domain:thezvi.wordpress.com
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
25m ago
This strikes me as somewhere between a reach and imaginary. Scotch codes more old than red or blue, expensive bourbon and rye codes to me more hipster trendy than red tribe. Cheap liquor is just cheap liquor.
Most urban blue tribe hipster trends of 2010 have been picked up by red tribers recently anyway.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
30m ago
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An owner wants to renovate a four-story building by adding an elevator and a library. He hires a drafter to draw up construction plans for the renovation. When the drafter is done, the owner likes the plans and wants to start construction, but the drafter informs him that permits cannot be obtained without the signature and seal of a "licensed design professional"—i. e., either an architect or an engineer.
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The owner contacts a licensed architect. But he thinks that the architect's fees are too high, so he hires a licensed engineer instead. The architect complains to the state architecture board that the engineer is practicing architecture without a license.
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At the proceeding before the architecture board, everybody involved concedes that the renovation involves components of both architecture and engineering. But the architect's expert witness testifies that it's 80 percent architecture and 20 percent engineering, while the engineer's expert witness testifies that it's 80 percent engineering and 20 percent architecture! The board sides with the architect, and imposes fines on the engineer (1 k$) and the drafter (300 $).
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The appeals panel reverses the board's decision. If the architecture board were justified in imposing fines in this case, then the engineering board would have been justified in imposing fines on the architect if the owner had hired the architect rather than the engineer, and that would be a nonsensical catch-22. It makes much more sense to say that, if a project has substantial overlap between architecture and engineering, then either an architect or an engineer can sign and seal its plans without fear of being fined.
Note that this case is from Pennsylvania. In contrast, New Jersey eliminated this problem by specifically allocating different types of buildings exclusively to architects, exclusively to engineers, or permissively to both groups of licensed professionals. The building at issue in this case was in IBC occupancies B (business—law offices on floors 1–3) and R (residential—an apartment on floor 4), of which New Jersey assigns both exclusively to architects.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1hr ago
This post is fine, but given its relation with CW issues, should be posted in the CW thread.
Tree
1hr ago
In the series: Chads living their best lives (translated and truncated from the french wiki, clarifications in parentheses):
Pierre de Craon (circa 1345-1409), nicknamed the Great, lord of La Ferté-Bernard, of Sablé and Précigné , Viscount of Châteaudun, etc, etc.
Craon became attached to the Duke of Anjou, who was marching to conquer the Kingdom of Naples in 1384. This prince (brother of the previous french King) had only been able to keep the multitude of warriors who formed his retinue, and followed his fortune, by exhausting his immense treasury, which he had gotten by despoiling the corpse of France (in the middle of the hundred years war).
The Duke sent Craon back to the duchess, where he received considerable sums from her, and instead of taking the money to his lord, spent them foolishly in Venice, on gambling and debauchery, while the French army was besieged by famine and disease. Craon's infidelity completed the Duke of Anjou's misfortunes, and he died of grief.
The expedition was one long disaster, and when leaders and soldiers returned from Italy, staff in hand and begging for alms, the Lord of Craon dared to reappear at court in magnificent attire. The Duke of Berry (another uncle of the king), seeing him enter the council, cried out, transported with fury: "Ah! false traitor, wicked and disloyal, you are the cause of my brother's death. Take him, and let justice be done." » But no one stepped forward to carry out this order, and Craon hastened to disappear.
His influence and wealth saved him. He had won the favor of Louis, Duke of Orléans, younger brother of Charles VI (King of France) and nephew of Louis I of Anjou and John I of Berry. With this support, he returned to court and filled it with intrigue. He maintained secret relations with John IV, Duke of Brittany, his relative, and sought to destroy the Constable of Clisson, having no other cause for hatred against him than his reputation and authority.
Suddenly, Craon was expelled from court (1391), without anyone even deigning to reveal the cause of his disgrace. It was Louis, the king's brother, who had requested the exile of this dangerous confidant, to punish him for having revealed to Valentine of Milan, his wife, a romantic affair he was having with another lady.
Craon retired to Brittany. The Duke of brittany, who hated the Constable, represented him as the sole cause of Craon's misfortune. Craon believed him and swore revenge. While the court was occupied only with festivities and pleasures, he secretly brought into Paris weapons and a troop of adventurers devoted to him. He himself mysteriously entered this city, and on June 14, 1392, when the constable was returning at one o'clock after midnight from the Hôtel Saint-Pol, where the king held his court, the Sire de Craon and his mounted troop awaited him in the rue de la Culture-Sainte-Catherine, mingled among his people, and extinguished the torches they were carrying.
