The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return
ericneyman.wordpress.com
ericneyman.wordpress.com
In the year before the 2020 election, a market opened on predictit called "Will Hillary run for president? Yes/No"
First this was a reasonable market, but quickly it became obvious she wasn't running (because she repeatedly said she wasn't, there was no campaign created at all, absolutely zero indicators she was running because she wasn't). Predictit allowed a comment section where people worked themselves into a frenzy every time some hillary "news" dropped that somehow secretly indicated she was running a phantom campaign. She missed primary registration deadlines - that only made the "Yes" market move up. There were still people hammering Yes up until a few weeks before the actual election and they closed the market.
Anyway it was the same thing. Low % "Yes" and 95+% "No." However, I found an edge holding on to a "baseline" Yes I'd established (1-2%, I can't remember) and just sell the waves of "news" that would spike it to 5+%. Then buy again at the baseline. There were a lot of shenanigans in the comments and people attempting to move the market with various tactics - it was a wild ride and one of my favorite markets I'd ever studied/participated in.
There are probably some true believers in the "Yes" jesus purchasers here but I imagine a lot of what I'm describing here too.
https://nypost.com/2021/05/12/hertz-investors-snag-8-a-share...
The most interesting part of the article IMO was the fact that the 3% probability is artificially high because there is no one willing to take the otherside of the bet, because betting "No" requires you to give your money to the prediction market for 6+ months, and if you're only getting a 1% return if you win the bet, you'll make more money if you put the cash in a high yield savings account.
Seems like prediction/betting markets only really work well when there is a reasonable chance of either outcome occurring, and is less accurate the more obvious one outcome is compared to another?
I'm well aware that people believe that these markets are accurate estimators of probability of events, but I've (as a life long gambler) always viewed it as a measure of people's confidence in an event happening at a particular probability. People are wrong/delusional at scale all the time (think of the mandela effect), it can be the case that large groups of them converge on the right outcome via market forces, but it kind of makes the big assumption every participant is in good faith, rational, and informed.
We can even both-sides this; Hillary fans and people who believe Jesus will come back soon are usually on opposing sides, right?
> [Time Value of Money] The Yes people are betting that, later this year, their counterparties (the No betters) will want cash (to bet on other markets), and so will sell out of their No positions at a higher price.
...
> Has this galaxy-brained trade ever gone well? Yes! In late October of last year — a week before the election — Kamala Harris was trading around 0.3% in safe red states like Kentucky, while Donald Trump was trading around 0.3% in safe blue states like Massachusetts. On election day, these prices skyrocketed to about 1.5%, because “No” bettors desperately needed cash to place other bets on the election. Traders who bought “Yes” for 0.3% in late October and sold at 1.5% on election day made a 5x profit!
one of the core theses of the book is that adherents to a prophecy paradoxically believe in it much more strongly AFTER it's been disproven
A lot of US protestant theology is rooted in a concept called "dispensationalism" that was introduced in the mid 1800s. It's a heady concept to explain, but essentially it comes down to a few linked core concepts:
- The secret, sudden arrival of Jesus to "rapture" believers away
- The world is getting worse, not better. There is limited use in improving society.
- Strict literalist interpretation of all scripture (where convenient, obv)
- An individual's ability to discern scripture as well as the state of the world
- Obsession with Israel as a nation-state
https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/dispe...
By tracking this number, you have a good proxy for the current fervor of a lot of intertwined political concepts in the US.
That sounds like 19th century fire and brimstone revivalism. Most Christians are not that nihilistic. The sects that survive and flourish tend to be those that don't impose a fatalistic view of the world.
So here it could be seen as an excuse to not only exploit existing systems, but also to avoid attempts at fixing them.
So in a way, holders of such fatalistic believes are ironically flourishing
but what I'll push back a bit on is that not all fatalistic convictions result in the death or collapse of the sect holding them, and sometimes it could be the main driver of their success
Fast forward to today, that foreign religion has multiplied (largely due to religious customs) while the local population has dwindled and lost much of its power owing to a political ideology overriding theology.
I see this foreign religion not being compatible with the host country's religion or value system and that many are rallying behind a sort of pan-Western theology to counter the many social issues throughout.
> The resolution source for this market will be a consensus of credible sources.
That is pretty sparse, but I suspect Polymarket has a vested interest in making sure this resolves appropriately (as noted in the article). I do like the use of the guineapig with rizz anyway.
Again, this is in the article! If you want to argue it's a problem, you should start by responding to what the article has to say on the subject, not just asserting it from scratch as if it isn't discussed!
3rd party systems resolve them: https://legacy-docs.polymarket.com/polymarket-+-uma
* Sabbatai Zevi (17th century): One of the most famous false Jewish Messiahs. He gained a massive following across the Jewish world. However, when faced with the Ottoman Sultan's choice between conversion to Islam or death, he converted. This conversion was a devastating blow to his followers and essentially a public "recantation" of his messianic claim, though not necessarily an admission of it being a lie on his part as much as a desperate act to save his life. Many of his followers were deeply disillusioned, while others continued to believe in him even after his conversion, developing complex theological explanations for his actions.
Conversely, if Jesus has not returned, some people can be convinced that he has.
Which brings me to the criteria. What are acceptable criteria? Maybe, "will a plurality of people believe that Jesus has returned in 2025?"
Eschatological cults routinely convince small numbers of followers that the end is coming. Hustlers do this all the time. I've been told personally, directly, that we know the date. It's coming. (The date in question came and went.)
Given the above, could 2025 be the year of Deep Fake Jesus?
Deep Fake Rapture?
It does make one think, at least.
"Take heed that no one deceives you. For many will come in My name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many."
They get the time value of your money.
And it makes the site more interesting. It's free PR.
It would be very surprising if they don't know this and are not taking advantage of the dynamic. It isn't even sketchy, nobody loses any value they didn't choose to lose.
I'd like to know the list of said sources and what consensus means (51%?). Presumably, this question can be asked and answered every minute? hour? so we could have up to the minute coverage of the second coming.
https://quantian.substack.com/p/market-prices-are-not-probab...
While I get your point, it’s critical to recognise that betting 90% on a six being rolled doesn’t make you correct when a six is rolled. You can believe polymarket was truly mispriced even with this outcome
See https://decrypt.co/311634/polymarket-allegations-oracle-mani...
The recent doge tax refund is a good example. If you want to be guaranteed payment you could bet on no even if you think it's a coinflip.
Polymarket propositions purportedly powerless as pure poles for popular predictions?
There is evidence of this everywhere, in nearly every person you meet. Including yourself. If even skeptical atheists act that way, why would the bible-thumpers be different? If they weren't different, how would that be an indictment of their belief?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/374704/share-of-global-p...
Which makes no sense at all. There is an evil conspiracy to kill everyone with a vaccine but then the conspiracists (guess doctors?) just give everyone a fake dose instead.
Rations will not help you or your family if civilization breaks down. Without a literal army, you are no more powerful than the ones who did nothing to prepare. All rations do is ensure that you starve to death a month later than expected.
Even better, those of you that collected guns and ammo as a hobby are about as prepared as the people who jokingly collect bottle caps in reference to Fallout. You have ensured you die first.
If you are not currently capable of planting, tending, and harvesting an entire acre of potatoes every year, you will not survive post civilization. If you do not have a stable of oxen and a simple machine shop to repair the old fashioned steel plow you own, you will not survive. If you do not already have fully formed pest control, without chemical inputs or external solutions, you will not survive.
It took humanity thousands of years to develop agriculture. Farming isn't a game. You will not pick it up after the end of civilization. You will not get it right on the first try. You will not reinvent it while hungry. Even if you get lucky and nothing goes wrong for a few growing seasons, you WILL have a failed crop eventually, and you will starve. Even successful farming is an eventual death sentence without civilization.
People who prep for "after the end" are not serious people. If you had a serious concern about the potential fall of civilization, you would not buy food and bullets, you would be throwing every resource you have at improving democratic representation and access, to prevent civilization from falling.
It might not be possible to restart if we kill it.
Prepping is like trying to develop a backup strategy after the datacenter has already burned down. Even if you are successful, have you really, honestly, considered what success looks like?
I don't see civilization collapsing overnight. I see it playing out as a series of scarce times that ebb and flow. I don't think the supermarket will go away, but I do think there will be times when it looks like those videos of Soviet groceries, where there's not much selection.
And I'm aware that natural disasters are increasing in frequency and cost/impact to a degree that the government won't or can't do anything about them. So I need to be able to weather the storms for a few months at a time.
As an aside, I also prepared by living in a neighborhood where people take care of each other and is close enough I can walk/bike to places.
Basically, I picture the USA collapse as turning the place into Puerto Rico, not Mad Max.
Seems to me we already saw that in 2020.
You learn a surprising amount in that first day. I.e., being stuck without power/internet/cell service/water, and realizing you can't watch DVDs on your laptop because they haven't come with disk drives for years. After the weekend, you end up with a list of issues to address, i.e., you buy a portable dvd drive and put together a Plex server with a bunch of locally-hosted media.
Honestly, I feel more capable and resilient than I ever have before. We had some tornadoes come through and we didn't even need to think about what to do, we went into our safe room which contains our go-bags, hiking food, critical docs, usb backups of key pass, battery backups and some ipads, and we chilled out watching a weather channel and listening to the emergency radio. Had a tornado hit our house, I'm confident we would have survived, been able to help the neighbors, and manage a few days until aid could come.
Depending on where you are, food beyond the rations might be easy or hard. Where I live, we've got seasonal berries, and plenty of wildlife of various sizes. Potatoes grow easily, if you happen to have any to plant. Probably too many people around here to avoid detection though, but a couple hours drive in the right direction and you'd be in a better place for that. Plenty of fresh water if you know where to look; if the surface wells stop running, it'll simply come out of the ground most of the time.
If there's all of a sudden a lot less people, nature's abundance starts becoming more apparent. Indigenous peoples thrived in my area without modern technology. I'll have a damn hard time, but if I can find a peaceful community to join, we can probably make it work.
If you believe in the literal statement about only 144,000 people being saved and in a pre-tribulation rapture, then “the world is done” only applies to a trivially small number of people.
Are you sure you would even notice? Especially not for long.
Supernatural things won't start occurring again for 7 years, and in a fairly slow drip. Unexplained loud trumpets in the sky? Natural disasters that already occur?
This isn't an issue regarding the existence of money and markets. That still functions. Maybe even in more degenerate ways than before, which is super exciting!
Its far more likely that everyone is practicing the wrong path to salvation. Given how much its been retconned just to be appealing and palatable as the religion grew, most differences between sects are arguments about the retcons, while ancestor versions of the religion are ignored and too unattractive to consider.
I see you have not yet been blessed by the gospel of Supply-Side Jesus:
Doesn’t the Bible frown on gambling anyway?
The upside isn't the important part - the downside is. It proves that you really believe what you say.
This happens all the time with countries when they are negotiating. E.g. Russia is pretty unimpressed when countries say they are going to give ukraine weapons unless there is a ceasefire. Its all cheap talk. If one of the countries bought the weapons first (that they otherwise would not of) and then threatens to give them to ukraine, its much more credible since they have sunk money into it.
Or you could look at the animal kingdom with energy expensive mating rituals. The point is to waste resources in order to prove your commitment.
Examples of this sort of thing show up all over the world.
Mark 13:32: But of that day or hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.
Fun example is the old fax pump and dumps. You'd get some 'market prediction' fax for a penny stock that is very clearly just some pump and dump. No one buying thinks it's anything but a P&D. But they buy thinking other people will be tricked and that they'll get out before the suckers do... so sad for the P&D savvy buyers that they are, in fact, the suckers themselves. It was very important to the effectiveness of the scheme that the faxes be both obvious to be a P&D but also not so obvious that their targets couldn't imagine it fooling anyone.
