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In the long run, we're all Dad

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Re: In the long run, we're all Dad

#3
Loved every bit of it. Congrats to the new parents. As a father of three, I think I got the biggest laugh out of:

"I cannot quite remember why I thought this would be a good idea. I blame the pronatalist influencer conspiracy."

Re: In the long run, we're all Dad

#4
Sad to see "Jennifer" listed as a "newer name". Aside from that spelling being more than a century old, it's just a newer spelling of Guinevere, a name which dates back to at least 1100, when it started appearing in written Arthurian legends. The Welsh form, Gwenhwyfar, is attested before that.

Re: In the long run, we're all Dad

#5
"There is a secret known only to parents of twins, medical residents, and Alexey Guzey: the human body does not actually need sleep. After 31 hours awake, you get an integer overflow in God’s database and go back to being well-rested again. Also you gain the ability to see angels."

LOL. Amaze.

On that note, I've heard some amazing things about the Snoo. It was banned from our house because of Luddit-ian reasons, but I still maintain you're not bonding with your baby at 3 am and parents should get that extra sleep and let a robot handle the near-robotic motions required to put a (< 6month old) baby back to sleep.

Re: In the long run, we're all Dad

#6
Good writing advice says that each sentence has a single goal. The goal is to draw the reader in, and convince them to read the next sentence.

This article does it masterfully. The title drew me in. The opening sentence finished the job. Well done.

Re: In the long run, we're all Dad

#7
post #5

"There is a secret known only to parents of twins, medical residents, and Alexey Guzey: the human body does not actually need sleep. After 31 hours awake, you get an integer overflow in God’s database and go back to being well-rested again. Also you gain the ability to see angels." LOL. Amaze. On that note, I've heard some amazing things about the Snoo. It was banned from our house because of Luddit-ian reasons, but…

The Snoo worked very well for us with baby #3 (#1 and #2 were before it was released). I'm optimistic that we will continue to make progress in this area and find something that works for a larger fraction of babies!

Re: In the long run, we're all Dad

#9
> Modern academics have a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this.

It's only perfectly reasonable if you aren't familiar with the broader context.

Breaking the levirate marriage custom was not in itself considered an action worthy of severe punishment. Indeed, there was a well-defined ceremony, spelled out in Deuteronomy 25:8-10 [1], intended to humiliate a man who refuses to marry his brother's widow. But being given an embarrassing nickname is a far cry from being smote by God. And if you get to inherit your brother's riches, it might be a fair price to pay.

But Onan's sin is described as something he did, rather than something he failed to do. It is pretty clear, when you look at the text the way someone of that time would have looked at it, that Onan's offense was not merely that he was being selfish, but that he was employing a method that severed the procreative element of the sexual act. He could have refused to marry Tamar. He could have refused to have sex with Tamar. But instead he fulfilled the letter of the levirate marriage custom without fulfilling its spirit. He used her for his own sexual satisfaction, but then deprived her of the natural ends of that action.

[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%202...

Re: In the long run, we're all Dad

#10

I read of an inconsistent mindset. God this. God that. "Natural selection didn't design" which is contradictory. Evolved murder monkeys. Happy to have babies. Women are indeed saved by childbirth. Men too.

You haven't read Scott's blog enough :)

He's an atheist psychiatrist. However, he enjoys how natural selection, social dynamics and reputation can also be modeled by the moral rules of most religions. For example, going to therapy isn't that different from practicing confessions in a church.

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