus, in a sense, much more optimistic about human will and the possibility of human righteousness than Christianity.
However, this optimism about free will occurs in front of the backdrop of God's absolute sovereignty. Reconciling God's authorship of all creation with human free will is going to be reminiscent of Calvinist debates - but that might be a discussion for a bit later.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
It is also worth bearing in mind that most hadith collectors were both obsessive and pedantic and therefore included every hadith they had heard that had a reasonable chance of being authentic, including those that were just minor variations of others. This means that if you read any given large hadith collection, it is likely that modern scholars would dispute some of them, or argue over their plausibility and likely context. Al-Bukhari or Imam Muslim did try to filter out unreliable hadith, but their judgements were not infallible. Authentic hadith are authoritative for Muslims, in theory, but the word 'authentic' leaves a lot of room to dispute.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I find the Qur'an is often more attractive when sung or recited in the manner of a poem. Certainly as far as religious texts go, it reads almost uniquely badly. However, famously there is a whole small genre of recitation of the Qur'an among devout Muslims, and even as a non-speaker of Arabic, I recognise the beauty of this. I don't know how much it's unique to the specific text of the Qur'an - Christian hymns in Arabic sound beautiful to me as well - but I can at least entertain the possibility that Arabic speakers are right when they tell me that the language of the Qur'an is beautiful, in its original language, and when proclaimed properly.
I am more experienced with the Bible, of course, and I'd say it varies. There are passages that, in Hebrew or Greek, stand out to me as particularly beautiful, or even individual phrases that, for me, have the character of a refreshing wind across my soul. Often they do not have this quality in translation in English - though that may simply be because of over-exposure to the translations. But there are also undoubtedly better or worse translations into other languages as well. I'll never forget once knowing someone who grew up with the equivalent of those excitable, contemporary Bible translations aimed at teenagers, who bounced off the Bible and found it tawdry, and then seeing their reaction upon first reading a more mature translation. The way the light came into their eyes as suddenly the words of Jesus lost that cheap feeling, and instead struck home, was a privilege to witness.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Well, the things that worked best for me in the series were generally either individual character work, or the entertainingly convoluted web of treachery. The most popular characters in Ice and Fire are the ones that lean into both, right? Tyrion stands out. But even past that, if I think about characters I liked or chapters I looked forward to, there's Davos, Jaime, Brienne, or even to an extent Sansa. Cersei getting chapters for the first time was also appealing; really, all of the core Lannister trio are great. I liked characters with strong convictions and complicated personal loyalties who get mixed up in or who have front row seats to leaders making difficult decisions under uncertain circumstances. Jon and Sam had some of this as well, though as I said, in general I think the Night's Watch sections, though good, deserve their own separate novel and don't complement the rest of Ice and Fire.
Meanwhile I tended to get bogged down in or just want to skip past the Bran or Daenerys chapters, or even a lot of the Arya chapters, because they are not connected to most of the political action. All the vague mysticism and prophecy is not what GRRM does well, and Essos in general suffers from firstly being a land of absurd racial caricatures, and secondly being completely disconnected from and irrelevant to the action of the story. I just do not care about the Targaryens.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I remember liking A Feast for Crows, and not being able to finish A Dance with Dragons. I think that may be just a product of my own biases, though. For my money the 'good part' of A Song of Ice and Fire is the Westerosi feudal backstabbing, whereas all the side plots are generally bad. I do not care about Essos, Daenerys, Targaryens, or dragons. All of that is boring. The Night's Watch and the Others are... good, actually, but should be a different series. There is no need for them here. I think the biggest criticism I have of A Feast for Crows is that I think it's the one that introduces most of the Greyjoy characters, and I'm sorry, we do not need this massive excursus about Cthulhu-worshipping Vikings. Are they a cool idea, in the abstract? Yes. They're certainly better than anything featuring Essos or the Targaryens. But - focus, GRRM! Focus!
I think aSoIaF is, for me, a good example of one of those works where the author does not understand the appeal of his own writing.
Then again, judging from those TV shows they keep making, apparently there is somebody out there who likes the incest dragons...
OliveTapenade
4d ago
What particular lessons do you take from al-Ghazali? Are there any highlights worth sharing?
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I have been receiving mixed reports about coding specifically - is that the context you're using it in?
I can't comment on that specifically, but for everything else, yep, I agree that bots are not useful.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
In hindsight I think the analogy fails because it combines two different things. I said that the construction worker shouldn't be praised for his strength - that part is true. The strength is being outsourced to the machine. However, it is also pretty obvious that the construction worker is doing work, albeit of a different kind, and deserves credit for that.
The analogy to a tech worker prompting Claude, I suppose, is that the worker should not be praised for his coding skills. That part was outsourced to Claude, in the same way that the construction worker outsourced his muscles to the earthmover. But the worker is nonetheless doing some kind of work.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
If you're right but the whole world considers you wrong, and worthy of mockery for it, you have been shamed, even if you do not personally feel ashamed, I would say.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Something might not be shameful, yet lead to people treating it as shameful anyway.
Isn't 'being treated as shameful' the same thing as 'shameful'? Shame is a social judgement.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
No. It may have been a bad analogy. What I mean is that:
A human should not take credit for work a machine did.
Machines do not deserve credit for anything.
So, for instance, if you got a machine to move a large boulder, you should not expect to be praised for your strength. All the strength belonged to the machine. But nobody would congratulate the machine for its strength.
It is meant to be analogy to illustrate 1) you do not deserve credit for prompting Claude to write something, 2) Claude does not deserve credit for anything.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Perhaps it was a bad example. Using or piloting an earthmover does require skill, and the job that you use an earthmover in is certainly one that deserves compensation.
I hope you understand the point I'm getting at, at least. The human is doing some work in that situation, but that work is not physically digging out and lifting tons of earth.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
To me it feels demeaning because it implies that if I use ai, that the content produced using it does not belong to me. As smart as AI’s get, if I use them, the outputs and productivity gain that comes from it should not be attributed to Claude. It should be attributed to the person that retrieved that output from Claude or ChatGPT etc.
Why do you feel this way?
The opposite of this seems obviously true to me. If you use an LLM, the content it produces is not yours. You cannot and should not take credit for anything that an LLM did. If you prompted Claude to do something, Claude did it, not you, and Claude deserves the credit.
(To the extent that machines can earn or accumulate moral credit, which they cannot. Claude deserves the credit in the same way that an earthmover deserves credit for moving a pile of rock.)
But I WANT to use ai for everything - and watermarking all output makes that harder.
Why does it make it harder?
The only effect is that it means that other people will know that you used a bot. Why should that trouble you? You did use a bot. You don't seem to think there's anything wrong with using a bot, so why feel ashamed?
It sucks that people will soon be able to definitively say you were using ai output, honestly.
Do you understand that this sounds like, "It sucks that I can't deceive people by passing off a bot's work as my own"? Is it not obvious why people might not be sympathetic to that complaint?
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Though for what it's worth, Pom, Yank, Seppo, etc., are usually intended as affectionate. I would not use them if I really wanted to insult an American or Brit.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Rhyming slang.
Immigrant -> Pomegranate -> Pom
By way of comparison, Yank -> Septic Tank -> Sep or Seppo
OliveTapenade
7d ago
New Zealanders think of themselves as more British than we are, though I think it's much of a muchness. The key difference is that they cannot pronounce vowels properly, whereas we can.
The economy crack does make me laugh a bit - Australia has its problems, but I'm pretty sure we're better at running an economy than the Seppos. I still remember us just dodging the 2008 global financial crisis entirely.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Certainly from a distance the impression I have is that the difference between a Washingtonian and a British Columbian, or a Minnesotan and a Manitoban, or a Mainer and a New Brunswicker, is pretty tiny. You could fly from Seattle to Vancouver and they would feel pretty similar. I'm not saying there are no differences, and I think Canadians are closer to Australians than Americans are (if nothing else, as far as I can tell Canadians don't have the American forthrightness or obnoxiousness?), but they are marginal.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
No. I don't think those jokes would read.