The author though shouldn't underestimate people just spending their funds inefficiently. A lot of people are not really aware that they could just get a risk free return better than they'd get from this thing, and even when they are they've adopted a non-linear utility where they value some unlikely JesusMarket windfall as much more valuable than a (higher EV) bond return.
Humans seem to have a pretty predictable mishandling of extremely small probabilities. A lot of cons work by convincing the mark that there is a small (but real) odds of a windfall return.
This thing shows up in cryptocurrency markets all the time, you can have some token listed on an exchange with no information at all but some symbol/name and random people will plunk thousands of dollars on it.
To some extent there seems to be a kind of wealth brownian motion where your income is proportional to the number of pixels on the internet that, when clicked, cause funds to be transferred to you. Of course, having an actual REASON to pay you is even better, but it's not strictly necessary.
So much, possibly the vast majority, of intellectual energy that goes into prediction markets is not about forecasting. Like the example Eric gives of “This Market Will Resolve No At The End Of 2025”, it's about arbitrage, it's about edge cases, it's about interest rates, it's about resolution disputes, it's about sniping the dumb money faster than others.
Prediction markets are a brilliant way to incentivize accuracy and good research. But you don't see much of that on Polymarket.
my intuition here would be that topics that are more "catnip"-y to "speculators" (which i'd lovingly more accurate call "degenerate gamblers") would be the one with the greatest "time value of money premium", such as it is... and also gets me wondering about how to model this topic preference because it seems like a very cool arbitrage opportunity...
https://aftertherapturepetcare.com/
If anyone want to pay me in advance to take care of their cat after rapture, drop me a line!
I live in the largest Muslim country in the world, and I'd say the majority of people also think that the "commercialization" (for lack of a better term) of their religion is also "too much". It seems people do have a "conscience" (for lack of a better term). But why do we still see people selling God on TV (and it sells)?
It's like people complaining about their government, but they don't take action.
Are you a Muslim? I have a question for you... if I crawled onto your doorstep beaten and starving, would you invite me in and feed you? I am ignorant of Muslim teachings, and I don't know if this sort of things is covered...that's why I'm asking you.
I'm a Christian, and if you crawled onto MY doorstep, I would be ashamed with myself if I did not invite you in and care for you.
If your faith urges you to help the helpless, and my faith urges me to help the helpless... why do Muslims and Christians seem so opposed? If the news is to believe, we're like matter and anti-matter, we can't be friends, and at some point it always devolves to violence from one or both of the sides.
In my opinion, they seem opposed because both religions claim to be the only source of truth and strongly try to spread that belief. It's like TAB vs SPACE, you can't have both in the same file, and ideally not in the same project.
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4 And Jesus answered and said to them, “See to it that no one misleads you. 5 For many will come in My name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and they will mislead many people. 6 And you will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for those things must take place, but that is not yet the end. 7 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. 8 But all these things are merely the beginning of birth pains.
9 “Then they will hand you over to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations because of My name. 10 And at that time many will fall away, and they will betray one another and hate one another. 11 And many false prophets will rise up and mislead many people. 12 And because lawlessness is increased, most people’s love will become cold. 13 But the one who endures to the end is the one who will be saved. 14 This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.
15 “Therefore when you see the abomination of desolation which was spoken of through Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place—let the reader understand— 16 then those who are in Judea must flee to the mountains. 17 Whoever is on the housetop must not go down to get things out of his house. 18 And whoever is in the field must not turn back to get his cloak. 19 But woe to those women who are pregnant, and to those who are nursing babies in those days! 20 Moreover, pray that when you flee, it will not be in the winter, or on a Sabbath. 21 For then there will be a great tribulation, such as has not occurred since the beginning of the world until now, nor ever will again. 22 And if those days had not been cut short, no life would have been saved; but for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short. 23 Then if anyone says to you, ‘Behold, here is the Christ,’ or ‘He is over here,’ do not believe him. 24 For false christs and false prophets will arise and will provide great signs and wonders, so as to mislead, if possible, even the elect. 25 Behold, I have told you in advance. 26 So if they say to you, ‘Behold, He is in the wilderness,’ do not go out; or, ‘Behold, He is in the inner rooms,’ do not believe them. 27 For just as the lightning comes from the east and flashes as far as the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be. 28 Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.
29 “But immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 30 And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory. 31 And He will send forth His angels with a great trumpet blast, and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of the sky to the other.
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Sun darkened. Heavens shaken. Loud trumpet sound. Host arriving. God didn't originate on Earth. Alien. Alien invasion. Re-invasion?
Neat huh? OH! Did you know the Bible also mentions a Dragon, called Leviathan. And zombies: "...they shall seek death and not find it. Death will flee from them..."
His story. Best story ever.
also elsewhere it is stated that jesus will return like a thief in the night. so perhaps he was already here and most people haven't noticed.
The resolution source for this market will be a consensus of credible sources.
At the very least they should name the credible sources in advance, because the bet is on their credulity.
I agree that almost anything I can think of would be more likely some kind of trick. Or in the most extreme examples I'd have to assume there's a good chance I was experiencing some kind of psychosis. So I'm not sure I could actually be convinced either. I suppose if I personally witnessed clearly impossible miracles being performed and multiple people I know and trust corroborated what I was seeing, that might do it.
uma whales currently have a lot of influence on voting results, but I can't imagine that this won't be addressed at some point
I can easily get 3% per year investing in safe bonds, so I expect at least 3% to put money on any 100% safe bet.
I want to be paid for waiting X months
Let's suspend all advertising for Him, for two or three generations.
Will He revive?
> Now as He sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will these things be? And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?” And Jesus answered and said to them: “Take heed that no one deceives you. For many will come in My name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many. And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.
> “Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations for My name’s sake. And then many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another. Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold. But he who endures to the end shall be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come.
Regardless of one's faith, from reading this text it is apparent that things would need to get substantially worse than they are today to warrant the return of Christ. In particular the part about being delivered up to tribulation--similar persecutions have happened in history but the scale necessary for such an event as described would be immense.
0: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2024&ve...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Masih_ad-Dajjal
"The Dajjal will imitate the miracles performed by Jesus, such as healing the sick and raising the dead, the latter done with the aid of demons. He will deceive many <...>"
As for the time of events, I find this the most compelling:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrological_age
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Year
Earth's polar axis slowly rotates, with a period of 26,000 years. This period is divided into 12 ages: the age of Aries, Pisces, Aquarius and so on. A lot of christian symbology revolves around sheep and fish. Symbolically speaking, 2000 years ago, Aries died to begin the age of Pisces. Similarly, in around 2150, Pisces will yield to Aquarius.
It's also interesting that the age of Aries is considered the last age of the 12, after which the next great cycle begins (see Pistis Sophia). Whether this has astronomical foundation is a question.
It sounds like the author is saying the belief is ridiculous in general. However, if Jesus returns, then the believers would ascend to heaven. So, they would not be able to cash out.
What if polymarket put in the money to drive people to vote on the no side? It could be quite a marketing stunt.
Jesus was understood as the incarnation of the logos (often translated as “word” but with a much deeper meeting). The logos was the emanation of the pure ineffable oneness — ie, logos is the “son” of god (the oneness). These ideas were worked out by the Jewish-platonic philosopher Philo of Alexandria (b. 50 BCE) and directly influenced early Christianity. The message of Jesus was that we are all part of the logos — and if we believe that, we have eternal life (since the logos is eternal).
Since the logos doesn’t die, it’s hard to say how it returns. But you know, I’m probably over thinking this prediction market
Well, you know, if Jesus were to materialize, I think he would probably confiscate all of the winnings, because:
>* “It is written,” he said to them, “’My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’”*
Matthew 21:13
I'm not even religious and I know that he despised usury and gambling.
And here we are - people bet on his return.
This is quite true. Taking away just the moral teachings is not true belief. Revelations is serious business stuff, the apostles watched Christ ascend from Mount Olive, it’s extremely trippy things. True believers are literally believing in wild shit. In fact, if you are true believer, you almost need to keep it hidden because it’s going to come off as mentally ill.
With that said, I somehow can’t seem to deny it anymore because reality is just not explainable. Reality is the most ridiculous explanation for why the Big Bang happened and we’re all just here in a perfect little globe. This “real” explanation is so batshit that the supernatural explanation is more sound - at least to me.
The closest science has gotten was to actually corroborate that, yes, this was all not infinite and had a starting point (big bang), literally corroborated let there be light. The quantum stuff just gets even more supernatural. Maybe I’m going mentally ill, but I tend to take the supernatural stuff quite seriously now.
Purpose and hope, even if the answer is utterly magical.
I do wish Craig had reframed from the personal shots he takes at various atheist/agnostic writers (which clearly cross into ad hominem at many points) but he is by far the most interesting defender of faith out there (IMHO). In his defense I think he was playing along with the at times very incendiary approach taken by Dawkin's and many other "new atheists" so it's not like he started the brawl :-). I think he's way too confident in Anselm's Ontological argument, but he has clearly studied it a whole lot more than me so I don't hold a strong conviction there.
It’s certainly possible that there is a purpose, but I think it’s more likely that we simply happened to evolve the way we did.
In a vacuum, wars are meaningless. It’s simply humans fighting other humans (and the ones on the front lines might not even want to be there).
That's a huge leap that speaks to your own perspective. It's not some sort of objective fact. That there is no purpose and we are still here is in fact quite beautiful and amazing.
Your entire premise is just completely made up.
You're not even expressing a leap of faith. It's a leap of cynicism that speaks to your world view, not your faith. Faith is not predicated upon a belief that there is no purpose to which otherwise faith supplies. You're just basically playing word salad at this point. And I don't mean that to suggest religious beliefs or faith is word salad. Just what you have offered here in this brief conversation.
There is no objective morality, because morality is a human invention. It's important for that exact reason that we make it very good then.
Love strangers. Eradicate poverty. Encourage personal growth. Build society up. Reduce suffering. Stop bullies. Understand.
I actually find a lot of comfort in the Mark Twain quote after he was asked by a reporter whether he fears death given his lack of belief in God:
> “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” --Mark Twain
The safest assumption to make, if you absolutely have to make an assumption at all, is that this reality is pretty average. With no knowledge whatsoever, it's certainly safer than betting it is somehow exotic.
Pretty much every religious person believes that THEIR understanding is the correct one. You cant objectively say that "this is the correct understanding" from a religous perspective (you can however do it from a for example a historical or textual analysis perspective).
You cant objectively prove that only mormons or bapists have "understood" the bible correct and everyone else are false believers.
what if jesus already returned? then the true believers would only be those that have recognized his return. there are people who did make that claim. that's who i would investigate.
That's absolutely not true. First of all, there was an enormous crowd of people: 600,000 families--millions of people--who received the revelation on Mt. Sinai. And secondly, G-d offered the Torah to all the peoples of the world. (https://www.sefaria.org/Sifrei_Devarim.343.2?lang=bi)
It's a fundamental principle of Judaism that all righteous people will be in the world to come, unlike Christianity.
All that being said, I will not be wagering that "Jesus" will come again.
It's true that it was very regional, within the reach of a group of people's ability to communicate.
> And secondly, G-d offered the Torah to all the peoples of the world.
Did he? Did all the other cultures of the world about that time simply not answer the door?
You're assuming too much about the motivations. I do not see what the issue is with a "very human scale" for messaging. That's...how you communicate with humans.
People now know about god, but they wouldn't have 3,000 years ago. And it's only one particular culture that was being communicated with, or did the Chinese and Native Americans just ignore him when tried to message them?
> I do not see what the issue is with a "very human scale" for messaging. That's...how you communicate with humans.
It's because its messaging seems to have originated from a very small and region specific group of people, instead of, you know, being communicated across the world.
