kromem @ kromem @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

basically the start for WWIII with Nike's and other fun things.

"WWIII: Just do it."

You mean like the first few lines of what I quoted where he talks about how traits from grandparents or great grandparents can come back?

Gattaca Getting more prescient with each year

It's kind of crazy how CRISPR turns the predictions on their head.

Only a hundred years ahead and didn't nail survival of the fittest? Pshh, amateur.

Here's Lucretius in 50 BCE:

In the beginning, there were many freaks. Earth undertook Experiments - bizarrely put together, weird of look Hermaphrodites, partaking of both sexes, but neither; some Bereft of feet, or orphaned of their hands, and others dumb, Being devoid of mouth; and others yet, with no eyes, blind. Some had their limbs stuck to the body, tightly in a bind, And couldn't do anything, or move, and so could not evade Harm, or forage for bare necessities. And the Earth made Other kinds of monsters too, but in vain, since with each, Nature frowned upon their growth; they were not able to reach The flowering of adulthood, nor find food on which to feed, Nor be joined in the act of Venus.

For all creatures need Many different things, we realize, to multiply And to forge out the links of generations: a supply Of food, first, and a means for the engendering seed to flow Throughout the body and out of the lax limbs; and also so The female and the male can mate, a means they can employ In order to impart and to receive their mutual joy.

Then, many kinds of creatures must have vanished with no trace Because they could not reproduce or hammer out their race. For any beast you look upon that drinks life-giving air, Has either wits, or bravery, or fleetness of foot to spare, Ensuring its survival from its genesis to now."

• De Rerum Natura book 5 lines 837-859

Bonus round, nearly nailed Mendelian trait inheritance too:

Sometimes children take after their grandparents instead, Or great-grandparents, bringing back the features of the dead. This is since parents carry elemental seeds inside – Many and various, mingled many ways – their bodies hide Seeds that are handed, parent to child, all down the family tree. Venus draws features from these out of her shifting lottery – Bringing back an ancestor’s look or voice or hair. Indeed These characteristics are just as much the result of certain seed As are our faces, limbs and bodies. Females can arise From the paternal seed, just as the male offspring, likewise, Can be created from the mother’s flesh. For to comprise A child requires a doubled seed – from father and from mother. And if the child resembles one more closely than the other, That parent gave the greater share – which you can plainly see Whichever gender – male or female – that the child may be.

• De Rerum Natura book 4 lines 1217-1232

"What people think they know about the Old Testament period and history" is markedly different from "how religious people are today and in the future."

But with your last 'quote' there I think you said everything that needed to be said. Good luck with your opinions. I hope they work out for you.

I'm not sure where you got that from, or why you keep being so hung up on "how religious people are today."

Don't worry about it. It's just academic stuff.

I'm not sure what 'emerging research trends.' If you mean trends of fewer people going to churches or identifying themselves as religious

No, more things like the increased number of Ashkenazi users of ancestry sites including ancient samples confused by their closest genetic match being 3,700 year old Minoan graves or Iron Age Anatolian samples in parallel to archeology finding increased prevalence of early Iron Age Aegean style pottery made with local clay in supposed Israelite ancestral sites or the discovery of previously unknown Anatolian trade lines around honey production and four horned altars.

A lot of the ancient Greek and Roman historians of antiquity are going to be vindicated a bit for unanimous assertions that have been dismissed by modern perspectives heavily influenced by anchoring and survivorship biases from our sources.

The students said to the teacher, "Tell us, how will our end come?"

The teacher said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.

Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death."

Yeah, this is a phenomenon called 'confabulation.' You see it with stroke patients too. There's some who feel like it's a more accurate term than 'hallucinations' for when LLMs make shit up these days too.

You're asking how discoveries in the past few decades have impacted millennia old traditions? Your evaluation may be a bit premature.

But as one example we've seen more progressive religious groups who learned 'Lucifer' was a mistranslation of Isaiah turn away from the Enochian interpretations of those passages and a distancing from the Milton-esque portrayal of sinister forces still present in things like American evangelical circles.

Analyses like Idan Dershowitz's of Leviticus's homosexuality bans that reveal it as a later addition to earlier laws have been a source of solace to many religious folk who felt at odds with a presumed Mosaic law.

Also -- a rigorous understanding of the underlying history of the text and its circumstances relies on far more than just 'translations.'

And there too, the work is still ongoing.

There's going to be serious upsets in what people think they know about the Old Testament period and history in the next few decades given emerging research trends - but just like how in medicine it takes 17 years from research to broad awareness in practice, it's going to take some time for discoveries in the past few years to snowball to broader awareness and perspective shifts.

That simply isn't true. If a group of people make claims about history that are provably false, not just about supernatural stuff but about actual events which feed into their attitudes towards modernity, then the availability of accurate information about what really did or didn't happen is quite relevant to people that deconvert, or oppose that group and their positions, etc.

