Judas goat
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
If you're a large male, especially if you sport a beard, you will probably experience that smaller children react to you with shyness or fear quite often. I have seen children crying when a young men entered their car. The small kid hiding behind their mother's legs is a stereotype born from real-life experiences.
But the behavior often completely changes when that male person is accompanied by another child that isn't shy around them (e.g., their daughter). Apparently, there's a deep-rooted instinct in children that tells them "this one is a father and thus cannot be a bad person".
Now as a father I know that kids don't form permanent memories until cca 2.5 years but this one is so vivid and detailed, and the whole setup must have been stroller otherwise whole memory doesn't make sense. I keep telling myself its not some invented memory or dream, but I'lll never know 100% truth.
Yeah small kids don't like that stuff on strangers, maybe it moves the threat assessment into more wild territory.
It's also possible you were in a stroller despite being a bit older; this is something I see a lot. A kid in a stroller can be transported faster and more consistently than one walking.
The human brain is the most complex structure we know about, there is no way we can know for certain when the first memories form. There are many references to unborn babys knowing certain types of music their mother listened to while pregnant, positive associations with food that their mother ate while pregnant, crying with a particular accent etc.
I do, however, know for certain that I have memories from the age of 1-2 years old, which I've been able to date by relaying these memories to older family members who also remember them and having them confirm when they happened. (For example, I remember passing a Christmas gift to my great grandmother, when I would have been 1.5 years old; she died not long after. And I remember the layout of the first apartment I ever lived in, which we left shortly before my 1st birthday.)
But I went through a severely traumatic experience at 3-4 years old that I believe caused me to retain older memories. I remember going through a conscious effort to retain as many memories as I could from before the event by repeatedly recalling them as frequently as I could, and although this probably caused them to become less accurate over time, I still remember them well enough that other people can recognize them and confirm them (the ones that involved other people, anyway).
Not just in children, I'm pretty sure that everybody's "threat detector" perceives "male" and "male with a child" completely differently.
I think you're partially correct about the "bad person wouldn't have a child" stereotype, but it's also about the context. Some bad people will have children, but in their presence are likely to be risk-averse and prioritize peace and safety of their offspring. A father away from their child can OTOH get aggressive.
A Golden Retriever will on the other hand project friendliness. There are small dog breeds like Yorkshire which are rather aggressive, but in my perception they wouldn't increase the threat perception.
These are of course stereotypes, they won't be true every time, but are IMHO useful as a rule of thumb.
“I thought Fangorn was dangerous.
'Dangerous!' cried Gandalf. 'And so am I, very dangerous: more dangerous than anything you will ever meet, unless you are brought alive before the seat of the Dark Lord. And Aragorn is dangerous, and Legolas is dangerous. You are beset with dangers, Gimli son of Glóin; for you are dangerous yourself, in your own fashion. Certainly the forest of Fangorn is perilous — not least to those that are too ready with their axes; and Fangorn himself, he is perilous too; yet he is wise and kindly nonetheless.”
The children correctly assess you as "dangerous". They then assess whether you are wise and kindly, and find you so, making a good ally or friend. Merely wise and kindly people do not make as good of an ally or friend.
https://www.science.org/content/article/fatherhood-decreases...
I'm asking since there's an extreme difference in prostate cancer prevalence tied to race (in the US at least) and some attribute this to testosterone level differences. The differences are however smaller than in your study.
Some sources:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091208132241.h...
When it's just me people aren't as open, women will clutch their handbags, get nervous when I suddenly cross the street toward them etc.
Crazy.
If only the moms at the playground had the same instinct when I pull up in a minivan with my children. Yet for some reason I’m still “stranger danger” to them.
Weird world.
https://www.agweb.com/news/livestock/beef/judas-goats-agricu...
Humans also have vestiges of herd behaviour. For example, if one person decides to cross the intersection on a red light (especially pedestrian) then more people are likely to follow even if they would wait for green light otherwise.
Going along with the crowd is foundational to being human - individuality doesn't come naturally.
They likely don’t grasp the causality but I guess after 4-5 trips like this they know it’s not going to be an afternoon stroll for anyone other than themselves.
