Part of the problem with this approach is that prediction engines are predicted on the idea that there’s more of a thing to predict.

So unless they really, really go out of their way with modeling the records to account for this, they’ll have a system very strongly biased towards predicting more criminal behavior for everyone fed into it.

No historical record that the Exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt even exists. In fact, there’s no record of these Hebrew slaves, period.

As I said in my earlier comment, this narrative was probably appropriated from the forced relocation of the sea peoples into the southern Levant. The Egyptians do have extensive records of conflict with them, who they note in that conflict were without foreskins (as opposed to the partial circumcision more common at the time), and there’s an emerging picture of Aegean cohabitation with the Israelites in the early Iron Age along with Anatolian trade with an area where the Denyen were talking about their founding leader Mopsus.

Here’s the source for the Noah’s Ark as originally a famine narrative: https://scholar.harvard.edu/dershowitz/publications/man-land-unearthing-original-noah

You’re welcome to find the material as you like, but I’m telling you that there’s a lot more value to careful analysis of it within it’s broader context than you (and many others) seem to think. Whether you find that stance condescending or not.

Kind of falls apart if rejecting the idea of objective good and evil and interpreting the parable of the fruit of knowledge in Eden as the inheritance of a relative knowledge of good and evil for oneself which inherently makes any shared consensus utopia an impossibility.

In general, we have very bizarre constraints on what we imagine for the divine, such as it always being a dominant personality.

Is God allowed to be a sub? Where’s the world religion built around that idea?

What about the notion that the variety of life is not a test for us to pass/fail, but more like a Rorsarch test where it allows us to determine for ourselves what is good or not?

Yes, antiquated inflexible ideas don’t hold up well to scrutiny. But adopting those as the only idea to contrast with equally inflexible consideration just seems like a waste of time for everyone involved, no?

Actually, the book of Job is nearly verbatim a combination of the opening of the Canaanite A Tale of Aqhat where Anat petitions El to kill the son of Danel as the lead in to a near copy of the dialogue on suffering of the Babylonian Theodicy. With what appears a sloppy edit to make it monotheistic later on, changing Anat from being a different god to simply ‘adversary’ and spawning fanfiction for millennia.

Understanding the context helps a lot in meaningful analysis.

Without the context, yeah, a lot can go over your head and it just seem pointless.

Edit: And Noah’s ark was likely originally a famine story before being turned into an adaptation of the Babylonian flood mythos.

Edit 2: And the eating of the fruit by the first two people was probably adapted from the Phonecian creation myth around the first man and woman with the woman discovering the technology of eating fruit from the trees.

There’s actually a lot of interesting stuff in the text when you learn how to spot it between the lines of the revisionism. Both OT and NT.

The problem is you basically only have two camps.

One, that thinks the text as it exists today represents an unadulterated divine transmission.

And the other, that thinks anything to do with it is worthless nonsense.

So there’s very few people actually looking at it in between those two extremes, with most engaged with the material clustering around the former, or at very least with an anchoring and survivorship bias around the former cluster.

We’re left with audiences for the text that on both sides would be incredulous at the idea that, say, the Exodus narrative was in part an appropriation of the LBA/Early Iron Age sea peoples history when they were forcibly relocated into cohabitation with the Israelites, or say, that Jesus was taking about evolution with the sower parable.

Even though both those things have very compelling cases that can be made given emerging available evidence, the discussion is all about the acceptance or wholesale rejection of canon with little to no discussion of what actually exists in the absence of the BS.

It’s most disappointing for the latter group though. While I kind of get the way the trauma of proselytizing and indoctrination turns minds off to anything connected with the material, it’s very frustrating that what should be the healthy opposition cedes so many claims of authenticity to the faithfully blind.

Hillary raised $90 million in the entire month of July.

Harris raised $89 million in a single day in July.

Ah yes, the mythical white woman who would have raised $250 million in 24 hours instead of just a record breaking $100 million.

I agree Whitmer would be the best chance at beating Trump in general.

But I do think that Harris can still do that job and that there’s logistical reasons why it’s going to be that.

I wish we’d have Whitmer, but I’m not terrified of it being Harris the way I was if Biden stayed in the race.

And if she picks a good VP that helps round out the ticket with the middle of the country, I could see the new ticket getting momentum.

Gravity is where the whole continuous singularities are, so yeah.

Using a rubber band around the lid of a jar to open it effortlessly.

It literally has the address of his house on it.

On a vacation when I was a teenager I taught my younger sibling the “SYN/ACK” game.

They still remember the TCP stack handshake protocol including resets and acks years later.

Maybe they both could and the US might have a return to a respectable election options?

Literally any half competent debater could have torn Trump apart up there.

The failure wasn’t the moderators but the opposition candidate to Trump letting him run hog wild.

If Trump claims he’s going to end the war in Ukraine before even taking office, you point out how absurd that claim is and that Trump makes impossible claims without any substance or knowledge of diplomacy. That the images of him photoshopped as Rambo must have gone to his head if he thinks Putin will be so scared of him to give up.

If he says hostages will be released as soon as he’s nominated, you point out it sounds like maybe there’s been a backroom tit-for-tat deal for a hostage release with a hostile foreign nation, and ask if maybe the intelligence agencies should look into that and what he might have been willing to trade for it.

The moderators have to try to keep the appearance of neutrality, but the candidates do not. And the only reason Trump was so successful in spouting BS and getting away with it was because his opposition had the strength of a wet paper towel.

Having a presidential election without debates would have been a big step back and loss for American democracy.

We shouldn’t champion erosion of democratic institutions when it helps our side of the ticket.

And generally, if eroding democratic institutions helps your ticket, it’s a red flag about your ticket.

Ok. Now how do I unwatch it?

Oh, man - the comments…

At a minimum, he’s certainly increased the chances of us being tortured significantly.

No, no he did not. 🤦🏼

nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death

Socrates literally claimed that he was a channel for a revelatory holy spirit and that because the spirit would not lead him astray that he was ensured to escape death and have a good afterlife because otherwise it wouldn’t have encouraged him to tell off the proceedings at his trial.

Also, there definitely isn’t any evidence of Joshua in the LBA, or evidence for anything in that book, and a lot of evidence against it.

The part mentioning Jesus’s crucifixion in Josephus is extremely likely to have been altered if not entirely fabricated.

The idea that the historical figure was known as either ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ’ is almost 0% given the former is a Greek version of the Aramaic name and the same for the second being the Greek version of Messiah, but that one is even less likely given in the earliest cannonical gospel he only identified that way in secret and there’s no mention of it in the earliest apocrypha.

In many ways, it’s the various differences between the account of a historical Jesus and the various other Messianic figures in Judea that I think lends the most credence to the historicity of an underlying historical Jesus.

One tends to make things up in ways that fit with what one knows, not make up specific inconvenient things out of context with what would have been expected.

Artists in 2023: “There should be labels on AI modified art!!”

Artists in 2024: “Wait, not like that…”