> "When everyone has a printing press [i.e., Facebook], the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to."
In retrospect, it gives a ton of insight into the flawed beliefs within the company.
https://twitter.com/nemild/status/1006533287378968576
https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-facebooks-little-red-...
In fact, there is no account of capital punishment, in regards to this law (killing homosexual men), in Jewish history.
As for Judaism, Rabbinic tradition understands the Torah's system of capital punishment to not be in effect for the past approximately 2,000 years, in the absence of a Sanhedrin and Temple.
And as for Christianity, Leviticus and indeed the entirety of the Law of Moses was fulfilled by Jesus Christ.
And so no, neither Jews nor Christians practice this at all.
'If a man lies with a man as with a woman, they have both committed an abomination. They must surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.'
If you are going to treat these writings as a single cohesive narrative, you still have to keep in mind the context.
One of the most interesting aspects of the writings Jesus, is that he only ever taught Jews. Jesus in fact never really laid out a formal theology of what to do after his death, he simply stresses that the second coming would be very soon.
The only person to discuss the applicability of the Torah to non jewish followers of Jesus is Paul. Paul is extremely clear that the Jewish law does not apply to non Jews.
It's also interesting that Paul never met Jesus, that Paul persecuted christians until a burning bush talked to Paul in a moment of divine inspiration, and afterwards Paul largely relied on his excellent knowledge of jewish scripture to explain why the jewish scripture no longer applied anymore.
There are many verses which deal with “what now if the law?”, and I think a fuller understanding requires reading more than one of them.
For example, there is, of course, the parts about the dietary restrictions part of the law.
But that isn’t all. Male converts to Judaism were required to be circumcised, but NT verses say that this is not required to convert to Christianity (though, not phrased like that of course), and in talking about this, it also talks about what the law succeeds in, and what it, well, not fails in, but, it’s insufficiency in the face of human failure?
I’m saying this not to say that the NT condones sex between two cisgender men (indeed, I believe that at one point after the resurrection, some apostles are on an island, and are telling the people there about Christ, and the text describes the homosexual sexual practices practiced by those native to the island as (in at least one common translation. This is by memory.) as “unnatural”, which seems to me to indicate disapproval, though I haven’t looked at commentary on how this was worded in the original Greek.)
My apologies for not including links and citations; I haven’t gotten out of bed yet this morning, and am typing this on my phone.
- men who had sex with another men
- should be killed
- they deserve it
Would you point me to a source/insight maybe?
Else I will believe, that this is too, as I have witnessed countless times personally, nothing but an apologetic approach to horrors religious scripture in modern age.
OTOH, like virtually of the rest of the old testament statutes applicable to the Jewish people, these and most of the other prohibitions in that chapter and the surrounding ones is voided as to non-Jewish Christians (though one might infer from it a continuing prohibition on same sex marriage from it), see Acts 15:28-29, where the apostles, addressing the acts of some in the early Christian community attempting to apply the Mosaic law in its entirety to gentile Christians, declared: “It is the decision of the holy Spirit and of us not to place on you any burden beyond these necessities, namely, to abstain from meat sacrificed to idols, from blood, from meats of strangled animals, and from unlawful marriage. If you keep free of these, you will be doing what is right. Farewell.”
Now, it's true that some modern Christians do exactly (or, rather more often, a cherry-picked subset of it) what the council in Acts 15—directed, as Scripture says, by the Holy Spirit—reacted against and declared invalid.
(edit: and if you accept their four-degrees-of-game-of-telephone translation at face value, as sibling comment points out)
Is that right, or did I misunderstand you? If that is what you're saying, do you have a reason to disagree with all of those translations? Can you offer your own for that passage?
I'm sure that at least some Abrahamic writings didn't get included in the Christian Bible. Or even in the Tanakh.
Why is it part of the Christian Canon? Because it provides important context for later material, e.g., Acts 15. The controversy in the early Christian Community over the application of the Jewish ritual law to gentile Christians is hard to understand without the Jewish ritual law.
