- Charles Colson, advisor to Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal
The Roman official who ordered Jesus' execution didn't really want him dead, so perhaps he gave off-the-books instructions to the guards that "if this person were to miraculously survive being crucified, and escaped his tomb in a few days, well there's nothing you could have done to stop a miracle. His tomb that of course is temperate and happens to have water supplies inside. There's nothing you could have done. Wink wink."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilate%27s_court
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swoon_hypothesis#Supporting_ar...
"It was uncommon for a crucified healthy adult to die in the time described by the Gospels; the Gospel of Mark reports that Jesus was crucified at nine in the morning and died at three in the afternoon, or six hours after the crucifixion. ... The average time of suffering before death by crucifixion is claimed by some to have been observed to be 2–4 days. ... Modern scholarship has also cast some doubt on the generally agreed depiction of Jesus being nailed to a cross, as opposed to the more common method of having a victim's hands and feet being tied to a cross."
If dying normally took 2-4 days, it's possible that a sympathetic guard could have declared him dead after only 6 hours on the cross (maybe after he first fell unconscious) and then transferred him to the tomb in the hopes that he might recover in the remaining 1.5-3.5 days, perhaps moistening his lips in the process.
If Jesus were tied to the cross rather than nailed to it, there's really not any plausible thing that could have killed him in just 6 hours of mild to moderate blood loss + heat exhaustion. It's much more plausible that he would have fallen unconscious while maintaining a heartbeat and weak breathing.
I used to be Christian and am now more of an agnostic who wants to believe in a benevolent God, and it would be really cool if something like this did happen. Maybe Jesus was just a person but a good one who tried to do good and got lucky through some series of events like this.
I recently unfortunately had a loved one who went through the dying process in hospice care, and it was horrifying to watch, but it took multiple days, about 5 days, and 6 hours just isn't plausible. 6 hours on the cross + a recovery from near-death three days later in a cool tomb makes a lot of sense if someone gave him water on the way to the tomb. Or maybe the tomb had a hidden supply of water in it, like a puddle big enough to drink.
What would be a benevolent God, in the context of our history and present? (wars, torture, floods, famine, ...)
(I am myself an atheist, curious of what drives people to believe in a deity)
Life is suffering. You can literally only live by causing suffering in other living plants/animals. Therefore to live a happy life, you must come to terms with this and attempt to cause as little unnecessary suffering as possible.
Therefore if there is a God, they are either an impersonal one (think mother nature instead of the Christian god), or their understanding/views are so removed from our own that we have completely misunderstood and guidance they have tried to give us.
I lean toward the first view. Anything capable of creating the universe might be interested in us, but I highly doubt we’re their only (or even primary) interest.
Maybe God is not omniscient or thinks in such non-human terms that human suffering didn't catch God's attention. E.g. maybe God operates primarily at the scale of quarks, and God wanted to create a universe full of quarks doing interesting things, and humans are an emergent behavior that God isn't aware of.
Maybe God is near-omniscient but is not omnipotent. E.g. maybe God had the power to create the universe from nothing, but can't affect what goes on in the universe. So maybe God has a hand on the universal/multiversal "off switch" and could choose to end all of everything if suffering outweighs joy, but maybe God is powerless to affect reality beyond this binary effect of enabling or disabling existence.
A third possibility similar to the second one is that maybe God sees all possible timelines, and cannot change events within a timeline, but can adjust the "volume knob" for the intensity of qualia in each timeline. In applied moral philosophy this volume knob is sometimes called "moral weight".
A fourth possibility, and a different way that God might be constrained in powers, is that perhaps God sacrificed their life in order to give life to the multiverse. You could imagine this as God wrestling against the nothingness of non-existence that came before God, and that the only way to win was to die in some way, so that God no longer exists but once did.
