bitcrafter
@bitcrafter@programming.dev
- Comment on Which timezone would win in a conflict? 3 weeks ago:
Apparently not quite! It looks like you would mostly be stepping back and forth between UTC and its opposite.
Given that time zones are essentially set by the local research stations, I conclude that Chile and Argentina would win the war because their time zone has the most coastland and so they would have the most penguins on their side.
- Comment on Which timezone would win in a conflict? 3 weeks ago:
They would all lose because they stretch all the way down into Antarctica which means that the penguins would be involved…
- Comment on How would a wealth tax affect real estate rentals? 3 weeks ago:
I think that the implication was that they would have to sell in order to come up with the cash to pay the tax?
- Comment on Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such?? 4 weeks ago:
Hey, at least you tried! 😉
(And don’t think too harshly of the other poster; we were all 14 once, after all!)
- Comment on Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such?? 4 weeks ago:
EDIT: Hahaha, instant downvote!
For the record, the downvote was from me, and it was because you are being an ass.
- Comment on Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such?? 4 weeks ago:
All evidence points to a jew who, under roman occupation, organized a political and religious movement around his person with a message so powerful that it immediately started replicating. Otherwise, how can we explain the sudden outflow of missionaries from Galilee ? Whose message were they spreading, which travelled as far as Asia and Ethiopia with relative unity and consistence ? What reason do we have to doubt that a revolutionary mystical prophet such as Jesus existed (they were legion at the time in that region), and why should we subscribe to some more exotic, laborious explaination ?
I think that it is worth noting that the person who did most of the successful evangelizing in the beginning that led to the explosion of the movement was actually Paul, who had his own message that wasn’t quite the same as Jesus’s apostles–in fact, he started spreading the message without talking to them first because he figured that he already knew everything that he needed to know, which led to conflict that required Acts to work really hard to make it seem like they were all on the same side all along.
But regardless, it is peculiar that people seem to think that starting a widely successful cult is a particularly hard thing to do if the founder has enough charisma (and luck), given that all you have to do is look around at the numerous modern examples. For example, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness was founded in 1966 by a guy banging drums in New York, and has since grown into a huge movement with hundreds of dedicated temples. So it is far more plausible that this is what happened in the case of Christianity than that some other more complicated process synthesizing the existence of a fake founder.
- Comment on Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such?? 4 weeks ago:
It must be very convenient to be able to declare victory in a discussion without hanging to present an actual argument. 😉
- Comment on Politics in America has always been dirty. How does trump really stack up? 4 weeks ago:
Poor thing must have accidentally made it with the shiny side facing in instead of out…
- Comment on Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such?? 4 weeks ago:
You are thinking about this the wrong way. From the scraps of information that we do have, which includes volumes of work by Jesus’s followers, there are two extremes one could take: we know absolutely nothing about Jesus or whether he even existed, or we know absolutely everything about Jesus. I agree that the later extreme is wrongheaded, but surely treating it as a binary choice so that the only other possibility is that we can say nothing at all about Jesus is also wrongheaded.
You might argue reasonably, of course, that his followers cannot be trusted, so we can learn nothing from their writings. This is not true, however, because if nothing else we can learn from the editorial choices that they made; for example, when a Gospel goes out of is way to explain a detail that would have been embarrassing to contemporaries, this actually provides potential evidence that this detail was true and widely known at the time so that it needed to be explained, because otherwise it would just have been left out.
At the end of the day, scholarship is essentially about weighing probabilities rather than certainties, and good scholars do not pretend otherwise.
- Comment on Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such?? 4 weeks ago:
Keep in mind that most likely the historical Jesus was just one of many apocalyptic preachers going around telling people that, within the lifetime of some present, God was going to come down and vanquish evil once and for all, so one had better be prepared and be on God’s good side when this happened. (Incidentally, the Romans probably could not have cared less about this; it was when they got word that he was claiming to be an earthly king–which may have been how Judas actually betrayed him–that they got seriously pissed and executed him because they had a zero tolerance policy for that kind of thing.)
You can see imminent apocalypse theme in the epistles where John writes that there is no real point making big life changes like getting married since the world is going to end any day; amusingly, when this did not happen, they needed to start coming up with alternative policies, and so other letters start to set down rules which thematically contradict the earlier letters, but it turns out that there are other things about these letters that make them different too so I’m many cases they are considered to be forgeries. (Obviously this is an oversimplification of the academic research!)
(Also, it’s also worth noting that John and the apostles had really different notions of what Jesus was all about, and part of the whole point of Acts is to paper over these differences and make it seem like they had all been past of one team all along.)
Finally, it is worth pointing out that there were a lot of texts floating around in the same genre as Revelation, so it was not all that unique and it almost did not make it’s way into the Bible, but the Church Fathers thought incorrectly that the John who wrote it was the same as the author of the Gospel of John; if they had known that these were two different Johns, then the Left Behind series would never have been written (amount other consequences).
