Anger subsided all the other emotions for me as far as climate change. There were people who knew. There’s something along the order of magnitude of 100 people who chose to obfuscate science and sacrifice us all for profit. I hate those people. I can’t even feel sad because I hate them so much.
That quote where he says “I know this may sound harsh, but everyone involved in this story should die.” was about the raped and murdered trans man Brandon Teena. Norm can rot in hell.
But using them interchangeably is accurate to Old English.
Eth and thorn were interchangeable. (go to timestamp 8:06, for some reason lemmy keeps eating my attempt to link directly to that time.)
See Bill Ackerman and Herbalife.
Federal regulators should have shut that shit down ages ago, but the grifter party loves MLMs (look at how the DeVos family made their money…)
Fuentes has explicitly compared interracial sex to beastiality. Fuentes has the opinions of the worst 4chan poster and would fully support the mass murder of Jewish and black people.
Well, the followers of Joseph Smith spent a great deal of money back in the early ‘oughts against gay marriage. Perhaps looking into things like the Book of Abraham (a “translated” copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which wasn’t able translated until after the Rosetta Stone, and clearly does not say what Smith said it did), genetic testing of Native American tribes showing no Middle East inheritance, the various anachronisms (iirc, pre Columbian horses?) and the precedence of “KJV’ism’s” in the text might be important. We can debunk a lot of what Smith said, which might have significance for a religion that has a stranglehold over the politics of Utah.
I think the difference between doubting Pythagoras and doubting Jesus is that no one is claiming g Pythagoras existed to bolster their claims on holding a moral superiority.
Pythagoras literally ran a mystery cult, and was associated for centuries with magical/divine powers after. Look at what probably happened to Hippasus.
Modern Bible scholars disconnect any ideas about moral superiority. The goal is to understand Jesus as a man, to the point where you can find polemics by modern Christian scholars about how godless the field is.
It’s good to question things, but there needs to be reasoning behind your question. There needs to be some sort of explanation of how a conspiracy developed to make a guy up who was crucified (Jewish conceptions of the Messiah at the time were more a kingly type ordained to overthrow the Roman yoke, and crucifixion is a pretty humiliating death…) Where is the motive, means and opportunity for a bunch of people to simultaneously decide this guy existed?
Was it acceptable for them to proposition that he may not have existed?
Yes! The pagan Romans were still in power. An easy way for them to win points would have been to point out the guy never existed. Why would Tacitus describe the crucifixion if it didn’t happen?
You have communities of people claiming that this guy was real and being obnoxious to Roman authorities. The Romans eventually went full ham on Judea - burning down the second Temple. It would be really really unusual if the guy didn’t exist and they didn’t say so.
Were this any other historical figure it would be enough to say we have sufficient evidence for existence. You’re letting your bias against the followers of this figure color what evidence you’ll accept for their existence.
Are we all going to turn into Muhammad mythicists next?
Were those solely present in Zoroastrianism? From what I understand of Egyptian religion, there’s the whole Thoth “weighing your heart to see if it’s lighter than a feather” thing. I think free will has always been a “popular” idea, but even then, there are passages in the Bible that contradict free will - to the point that Calvinists much later discarded it.
The earliest Christians did not view Jesus as God incarnate. That’s a later development through the second century.
Why Krishna specifically, instead of another avatar of Vishnu like Rama?
How do you explain the transmission of that idea? Are we supposed to imagine something of a “Journey to the East” where mostly illiterate conquered peasants brought back the ideas if not the text of the Bhagavad Gita?
Maybe look into who popularized your idea. The guy who made Zeitgeist also made Loose Change…
What similarities to Krishna? Please give me some examples, and a plausible explanation of how those ideas would have crossed the continent?
Uh… how?
The Zoroastrian “borrowing” is more along the lines of there’s a perfect good force versus a perfect evil force.
But I don’t know how there would be any Hinduism influence. There’s lot of Greek influence, but India was really far away.
It’s the name with the explicit connection to James, a leader of the early church.
There’s a difference between the idea of a pseudo-fictional composite character, like King Arthur who was constructed centuries after his time, and a real historical guy who existed and had stories written about what he said.
Consider how much evidence we have for Pythagoras. Pythagoras was also a weird religious cult leader, but I’d expect most here would know him for the Pythagorean theorem. Which he didn’t come up with. Does that not make him enough of a “Pythagoras” for you?
