<Add: post has been edited due to mediation with Soul and TINAE and may be further edited or deleted in time>

u/ExpressionOfTheSoul writes me: "If you're interested in discussing the things you brought up to me in the Emotional Healing forum, I suggest making a post about it on an appropriate forum and pinging me to it. Perhaps you could post it on one of the forums you mod or at the Conspiracies forum (If you want to post anything about me over there, go ahead). The mod decisions regarding the bans are final. There is a new post in the Expose religious extremism forum and a couple in the Bible Oddities forum you might be interested in discussing elsewhere." So it appears appropriate [to me] to collect a few facts about this account in one place for proper understanding.

[....] Since I don't understand the account's behavior, I'm just documenting it. (1) Soul appeared at Conspiracies last week and began posting [...] and I interacted and sought understanding. (2) Soul deleted all content and created three new forums (now four five six) and posted welcome messages with guidelines but without sidebar rules [he states that rules were publicly available via reporting function]. (3) I posted some questions in two of these, and Soul interacted with one of my comments [including his questioning responsively]. (4) Soul permabanned me from both forums, I copied my unanswered questions [with preface] to his third forum, and he permabanned me from that forum as well. (5) Soul wrote the message above. Clearly Soul is interested in maintaining a positive persona in speech and also in permitting a number of aggressive actions in tools and logs, and in focusing on his new forums while accepting being pinged in other forums.

The ban reasons were "No proselytzing efforts." (SeekersOfTheWay), "Moderator discretion." (ExposeReligiousExtremism), and "No proselytizing, persuasion, or agenda pushing." (EmotionalHealing). I infer that Soul is not too interested in working out a consistent moderation policy but seeks to organize discussion in specific but often [relatively] unpublished ways.

Though there might be much I'd want to say as to the several posts Soul has made, supportive and supplemental [including upvotes], for now I should probably stick to the questions that went unanswered (looking forward to Soul's answers), and try again in the fourth forum if I have any observations there. Those questions are:

I hope you don't mind my having a few questions about belief so that I know how to interpret the forum's purpose.

1. I see you're talking about theosis or divinization, as described in the Gospel of Thomas passim, and called in 1 Peter 1:4 being "of the divine, fellowshippers, by nature" (literal). That would be the meaning of "becoming Christ" (Anointed), because there are both the many applications of instantiations of Christ and the one central application of participation in Christ. It is rightly taught under the marriage metaphor by which one is the bride of Christ, thus the body of Christ, thus one with Christ, thus in various aspects indistinguishable from Christ: the bride is both a partial instantiation of the household that is named Christ, and a holistic participation in everything that Christ is and means. It doesn't appear Yeshua taught us to do anything different than he did (he taught us to do greater than he did), so it seems that in every way in which we are Christ he is also Christ. Q: Is it fair to uphold Yeshua as the model of the bridegroom with the follower being the model of the bride: that is, how could we have any better model for our lives than his life?

2. In this sense I would take your concern about "belief in" and "worship of" Christ. In my review of theology there is no belief in or worship of Christ other than what directs itself to belief in and worship of the Most High, and any sense in which it is applied to Christ the Body it is to be applied equally to Jesus and to his follower, in that bridal household metaphor. When Scripture speaks of "worshipping of" mortals it is to be worship of the image of God in the mortal, and the idea of "trusting" a mortal would similarly be limited to trusting God to work through the mortal; and Jesus honors those limitations in his teaching. Inferring from your other forum, you're rejecting absolutism, which would here involve trust and worship that is not directed to the Most High alone (even as in our actions we accord trust and reverence to humans freely). Q: Is that the kind of belief and worship that you're deprecating here?

3. You also speak of evolution (i.e. change), and in actual practice the most important evolution is that over a single life, because there is nothing for us at any moment that growth and improvement are abandoned; the open mind is always experiencing newness and volution. I've been investigating concepts of the "many lifetimes" ("reincarnation") and so I'd presume you're looking for more Abrahamic concepts like gilgul rather than more Hindu concepts like transmigration. It's complicated of course, so I have questions. Q: Are you looking at a multilife view that accounts for the constant evolution (change) in population totals, such that the billions alive today obviously did not all have continuous existence coming from past millennia? Most reincarnation views don't handle that very well, but I think gilgul does. I don't see the answer in Thomas or I would've brought that in.

4. Q: Are you familiar with details of Oversouls that are evolving as various unique lives manifest? An Oversoul is an archetypal personality that connects lives in such way that we can speak of both continuity and individuality without running into the contradictions that often arise on the subject. The Oversoul manifests in many individuals, can appear in multiples at once (i.e. can increase in its number of representatives on earth), and is undergoing a communal learning process via the individual variations of the archetype. The Oversoul exists first in God's conception and variously in its manifestations. I trust that explanation is what you're going after.

That should suffice for now. I hope this gets discussion off on the right foot because practicing this life with reference to the past and to the next life includes ensuring we have the core absolutes agreed. As I noted separately, this is not done by dogma but by evolving hypotheses that model the mind of the Most High with ever-increasing accuracy and sufficiency.

Add: Fifth permaban from ExposingExtremism for posting a perfectly responsive news article with title "Exposing Extremism 25 Dec 23: Alleged members of extremist group indicted in suspected SoCal New Years Eve bombing plot. A federal grand jury indicted four people on Tuesday in connection with a suspected terror plot to bomb targets in Los Angeles and Orange counties on New Year's Eve." Stated reason, "Mod discretion-user has exhibited mod griefing behavior across multiple forums. Ban final. No appeals." Apparently Soul believes it's entirely rational to create lots of fora about religiously motivated extremism and gatekeeping, then to gatekeep answers to questions about his core methodology, and then to have essentially no rule because "moderator discretion" can always be used for permaban whenever no other rule applies. This is creating welcomes one by one and demolishing them one by one [....] I sought to be sensitive, but it appears to me this is just the same user as one or more previous incarnations who doesn't desire to question his own presuppositions with the assistance of others. I still believe in enough sensitivity to give him space to remove [curtail] his own extremism in protecting his beliefs against rational improvement, but remind everyone that there are always the two choices, contradiction or truth, and one had better either admit one is on the side of contradiction and nihilism or on the side of truth and self-awareness.

I was challenged here by the testimony of Richard Carrier that Josephus's two passages about Jesus are both forgeries, via some literary analysis by Paul Hopper. I conclude that Carrier is an extreme outlier who is handling the data with thorough bias. The process strengthens my belief that Josephus's passage is essentially authentic in all details.

First, Dr. Carrier has quite an interesting self-written bio:

Richard Carrier is the author of many books and numerous articles online and in print. His avid readers span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism and humanism, and the origins of Christianity and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He is also a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and historical methods.

From Hong Kong to Poland, just wow.

Further, he's a contributor to John Loftus, Christianity is Not Great, The End of Christianity, and The Christian Delusion. And author of Why I Am Not a Christian, Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn't Need a Miracle to Succeed, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (Revised Edition), Sense & Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism, The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus, Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ, and Hitler Homer Bible Christ (he'd fit right in here).

He did the meme!

Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such films as ....

Oolon Colluphid is the author of the "trilogy of philosophical blockbusters" entitled Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?. He later used the Babel Fish argument as the basis for a fourth book, entitled Well, That About Wraps It Up For God.

Methinks he has a bit of axe to grind and is a great segue from the concept I pointed out to u/ExpressionOfTheSoul about unnoticed bias toward atheistic higher critics.

Second, Carrier's evidence, the Hopper report, is an outlier in a steady stream of consensus that the Josephus passage is essentially authentic, either in its core or in all but 2-3 words. Carrier says that "You Can’t Cite Opinions Before 2014" (Hopper), which is a neat way of excluding all contrary evidence, but interestingly most all opinions after Hopper continue the same track of trusting Josephus even recognizing Hopper's opinion.

Here's the textual analysis. Textual evidences to favor Jewish outsider vs. Christian insider:

1. Passage exists in all Greek manuscripts.

2. Josephus is noted noted for any other interpolation (both he and Eusebius are conservative copyists).

3. "Wise man" is outsider language and used by Josephus (Luke 24:19 "prophet").

4. "If indeed one ought to call him a man" is a natural introduction to state merely that Jesus's wonders were unexplained without taking a position why.

5. "Wonder worker" is an outsider concept (albeit "worker"/poietes aka Oseh/Essene is an internal word taken from Luke 24:19 "mighty in deed").

6. "Teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly" is outsider language (Luke 24:19 "and word before ... all the people").

7. "Jews" and "Greeks" is outsider language, especially in that later insider language doesn't focus on Jewish followers but only Gentile (Luke 24:19 "all the people").

8. There was no polemic reason against reading "He was 'the Christ'" as an outsider quotation of others (i.e. most notable Christ to that point; Luke 24:26 "the Christ").

9. "He was 'the Christ'" is the more unexpected text, indicating "He was thought to be the Christ" is the later variant; editing in the opposite direction toward greater polemic is silly because Eusebius would be disposed to keep a text about Christ pure.

10. The "first men" "among us" is outsider language and used by Josephus for his personal contacts in the Sanhedrin and priesthood (Luke 24:20 "the chief priests and our rulers").

11. "Condemned him to a cross" adds detail to Luke 24:20 "condemned to death".

12. Those who loved him not ceasing is consistent with Luke 24:21 "we were hoping that it was He".

13. "Spending a third day restored to life" is consistent with Luke 24:21 "today is the third day"; this is described by Josephus more distantly as "appeared".

14. The prophets foretelling these and a thousand wonders is consistent with Luke 24:25 "all that the prophets have spoken" and 27 "all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself".

15. "Tribe" is outsider language and used by Josephus (Van Voorst).

16. Mention of "Christ" is further consistent with Josephus's desire to explain the origin and currency of the name "Christian".

17. The entire passage is consistent with paraphrase of Luke 24 (Goldberg), which would have been accessible to Josephus and paraphrased by him like many other sources.

18. Passage omits deicide or Jewish blame, indicating outsider status.

19. The dissimilarity of the passage with its context indicates reliance on a Lukan source and supports authenticity.

20. Josephus 20:9:1 "who was called Christ" presupposes he testified of Jesus earlier.

21. Origen (on Matthew 10.17 and Celsus 1.47) read Josephus and found his testimony not accepting Jesus as what Origen understood Christ fully to be, which is consistent with the paradigm of Josephus paraphrasing Luke 24 but remaining neutral about its conclusions (i.e. the interpretation that "the Christ" is a quotation of others), not consistent with complete forgery. Though Origen created ripples of doubt that extend to the present, the simplest resolution is that Josephus was rightly understood as passing on the testimony without agreeing with it.

22. Eusebius quotes accurately and total forgery would upend his entire purpose of scrupulous history.

23. Arabic version by Agapius, 10th century, is admitted by Whealey and Carrier to derive from Eusebius, because they think this supports Eusebian origin, but since it actually removes variants from the pre-Eusebian strain it strengthens Josephan originality and Eusebian trustworthiness.

24. James Dunn reviews "broad consensus" on John Meier's reconstruction.

25. Robert Van Voorst says most modern scholars agree.

26. Bart Ehrman and John Meier believe the original was neutrally toned, consistent with my proposal he is quoting Luke, with Ehrman saying Meier's version is the most accepted.

27. Geza Vermes reconstruction is consistent with Meier.

28. Garry Goldberg: Luke 24:19-21, 26-27 "more closely resembles the Testimonium in its phrase-by-phrase outline of content and order than any other known text of comparable age" (related in origin).

29. T. C. Schmidt 2025 finds the language is statistically Josephan; Andreas Kostenberger agrees more generally.

Arguments to reject the whole passage:

1. Silence in Jewish Wars (no parallel passage).

2. Silence about any broader scope of the single paragraph about Jesus compared to other Josephan sketches.

3. Silence in 12 mentions of Josephus prior to Eusebius that don't mention this paragraph.

4. Silence between Eusebius and Jerome.

5. Silence in selective contents of Josephus written ca. 500.

6. Silence in Photios's 9th-century broad review of Josephus.

7. Kenneth Olson finds similarity between the testimony and Eusebius in Demonstrations of the Gospels.

8. Louis Feldman argues, with challenged methods, that three clauses of the testimony appear only in Eusebius (but "wonders" and "tribe" are common enough in variation and "still to this day" is very generic).