In any case, it was definitely communicated across the world. If you're picking a specific point in time when first contact was established according to a specific tradition, that might raise a question of why first contract there and in that way. But we in 2025 have the hindsight of seeing what happened globally after that and spread it did.
I don't think it is a coincidence that specific groups of people received revelation the way they did, when considering things like the quality of their oral and scribed history. Would you pick a region of people who don't know how to write and barely know how to talk, or a region of people who are highly skilled in both?
What do you mean? Did the non-Judeo-Christian faiths know about him or not? What was their relationship to it?
> But we in 2025 have the hindsight of seeing what happened globally after that and spread it did.
Sure, it only took thousands of years and a co-opting of the original message by an apocalyptic Galilean preacher changing the message and constant re-envisioning through history. And if the end game is half people in the world still not believing (if we generously assume that both Christianity and Islam are equal and valid in the eyes of the Hewbrew god), I guess mission accomplished.
> I don't think it is a coincidence that specific groups of people received revelation the way they did, when considering things like the quality of their oral and written history. Would you pick a region of people who don't know how to write and barely know how to talk, or a region of people who are highly skilled in both?
But in the case of a place like China, writing was definitely in the cards. Ancient Babylon had writing long before that as well, so that's not a good reason.
Right. Why would the omnipotent creator of the universe communicate the same way I do?
Faith is a concept, like so many other concepts. It is a unique creation that has properties, one of them is that it’s not meant to be provable that easily.
> When Michael Jackson does a concert, it’s really only in a few locations. It’s up to the world to spread it.
In this example, what is up to the world to spread for Michael Jackson? Is god a singular entity with a specific location? I'm sure Michael would have happily shown up in every place on earth if he could have sold tickets.
If ever there were a post-hoc rationalization, this is it.
It's funny how the faithful are generally happy to use any evidence that they think supports the faith, but once it gets too difficult then suddenly it's not supposed to have too much evidence for it.
Israel’s creation story gets every step in the right order.
How?
Faith was a gift to help.
In terms of Christ, let me put it this way. Imagine your high school, and one day the President of the US visits. You may not directly see him, but the whole school would know about it, even if he was just there for 5 minutes. It’s a matter of faith, and it’s the little bit you need to help with the gift of free will.
The very first story (well second story) in the main monotheistic books was the Eden Story. That story is all about how vulnerable we are with the choice of free will. Empirically, we have seen the failure of it over and over throughout human history (systemically you can easily see it). So, yes, I fully believe in the fallen nature of man, not because we are evil, but because what a gift and responsibility free will actually is.
I think this hypothesis is flawed.
I think most people in society strive to do right, and therefore most of us are able to live in relative peace and with relative trust in our fellow members of society.
There are some people who do wrong, but we’ve set up our society to strive to detect this and punish those (albeit using imperfect systems and knowledge, leading to false positives and negatives).
Therefore, I think religions are an encoding of human morality, not the other way around.
So how many times would you push it? Such is our character that asking how many times you'd push it is far more interesting than asking if you'd push it. And asking how many times you'd push it also gets rid of the marginal utility argument, and just to the dirty self centered core of humanity.
People without any static set of values will trend towards doing whatever they want and then justifying it afterwards. There will undoubtedly be a guy who pushes it thousands of times, and then donates a fraction of it to charity, convincing himself that he's actually saved lives on net. That is humanity in a nutshell.
Is that a royal "Our"? I don't think you are speaking for anyone but yourself. People like Trump, MSB and Netanyahu aren't normal. They tend to abuse religion as a justification for their actions rather than spititual inspiration.
In that scenario pushing the button seems like the right thing to do. If you don't, that person might lose their faith later and end up in hell, and it would be your fault. What is the worth of a soul? My understanding is it's infinite. If not infinite, certainly it must be worth more than a measly cool million.
Have you read the Bible? Jesus would disagree with this take very hard. Or do you have any support for this moral argument from any of the apostles?
> Jesus would disagree with this take very hard.
Citation needed for that. This is something hotly debated among all sorts of Christians so I don't claim to have a solid answer, but perseonally I think the Bible is repeatedly pretty clear that you can lose it[1].
I used to be a strong believer, but no longer am. Out of curiosity, do you think I'm going to Hell or am I still all set for (eternal) life because of my past faith?
[1]: https://www.biblestudyguide.org/articles/salvation/salvation...
I think that most people with a moral compass would either take this approach, or would not press the button at all.
I think your second paragraph is misguided and reveals an overly pessimistic view of the nature of humanity. (Such is the nature of cynics: they always think everyone else is just as cynical as they are.)
> People without any static set of values will trend towards doing whatever they want and then justifying it afterwards.
Religious people aren’t immune from that, and conversely, it’s not necessary to be religious to have moral values.
edit: I thought about this some more. I think that the button problem is equivalent to the trolley problem (provided you can save >1 life with $1 million, as above).
This is the heart of where the saying that power corrupts comes from. It's not that power corrupts but that these sort of decisions are ones that will never be available to anybody without power. Yet for those with power it's not that far away from many practical scenarios. In other words, we start corrupt, but our impotence mitigates the relevance of that. Power just reveals our character.
And no, religious people are obviously not immune from this, but with a fixed set of values rationalization becomes far more farcical than without. The Bible's position on homicide, let alone for personal gain, is unambiguous. A person without any set of fixed values, by contrast, will have no problem justifying and rationalizing even the most egregious acts, so long as the reward is seen as desirable enough.
---
To respond to your edit, consider that you're basically doing a version of the trolley problem where you have the choice to redirect the track from killing one person, to killing two, but you get a million bucks for doing so. And you're now arguing that this is the utilitarian choice. It's plainly a false rationalization, but we can so easily convince ourselves that it's reasonable. Our extreme strength at rationalization is humanity's biggest moral and ethical failing. [1]
No, this is definitely not right.
Consider first the non-repeated case. There are two possibilities:
1. You do not press the button. Nothing changes about the world.
2. You press the button and donate $1 million to a humanitarian organization. A random person dies, but the humanitarian organization uses the money to save an average of 5 others.
Option 1 is like not pulling the lever, thereby letting the trolley run over 5 people. Option 2 is like pulling the lever, thereby saving 5 people, but letting the trolley run over another.
(From this, the repeated case trivially follows.)
However, as you allude to, the button problem has a third option: press the button and keep the $1 million. This is so cartoonishly diabolical that only a sociopath would do it. If this was how most people acted, nobody would ever help anybody else, we would all be looking for opportunities to stab each other in the back, and we would most likely not even have developed such a nebulous concept as ‘morality’.
This is what I alluded to with my remark about cynics: the cynic is negative, and therefore, thinks that everyone else is negative too. However, this reveals more about the cynic than it does about humanity (at least, I hope so; I am an optimist who likes to have faith in humanity).
> And no, religious people are obviously not immune from this, but with a fixed set of values rationalization becomes far more farcical than without. The Bible's position on homicide, let alone for personal gain, is unambiguous. A person without any set of fixed values, by contrast, will have no problem justifying and rationalizing even the most egregious acts, so long as the reward is seen as desirable enough.
Many, many wars were and are fought for religious reasons. The Christian Church itself has famously fought multiple religious wars (IIUC, so has the Islamic prophet). Considering this, I really don’t think religion gets to take the high ground when it comes to ‘having fixed values’.
And what you're doing is what humanity naturally does. The people we view as awful in history certainly acknowledged they're doing some awful things in the present, but rationalized it by imagining the utopia that it will bring in. In their minds not only were they behaving ethically, but they were practically a martyr fit for Sainthood, as they are taking the burden, the stain, of such actions upon themselves, only to help an unimaginable number of people in the future. Really it was just charity at unimaginable cost to themselves.
Of course that utopia of the future never comes to pass, but the horrible things they do in the present always do. Such is the nature of humanity that we'll always find a reason to press the button. It's not about 'good' or 'evil' or anything of the sort. Rationalization enables a good person to do the most evil of things, and feel fine about it.
I think the only way to combat this issue is with static values. That can take many forms ranging from religion to a distinct and well defined personal philosophy. But I think anybody lacking such a structured system (from whatever source) will always succumb to rationalization.
Would you steer the trolley to the track with one man on it? If yes, and you believe you could save more than one person with $1 million, then you would also press the button!
> And what you're doing is neither novel nor surprising. This is the exact rationalization most of every person we now view in history as awful also used. They acknowledge they're doing some awful things in the present, but rationalize it by imagining the utopia that it will bring in.
This is also true for the trolley problem! He who pulls the lever does an awful thing (kills one man) in the pursuit of some benefit to society (saving five others).
(The ethics of the trolley problem itself have been discussed at length, so I don’t think we need to repeat those arguments here.)
And again, many religious wars have been and are fought! Religious leaders haven’t theoretically killed people in the pursuit of utopia, they have literally, actually done that!
After all: that’s the subject of our discussion: not whether people are moral, but whether religious people are more moral than the baseline.
Keep in mind that the obvious exceptions like South America = high religiosity + high criminality or Scandiland = low religiosity + low criminality, are group/macro level issues and not individual. Very small numbers of highly sociopathic individuals or groups can have an extreme effect on overall stats. For example the homicide rate for St. Louis is higher than for any country in the world, yet obviously the percent of people of homicidal tendency in St. Louis is negligible. Macro level stats and individual level tendencies are very different things.
[1] - https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/41333/chapter/3523552...
also the existence of exceptions doesn't negate that the rest of us have that choice.
Much like how religion posits a soul, you are positing free will despise observing that rocks always fall in accordance with the laws of physics and we have yet to determine any normal way of altering the course of chemistry one jot or tiddle(in fact we build our edifices on these observations, so confident are we). You yourself suggest that the input of "revealed God" removes human free will to disbelieve. In other words, God can't(or didn't for whatever reason) create a human that can experience God without disbelief. Anyway long and short of it, just because you believe in free will doesn't mean it exists, either in your belief structure or in actuality, and Calvinists reject your hypothesis outright.
as for calvinism, how is that relevant? the existence if some faction believing something that contradicts the belief of others has no bearing on that belief other than that it may raise some questions that are worth investigating. my brief look at that leads me to the conclusion that their view of free will makes no sense to me.
This is not my field at all so don't take my word for any of it, but I highly recommend people interested in this read or watch Robert Sapolsky's work. His books "Behave" and "Determined" are utterly fascinating and get very, very deep into this in a way that is challenging but understandable for a non-Neurologist.
> you are positing free will despise observing that rocks always fall in accordance with the laws of physics and we have yet to determine any normal way of altering the course of chemistry one jot or tiddle(in fact we build our edifices on these observations, so confident are we)
Physics (quantum physics specificly) posits a non-deterministic universe.
However even with a deterministic universe, i don't see how it neccesatates removing free will. Perhaps you (your soul or whatever) can choose whatever you want to, you just always have to make the same choice given the same input. Maybe you dont literally have free will in what you immediately do, but you have free will in defining what type of person you are, which informs what you will do in response to some input.
[Im an atheist if that matters]
So no, try again, because that argument is silly.
i didn't make such a claim. the existence of god has nothing to do with free will. he either exists, or he doesn't. your or my belief in the existence of god however is governed by the freedom to either believe or reject his existence. if god exists then rejecting him does not make him go away, nor does believing in god make him appear if there is no god.
my argument was that free will is the reason why god did not reveal himself in a way that everyone would immediately recognize him without a doubt. it was not an argument about his existence.
well of course, the bible acknowledges that too:
For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. Romans 1:20 ESV
that's the point of freedom. if we didn't have the freedom to deny god then we would all be devout believers.
> the failure of Christendom to reach its prophesized conclusion
which conclusion is that? maybe that prophecy has not yet come to pass?