We currently know so little about physics that we don't know if we live in a singleton universe, an infinite multiverse (like in the many-worlds hypothesis), or a finite multiverse (like the Marvel movies, where you can assign a finite number to each universe because there are finitely many). And we don't know if we live in a block universe (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time... ) or if there is something else (e.g. a combination of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_presentism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return ).
Perhaps in the future we can use reasoning to determine the most likely answers to metaphysical questions, and if God does exist, is benevolent, and is still alive, maybe we can even find a way to communicate with God, perhaps through particle accelerators or whatever other equipment could affect the phenomena which are easiest for God to notice. I figure it doesn't hurt for us to think about what our civilization would ask God if given one chance to do so. If God really does control the "volume knob", we have a lot to be grateful for, such as the spontaneous arising of RNA life through excellent luck in prehistory. More recently, we barely survived the Cold War. I study Cold War history a lot, and many of those of us who do so estimate our odds of having survived up until now as being 1 chance in 3.
Jesus told his believers to eat his flesh and blood to get eternal life (John 6:53–57)
Someone took it literally and opened the grave, and ate the body
This is how the body disappeared suddenly and the grave was open. Others seeing this thought this was a miracle. Meaning Jesus came back to life, opened the grave and left
Whoever was involved had a good reason to keep that secret
You say literally, but the Kraft Heinz company would like you to know that it definitely also might have been Flavor Aid.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...
Or what?
You can’t possibly take Wikipedia seriously as a source of information on controversial figures. That would be the least charitable interpretation and violate HN rules
Do they, though? Most people don’t know shit outside their preferred news channel.
Zoomers are faithfully recreating the boomer flaw via moderation so they have a nicely curated injection of sludge
Your mortgage backed by Americorp indirectly backed by the fed depends on you being a good goy and so what? You keep doing it to pay the bills.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0127/Can-mathematics-...
However, the model makes a few simplifying assumptions, eg a single leak is sufficient to expose the conspiracy, and I think it also doesn't cover mortality. A conspiracy that wasn't exposed up until the death of all in the know would probably be considered as succesful by the model. I think it's fair to assume that the probability of getting exposed at least significantly drops at that point.
While there probably are conspiracies that would take multiple leaks to fully expose, one thing to note is that leaks tend to be correlated with one another. Newsworthy reporting on conspiracy leaks inspires copycat leaks[0] - either to get one's fifteen minutes of fame or to jump ship before the prosecutions come about.
A conspiracy that is "successful" in the sense that it was taken to the grave can still get exposed, though. Sure, the members of the conspiracy can't leak it themselves, but they also can no longer destroy any physical evidence or information they left behind. So that evidence could itself be considered a conspirator that cannot die and will eventually leak.
[0] This also applies to school shootings.
There are ways to at least partially inoculate against leaks; regulatory capture and elimination of accountability, quid pro quo journalism, “fact checking”-driven censorship, or just simply positioning yourself politically so that the responsible entities don’t want to investigate.
Anything left over can be written off as a smear job, a conspiracy theory, etc.
There's still a credibility issue. There are a lot of people who claim to have worked for the government and have direct knowledge of extraterrestrials. They mostly come across as crazy, but this might also be what a conspiracy looks like. Even when people expose it, they just look crazy and are easily dismissed.
That's what they want you think!
As you effectively prove, any long running conspiracy must have tools to discredit defectors. I’m willing to bet dollars to donuts that if, hypothetically, some WEF flunky went on twitter and started posting about a global depopulation conspiracy, that the prestige media would either ignore or deny (“debunk”) it and any alternative sources would be smeared and delegitimized somehow.
One possible tool for discrediting tales of one’s real conspiracy would be spreading stories of various fake conspiracies and then lumping them all together as nonsense.
Evidence to the contrary doesn't discredit anything in the minds of most people... They are more likely to simply attack the person putting forth the evidence for causing them cognitive dissonance migraines.