9. Finally, Paul Hopper 2014 argues for creedal style rather than historiographic style. Carrier's blog indicates (1) aorist verbs feel different from other Josephus, which is explicable by Lukan source hypothesis; (2) obliquity of reference to Pilate feels different, which is consistent with Lukan source and with the historical fact that Pilate's known reticence about Jesus (cf. Talmud) is not his ordinary brash character as e.g. in the Golden Eagles incident; (3) event structure feels different, which is consistent with the data being only a Lukan source and a later extant "Christian" people; (4) absence of plot, again consistent with the idea that Josephus is avoiding Luke's greater plot while using the historical data from it; (5) dissimilarity to Josephus's purpose, except it's perfectly fitting for a brief gloss on Luke that indicates the historical artifact of Christians existing by reference to his knowledge of Pilate and the Sanhedrin. That is, all Hopper's points are well-explained by Goldberg's responsive Lukan hypothesis and Schmidt's statistical confirmation thereof. Carrier is so skeptical he introduces the novel theory that Josephus's other reference to James and Jesus is wholly forged too!

TLDR: I appreciate the challenge! Conclusion, Josephus paraphrased a version of Luke 24, accounting for all slight style differences, and he toned down the polemic to attempt neutral description that Jesus was "surprising", took the name "Christ", and "appeared" after death. Josephus's testimony then is entirely consistent with communicating (1) Christians exist, (2) Jesus founded them, (3) Jesus's narrative is unexplained and his meaning in history unknown, (4) Christians are distinct from primary Jewish sects and thus need no more special treatment than any other unexplained claims. It comes from his Pharisee and Sanhedrin sources and from a version of Luke 24, paraphrased like his other sources. The problem arises because, via later distance, people read his intent as more startling and less neutral than his context clearly intended, and people read Origen's distaste for him as more divisive than Origen indicated. If it's more startling to us, that's better evidence it's original and we just misunderstood it. "He was the Christ" was not an endorsement but a claim in process: later Christians read it as a make-or-break testimony, but Josephus intended it merely as journalistic reportage of others' testimony and his own permission that Christ did so many wonders he must have been specially "anointed" to do them. At that time acceptance of a Jewish Jesus as someone special was not regarded as a hardline boundary between peoples, because the character of Jacob the Healer in the Talmud is very similar: Jacob lived c. 100 and healed in Jesus's name but was accepted as a marginal Jew in relatively good standing, because nobody had yet made confession of Jesus a boundary on either side of the divide. The same is true of Josephus. All data for the passage being completely spurious amount to either argument from silence or speculation from cherry-picked similarities that don't account for the whole context.

To Soul, I say thank you for strengthening my faith in the Josephus testimony! Before this analysis, I had previously believed the original was the minimalist core of about half the text, but now I believe, because I have much more evidence, that this centrism was proposed as a feint and the original was so close to Eusebius's words as to be regarded as fully authentic (i.e. only with quibbles about two words that don't affect sense). I appreciate your allowing me the opportunity to add all this evidence to my understanding.

Evidence of Christianity for u/ExpressionOfTheSoul.

I assert that compelling, falsifiable evidence shows that Jesus claimed to have attributes identifying him as the Christian creator god (i.e., to have access to all the powers of the cosmos). Material (except (h)) is taken from Bill Craig with much personal counterpoint.

(a) He claimed to be the Christ (a translation of Messiah or Anointed). Josephus says simply he was the Christ, and Tacitus says Christians are named after him, both early testimonies while eyewitnesses of Jesus were alive, besides overwhelming NT assertions of the accepted title. Josephus adds that many others claimed to take the Messianic mantle, namely Judas of Galilee, Theudas, Simon of Peraea, and Athronges. Rabbi Gamaliel (famous in the Talmud, a Sanhedrin member who was also Paul's teacher) confirmed the parallel between Theudas, Judas of Galilee, and Jesus in his oral testimony to the Sanhedrin, preserved in the secondary source Acts 5:34-40 (supported by Josephus); so it is a historical fit for Jesus to have made the claim. John the Baptist, also mentioned by Josephus, was asked if he was the Christ and denied the claim. Examples of Jesus specifically making the claim are at Peter's confession (Matt. 16:18, Mark 8:27-30) and at John the Baptist's doubt (Matt. 11:2-6, Luke 7:19-23) where Jesus quotes Is. 61:1 specifically about the expected Messiah. It was also known that Daniel 9 indicated the 30s AD as the time when Messiah would be expected, as shown by Talmudic commentary on this passage as having failed for those who saw no Messiah before the temple fell. Jesus never downplayed or demurred from any prior claim made about the Messiah, and, when asked specifically about them in the Olivet Discourse (three gospels), he indicated that some Messianic events were near and some not necessarily so. Since he affirmed the historical context of this title, he was claiming all extraordinary attributes of Messiah as well. These include that the Messiah "will strike the earth with the word of his mouth forever" and will be "free from sin" (Psalms of Solomon 17:32-37); and that he existed with God "prior to the creation of the world and for eternity" (Enoch 48:6, 11, later echoed by John 1:1-5). So this compelling, falsifiable evidence shows that Jesus claimed to be Messiah knowing that it involved claims of preincarnate existence. It is not an extraordinary fact that he claimed this, but it would be extraordinary for his claim to be accurate and for preincarnate existence to be a true historically testable proposition.

(b) He claimed to be the Son of God. Josephus questioned whether it would be lawful to call Jesus a man, and Tacitus (hostile witness) says guardedly that Jesus caused a "most mischievous superstition" that arose again after his death. More specifically, Jesus compared himself to the son of God in the parable of the vineyard (Mark 12:1-9, Gospel of Thomas 65, with Semitisms indicating its authentic derivation from Is. 5:1-7). He said none knew the Father but the Son (Matt. 11:27, Luke 10:22), which suggests authenticity due to its multiple witness, its linguistically shown Aramaic origin, and its embarrassment to the later doctrine of knowing the Father being encouraged (Phil. 3:8-11). He spoke of the Son not knowing the day that the Father knows of (Mark 13:32, Matt. 24:36), which also has the criteria of multiple witness and embarrassment to later doctrine. Even liberal historians recognize that Jesus deliberately caused stirs in Jerusalem before his death, and one of these was his direct claim "I am the Son of God" (John 10:36) which was charged against him by multiple witnesses for his trial (Matt. 27:43). In this case Jesus quotes Asaph (Ps. 82) for the definition of "son of God" as specifically meaning what was understood as an angelic nature, i.e., again claiming preincarnate existence. Further the NT passages cited indicate that Jesus was making greater claims via this title, namely unique knowledge of the cosmic will and unique proximity to the cosmic Father. 4 Ezra 7:28-29 cites both titles: "My son the Messiah shall be revealed ... and those who remain shall rejoice four hundred years [the last four centuries BC]. And after these years my son the Messiah shall die"; this definition and identity of the two titles is also supported by the DSS, and the circulation of these books in Jesus's day indicates his awareness of the claims involved.

(c) He claimed to be the Son of Man. Jesus used this title in over 80 instances in the NT, even though it is not used in prior OT thought (except Daniel 7:13-14) or later Christian thought (except Acts 7:56). This supports the claim having been made, based on the criteria of independence and dissimilarity. However, the claim is consistent with then-circulating Essene sources about "the Son of Man", 1 Enoch 46:5, 48:3-6, 62:7, 69:29, and 4 Ezra 13 (including God's son at verse 37). The claim involves the power to judge (Matt. 10:32-33, Luke 12:8-12), including a claim of mastery over the afterlife, about which more shortly. The claim "Son of Man" is also present in the trial testimony, of which Matt. 26:64, Mark 14:60-64, Luke 22:69 are secondary sources, which confirm all three titles so far. Many of the NT instances, including these, refer to the appearance in Daniel's vision directly, such as coming on the clouds of heaven and receiving the dominion and glory of God. Again this speaks to a self-concept of cosmic preexistence. The potential fact of such preexistence itself is based on other evidence that I'm holding for later, but the fact that Jesus claimed preexistence is mundane and well-attested.

(d) He claimed to be the king in God's kingdom. Mara refers to Jesus as a wise king who was executed by the Jewish people, and Tacitus, Josephus, and the Talmud all indicate that he was judged guilty of a capital crime, i.e., claiming kingship independent from Tiberius Caesar's. Pilate wrote, "This is Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews" as his charge, and all four gospels abridge this inscription differently; there is even an anticipation of whether the inscription conflated whether Jesus was king or merely claimed to be, which indicates that the four gospels are reliable secondary sources of the written inscription. It was common for the executed to be displayed with signs of their crimes; thieves could be hung with moneybags as their symbol, and Jesus was given a crown of thorns and an inscription for the very purpose of creating a visual spectacle symbolizing his judged criminality as a royal pretender. Further, God's kingdom is attested by most historians as the most certain element in all of Jesus's teaching. His role in it as king of kings is illustrated by Matt. 19:28, Luke 22:28-30, which also meets the criterion of embarrassment because people would later ask if Judas was intended to have one of the 12 thrones (or whether Jesus anticipated Matthias). Here Jesus's claim of kingship extends beyond his death and so he is claiming an afterlife for himself and his disciples. As previously indicated, the scientific study of afterlife is largely focused on the general class of resuscitation events known as near-death experiences, which number in the tens of millions and about which I have much to say. Thus the claim to kingship has significant focus on yet-unknown physical possibilities; but the fact that Jesus claimed kingship is itself not an extraordinary fact and is indeed testified by almost all historians.

(e) He claimed to be the unique teacher (Rabbi) of Israel. The Talmud indicates that Jesus's generation was the first to include rabbis, and comparing usages linguistically suggests that Jesus may have been the first of all to adopt the title, which then became faddish among the Jews (meaning "my exalted one"). The generations prior had been called "zugoth" instead, sages yoked to each other, up until the final pair of Hillel and Shammai, whom Jesus would have met in the temple when he was 12 or so. Until 70, only a few rabbis were attested, but through 500 there were about two thousand rabbis named in the Talmud. So evidence indicates that there was a consciousness of giving new meaning to the exaltation of the teacher. In particular, Jesus's emphasis on "I say unto you" was a unique demonstration of teaching ability, stated dozens of times with either "You have heard it said, but," or "Truth, truth". Both the class of prior sages and the rabbis of the Gemara would insist on naming earlier teachers for their teachings rather than taking authority personally, so this meets the authenticity criterion of dissimilarity. The effect of his unique teaching style was astonishment at its difference from other teachers (Matt. 7:28, Mark 1:22, Luke 4:32, etc.), further supporting this general fact. But when pressed on difficulties in the Torah, Jesus affirmed it and then placed his own teaching (expanding on overlooked contrasting Torah data) as equal to the direct word of the Lord to Moses (Matt. 5:31-32, Mark 10:2-12). All historians agree that Jesus has a body of disciples to receive and perpetuate his teaching: the Talmud numbers them five, but uses some of the same names as the NT; Josephus explicitly calls him teacher of truth; Mara the Stoic calls him as wise as Socrates and Pythagoras and the giver of a new law (Torah); and Tacitus explains that his teaching was so effective that its "superstition" was continued by his disciples after his death, until a great body of Christians was present in Rome by 64 AD. Thus the claim of unique teacher is widely recognized as a real claim made, and includes at least an authority equal to the giver of the Torah and a component that testified of superstition (inexplicability).

(f) Jesus claimed to be the unique forgiver of sins against God. Here Craig writes, "Several of Jesus' parables [e.g. prodigal son and lost sheep, Matt. 18:10-14, Luke 15:1-32], which are acknowledged on all hands to have been uttered by the historical Jesus, show that He assumed the prerogative to forgive sins." Jesus once staged a demonstration (an apparent healing of a paralytic) for the express purpose of claiming authority to forgive sins against God (Matt. 9:2-8, Mark 2:1-12, Luke 5:17-26 ). The testimony of the religious leaders expressed in these passages is further supported by the circulation of the negative title against him "friend of sinners" (Matt. 11:19, Luke 7:34), indicating his claim was understood as he intended it. Even the proximate cause of his betrayal was Judas's disgust with Jesus's acceptance of a sinner (Mark 14:5, John 12:5). This claim might be regarded as not supernatural at all, in that the ability to forgive sins might well refer solely to the power to judge rightly and cause remediation on earth of injustices, personally and through his followers; but it involves at least a total attunement to the external objective standard of universal morality, not just an approximative lower tribunal.