> You are making an argument that does not exist in any scripture
the bible is full of quotes of god or jesus calling the people to believe while leaving them the choice not to: i did not study the bible, so this is just the result of an online search, and the quotes are without context:
And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Joshua 24:15 ESV
The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. 1 Corinthians 2:14 ESV
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16 ESV
Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed Romans 13:2 ESV
The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price. Revelation 22:17 ESV
“Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. Isaiah 55:6-7 ESV
But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, John 1:12 ESV
And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. Hebrews 11:6 ESV
“See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you today, and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside from the way that I am commanding you today, to go after other gods that you have not known. Deuteronomy 11:26-28 ESV
the quran is more clear, but again, just a search for quotes without context:
“the Truth [has come] from your Sustainer: let, then, him who wills, believe in it, and let him who wills, reject it.”[Sura Al-Kehf, verse 29.]; [This is] the truth from your Lord: let anyone who wishes believe it, and let anyone who wishes disbelieve it. Whoever please, i.e. with his free will, believe and whoever please disbelieve (18:29)
“Verily, We have shown him the Way: whether he be grateful or ungrateful (rests on his will)”[Sura Al-Mursalat, verse 3]. Indeed We have guided him to the way, be he grateful or ungrateful. (76:3)
“Allah does not change the condition of a people until they bring about a change in their inner-selves (anfus: psyche)”[Sura Ar-Rad, verse 11]. Indeed Allah does not change a people's lot, unless they change what is in their souls. (13:11)
“Allah would never change the blessings with which He has graced a people unless they change their inner-selves”[Sura Al-Anfal, verse 53]
from bahai faith, there are a few people talking about free will, but these are the only direct quotes i found:
There is, unfortunately, no way that one can force his own good upon a man. The element of free will is there, and all we believers -- and even the Manifestation of God Himself -- can do is to offer the truth to mankind. If the people of the world persist, as they seem to be doing, in their blind materialism, they must bear the consequences in a prolongation of their present condition, and even a worsening of it. Shoghi Effendi, Lights of Guidance, p. 113
Thus doth the Nightingale utter His call unto you from this prison. He hath but to deliver this clear message. Whosoever desireth, let him turn aside from this counsel and whosoever desireth let him choose the path to his Lord. Baha'u'llah, Tablet of Ahmad
O SON OF MAN! If thou lovest Me, turn away from thyself; and if thou seekest My pleasure, regard not thine own; that thou mayest die in Me and I may eternally live in thee. Baha'u'llah, Hidden Words, Arabic #7
My question would be: If the Bible was written by an omniscient and all-powerful God, then why does it have so many inaccuracies in it? Easy ones include a global flood that killed every animal on Earth. (Except for the two of each animal on Noah's ark, which would have overheated with so many animals in it, if it hadn't collapsed under its own weight first.)
But there are also internal contradictions between the four gospels of the New Testament. Why would God make his own books inaccurate? To me, that indicates they are not the product of divine inspiration but the written accounts of oral histories.
Your response may be that God introduced these errors into his holy books to test our faith. But at that point, isn't the answer to every contradiction and inaccuracy just, "To test our faith"? Is there literally anything that would change your mind, or is your faith just being tested even harder?
This would be a very good gotcha for a religion that believed the Bible was written by God (or at least dictated verbatim) and that it was intended to be a purely literal factual account, neither of which are majority positions within Christian theology (Fundamentalism, in which close approximations of both are important defining beliefs, being a relatively new movement within Protestantism and not the mainstream of Christianity.)
Fair enough! But if God is all powerful and all knowing, he decided to make the bible incorrect. Why would he do that?
1. Physical reality (e.g. how many years has earth existed)
2. Metaphysical reality (is there a creator? If so is your "soul" or life in any way relevant to them?)
3. Moral reality (Is killing other humans in cold blood justified by scripture? Are there such a thing as "Good" and "Evil"?)
4. Cultural reality (What do the people who raised you and otherwise influence you believe, local traditions and stories, scripture)
5. What feels intuitive for an individual to realize ("As above, so below", the unit of self, comparing Christ with POTUS, "the fall of man")
Assuming your local space-time intepretation gets it all right (and everyone with different understanding got and gets it wrong) and that all of these by necessity align is some next-level hubris...
2) I can grant you he might have just been a harmless mentally ill person.
3) You must now grant me that we crucified someone for that.
4) The above is evil. There is your proof. If you need more, you can check out Nazism.
5) This mentally ill person was pretty adamant about the nature of sin.
6) At the very least , it’s worth considering if he might have been right about a few things.
7) At the very least, one should be slightly freaked out that he actually existed and most likely died due the very reasons he suggested - that something is utterly wrong with humans.
8) I’d let the whole true date of physical reality go. We literally reinvented time after he died. I won’t hold the Old Testament to the test of carbon dating, and reconsider that those books told us all the nature of how things began (from a big explosion).
9) And then we find the miraculous Dead Sea Scrolls proving that those books were not altered through the course of time.
10) The books say your soul is quite important. Christ was also one of the first to suggest your morality is from within (the thing atheist often suggest).
11) I’d finally suggest the following about science:
Imagine I take a shit in a toilet. Imagine you are a brilliant scientist that sits around and figures out every measurement of how the shit moves around the toilet, down to the physics, down to the chemical composition of the shit. You would have figured out the physics of the universe of your toilet, but you will never ever know that I took the shit because I ate a lot of Taco Bell.
12) Hubris would be thinking our constant measuring (science) proves anything about our purpose.
13) Given the above hypothetical, it would be humble to accept the fear of god scripture puts into us, since we would have never even come close to figuring out our purpose via science (finding the true nature of God’s Taco Bell order) without these goofy books.
14) Last but not least:
If the Big Bang was the moment of creation, you can believe one of two things:
A) Something caused it
B) Space was a vacuum and something came from nothing.
If you believe A (You believe in God), our very existence is contingent on the sequence, A lead to B, then to C, and so on, so the entire chain of us talking here was deliberate (plus or minus all the free will decisions of humans, mostly a rounding error in the grand scheme).
15) And my personal favorite, everyone one of our births was a miracle given how sexual reproduction works (we all beat a million other possibilities). Faith is not hard when you truly see just how insane the odds are for so many things. Therefore, I’m quite open to the ridiculousness of the Galileans story. Another way to put it is, I am in awe of God.
The same could be said for the "prophets" of any major religion. Muhammadﷻ (SWT) arguably went into a state of psychosis after the premature deaths of both of his sons. Joseph Smith, a local drunk in a small western NY town, said a magical rock in a hat that only he could see told him the garden of Eden was in St. Louis and that the native Americans weren't native Americans, but rather, the real original Israelites.
3) You must now grant me that we crucified someone for that.
Sure.
4) The above is evil. There is your proof. If you need more, you can check out Nazism.
Sure. However, some pretty fucked up stuff has been done in the names of God, Jesus, Allah, Muhammadﷻ (SWT), Israel, Buddha, and so on. Doesn't justify anything.
5) This mentally ill person was pretty adamant about the nature of sin.
So was MLK Jr. He got shot.
6) At the very least , it’s worth considering if he might have been right about a few things.
Sure. Which is why his message is also a cornerstone of Islam.
7) At the very least, one should be slightly freaked out that he actually existed and most likely died due the very reasons he suggested - that something is utterly wrong with humans.
It actually gives me reason to reject religion as a whole. If God made man in his own image, and man treats his fellow man with disdain, hatred, violence, etc, what does that say about God? If God was so perfect, why would he create beings that have free will to destroy the life of another? Paradoxical at best, a fallacy at worst.
That is the ultimate intellectual question. But pay attention to the key word, intellectual. You cannot get spiritual answers from an intellectual question. That's what makes faith rather hard at times and often requires meditation.
It actually gives me reason to reject religion as a whole.
Christ, allegedly, died due to the pride of religion. He was very much on a mission to call out the pride, power and arrogance of organized religion. Again, the answers are simply not available in the intellectual domain and must be sought in the spiritual domain.
I'm not even a member of a Church as I mostly do my reading on my own and do my own reflection. I think one of the main things God tries to hammer home is that we are to all have an eternal life in the after-life (which is mercy, because he could just erase us). If eternity is what is at stake, it is probably in our interest to cleanse our soul of whatever makes us shitty humans, lest we enter eternity tainted and unreformed, for a soul like that will be shitty for all eternity.
Faith. Key word, faith. There is no reason for faith, because you're placing faith and (fleeting) hope that some dude in a desert a few thousand years ago found the ultimate way to interact with (his understanding of) humanity's creator, if we even have one. What makes you so 1000000% sure that this guy's understanding of the supernatural is correct? You're assuming that there actually is some omnipresent being that manifested existence, and that same being actually divinely created humanity on purpose, and not only that, gave humanity free will, and not only that, also simultaneously loves and hates you, and will condemn you to eternal hellfire if you don't worship him enough. Oh yeah, according to some, he's got a son too, born of humanity but with magical powers.
Faith. Come on.
Like any other product, someone invented it first, and others followed/copied. Over thousands of years, religions evolved separately, but you can still find traces of a shared origin running through them all.
It ought to be telling that all the woo woo comes from people who don't know anything.
Georges Lemaître, one of the original articulators of the Big Bang was a Catholic priest. He did not appreciate Pope Pius XII characterizing his research as confirming "let there be light." There are many references to criticism he received for publishing a theory that meshed well with "let there be light," however I am not able to find any primary sources for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre#Views_on...
Light is an electromagnetic field that permeates everything in and through. Without the field first there are no photons, there is no physics, no gravity.
God claimed to be this force. In all. Through all. Nothing could exist without it.
How would a primitive people know this, understand this? They could not. We certainly can.
Even agreeing on what a "True Believer" is would be impossible but, from what I have read of the bible and know from 18+ years in the church I agree. As I child I got in trouble a few times for suggesting we take the concepts in the bible to their logical end. Things like:
- If we really believe all these people will burn in hell then why aren't we all becoming missionaries?
Then when I learned about "age of accountability" [0] I had 2 questions:
- If there is no age set on the age of accountability (to account for people living in remote areas who never heard the word of god) then isn't being a missionary and going to those places damning some percentage of them to hell if they don't accept jesus as their lord and savior? Aren't you making it worse? Even if you are able to "save" 60% you've damned the other 40% when before you visiting 100% would never have met the "age of accountability" due to never hearing about jesus?
and the much more horrifying question (note: I was 6 or 7 at the time)
- If the the age of accountability is real, and if our time on earth is truly inconsequential compared to eternity in heaven then (AGAIN: I was a child, I want just following logical chains), isn't the best option to kill everyone before that age so they will live for eternity in heaven?
Needless to say none of these questions were appreciated and all of them resulted in anger from the adults I mentioned it to. It taught me from a very young age how to lie or obscure what I thought/believed since voicing it or even asking innocent questions got me in trouble for reasons I could not understand. Perhaps there are logical flaws in my questions that a biblical scholar could point out but all I got was the fury of people too invested in a myth to question it.
[0] Concept that if you are younger than it and you die without being "saved" then you will still go to heaven because, essentially, you didn't know any better. There is no age defined since people reach that state at different ages and, IIRC, it even accounts for people who never hear the word of god and thus don't have an opportunity to be saved.
"If we really believe all these people will burn in hell then why aren't we all becoming missionaries?"
Every Christian should seek to "become a missionary" in the sense that they should be a positive example and "practice what they preach" while being ready to share honestly about the Christian faith if appropriate/if asked. This is a standard we should hold ourselves to with the help of God.
Early Christians did employ this level of urgency for evangelization, and (according to tradition) the original 12 themselves went as far as Spain and India (without the aid of modern transportation methods, of course). Christian churches spread as far as China, but later suffered persecution and much of the rest of the known world had to wait until the colonial era before Christian missionaries arrived in significant numbers again. Outside of specific uncontacted tribes (and I think a guy just got killed trying to evangelize one of them), I do not know if there are currently populations to which the gospel has not been preached. Translation of Christian writing and good works are the correct method of evangelization at this point, and this work should be supported materially and with prayer.
