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The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

ericneyman.wordpress.com

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Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gambling is pining for wealth.

Gambling is humanity's way of enacting a tax on hope.

Usually that’s, “a tax on people bad at math.”

If I put an effort into not being cynical, I would say public funds spent on R&D are the more accurate tax on hope. We are collecting money for Progress and Progress will save us from today’s inescapable facts. We hope it will not replace them with something worse.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original shares ended up being worth $8. There might have been a point during the bankruptcy were they were worth nothing (due to changing used car values) but in the end they were worth something. https://nypost.com/2021/05/12/hertz-investors-snag-8-a-share...

Yea but that's the thing, if a company is bankrupt, shouldn't it be 0? Like rationally? In that sense, it feels thematically similar as people were trying to outsmart each other with trickery.

Rationally, I agree. But IRL it's surprisingly hard to measure the value of a company - both the assets and the value of continuing operations - even without considering they are in constant flux, even if there's no trickery.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#403

I can shed some light on this, maybe - In the year before the 2020 election, a market opened on predictit called "Will Hillary run for president? Yes/No" First this was a reasonable market, but quickly it became obvious she wasn't running (because she repeatedly said she wasn't, there was no campaign created at all, absolutely zero indicators she was running because she wasn't). Predictit allowed a comment section wh…

It’s possible I’m being a jerk, but actually maybe betting services could do a social good: allowing people who believe things despite all reason to incur some small cost to themselves and hopefully course-correct?

We can even both-sides this; Hillary fans and people who believe Jesus will come back soon are usually on opposing sides, right?

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#404
post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classically, the Devil follows the djinn trope. It’s weird that Jesus is slowly being cast into that same role.

Djinn trope? Point me at some relevant scholarship. I've always found the 1001 nights djinn interesting characters.

The notion of being careful what you wish for because you just might get it is embodied in djinn, genies, Pandora, and the devil.

You get what you asked for and not what you wanted.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#405
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That’s not what that means at all, your inserting modern values into the parable. In the culture of that time, the rich were viewed with high regard. The understanding was that if you were rich, then clearly you were in a favorable relationship to God because he was blessing you with wealth. With that understanding, the sentence that directly follows the parable makes a lot more sense: “When the disciples heard this,…

The rich is firmly attached to wordly things, they would rather sink with their gold than let it go. The monk that you've described is attached to his self by training it with sophisticated hardships. He hoards inner peace just like the rich hoards gold. Both are practicing the culture of personality. They need to leave that baggage behind, their self-centered life and their polished personas, and reorient their life around helping others. Once they do this, an enormous internal conflict will emerge - the struggle between their selfish and selfless sides, and at the end of this path they'll enter the kingdom of God.

Those who want to climb to the mountain top need to leave everything behind. The higher they climb, the longer will be the fall if they look back for a moment and slip on this narrow path, longing for what they left behind.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#406
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

free will is one big reason why god would not reveal himself in a universal fashion. free will includes the freedom to reject god. if god were to reveal himself openly then the freedom to reject him would not exist. we would not have a choice but to believe.

>free will is one big reason why god would not reveal himself in a universal fashion. Much like how religion posits a soul, you are positing free will despise observing that rocks always fall in accordance with the laws of physics and we have yet to determine any normal way of altering the course of chemistry one jot or tiddle(in fact we build our edifices on these observations, so confident are we). You yourself sug…

i don't know how free will is supposed to affect the laws of physics or chemistry. free will is about the choices we can make. that doesn't imply there are no limits to our capacity. nor does having a choice to believe in god or not imply that humans can't experience god without disbelief. on the contrary. that's the whole point. i can believe that the universe is created by god, and that everything i experience is in some way experiencing god, just as i can believe that god doesn't exist, and then, if god does exist, i would experience god without believing that my experience is caused by god. experiencing something doesn't require that i recognize the cause of the experience.

as for calvinism, how is that relevant? the existence if some faction believing something that contradicts the belief of others has no bearing on that belief other than that it may raise some questions that are worth investigating. my brief look at that leads me to the conclusion that their view of free will makes no sense to me.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Socialist Jesus” is kind of a meme (or, maybe a blowback meme on Capitalist Jesus). But, he was apparently pretty into taking care of the poor, right?

The meme relies on assuming Socialism==being a good person. This is obviously not the case, as any economic structure is more complex than just being a chill dude, and the bible has a more complex view of morality than just "being nice to thy neighbor".

No? The meme relies on Jesus having lived and spoken in a way that a large group claiming to be his followers today would deride as "Socialism", whether or not it resembles your own, Karl Marx's, or Maduro's "Socialism", and in fact regardless of whether the meme-sayer thinks Socialism by some definition is good. It's a statement about how the loudest followers of Jesus or Christianity preach and act at odds with the meme-er's understanding of the gospel (specifically the 4 books of the Bible that tell the story of Jesus), and for it to work you don't even have to assume that Jesus was good.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you, presumably someone who is not a christian and has never read the bible, know better than billions of christians and the millions of people who've actually read the bible. I'm not religious, but this is a bad take.

You know Christianity was built in a time of broad scale illiteracy don’t you? The reason sermons and the Bible are so at odds with each other is that for the most part only the priesthood had read the damned thing. Even today most Christians haven’t read the whole thing. I’m not Christian in large part because I did. And it’s almost all batshit.

> I’m not Christian in large part because I did. And it’s almost all batshit.

Haha, same. I was forced to go to church and Sunday school as a kid, which I hated. But since I was there, I read large parts of the bible. This led me to asking a lot of questions, some of which caused me to be remove from Sunday school a few times. Eventually I was old enough to explain why I was an atheist and never went back.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#410

I can shed some light on this, maybe - In the year before the 2020 election, a market opened on predictit called "Will Hillary run for president? Yes/No" First this was a reasonable market, but quickly it became obvious she wasn't running (because she repeatedly said she wasn't, there was no campaign created at all, absolutely zero indicators she was running because she wasn't). Predictit allowed a comment section wh…

It’s possible I’m being a jerk, but actually maybe betting services could do a social good: allowing people who believe things despite all reason to incur some small cost to themselves and hopefully course-correct? We can even both-sides this; Hillary fans and people who believe Jesus will come back soon are usually on opposing sides, right?

The people who were “Yes” hillary stans were very much not hillary fans. very much the opposite. much of it seemed fueled by far right wing conspiracy theories
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