Also, not all Christians are gentile Christians.
Maybe this is a dumb question (having had no religious instruction) but do all modern Christians (except, I guess, some fundamentalists) understand that the Old Testament doesn't apply to them? If that's so, it seems like that stuff should be flagged somehow, to avoid misunderstandings.
Or do some modern gentile Christians perhaps go further, and believe that the old Jewish ritual law was a misunderstanding, and not an accurate statement of God's will? And if so, who are they?
Also, who are the modern non-gentile Christians?
I found a site that explains some of this,[0] but have no clue about its reliability. The root is here.[1]
0) http://www.winternet.com/~swezeyt/bible/origins/jwGn.htm
1) http://www.winternet.com/~swezeyt/bible/origins/originsMain....
I know of no modern Christian group that doesn't have a general understanding that the applicability of the OT law to Christians is, at a minimum, limited by the explicit terms of Acts 15. OTOH, there's obviously quite a bit of variation in what particular bits of the OT law modern Christian groups think actually still applies.
> If that's so, it seems like that stuff should be flagged somehow, to avoid misunderstandings
It's kind of (in general, not necessarily the specific passage in particular) the reason that the Catholic Church spent a very long time not being particularly happy with people without specific training reading the Bible themselves rather than going through tainted clergy as gatekeepers.
> Or do some modern gentile Christians perhaps go further, and believe that the old Jewish ritual law was a misunderstanding, and not an accurate statement of God's will? And if so, who are they?
Without getting into boundary disputes about where "Christian" ends, sure, there are probably groups that identify as Christian that believe that.
> Also, who are the modern non-gentile Christians?
One interpretation is that anyone who has ever been a Jew remains one and boundy the law even if they become Christian. (Of course, even the Jewish understanding of Jewish law seems to have h evolved—and become quite diverse—considerably since Christianity split off, and I'm not sure how much that influences theology as to what precepts, precisely, apply to modern Jews who become Christians.)
> It's kind of (in general, not necessarily the specific passage in particular) the reason that the Catholic Church spent a very long time not being particularly happy with people without specific training reading the Bible themselves rather than going through tainted clergy as gatekeepers.
OK, that makes sense. There's some of that perspective in the sciences about misunderstanding of the literature.
They also did believe that the government should be structured according to those same OT provisions, and enforce them as laws.
“trained” rather than “tainted” was the intent here.
But from the Protestants' perspective, "tainted" arguably works too.
That sounds like Messianic Judaism.
I believe that Jesus did not speak at all about homosexuality. There is no indication that he attacked or held any anger towards homosexuals.
Conversely Jesus was strongly anti-capitalist! No money changing or animal selling in temples folks!
But fundamentally - when reading the bible your question must be "am I a Christian - or not?" what is the purpose of Jesus's ministry and passion if he did not bring a message and a purpose beyond and more significant than the messages revealed to prophets and his servants? If you are a Christian surely your preoccupation must be his word - and more importantly his meaning; interpreted in the context of his explicitly stated principles and lived actions.
Unfortunately, this whole thread seems to be on the topic of “It’s a shame that mass-dissemination of information demonstrably fails to make the best ideas into the most popular ideas [0]” — and although you interpret the bible that way, I’ve witnessed many profess Christianity while also condemning gay men.
[0] Well, unless you take the memetic evolution attitude that “best” isn’t a moral statement but shorthand for “best at reproducing”, but if anyone on this thread has said that, I’ve missed it.
Remember there have been 1000's of people practicing grotesque child abuse while professing Christianity, and yet one of the most frank and flat statements of Christ is "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."
Be aware that if I, as a lapsed neopagan, am asked to judge which Christians are acting in accordance with the deeds and words of an entity that I regard as fictional as my own pantheon, there might not be any “True Christians” left.
To focus on the point, how about a biblical example: Parable of the Sower, specifically that sown on the path and in the thorns.
