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Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

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Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#781

Post by Bootvis »

mcv wrote: post #477
chrisweekly wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sat and Sun constitute the weekEND, right?" "Of course." "And Sunday is the 7th day, the day of rest?" "Yeah, that's what they preach at my church." "What about your workplace?" "Everybody knows the standard workweek is Mon-Fri. What's your point?" "Ok, so we're agreed the weekends include Sunday, your Bible says Sunday is the 7th day, and the workweek starts on Monday." "Yep." "So printed calendars and day-planners…

The Bible does not say that Sunday is the 7th day. It says that Saturday, the Sabbath, is the 7th day. And that Jesus rose on the day after the Sabbath, which means it was on the first day of the week. And that's the day most Chistians have adopted as their day of worship. (Except Seventh Day Adventists who keep it, as their name suggests, on the 7th day: Saturday.) If your church preaches differently, they should re…

And not event that far, sabbath (Saturday) is determined to be the 7th day of the week at the start of Genesis.

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#782

Post by cassianoleal »

myth2018 wrote: post #100
octobus2021 wrote: post #63

This is absolutely hilarious, and despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well, with each chunk funnier than the last :) A few notes: - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is…

> however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally; That happens in Portuguese (brazilian, at least). Digital clocks go through 0-23 hours, but the second half is _sometimes_ named as 1-11 afternoon/night (whatever fits your taste). Hour 0 is never referred to as 12, though: it's always 0 or "half night"

> "half night"

Minor nit, but probably important since the equivalent vocabule exists in English: "midnight".

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#783

Post by zimpenfish »

felipeerias wrote: post #605

So the moral of the story is that having history and cultures is… bad somehow? Or at least weird? The way I see it, a realistic alien would be more likely to answer "You think that's complicated? Our own calendar has to track our lifecycle according to the orbit of a planet that doesn't exist any more!" Or maybe: "Ah, of course, you tend to use base-10 because you have ten fingers. I keep forgetting about those." …wh…

> Because it does not match at all the one instance of a space-going species

I think conflating "made it to our local moon" as "space-going" might be the problem there when comparing with "made it to a whole other solar system" as "space-going" aliens.

I should imagine that humanity will have to get a whole lot more logical and hyper-rational before we make it out of our solar system in a repeatable way (assuming we survive that far.)

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#784

Post by verythroughaway »

This thread is filled with "So what!?" imo.

Like this part:

   "and we further subdivide the months into 'weeks', which is 7 days."
   "ahh, so each month is an integer multiple of weeks?"
   "that would make sense, but no. Only one is, sometimes"
   "SOMETIMES?!"
What does it matter?

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#785

Post by oxmane »

gmiller123456 wrote: post #573

"But enough about our calendar, let's hear about yours" "Well, due to what makes a planet habitable, you won't be surprised that our planets year and day isn't incredibly different from yours..." "But it took you millions of years to get here, why is your calendar based on a place you haven't been to in so long?" "Well our species lifespan is about 100 years, so, actually, I was never there" "But I guess you use that…

Definitely the best comment I read on this thread.

Not sure if this was the intention, but I read it as both recognizing the original post as funny, and yet recognizing that we (as in humanity) aren't "stupid" for having this complex system, but that's just how things develop.

Having both views live together is the best take on this.

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#786

Post by rendall »

_k9eq wrote: post #154

I find the implication that aliens are rational and have no subrational concepts due to tradition and habit interesting, as it sort of implies that these kinds of outgrowths are not necessary and can just be done away with. The narrator starts from a position of not wanting to legitimize or historicize beyond reductive statements like "some ancient civilization did XYZ". I'll admit that I skimmed through the last par…

I'm also not a fan of the "alien-who-is-really-the-writer has an objectively superior and judgmental perspective" genre, even when it's trying to be funny. Some movies: K-PAX was one, Powder, another.

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#787

Post by GoblinSlayer »

bawolff wrote: post #692
thaumasiotes wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would that be considered the first day of Fall? Even taking a purely astronomical perspective, the autumnal equinox would be the center of Fall, not the beginning.

Because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_lag

So is it astronomical season or weather season? Weather varies between locations.

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#788

Post by rendall »

Nition wrote: post #780
rendall wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what the percentage would be of Biblical scholars who believe that Jesus was an actual person if we excluded those who believe, say, Moses parted the Red Sea or even those who believe Jews were enslaved in Egypt at the time.

Most scholars, even the non-Christian ones, believe that Jesus was an actual person. Whether he really performanced miracles is of course a very different matter.

The set of people I would exclude for shiggles include non-Christians.

Except for the New Testament, there are only 2 other known possible references. One was altered by later Christians, and the other could have referred to a Jew named Chrestus.

Without other external motivation, would this be enough to establish historicity?

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#790

Post by adastra22 »

scoofy wrote: post #727
beltsazar wrote: post #677

> "uh, it's supposed to be the birth of a religious leader, but they got the math wrong so it's off by 4 years, if he existed at all." > "if? You based your calendar off the birth date of someone you're not sure exists?" I find it quite offensive. Not all scholars agree that Jesus was raised from dead, but the existence of Jesus is accepted even by non-Christian scholars. > Virtually all scholars of antiquity agree t…

The argument isn't generally that "Jesus" isn't a person, but rather probably built off one person, but also a collection of stories about people who might be other persons or made up. There were lots of messiahs at the time, and considering that the first gospel was probably written a good 20-to-60 years after the protagonist's death, it seems reasonable to many to presume that some the stories might be stories abou…

For the record, I'm an atheist that just happens to be interested in biblical archeology and philology. I got no skin in this debate though.

There is very little question that Jesus the human being and Roman subject existed, professed some sort of fanatical messianic religious messages, and got executed for it. Stronger than any evidence for Jesus directly is the evidence for the existence of his brother, James, who was a respected religious leader in Jerusalem for about 25 years after the death of Jesus. It is James that Josephus was writing about--Jesus is only mentioned to explain who James is, "the brother of Jesus who some call Christ." But in addition to this one near-contemporaneous reference, there is also a dozen or so writers who talk about James in the 2nd century. That is a century after his death and the death of his brother, but these writers seem to be working from largely different sources so we can infer multiple historical accounts that would have existed at the time. If we agree that James existed, then the strongest argument for the existence of Jesus is that all of these motivated, non-Christian secular writers of the 1st and 2nd century would have been in a better position to know whether Jesus had existed, and if there was any doubt they would have definitely smeared James as having made up his imaginary brother. But none of them did.

If anyone is interested in this question btw, Reza Aslan's Zealot is an approachable book on the historical Jesus, what little we know for certain and the surprising amount we can confidently infer from the available evidence.

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