Makes me think of someone who actually benefits from a MLM scheme and gets to interact with others who don’t. In a way also an influencer, but of a different kind than the social media one.
That is, the Nazis gave a Judas some food and other favors if they could find and report jews in hiding.
Spys?
I mention because I am constantly amazed at the area of land dedicated to the US Military. San Clemente Island is a 34 km long 147 km2 and shows traces of human activity dating back 10,000 years. Currently it's used as a live firing range and has a small naval installation on it.
Not judging. Just amazed.
Pendleton is more interesting than San Clemente Island though, in my opinion. It's miles and miles of beautiful prime real estate right on the Southern California coast, used for nothing but practicing amphibious landings, helicopter touch and goes, and firing missiles into the hillsides. You'd think the military could do it in a place that isn't nestled right next to the nation's second biggest metropolitan area.
That means that in different years different generations will need or want different uses for the land that may seem counter intuitive, but there’s a method to the madness
The EPA does not currently require 100% hazmat clean up of any offshore properties due to cost prohibitive clean up and lack of shipping and storage of contaminated topsoil
…so islands are used for live fire ranges and given varying degrees of warm fuzzy land designations like ‘wild life refuge’ because they are not usually fit for human inhabitants and it costs money the more upkeep/stewardship an area needs …ie the most basic upkeep is fire suppression
But because it’s federal land any entity that can challenge successfully for an activity permit can arrange ‘incidental takes’ and do permitted activities
Unfortunately well-meaning eco non profits use their status to do ‘discreet land conveyance’ under the auspices of ‘creating wild life corridors’ …
it’s a quick and dirty way of getting land owners who wouldn’t normally want to sell to the government but will sell to an eco non profit, who simply conveys the land back to the government anyway, while parcel swapping like trading cards to make ‘wild life corridors’ that often don’t work as intended.
The government can’t currently afford the stewardship cost of all the lands that gets conveyed back, so counter intuitive uses are in effect to help pay
…that’s how an island that can seem pristine can become a wild life refuge with degrees of hazmat-contaminated topsoil that gets target practice bombing on Tuesdays
As for the historical artifacts, historical artifacts are managed via Section 106 of permitting, there are protocols of prioritizing artifacts so that we save what we can but build over if needed, otherwise we’d never get anything done if every burial ground was forbidden to use in perpetuity
What usually makes headlines is when certain tribes complain about the Section 106 permitting, especially if it’s a national utility such as a fuel pipeline. National utilities get higher priority that allows for a ‘streamlined’ version of Section 106 permitting, much to the chagrin of people who don’t know or understand or use their citizen rights, responsibilities, and privileges to learn or change the process.
As for military bases they are huge economic boosters for towns that have them, ergo when their mission changes, or when a different platform gets a higher priority and the bases close some towns try to fund raise to keep them open, but it’s rarely successful more than a few years.
The bases may sit in various stages of disrepair for years before being refurbished for a different mission by the federal government or conveyed back to state/local government and re-purposed.
Then there was that short story by George R. R. Martin, “The Way of Cross and Dragon".
"Judas gate": A small door or gate (still large enough to pass through, I think) set into a larger door or gate (as in a factory).
"Judas door": A small hole in a door through which a person can spy without being seen from the other side. Or sometimes also the same as the Judas gate.
"Judas hole": A peephole
For some reason, the term "Judas phone" redirects to the iphone 4 page.
Judas pig, rat, sheep and steer all redirect to Judas goat.
There's a Judas' Belt, a firecracker that would be strapped to a paper mache effigy depicting Judas.
From the term's WP page[0]:
A minced oath is a euphemistic expression formed by deliberately misspelling, mispronouncing, or replacing a part of a profane, blasphemous, or taboo word or phrase to reduce the original term's objectionable characteristics.
...snip...
Alliteration can be combined with metrical equivalence, as in the pseudo-blasphemous "Judas Priest", substituted for the blasphemous use of "Jesus Christ"
from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33655215
Or Judas goat is specifically for slaughter house
It's a bit like hunting fallow deer here, don't shoot the white ones, just look around them for the rest of the herd in more camouflaged colours.
But the whole narrative was written after the fact to justify Christian claims of being the legitimate heirs to God's covenant and condemn the Jews as a people for "betraying Jesus" so expecting any degree of nuance beyond "Satan made him do it because Jews are greedy" is likely expecting too much.