Clisson at first believed that it was a joke of the Duke of Orleans; but Craon did not leave him long in this error, and cried out to him in a terrible voice: "to Death, to Death, Clisson, you must die." - Who are you, said the constable? - « I am Pierre de Craon, your enemy. You have irritated me so many times that you must make amends."
Clisson had only eight of his men with him, who were unarmed and who dispersed. He wore a coat of mail under his uniform and was defending himself like a hero when a mighty sword thrust, hurling him from his horse, caused him to fall against a baker's door, which was not quite closed and which his fall finally opened. Craon, seeing him unconscious and bathed in blood, believed him dead, and, without dismounting, thought only of escaping.
The provost of Paris was immediately summoned by the king and ordered to pursue him and his accomplices. Craon arrived in Chartres at eight o'clock in the morning. Twenty horses were waiting for him, and he reached his castle in Sablé. However, one of his squires and one of his pages were arrested, beheaded in the market hall and hanged on the gallows. The concierge of the Hôtel de Craon had his head cut off for not having denounced the arrival of his master in Paris, and a canon of Chartres, with whom Craon had lodged, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
All of Craon's property was confiscated. His private mansion, located on rue du Bourg-Tibourg, was razed and the site given to the parish of Saint-Jean-en-Grève, to be converted into a cemetery. The street that bordered his paris residence, and which bore the name of Craon, was renamed. His castle of Porchefontaine was also razed.
Craon, not believing himself safe in his fortress of Sablé, withdrew to the Duke of Brittany, who said to him: "You are a puny creature when you were unable to kill a man whom you were above. You committed two faults, the first of having attacked him; the second, of having missed." "That is truly diabolical," replied Craon. "I believe that all the devils of hell, to whom he belongs, guarded him and delivered him from the hands of me and my men, for more than sixty sword and knife blows were hurled and inflicted upon him; and when he fell from his horse, in all truth, I thought he was dead."
Charles VI, encouraged by the Constable and his supporters, decided to take the war to Brittany, because the Duke Jean IV of Brittany refused to hand Craon over to him, and protested that he neither knew nor wanted to know anything about where he was hiding. The rendezvous of the royal army was arranged at Le Mans. It is known that, while crossing a nearby forest, Charles VI fell into madness (August 1392) (killing 4 of his subjects/servants, but who’s counting) (The King’s insanity, brought on by Craon’s antics, lead to a fight over the regency by his uncles and brothers, plunging France into a civil war and a new, more horrible, phase of the hundred years war).
The Dukes of Berry and Burgundy took the reins of government, and the latter began by declaring himself against Olivier V de Clisson, even having the king sign the order to arrest him. Meanwhile, Pierre de Craon had taken refuge in Barcelona, in the hope of leaving for Jerusalem. He was imprisoned by the Queen of Aragon but probably escaped in December 1392, returned to Brittany where Duke Jean, in February 1393, "put him at the head of one of the army corps charged with besieging the stronghold of Josselin, belonging to Clisson".
Clisson subsequently signed (1395) a suspension of arms with the Duke of Brittany, and expressed himself in these terms: "We want all acts of violence to cease, except against this wicked man Pierre de Craon." Craon led a wandering life for several years, to hide his head from the severity of the law. He was secretly protected by the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, even though they despised him.
Fearing the consequences of his crime, he placed himself under the protection of Richard II, King of England, paid homage to this monarch, who assigned him a pension, and obtained a pardon in 1396. He then returned to court; but now safe from prosecution for the assassination of the Constable, he could not be protected from those pursued by the Queen of Sicily to obtain the restitution of the sums she had entrusted to him during the Naples expedition, and the Parliament of Paris sentenced him to pay 400,000 livres.
Craon was arrested and taken to the Louvre Tower, but he remained there for a short time; and, through the intervention of the Queen of England and the Duchess of Burgundy, the matter was settled.
Craon's misfortunes had brought him to his senses. After monks were sentenced to death as sorcerers and convicted of casting a spell on Charles VI, the Lord of Craon obtained that confessors would henceforth be granted to convicted criminals, something that had not previously been done. Craon then did voluntary penance for his crimes. He had a stone cross with his coat of arms erected near the gallows in Paris. It was at the foot of this cross that criminals confessed before their execution.
Craon bequeathed a sum of money to the Franciscan friars, charging them with this work of mercy in perpetuity. Historians of France and Brittany do not provide the date of Craon's death, which was probably in 1409.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1hr ago
What's maximally red-coded? Probably Jack Daniels?