Of course they all tell each other that all facts are subjective anyway and wouldn’t it be cool and interesting if you were in on a big secret and everyone else except you and your new friends were sheep.. oh and by the way did you know that it’s actually lizard people who started the idea that the earth was round? Doesn’t that feel right and would explain why your life hasn’t turned out the way you wanted? And so on.
In this case I’m explicitly talking about making up non-credible evidence. If everything is subjective then whatever I made up is as good as anything else, I just need to tune it to your biases to make it feel as truthy as possible. But if you believe me then you’ll start to have problems when you need things to actually be true (like running a space program or military for example).
The World Economic Forum is just a bog-standard capitalist outfit. Their more out-there views are not particularly divorced from the rentier capitalism of the New Gilded Age. To be unambiguous about it, that means a heady mix of international megacorporations, uncensored corporate speech[0], copyright maximalism, and the Brussels Effect[1]. The Occam's Razor explanation for the WEF is that greedy corporations that want to maximize profits are going to be greedy and profit-maximizing - in other words, it's the "capitalist agenda".
But if you have particular kinds of brainworms[2], you're going to ignore the greed that you don't want to talk about and start making up reasons for their actions wholly unrelated to what they actually think. For example, if you think white people are being "replaced", then you'll look past the obvious explanation and into the fringes of the ink blots, and come back thinking that the WEF was created by the powerless to oppress the powerful with... power they don't have.
In cases where conspiracies have actually tried to discredit defectors, it usually fails. In fact, it fails so hard that it becomes a meme, like "Russia denies" or "I did not have sexual relations[3] with that woman". Most actual conspiracies are just not that well thought out[4] enough for this to work, while the people writing the conspiracy theories are actually overthinking things.
What actually kills conspiracy theories is conflicting information - i.e. the conspiracy theory not actually lining up with reality. There will always be people who still buy it, though, because conspiracy theories that are not true always substitute veracity with narrative salience. In fact, sometimes being widely known to be false benefits the conspiracy theory, because now you can work the debunking of obvious lies into your conspiracy narrative and make it more salient than ever. And there's no actual conspiracy on the debunking side, either. You are not being smeared by the media because they're all in on trying to hide the truth - remember, coordination leaves evidence. You are being smeared by the media because you are on the side of narrative fiction.
[0] Sometimes complained about under the banner of "money is not speech"
[1] The process by which treaties agreed to by rich countries tie the hands of non-party countries by way of tolerance.
[2] Typically the "50s red scare" strain of anticommunism
[3] it's only sex if the balls are touching - Bill Clinton
[4] Reason being that being in a position of power gives you symptoms of brain damage. In order to implement a successful conspiracy you need power, and that power will blunt your reasoning over time.
Alternately, they can’t stand living in an objective reality where powerful people are systematically up to bad things and they’re helpless to do anything about it. Given the response to the comment you’re replying to, even the possibility that there might be any kind of conspiracies is displeasing to many.
As for the most boring explanation probably being true, well that would be a terrible heuristic to use for any of the hard sciences. I don’t see why it would be the case for the considerably more complex and chaotic social sciences.
> The World Economic Forum is just a bog-standard capitalist outfit.
That’s certainly what the prestige media will tell you! In any event I just tossed it out there as an example.
> Typically the "50s red scare" strain of anticommunism
You may want to pick another example, given that there were in fact communist sympathizers in the State Department at the time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Eastern_Bloc_agents_in...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_in_the_Venon...
To which you replied with a strawman:
> For example, if you think white people are being "replaced", then you'll look past the obvious explanation and into the fringes of the ink blots, and come back thinking that the WEF was created by the powerless to oppress the powerful with... power they don't have.
…in a very detailed comment trying to portray the WEF as not a cabal subverting democracy with oligarchical acts.
I think it’s interesting that your comment can be understood as what the GP was discussing in action.
I'm not sure how you got that from GP's comment, but they were saying the exact opposite about the WEF: it is just a way for greedy corporations to maximize profit by co-opting governments and international institutions to do their bidding. That's what they meant by "corporate free speech" and the Brussels effect.
