Great post - I figured that this would be the case based off of the idea that, whether you are male or female, certain markers can only be passed on through father/mother…

Your haplogroup, for instance, always comes from the father. It would seem to me, then, that things like haplogroups would only be linked to male genetics, and simply smushing together two men’s genetics would result in things like repeat haplogroups and a total lack of mtDNA.

Perhaps, eventually, technology would exist that could translate the haplogroup of a female into the genetic code necessary for reproductive genetic combination, and likewise extract female-specific reproductive code from a male and do the same… But yeah, I imagine that would also just be the point of full genetic customization from top to bottom, and so the ability to do that would no longer be surprising but simply something that has come to us as a byproduct of advanced gene editing.

You bring back memories, man.

But I am serious…! This is how it works…!

This is one of the silliest quotes because we know that the ancient pagans often viewed one another’s gods as correspondent - “Thor is their Zeus,” etc.

And then you have the problem of henotheism where there is potentially a single god with many avatars and a pantheon of lesser spiritual beings… And you start to realize, "Wait, if the Vasihnavites, Shiavites, etc. are really just saying that there is a an arch deity over everything with many avatars in the form of lesser gods that he wears the masks of, plus lesser deities that can’t defy him and act as angels and demons…

"… What is a God, really? Aren’t they nearly monotheists…?"

What is a God.

Plus there’s the very classic position of the Jews and the Chrsitians - the gods of gentiles are demons.

Christianity does not become a religion that denies other gods, but one that claims other gods are misidentified.

Throw in some liberalism and yuo can even have Christians arguing that the worship directed as Vishnu by devoted Hindus who lead ethical lives and strive to be great manifestations of goodness & virtue for the sake of God’s love is not the worship of demons, at all, but rather, an attempt to reach our God through their own traditions that may even be guided in some form by the Holy Spirit…

So, IDK, IDK to what extent anyone is denying other people’s gods and its relevance to religion today.

The very earliest stuff obviously doesn’t have that, and we rely on church history because it wasn’t like even the most interesting thing a Roman governor did that week to kill some random churchmen who created conflict among Jews, nor do we have much preserved about mobs killing these guys other than in the original Christian communal sources.

But really, if you start from the premise that everything Christians ever write about thesmelves is pure propaganda without an iota of truth in it, that creates a non-serious standard with which to evaluate things.

Is it really absurd to think that Protomartyr Stephen was killed by a mob of Jews for preaching a radically different religion to them in a time of great political upheaval? Isn’t this exactly what we think of Christians at later times - that they’d just turn on a guy and kill him for being a heretic? Why is it so unbelievable that it once happened to a Christian? Why is it so troublesome that the only people who bothered to write about these martyrs and preserve their memory were the people who were victims in the course of this?

Obviously, you can say that it’s propaganda and lies, and maybe some of it was. But we know it’s absolutely historic that Christians wre officially persecuted later on. it is also par for the course that they would be less formally persecuted prior to that. it also amkes sense that Christians, like every other group, try to preserve a communal memory.

Almost all of the Christian folklore surrounding Jesus can be directly tied to other myths that were common knowledge to Mediterranean people at the time.

Yeah I got the Mithra chainmail in my AOL account back in 1998 - I know the arguments.

But Christianity presents us with something very wild - it takes the Messianic tradition of Jews which was hitherto interpreted as being about creating an earthly Kingdom that conquers the world and incorporates the gentiles into Israel (or makes the gentiles servants of Israel, who all become noblemen living in a heaven on earth, some interpretations)… and Christ says

“Yeah, but no - the Kingdom is purely spiritual. It’s not temporal. The gentiles join us by worshiping God with us and living these truths - look, this Roman occupier has more faith than all Israel, because you guys are just terrible. You bicker over the law, and miss the total point of the law…”

And the Messiah is now about conquering the world through spreading the Gospel of loving God, and loving your neighbor as yourself, giving up your possessions and conquering greed, freeing yourself from hypocrisy; living in simplicity and supreme virtue, at peace with those around you, practicing non-violence, and now we don’t even need any kind of ceremonial laws at all because we are living the virtues. And that’s how the world becomes part of Israel - by adopting the great things abotu our religion - and that’s also how you get to heaven, which is only achievable after death when I come again…

This is a very unique interpretation of the Judaism of the time - absolutely revolutionary.

Even if you want to say that all the miracles and ‘signs’ are a myth, I think that the “Mithra” angle is actually bad beacuse you could just say they came up with those signs and added them so as to be able to claim they are fulfilling the Old Testament, which was infinitely more relevant to the Jews who were the community that gave birth to the religion.

Keep the faith, by all means. But part of believing is accepting that you don’t get to have proof.

