If you do things right, people won't be sure you did anything at all.
Also, the main question addressed by most deconstructions of the Superman-type superhero.
Plus, more literally and now that I think about it maybe directly inspired by Plato: The Invisible Man
If Jesus was godly and perfect all the time, he'd basically be an unemotional miracle engine who could do no wrong.
If he was human but with access to godly powers... would be interesting to know about his mistakes and failings. Like a time he cured a sick man, and this man turned out to be a crook or something.
This was a pub conversation. I'm no theologian, so apologies if the topic is already dealt with in the religious texts.
Hypostatic Union: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07610b.htm
The Incarnation: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07706b.htm
Communicatio Idiomatum: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04169a.htm
1. A fork of HamTrainer (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.practicalapps.hamtrainer...) using the Baltimore Catechisms I-IV as its test banks. The point of a catechism is to actually be able to memorize it and to be able to reflect upon the dogmas of the Church at will. The current catechism is great as its intended purpose as a reference, but the actual regional catechisms (YOUCAT, Adult Catechism et. al) often fail to summarize the tenets in a digestible and rote way. If RCIA fails to be a uniformly "good" experience due to its reliance upon volunteers, effectively automating the ingestion of the dogmas of the Church makes (to my mind) perfect sense for the sincere would-be initiates. It would be trivial to transform the Gutenberg transcriptions of the Baltimore catechisms into the multiple choice format used by HamTrainer. The main difficulty would be curating a meaningful set of "wrong" answers.
2. A fully macronized and properly put together epub3 (ala Standard Ebooks) of the Nova and/or Clementina Vulgata. The Latin Macronizer (https://github.com/Alatius/latin-macronizer) would perform most of the heavy lifting. Any errors or absences could be iteratively corrected once the scaffold was in place. Given the primacy of the Vulgate in the Catholic Church, it's a little disappointing that the Nova Vulgata is freely available as a Vatican website, but no one has put together an actual proper ebook of it. Ditto with the Divine Office, but this would probably destroy the livelihood of some individuals.
3. Syntax highlighting for Latin with Whittaker's Words (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Whitaker%27s_Words) providing most of the heavy lifting. The number one issue people seem to have with learning Latin is the inability to decode the appropriate tense and inflection at speed. Syntax highlighting for (macronized) Latin is the obvious choice for simplifying this process until it becomes second nature for the user.
> Like a time he cured a sick man, and this man turned out to be a crook or something.
Can't resist nitpicking your example, though. If he did this, he'd have something in common with plenty of folks who took the Hippocratic oath. ;) And I bet they'd all say it's not a mistake at all.
Ed: not to mention the fact that, canonically anyway, he would definitely know in advance who/what they were.
Maybe I can better phrase my example..
Would Jesus heal a super sick / dying man who Jesus knew is gonna murder like 10 people as soon as he's better?
The thought problem in my example was about curing a person who will commit a serious crime in the future only after being healed enough to commit this crime. And the supernatural healer having this foreknowledge.
It wasn’t thought that a Sage would be emotionless at all, but would actually embrace emotions fully. They would just be the ideal emotions to express for the given circumstance.
It’s a far-fetched idea but the case for emotion being unnecessary is refuted well by stoicism and other philosophies (in my opinion). I think the idea that a perfect entity would feel nothing may be inspired by the fact that as humans, we’re often victims of our own emotions and we fear how they can control us. In reality, they’re a useful tool of expression, positive reinforcement, and communication. The only problem is when they aren’t the product of careful reflection and ongoing consideration.
By definition, we can't count these people who are actually content to be virtuous "nobodies". We don't know who they are or if they in fact actually exist. Who or what is a Ramanujan without seeking a Hardy?
It's a question as ancient as Diogenes: Plato asked a variation on this question in the Republic with the Ring of Gyges which granted invisibility to its wearer: Is there anyone who would still act virtuously while being in fact accountable to no one?
I have similar open-ended questions concerning the Buddha and Jesus Christ as found in the Gospel of Mark. Both the Buddha and Jesus are types of "re-wilded" humans that share more similarities with each other, classical Cynicism, Pyrrhonism, and Daoism than with most other philosophical systems.
According to the Pali Canon, the Buddha only became a sammāsambuddha (viz. a teaching buddha) because of the request of Brahma to remember those on the cusp of enlightenment, otherwise regarding teaching as an uphill battle not worth fighting: "This Dhamma that I have attained is deep, hard to see, hard to realize, peaceful, refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to-be-experienced by the observant. But this generation delights in attachment, is excited by attachment, enjoys attachment. For a generation delighting in attachment, excited by attachment, enjoying attachment, this/that conditionality & dependent co-arising are hard to see. This state, too, is hard to see: the pacification of all fabrications, the relinquishing of all acquisitions, the ending of craving; dispassion; cessation; unbinding. And if I were to teach the Dhamma and if others would not understand me, that would be tiresome for me, troublesome for me.” (SN 6:1, tr. Thanissaro Bhikkhu).
If he hadn't acceded to the request to teach, he would've become a paccekabuddha (viz. a buddha on one's own) and no one would've noticed anything except one of the Sakyan princes disappearing from worldly life.
In a similar fashion, Jesus in the Gospel of Mark is portrayed frequently as trying to escape the notice of the public and preventing the knowledge of his "miraculous" works. It's an interesting question to think about (assuming a historical Jesus) what would Christianity look like if his patients had obeyed his injunctions to stay quiet and to just be grateful? Would it exist at all? Assuming that Jesus did in fact perform good works but he told every recipient to be quiet, how can we epistemologically know how many he actually performed?
It all reminds me of Chapter 17 of the Daodejing: