Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

ericneyman.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 649 posts

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#501

Post by Tijdreiziger »

em-bee wrote: post #495
Tijdreiziger wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The burden of proof is on the claimant. If you want to convince me to change my beliefs, you should provide a compelling argument. If you believe that religions are ‘right’ and/or have better answers than the scientific tradition, it should be trivial to defend your claims. (Your other comment [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44130369 ] is more agreeable.)

first of all, i am not making the claim that religions are ‘right’ and/or have better answers. i am making the argument that if you want to find out if they are giving better answers or any answers for that matter, then you need to research them. i can tell you what i believe but i am not here to represent any particular religion, and i can't speak for all the religions. you will get better results and answers if you…

Ah, but the original claim (not by you) that I replied to and that spawned this subthread was:

> I strongly encourage you all read this book(the bible) and take it to heart.

This seems to be somewhat different from what you’re arguing now, though.

For what it’s worth, I shared my beliefs (veganism, humanitarianism, and the scientific method), and I still think that if you believe that your beliefs (religious or not) hold more truth and/or usefulness than mine, you should be able to (at the very least) provide some pointers to relevant literature.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#502

Post by api »

tengwar2 wrote: post #355
klipt wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that how the rich men are squeezing into heaven these days? "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven" There's a theory that the eye of the needle was a narrow gate in Jerusalem's city wall that was notoriously hard for camels to squeeze through. But seems the hard evidence for that is limited.

That story is only tracked back to the 1400's, so not credible. The currently favoured theory is that this was a translation error. Apparently in Aramaic (the language of Judaea and Galilee), the word for "camel" is very close to the word for "rope". As with all parables (and this does qualify as a parable) it may be intended to reward some thought - e.g. the only way of getting a rope through the eye of needle is to…

So basically it says “you can’t take it with you, so do something good with it while you’re alive instead of hoarding it like you can take it with you.”

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#503

Post by masfuerte »

yieldcrv wrote: post #475
masfuerte wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a theologian, but if this were to happen I don't suppose the unsaved would be able to peacefully play the prediction markets during the tribulation . It sounds bad.

The tribulation occurs 7 years after 144,000 of the most boring most devout people disappeared forever. Are you sure you would even notice? Especially not for long. Supernatural things won't start occurring again for 7 years, and in a fairly slow drip. Unexplained loud trumpets in the sky? Natural disasters that already occur? This isn't an issue regarding the existence of money and markets. That still functions. May…

I was misled by the marketing. The tribulation seems to be less annoying than most of modern life.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#504

Post by sb057 »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #236
tboyd47 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If not "the majority", then a proportion conceivably large enough to affect the polymarket results.

Isn't that subset of the population also very likely to believe that gambling is haram?

Technically, prediction markets aren't gambling, they're soothsaying, which is a form of witchcraft punishable by death.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#505

Post by mywittyname »

zahlman wrote: post #277
mywittyname wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll throw in my $0.02 on this topic. I have a basement full of shelf stable foods, a reasonably large battery backup system plus some solar panels, and a couple of guns. I don't see civilization collapsing overnight. I see it playing out as a series of scarce times that ebb and flow. I don't think the supermarket will go away, but I do think there will be times when it looks like those videos of Soviet groceries, wh…

> I don't think the supermarket will go away, but I do think there will be times when it looks like those videos of Soviet groceries, where there's not much selection. Seems to me we already saw that in 2020.

Yeah. My mindset is assume "2020" becomes a regular occurrence that gets progressively worse over time. And I'll mentally work through situations such as "2020 with an extended utilities outage", or "2020 but car travel is not possible", or "2020 plus pervasive violent hate crimes". Then we dry run for the weekend.

You learn a surprising amount in that first day. I.e., being stuck without power/internet/cell service/water, and realizing you can't watch DVDs on your laptop because they haven't come with disk drives for years. After the weekend, you end up with a list of issues to address, i.e., you buy a portable dvd drive and put together a Plex server with a bunch of locally-hosted media.

Honestly, I feel more capable and resilient than I ever have before. We had some tornadoes come through and we didn't even need to think about what to do, we went into our safe room which contains our go-bags, hiking food, critical docs, usb backups of key pass, battery backups and some ipads, and we chilled out watching a weather channel and listening to the emergency radio. Had a tornado hit our house, I'm confident we would have survived, been able to help the neighbors, and manage a few days until aid could come.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#506

Post by wat10000 »

CyrsBel wrote: post #484
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who said he ignored the rest of humanity? People now know about god, but they wouldn't have 3,000 years ago. And it's only one particular culture that was being communicated with, or did the Chinese and Native Americans just ignore him when tried to message them? > I do not see what the issue is with a "very human scale" for messaging. That's...how you communicate with humans. It's because its messaging seems to ha…

They would've known about God 3,000 years ago. No, Chinese and Native Americans and etc did not ignore him. Abraham was of a pagan land when he first encountered God. In any case, it was definitely communicated across the world. If you're picking a specific point in time when first contact was established according to a specific tradition, that might raise a question of why first contract there and in that way. But w…

I wouldn’t pick a region at all, I’d do all of them.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#507

Post by wat10000 »

CyrsBel wrote: post #486
wat10000 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ That's...how you communicate with humans.” Right. Why would the omnipotent creator of the universe communicate the same way I do?

So that...you can comprehend the communication? Are you going to forget how to write or speak with your mouth when there is telepathy available and the next thing? Does Telnet still work?

The topic here is scale. I only talk to a small group of people because they’re the only ones I can reach. If Donald Trump can reach a billion people, why couldn’t God? The technology didn’t exist but that’s not supposed to be a limit for this particular entity.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#508

Post by harimau777 »

kbrkbr wrote: post #499
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I presume your experience is limited to the parochial world of American Evangelical Christianity, or perhaps anecdotal, informed by your experience with intellectually unsophisticated people. Dawkins and his ilk used to love to pick on these poor people, because it’s so easy, even for a philosophical and theological rube like Dawkins. But you are certainly not describing the intellectual muscle and heft of the Cathol…

I'm genuinely curious. What would that be? Judging by their creeds it's believing that Easter really happened, and that the highest being is a composition that must be explained in hard to understand greek ontological terms.

Honestly, it would be weird if a supream being DIDN'T have to be explained in difficult to understand, abstract terms. Heck, look at medicine, human's are explained using difficult to understand Greek terms.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#509

Post by amdivia »

ecocentrik wrote: post #188
legitster wrote: post #95

So, there are actual geopolitical ramifications of this metric. A lot of US protestant theology is rooted in a concept called "dispensationalism" that was introduced in the mid 1800s. It's a heady concept to explain, but essentially it comes down to a few linked core concepts: - The secret, sudden arrival of Jesus to "rapture" believers away - The world is getting worse, not better. There is limited use in improving…

- The world is getting worse, not better. There is limited use in improving society. That sounds like 19th century fire and brimstone revivalism. Most Christians are not that nihilistic. The sects that survive and flourish tend to be those that don't impose a fatalistic view of the world.

I agree with the sentiment, but in this specific case, the "nihilism" is more of a green card to do whatever to better your own life, as there is no point improving anyone else's, just focus on yourself and survive.

So here it could be seen as an excuse to not only exploit existing systems, but also to avoid attempts at fixing them.

So in a way, holders of such fatalistic believes are ironically flourishing

Post reply on HN