Except we know that’s not true, eg, in the case of pushing DIE which has catastrophically reduced profits in Disney, WarnerMedia, and Netflix. And more broadly ESG scores, which have led to the ridiculous virtue signaling we see.
The “boring” explanation is that it’s a cabal by the people involved to implement their vision — not that there’s some magic corporation that’s always maximizing its value through its drone agents. That’s just as much a fiction as anything else.
To portray the WEF as “those greedy corporations!” minimizes the nature of what people there are doing by creating fictional entities who are the real actors.
For example, Bill Gates, the EU, and the MPAA all stepped in to tell President Biden to get lost when he proposed suspending COVID-19 vaccine patents. They worked tirelessly to water down and chip away at every WHO vaccine program that might have meant them either having to negotiate a rate or not enforce patents in certain countries. If this was just about pushing a liberal or left-ish agenda at the expense of profits, they would have just licensed the patents at zero cost to anyone in Africa with an mRNA printer[0], and then lobby the government to suspend patent protection so the laggards couldn't get a competitive advantage with a proprietary vaccine.
Things like ESG scores are offered because people don't want to invest in oil companies and investment brokers can make more money if they offer that option to people who would otherwise not have invested in the stock market. This is free-market capitalism working "as intended" - people see the long-term risks of bad environmental management and divest themselves from it.
I have no idea what "DIE" means or how it has catastrophically hurt Disney profits.
[0] (aggressively pirated grunge metal plays in the background)
You wouldn't steal a car. You wouldn't steal a handbag.
Downloading COVID-19 vaccines is stealing.
This is a belief in magical entities the same as you were denouncing.
> For example, Bill Gates, the EU, and the MPAA all stepped in to tell President Biden to get lost when he proposed suspending COVID-19 vaccine patents.
Yes — which is why it’s important to understand the particular benefits to Bill Gates, and other individuals involved.
> Things like ESG scores are offered because people don't want to invest in oil companies and investment brokers can make more money if they offer that option to people who would otherwise not have invested in the stock market.
Yes — that’s the pretense. But not the practice which a) uses captive funds to push agendas of insiders and b) is focused on pushing the destructive social agendas of insiders ahead of actual metrics.
> This is free-market capitalism working "as intended" - people see the long-term risks of bad environmental management and divest themselves from it.
Except that it’s not:
It’s insiders using grandma’s retirement money to push their personal political agendas, even when that loses money for grandma.
Again, look at media companies for that collapse — WarnerMedia, Netflix, Disney, etc.
What collapse? These are e some of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world. Netflix stock went down because the market foolishly expected that all of the subscribers Netflix gained in two years of extremely reduced social lives would not only stay subscribed, but were representative of how fast people would keep subscribing. When this obvious idiocy turned out to be false, the stock plummeted back to more realistic levels it had pre-pandemic.
By the way, I also tried to find out what you meant by DIE, and came up empty handed (though I'm sure searching for WEF DIE has put me on since watch lists somewhere).
Here's the thing about conspiracies: they have a shelf life. The amount of time you can keep a conspiracy secret is bounded by the number of conspirators, how well you can get them to shut up, and how long it has been since the conspiracy occurred. You can take a secret only you know to your grave, but work in a group of ten and someone will confess before their death. Bring in hundreds or thousands and the conspiracy will be blown open accidentally before you can even execute on it.
Now think of how many people had to cooperate to change something as simple and fundamental as the passage of recorded history. Hell, forget the fact that these were all angry, violent warlords; just think of how many scribes, monks, and bureaucrats would all have to remember to write 1000 instead of 736 whenever they wrote a date. It only takes one slip-up to reveal the fraud to archaeologists in the far future, even if they all agreed that they wanted to live in the nice round-number millennium. And nobody would be trying to protect against that because nobody would be thinking, "how do we hide this from 21st century archaeologists trying to discover our time crimes?"