(g) He claimed to work wonders (inexplicable events). While modern illusionists claim the same, the sheer number and variety of testimonies and their impromptu, wild settings has indicated to virtually all scholars that his reputation as a wonder-worker was unique and rapidly established in his lifetime. Jesus's statement that he casts out demons by the power of God (Matt. 12:28, Luke 11:20) is recognized by NT scholars as authentic and an illustration of his self-concept as a healer above the powers of the physicians and pharmacists of the day. It claims divine authority over phenomena understood as demonic, i.e., it claims access to physical laws of restoration of mental order that have been largely, but not completely, unparalleled in the powers of other healers in history. In his claim of Messiahship (Matt. 11:2-6, Luke 7:19-23) is specific reference to healing power, including raising the dead, about which several NT anecdotes circulate giving this power to him and his followers; again, the question of whether this happened is investigated under NDE study, while the question of whether this was claimed is easily settled by the supermajority testimony of historians that it was indeed claimed. John Meier, of the quest for the historical Jesus, affirms that the "miraculous" healing claim "has as much historical corroboration as almost any other statement we can make about the Jesus of history." The claim was repeatedly tied to Jesus's power as God's king, his unique authority as the exalted rabbi, and his moral healing power as forgiver of sins.

(h) He claimed 3-day turnaround as a personal sign (John 2:13-25, original; Matt. 12:40, unique; Luke 13:32, memetic; triply taught, Matt. 16:21, 17:23, 20:19, Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:34, Luke 9:22, 18:33, 24 passim). Contemporary trial record, Matt. 26:61, and hostile testimony, Matt. 27:40, 63-64, Mark 14:58, 15:29, John 2:20, reflect then-extant documents. Cf. Hosea 6:2, etc. Historians agree 1 Cor. 15:3-4 and Acts 10:39-40 reflect creed formed by c. 38 AD. Josephus specifically echoes 3 days, and even Celsus c. 150 ridicules, "You will not, I suppose, say of him, that, after failing to gain over those who were in this world, he went to Hades to gain over those who were there", showing developed 3-day harrowing doctrine. Jesus's tying himself to a supernatural 3-day sign, before historical fulfillment was attributed to him, indicated divine self-concept.

Individual historians differ on which of the above facts are most sufficiently attested, but their preponderance is sufficient to indicate to the vast majority that Jesus had a self-concept that transcended currently known physical law. Either he was wrong, or he was aware of greater knowable physical laws that we have not yet fully discerned.

Accordingly, there is compelling, falsifiable evidence for the fact that the historical Jesus taught that he had unique powers that allegedly demonstrated then-unknown natural laws, such as possibilities of preexistence, approach to omniscience, afterlife, cosmic unity, and unparalleled healings of disease and death. It is not necessary to evaluate whether any supernatural events occurred in order to establish the facts that inexplicable powers were claimed as a central part of Jesus's teaching. In fact, the body of historians that recognizes these facts about what Jesus claimed include all the skeptics and liberals who doubt his divinity or the supernatural. Either these claims of cosmic attunement were false, or they represented then-unknown natural laws that modern science has yet to fully quantify. Whether the claims were true must be tested by the method of inference upon unrepeatable events and the criterion of the evidence needing to be as extraordinary as the claim, which is a separate study. But the fact that Jesus made a broad body of similar claims about his powers in the years 30-33 AD has been established by the evidence.

Who are the 13 families? Here are the first search results:

Time, 1940, citing SEC: "The 13 most potent family groups’ holdings were worth $2,700,000,000, comprised over 8% of the stock of the 200 corporations: Fords, $624,975,000; Du Fonts, $573,690,000; Rockefellers, $396,583,000; Mellons, $390,943,000; McCormicks (International Harvester), $111,102,000; Hartfords (A. & P.), $105,702,000; Harknesses (Standard Oil), $104,891,000; Dukes (tobacco, power), $89,459,000; Pews (Sun Oil), $75,628,000; Pitcairns (Pittsburgh Plate Glass), $65,576,000; Clarks (Singer), $57,215,000; Reynolds (tobacco), $54,766,000; Kresses (S. H. Kress), $50,044,000." It emphasizes that this cutoff of 13 lists the primary groupings that maintained power over the top 200 corporations. However, it's not a resource actually used even though the names are significant:

1. Ford family
2. du Pont family
3. Rockefeller family
4. Mellon family
5. McCormick family
6. George Huntington Hartford
7. Stephen V. Harkness
8. James Buchanan Duke
9. Joseph Newton Pew
10. John Pitcairn Jr.
11. Edward Cabot Clark
12. R. J. Reynolds
13. Samuel Henry Kress

CIA, 1995, quoting Fritz Springmeier, Bloodlines of Illuminati (ne Viktor Schoof; convicted of bank robbery and jailed 2003-2011, claiming he was framed). "Several people from different places have confirmed that there are 13 Illuminati bloodlines. Further, several ex-Illuminati people have confirmed my list of 13 families. It is possible that my list is off on a name or two, but if it might be off, it can not be off much, if any. I believe the facts speak for themselves." (Chapter titles begin "The Astor Family", etc., but four chapters are added after the 13th family and chapter has been named; this is a compilation of many articles from different periods.)

1. Astor family (John Jacob Astor)
2. "Bundy Bloodline" (Ted Bundy, McGeorge Bundy)
3. "Collins Bloodline" and Todd "branch" (Joan Collins, Mary Todd)
4. du Pont family (Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours)
5. "Freeman Bloodline" (Walter Jackson Freeman II, Roger A. Freeman (economist))
6. Kennedy family (P. J. Kennedy)
7. House of Li (Zhuanxu)
8. "Onassis Bloodline" (Aristotle Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis)
9. Rockefeller family (John D. Rockefeller)
10. Rothschild family (Mayer Amschel Rothschild)
11. "Russell Bloodline" (Charles Taze Russell, Richard Russell Jr.)
12. Vanderbilt family and "Van Duyn Bloodline" (Mona Van Duyn)
13. Merovingian dynasty (Clovis I)
14. Disney family (Walt Disney)
15. "Reynolds bloodline" (R. J. Reynolds, Richard S. Reynolds Jr.)
16. Clan Donald (Richard and Maurice McDonald)
17. Krupp family (Friedrich Krupp)

This music album gives the same names as Springmeier 1-13: Rothschild Rockefeller Kennedy Astor Bundy Collins du Pont Onassis Li Van Duyn Freeman Merovingian Russell. So does this blog and this tweet. Here a researcher changes Merovingian to Reynolds. And https://grokipedia.com/page/Fritz_Springmeier gives the original list of 13.

Before leaving Springmeier, I made one more try by checking out "List of banking families", which is of course arbitrary WP which I will make further arbitrary by listing only ones that I like: Barclay, Baring, Fugger, Goldman-Sachs, Hinduja, Lazard, Li, Medici, Mellon, Morgan, Rockefeller, Rothschild, Warburg. Wow, 13 without trying, I must be inspired.

So it appears all real claims of 13 families come from Springmeier 1995 and refer to the same people, not listed as a particular club, but instead offered as "if there is a club here's evidence this named group is a member". In particular the names I put in quotes above are not recognized as directly connected families but just very common surnames. So I'm disappointed because this isn't what I was directly looking for. An ordinary list of Davos participants any year would cast a wider net. The Time list happens to use the framing "13 families" but is merely the American rich list. If I were to say here are 17 likely families, even though they appear in different periods and have different connections and overlaps, well, I can use the list, but it's effectively useless to hold a claim that there is an organized list of 13 that all have the same status at the same time or that get substituted one for another at times from a larger group.

So once again, the cabal is disconnected, the rumors of organization on either our side or theirs are exaggerated. What I always say is that there are many many families, they shift and rearrange, merge and separate, and they don't make any real public list available; the rich list is a known farce that gives no indication of the true level-pullers. Therefore this is a very poor way of going about an international question.

One reason for my interest is Q's statement about focusing on three, Saud, Rothschild, and Soros. The context indicates that the Q operation wants us to focus on the first one (with Trump's connections) overpowering the other two. This leaves one to guess where all the rest of the wealth in the world is controlled, and I'm just not finding any useful list. And genealogists know that tracing a "single" family through its branches is very sketchy, let alone to trace actual movements of money and power as if these automatically follow names when they don't. I'm left with the conclusion that there's no real core network of any number, but rather my conclusion from Carroll Quigley that each circle thinks it is the real inner circle, and the hydra is not slain by counting its heads.

Add: Not really related, but if anyone wants to know the original Illuminati (Perfectibilists), there were thousands. A Masonic site yields a little detail on: founder, Adam Weishaupt (Spartacus); first four novices, Franz Anton von Massenhausen (Ajax), Franz Xaver von Bauhof(f) (Agathon), Max Edler von Merz (Tiberius), Andreas Sutor (Erasmus Roterodamus/Rotterdamus); Franz Xaver von Zwackh, Adolph Knigge, Charles of Hesse-Kassel, Charles Savalette de Langes, Alexandre Roettiers de Montaleau, Ernest II of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, Johann Joachim Christoph Bode, and (the) Johann von Goethe. Also on WP are many others such as Johann Friedrich Baring (I just named his family independently), Junius Frey (Frankist converso), Franz Georg Karl von Metternich (German diplomat), Donato Tommasi (Italian politician).

Is Jesus Christ the Lord and the God of yourself and of the universe?

Please answer YES with any testimony, or decline to answer. This is a question between action (YES vote) and inaction (no vote); a NO vote is the same as no vote and is technically unnecessary.

This poll methodology is recognized to be unscientific but is better than nothing. Thank you for your responses. I recognize that many distrust poll testimony and believe in other methods of individual or group activity. However, this is not a group action question but a question of individual experience, so it's not a matter of consensus but of collection of testimonies that need no consent or validation from anyone else.

Repost.

A circulating graphic is entitled "Titles of the Jews". However, proper exegesis shows exactly what the Bible (NKJV today) says about it, and it does not apply these to "the Jews" as a collective.

1. "The fig tree which You cursed" Mk11:12-25: application not stated.

2. "Serpents, brood of vipers" Mt23:33: only "the scribes and the Pharisees" 2.

3. Who "know neither Me nor My Father" Jn8:19: only "the Pharisees" 13; "Who denies the Father and the Son" 1J2:22: only "antichrist".

4. Who "do not receive Me" Jn5:43-47: "the Jews" 18, not all, but possibly as a group as by representatives. "He who denies that Jesus is the Christ" 1J2:22 (not "10:22"): only "a liar".

5. "Antichrist" 1J2:22 (not "John 10:22"): only "who denies the Father and the Son".

6. "A liar" 1J2:22 (not "John 10:22"): only "he who denies that Jesus is the Christ".

7. "Of your father the devil" Jn8:44: only "those Jews who believed Him ... And ... answered ... 'we ... have never been in bondage'" 31-32.

8. "The one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her" Mt23:37: only "Jerusalem". "Of the Just One ... the betrayers and murderers" Ac7:52: only "the council" 6:15.

9. "A synagogue of Satan" Rv2:9: only "those who say they are Jews and are not". "The synagogue of Satan" Rv3:9: only "those ... who say they are Jews and are not, but lie".

10. "Who killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets" 1Th2:14-16: "the Judeans" (same word as "the Jews") 14, not all nor as a group, because distinguished from other Jews (thus translated Judeans).

11. Who "said, 'His blood be on us and on our children'" Mt27:25: only "the multitude" 15.

12. "Who ... have persecuted us" 1Th2:14-16: "the Judeans" 14, as above.

13. "Who ... do not please God" 1Th2:14-16: "the Judeans" 14, as above.

14. "Who ... are contrary to all men" 1Th2:14-16: "the Judeans" 14, as above.

15. Who "bind heavy burdens ... on men's shoulders" Mt23:4: only "the scribes and the Pharisees" 2.

16. "They ... forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved" 1Th2:14-16: "the Judeans" 14, as above.

17. "They ... always to fill up the measure of their sins" 1Th2:14-16: "the Judeans" 14, as above.

18. Who "carried Sikkuth your king" Am5:26: the "house of Israel" 1-25, not all, but as a group as by representatives. Who "took up the tabernacle of Moloch" Ac7:43: only "the council" 6:15.

