as alive as you need me to be
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Personally, I think it is more likely than not that somebody named Yehoshua existed, and did at least some of the things described in the Bible.
Because there were a good number of other Apocalyptical, Messianic Jewish type preachers/cults around the same time, the same area.
Getting conquered by the Romans ... yeah, makes sense this would make people think they're living in some kind of end times, a seemingly unstoppable heretical force is now in charge of near everything, forcing the Jews to endure heresies and descrations... surely God must be pissed and have something up his sleeve, to make things right.
I'm a fan of Paulogia's minimal witnesses hypothesis, basically, you more or less only need Paul and Simon Peter to have something approximating post-bereavement hallucinactions or guilt based psychotic breaks, and then word of mouth and legendary development takes care of the rest from there.
Jesus, imo, probably was a real dude, who got crucified for eventually causing too much trouble. Thats entirely believable to me.
Resurrection? Miracles? Uh no, but, its pretty believable to explain how things roughly similar to, or based on things he may have actually done, got exaggerated and reformulated into the original Gospels.
But yeah, as Price says, he very directly states that he thought he would return before all of his contemporaneous followers passed away.
So... thats why a good deal of the theology is basically based on "well he did actually, in a way, from a certain point if view."
... Because he very clearly did not do so literally, matter of factly.
It gets even more wild if you look into the 'Gnostics', the Sethians, the Valentinians, etc, the stuff that didn't uh, make the final editors cut, as it were.
The... only thing I think I technically agree with them on is that... the holy day should by rights be Saturday, not Sunday.
Beyond that... yeah, some of them are very pleasant, delicate people... whats his name, the guy that Hacksaw Ridge was about... basically fairly close to a real story, he was an Adventist, thus a Pacifist, refused to pick up a weapon during WW2...
Became a medic, saved I think around at least 100 soldiers lives, got a Medal of Honor.
But the flip side of this is that, as best I can tell, at least some of their Preachers/Pastors, they've been conspiracy theory crafting intricate explanations of how the Catholic Church is more or less the most heretical thing that can be, Pope is the AntiChrist, etc etc, many, many other details... been doing that for decades.
I've managed to not meet too many Southern Baptists, due to being nowhere near the South at any point in my life... but yeah, what you say about them comports with what I've heard... seen on youtube, from people covering absolute nutjob, modern fire and brimstone preachers and 'prophets'.
Dear lord that's a whole can of worms there, people and branches that make prophecies and encourage other members to... or, who claim God is directly talking to them... makes for a whole lot of dramatic nonsense real fast, such as the recent Tiktok Rapture mass psychosis event.
If we ever doubted how those old tales of things like 'dancing madness' happened, well, now we know.
Sometimes people just kind of... euphorically, collectively, snap.
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Well, nearly all biological lifeforms would ... more or less wither and die, rather quickly.
Give water infinite surface tension?
Yeah, whole lotta internal processes stop working ... life as we know it is... kinda mostly built around water acting like water.
I mean, can I just say I follow the Jefferson Bible, am I a Christian if I do that?
Yes?
No?
Let me guess:
A bunch of different Christians will disagree about that!
Those are all good specific, relevant, additional details to bring up, yes, I did gloss over aspects of history a bit, hehe.
"more or less"
(load bearing phrasing, lol)
You don't need to suspect that, you need to be 1000% sure of that.
Even in good economic times, what is it, like 90% of newly started businesses fail in a year or two?
Yeah, the 'start your own business!' advice is yet another laughable boomerism, easily dismissed by a casual glance at any data from the last 50 years, but no, no, they know better than reality, donchaknow?
Just... yeah, I'm sure all the banks are really just itching to give out a $250,000 business startup loan right about now.
Not like bank failures have been steadily climbing, not like the credit markets are seizing up, bond markets going fucking haywire.
No no no, everything's just fine.
... I suspect people are going to be very shocked to discover the differences between a recession and a depression.
History is apparently stupid though, learning from it is evidently a social faux pas... we just love continuously having to learn what mistakes look like by slamming our faces into them with reckless abandon.
How is it an interesting thing to do?
Hateful bigotry is bad, is that your point?
... Religion is the only one of those things that, by definition, constitutes a worldview that... very often serves as a generator of violent bigotry, in and of itself.
'Race', gender, sexual orientation, those things can lead to the actual enactment of violent bigotry against outgroup members... but they have to be paired with an accompanying worldview and/or material economic situation of disparity for that to arise.
Religion is the only one of those that doesn't need any extra components for its adherents, its members, to enact violent bigotry against outgroup members.
I'm not justifying violent bigotry.