As for the question of "the fate of the unlearned", there have been a variety of answers (or, more accurately, methods of approaching this question) which have included "they're screwed", "God judges them according to their heart", "God sends them the gospel via miraculous means", "Those who live according to the Logos are Christians but not aware of it", to the more modern "they may receive salvation through Christ through their faith in God as they know him" (other religions). It is important to note that from the perspective of Christian cosmology, (falling in Eden), God would be wholly justified in smiting us down into hell, and has no obligation to have done any of the things he has for us.
"Then when I learned about "age of accountability" [0] I had 2 questions"
You were right to consider the difficulties with this position as it (as expressed in your footnote) is not a historic Christian belief, but a retroactive justification for groups who deny infant baptism.
If we adjust the question to "why don't we kill all infants after they're baptized if they will just go to heaven", the answer is because it is expressly forbidden by God in his prohibition on murder. On a similar note, suicide is expressly forbidden because it is a rejection of the role on earth you have been called to play, whereas giving up your life for the sake of another, or for the sake of the Gospel, is an ideal because it is in the service of others, which is the fundamental role Christians are ordered to fill.
I hope this helps. May God bless you and reveal his truth in your life.
I have the same question/concern as GP (and have never seen another express that, so that's cool!) and have never gotten a great answer. I (truly) appreciate you engaging on this. It's very difficult because most people get so highly offended at the premise that they aren't able to address it (and I don't blame them as it is quite a horrifying thing to think about, even just as a thought experiment).
Yes I agree that murder is wrong, but wouldn't it be an incredibly selfless act to sacrifice your own salvation so that countless others could be saved? I.e. if I had two kids (or 10 kids, or whatever), I can only go to hell once but I could "guarantee" salvation for all of them if I'm just willing to kill them. Wouldn't the best gift I could give them be eternal life with Christ?
Going even further, Jesus (by most accounts) allowed himself to be killed when he easily had the power to stop it, which seems to me to be only a stone's throw away from suicide. He did it to save all of us from our sins. Isn't that basically the same thing?
A fundamental tenant of Christianity is that it is not permissible to take an "intrinsically evil" action even if it is for a good or selfless purpose. Another is that every attempt to "game the system" (for lack of a better term) is also sinful. If our ultimate goal was to "maximize entrance of other souls to heaven" and we considered ourselves to be equal in ability to God, this might be an avenue of investigation, but if our goal is to "submit to Christ our Lord" it is the slaughter of innocents resulting from our attempt to play God.
We understand religious truth as God has revealed it to us, but because of the disparity in knowledge between humanity and an all knowing being, I have the feeling (but no proof) that we'd not be able to "pull of a heist" like this. I don't know if or by what mechanism God might choose to subvert the attempt. I'm thankful that you're speaking purely hypothetically. It is my estimation that if you have faith you would not do it because it is impermissible and evil, and if you do not have faith you would not do it because you wouldn't believe it to be effective.
I also question if a person legitimately believing they would be endlessly tormented beyond anything they can conceptualize could truly chose this. Even if they could, I would imagine they'd rescind after a second of hell (not that they'd have the option). It's nice to say (as the other response did) that we'd suffer anything for our children, but if I strip away my pride and look at myself in the mirror and am honest with myself and consider the reality of what eternity means, I don't think I could do it, even though I do truly believe I'd give up my life to save their's. It's possible that I'm a coward, or it's possible that I'm able to be more honest with myself about the question. I entrust their eternal well-being to God's mercy (as I understand them to already be a Christian through Baptism) without damning myself.
It's a somewhat similar issue of authority when it comes to the crucifixion. God, being all knowing and having all authority, is able to undertake such a mission. We are able to take similar actions (jumping on a grenade to save our friends, for example), but they are temporal actions with largely temporal results. To attempt to enter the "spiritual realm" and generate "spiritual results" other than in ways which have been provided to us by God, are in obedience to him, and are facilitated (not the best word but I can't find a better one) by the Holy Spirit (also God ofc) functionally amounts to, well, "witchcraft".
As a parent, I would go to hell to keep my children out of it. Therefore the logical thing to do would be to kill my children and ensure their salvation. While I burn in eternal torment, I can hold onto the slight bit of comfort that I will never see my children burning next to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1RqTP5Unr4
The true believers in Christianity have to know, their world view is hinged on knowing that there is a god, that the world was created in 7 days, and that the earth is only 6,000 years old, among many other questionable religious beliefs. They're wrong about all of it (IMHO as someone who grew up Catholic), but at least in their own minds, they know. And that's good enough for them, they don't have to ask any more questions because a book written by kings told them so.
Dogma was a great/funny film.
Looking at the Ophanim link and related pictures reminded me of Contact(1997), not great+boring imo, but your comment reminded me of the wheel thing in the movie, and now I wonder if it was something intended (being a heavenly chariot and all) I could have easily missed it — or if that is just a coincidence
"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven"
There's a theory that the eye of the needle was a narrow gate in Jerusalem's city wall that was notoriously hard for camels to squeeze through. But seems the hard evidence for that is limited.
This is a very debunked myth, brought to you by people who are desperate to avoid Christianity's clear proscription on hoarding wealth.
King James has entered the chat.
Henry VIII has entered the chat.
Many don’t pay attention to the fuller context.
And Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly, I say to you, only with difficulty will a rich person enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished, saying, “Who then can be saved?” But Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
Experience confirms this. Look at the aspirations of the poor in our societies. They are often vulgar, base, and materialistic.
So if you're wealthy and poor people exist, you're in a state of sin. Christianity is an apocalyptic religion, you're to assume the world could end tomorrow so your instructions aren't to simply not want the money, it's to get rid of it and donate it all to charity immediately.
> But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions. [Then follows the camel and the needle.]
The rich man fails the test because he is unable to give up his wealth; his heart is not in the right place. He loves the world and he loves his riches more than he loves God. It is entirely possible to have your heart in the right place and be rich, as demonstrated by several other examples.
Another example is in Acts, where Peter kills a man and his wife because they lie about how much money they're giving - they were perfectly free, and would have been saved, even had they withheld their money from the commons. Paul also says there are not many rich men that are Christians - but there are some.
The attitude that "ahah, you didn't give your money to the poor, so you're not a REAL Christian doing what you're supposed to do" is put into the mouth of a figure in the Bible. That figure is Judas.
> Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.
> 4Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, which should betray him,
> 5Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?
Jesus, and the other apostles, are not saying that you can't be rich. They're saying you cannot love money more than God, and even trusting in money is ultimately a foolish endeavor because your life and prosperity are in God's hands.
If you are snidely arguing that people aren't Christians or following God simply because they haven't given all their money to the poor, you are falling into the same error as Judas, and the same general category of error as the Pharisees.
It's almost as if the Bible has different authors with different audiences and different aims in their writing, all of whom had no idea or plan for their writing to be codified into a single text by third parties who in turn had their own audience and goals.
Luke and Acts internally claim to be written by the same author, and modern scholarship agrees they were written by the same author.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke%E2%80%93Acts
> The view that they were written by the same person is virtually unanimous among scholars.
So no, "well, it's because the Bible was written by different people" doesn't get you out of this one.
It doesn't say pay your taxes as long as there is no waste. Or the government spends the money wisely. It just says pay.
Doesn't say obey kings/rulers/masters if they treat you well. Or you voted for them. Or you agree with their policies. It just says obey.
All of which is very much the opposite of Evangelical Christianity in the modern USA - much of it is completely corrupted by political power and wealth. It usually only makes people angry or dismissive when you point that out.
The message is that spiritual goods are superior to material goods, and that the former should be prioritized over the latter, or that the latter ultimately exist in service of the former. The wealth of the rich man is not the source of his obstacle to spiritual good; it is his attachment to his wealth that stands in the way.
If I put an effort into not being cynical, I would say public funds spent on R&D are the more accurate tax on hope. We are collecting money for Progress and Progress will save us from today’s inescapable facts. We hope it will not replace them with something worse.
In some cases it's because the enjoyment they get is worth losing money (and/or they wrongly believe it will be), in some cases it's because even though buying weekly lottery tickets is extremely unlikely to be worth it, the tiny possibility of winning big on it is the only way they could possibly become a millionaire and they want to fantasise that it might still happen.
And the ones who are gambling in the belief that the odds are in their favour, it's not because of their maths, it's because they believe (rightly or wrongly) that their knowledge / opinions on a particular sport are good enough to beat the bookies.
Sure there are also people who think things like "my roulette strategy is bound to work", but it's a tiny proportion.
Depends on which activities you gamble on, I suppose.
There's an old quote: “When as a young and unknown man I started to be successful I was referred to as a gambler. My operations increased in scope. Then I was a speculator. The sphere of my activities continued to expand and presently I was known as a banker. Actually I had been doing the same thing all the time.”
(previous chapter in Matthew, earlier in the same chapter in Mark/Luke)
These words eventually became the foundation of Christian charity in an Ancient world that until then despised and rejected the weak and infirm.
Many of our modern day institutions trace their origin to that Christian charity, to those few enigmatic words.
(Peter Brown's “Through the Eye of a Needle” is a great book to know more about this process.)
If by theology, you mean the possible interpretation of "strip away almost everything", while it is debatable whether this particular parable actually means that, it is always accepted that a rich person can give up what they have. This is literally the words of Jesus (Mark 19:16-22), the context in which the parable is given.
Francis of Assisi is an example of one person who made this decision.
Plus takes into account that in text criticism the more difficult spelling is usually the more correct, then rendered into the more common through lapsus calami/scribe error.
The parable of the talents and the connection between investment skill and being blessed by the master show that being rich or good with money is considered a good thing that can be used poorly or toward evil, not simply evil in itself. It is the love of money that is the root of all evil, not that money is evil in and of itself. Money is simply a tool fit for a purpose, as Jesus shows with the miracle of the fish with a coin in its mouth which was used to pay their temple taxes, so that Jesus could keep the legalistic Pharisee and Sadducee busybodies off their backs for a little while longer.
"Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's." Or something like that.
I don't see this as an issue. There are only so many images to use in a subsistence agriculture society, hence sheep and grain coming up over and over. Sometimes similar images will be used to make different points.
If you want something genuinely difficult, have a look at the alternative explanation of the parable of the talents where the man who does not commit usury is the good guy. One of the gospels (Luke) has additional detail about the "nobleman" who goes off to which suggests this is Herod the Great, (bad guy - see Lk 19:27), so the original meaning is up for debate. Personally I believe that a large part of the point of parables was to spark debate, so we should not assume that the meanings are obvious.
Yeah, I won't rule out that they exist, but I think there are far better ways of "betting on Jesus" according to most denominations. I think price fluctuations in a market like this is more down to people betting on a bigger fool coming along, or otherwise convinced themselves that they can make money off this without actually believing in the outcome.
Word of Faith/Prosperity churches - God is a genie.
You get what you asked for and not what you wanted.
It just may be more distant from what you wanted the worse you are.
Another example of Jesus being very non-consequentialist: why you do a thing matters completely.
Modern Evangelical Christian movements have from the beginning incorporated (classically) liberal political theory, including economic theory, into their theology, not merely their ethics (as almost all faiths must do to some extent). But more recently there has been incorporation of more (classically) illiberal libertarian and conservative ideas in their theology. Someone else pointed out Prosperity Gospel, but the new hotness is the idea that charity and empathy is un-Christian. (Or to steel man it, the idea is that excessive charity and empathy is un-Christian, but that begs alot of questions and arguably invites more self-serving utilitarian line drawing--the movement presupposes that contemporary American political culture is too charitable and empathetic.)
I think you’re on the right track. It’s not the betters but the bookie who you need to look askance at here.