And the entire message of the New Testament is to offer the Jews salvation and explain how their old ways were wrong. The New Testament explicitly condemns absolutely nobody, instead offers salvation to absolutely everybody, which the only condition being that they ask for it. This is in stark contrast to the old testament, in which only the Jews would be saved and all else are condemned.
Not to mention the New Testament explicitly states there is no Jew or Gentile in the body of Christ. The distinction is entirely abolished. And Jesus calls Judas a friend, and says he could avoid this all if he wanted to but he must do it to fulfill the scriptures.
All in all it seems like you are reaching for a reason to say the New Testament is anti-Jew, when it is truly not against anyone (except perhaps those unwilling to love God and their neighbor).
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_and_the_New_Testa...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_Christianity#C...
People will use anything to find a reason to dislike other people. You can be a part of perpetuating those malcontentments, or you can look at the entire rest of the New Testament which at every turn denounces condemnation and emphasizes love above all else.
Judas's story is a big point in supporting my atheism , like you had a dude following a God for years, witnessing extreme miracles and still the guy had doubts that the person was a God and at the same time this Gods would want me to believe based only on that old,censored book that contradicts itself with reality and morality 100 times. I would have censored this story too if I was there.
After all we have doubters and people who betray for money today in all walks of life.
What's even more noteworthy about miracles is the report that some of those who had the miracle applied to, who were healed even some of them didn't believe or even say thanks! The point of the miracle maybe was not really to make people believe... it's a mystery to me.
> One might say that the existence of a doubter or rejector lends the story authenticity.
The story? Certainly!
Evidence of that specific god? Not at all (it's actually the opposite).
Let me put it this way:
You get told a story about how someone, $LEADER, had millions of people following his proposal to get rich, hanging on his every word, believing his every utterance, because he claimed to have the people's interest at heart.
Believable? Maybe.
Then you get told that one guy from $LEADER's inner circle, who saw every thing that $LEADER did, and heard everything that $LEADER said, stopped believing that $LEADER was, in actual fact, capable of doing what he said he could do.
Believable? Sure, much more than before.
But .. that still doesn't provide any evidence that $LEADER was, in fact, who he claimed to be, nor that what he claimed was true, nor that he believed what he claimed to be true.
In fact, it's just the opposite - we now have more reason to believe the story, but disbelieve the claims of $LEADER.
Replace $LEADER with SBF and the context with cryptocurrencies.
Not for me, if someone that was in the inner circle and witness so much did not believe then expecting me to believe this stories is too much. Anyway other issue I have are the contradictions with the reality and that the God morality is incompatible with my morality so even if he existed 100% I would not worship him.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/feb/01/stephen-fry-...
>In his imaginary conversation with God, Fry says he would tell him: “How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It’s not right.
>“It’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?”
>Pressed by Byrne over how he would react if he was locked outside the pearly gates, Fry says: “I would say: ‘bone cancer in children? What’s that about?’
>“Because the God who created this universe, if it was created by God, is quite clearly a maniac, utter maniac. Totally selfish. We have to spend our life on our knees thanking him?! What kind of god would do that?”
So Judas was setup by God? Give him a test that he will fail?
I also hate the story where God allows Satan to kill some extremly good person children to test him and later to reward him the "good" God gives the man other children( f that God, he kills your children, you pass the test and he is so heartless or impotent to restore your children - an average human would not be such cruel)
My "favorite" part of this is the section of the Old Testament/Torah about "sexual immorality" - if a man violates an unbetrothed woman, the punishment is a fee to the father and marriage to the poor girl. If betrothed, both man and woman is stoned to death (unless it was outside the city), as the woman being guilty for not screaming loud enough to get others to stop the act. Oh, and the reason you shouldn't take your fathers wife is to not "uncover your fathers nakedness" - nothing to do with the woman itself. (Deutoronomy)
The thing reads like a bad joke.
Yes. My theology is rusty, but that is supposed to be what sin is. Nobody is free from it, everybody is tempted and fails.