I'm explaining what causes it:
So long as there are idiotic squabbles over nonsensical and contradictory and logically incoherent worldviews, that are deeply held with great conviction, there will be violent bigotry.
Further, 'race' itself is an ultimately incoherent construct, it is a worldview, one that is just so ingrained into so many that we don't even realize this.
People groups exist, ethnolinguistic groups exist, heritages of haplogroups exist... 'race' doesn't, 'race' is a way of thinking, promulgated by some societies, that just clumsily and incoherently defines people into ingroup and outgroup members, and then oppresses the outgroup members so hard that they are functionally forced to adopt it as a practical, lived identity.
Imagine trying to do the 'one drop rule' with the US conception of 'white people'.
Oh, sure, you're uh I dunno, Norweigan, eh? Well, there's actually a German, and even a Spaniard, somewhere in your set of great great grandparents, so clearly, you're some kind of white mochalatto, not really pure white, thus impure.
... Absolute nonsense.
Gender and sexual orientation?
These are unchangeable, naturally arising aspects of people, that some other people with some worldviews may choose to hate, or not.
Religion?
Very often the worldview that chooses to hate.
'Race'?
Yeah, more complicated, more like a clumsy worldview that is enforced onto others untill they adopt it or have no choice but to adopt it... by certain other kinds of worldviews, which are very often religions.
With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.
Yup yup, best find those bootstraps and start pullin', reaaal hard.
Oh what, you're obese and crippled and old and tired?
... did I stutter ...?
Well it sure is a good thing SNAP basically doesn't exist anymore, otherwise these brain dead morons, these wayward souls, they'd have a chance to be tempted into becoming profligate hypocrites in another way!
You see, God, Trump, they're the same thing, and this is all a good thing, because now they'll have a chance to prove themselves before the sacrificial altar of capitalism, just as Jesus wanted.
Just uh, start a business or something, in the midst of a rapidly worsening economic depression, can't be that hard, right?
And then the fourth type of guy: Oh hi Mark!
Yeah... he's... the kind of person who is popular because he is popular, people laugh because other people are laughing, so thats what 'funny' is, right?
Not trying to say he's a bad person, he's probably a good dude, but as far as looks and talent go?
Average, but popular with people who decide which people will become popular.
Bi guy here:
lol wtf, Pete Davidson is like, the most average looking dude ever.
He's probably just popular because people write 'funny' things for him to say, and people enjoy laughing, and he's basically nice / goofy / safe.
Now Adrian Brody?
Ok, so, he actually has a chisled, yet slender face. He also has a ... fairly uncommon kind of nose, for someone with such a chiseled yet slender face.
That makes him, imo, a kind of ... very distinctive, 'controversial' kind of beautiful.
And what I mean by controversial is that... basically, there are facial proportions that are just generally seen as attractive, by most people.
But there are also people who more or less follow thoae typical 'beautiful to everyone' proportions, but, have some elements that wildly diverge from the 'generally beautiful to everyone' proportions.
This has been studied, and such people tend to be rated extremely beautiful by some people, and extremely unnatractive by other people.
Thus 'controversially beautiful'; you either really find such a face very appealing, or you really don't, very few people rate them as middling or average.
So, for what you describe as basically someone being drunk in the proverbial character creator menu?
Well, yeah, see, thats the kind of thing that can result in a face that some people are really into, and others are really not. You're clearly in the 'not into it' camp, but a lot of women are in the 'into it' camp.
To attempt a similar kind of comparison with what I'd think is a controversially beautiful female face:
Look up Dichen Lachmann.
Heritage? Australian and Tibetan.
Yeah hows that for 'drunk in the character creator menu'?
She has very striking and unique facial proportions, personally, I'm a big fan of them, but also, as I think she is 'controversially beautiful', I would expect a fair number of people to basically describe her as very strange looking, the way you describe Brody.
But beyond all that: Brody is actually just a very good actor, pretty talented, so... it makes sense to me that people would generally appreciate that and also find that beautiful.
Anyway, yeah, there is actual 'science', or at least exhaustive data analysis, that can give you an idea of how percieved beauty 'works', going by actual measurements of facial proportions.
Some people, some combinations of ranges of facial proportions... are just generally agreed to be unattractive, average, attractive...
... while others are 'controversial' with basically the opposite of a bell curve distribution, a two peak with a valley in the middle...
...other kinds of people, sets of facial proportion ranges, are generally more or less beautiful to certain identifiable subsets of people... you've got the whole oval/circle/triangle/diamond/heart/square rough face types, long used to help people pick out haircuts and glasses that look good on them... for artists to mockup chatacter designs with...