John Goodman also played the patriarch of a Megachurch family in the Righteous Gemstones. Maybe there's a pattern there? He did play a Senator in Alpha House too.
But you are certainly not describing the intellectual muscle and heft of the Catholic tradition. You don’t stand a chance.
Materialists, by contrast, either never realize the incoherence of their naive position, or double down, consigning themselves to ever greater absurdities (yes, I am looking at you, eliminativism).
We didn't get that.
Instead, we got a downvote. So much more intellectual maturity and integrity.
Judging by their creeds it's believing that Easter really happened, and that the highest being is a composition that must be explained in hard to understand greek ontological terms.
The point I wanted to make however was rather that ontology moved on. The creed stayed the same.
Medicine is still complex, but moved on a bit since the good old days of the four humors.
Many times I've asked that I'm told "he was 100% human and also 100% God." I'm sure different sects believe differently on that, but plenty do accept that. When I ask "how is it possible to be 100% human and 100% God?" you'll sometimes get answers like, "well it's like water in different forms, ice, liquid, and vapor" but that doesn't answer the question (it answers a question about how Jesus and God the Father can both be God yet still be "monotheistic"). When pushed it has always come down to "some things have to be accepted on faith." That is obviously enough for plenty of people, but I personally find it insufficient. Back when I was a believer I had cognitive dissonance over that question that I somewhat learned to live with (obviously not entirely as I am no longer a believer, but it wasn't that question that led me to ultimately lose my faith).
What you will get plenty of depends on personality - outright attack, run away in some form, or usual blanket statements with 0 actual meaning like "its faith", "you have to believe".
As if anything else mattered but a clean moral behavior. Made up rituals very specific to given sect, on different dates, some ignored, some have other meanings. You shouldn't take it all literally, but they often take it literally to absurd levels.
Yeah, I cant give much respect to believers or faith which cant handle a minute or two of critical thinking, and deeply ignore its own past and rather harsh moral failures. Mistakes not acknowledged and acted upon are mistakes waiting to happen again.
> As if anything else mattered but a clean moral behavior
this is actually a strongly non-Christian view point: 'all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God' i.e. no morals are clean enough unless it's 100% of God (why should he accept less?). yes, our harsh moral failures, or even successes could never be enough
hence 100% humanity and divinity of Christ -- he alone provides a 100% perfect bridge, paying 100% the cost for us, one that was infinitely beyond our ability to pay
this is 100% grace, joy, freedom and surety. thanks be to him
To "believe" without good morals or works entirely is to put on a false face, essentially. Therefore, some manner of effort is expected of believers. It's a bit of circular reasoning, but not much.
I agree it's unfortunate that these kinds of questions sometimes get answered by inadequate metaphors or simply by dismissals. The whole joy of theology, while still requiring faith, is trying to answer these questions rationally.
Does this surprise you? The council of Nicea where this was defined as the orthodox claim happened in A.D. 325.
> I'm sure different sects believe differently on that, but plenty do accept that. When I ask "how is it possible to be 100% human and 100% God?" you'll sometimes get answers like, "well it's like water in different for
The _vast majority_ hold that, because the vast majority affirm Nicea. The only major denominations not holding to the orthodoxy here are (in descending order of size) Latter Day Saints (Mormons), Oneness Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Unitarians, and Christadelphians. They represent approximately 1.6-2.4% of the Christian population.
> you'll sometimes get answers like, "well it's like water in different forms, ice, liquid, and vapor" but that doesn't answer the question
The real (orthodox) answer depends on a metaphysics of substance that most Christians, even those who hold the orthodox view, are ill-prepared to elaborate on.
There are just as many problems or difficulties with viewing Jesus as the only god as with the trinity, but comparatively few professing Christians are all that critical about it.
(For my part, I’m Christadelphian.)
I loved science from when I was really young, read every book in my school library’s J523/Astronomy section, including Cosmos in 3rd grade. But I also went to church every week with my family, read through the entire Bible in middle school, and believed that my faith would crumble and I’d go to hell if I ever gave up the belief that the Bible was 100% true and literal.
I also chose to keep emotional distance from non-Christian friends. They might lead me astray.
I remember an exchange with my mom (who was a teacher, mostly at Lutheran schools) during a car ride when I was maybe 6 or 7. I was excitedly talking about the big bang or something, and she said “yes, but we know from the Bible that the earth is 6,000 years old, right?” “Yes,” I answered, and in that moment I believed it. I didn’t feel conflicted: the Bible must be true, so someday I’d figure out in what sense the science was true too.
As I got older, I sustained this by basically hand-waving away the less intuitive explanations for an old earth. There are plenty of books out there for helping people do just that. Maybe the speed of life was different in the past. What can we really say with certainty about evolution? That kind of thing.
The beginning of the end was the day I learned about dendrochronology: tree rings. They’re too simple to hand-wave away. Soon after, I lost my faith.
Another huge area of cognitive dissonance: we prayed all the time, we talked about “miracles”, but I never heard any really credible evidence for one. It took some serious introspection, while still a Christian, to discern whether I actually believed in them or not.
It is an incredible book and a crime it is not a standard text in education.
(Many) true believers believe that prayer has the power to heal people. So if you pray for someone with cancer, and they get better, then it shows the power of prayer.
If you pray for someone with cancer, and they don't get better, then it was all part of God's plan.
This may not strictly meet the definition of cognitive dissonance, but it is close enough for me.
There’s also the temptations of Jesus: skipping the pain and taking over (to fix things, as he will eventually) was a temptation to him. He had the power, he had to decide not to use it on himself. Consider also Gethsemane.
[0] not in the sense of being purely fictional - it's likely there was an actual "Jesus," supernatural claims aside - but in the sense of being mythologized and having stories written about oneself which may or may not be true but tend to form some cultural canon.
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::shrug:: it's all laid out in the Bible. Jesus wasn't ambiguous about anything about Himself, or His opponent.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/14nnbwt/w...
I'm not religious, but this is a bad take.
One thing Jesus was definitely not, was an optimizing utilitarian. He repeats in a dozen different ways in the Sermon on the Mount that people should do what is right, right now, and not worry about what's going to happen (worry about tomorrow, worry about what they will eat, what they will wear etc.)
This is obviously not the case, as any economic structure is more complex than just being a chill dude, and the bible has a more complex view of morality than just "being nice to thy neighbor".
No, it doesn't.
It relies on understanding what views today have been described by their opponents as "socialist", and what views Jesus espouses in the Scripture. It does not require:
(1) thinking Jesus is good, or
(2) thinking socialism is good, or
(3) knowing or applying any actual definition of socialism (since it only involves the term "socialism" being used as a hostile epithet, not any concept of whether or not something actually is socialism.)
> I'm not religious, but this is a bad take.
???
In the same vein, claiming you know more about a religion than the millions/billions of people who follow it is a low-IQ take, especially if the person making the claim knows nothing about the religion.
Though he did throw out some wicked burns a time or two.
I think you might be forgetting about the bulk of the Old Testament
> I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (Revelation 1:8).
> And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment” (Revelation 21:6).
> “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Revelation 22:13).
Furthermore Jesus was the God of the Old Testament, at least if you accept the New Testament as scripture[2].
[1]: "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." --Matthew 5:17
As for the second, you’re leaving out the last couple of millennia of Christians debating the exact nature of God and fissuring into different groups over the details. Most variants recognize some difference between the OT and NT gods, however, because you have to explain the difference in their actions and instructions.
> I think you might be forgetting about the bulk of the Old Testament
I'm pretty certain Jesus Christ does not show violence or aggression in the OT even as much as the one time being described as him showing violence or aggression in the NT.
I mean, I think that's a necessary consequence of a pretty fundamental element of the OT vs. NT distinction.
I personally am 100% sure Jesus would be dead pretty quick if he came back - a lot faster than before, and I doubt it would take 30 pieces of silver either!
Even today most Christians haven’t read the whole thing. I’m not Christian in large part because I did. And it’s almost all batshit.
Haha, same. I was forced to go to church and Sunday school as a kid, which I hated. But since I was there, I read large parts of the bible. This led me to asking a lot of questions, some of which caused me to be remove from Sunday school a few times. Eventually I was old enough to explain why I was an atheist and never went back.
The OT god is an abuser who demands unconditional and unquestioning love and admiration and threatens disobedience with eternal torture. It's textbook.
The NT is more complex, but huge swathes of Christianity are still hypnotised by the OT. They like the idea of Jesus as an authority, but not so much the reality of the teachings.
This is something he has in common with many of the people that modern dominant (in the US, at least) political groups condemn for "socialism".
You can't equivocate terms like this, identifying with the more extreme definition but walking it back when pressed. This is active distortion and manipulation of language, and this is far from the only instance of such in society.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/11/06.htm
> the people that modern dominant (in the US, at least) political groups condemn for "socialism"
They weren't talking about actual socialists, they're talking about the right's propensity to call anyone else a leftist. For example, if you ask my dad if Biden was a socialist, he'd tell you yes, and then if you asked how, he would list many things that have nothing to do with economic policy.
On a postmodern basis: if enough people believe in that narrative, it becomes reified as the truth, which is socially constructed. Therefore if the dominant belief is that they are socialist, then it is so.
The people that are condemned by others for "socialism" very often do not identify with socialism in any respect.
No one is literally claiming that Jesus was espousing some kind of proto-Marxist economic theory so much as pointing out that in the context of modern (specifically American) political discourse, Jesus would be considered a socialist.
Then again, so would Ronald Reagan and Adam Smith. At this point the Overton window of what constitutes "socialism" has drifted so far that anyone to the left of Ayn Rand might as well be a tankie.
This. Thank you.
Tankie (authoritarianism with little red flags (after precipitating incident)) is to Tank Man (precipitating incident) in relation to China (socialist status quo (before precipitating incident)), is as Fonzie is to jumping the shark in relation to Happy Days.
Do you know when tankie was first used in this authoritarian socialist sense, or is that what you're saying?
My understanding is that it was first used in the immediate aftermath of 1956 in internal criticism within the British Communist Party, and gained wider international currency after the Prague Sprint in 1968.
The Year of Jubilee alone, from the Pentateuch, basically eliminates capitalism as we know it (if enacted at a full societal scale.)
So I would say that on the Bible, we'd still have free markets but with more guard rails so that nobody falls through the cracks if they're at least trying.
I do think we should bring back the Year of Jubilee though. Ironically, 2025 is a Year of Jubilee. I'm a big fan and I'm sure there are viable modern interpretations for it.
Capitalism is more about ownership of the means of production and the relationship of labor to capital.
None of those things have anything to do with who owns the means of production or taking things from people who produced them, though. Jesus advocated for voluntary selflessness, not charity by compulsion. And certainly he didn't advocate for there to be a hall monitor on someone's personal life and income in order for that hall monitor to be the arbiter of whether or not it's all according to Jesus' "socialist" tendencies.
In modern American political discourse, if Jesus showed up he'd be expected to do miraculous things like multiplying resources. So...I don't see how meaningful it is for someone to say Jesus would be a socialist as if it is any kind of informed or useful commentary on the state of American discourse.
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The two are very difficult to separate though, I've met very few who could handle a lot of money without becoming corrupted.
This does not mean it's okay to hoard wealth at the expense of others, of course.
I think that Saint Basil the Great's sermon to the rich[1] is instructive for a historical and reasonable Christian instruction on the rich.
Let me add an excerpt I really appreciate: But how do you make use of money? By dressing in expensive clothing? Won’t two yards of tunic suffice you, and the covering of one coat satisfy all your need of clothes? But is it for food’s sake that you have such a demand for wealth? One bread-loaf is enough to fill a belly. Why are you sad, then? What have you been deprived of? The status that comes from wealth? But if you would stop seeking earthly status, you should then find the true, resplendent kind that would conduct you into the kingdom of heaven.
