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

591–600 of 649 posts

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#591

Post by FrontierProject »

hatradiowigwam wrote: post #154
jordanb wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The message IS clear...but I don't see the same message as you. Solomon was /beyond/ rich. So was David. So were countless people that are destined for heaven(as in, Jesus describes them being in heaven in the new testament). Those people all did some things we can see and talk about - and possibly many things we did not see, do not know, and can not talk about. At the very least, those people we know are in/destined…

It continuously blows my mind how few people on the internet understand the distinction between the Old and New Testaments.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#592

Post by aspenmayer »

zdragnar wrote: post #533
tsegratis wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

;) i love critical questions > As if anything else mattered but a clean moral behavior this is actually a strongly non-Christian view point: 'all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God' i.e. no morals are clean enough unless it's 100% of God (why should he accept less?). yes, our harsh moral failures, or even successes could never be enough hence 100% humanity and divinity of Christ -- he alone provides a 100…

There are plenty of denominations- Catholics foremost among them- who agree that good morals and works are not contributing to your redemption, but a natural consequence of having genuinely accepted Christ. To "believe" without good morals or works entirely is to put on a false face, essentially. Therefore, some manner of effort is expected of believers. It's a bit of circular reasoning, but not much.

"Faith without works is dead," right?

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#593

Post by aspenmayer »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #349
paulryanrogers wrote: post #34

[flagged]

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 think someone like Zizek could debate a Catholic.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#594

Post by FrontierProject »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #416
hatradiowigwam wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think those were evil people doing evil things. Who calls the people who perpetrated these things "Christians"? If I am king, and direct my armies to slaughter another country's people because " cannot be tolerated by us, the Christians"....then I am a liar, and masquerading as something I am not. The people that did these things wanted to do them for one or more reasons, and none of those were because God told the…

Sigh...

"All programming language documentation is worthless because some developers make spaghetti code."

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#595

Post by lukev »

CyrsBel wrote: post #482
lukev wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add, not just Jesus, but the entire Bible. The Year of Jubilee alone, from the Pentateuch, basically eliminates capitalism as we know it (if enacted at a full societal scale.)

I don't think the Year of Jubilee would eliminate capitalism. It just adds a reset into the assumptions so that nobody is ever screwed. Instead, there's a reset available for people every so often. I also think the Bible says a lot about wisdom and how to earn a profit, not just in financial terms but in time management too. Proverbs has many examples. So I would say that on the Bible, we'd still have free markets bu…

Capitalism isn't really just about free markets, though. Lots of economic systems have markets.

Capitalism is more about ownership of the means of production and the relationship of labor to capital.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#596

Post by NickC25 »

ivape wrote: post #535
NickC25 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>2) I can grant you he might have just been a harmless mentally ill person. The same could be said for the "prophets" of any major religion. Muhammadﷻ (SWT) arguably went into a state of psychosis after the premature deaths of both of his sons. Joseph Smith, a local drunk in a small western NY town, said a magical rock in a hat that only he could see told him the garden of Eden was in St. Louis and that the native Am…

If God was so perfect, why would he create beings that have free will to destroy the life of another? That is the ultimate intellectual question. But pay attention to the key word, intellectual . You cannot get spiritual answers from an intellectual question. That's what makes faith rather hard at times and often requires meditation. It actually gives me reason to reject religion as a whole. Christ, allegedly, died d…

>That's what makes faith rather hard at times and often requires meditation.

Faith. Key word, faith. There is no reason for faith, because you're placing faith and (fleeting) hope that some dude in a desert a few thousand years ago found the ultimate way to interact with (his understanding of) humanity's creator, if we even have one. What makes you so 1000000% sure that this guy's understanding of the supernatural is correct? You're assuming that there actually is some omnipresent being that manifested existence, and that same being actually divinely created humanity on purpose, and not only that, gave humanity free will, and not only that, also simultaneously loves and hates you, and will condemn you to eternal hellfire if you don't worship him enough. Oh yeah, according to some, he's got a son too, born of humanity but with magical powers.

Faith. Come on.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#597

Post by lo_zamoyski »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #494
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…

There is no dissonance in Catholic faith / philosophy? No hoop jumping to explain why Biblical claims don't match the lived experience of most people?

No.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#598

Post by ecocentrik »

amdivia wrote: post #509
ecocentrik wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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

Is that religion or that just a popular social sentiment held by religious individuals and communities? I understand how it might be hard to tell the difference with heavily fractured Christian sects. Are pastors writing theological treatise on this, are they addressing it in sermons or is this just a shared attitude reinforced by other small town attitudes?

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#599

Post by aspenmayer »

wat10000 wrote: post #417
ivape wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Michael Jackson does a concert, it’s really only in a few locations. It’s up to the world to spread it. As others have mentioned, he could show up in the sky like Mufasa, but he could also just brain wash you in an instant and fix all of it. Faith is a concept, like so many other concepts. It is a unique creation that has properties, one of them is that it’s not meant to be provable that easily.

"...it’s not meant to be provable that easily." If ever there were a post-hoc rationalization, this is it. It's funny how the faithful are generally happy to use any evidence that they think supports the faith, but once it gets too difficult then suddenly it's not supposed to have too much evidence for it.

When constructing a house of cards, it's important to not make it look too easy.

Re: The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return

#600

Post by em-bee »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #567
em-bee wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

again, i don't want to make the claim that my beliefs are in some way better. that would be hubris, and that's a big reason why i want you to do your own research. but here are a few points that relate to the current discussion: science and religion must be in harmony. that is, they should not contradict each other. if there is a contradiction (in any specific point) then one of them is probably wrong. to resolve tha…

> again, i don't want to make the claim that my beliefs are in some way better. that would be hubris, and that's a big reason why i want you to do your own research. Well, we’re on a discussion forum, so the point is to discuss our opinions, not to claim that we’re better than another :) I think it’s unfortunate that you wouldn’t share some of your beliefs; we could have constructively criticized each other’s beliefs…

I think it’s unfortunate that you wouldn’t share some of your beliefs; we could have constructively criticized each other’s beliefs, and thereby sharpened our critical thinking skills.

actually, i'd love that. i just had some bad experience doing that in public where uncharitable readers can chime in. my email is in my profile. how about we continue the discussion there?

prevailing religious texts are outdated compared to our current understanding of the world

it's not that the texts themselves are outdated, but that peoples interpretations of those texts is. for example when the bible claims that the world was created in seven days, we today know that this can't possibly be true, therefore this text can't possibly be meant to be taken literally. it also means that it was never meant to be taken literally, but the people who did take it literally lacked the scientific understanding to realize that.

but this problem may also occur with a religious text written today. when a discrepancy is found it doesn't mean the text is wrong, but our interpretation of it is. or maybe the scientific findings are faulty. it's no different than having findings that contradict a scientific theory. either the theory is wrong or the findings are in error. the interpretation of a religious text is just like another theory.

the correlation between religiousness and harmony is not as strong as many religious people seem to claim

well, that to me is an indictment of those religions, and rightly so.

most of them also include many infamously unproven teachings (the existence of a creator and afterlife/reincarnation)

well, the problem here is that these are by their nature either unprovable or we simply lack the scientific knowledge to verify or falsify them.

absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. this is the leap of faith that a believer in science needs to do. it is fine to reject claims that can clearly be proven wrong (such as the age of the earth) but for anything that can't be proven we need to keep an open mind. that doesn't mean to blindly accept it. keep that skepticism, but at least allow that those claims are at least in the realm of the possible, specifically because we have no way to prove otherwise. to reject god or the afterlife without proof is just as much an act of faith as is to accept them.

Post reply on HN