The problem is language itself. We trust it way too much to convey meaning, and truth. But it's just a delusion, or a mirage, in much the same way that the search for artificial intelligence is. In fact, I would say that language itself is the first AI invented.
https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...
Do you have any source or pointer to learn more about this ?
Should be:
"When everyone has a printing press, the most persuasive ones are the ones people listen to"
Where it all goes wrong is that it is very expensive to test an idea and determine whether it is good, whereas an idea that is very attractive to repeat and copy without testing is much fitter and the more it resists testing the better it is.
This is why the whole framework for protecting IP is broken as well - we incentivize coming up with ideas, but ideas are worthless - it's evaluating and testing ideas that is valuable.
We're letting the world burn for the sake of online advertising revenue and broken business models.
And a good tautology like this one can at least help people realize the difficulties in distinguishing merit from success.
Which puts it up a step from overconfident generalizations.
Facebook solved a problem (connecting) but it also created one (fake content, bot farms).
Either Facebook will fix it, or if they don't, new products will pop up to solve the problem to try to provide more reliable content.
Recently, might have seen it on here (I forget where) someone trained an AI to try to detect fake news. Sure the first attempts will be crappy prototypes, but the point is that people are trying to figure the problem out.
While this may be inevitable on a long timescale, the cost in human lives and dignity may be monstrous before this naturally occurs.
Do you believe that “more reliable content” will have a financial edge over “more popular content”, and if so, why?
A more humble view might include that he was raised in relative privilege, a lot of doors were open to him, and there was a lot of good luck involved.
I imagine it is only a small fraction of people who would be so brash as to ask fellow students for their email passwords, but with the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that someone who asks for that information probably wants to do something nasty with it.
There are a lot of mistakes being made for which consequences have not yet occurred. Journalists of previous generations on whom we could rely had built up lifetimes-worth of reputation. On whom can you rely today? It's an open problem which I think is solvable in spite of today's difficulties.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/10/11/pro-trump-outlet-link...
https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/11/12/bl-fake-profiles/
https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/12/13/facebook-bl-cib/
https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/12/20/facebook-removes-the-...
As was true before the internet, we need to make sure we have reliable sources to trust the news.
We don't need real journalists, we need a way to pay for news that makes accurate reporting profitable.
People want to read/watch news they want to believe or agree with, and instinctively they shun away from facts that causes cognitive dissonance with them. What they want is to believe their preferred news sources are objective, but they will do everything they can to avoid doing actual due diligence to verify that objectivity.
That’s why if we leave it to purely market economy, completely objective, facts based journalism will never be as profitable as sensationalism based stuff you see these days.
I think it was pg who said "make something people want". If the plan is to get rich that is the way to go. If you want to improve the world, you should build something people need. Unfortunately, they often don't want it or don't want it enough to pay for it which makes the endeavor unsustainable.
Plenty of foreign journalists didn't buy what the US government was saying and refuted its claims with facts, the whole idea that Saddam Hussein had nukes or WMD was completely preposterous, it's just that US journalists were afraid of being labelled traitors if they didn't go along with the Irak war. Journalists are people after all. So they "chose" to listen to Rumsfeld instead of Hans Blix.
Journalists aren't trusted anymore and their work isn't valued by the public because things like the Covington school incident happens, where Journalists just keep using tweets as a meaningful source of information, with no serious investigative work.
Journalists don't like Facebook, Google and co because they are direct competitors to them in terms of attention and ad revenue. Ironically they somehow like Twitter and are all on Twitter even when Twitter is actually competition to them, way more than Facebook or Google. Why bother visiting the nyt when all the drama is already on Twitter?
signed media is going to become FAR more important in the future.
We're going to have cameras shipping with crypto so that news agencies can sign their video.
I've lived through enough presidencies to assure you that it never mattered if it was real or not. Supporters ignored or excused it, opposition treated it like the end of the world. Sane people stopped paying attention long ago to keep their sanity.
Does that sound like something that would be feasible to produce/practical in the real world?