I feel like an upscale liquor shelf kind of supersedes the tribes. I would be equally unsurprised to see BTAC bottles at a car dealer's home in the suburbs as an academic's bungalow in the city.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
I'm not really sure how this is going to work out either. Depends how it heals up.
Part of me feels like I'm gonna get the stitches out and go right back to it. To a certain extent if I limit positions/moves I'm doing I can reduce the risk of getting hit in the face pretty substantially. So there's a lot I can do with minimal risk of reopening the wound. My buddy and I signed up for private classes with the head coach once a week, and I think I plan to get back to those first, because those will give me the most flexibility to train while just skipping anything risky. I could spend a month or two just working on open guard and De La Riva and leg locks, structuring drilling and sparring around those positions, and spend just as much time learning techniques and drilling full speed, and never be anywhere near a position to get whacked in the face again. Anyway the fear is likely more psychological, but I don't want to tear the same wound open again, it'll be a minute before I fully trust it.
Another part of me feels like I should probably take a prolonged break from BJJ altogether, because it could be months until I can just roll without restrictions/worries. I don't know when I'll feel super comfortable tying up with someone standing, the slide by that ended my night was a super routine move. And it's not that practical for me to totally limit the drilling aspects in the regular classes, because the coaches are just writing their curriculum without reference to me. In general, there's plenty for most people to do around BJJ without actually rolling, though you'll ultimately need to roll to get anywhere. The head coach at my gym is somewhat legendary for, when he started out, showing up to classes for months even though he couldn't train due to injury, just to watch and learn. For me though, it's as much a fitness routine as a dedication to mastering martial arts, and if I can't do the whole thing I might prefer another hobby.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I mean yes, but after the fact. If you’d lived in the era of antipopes, that doesn’t resolve the issue of whose rulings are the infallible ones or which hierarchy actually has succession.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
He also had universalist views on salvation from what I’ve read of him. His belief, AFAIK was that sincere Jews and Muslims didn’t need to become believers in Christianity to be saved. That’s pretty darn progressive/liberal thinking from a Christian perspective.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
The desired outcome for the donators is that leftists see that trying to cancel people as racists no longer destroys them when the victim instead get lots of money, stop doing so, and therefore no one gets into those situations anymore (i.e. no viral shitstorm happens when people say "nigger"). Similar to how, althouth it strains the comparison, the West is hoping that Putin realizes that invading another country is not worth it because of the support they'll be getting.
I do not think that this will work. The left can cause shitstorms a lot easier than the right can cough up money.
And even if that was not true, the non-exploitable equilibrium would be if the left stopped trying to cancel people because they realized that the minute they focused their anger on someone, they would be showered in money by their opponents. I am not holding my breath for that. It would require playing politics on level two, and most people play level one. I mean, the single most important asset Trump had for winning the primaries was the left-leaning press, which loved to hate him. "You won't believe what the horrible racist has done now" etc. They never stopped to consider that the median R primary voter would be rather unsympathetic to them, and might consider "Trump really riles up the liberals" a point in his favor.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
Seriously not literally strikes again.
Tanista
2hr ago
The question is actually whether the wedge itself helped the giant grow.
American socialists continually lament the lack of class consciousness even on the left. The identity politics-obsessed left that has power has based their entire movement on America's second founding. Maybe the next weapon is just significantly worse.
Their power comes from the fact that there is - was - a bipartisan consensus on some things. Many things that expanded their power were justified explicitly by special pleading on race and either allowed or ignored by mainstream Republicans for fear of being on the wrong side again. Would they be equally sanguine for other things?
It took till Trump to even fight on the AA issue. Things like the trans activist craze are building off laws and ideas that started with race. In a different time it would be inconceivable how fast it's spread and even been mandated. But you can't actually deny the left the tools that do this, because they can always point out where they come from.
madeofmeat
2hr ago
If I am wrong about the universe, I will not be wrong in how I have held myself. If you are wrong about the universe, you will have been wrong about the very nature of your soul.
Shouldn't people try to hold themselves in the way they think is right no matter what their nature is?
I love this post. No extraneous text, just a direct injection of educational information. Obvious in hindsight, but I'd never have thought about it if you hadn't spelled it out. I am better off for this post, in some minuscule way.
jake
4hr ago
I've leaned on its empiric benefit here because I question the receptiveness of this audience to moral condemnation.
It's the one-two, we of low agreeableness thinking we know better than the tradition civilization stands upon, and of simple rebelliousness at the idea of being judged and found unrighteous. I hate to invoke Pascal, but something runs parallel here. If I am wrong about the universe, I will not be wrong in how I have held myself. If you are wrong about the universe, you will have been wrong about the very nature of your soul. We can slap fight about whose personal investment functions as greater cognitive vulnerability, but it's not me, and I know I'm right.