Yeah I agree - there is no proof, and if there was proof, it would ruin it, because we’d no longer be doing good and loving God and our neighbor because it is right, but we would be doing it with the expectation of receiving heaven…

We would no longer be living a spiritual life for the good of oruselves and others - in hope & faith - but we would be Capitalists engaging in transactions that we deemed profitable.

I am not saying you have to believe the corpus of text as 100% factual and become a Christian right now, but I am suggesting that people believing the text isn’t absurd… Moreover, I would suggest that it tends to prove that Jesus Christ was real…

The text itself asserts

• Times & places where he was; actual historic figures; a trial and a death, all of a single person.
• Claims he drew large crowds, healed people, had some publicly known altercations with local religious authorities.
• Claims that other people died in very public events (Stephen the Martyr in Acts) and that actual meetings were convened to decide what to do about it with the head Jewish rabbi at the time (Gamaliel)
• Records his teachings in ways that sometimes kind of conflict with one another in terms of phrasing, and also records different details about events that could be mutually contradictory…

Which all implies that the synoptic Gospels and Acts were very opened to being fact checked by their contemporaries and future generations by trying to place themselves in history, and that the texts were not designed by a cabal of conspirators who wanted to deceive people and come up with the perfect story because the story they made was hardly written by committee - it has things we’d see as imperfections & errors.

Ever play Telephone with a single word for 5 minutes? Now do that to a epic for 100 years, the end result will certainly be something but it may be nothing like the truth

The Telephone game is designed to show you how private rumors occur.

The four Gospels are all the accounts of eyewitnesses to these events that were then recorded by their own hand or by their assistant’s hand, and preserved within the church. Of course, some speculate that they were forged later, but there’s a very long, complicated argument that involves the earliness of the spread of the knowledge of the Gospels and how well they were independently preserved in faraway locations from France to Egypt that indicate that they likely were completed shortly after Christ’s death.

It’s also the case that Christianity was a proselytizing faith, right, so immediately there are operations which send missionaries into the world to spread the news… By all means, deny the miracles and the story, but it seems likely that there was consensus about what had happened before the missionaries departed, which allowed for there to be the preservation of the Gospels and what would later constitute the New Testament.

There’s not a good argument to be made that these guys were just spreading nonsense and spitballing it as they go - the story was straight before they were leaving Jerusalem, or else the four Gospels and the subsequent apostolic letters would not have been something they could have ever all agreed upon.

No, and that is to even be expected.

He was a prophet whose movement had around 120 or so core disciples along with his apostles, plus thousands who followed him about and considered him a healer and revolutionary teacher.

There are people who have done similar things that are completely lost to history other than small records that vaguely outline the controversy surrounding them… We shouldn’t really expect more in terms of proof…

But what is unique is the fact that we have an extremely well preserved corpus of text surrounding him. We also have some good idea that a lot of his followers were prosecuted and killed, and never recanted in the process, which might incline you to believe in the radical truth that they lived by.

Of course I am biased - I am a Christian - but it really does just seem pointlessly antagonistic to dismiss His Existence at all.

Just amazing - the government literally going to bat for the sake of concert goers who demand hotel rooms.

Can’t imagine working through drug addiction and getting clean enough to be given a hotel room, and then eagerly trying to find some form of employment to become stable, and then your case worker is like *What do you think about spending a few days in Aberdeen…? WIth the Taylor Swift concert and all… There’s a need for this room for someone else…"

Lol what.

… Who do we think is behind the DDoS attack?

Are the Israelis up to something?

It’s great - scratches the itch, overall. I sometimes pine for places where major debates on a specific topic constantly rage - ideally, I’d be able to discuss religion whenever I wanted, skipping threads I felt I didn’t want to wade into…

But it is a good enough replacement overall and I feel like we are proceeding to having such a size. I am also open to the idea that I have not curated enough to find a place where this si consistently happening in the Fediverse yet…

I was a fairly active member at Reddit with a good social standing, I made 1 “controversial” comment and I got perma-banned… this sucks.

There have been some controversies that have led to banning and banning of entire instances. Usually, this involves Lemmy instances that were tolerating a lot of blatant transphobic memes that cut deep and were very mean…

I get why people isolated them.

I am still worried, though, that there are people who would still react this way to good faith discussion where there are disagreements. While there are some places where that is for sure OK, I think there are some instances that might react so negatively as to want to ban a specific user or their instance over it. I may be overreacting but IDK.

… As a Christian, I approve.

The idea that the government should run off of some merciless view that the principles of free market capitalism dictate who eats and who doesn’t is completely bizarre.

I have nothing against capitalist Christians who think that the principles of capitalism are generally fine and that, otherwise, we have an obligation as Christians to feed the poor and it just so happens to not be the role of government, but any explicitly Christian state has to feed the poor.