19. Who "carried ... Chiun, your idols, The star of your gods" Am5:26: the "house of Israel" 1-25, not all, but as a group as by representatives. Who "took up ... the star of your god Remphan" Ac7:43: only "the council" 6:15.

20. "Insubordinate" Ti1:10-11: only "Cretans" 12, "especially those of the circumcision" 10.

21. "Idle talkers" Ti1:10-11: only "Cretans" 12, "especially those of the circumcision" 10.

22. "Deceivers" Ti1:10-11: only "Cretans" 12, "especially those of the circumcision" 10.

23. "Who subvert whole households" Ti1:10-11: only "Cretans" 12, "especially those of the circumcision" 10.

24. "Teaching ... for the sake of dishonest gain" Ti1:10-11: only "Cretans" 12, "especially those of the circumcision" 10.

25. "Whose mouths must be stopped" Ti1:10-11: only "Cretans" 12, "especially those of the circumcision" 10.

26. "Giving heed to Jewish fables and commandments of men who turn from the truth" Ti1:14: (implied) only "Cretans" 12, "especially those of the circumcision" 10.

27. Whose "house is left to you desolate" Mt23:38 (not 37): only "Jerusalem" 37.

28. "Blinded ... this day ... in the reading of the Old Testament" 2Co3:13-16 (not 11:13-16): "the children of Israel" 13, not all, but possibly as a group as by representatives.

29. "Blind guides" Mt23:16-17: only "the scribes and the Pharisees" 2.

30. Upon whom "wrath has come ... to the uttermost" 1Th2:14-16: "the Judeans" 14, as above.

31. "Sodom and Egypt" Rv11:8: only "where also our Lord was crucified". "Egypt" Is19:3-10: only "Egyptians" 2-23, not "Judah" 17 or "Israel" 24-25. Upon whom "He will bring ... all the diseases of Egypt" Dt28:60: "all Israel" 27:9, as a group as by representatives.

32. "Stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears" Ac7:51: only "the council" 6:15.

33. Who "reject ... salvation" Ac13:46-47: only "Antioch ... synagogue" 14.

34. "Wise ... fools" Ro1:22 (not 5:22): "men" 18.

The conclusion given is "True Israel is the Church", citing Ro8:27-28 which does not contain that thought, and Ga6:16 which speaks of "the Israel of God", application not stated. There is no verse in many translations containing both "Israel" and "church".

I conclude then that there are only two verses here from which titles for 'the Jews' might be taken (John 5:18 and 1 Thess. 2:14); and 'the Jews' usually refers to a contextual subgroup of Jews and not to all Jews either individually or collectively as the phrase "Titles of the Jews" would imply.

If we were to use the data above to attempt a further conclusion accurately, we'd note there are several terms that can be taken to represent the national entity Judea and its predecessors, though it does not appear there is a simple term intended to mean every citizen of the nation without exception. These terms might be used to construct a more accurate list of national curses currently imputed to the Judean nation and its successor people. Of course, these curses are similar to Biblical curses on other nations, and have their compensating blessings too. But seeking to give full credit to the meme creator's intent it would seem the best that could be said is that the Bible does impose a few negative statements about the national-political entity once named Judea.

If the highly disorganized creator had desired to make a proper list of "titles of the Jews", exegetically he would have searched for Hebrew Yehudi, Aramaic Yehudai, and Greek Ioudaios. This would turn up:

Of whom "the eye of their God was upon the elders" Ezr5:5; for whom "relief and deliverance will arise" Es4:14; who "had light and gladness, joy and honor ..., a feast and a holiday" Es8:16-17; of whom "JESUS ... has been born King" Mt1:25-2:2; of whom "IS JESUS THE KING" Mt27:37; who "do not eat unless they wash their hands in a special way, holding the tradition of the elders" Mk7:3; of whom "the Passover ... was at hand" Jn2:13; of whom "was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler" Jn3:1; who "have no dealings with Samaritans" Jn4:9; of whom "salvation is" Jn4:22; of whom "the Passover ... was near" Jn6:4, 11:55; who "sought to kill him" Jn7:1; of whom "Feast of Tabernacles was at hand" Jn7:2; of whom "there was a division ... because of these sayings" Jn10:19; of whom "many ... believed in Jesus" Jn12:11; whose "officers ... arrested Jesus" Jn18:12; who "Caiaphas ... advised ... it was expedient that one man should die for the people" Jn18:14; who "in synagogues and in the temple ... always meet" Jn18:20; of whom "many ... read this title" Jn19:20; whose "custom ... is to bury" Jn19:40; "devout men, from every nation under heaven" Ac2:5; among whom "Cornelius ... has a good reputation" Ac10:22; for whom "unlawful it is ... to keep company with or go to one of another nation" Ac10:28; of whom "all things ... He did ... in the land" Ac10:39; of whom "they preached the word of God in the synagogues" Ac13:5; of whom "many ... followed Paul and Barnabas" Ac13:43; of whom "a great multitude ... believed" Ac14:1; of whom "many myriads ... believed, and they are all zealous for the law" Ac21:20; for whom "the gospel of Christ ... is the power of God to salvation ... first" Ro1:16; to whom "God ... will render ... tribulation and anguish, on every soul of man who does evil ... first ... but glory, honor, and peace to everyone who works what is good ... first" Ro2:5-10; "under sin" Ro3:9; of whom "is He the God" Ro3:29; who "request a sign" 1Co1:22; from whom "five times I received forty stripes minus one" 2Co11:24; who "knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ ... have believed in Christ Jesus" Ga2:15-16.

This is a quick pass for Scriptures that reasonably could apply to all "the Jews" as a nation with agents, rather than to a subgroup, besides John 5:18. With a single concordance review I found 35 real titles compared to the 34 fake titles presented. It appears good exegesis is easy, and yet some people seem to pretend it without making any attempt at it, indicating that good exegesis is not their true intent.

(The same methodology can be used to discuss how Jesus was a Jew, which can be proven separately.)

Repost apropos of Jefferson on banking.

I have thrown out these as loose heads of amendment, for consideration and correction; and their object is to secure self-government by the republicanism of our constitution, as well as by the spirit of the people; and to nourish and perpetuate that spirit. I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers. Our landholders, too, like theirs, retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation. This example reads to us the salutary lesson, that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance. And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, and to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.

I add: The four horsemen of the American apocalypse are DEBT [oathbreaking], TAXATION [theft], WRETCHEDNESS [licentiousness] and OPPRESSION [abuse]. Ayn Rand described the same as "mooching and looting". These are minions of the bigger ones coming, conquest, war, famine and plague. We have this opportunity to repel them personally every day.

(Emphasis added.) The following is one interpretation of Talmud, from Daat Emet, a Jewish org that I am unfamiliar with and cannot vouch for the authority of; obviously there are contrary interpretations that I have already brought forward on other fora so it's appropriate to give this one as counterpoint. Note, they set themselves up as an outlier "liberal" organization pitted against a "fundamentalist" rabbinical dogma, in their page "About Daat Emet" where the alert reader will hear the echo of Magnus Hirschfeld: "DE has reached the conclusion that the amazingly rich classical Jewish legacy, which makes up the main body of Jewish culture, has been deliberately misinterpreted for a long period of time; as a result, it has become a political tool in the hands of self-interested fundamentalists who lay claim to having exclusive ownership of this legacy .... What is most astounding is that the triumph of rabbinical dictatorship continues to plague us to this day. The entire traditional sector of the Jewish collective body still lives in full conformity with the cultural rabbinical dogma; what is more, the Jewish liberals, having rejected the rabbinical interpretation, failed to create a new one. Essentially, the ancient monopoly continues to dominate Jewish culture .... In essence, DE created a new scientific and humanistic interpretation of the classical Jewish legacy, restoring it to its natural historical context. This interpretation solves two crucial objectives at once: it fosters Jewish culture and protects it from fundamentalist outrages, enabling its bearers to function successfully in the modern world." The founder's name is given as Yaron Yadan.

https://daatemet.org.il/en/question/pedophilia-in-halacha/

https://web.archive.org/web/20241208083928/https://daatemet.org.il/en/question/pedophilia-in-halacha/

Anonymous asked

Dear Daat Emet staff,

Do you know how Chazal viewed pedophilia?

Enigma

jsadmin Staff answered

Dear Enigma,

In answer to your question we must note two important things about Chazal’s approach to sexuality in general and to pedophilia (sexual attraction to minors of either sex) in particular:

1. Chazal were (as determiners of Halacha) looking at the Divine will and not man’s. Obedience to the text (the silent letters) was more important to them than harm done to some specific individual.

2. Chazal ignored (due to a lack of knowledge or a lack of desire to consider) the psychological and emotional aspects which stem from sexual activity. Their view of sex was as a purely legalistic act of acquisition, and the laws against certain forms of sexual relations are purely theological.

First we will bring the Halacha which treats pedophilia lightly:

According to Halacha, sexual relations have taken place when the participants are a male over the age of nine and a female above the age of three. Below these ages what has happened is not considered sexual intercourse (in neither the sense of acquisition nor the sense of forbidden sexual relations).

It is written in the Mishnah: “A girl of three years and a day is sanctified (as a woman is acquired) through intercourse…if one of those forbidden to have relations with her according to the Torah does have relations with her, he is killed because of her, and she is exempt. If she is less than that (less than three years and a day), it is as one who sticks a finger into an eye” (Niddah 5:4). The sages of the Talmud explain the Mishnah’s simile “as one who sticks a finger into an eye”: Just as an eye, if poked by a finger, gives off a tear and then once again gives off tears, so is it when a man puts his penis in a girl younger than three, her hymen tears and then heals over. This is why it is not called intercourse in matters of prohibition or of acquisition (Niddah 45a).

Thus did Maimonides rule (Laws of Forbidden Intercourse 1:13-14): One who has sexual relations with a girl younger than three is exempt from punishment, even if he did so with his own daughter, and one who has sexual relations with a boy of under nine is exempt from punishment, even if she did so with her own son, and homosexual relationships with a minor boy under the age of nine is exempt from the punishment written in the Torah: “If a man lies with a male as one lies with a woman, the two of them have done an abhorrent thing; they shall be put to death — their bloodguilt is upon them” (Leviticus 20:13).

From what we have brought above, you can learn that Chazal and the religious arbiters treated sexual relations with a minor as a meaningless act. They completely ignore the psychological and emotional impact upon a boy or a girl who have undergone an irreversible trauma which can warp their entire lives. Their only concern, the target of all their sophistry and discussions, was the legal/Halachic aspect. They treated intercourse as an act of acquisition and spill a great deal of ink and intellectual energy on embarrassing and shameful questions like whether an act is considered sexual intercourse if only the corona of the penis penetrates, or if there is any contact between the corona of the penis and the female genitals (what is called by Chazal “a kiss”), or is full penetration of the entire sexual organ required (Yevamot 55b)? There are many more such nonsensical questions.

To more precisely show Chazal’s emotional insensitivity, I will cite another Talmudic discussion which deals with sexual intercourse with a minor girl. Since they hold that a girl under the age of three is not “worth” intercourse, that one who has sex with a girl under the age of three is not punished, they wonder whether if one has sex with a girl under the age of three and her hymen is torn, does it heal, or was it never torn in the first place? The Halachic implications of the doubt is relevant in the case of a girl who again has sex after the age of three, and bleeds. Is this hymeneal blood or menstrual blood? Thus do Chazal sail away on virtual analysis which has nothing to do with a woman’s physical reality, while ignoring humanity.

Another thing to note is that the word “pedophilia” comes from the Greek (paed=child, philos=love) while there is no Hebrew word for sexual contact between an adult and a child. Halachic language completely ignored the existence of pedophilia. On the other hand, medicine treats pedophilia as a disorder caused by psychological and social issues, one which testifies to problems in sexual development. Treatment of this phenomenon is both medical and behavioral.

From all that has been said above, there is no doubt that were a comprehensive, in-depth anthropological study done within the contemporary Charedi community, we would find a high percentage of those who act upon their sexual attraction to little children, either because of Halacha’s turning a blind eye or because the act of pedophilia is treated lightly. In other words, the Orthodox community sees sexual activity between adults as more serious than having sex with a child.