There are infact statistically identifiable and defineable 'types' of faces that certain people find more or less attractive, this kind of thing can be substantiated and defined with math. Its just that humans typically do that 'math' in their heads subconsciously, heuristically, and use a widely varying array of often just nonsensical adjectives to try and actually describe this... because that underlying math is actually very complicated.
That and most people also have varying exposure to different kinds of faces, depending on a whole lot of other variables, and that will to some degree also shape their perception of what is and is not beautiful.
And finally beyond that, sometimes there's just no accounting for some kinds of personal tastes and preferences.
Uh....
I'm afraid you're going to have to explain that meme to me a bit more, before I can have what I'd call a potentially defensible 'fan canon' opinion on that.
If its literally just 'escape the matrix by poisoning yourself to death, via eating dessicant pouches'...
... then no, thats just suicide by way of being an idiot, I would not think that would ... mesh with what the matrix world would seem to define as a viable means of transcending 'reality'.
Unless there is some kind of....extremely strong, or kind of extremely 'deep' belief structure that goes along with this, then probably not, no.
... However...
IIRC... if we expand to include MxO's character archetypes as potentially valid canon...
Well, one of those archetypes more or less is: you are a paranoid schizophrenic.
So... maybe? Kind of? ... ???
Yes, I would say that a kind of... immense spiritual awareness, or contemplative understanding of the interconnected nature of reality (and yourself) constitutes a kind of very strong belief.
Though I don't think its explicitly stated in the movies that the 'spoon kid' ... literally pulls himself out of the matrix...
In MxO, which is I guess roughly 'secondary canon', one of the kinds of character archetypes you can play as, is basically 'zen master', so yeah I would tend to agree that thats probably another reasonably valid 'canonical' way by which someone could escape the matrix on their own, transcend 'reality'.
Thats true, that is also a thing.
But... usually ... the style shift... contextually makes sense, to... emphasize something. A mood shift, a perspective shift, a time shift, etc.
Or sometimes you get a sort of... clipshow type format, but its not actually a clipshow, its ... the style is bouncing around all over the place, basically as both an artistic tour de force, and as a sort of meta joke, for that whole episode.
I guess I'm just not seeing anything like that here.
You gotta go to the Seventh Day Adventists, imo, to get some reeeeaaallll hardcore Catholic hate, good lord do they hate Catholics.
(This message brought to you by Corn Flakes: Stop masterbating)
Wait, Mormons appropriated the term Gentiles, from... Jews?
That's incredible.
I'll be frank: Mormonism is based on the fan fiction of an easily provable, known at the time to be a serial con artist and fraudster.
... Who then went on to lead a cult of what we would now call domestic terrorists.
He specifically tried to destroy any press outlets that were critical of him.
Like, with violent armed force.
Every element of the origin story of Mormonism collapses under any serious scrutiny from anyone who isn't a Mormon, its laughable.
He also just appropriated a bunch of Masonic poses and hand signs and such, like, verbatim, without modification in a good deal of cases, and invented rituals to go make use of them.
The uh, what is it, the papyrus he picked up off of a travelling antiquities merchant, that he then declared was "The Book of Abraham"?
He was just bullshitting around his total inability to read actual hieroglyphs... the knowledge deriving from the discovery of the Rosetta Stone was quite rare at the time, so he felt comfortable making up a nonsense 'translation'.
Then, some decades later, actual Egyptologists get around to reading the original text and the "translation" and uh... welp, long story short, its a copy of a fairly common Egyptian funerary rites text, instructions on how to breathe properly when in the underworld. Has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham, bears no relationship to Smith's fabricated translated story.
Mormonism is literally a fraud.
But!
That hasn't stopped other cults and religions from... making it big time.
I'm honestly tempted to think this is some kind of edit.
The art style for both characters, not just the woman, completely changes for the last two panels.
Everything is different, more simplistic faces and facial features, more swoopy, less angular, less detail, both characters become basically ovals or rounded rectangles, when they were first basically polygons... eyes for both characters are now totally different...
Honestly its pretty big femcel vibes, in the sense of the 'woman who cannot attract a mate to save her life' meaning of femcel.
... I must be very old school, out of touch, or just doing my own thing...
Because I would do corduroy pants and a tweed vest with elbow patches, over a hoodie.
But then basically either totally cheap flats for shoes, or basically 1's boots, but in whatever shade of brown leather works best with the jacket.
... I also now actually have a proper tobacco pipe, haven't smoked in years, but that seems like it would work with that old kinda getup too.
... Am... I the last living hipster?
I definitely hated all the other hipsters for entirely missing the point, in one way or another, thus, arguably, I am qualified as a hipster.