And one more because I can't help myself: Since, then, the wealth still overflows, it gets buried underground, stashed away in secret places.... A strange madness, that, when gold lies hidden with other metals, one ransacks the earth; but after it has seen the light of day, it disappears again beneath the ground.
(The whole thing is worth a read, Basil just went hard non stop)
1. https://stjohngoc.org/st-basil-the-greats-sermon-to-the-rich...
1. Claim that "camel" or "needle" are a mistranslation or symbolic.
2. Separate financial life from your spiritual beliefs to avoid inner conflict.
3. View wealth as a sign of God’s blessing or something used to do good, making it feel morally acceptable.
4. Emphasize other passages that support generosity or success.
Possibly; but this may just be a lack of imagination on our part. For example, can God abanlqhgfznsjks? Probably not, because that particular string was just a random assortment of keys that I pressed; it conveys nothing meaningful, so to ask if God could abanlqhgfznsjks might not really be asking anything at all.
i don't know why we find this so obvious when discussing math and yet so difficult when discussing God
And more generally, that's just the nature of the supernatural in any religion. If what was going on was entirely logical, it wouldn't be a miracle.
i freak out about what the bush said: I AM THAT I AM
the first recorded instance of recursion, spoken in a language famous for its lack of abstraction, to an uneducated goat herder, communicating an idea that even the greeks struggled with thousands of years later in a much more sophisticated and leisured culture
The "eye of the needle" was a (very small) gate into Jerusalem.
To get a camel through that gate, it has to lower its head and crawl on its knees.
So Jesus was calling rich people camels; camels can be very arrogant beasts so it fits.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-testament-studie...
It would make a better argument to find a text describing how Jesus referred to a rich person (real or parable) and said, “this rich person gets it, be like him”. Direct, and without the mental backflips.
Job refused to curse or condemn God even when he lost most of his family and all of his holdings - his friends tried to tell him that because he lost his riches, he had obviously sinned, but he refused this. He gained back the things he lost, because of his faith in God.
Job 1:20-22
20 Then Job stood up, tore his robe, shaved his head, fell to the ground, bowed very low, 21 and exclaimed:
“I left my mother’s womb naked, and I will return to God naked. The Lord has given, and the Lord has taken. May the name of the Lord be blessed.”
22 Job neither sinned nor charged God with wrongdoing in all of this.
In those times, rich people were considered blessed by God, poor people or those afflicted with disease were considered cursed by God. People afflicted from birth were said to have been "born in sin" due to the sins of their parents.
The Pharisees and Sadducees were wealthly, influential people who preached exactly this. The Sadducees in particular didn't believe in an afterlife, and so were focused on only the "here and now" and material things of this world. Jesus specifically called them out to let them know their wealth wouldn't get them into heaven, and their success was not a sign of righteousness.
Jesus distinctly preached that money could not buy salvation, and that those whose focus was on money could not focus on God, and would therefore be condemned. He explicitly called out Zaccheus, a tax collector, when Zaccheus promised to repay any money he'd taken in bad faith four times over and to give away half of what he owned to the poor:
Luke 19:9-10: 9 Jesus said to him,"Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. 10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost."
Zaccheus probably had a lot of money left even when he was done, but the point is that money was no longer the priority in his life.
God may choose to bless people with prosperity, but your wallet doesn't make you righteous. It doesn't make you unrighteous either - your actions and your faith, or lack thereof condemn you. The whole of the Law is:
Matthew 22:34-40
34 When the Pharisees learned that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and, to test him, one of them, a lawyer, asked this question, 36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37 Jesus said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and the first commandment. 39 The second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 Everything in the Law and the Prophets depends on these two commandments.”
"The Holy One said, open for me a door as big as a needle's eye and I will open for you a door through which may enter tents and camels."
Sounds familiar? The meaning of that saying in jewish context is that we cant really understand Gods abilities.
Could the christian saying mean something else? Sure. We dont even know if jesus even said that exact phrase.
My point is more that there are often more than one interpretation of vague sayings from 2000 years that been through an oral tradition, translations and copying.
It is incredibly clear and without nuance nor is there a reason to suppose it's an issue with translation. Its also consistent philosophically nor is it the sort of thing that the powerful would want inserted when they compiled works.
If you disregard it then it makes more sense to disregard the entire bible.
So is the Son of God descending to earth and being nailed to a cross for the sins of man.
It is therefore hardly shocking that some fail to see the plain meaning of the language and their confusion needn't imply actual credible controversy.
It is pretty clear that the saying you provided and the Christian saying are different sayings with different meanings that share the metaphor about a Camel going through the eye of a needle.
The surrounding context is Jesus telling a rich person to give his material wealth away because it is barrier to salvation. It is clear that focus on the temporal comforts privided by wealth stunts ones need for spirituality. The man cannot give up his attachment to wealth and gives up on salvation in the Christian sense.
It is hard for me to get from this that the rich are especially virtuos and therefore the only lesson was intended to be taught is that not even the rich can be saved without god.
It seems very clear that wealth was a direct impediment to salvation.
They are again different in meaning with one being that attachment wealth is a barrier to being saved and the other being through god all things are possible. If you believe a plain interpretation of the text is in accurate the onus is on you to prove why and you haven't.
Those who want to climb to the mountain top need to leave everything behind. The higher they climb, the longer will be the fall if they look back for a moment and slip on this narrow path, longing for what they left behind.
Those people all did some things we can see and talk about - and possibly many things we did not see, do not know, and can not talk about. At the very least, those people we know are in/destined for heaven: followed God, feared God, obeyed God.
I don't believe their being or not being rich is part of the calculus for "getting into heaven" as you said. Being rich may make you less likely to do those 3 things though, in which case you would correlate richness with not getting into heaven.
The subsequent verses are much less quoted but very explicit about this: And looking at them, Jesus said to them, “With people this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
This is supported by other text where Jesus says explicitly what people should do with money:
Jesus said to him, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me"
So anyway it's very clear that using money selfishly (which is what many Christians do) is clearly not what God wants from us, it's just that God can love us for our imperfections and sin, which in my view is sorta the main idea behind the New Testament. God wants us to love each other like he loves us, and he would certainly give up his money for us since he even gave up his own son, but accepts that we will be more selfish than that.
I love how you put that, and wholeheartedly agree.
Prosperity gospel is plainly contradicted by the Bible (see again: The Book of Job), but so is the Redditor Christianity you are espousing.
> 25 It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
> 26 And they were greatly astonished, saying among themselves, “Who then can be saved?”
> 27 But Jesus looked at them and said, “With men it is impossible, but not with God; for with God all things are possible.”
That said many Christians I know are much harsher critics of other Christians who don't live their beliefs than most of the atheists I know, and IMHO that's how it should be.
I can read, and I have read the whole thing, several times, I know what Jesus taught. And it's perfectly obvious that very few so called Christians even come close.
Disclaimer: No longer a believer so take with a grain of salt
Yeah, for sure. They'd best hope that he don't return anytime soon if the Christian bible's description of his return has any validity to it, because he's supposed to return with a flaming sword and a host of angels behind him, and he's likely to be raging pissed at the majority of (Christian) humanity for the way they've twisted his words and teachings.
If I remember correctly...his first visit was prophesied to end exactly as it did. His next visit is prophesied to be a little different - to paraphrase...he is coming with an army to make war on the beast and all [humans] who follow him. Instead of a spotless robe like earlier depictions - this robe is drenched in blood, and he has a sword coming out of his mouth. Here's the passage immediately following description of this second coming(Revelations 19).
“Come, gather together for the great supper of God, 18so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals, and the mighty, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, great and small.”
I don't think this visit is supposed to be like the previous one. I strongly encourage you all read this book(the bible) and take it to heart. You aren't my friend, or someone that I know - but it would give me no pleasure at all to know you were spending eternity in hell. We don't get down seeing people suffer, or "you'll all be sorry when you see I'm right!!!" style feelings. If those true believers seem like a bunch of elitist jerks who are always putting you down instead of helping you up, those are /NOT/ true believers. Those are true assholes.
I mean, according to the Hindus and Buddhists, we’ll be reincarnated rather than going to heaven/hell.
We could read the Bible, or the Qur’ān, or the Vēdas, or the Buddhist scriptures, or any other religious text… but how would we know whether any of them holds truth?
When those pressures or promises of rewards aren't present, people rarely stumble into any particular religion.
But if you took it at a high macro level and did narrow down to a few dozen, those are still terrible odds. If I have a 1 in 36 chance of picking the wrong religion and being damned, I think we need a better standard of evidence to narrow this field a bit. Unless of course you believe that a loving (some would say omni-benevolent) God would think it's reasonable to torture 97% of his children who are actively searching him out, just because they picked the wrong church. (that's not even considering all the others of course).
there is good and bad in essentially every religion
have you looked all the major ones listed here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_religious_groups
for me the standard of evidence is the search for the truth. that means, keep searching until i am satisfied. it could take a lifetime, and maybe that's the point. don't just make a choice and then blindly accept everything from then on.
> what makes sense for example is the positive impact a religion has on the world. which religion is doing the most good?
I try to have a positive impact on the world by being vegan and donating to (secular) humanitarian organizations. I struggle to see how believing in a religion would improve on this (although I’m open to a good rebuttal!).
> which religion has the better answers to explain the world in which we live in today?
I think that the secular scientific tradition does better here than religion (even if it isn’t perfect, of course).
> take the issues and questions that matter to you, and then look at the answers and see if they are satisfactory. keep searching until you find the answers you seek.
I did that, and it doesn’t look good for religion, as explained above. And yet, here we are with one of the parent commenters telling us that we should believe in the Bible, lest we burn in hell.
Hence my comment above: what evidence shows this, and if there is no evidence, why should I believe it (or any other religious scripture) over my current ideals?
that's not what i am asking. if you believe that religions are "wrong", then it's on you to verify that.
what evidence shows this, and if there is no evidence, why should I believe it
i can't tell you that. you need to look at each religion yourself and decide.
as i asked in another comment, have you looked at all the major religions (as listed on eg wikipedia), and can you say with confidence that none of them do better than secular scientific tradition?
If you believe that religions are ‘right’ and/or have better answers than the scientific tradition, it should be trivial to defend your claims.
(Your other comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44130369] is more agreeable.)
i can tell you what i believe but i am not here to represent any particular religion, and i can't speak for all the religions. you will get better results and answers if you look at each religion yourself, and come to your own conclusion.
> I strongly encourage you all read this book(the bible) and take it to heart.
This seems to be somewhat different from what you’re arguing now, though.
For what it’s worth, I shared my beliefs (veganism, humanitarianism, and the scientific method), and I still think that if you believe that your beliefs (religious or not) hold more truth and/or usefulness than mine, you should be able to (at the very least) provide some pointers to relevant literature.
but here are a few points that relate to the current discussion:
science and religion must be in harmony. that is, they should not contradict each other. if there is a contradiction (in any specific point) then one of them is probably wrong. to resolve that difference science needs to do more research and religion needs to get a better understanding of the claim. perhaps there is an interpretation that can explain the discrepancy.
religion must be the cause of unity, harmony and agreement. if it is the cause of discord and hostility, if it leads to separation and creates conflict, the absence of religion would be preferable.
there will be a time when humanity will learn to live without meat. but today is not the time yet. that doesn't mean i'd believe that being a vegan today would be wrong, but rather that not everyone lives in a position where they can afford to give up meat because they have nothing to replace it with.
most religions are ill-equipped to deal with the problems we are facing today. religions need to adapt and renew themselves to be able to address the questions we are having today. the return of jesus plays a critical role here.
independent investigation of the truth. everyone should do their own research and study of religion. we can't leave that to priests or other studied leaders. those played a role in times when people where illiterate and depended on others to do the studying for them.
this is why i am hesitant to tell you what i believe, or what you should read, because in discussions like this it easily comes across as telling you what you should believe, as the example you are quoting shows. but that is precisely what i don't want to do, because that would be wrong. you need to find your own answers. that doesn't mean that i think reading the bible would be wrong. it's just not enough. you should also read about all the other religions, at least the major ones, if only to get a better understanding about the different beliefs that the people in this world today are holding. it is probably not necessary to read all the holy writings of each religion, at least not unless one of them piques your interest and you want to learn more.