Sincerely,

Daat Emet

jsadmin Staff answered

Dear Shabtay,

You are quite correct; the Torah permits marriage with an infant. This can be learned from the verse “I gave my daughter to this man.” The father has the right to marry his minor daughter off to whomever he pleases. The Talmud treats sexual relations with a little girl as something self-explanatory, and they say:

Three [categories of] women may use an absorbent [cotton to absorb sperm as a contraceptive]: a minor…What is the age of a minor? From the age of eleven and a day to the age of twelve and a day. Less than that or more than that must carry on her sexual relations in a normal manner (Ketubot 39a).

As you have written, sleeping with a young girl is permitted, as long as you marry her “according to the teachings of Moses and Israel.”

For more on this matter, see our answer The Halachic approach to having sex with minors (in Hebrew).

Sincerely,

Daat Emet

jsadmin Staff answered

According to Halachic definitions, an infant three years and above must be treated, when it comes to modesty, as a grown woman. Halachic treats a little girl as a sexual object. But how do Charedi and the religious in fact treat little girls? Do they treat them as sexual objects? This is an interesting question, one which should be explored in-depth. It is possible that there is a gap between written Halacha, which may not be changed, and the cultural changes which have taken place in the modern era.

If sexual attraction is dependent upon culture, it is possible that the Western culture has influenced the Orthodox public and sexual attraction to little girls will not exist (for normal men, with no deviances or disturbances). On the other hand, the textual discourse of the Orthodox public can be a very significant source of influence upon the viewpoint and lifestyle of the religious or the Charedi person, even creating a reality of legitimate sexual attraction even to children.

The very fact that a religious man treats Halachic rulings seriously (as the words of the living G-d) and because of practical Halacha treats little girls as sexual objects influences his mind.

There is a halacha which forbids being alone with a girl of three and above (Even HaEzer 22:1). A religious man may not be alone with an infant lest his urges overcome him and he sleep with her. The application of this halacha can have an effect on a man’s mind.

This is also the case for the rest of the practical halachot, such as the prohibition against reading words of Torah in front of a girl who is not dressed modestly (in the words of the halacha, “has more than a handspan uncovered”) and the prohibition against hearing the voice of girls singing, etc.

In short, it would seem we need to see if the Orthodox society has been examined when it comes to this topic, and if so, what the conclusions of the research were.

Sincerely,

Daat Emet

jsadmin Staff answered

Dear Oshri,

First of all, we appreciate the courage and intellectual honest it takes to clarify these issues to arrive at the truth.

Our answer to Pedophilia in Halacha which you printed and showed to your teacher was precise and accurate.

Note, please, two things:

1. Halacha permits having sexual relations, even with a minor under the age of 11, through sanctification and marriage. (This is pedophilia.)

2. Halacha exempts one from punishment incest with a girl under the age of 3. Though we say “exempts,” this does not mean that one may do so. For example: a father who has sexual intercourse with his daughter of more than 3 would be liable to death by burning (Maimonides, Laws of Forbidden Intercourse 1:5), but if the daughter is under 3 the father is exempt from punishment. (this is the halacha we cited from Maimonides; it is most odd that your teacher did not find it.)

To remove any doubt, we will cite Maimonides’ words in full:

Any woman is forbidden to them if she is age three and a day or above. A grown man who has sex with her is liable to death, karet, or lashes and she is exempt unless she is an adult. If she was younger than this, both are exempt for her intercourse is not intercourse. Similarly, a grown woman who has intercourse with a minor child of nine years and a day is liable to karet or death or lashes and he is exempt; if he were nine years old or younger both are exempt.

If a man has intercourse with a man or a man has intercourse with him and both are adult, they are stoned, for it is written “Do not have intercourse with men,” be he the penetrative partner or the penetrated. If he is a minor of nine years and a day or more, the man who has intercourse with him is stoned and the minor is exempt. If he is a male of nine years or less, both are exempt, though it is appropriate for the court to subject the adult to lashes for rebelliousness, for he had intercourse with a male, though he was under the age of nine. (Maimonides, Laws of Forbidden Intercourse 1:13-14).

We would be pleased to see your teacher’s response.

Sincerely,

Daat Emet

Should c/Conspiracies jointly petition admin for a single new moderator as opposed to a mod team or no mods?

Please answer YES or NO in separate main comments below, with any reasoning as desired (including proposals of individual mods, no mod, or multiple mods).

YES indicates our direction should be to get agreement on there being one mod approved first with details to be sorted out later, NO indicates we should take any other direction.

This poll methodology is recognized to be unscientific but is better than nothing. Thank you for your responses. The previous poll yielded 4 votes in favor of moderation, 1 vote against, and 1 vote conditionally in favor.

I recognize that many distrust voting and believe in other methods of consensus, and of individual or group activity; I merely point out that remaining silent on a position is generally treated as giving consent to others to make the decision.

Since this field gets little traction here, I anticipate very little interest in this challenge.

1. Two billion Christians are committed to a record (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9) indicating we are now in the 6,018th year of the cosmos (James Ussher: 6,029th).

2. Two billion other theists (mostly Muslims and Jews) are committed to the same record. Jews make this 5786 AM, recognizing that the Seder Olam Rabbah deliberately skipped about a dozen Persian kings, which I reckon as gaps totalling 232 years. Muslims, generally agreeing, also invented the kalam cosmology that teaches a finite beginning in historic times.

3. For the rest of mankind, all written history testifies the universe and earth are thousands of years old; even the Sumerian King List doesn't exaggerate beyond human lifespans of 43,200 years (Enmenluana), and the legendary Buddhists stop with lifespans of 100,000 years, still within the range of thousands and not billions. 200 creation traditions demonstrate the origin of the universe as designed and humanity as a rapid development, as a universal testimony.

4. All written science for 5,000 years [with the exception of a trend begun by Huxley, Darwin, and Wallace about 200 years ago] assumed a similar timeframe of thousands of years and an orderly creation by an external power.

5. Therefore the only exception to this testimony is a demonstrable cabal of antitheists that have invented and declared a "war" on theism and commandeered control of a scientific establishment that censors all other opinions and is sustained by leeched tax money (Stein, Expelled). These follow a pattern of other previous occasional pockets of people (not "scientists" like this time but always religionists) who claim vast age for the universe but who never could catch on due to their inconsistency and infighting (e.g. gnosticism).

6. This cabal relies on an ever-spinning series of cave shadows that are abandoned when they become useless, but during their lifetimes are upheld as "settled science" (finch beaks, Lamarckianism, Peking Man, steady state, hopeful monsters, panspermia, and nowadays dark matter, dark energy, anthropic principle, math universe hypothesis). They rely on parroting of pictographic narratives rather than on deliberative knowledge, such as the new "tree of life", Haeckel's embryos, Miller's tubes, the "march of progress" apes and men, etc. (Wells, Icons of Evolution).

7. One demonstration of the bankruptcy of this position is NASA's admission that neither of two theories, one dating the universe at 9 billion years rounded, and one dating it at 11-18 billion years, can be taken as settled science. If an official repository of old-earth evidence admits that all old-earth theories are suspect because they disagree and the error has not yet been discerned, then there is no proof of old earth.

Uniquity of triads.

To supplement the study on the trinity (trineness) of God, this study is a list of concepts that have arisen as basic triads, either directly from Scriptures or from logical extrapolation of Scriptural concepts. Often these triads are easily compared to the classic definition of trinity, but often there is deliberate ambiguity in mapping one triad to another. Sometimes all three aspects of one triad apply to all three aspects of another. However, it appears to me that even when two triads do not map easily one to another, they remain isomorphic descriptions of the plurality in unity of God, because the relationship between two triads can either be identity, distinction, or elements of both, which forms another triad! This suggests that distinctives do not prevent triads from each being valid expressions of God, because the distinctives also form a triad and constitute an expression of God.

The purpose of this compilation is to show that some aspects of God appear paradoxical when compared to others, but that when considered as independent structures they behave similarly. The paradoxical appearance only arises because it is assumed two concepts can be mapped precisely one onto another, but that would make the concepts redundant with each other. Instead, no human concept maps precisely onto another. This means that whenever one attempts to claim a paradox, it arises from failure to define terms precisely and to rightly compare and contrast the definitions.

In one of its simplest forms, paradox is cited because the following beliefs are held to be contradictory as a group: "The Father is God", "The Word is God", "The Father is not the Word". The resolution of the paradox involves recognizing that distinctions exist between Father, Word, and God, and so "is" does not mean precise identity, but establishes that essential attributes are identical but some distinction still exists. Any tension between these triads is resolvable the same way.

• Father [God], Son [Lord], Spirit [Holy]: The traditional triad of Matthew 28:19 and Eph. 4:4-6.

• Father [Begetter], Word [Flesh], Glory [Dwelling]: The traditional triad of John 1:14. The Word is the Logos (Verbum) and the Monogenes (One-of-a-Kind).

• From, To, Through: How all things relate respecting him, Rom. 11:36.

• Above, In, Through: How he relates respecting all things, Eph. 4:6.

• Of-None, Begotten, Proceeding: The Athanasian definitions of the distinctives of these triads.

• Of-Self, Of-Other, Of-Others: One way of reconciling the Athanasian terms for relations of personality. This also harmonizes with the next two.

• Seity [Self], Aseity [Of-Self], Deity [God]: Another way to summarize the same thing from a human perspective. A seity is a considered self; an aseity is a self considered in itself; a deity is then a perfect harmony of self and consideration of self. Here the Father is the considered self that originates the triad; the Son is "God with God", self of self, John 1:1-2; and the Spirit is the perfect relation between them, "God out of God", the love of 1 John 4:7-8.

• Deity [Simplicity], Seity [Complexity], Aseity [Profundity]: From a divine perspective, the Father is simple unconsidered deity; the Son is the Self the Father sees when considering "himself"; and the Spirit is the consideration of the Father for his Self, the Son. This shifts the application of the words because the perspective of consideration changes.

• Unity, Diversity, Triunity: Triunity is a special case of "university", meaning "unity in diversity".

• One, Two [And], Three [Many]: Even mathematical simplicity is an incomplete expression, Rom. 12:4-5, 1 Cor. 12:12-20.

• Singular, Dual, Plural: The same triad expressed in grammatical cases.

• Absolute, Relative, Both: A general harmonization of these harmonies.

• Incomprehensible, Almighty, Eternal: Three of the six Athanasian attributes that apply to all of the trinity.

• Omniscient [All-Comprehending], Omnipotent [All-Doing], Omnipresent [All-Spacetime]: A common logical application of the infinities of the prior triad. Omniscient implies Ineffable, Inexhaustible, Unshared, Incommunicable, infinite in thought. Omnipotent implies Omniefficient, All-Working, infinite in action (matter or word). Omnipresent comprises Immense (Immaterial, Total, Full) and Eternal (Agelong, Endless, Everlasting), infinite in relation. Thus:

• Thought, Action, Relation: Explicit forms of these infinities.

• Uncreated [Creator], Lord, God: The other three of the six Athanasian attributes.

• Being, Power, Glory: Another common creedal triad.

• Kingdom, Power, Glory: The Lord's Prayer that may indicate the source of the creedal statement, Matt. 6:13.

• Ehyeh [I Am], Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh [I Am What I Am], Yahweh [I Am I]: God's self-naming from Ex. 3:14-15.

• Self-Identity, Self-Existence, Self-Causality: I use these words to explain the three names. First, such perfect being that that being uniquely is identifiable as God; second, such perfect consideration of that being that the consideration is also really God; third, such perfect relation between being and consideration that "cause" and "effect" have no difference when applied to that relation, such that God is the uncaused first cause of all. (Thus these words apply similarly as the triad, deity, seity, aseity. "Self-causality" does not mean that one literally exists before one causes oneself to exist, but that one has no cause outside oneself.)

• Unimagined [Inscrutable], Unlimited [Illimitable], Undistinguished [Indivisible]: This is a similar explanation from a negative perspective: only God can fully imagine, limit, or distinguish his infinity.

• Ousia, Homoiousias, Homoousias: At the risk of simplifying several hard-fought disputes, the Father is an existence, the Son is a similar existence, and the Father and Son are both of the same existence, the Spirit.

• Transcendence, Personality, Immanence: God is both wholly other to creation and wholly within creation, and reconciles these in the personality of Jesus.

• Being, Seeking, Rewarding: The basic activity triad from Heb. 11:6.

• Existence, Equality, Possession: This triad as applied to God in himself.

• Being [Doing], Having [Inhabiting], Relating [Transcending]: Another way of expressing the thought of Hebrews 11 within God.