Judas' great crime wasn't selling Jesus for forty silver, Peter is supposed to have committed the same crime by thrice denying Jesus (that never made sense to me, but it's what I was told). Peter realized what he had done, repented, and returned to Jesus while Judas realized what he had done and let his guilt drive him to suicide. He "betrayed" Jesus' forgiveness.
Isn't one of the main points in Christianity that people have free will and so Satan wouldn't be entering and controlling Judas, but would more likely be telling him falsehoods and persuading him to sell Jesus out? i.e. a normal man can always overcome Satan by choosing God, even if it's just right at the end of their life.
I'm actually of the opinion that Christianity held back humanity's development for at least a thousand years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
Alternatively, if he truly believed in Jesus as a god, then he might think "how could they kill a god?" and would want the silver as he'd expect it to be funny when the Romans couldn't kill him.
What chances are to convince me that those miracles were real if someone that was there and seen them with his eyes had doubts?
I can imagine Judas hearing someone recounting a miracle and he'd be shaking his head and thinking "I was there, that's not what happened at all".
I honestly don't care if 1% or 5% of the text is real anyway.
I have heard a story that Judas didn't actually betray Jesus willingly. It had to happen this way and Judas just played his role. Makes the story more tragic and less black and white.
There's too many alternative explanations to say that either the miracles were false xor the Judas story was false - I don't see that they're necessarily connected.
The assumption here is that people will unconditionally believe and follow a person who performs miracles. But human beliefs and actions are more complex than that. People regularly refuse the evidence of their own senses, or that of knowledgeable authorities, if it contradicts their prior world view. They also regularly act contrary to better knowledge if they think it's in their interest.
So I think it's perfectly plausible that Judas experienced all of Jesus' miracles, but out of a mix of personal disappointment (Jesus not living up to Judas' expectations) and greed decided to betray him nevertheless.
I don't think that does justice to the historical weight of the New Testament accounts. We have multiple eye witness accounts of the events surrounding Jesus' life, recorded within a few decades of the events themselves and emerging from an oral tradition that placed a premium on verifiable accuracy. The early Church writings we have (for example Eusebius) make it clear how concerned the first Christians were to ensure the historical reliability of their teaching, and how strongly they opposed the spreading of stories that were of doubtful veracity. In fact, the New Testament itself repeatedly tells its original readers to verify its accounts by asking other eye witnesses (e.g. Luke 1, 1 Corinthians 15).
e.g. Did Jesus exorcise demons?
As far as I am aware there are no contradictions on the Bible. People often point to the sorts of cases claiming a contradiction, when really it is two authors describing different aspects of a thing that are all simultaneously true.
More apropos would be the accounting of Judas's death: Matthew describes him as hanging himself, whereas Acts says he burst open in a field. However this isn't a contradiction either: it may simply be the case that he hung himself in a field, then over time grew bloated and burst open.
I would consider those miracles to have the most plausible explanations. There's any number of medical conditions that can make a person appear to be dead for days and that's the reason that coffins were sometimes fitted with a bell that could be operated by the "dead body" in case they'd been buried alive after being mistaken for dead.
Blindness can be caused by neurological conditions and presumably be cured by a person encountering someone that they believe to be a representation of their god. The problem is that medical knowledge at that time was limited to say the least, so even assuming that the reports are 100% accurate, there's still a lot of uncertainty as to the conditions that were cured and indeed if they were permanent cures.
Personally, I don't think it likely that we have accurate representations of the miracles described in the bible, so it's somewhat meaningless to dissect the stories that were transmitted orally for centuries before being written down (biblical scholars may be able to show that modern bible descriptions have been changed from the original source documents during translation etc. as well).
The COVID years have inoculated me against that line of thinking (pun intended). If people would deny that the bodies piling up in hospitals are conclusive evidence of something more than "just a flu" then I can totally imagine an individual seeing a miracle and arguing "dunno, maybe he was just a little dead". And I've definitely seen people take money to argue in favor of policies they know to be false, harmful, or both.
(In fact, the Bible's willingness to talk about the weaknesses of its protagonists makes it all the more believable to me. If the early church leaders had "censored" the story to fit their own interests, why did they leave in all that embarrassing stuff about themselves?)
Bad Hooorse
Bad Horse
Bad Horse!
Bad Hooorse!