You have to gauge your sense of skepticism. There’s a difference between “oh, Gilgamesh seems to be showing up in all of these King’s List documents that claim thousands of years of dynastic dominance which are 80% bullshit to oil up a kingship’s perceived position in the world.” and “oh, here’s a bunch of texts about an unusual rogue ‘rabbi’ that developed a following; there’s some probably exaggerated claims of healing, an oddly novel resurrection story that has more added to it as each Gospel is written.”
Read just the resurrection, Mark-> Matthew-> Luke->John to see how the more fanciful stuff develops. Heck - maybe even read the New Testament in chronological order - starting with the letters of Paul and see them as dealing with situations happening in real time. Treat it as a ‘found footage’/‘ambiguous narrator’ collection. A murder mystery.
There’s a difference between reading the Bible as a religious text, to either prove or disprove, and as a compilation of vastly different documents, by vastly different authors, writing across centuries.
For a modern example, think about John of God - one of the faith healing charlatans that Oprah promoted. Will people who live in the next few centuries automatically discount his existence because they find it occasionally next to a description of his supposed miracles, which accounts are perhaps more likely to survive than those of his sexual assault allegations? Will the things that he will have said to have said not be accurate, even if other information about him is not?
At the end of the day, there’s just as much evidence for the existence of several early historical figures that we don’t doubt the existence of. I think it’s reasonable to not privilege the text as anything other than a primary source document, and recognize that a lot of similar supernatural claims have been added to multiple real world figures in history.
The two major improvements with JW’s right now are that the New Zealand court battle means that they need to give up some aspects of “disfellowshipping” - basically, doing something against the religions rules could result in you losing all of your friends, family and social connection. The kind of situation where maybe you could talk to your family again if yo were actively dying. Now the rules allow sending along an invite them to church (“Kingdom Hall”) meetings and maybe a short “hello” occasionally.
The other change is that they just got rid of the informal “ban” on college education that they’ve had for ages. Dads letting their kids get college educations could be punished at church, and there’s a ton of JW propaganda that discourages more than graduating high school. They’re recognizing that isn’t economically viable, and also they need educated professionals to run their ministry.
I don’t know if that’s they are getting more “relaxed” though. It’s more a savvy game to hold on to power and avoid consequences.
That’s a common misunderstanding/simplification. It’s more “wow, these gods are kinda similar to ours, so they must be the same.” Portable Orange on YT has a good and well sourced video, and I think reading Dr. Devereaux’s blog posts is a good way to understand some ideas about ancient polytheism. Neither of these are published journal articles or books, but they both thoroughly cite their sources.
While Jesus and Paul likely never met in person, the point is that Paul is writing to established Christian communities within a few decades of Jesus’s death. There are already churches with established leadership and community structures.
I found out my mom had spent three decades of my life lying about who my biological father was.
She has always spun some romantic bullshit story about a specific guy. Like I’m talking there was a whole ass story of her life leading up to my conception that she liked to tell me. A pretty fucked up story - she was a teenager, this guy was in his early twenties. But still, a mostly normal and consensual story barring the statuary aspect, not at all shocking where we live. He knocks her up, chickens out immediately, dumps her, etc. There was even a cathartic story about her being a then abandoned pregnant Sonic carhop, discovering the guy as a customer and throwing fries at his face. She describes my eyes and hair as his.
I reach out to the guy as a teenager with help from family, who keep track of this guy throughout the years in case I’d want to ever make connection. I reach out, he denies that he’s my father. Well, sucks, but nothing too unexpected.
As a lark, I get genetics testing kit one year. It’s on Amazon prime (back when that was a good deal and back before I realized how problematic that giving my DNA to a random company.)
I take the test. A woman reaches out. My aunt. And she’s not the sister of my “father.”
My biological father was a different adult man (mid twenties) who raped a teenager he met at a party. Even told me to my face that he hadn’t been interested in her, but more in her older sister.
When I confronted her with this. It was a non reaction. It was “oh.” She’s told so many lies throughout her life, but this was finally the one she couldn’t bullshit her way out of. She lied to me for thirty years, and unlike any other lie she’s told, there‘s no “oh you’re just remembering it differently” or “I didn’t really mean that.”
The most difficult thing is that maybe it was traumatic for her. Maybe it was violent. I’ve met him twice, and neither experience was really pleasant. He has a history. Maybe she did block it out, repress it in that Freudian way and did convince herself that some guy she had a crush on and her had some secret little tryst. Realizing maybe the hell of my childhood had an explanation - that she was trying to punish me, that she hated me as a symbol of rape. Can I forgive her for that?
It’s just such a complicated and difficult thing to wrap my head around. Nothing about her as a person has ever made any sense.