So in conclusion, be very wary of trying to read a lot of significance into the New Testament as a whole because it was not a unified document written with single purpose.
- Comment on [fluff post] If lemmy users are Lemmites, what would we like to call piefed users? 1 month ago:
(Off-topic, but your username is fantastic!)
- Comment on At Gamescom, it felt like the industry now has a plan: make games quicker | Opinion 2 months ago:
Make sure you check out Metal: Hellsinger if you haven’t already!
- Comment on Me too. 2 months ago:
I think that is a bit of a misleading way of putting it because the feeling being a “self” that is in charge of the body is an experience that is contained within consciousness rather than the essential nature of it; in principle, one could imagine having consciousness without any feeling of being a “self” at all.
If I had to define the nature of consciousness, I would say that it is essentially an internal simulation that the brain creates in order to aggregate information from various sources in order to facilitate processing and decision making. Just to be clear, this is not my own original idea, and more importantly I do not think that it is a particularly clever or deep way of thinking about consciousness, but rather the inevitable conclusion one reaches when one plays around with one’s own attention and awareness and sees what happens; the trick is just to do it like a scientist and be constantly challenging one’s own conclusions, rather than to invent one’s own version of chakras. I find it especially enlightening to watch what the mind does when one tries not to steer it into doing anything; with some practice, it is possible to watch the “self” pretend to be in charge while simultaneously realizing it is not, and this experience can be helpful (though frustratingly I have not found it to be as immediately life-changing as I might have hoped).
- Comment on New Executive Order:AI must agree on the Administration views on Sex,Race, cant mention what they deem to be Critical Race Theory,Unconscious Bias,Intersectionality,Systemic Racism or "Transgenderism 2 months ago:
China takes care of its people
- Comment on UwU brat mathematician behavior 3 months ago:
Imagining your death.
- Comment on There's a lot of freedom at first as a soldier to realize that you could put down so much evil in the world until you realize you might actually be putting evil into the world. 3 months ago:
+1 actually a shower thought
- Comment on Planck units 3 months ago:
I for one like to keep things simple and just express everything directly in units of the number of periods of the radiation emitted by the ground state hyperfine levels of Cesium-133.
- Comment on Everybody talks about beliefs like they're this big important thing. 3 months ago:
Okay, fair enough, you got me: I wrote his name on a piece of paper and was standing on it when I wrote that comment in order to absorb his authority. You win this Internet argument.
- Comment on Everybody talks about beliefs like they're this big important thing. 3 months ago:
I was definitely not standing on the authority of Elliott, merely making use of his words and crediting him for it, so you are simply wrong.
- Comment on Everybody talks about beliefs like they're this big important thing. 3 months ago:
On the contrary, quoting is exactly the act of borrowing another’s idea, but doing the courtesy of giving credit to the person from whom you borrowed it.
- Comment on Everybody talks about beliefs like they're this big important thing. 3 months ago:
Good writers borrow, great writers steal. -T.S. Elliot
- Comment on Were people happier in the past? 4 months ago:
I am not so sure that “rulers of the past” were quite as concerned about whether their subjects were happy as you are making it seem they were.
- Comment on Is it really doom scrolling if it's just true? 4 months ago:
Think of it as being a different way of saying “anxiety scrolling”, because “doom scrolling” is primarily referring to the experience of being driven by anxiety to compulsively consume a never-ending stream of bad news.
For example, I had to cut myself off from following what is going on in Los Angeles earlier today because I recognized the signs of going past the point of merely keeping tabs on it to stay informed and compulsively anxiously reloading the page to see if there were any new updates.
- Comment on What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with? 5 months ago:
Thank you for linking to a source!
- Comment on What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with? 5 months ago:
Sure, I am obviously not obligated to read the book, but what I was specifically responding to was the following remark:
Yeah isolating yourself from everyone you disagree with is awesome, truly nothing bad ever comes out of it.
which in turn was a response to the following:
Do you have to agree with everyone you give your money to? What sort of economy would that be?
Probably a pretty nice one, actually.
- Comment on What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with? 5 months ago:
Ergo we should feel obligated to give money to people who we believe are actively harming the world?
- Comment on What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with? 5 months ago:
Huh? What did he do?
- Comment on i truly believe that there's an open war between Humanity vs. Advertisers and their allies. 5 months ago:
No, the person in OP’s shower is me!
- Comment on How do I discover the Pixelfed content that is out there when so many big instances block exploration? 6 months ago:
I only see a couple of the most recent posts, but the number 2K seems to indicate that there are a lot more that it just is not showing me.
By contrast, I felt like looking at pictures of galaxies right now, so I went over to astrodon.social/tags/galaxies, and behold–look at all of them! So easy!
In fact, maybe the lesson here is that I should just give up on Pixelfed and use Mastadon for discovering cool things to look at in my downtime.
- Comment on How do I discover the Pixelfed content that is out there when so many big instances block exploration? 6 months ago:
I just go to the web site, e.g. lemmy.sdf.org.