• Space, Matter [Energy], Time: The observed created triad hinted at by Gen. 1:1-3.

• Length, Width [Breadth], Height: The three observed physical dimensions within space.

• Water, Blood, Spirit: A physical triad of 1 John 4:7-8 that was compared to the trinity.

• Mind [Soul], Strength [Body], Heart [Spirit]: The human triad from Deut. 6:5.

• Thoughts, Emotions, Will: A triad often found within the mind, in its reflection upon itself, the body, and the spirit.

• Knowledge, Understanding, Wisdom: Another mental triad in its reflection upon God, Ex. 31:3, 35:31, Prov. 2:6, Is. 11:2.

• Head, Arm, Hand [Finger]: A bodily triad applicable to God. Head, 1 Cor. 11:3; arm, Is. 53:1, etc.; hand, 2 Kings 3:15, Ezek. 1:8; finger, Luke 11:20 with Matt. 12:28.

• Soul [Nephesh], Dust [Aphar], Breath [Neshamah]: The human triad from Gen. 2:7. Here the soul is the unity of body and spirit; at other times the body, or the spirit, is the unifying focus.

• Creature, Name, Call: The earthly naming triad from Gen. 2:19.

• Deity, Name [Attribute], Being [Nature]: Application of the naming principle to God.

• Unshared, Shared, Substantially-Shared: There are ways in which God does not communicate himself with us and ways in which he does, and these are harmonized in our receiving sufficient substance to have both the experience of the communicable and the intuition of the incommunicable.

• Sensing, Knowing, Revealing: The activities by which God's sharing progresses to us.

• Self [Autos], Law [Nomos], Autonomy: God is a "law unto himself" because he is the original self and the original law.

• Deity, Icon [Angel], Glory: 2 Cor. 4:4, Col. 1:15, 1 Cor. 11:7.

• Deity, Radiance, Glory: Heb. 1:3.

• Deity, Image [Character], Substance [Hypostasis]: Also Heb. 1:3. From this verse I can say that the Bible teaches there is (at least) one hypostasis, and I can avoid dogmatism about whether there are actually two or three (each way of phrasing can be harmonized with the others, because multiple definitions of hypostasis have been used).

• Justice, Mercy, Faith: Jesus's triad of weighty matters, Matt. 23:23, compared to the spice triad of mint, anise, and cummin (compare the unity of Ps. 85:10).

• Pure [Good], Right [Just], Great [Holy]: As we get into the outflow of God's attributes in creation later, we will see that he is good of himself, that he is just in accord with himself, and that he is holy in his relating to himself, informing our expressions of these principles in our lives. Further, simplicity and grace are aspects of purity, merit and mercy of righteousness, and glory and majesty of greatness.

• Irresistible Force, Immovable Object, What Happens: The answer to this humorous implied question is that there is perfect harmony if the force and the object are the same entity (the unmoved mover), because they never "meet" in opposition, a possibility the paradox-framer didn't consider.

• Yahweh, Yehoshua, Qadosh: If we seek personal names, even though all personal names work as attributes at this level, it's often considered that Yahweh (Self-Existence) refers more particularly to the Father, while Yehoshua (Jesus, Yahweh's Salvation) is the Hebrew name of the Son. If the Spirit has a personal name it may be the word Qadosh (Holy). However, the attributes of self-existence, salvation, and holiness belong to God in unity. The following may be more specific:

• Abba, Pili, Sheken: This may not even be a triad, but is my attempt to select unambiguous names. In particular, though Jesus instructs us to use the basic names of the Great Commission, father, holy, and spirit have some ambiguity within the Godhead, and son has different application before the incarnation than after. Abba (Daddy, Dada, Papa) uniquely refers to the Father of Jesus, Mark 14:36, Rom. 8:15, Gal. 4:6. Pili (Wonderful, Secret) is a name taken as unique by the Angel of the LORD, Judg. 13:18, Ps. 139:6. Sheken (Dwelling, extrabiblically Shekinah) uniquely applies to the Manifestation of Glory, Deut. 12:5, etc.

• Father, Son [Child], Mother: The earthly family, where in the Godhead the role of the mother is taken by the Spirit-filled church. Interestingly, unlike the third party being the harmonizer, in this view the second party (the Child) is the harmonizer.

• Voice, Word, Sound: This is an old triad hinted at in Scripture, in which the first party (the Voice) harmonizes two things (the message and the sounds it expresses).

• Leader, Follower, Spirit: A triad suggested by C. S. Lewis in which the third party takes the traditional place of harmonizing.

• God, God [Word], With: The Son (Word) is God, and God with God, where the Spirit is the relation between the two, John 1:1.

• God, Out Of, God [Love]: The Spirit (Love) is God, and God out of God, where the Son is the expression of the two, 1 John 4:7-8.

• Lover, Beloved, Love: A triad of action suggested by 1 John 4:7-8 and also Song of Songs; I also like to call it Lover, Loved, Loves.

• Abraham, Isaac, Jacob: As in Ex. 3:15, the patriarchs are often considered to be typological of the trinity of God.

• He-Created [Bara], God-Himself [Elohim], In-The-Beginning [Bereshith]: Gen. 1:1 combining singular verb and plural noun in unifying context.

Unity and diversity.

This study transitions from axiomatic understandings about God's identifying himself to us in unity and diversity into our coming to more structured study on the basics of the nature and attributes of God. I have found it important first to know what set of things we categorize as names or attributes so as to organize among them. I used to try to make one attribute or set more basic than others, but that seems futile. Rather, there are many attributes that flow together and organize themselves in predictable ways without any having automatic primacy. The only exception that allows us to reject attributes we observe in experience is if we reject everything: nihilism. Technically, one always has the option of believing that nothing exists: there is something or there is nothing. But nobody wants to be a full nihilist (desire betrays nihilism), and those few relatively consistent practical nihilists still hold onto enough concepts of existence as to remain inconsistent at core.

Though I began analysis with the concepts Absolute, Relative, Both, and Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis, what I have to add is no less foundational. I find the repeating trend that any one thing implies a Monad, a monad implies a Dyad, a dyad implies a Triad, and a triad often reconciles back as an expression of the one thing, in just the ways these other triads of words imply. God formed man (Genesis 2:7); man alone is not good, God made woman (2:18, 22); man and wife become one flesh (2:24); be fruitful and multiply, God appointed offspring (1:28, 4:25); people call upon the LORD, God named them Man (4:26, 5:2). The entire pattern is present in seed form. (Remember Three is a Magic Number?)

Hebrew nouns have a singular, a dual plural (used only for pairs), and a mass plural (usually implying at least three). How strange that in the Bible's first three words we have a mass plural ("Elohim", God as a mass noun), a singular verb ("bara", created), and a unifying context ("bereshith", in the beginning). Paul makes it a basic philosophical concept that the human body demonstrates a perfect reconciliation of unity and diversity without contradiction, in extended metaphors in Romans 12:3-8 and 1 Corinthians 12:4-27.

A Scripture that expresses this reconciliation of unity and diversity practically is Ecclesiastes 4:7-12, although it focuses more on dyads and makes application to triads only suddenly without transition: "Again, I saw vanity under the sun: one person who has no other, either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil, and his eyes are never satisfied with riches, so that he never asks, “For whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure?” This also is vanity and an unhappy business. Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken." (One fighting against another is a he-said she-said impasse, but two witnesses establish a matter, Deut. 17:6. Compare John 8:16, 29, 12:24, 16:32.)

Therefore the patterns of One, Two, and Three among attributes are not imposed from outside but flow naturally from inside the attributes themselves whenever we experience or discuss them. A very basic Scripture of belief about God's attributes is Heb. 11:6: "Whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him." One God is sought, two complementary beliefs are enjoined, three concepts are included (Exist, Seek, Reward). Existing is an attribute of a monad; Seeking is an attribute of a dyad, from one to another; Rewarding is an attribute of a triad, from one to another in a third, the reward itself.

(I began by emphasizing God's self-expression in all kinds of numbers because we are so used to hearing trinitarianism as foundational Christianity, which it is; but we are not to understand this as if God's nature is dependent upon the particular numbers one and three, but as our understanding gravitating more often to these numbers rather than others in apprehending him. True trinitarianism also permits there being two that testify within God (and three that testify), and there being seven spirits within him (and indeed ten fingers within Christ's two hands). As already noted, God frequently associates himself with tetrads (though not usually in terms of identity), so often as to need separate analysis. The controversy of trinitarianism, however, is really a facet of the broader quest to understand how God reconciles contrasting attributes within himself, codified by the particulars One and Three. The study so far is intended to equip us to resolve these attributes like any other paradoxical tension: by realizing that God is the ultimate meaning of both unity and diversity, which never refer contradictorily within him to the same thing in the same way, but harmonize in the end.)

Thus within God, and applying his core rule to himself, we can consider him as existing; as seeking himself; or as rewarding himself with himself. Yet God does not seek or reward "as though he needed anything", Acts 17:25. Rather, "I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me" (John 5:30): the Son seeks not of himself but of the Father, and does so by making his will identical to that of the Father, without self-consciousness it could almost be said. "I do not seek my own glory; there is One who seeks it" (John 8:50): the Father seeks the glory he shares with the Son, which could even be considered as the Father seeking the Spirit. As seeking is generally a two-way transaction, rewarding is generally a three-way transaction: "For he whom God has sent utters the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand" (John 3:34-35). The Father gave the Son the Spirit. So I regard that Being by which he exists, that Identification by which he seeks himself, and that Relation by which he rewards himself with himself to be another fundamental triad (just as in math some of the first principles are Existence, Equality, and Possession).

These words also give us the power to reflect attributes upon themselves by recognizing that the attributes have attributes too. Since God possesses Existence, Existence also possesses Existence, and God also possesses Possession. But this can get overly technical and philosophical, and really only has application when discussing the practical meaning of these attributes, an important case of which is the distinction between being and equaling. The attribute is the attribute itself ("I AM WHO I AM", Ex. 3:14), but the attribute also has equality with other attributes than itself. But one name is not perfectly identical with another, even if identified or equal with it, unless they are the same name; there is always a distinction between one name and another. Therefore we have the common ambiguity in the word "is", sometimes meaning perfect identity, and sometimes meaning equality of essential attributes with distinctions evidenced by the distinct names.

Properly resolving this ambiguity is often essential for understanding. The statement "A is B" might mean "all A's attributes are B's and all B's attributes are A's" (bilateral, being), but it might only mean one half of that proposition (unilateral, equaling). Ordinary "children" are "offspring" and vice versa, but sometimes we need to make a distinction: "not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring" (Rom. 9:6-9). Paul shows that the attributes of spiritual children ("children of the promise") do not always flow to become attributes of physical offspring ("not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel"); it's not bilateral. The fact that textual markers indicate when to use "is" for equality rather than perfect identity of being will assist us greatly in resolving what some see as contradictions. Often the word "is" does not express the relation between attributes, but the word "of" almost always does in one way or another, leading to our saying "of" when "is" becomes more controversial.

The attribute of Unity or One also has two distinct cognates, "alone" and "unique". When we say "God is one" (Rom. 3:30, Gal. 3:20, James 2:19) we conceive of the One who is God as "alone". But when we say "there is ... one Spirit" (Eph. 4:4) we conceive of the One who is Spirit as "unique" rather than alone, in the same way the Only-Begotten ("monogenes") is unique. Again cautious explication resolves the ambiguity.

This all shows that attributes often group themselves naturally into such clusters as monads, dyads, triads, and tetrads, and that these attributes can also interact with each other and describe each other, as can the groups. When we come to discuss Deity (God) as a name or attribute, we will need to understand it to see its relation to other attributes. As noted, all names come from within our partial experience and thus are either shared with creation or unshared and negations of creation principles. "Deity" or "God", as elohim, is a name shared with created beings such as angels, who have the various attributes of elohim without being the Creator Elohim; but Paul informs us that we are seeking the nature not of elohim in general but of the only one who fully embodies the meaning of Elohim.