At any rate, we live in a world of ideas so foolish only a smart person could believe them.
Owlify
4hr ago
It would still be rape to do it with a sixteen year old in a coercive situation.
jake
4hr ago
The universe, our solar system, our planet and all life are the consequences of the Big Bang and the laws of physics. These events happened, cosmological and Earth's natural history, but they are simply and solely what happened. They neither support nor repudiate the Genesis account. The skeptic takes the Genesis account as expressly literal and says "but history." In this they err, but understandably so as the American skeptic particularly will have been exposed so much to Protestants who hold to Young-Earth creationism. The apologist in turn errs in accepting the skeptic's framing as they concede the point of natural history as supporting the naturalist paradigm. This is true for the YEC, whose first error is that belief, it is also true for the OEC/believer in Theistic Evolution who accept it as having explanatory power.
But the apologist is correct in the importance of faith, the point is ubiquitous. I assume you are familiar enough to know the recurrence of "The Jews fall to apostasy and ruin, God personally delivers them, and yet they fall once more." They knew, still they fell, again and again. It's never been about what you know, it's about what you hold in faith. That we see no glaring gap in natural history is not because if there were we would have no choice but to believe. We see contiguous natural history because that is what happened. Faith is for why.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4hr ago
Overnight updates:
- It looks like the NeverTrump line on the deal from the US side is that luxury car buyers and private jet makers get tariff relief and normal people don't. (Although the UK doesn't really export mass-market consumer goods - I don't think Scotch drinkers and Barbour wearers are that much poorer than Land Rover drivers). Given that the main manufactured goods covered are cars and jet engines this is being called (surprisingly accurately) the Rolls-Royce deal. (Although Rolls-Royce cars and Rolls-Royce jet engines are now entirely separate companies).
- Conservativehome.com rather surprisingly does not have a rapid reaction piece up from a UK Tory perspective. That suggests that the Tories are split over whether to support or oppose the deal.
- Taking time to think about it, there is an interesting pattern which matches the 1st Trump admin's negotiations with China. Trump launches a trade war saying that the aim is to revitalise US manufacturing, but when the time comes to negotiate manufacturing gets thrown under the bus and Trump negotiates benefits for US agriculture.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4hr ago
I dont think the Father is non-physical because its "better". I think its a continuation of jewish belief, and continues to draw some justification from the (reduced) image prohibition.
I wonder what you think of the Real Presence and relics? They seem in a similar spirit as physical resurrection to me.
2rafa
4hr ago
Yes, I could have clarified ‘from the Islamic world’, but pretty much every Western country that has experienced mass immigration has experienced it from there too.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5hr ago
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.
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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)
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
5hr ago
Oh come on. The “if you have this opinion you’re an incel” implication is the most trite of Twitter-tier ad hominems.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
5hr ago
So, if Rome got a separate bishop, and the pope was only head of the catholic church, that would resolve the issue? I would be surprised if its that easy.
Corvos
5hr ago
To be fair, it’s generally acknowledged that NICE is the part of the system that actually works, and it genuinely does a pretty good job of deciding what forms of treatment are sane and worth the money and what forms are just utility monsters.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
6hr ago
Change is dangerous, but the relevant part of the change has already happened and can't be undone. As Nietzsche said, "God is dead". Now the only choice is how to replace Him.
Relics I pretty much think of as superstition. I'm not against the idea of holy objects or corpses, but relics imo verge into idol worship, where they seem to have power of their own. Even if Stephen was blessed for his faith, I'm not sure Stephen's fibula was blessed in the same way, and I especially don't think I'll be blessed for revering his fibula or carrying it around. It seems like a distraction pulling one away from Christ.
I've never really understood the Real Presence. It sounds like it means the bread and wine are literally Jesus' body in some sense, but in what sense? Clearly they don't actually physically become flesh and blood at any point--we would know if they did. I'm also sure that people have done unsavory things to bread and wine post-blessing, and while that may be symbolically violating Jesus I'm confident he's not actually harmed, so common sense tells me that the Communion isn't literally part of his body.
The physical resurrection has a strong biblical foundation. I'd argue Christ made a concerted effort to teach his apostles specifically that the resurrection was both real and physical. As I said elsewhere:
I guess you could see this as a "spiritual" resurrection, but then, what's the difference between a resurrected spirit body capable of eating food and otherwise interacting directly with matter, and a physical body? And why does the stipulation that the resurrection is non-physical matter so much, if these bodies possess important physical characteristics?
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