Non-Christian exploring Christianity out of fear of Jesus’s threat of eternal punishment and empathy for immediate family
Minnesota, USA
Joined August 2021
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Being able to read primary sources with no publicly available english translation has been a super nice benefit of LLMs, I gotta say.
The first ever statistical population survey on homosexuality and bisexuality from Germany in 1904 has very comparable numbers to modern Gallup polls in 2025.
I've been reading up on the history of "homosexuality" as a concept, and today I was reading letters and pamphlets from Karl Maria Kertbeny, and it is really interesting to see where the arguments are same as today and where they are different.
What you trust is the foundation for what you believe. What you believe is the foundation for what you "know".
The only possible exception is the immediate awareness (possibly describable as a "belief") that you exist.
Do you trust your intuitions? Your reasoning? Your senses?
This is why for a complete system of epistemology, one needs to start prior with a system of trust.
One can start with a descriptive theory, merely observing and describing how people trust. But more interesting is the prescriptive side. What *should* one trust?
Stories of the bodhisattvas made David Bentley Heart "anxious that Christians were in danger of being outdone in the love and mercy department".
Full quote from That All Shall Be Saved below. Might need to click to see the full screenshot
So Tyndale is apparently the origin of sometimes translating "Sheol" as "grave" instead of "hell".
I've decided to officially commit myself to a deep dive critical analysis on the topic of "Hell".
Here's another one of the spreadsheets I'm making for the research phase.
It's going to be a major theme of my posts for the next few months.
xitter.cf/BaxterWilliams_/status…
The reasoning for his translation choices here is not super clear. It might have something to do with his theory of "soul sleep", but it also could be correcting the English laity's improper understanding resulting from the "doom paintings". Still looking into it.
Baxter Williams retweeted
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.
I've had this theory since grad school, but I believe that much of our brain is, in modern terms, an "aritificial intelligence" (an unconscious neural net) that the conscious part trains through childhood so that it can take care of tasks without us paying full attention. 1/
One of my first jobs was as a factory line worker. It took a lot of conscious attention to train the movements for the first few weeks. But after enough training, I found I was basically able to relax and day dream most of the day. Leaving my "trained" brain to handle it. 6/