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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   31016 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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How do you make God more interesting than or more impressive than whatever's happening in their smartphone?

Well, he could start doing stuff again. Blatant smiting, parting of seas, that sort of thing.

Even the parting of the Red Sea would get secularized these days.

19 Then the angel of God who went before the host of Israel moved and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud moved from before them and stood behind them, 20 coming between the host of Egypt and the host of Israel. And there was the cloud and the darkness; and the night passed[a] without one coming near the other all night.

21 Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. 22 And the people of Israel went into the midst of the sea on dry ground, the waters being a wall to them on their right hand and on their left. 23 The Egyptians pursued, and went in after them into the midst of the sea, all Pharaoh’s horses, his chariots, and his horsemen. 24 And in the morning watch the Lord in the pillar of fire and of cloud looked down upon the host of the Egyptians, and discomfited the host of the Egyptians, 25 clogging[b] their chariot wheels so that they drove heavily; and the Egyptians said, “Let us flee from before Israel; for the Lord fights for them against the Egyptians.”

That’s easily attributable to luck and unusual weather conditions. Even if the whole modern world saw it being broadcast live on TikTok, I’m not sure it would change the priors of anybody, one way or the other, really.

Things like Elijah calling down fire from Heaven, and God speaking to Job from the storm, those might be more plausible. But then…AI and movie magic. I’m not sure those would have any effect on anyone who wasn’t directly present, and perhaps not many of those, either.

It is interesting to think about what sort of evidence you personally would need to bump your personal probability of "God" existing to like 99%.

There's a bit of a problem in that '1 off' events can be 'explained' as an extremely rare confluence of factors that produced an unlikely (but not impossible!) occurrence. And events that seem impossible but are repeated with some kind of regularity can be studied and eventually 'explained.'

And a lot of things CAN be written off as hallucinations or misperceptions of an otherwise normal event.

For me, I'd count "Reviving someone who was proclaimed dead, on demand" as pretty high up the scale of things that can't be explained (yet) with current science, and thus proof of 'divine' intervention.

I just now realized how both the pager operation that decapitated Hezbollah leadership and the decimation of Iranian military ranks with precision strikes sort of pattern match to the idea of an angry God smiting the enemies of his chosen people.

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