We just about know that maple syrup comes from Canada, but in general, I think it'd be fair to say that Australians can't tell the difference between Americans and Canadians. That probably sounds ridiculous to you, but then, it sounds ridiculous to me that Americans can't tell the difference between Australians and New Zealanders, even though our accents are totally different.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Are you asking how other countries think about Canada?
Well, from Australia, the answer is that we don't, very much. I feel like Canada is the forgotten member of the Anglosphere. We have strong opinions on ourselves, the Kiwis, and of course, the Yanks and the Poms, but not the Canadians. (The fact that the Canadians do not have a silly slang name seems instructive.) If we do think about Canada, it's mostly the idea of Canada as a smaller, somewhat more well-behaved America.
For me personally, I think of Canada as a country halfway between the US and the UK, and most of the news I've heard about it recently has been discouraging - it seems like it's been transforming pretty radically over the last few decades? But in general I think Canada is much 'quieter', so to speak, than either the US or UK. Perhaps that's the inevitable result of being midway between two great powers. Australia is also a colony, but in the context of our immediate neighbourhood, we're pretty influential. Among Oceania or southeast Asia, Australia can be assertive. But Canada is perpetually overshadowed.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
How are those ties of kinship and "cultural commonality" supposed to help when Blues decide that my religion needs to be illegal, or that I shouldn't be allowed to have police protection, or that a mob should burn my church down, or that I should be charged with serious felonies for attempting to defend myself or even for owning the means with which to effect such a defense?
Do you have citations or examples for any of that?
Who, exactly, are these Blues who want to ban Christianity, or revoke police protections for... conservatives? Christians? white people? Something else?
OliveTapenade
15d ago
That's certainly the pattern I've noticed in the replies to me here. People who work with data think that LLMs are great and the wave of the future. They automate so much, they increase productivity, and so on. Laptop people, so to speak, think the tech is valuable. People who work with other people or with the world, though, still don't see the use. LLMs do nothing to help in roles that are primarily about interacting with other human beings, or which are primarily about interacting with physical stuff.
I wonder if there's a level of myopia here, where the data people assume that their kind of work is the whole world. Then again, to be fair, you could make the case that I, with my people-centred job, think that people work is the whole world, so we are both blind to a whole section of society and economy. On the inside view, I'd defend myself by saying that statistically, people and physical stuff do in fact make up almost all the economy, but on the outside view, should I trust myself?
OliveTapenade
15d ago
Given the way cars are going, I'm inclined to say that having software is a downgrade for my car.
Yes, translations of 33:35 don't convey the rhythm that well. Consider:
None of it flows that well, whereas Arabic fortunately expresses all this with suffixes - -in for men and -at for women, so transliterated from Arabic you get:
And this is just one example. There is a lot, both in terms of aural quality and in terms of meaning, that works well in Arabic, or in other Semitic languages, but does not come across well in English. One that comes up a lot is comparatives and superlatives. Arabic expresses degree by modifying the vowels that connect the root elements, rather than by adding a new word. English translations have to come up with awkward phrases like, to use the example of 1:1, "the most compassionate, the most merciful", or "the all compassionate, the everlastingly merciful", or "the supremely beneficent, the greatest in mercy", and it loses the elegance of the original.
This is not to say that I think that Arabic is uniquely well-suited to expressing God's word or anything - I am not a Muslim and I do not subscribe to the doctrine of i'jaz. This is a problem with all translation, and there are things that can be expressed very beautifully in English but which are very difficult to translate into Arabic. Nonetheless, for me as a non-Arabic-speaking observer, it is still useful to learn just enough to be able to see what it is that people have in mind when they talk about how the Qur'an is so much more attractive in the original language.
UBS Greek New Testament. Git gud. :P
Nah, to be serious, I go back and forth a bit. The translation I use the most as a default is the NRSV, which generally strikes a good balance between readability and formality or dignity, but there are certainly places where I think the NRSV mistranslates, or just has a bad style. In places I think the Jerusalem Bible or NJB have quite nice turns of phrase as well.
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