The idea that there's a dichotomy of either "believe in BS" or "don't care" cedes the claims over history to the fanatical.

Personally, I care about knowing my real ancestral history. I care about knowing my real cultural history. To me, the historical reality of the book of Joshua being anachronistic BS that flies in the face of the archeological reality of the Israelites cohabitating peacefully with Philistines and Canaanites has quite profound implications for a major modern world news topic, and recontextualizes phrases like Leviticus's "love thy neighbor as yourself" and "love the alien residing among you as yourself."

A historical reality of an early history of cohabitation with ethnically different neighbors as opposed to the claimed history of conquering those neighbors is relevant in opposing the dogmatic claims of justified oppression of others and in interpreting the tradition that history left behind. Even if it gets ignored by the 'faithful' it's a useful context for those standing in opposition to their claims and dogma.

And as I said, the academic matters.

It's not necessarily for them. They aren't the center of the universe, even if they believe it to be so.

Other people who care about evidence and history and reality might be interested in the fact that originally there was a claimed prophet and leader of the Israelites who was a woman named 'bee' around the time there was an apiary in Tel Rehov importing queen bees from Anatolia as the only honey production in "the land of milk and honey" where inside the apiary was one of the earliest four horned altars (later appearing as an Israelite altar feature) dedicated to a goddess for example.

I could care less if an Orthodox conservative religious person believes that's true or not. Archeology tells us unequivocally that the apiary and altar were true, and that's valuable context for untangling the folk history that was being reshaped by later hands.

Yes, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

For years I thought that was a silly story showing the ridiculousness of the apocrypha, and it was only decades after first reading it in a high school class that I effectively realized it was subversive satire.

The Thomasine tradition was notoriously opposed to physical resurrection early on. Hence "doubting Thomas."

This opposition to a core canonical principle was likely part of what led to the Gospel of Thomas eventually being punishable by death to even possess.

But here's this text attributed to the Thomasine tradition that probably had more resurrections per page than maybe any other text in any religion, and certainly in Christianity. And so instead of needing to be buried in a jar like the other, it survived the dark ages and middle ages fine, just as this kind of weird text but dogmatically agreeable.

And yet the story in between kid Jesus smiting and resurrecting is all about how Jesus, despite being very bright, wasn't able to learn his letters and looked at letters and words different from others. A weird focus for the text, and one that at its end overlaps with part of the opening of Luke.

Then if you look closer, some other details stand out.

For example, it mentions how the author 'Thomas' is a philosopher in the opening.

And through that lens, another detail stands out - the kid that falls off the roof to his death and then is raised back up is named Xeno - like the philosopher famed for his paradoxes of motion. Probably not a very common name in a Jewish town in 1st century Galilee.

These days that text reminds me of a famous adage, "the only way to tell the truth is through fiction."

I think a group, that was on the outskirts of a growing organized religion that eventually becomes the canonical church, took their own stories about Jesus's childhood where he was bright but struggled with learning letters and reworked them into a tale so over the top and ridiculous it was actively making fun of the canonical infancy stories that were being added to the Synoptics. But that the canonical group, blinded by their own beliefs, failed to even recognize the satire and ended up keeping the texts alive thinking that they were agreeing with them, even though it was effectively the philosophical sect of early Christianity taking the piss at their fantastical dogma.

And then today we just take it at face value as authentically intended and just think "man people back then believed weird stuff."

The academic matters.

Arguably more than the fiction.

Yes, it's true that many, many people believe very strongly in the fictions that arose around the realities that the academic cuts closer to.

But reality matters.

I'm sure we might agree that it would be absurd to say that the stories of Homer, because of how they are treasured by audiences in their own right, should invalidate the importance of better learning the historical realities on which they drew.

There was a history. That history is not what was canonized in the Torah. It was not what was canonized in the New Testament.

And at least to me, that history is much, much more interesting than the fantasies and propaganda which eroded it.

It was a great year for film.

Heroin - safer than fentanyl and sure to keep your human from ever running away.

"When my little Bobby is a bit too active and needs to calm down, I chose heroin each time, every time."

"Heroin: Xorglob tested, human approved."

What kind of Bond villain keeps naming their AI systems?

First it was "the Gospel" and now "Where's Daddy?"

Did they hire Nathan for You as a consultant or something?

The royal 'we' develops later on, likely in part because of the Bible.

And yes, there are references to 'he' or 'Father' but it's important to keep in mind (a) Hebrew is a binary gendered language with no neutral 'Parent' as an option, and (b) there's extensive evidence of revisionist misogyny in the Old Testament where you go from a woman prophet leading the Israelites to a "Queen Mother" being deposed and major religious reforms that include banning the worship of the women for their goddess who was evidenced as married to Yahweh before those reforms.