Well, we’re on a discussion forum, so the point is to discuss our opinions, not to claim that we’re better than another :) I think it’s unfortunate that you wouldn’t share some of your beliefs; we could have constructively criticized each other’s beliefs, and thereby sharpened our critical thinking skills. Alas.
> science and religion must be in harmony. that is, they should not contradict each other. if there is a contradiction (in any specific point) then one of them is probably wrong. to resolve that difference science needs to do more research and religion needs to get a better understanding of the claim. perhaps there is an interpretation that can explain the discrepancy.
My take is that religion is an encoding of human morality [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44127397], but that the prevailing religious texts are outdated compared to our current understanding of the world.
> religion must be the cause of unity, harmony and agreement. if it is the cause of discord and hostility, if it leads to separation and creates conflict, the absence of religion would be preferable.
Agree, but I think that the correlation between religiousness and harmony is not as strong as many religious people seem to claim. I think it is hard for many religious people to imagine a-religious harmony, because religion is such a foundational part of their worldview.
> there will be a time when humanity will learn to live without meat. but today is not the time yet. that doesn't mean i'd believe that being a vegan today would be wrong, but rather that not everyone lives in a position where they can afford to give up meat because they have nothing to replace it with.
Agree, with the caveat that most HN readers are in a position to replace meat, and that eating plants directly is more efficient than feeding animals plants and eating the animals (IIUC). However, I can’t possibly claim to know whether it’s possible for every culture on Earth.
> most religions are ill-equipped to deal with the problems we are facing today. religions need to adapt and renew themselves to be able to address the questions we are having today. the return of jesus plays a critical role here.
See above.
> you should also read about all the other religions, at least the major ones, if only to get a better understanding about the different beliefs that the people in this world today are holding. it is probably not necessary to read all the holy writings of each religion, at least not unless one of them piques your interest and you want to learn more.
Agree, but I don’t think this approach precludes not believing in any of them.
———
For what it’s worth, I do believe that most religions include many valid moral guidelines (‘love thy neighbor’, etc.), but I think most of them also include many infamously unproven teachings (the existence of a creator and afterlife/reincarnation).
actually, i'd love that. i just had some bad experience doing that in public where uncharitable readers can chime in. my email is in my profile. how about we continue the discussion there?
prevailing religious texts are outdated compared to our current understanding of the world
it's not that the texts themselves are outdated, but that peoples interpretations of those texts is. for example when the bible claims that the world was created in seven days, we today know that this can't possibly be true, therefore this text can't possibly be meant to be taken literally. it also means that it was never meant to be taken literally, but the people who did take it literally lacked the scientific understanding to realize that.
but this problem may also occur with a religious text written today. when a discrepancy is found it doesn't mean the text is wrong, but our interpretation of it is. or maybe the scientific findings are faulty. it's no different than having findings that contradict a scientific theory. either the theory is wrong or the findings are in error. the interpretation of a religious text is just like another theory.
the correlation between religiousness and harmony is not as strong as many religious people seem to claim
well, that to me is an indictment of those religions, and rightly so.
most of them also include many infamously unproven teachings (the existence of a creator and afterlife/reincarnation)
well, the problem here is that these are by their nature either unprovable or we simply lack the scientific knowledge to verify or falsify them.
absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. this is the leap of faith that a believer in science needs to do. it is fine to reject claims that can clearly be proven wrong (such as the age of the earth) but for anything that can't be proven we need to keep an open mind. that doesn't mean to blindly accept it. keep that skepticism, but at least allow that those claims are at least in the realm of the possible, specifically because we have no way to prove otherwise. to reject god or the afterlife without proof is just as much an act of faith as is to accept them.
It also manifests in this sort of insulted vibe that religious people get when their faith is questioned.
Basically, it’s socially not okay to question the faith of someone in a particular religion because it’s their culture, it’s their belief system, but the atheist/agnostic “belief” system isn’t respected in the same way. The person who has not found any evidence of god as described in various religions is told to seek enlightenment as if they are the ones who are incomplete.
People who use the scientific method don’t “pick at random” when there is no available answer. They test for answers and wait until they observe the answers and have the ability to reproduce those observations.
In short, the religious expect the non-religious to be afraid of dying and to be looking for a solution, when it’s completely valid and logical to have determined that there is no solution and therefore it is not worth spending time dwelling upon.
not accepting something blindly IS the same as questioning something. or reverse, if you do not question your beliefs then you are accepting them blindly.
There is no obligation to obtain a belief system
i didn't say there is, except maybe that rejecting all belief systems is also a kind of belief.
Someone who is agnostic is not blindly accepting anything.
again, i didn't intend to make that claim. if anything that was more targeted at those who do follow a particular religion and stopped asking questions.
IMO, you are also an elitist jerk by telling non-believers that they will be going to hell for not believing your religion, a religion which 69% of the entire world does not believe.
What kind of god creates beings only to punish the majority of them with hellfire? Why would god allow alternative religions to be created just to "trick" his creations into believing the wrong thing? And why would I want to worship that god if that's all true?
Catholics don't believe that you have to be Catholic to go to heaven. In fact, believing that you do is explicitly condemned as a heresy (Feeneyism).
As for "going to hell": we believe that everyone goes there after death, as a temporary state. It's akin to the Catholic concept of purgatory, before the resurrection, final judgment, and placement in either outer darkness or the kingdoms of heaven. Thankfully, most people that have ever lived on earth are destined for the latter, not the former.
I don't think God wants to "trick" anyone. I also don't believe there is any hard set of "rules" he applies to 100% of humanity without exception. Take little children for instance...tragedies happen every day, and they are too young to know what those rules are, or have a chance to follow them. Those children aren't destined for eternal torture - that would be cruel and heartless - and I don't believe God is cruel or heartless.
I apologize for coming off as an elitist jerk. I didn't realize it would be read that way, and it was not my intent at all. I'm not better than you, I don't /think/ I'm better than you, and I'm too inexperienced/ignorant/prideful to even be able to know what "better" is, much less which one of us it would apply to.
All my comments, posts, and intentions are that 1 person is positively influenced by them. Maybe they go on to influence someone else, and it spreads throughout people - I have no idea what will happen that is influenced by things like my post. However, I don't think my post is going to hurt anyone - my hope is that it will help someone. Think of it like throwing seeds(in the parable!)... some of them, maybe just /one/ of them, will fall in fertile ground - and lead that person(s) to the same peace with God that I feel.
I've read the Bible cover to cover multiple times though, and nothing makes me believe the Bible less than actually reading and studying the Bible. The book of Job alone was pretty hard to reconcile, but even just harmonizing the four gospels on the important details of Jesus life and crucifixion is very, very difficult (or even impossible depending on who you talk to). I won't even get into Song of Solomon :-D
Honestly if you want people to find faith, I wouldn't recommend reading the Bible. I would recommend a mix of the New Testament (minus the Book of Revelation) plus Church attendance.
Dude, that's pretty harsh and I would say quite unfair given what they've said. If he/she/they/whatever believes that we are going to Hell, wouldn't the right thing to do be to tell us and try to save us?
I do think that plenty of people saying similar things can be elitist and requires a certain level of hubris/arrogance, but I don't think that's always the case, and GP definitely didn't strike me as one of those assholes.
> What kind of god creates beings only to punish the majority of them with hellfire? Why would god allow alternative religions to be created just to "trick" his creations into believing the wrong thing?
These are excellent questions/arguments and are on my top five list of "reasons I am not a Christian," and I'd love to hear an explanation from any believers if they'd like to tackle them.
Perils of posting late at night, I guess. hattip.
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https://biblehub.com/matthew/24-14.htm
Jesus also warns that His message, the Gospel (GetHisWord.com), will be universally hated across the world by those who dont believe. The Devil will inspire people to censor it to prevent both people's sins being forgiven and godliness in nations. This is happening.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
As for signs of the end, a number must happen. Many already happened or are happening. That should worry non-believers while friends of Christ are encouraged. I listed some here:
https://gethisword.com/signsofthetimes.html
A few more that may or may not be in the article.
God's Word predicts Jews wont worship in the temple despite taking their country back. They still can't today. Prophecy appears to say there will be a peace deal that lets them do that. Then, the situation will reverse.
Two prophets will be preaching and performing miracles before the whole world. YouTube and the Internet make that feasible.
The leaders will promote a new, world order. Important aspects will be a world government with one currency. Then, by a mark on the body or forehead, people will be allowed to buy or sell goods (or banned from participation). Our country's leaders, along with business leaders, keep pushing for the same thing in multinational organizations. We also have the tech to do it now.
So, there's a few, specific things to look for that will be easy to spot. Christians meanwhile resist attempts to create those things to give non-believers more time to hear the Gospel and repent. If they dont, Jesus says they go into a fiery furnace for the evils they did in their lifetime. Those receiving the mark... which they'll know requires rejecting Jesus as Lord... are tormented forever in the presence of the Lamb.
https://www.gotquestions.org/one-world-government.html
I'll also add that the Bible teaches that Satan puts thoughts in people's heads, including rulers and business elites, to cause them to pr p mote his goals. If true, we will repeatedly see the same ideas pop up that the Bible warns about pushed top-down in many cultures. We'll also see them do damage over time.
So, in Revelation, it's a push for world governemnt, a single currency, and ability of governments to dictate both commerce and religion (esp universalism). In Old Testament, the pagans push subjectivism (eg polytheism/atheism), sexual immorality (esp homosexuality), exploitation of the poor, arrogant attitudes, violence, and sacrificing infants for more sex or money.
If we see these trends, we're to oppose them because God promises to punish them in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Historical data confirms that most countries that did such things were destroyed in time. Often from the activities driven by their cultures. That's also why we not only share Christ and His Word but promote character education and righteous government.
(Note: Christians being mere humans beings redeemed from sin, but with a human nature, means they will often fall short of the above goals in politics and life in general. Sadly. Doesn't make it any less true, though.)
I'm not sure why it should or would worry "non-believers" since by definition they don't believe, therefore ... what would they even have to worry about?
At some point, they have no excuse but to believe what's proven good and true. Christ and His Word.
Funny how the people who claim this sort of thing are often responsible for some of the worst atrocities in history. It's almost as if they don't actually believe (nor have even read) the words of Christ at all... :shrug:
With all that, I dont know why any of you say things like that given the Bible clearly predicts it. If anything, the atrocities of false Christians and atheists confirms the Bible's assessement of humanity. Whereas, people actually obeying God and loving others dont commit atrocities because it violates His law.
However, atheism, evolutionism, feminism, CRT, capitalism... these all allow many forms of atrocious behavior by design. Atheism combined with Darwinism can justify any evil since there's (a) no objective morals and (b) nothing matters in the long run. Communists torturing Christians used to point that out, too.
The topic was about gambling on the return of Christ. I shared Biblical prophecy about the end times, including pre-conditions for Christ's return. That should establish whether such a wager would be correct or incorrect. Also, Christ commanded us to always share His Gospel and point people to Him when He is the topic.
Re my wager
Christ warned to have nothing to do with people who were making claims about His return before the Second Coming. That they're liars and schemers. See below in v26-27:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matt.%2024&vers...
So, no I didnt bet. I'll also have nothing to do with that. I also think the Bible leans against gambling. It also becomes a household-destroying addiction for many. So, no to other forms of gambling, too.