A difficulty commonly found in approaching him is to fixate on some name or cluster (God the Father, or Ein Sof the Infinite, or Yahweh the Self-Existent) as if it is both positive and unshared revelation of God's character. But he has not granted us this: either the name has meaning within our partial experience of creation (e.g. Father) or the name has meaning by negating all our shared experience of creation (e.g. Infinite). However, by assuming this ability to conceive of God ineffably, many have then looked at Jesus and proposed that he does not have the ineffable attribute perceived in God, because Jesus too is subject to the same limitations on our experience as describing him positively only in created terms. Instead, we should take such affirmations as "his Son [is] the exact imprint of his nature" (Heb. 1:2-3) at face value and say that God possesses a nature ("his") and the Son possesses that nature ("is of"), where the word for "nature" is "hypostasis". That directs our quest as to determining in what distinct ways the Father and Son possess the same nature.

In summary, whatever name can be used, including "God" itself, must be used within a universe of meaning that associates it with other attributes. A calling by name itself is a relation of unity (calling) and diversity (name to creature). How much more should we anticipate that our statements about God involve words with fluid ability to accompany multiple senses and yet solid certainty of the sameness of concept upholding each sense. While controversy can hardly be avoided, it is hoped that these remarks prepare us well for true and edifying consideration of attributes of Deity.

Meaning of names.

Prior study emphasized how God assigns himself names in many ways that can be analyzed with mathematical simplicity, some as unities and some as numerable clusters in relationships. We continue by considering relationships of relationships, namely, recurring patterns between groups of names. This will necessarily be more philosophical but I trust the Biblical examples (ESV today) will keep us grounded.

First, what is in a name? For example, "Whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field .... The man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living" (Gen. 2:19-20, 3:20). A name is a call sign, a repeatable group of symbols such as sounds or written characters, that has a relationship with an object.

This means that we can begin with any creature (to create a monad), assign it a name (to create a dyad), and then institute a call, a relationship between creature and name (to create a triad) expressed in action, knowledge, and responsibility. The call or act of responsibility may include a recognition of salient focused meaning ("mother of life") alluded to by the symbols that make up the name ("Eve"). As Shakespeare alluded, names can become deceptive, but we start by focusing on their eternal meaning rather than any temporal corruption.

While it is possible to extend this theory to tetrads, it is expressed in this way here because we will see triads have a natural repetitive affinity to them that has unique applicability to the subject. In the prior study we learned that each number has its own character, and a character of threeness is its apparent descriptive strength compared to twos and fours.

What is meant by the group of all names or words or thoughts or concepts, and the group of all names that apply to God? We observe that namespace is mathematically infinite, although due to the granularity of the universe creatures only use a finite number of names at any time. God may consider an infinity of objects at once outside of spacetime, but we can only consider a broad but finite class of them at once. "Whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything" (1 John 3:20), implying that our self-condemnation is necessarily finite and superable. This echoes the general principle, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD" (Isaiah 55:8).

A powerful metaphor implies the infinity/finity gap (9-11): "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it." We can see that earth (man) has limits heaven (God) does not have; that all water (word, thought) comes from heaven and is destined for heaven; that water circulates to create fruit (meaning); and that it is efficacious (not corrupt) for that purpose. Because we can see the physical parallel we can infer the metaphoric parallel to God's thoughts and acts.

In the mathematic science this distinction is elaborately known, which I will simplify. Two boundaries of "conceivability" are recognized. One is that an infinity of complex infinities are "conceivable"; the other is that everything man has so far conceived is more limited and always corresponds simply to the same one infinity, not to an infinite regress of them. It's easier (more conceivable) to speak of the natural "three" than the irrational "pi"; going further, some numeric concepts (like Cantor diagonal numbers) might be "conceivable" by God in one sense and yet literally take infinite time to conceive and thus be "inconceivable" by creatures in another sense. It's been said of that word, "I do not think it means what you think it means", so let's be very cautious with our conception of inconceivability.

I earlier wrote, "Is there an unknowable to God? We cannot know!" I believe that, if something exists that no human will ever conceive, no conception would ever reach it, meaning that even the name "inconceivable" does not have a true referent (nor does the name Ein Sof, as if a concept could remain "ungrasped" by any conception). If such a word referred to a thing, it would immediately contradict itself, so it is actually a meaningless word. Often, incorrectly, it merely means "relatively unknowable", not absolutely; all Biblical metaphors speak of relative unknowability that will be revealed someday. "The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law" (Deut. 29:29). "Nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known" (Matt. 10:26). However, it also seems that every disclosure creates new questions, so we never know everything there is to know.

This shows that we don't know what "all" literally means. It can never mean more to us than "everything creatures will ever experience" because we can never know what lies beyond the collective experience of Creation. When we speak of God outside of timespace, that is a metaphor for his ability to influence anything whatsoever within timespace. He is "in the beginning". He is "before all things" in the sense of facing and upholding them all. This can mean "including himself" (the Father and Son stand before each other), or can mean "excluding himself" as well (yet we only experience him as he interacts with all things, not in any theoretical interaction he limits only to himself). Thus "all" has a natural limit of "everything creatures experience" and cannot mean "everything that exists whether we assign it meaning or not": nothing can have and not have meaning at the same time.

This gives rise to the notion that core attributes of God can only be conceived of as negatives, like "infinite". Every name of God is either positive, thus referring to some object of finite human experience and thus always partial and communicable, less than fully God; or negative, contrasting with experience and potentially excluded from all experience, infinite and incommunicable. Were it possible to experience God without any reference to Creation, there would be no words or logic to describe the experience, because words refer to objects of experience. Thus names are meaningless with reference to hypotheticals, and, to answer our question, the realm of "all names" is limited to the bounds of creaturely conception.

This allows me to repeat distinctions I stated earlier. (1) Where Creation contains realities and imaginations of negations of realities, Creator is the reality and not the negation ("God is light, and in him is no darkness at all", 1 John 1:5). (2) Where Creation contains spectra of dialectic realities, Creator synthesizes the reality ("Who dwells in unapproachable light", 1 Tim. 6:16, "He would dwell in thick darkness", 1 Kings 8:12, 2 Chr. 6:1; my use of the same reality as previous in a different way is intentional). (3) Where Creation contains body (matter) and spirit (energy) and their relationship (spacetime), Creator realizes body, spirit, and relationship ("In the beginning" "heavens and the earth", "Spirit" and "waters", Gen. 1:1-2; "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!", 1 Kings 8:27, cf. 2 Chr. 6:18).

The first distinction uses all light energy as an example of what we call an Absolute, a monad. The negation of an Absolute is not a thing, but an absence of a thing. The second distinction uses situations (dwellings) of more light or more darkness as examples of what we call Relatives in dyads. A relative cannot be fully negated but is on a spectrum where broad differences are separate things. The third distinction uses the relationship between members of a dyad as a "tertium quid" (literally, third thing), creating a triad typically called Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. All three are real things. That means in naming things, we mix freely among referring to an Absolute Thesis; referring to a spectrum from that Absolute to a Relative Thesis and a Relative Antithesis; or referring to a harmony of these two in Synthesis. Many things, like light, are thus Both Absolute and Relative.

In God, all opposites synthesize, if they are true things (dwelling in light, dwelling in darkness); Paul illustrates this in himself didactically. "Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone .... To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) .... To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law) .... I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some" (1 Cor. 9:19-22). By this relative use of all Paul describes himself as able to accommodate both sides of the spectrum: how much more is God able.

Yet, if a concept is not a true reality (like darkness, contradiction, or evil), God is the Absolute of that concept and not the negation: "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." This speaks of total light unmixed with any kind of darkness anywhere.

To summarize, the concepts Absolute, Relative, and Both, and Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis, describe other names but are themselves names. God is Absolute, but he is also both sides of Relative spectra, and so he is Both Absolute and Relative in one. In the same way he is a Thesis (Absolute), an Antithesis (Relative), and a Synthesis (Both). God can be revealed as a unity from any one name, or as a diversity from among a group of names, or as an all-in-one that comprises both (a "uni-versity").

This background is stated to allow readers to recognize that God accepts all kinds of names unto himself because he is the source of every named creation. It appears that the answer to our last question is that every concept whatsoever that has reality (excluding constructs like evil that refer to absences of real principles of creation) can be applied to God in some sense, though this is a tentative conclusion that needs more fleshing out from Scripture and experience in a later study. For now let us consider that by inhabiting all things God identifies with all things, yet without evil. Paul talks about this in two related Scriptures I close with, without immediate explication. Discussion is warmly invited.

"For 'God has put all things in subjection under his feet.' But when it says, 'all things are put in subjection,' it is plain that he is excepted who put all things in subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all" (1 Cor. 15:27-28).

"And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all" (Eph. 1:22-23).

Number study.

God knows himself as he is, unlimitedly, including what is hidden from us. We experience him always within limits and partially. We use names because lexical strings can be used easily to invoke something far greater or even indescribably great (the map is not the territory). This means that the unity of God as he experiences himself is mediated to us by a diversity of names and of simultaneous experiences.

Trinitarian creeds express a definitional core for this unity and diversity, and should be upheld fully; yet, because often charged with contradiction or incompleteness, they can be and are supplemented with unofficial helpful explanations. They are not insufficient, but we can amplify them by resorting to additional Scriptural background. When we seek this resolution we find that God uses numbers in many more ways than Trinitarians.

1> "The LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deut. 6:4). Most have no problem with "Yahweh is our God is Yahweh is Unity". But he is no monad or concrete block; he displays diversity, and most unitarians recognize this backhandedly. We focus on diversity thoroughly, but must begin by affirming all is core unity.

2> "In your Law it is written that the testimony of two people is true. I am the one who bears witness about myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness about me" (John 8:17-18). Before we talk threeness we must admit the Lord uses the concept "two" about himself and not directly "three". The Son is himself the "One" (the Unity) in the same way the Father is Unity; but he is "not alone" because he does what the Father does. So here Scripture assigns names to the one (Yahweh) that are given the concept two (Unity and Father). Ancient of Days interacts with Son of Man, without always mentioning the Spirit that flows between them. However, logically, a duo always implies a relationship, and that relationship can be counted as a third; thus this picture gravitates back to trinitarianism without fully recognizing it.

Each number has special meaning that is both implicit and traditional; all creations of God reflect his nature. Expressions of twoness include male-female, right-left, heaven-earth, human-divine, but all show a complementary unity that reflects the unity of Father and Son.

3> "Every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses" (Matt. 18:16). As anti-Trinitarians note, God never uses the words "person", "trinity", or "three" with respect to himself, unless the indirect association of this verse with John 8 is admitted. There are many triads, starting with Matthew 28:19 (Father, Son, Spirit) and always answerable to that formulation, but the word "three" is missing. The conclusions are of course sound that Father is God, Son is God, Spirit is God, and these are distinct; but we do best to talk about God the way Scripture talks about him when our secondary formulations are challenged for insufficiency.

An important point in these Scriptures, and Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, is the "fuzzy math". "Two or three", like "six or seven", is an idiom for an inexactly counted number. Sometimes God wants an inexact metaphor so we recognize math is not complete either. As we go on, more reasons for fuzziness appear.

Here patterns include body-soul-spirit, past-present-future, length-breadth-height, sky-land-sea, father-mother-child, thesis-antithesis-synthesis: among some pairs there is a tertium quid that comes naturally. We observe philosophically that the mind naturally turns pairs to triads but does not so easily turn triads to quartets; why? I can only say it makes sense because the increased relationship of a fourth to all three priors (e.g. tetrahedron) is not so easily envisioned as pairing off all four more distantly (e.g. square). A Catholic illustration places the four words Father, Son, Spirit, God in a tetrahedron rather than a square, because the joins to the word "God" are intended to emphasize the relationship of "is", while the joins among the three vertices are intended to emphasize the relationship of "is not". While this is accurate in itself and reinforces the creeds and Scriptures, it invites the question of why "God" is not a fourth in the Trinity. The answer is that "God" is a title that is typically presented in unity, or (as "Elohim") in indefinite diversity, and is not often presented as only one in a plural transaction. When that does happen (as in the creedal "God of God, Very God of Very God"), all in the transaction share one Deity.

But God does associate himself with larger numbers as well; and it's possible to see his diversity in these ways as well, without losing anything else we have gleaned from Scripture or creed.

4> "A stormy wind came out of the north, and a great cloud, with brightness around it, and fire flashing forth continually, and in the midst of the fire, as it were gleaming metal. And from the midst of it came the likeness of four living creatures" (Ezekiel 1:4-5). The greatest description of the appearance of the enthroned, joined with several other testimonies, gives him four constant attendants that constantly exude fourness, even as they chant the threefold "Holy" (Is. 6).