Desirable? Well, you've created a system that authenticates a camera as being at a place at a time. It's a good way to authenticate photos, but a bad way to stay anonymous.
How do you feel about photographers and journalists becoming even larger targets for anyone who wants to keep a secret?
The issue is : does it authenticate that a particular camera that belongs to a particular person is/was at a place at a time and produced an image - because if so then if the device is found in a search the owner/user/keeper is in hot water.
So the camera must be anonymous - but it must be impossible for a lie about the place and time to be encoded into the image.
It's perhaps worth considering that an authoritarian government might not trouble itself with such legal niceties. All they have to do is mandate that journalists with cameras register their keys, make possession of a camera with an unregistered key criminal, and track sales / border entries. China springs to mind as a country that might do such a thing.
Again, you're absolutely correct in asserting that anonymity of camera-user is important! It's just perhaps worth considering how linking hardware to images might undermine that in dangerous ways.
Meanwhile secure enclaves are now possibly a lot safer, but as Kalium mentioned it might not be very attractive for everyone.
For forensics experts however it could become very useful I believe.
I don't see this as a move into a new world, but rather the increase level of hopelessness we're dealing with when it comes to good journalism. It may be time to pause and rethink our current approach to journalism since the current model is not working very well now and certainly won't be in the future.
Facebook does a lot of disageeable things but making everyone a journalist isn't one of them. This just decentralised journalism and actually empowered freespeech. There are issues with it, but that's a better problem we can work on to mitigate than giving a few channels a monopoly over truth.
And there were some valid criticisms.
This is a very common stance now - because one person said one thing, or a person said something once, or did something once then all people associated with that person (in the mind of the commentator) are a "thing".
The reasoning is "a rightwing person once said a racist thing, therefore anyone who is rightwing is definitely racist" it is clearly nonsense, and is extremely corrosive to debate.
There are some great stats about just how much the number of professional journalists has shrunk in the social media era.
Here's a thread from January this year, where a journalism professor lays bare the facts about the decline of his domain: https://twitter.com/jeremylittau/status/1088503510184927233?...
If my memory serves me right, that thread was on the HN front page at the time. Essentially the expense of quality journalism was seen as frivolous in the 80's, got nixed, and by the mid-90's newspapers relied on their established captive audience to churn out reliable profits with little appetite for innovation. Who was going to compete with them, anyway?
Internet changed the landscape, and social media has been instrumental in hammering nails in the coffin. But the decline of journalism and destruction of quality newsrooms has been going on since before there was public internet.
In this context I think it should be termed "now that there are no classified ads."
As a rule, people don't want to pay for anything that benefits them in a second-order way with non-immediate consequences - even if objectively the benefits are real.
It's a classic economic monkey trap. Holding onto something now is "better" than letting go and getting a bigger benefit later.
Which suggests that perhaps we should be doing more to eliminate monkey traps from our economic and political systems.
Maybe because it’s already a paid service and its quality still has to be observed. But if you take their government from them, returning that substantial income cut, they instantly want it back.
This doesn’t have to invalidate your point, but this particular comparison seems pretty shaky. (Or it’s not and I’m missing something.)
And more historical, "Another Interview with Mr. Lincoln; His Opinion of Compromises" (1861) https://www.nytimes.com/1861/01/14/archives/anotherinterview...
More niche publications don't have that problem, but I think a big question is how we systemically increase the quality of mass journalism.
Now a journalist will not only need training in writing well, conveying a story with facts, and investigating, but they will also need to become experts in identifying fake source material.
In a world where anyone can make a video or photo of anyone doing anything, we'll need to rely on reputable journalists to vet that material for us.
Saw a video on YouTube of the President saying something bad? No idea if it's real anymore.
Sure, a lot of this technology has existed for a while, but it was usually in the fringes (see The National Enquirer). Now it's going mainstream.
And the worst part is, there are a whole group of people who will not trust a professional journalist (sometimes with good reason) but will trust anyone online who happens to provide evidence that boosters their existing opinions.