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  • Yes. God's name is super interesting because of the extremely strong taboos surrounding saying it, stemming ultimately from the Third of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:7)- "Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD they God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guitless that taketh his name in vain." Note the emphasis on the name of The LORD, and how the word "LORD" is all caps- this is a sort of censorship of God's actual name, which goes back to the ancient Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures. When you see "LORD" in a Bible passage in English, the original passage has God's name in Hebrew. Jews have historically said the word "Adonai" (meaning Lord) instead of God's name when reading aloud, and almost all translations follow this and just use the word for "Lord" (Kyrios, Dominus, etc.) instead.

    Anyway, the name is rendered in Hebrew as "" which is roughly equivalent to the letters "YHWH" in the Latin alphabet. Hebrew doesn't use vowels, and the vowel sounds hsve intentionally not been recorded by scribes. The modern academic reconstruction is "Yahweh" for the pronunciation based on names for people and places that include parts of the name. You may also see "Jehovah" in some contexts which is based on older German scholarship that incorrectly rendered the vowels of the word. The name's meaning is given to Moses in Exodus 3:14 where Moses asks who he should tell his people to worship and God replies "I AM WHO I AM" "Say this to the people of Israel: I AM has sent me to you" (in Hebrew, I am who I am is Eyeh Asher Eyeh). Modern scholarship agrees that the name has some connection with the word "to be" and means something along the lines of "The Existing One."

    Myself, I interpret God's response in the story and the meaning of His name as a declaration of self sufficiency, that God is what exists in His own right, and doesn't need anything or anyone else to exists. It's not only a declaration of montheism, but a declaration of supremacy over all of the universe. But yeah, not only does your Bologna have a first name, but God does too if you're Christian or Jewish.

  • The crazy thing about this is that 2nd amendment nuts are always super defensive about the police in cases like this, even though this is obviously a case that shows you don't have a right to bear arms if the police can just roll up to your house in the middle of the night and shoot you with impunity if you have a gun in your house or are holding one when you answer the door.

  • "I just take scientists out and give them a bunch of funding for their research, and they always give me the results I want. Now of course they could always say no, but they won't because of the implication. You know, that if they produced results that disagreed with me, that I would refuse to fund future studies. Of course I would never do that, but they don't know that. So they give positive results for me. You know, because of the implication."

  • There are definitions of "God" that I feel are hard to prove, but others that are easy. For example, of your definition is "God is the ultimate cause of the universe" then it's pretty trivial that if everything has a cause there must be an end of the chain. Of course, this the could be a computer program running the universe simulation or even just the laws of physics themselves if those are truly causeless. But nonetheless, it's still a somewhat satisfying definition of "God" so I'm comfortable saying I believe in God. Harder definitions include "God is an omnipotent being" (which most of God's traditional attributes can be derived from) and "God is the being described in the Bible/Qu'ran/other religious text" which I feel like are unprovable.

    A lot of religious apologists will make arguments in favor of the easier definition and then try to claim that this means their specific view of God is real. Personally I think that's insane. Like "there must be some end of the chain of causality therefore God became a Jewish carpenter in the ancient Roman Empire." Even if you're Christian that should be a bad logical jump.

  • I'm Western esotericism, names have power beyond simply being signifiers for the thing they represent- they embody some part of the thing they represent. The word "fire" contains some intrinsic "fire-ness" but not the whole picture. After all, everyone has different names for the same thing. It is thought that everything has a "true name" that perfectly encapsulates all things about it in their entirety, and this true name could be found by intense study, meditation, or etymology. The Bible pays a lot of attention to names in this way. Adam, the first man, names all the animals. Genesis pays a lot of attention to the names of places, and a lot of stories in Genesis are essentially folk etymologies of locations. God's own name is of special importance, and its meaning was revealed to Moses by the Burning Bush. Even today Jews believe that even saying God's name is powerful and dangerous and that only the High Priest would be allowed to say it once every year during Yom Kippur. Jewish folklore says that even this name is merely a part of God's true name, and that Moses pronounced a longer more complete form of The Name to part the Red Sea, and some systems hold that there are even longer and even more complete forms that have been known to rabbis in the past.

  • This is not true. Oxidation is a broad type of chemical reaction involving the loss of electrons. Rust is a type of oxidation, much as a square is a type of rectangle. Oxidation can occur on the surface level (tarnishing of some metals, passivation of aluminum) or throughout (combustion). Rust actually only occurs on the surface as well, but the iron oxide is less dense than the metal and it increases the available area of the surface exposed to oxygen.

  • You obviously don't know much about Missouri. St Louis may as well be a different state than the rest of Missouri when it comes to demographics. The city is about 42% white, while the state as a whole is 77% white, for example. The Black people living in Missouri largely don't have white friends and family living in the countrysides they could have pleaded with to vote for Harris.

  • This community sucks but we far as I know none of these people suggested bombing a fertility clinic on it. Do they ban all Muslim subs after Islamic terror attacks or anti abortion subs when someone bombs an abortion clinic? I hate the direction Reddit moderation has taken because this kind of reactionary bullshit will probably just push these people onto telegram chats and discord channels where they actually will get radicalized instead of just whining about how they wished they had never been born.

  • More importantly, stories allow us to explore morality and philosophy in safe hypotheticals. Faust allows us to inspect the thirst for power and the danger of being willing to do anything for it. Gilgamesh allowed our ancestors to wrestle with mortality and what it means to live a good life. Modern works like Altered Carbon explore generational wealth and the compounding effects of the ownership and control of capital. Even the term "republic" comes from a fictional story Plato wrote about his ideal society. I would say the interaction between fiction and philosophy is far more important than the interaction with technology. After all, the term very term "robot" comes from a play whose entire point was a critique of capitalism where the robots were a metaphor for the working class being exploited by the owners of capital.

  • Tbh it probably costs the theater that much, it's just that wages haven't matched inflation for decades and streaming just utterly destroys theaters on cost. New movies coming to theaters also just mostly suck. Why would anyone want to see Marvel slop formula #2,938 when it's nearly identical to the 2937 ones that came out before it? Even non Marvel movies are essentially Marvel movies with the action/comedy/nothing too thought provoking or interesting formula to appeal to the max number of people as possible. I remember getting extremely mad to the point of wanting to leave the movie theater during the last Marvel movie I watched because they had a scene that was almost a serious, touching moment and just had to have a stupid fart joke immediately after because God forbid anyone experiences any kind of emotions in a movie.

  • Ask A&W

    Jump
  • Counterpoint - pizzas are sold by diameter, but pretty much everyone I know underestimates how diameter corresponds to actual pizza size and think a 16" pizza is twice as big as an 8" pizza instead of four times as big, which it actually is. Meanwhile, a burger patty that is twice as big as another one is actually twice as tall, while one that is wider is only about ~41% wider. Vertical dimension is more intuitive for the overall mass difference.

  • Zoo animals: escape and start attacking people

    Him: How could the zookeepers do this?

    You expect the zoo animals to follow their nature, but you also expect the zookeepers to do their job and keep them in their cages. The Democrats have consistently failed to do anything meaningful to fight the Republicans and are more interested in keeping the Democratic party establishment in power than actually beating the Republicans.

  • This is a team effort that's been decades in the making. S&P down downgraded us in 2011 and Fitch downgraded us in 2023. Neither party is interested in reducing the national debt, and the American public are too stupid to understand that you need to raise taxes to pay down debt. To blame this merely on Trump and the Republicans is missing the big picture, although Trump is definitely making things way worse