Man loves God with heart, soul, and might (Deut. 6:5, Mark 12:30), corresponding to heart-soul-body; but this is sometimes shortened to two, heart-soul, and Luke thought it necessary to translate "soul" with two words meaning soul and mind (Luke 10:27), making man fourfold with heart, soul, strength, and mind. I don't think this teaches man has four discrete levels, but I do think that the soul level has observable subdivisions. Similarly, I don't think the four living beings are God himself, but I do not know that I can simply prove the contrary directly from Scripture. I note that the translation "creatures" is incorrect, because in both Hebrew and Greek the word means "living ones", "lives", and I note these beings are frequently referred to. As righteous sentient expressions they always speak for God rightly and are inseparable from him. The easiest fast conclusion is that they are like his robe or his throne, completely possessed by his will, but separable in the mind from the form that the person of the Ancient of Days takes. We would be wise to follow Ezekiel, who saw a vision that drove others mad, and multiply words for caution's sake, saying, "Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD." Glory has likeness, and likeness has its own appearance, all for the sake of revealing one God showing himself and communicating within himself.

There is enough material on fours in Scripture that all relate to these living ones that it could occupy an entire book, from the four Rivers of Eden to the four Horsemen of Apocalypse. Details are left for now as an exercise.

7> "Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness" (Rev. 1:4-5). Skipping over the more distant relationships of five and six, we come to this very explicit passage very often ignored. Some solid testimonies to it still appear, such as the original lyrics to Be Thou My Vision. We are not going the way of the false teaching "There's nine of them!" by calculating God as being 3x3 or 1+7+1, but we are going to explicate a passage that needs it in order to prevent others from doing so. This is still God expressing himself in the nominal triad of I Am, Spirit(s), and Jesus, but now, instead of focusing on the unity of the Father or the God-Man dual nature of the Son, we are given a heptad of Spirits. Isn't there one Spirit?

Yes, there is, like there is still one wind when seven hurricanes appear, and there are still "seven Seas" when we call them all "the Sea". Because the Spirit manifests as an uncountable (wind, water, fire), we can sometimes count occurrences of Him, as we will see below. What John saw was a heavenly menorah of seven branches that was the pattern for Moses's construction (and also for the seven lampstands of Revelation 1, a separate vision), and he intuited that the seven flames he saw were the one Spirit, but that he was to describe them as the seven Spirits (flames) to allow us to make that connection. The point for now is that the Christian God of the Scriptures and creeds does not deign to call himself directly three, but does repeat that his Spirit can be called seven. But like the ten fingers of Jesus, what we see always operates in unity.

Seven may be associated with perfection because of its unique place among the primes as a just-comprehensible but ever-ineffable collection of units. Its association with God throughout Scripture is well-known and needs no advertisement. I will emphasize one heptad that includes the Trinity yet shows God's greater diversity without admitting new "Persons" thereto. It is the seven unities of Eph. 4:4-6: Body, Spirit, Hope, Lord, Faith, Baptism, Father-God.

10> "He wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments" (Exodus 34:28). The one time God speaks from heaven to all men he gives (literally) "ten words", which can be pictured as the one Word dividing himself up into ten expressions. Being the count of fingers or toes (important in Daniel's and John's prophecies of the end), "ten" is often inexact in Scriptural colloquialism. It was used just as we use "dozen" roughly today, and in fact "ten or twelve" is often a range of fuzziness and a good paraphrase of Scriptures that mention e.g. "ten days", "ten times".

But here we have the ten words enumerated that are God's expression of himself (see our sidebar); five about "the LORD your God", and five about man, namely what "you shall not". Tens have several unappreciated tie-ins. God first expressed himself in a Creation account including the phrase "God said" ten times: he created Light, Space, Land, Plants, Lights, Swarms, Beasts, Man, Dominion, Gifts. This corresponds to M-theory in physics, in which the best mathematical description of the universe has ten dimensions (one time, three space, and six spatial but basically inaccessible due to size). Interestingly, just as some isomorphic versions of the theory use 11 dimensions for math purposes even though the 11th is unpopulated, so too does Genesis 1 contain an 11th instruction differently introduced, God's blessing on the animals. In creating the mouth, the Lord made it capable of ten to twelve different vowels (all languages are conformable to this structure): Hebrew uses nine vowel symbols but they have ten or eleven sounds depending on system. (I like to count the basic phonetic alphabet as 12 vowels and 30 consonants, but again due to fuzziness this can all be counted under tens.)

In 384 AD, Jerome passed on a tradition (Letter 25, to Marcella) that the Lord has ten basic Hebrew names. An accurate Latin transcription is: El, Eloim, Eloe, Sabaoth, Elion, Eser-Ieje, Adonai, Ia, Jod-He-Vav-He, Saddai. My modern transliteration would be: El, Elohim, Elohe, Zevaoth, Elyon, Ehyeh, Adonai, Yah, Yahweh, Shaddai; these can be translated: Deity, Godhead, God, Power, Greatest, Existent, Lord, Self, Self-Existent, Sufficient. This tradition is widely reported and the list varies; I've also seen Chai (Life), Daath (Judgment), Gibbor (Strength), and Melekh (King) as base names added to this tradition. One reliable source is Hebrew4Christians by John Parsons, who groups nine of these together and lists other names. Another tradition comes from Pseudo-Dionysius (6th century), who finds ten types of angels in Scripture: Seraph, Cherub, Throne, Dominion, Virtue, Power, Principality, Archangel, Angel, Guardian (the last two may be joined, leaving nine). In each of these cases, as with those of other numbers, believers are seeking to categorize God's revelation in new systematic ways, and to recognize God's rulership through various names, whether they refer to his direct revelation of himself or his general revelation through creatures. We take caution never to idolize a system or a referent, but always to seek the one God who reveals himself in the systems.

13> "[1] The LORD, [2] the LORD, [3] a God [4] merciful [5] and gracious, [6] slow to anger, [7] and abounding in steadfast love [8] and faithfulness, [9] keeping steadfast love for thousands, [10] forgiving iniquity [11] and transgression [12] and sin, [13] but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation" (Ex. 34:6-7). Like the Ten Words, the 13 Names were given on Mount Sinai. The count is traditional and follows Hebrew rules, even if counterintuitive to us. Each is a characteristic of God that interacts with the others, even the two occurrences of the same name Yahweh, and the extended description of his justice. We shouldn't neglect that Moses wrote this as the sublime revelation of God's name, and that later analysis is intended to stimulate our thought, not to analyze God to death, or to substitute some tight attribute set and worship our or another's understanding of it instead.

72> "[19] Then the angel of God who was going before the host of Israel moved and went behind them, and the pillar of cloud moved from before them and stood behind them, [20] coming between the host of Egypt and the host of Israel. And there was the cloud and the darkness. And it lit up the night without one coming near the other all night. [21] Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the LORD drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided" (Ex. 14:19-21). While mentioning diverse names of God, it's important to properly understand this passage's relationship too. As a student of wordplay I can explain that scribes noticed this climactic demonstration of the Angel of the Lord's power as being written in three verses of exactly 72 letters each, taken as forming a rectangular crossword. The 72 three-letter strings formed were taken as secret names (a few are real Hebrew words, but any Hebrew triliteral can be given meaning). This requires caution because it invents new words and risks missing the forest for the trees (existing revelation); but if we name the true God afresh with designations that reflect his own names and uphold revealed truth, that is not sin in itself.

120> "The company of persons was in all about 120 .... Divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one" (Acts 1:15, 2:3). Finally the One Spirit accommodates 120 or any number of believers. It is my hope that worshipping him, the Unity in all Diversity, can be heightened by recognizing the Scriptures, creeds, and traditions in their fullness.

Being asked to look up one hoax about Jews, my files reveal many more. The fact that there's been a long pattern of circulating false stories about Jews with racial implications (probably more so than other races), and that demonstrations of their falsity create sympathy for the Jews by contrast, suggests that there are two paths taken by opponents of truth, circulating a bald lie about a perceived enemy, and circulating a bald lie that one's enemy circulates bald lies. A simple dedication to truth defeats both, even if enemies are undifferentiated. Consider this theme as evidence is reviewed just from Scored presentations that I looked into and, in all these cases, found they needed debunking.

1. Bible misquotes: Too many to review here. The Bible speaks for itself and can be appealed to whenever someone doesn't take it in the grammaticohistorical sense its authors intended. However, this category should be mentioned first simply because there are frequent narratives around what the Bible says in context that it flatly doesn't say. Most notably, it says the synagogue of satan is not composed of Jews, but is quoted as if saying the opposite (that's worth its own post). Nor does it apply negative titles to the Jews as a whole, but applies a number of positive titles of the Jews.

2. Talmud misquotes: Too many to review here. Nicholas Donin converted from Judaism to Catholicism in the 13th century and got the ball rolling with exposing Christianity to the Talmud without the benefit of their understanding the context. This led to a continuing notion that the Talmud was blasphemous (for instance, it does contain one dirty joke that uses a nickname that might apply to Jesus, which was misquoted here about 20 times). This peaked in 19th-century Germany where several authors attempted to quote Jewish sources as being despicable, when the quotations themselves were so poorly translated and sourced that they are often unrecognizable to Jews. This telephone game continues today. One misquote kept getting rephrased to sound more evil about "power over" "blood", except its ultimate origin was merely the Christian-accepted verse Ps. 105:44!

3. Foreknowledge of 6 million deaths: Renegade Tribune: "An ancient Jewish prophecy had promised the Jews their return to the Promised Land after a loss of 6 million of their people. According to the book Breaking the Spell by Nicholas Kollerstrom, publications and speakers had referred to the death or persecution of 6 million Jews on at least 166 occasions before the end of World War II." That claim is false. The first sentence is sourced from Benjamin Blech, The Secret of Hebrew Words, but what Blech actually says is that "tashuvu", the word translated as the last "ye shall return" in Lev. 25:10, is a variant spelling lacking a central waw. After 1948 it was noticed that the gematria for this word, 708, corresponds in this millennium to the year 1947-1948, and that the missing waw, 6, corresponds to a missing 6 million. This is not a prophecy that promised anything, this is a mathematical synchrony found after the fact that is not specific enough to give the detail stated in advance to anyone. Secondly, the cherry-picking of text searches prior to 1945 for "six million" and "Jews" together cannot be used to indicate foreknowledge of the Holocaust death toll. Analysis shows that six million was arbitrarily selected whether it meant: an estimate of Bar Kochba deaths; the total world Jewish population; the Russian Jewish population; the Russian Jewish family count; the European Jewish population; the Jewish population represented at a global conference; or the dollar size of a Jewish fund (yes, reference to the Jews in proximity with six million dollars was included as proof of foreknowledge). Germar Rudolf in the intro to Don Heddesheimer's First Holocaust gives actual results of searches for millions of Jews from 1 to 7 and the data show that "three million" is the most common number cited, despite Rudolf backpedaling by treating the data differently even though the generic nature of the data remains constant.

4. Star of Remphan: Many sources propose the star of Remphan is the hexagram or star of David. That claim is false. There were no hexagrams for another 250 years in that region after the term "star of Remphan" was reported, but those words translate a text from Amos 750 years earlier that calls it the star of gods like Chiun (Saturn). This indicates Remphan simply means Rephaim (Titans, sons of Saturn); and the star in question, given Amos's context, is most likely the spirit associated with the bronze serpent Nehushtan that had become an idol. Therefore the star of David cannot be called the unique star of Remphan. However, because of its recent association it may be considered one of many stars of Remphan of varying historical quality, including the T-and-O symbol, the pentagram, and most notably the poled snake incorporated in logos and in the modern dollar sign.

5. 1,030 Jewish expulsions: An anon with the handle of 'Lord Molyneaux' (including the apostrophes) published the samizdat The Complete List of the One Thousand and Thirty Jewish Expulsions in Human History. This is a misleading claim, and perhaps intentionally so, because after this bold analytical title he immediately backpedals in the first expulsion, "This first entry may in fact need to be omitted due to the fact that it is largely mythological." I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't 1,030 after all. #2 and #3 are the same captivity, the partial and the full wave in Assyria; #5 under Haman wasn't carried out at all and wasn't because of Jewish criminality. If we compared this to expulsions of Roma people or Christians, or compared it to the national curses of Amos 1-2, there'd be nothing special about the list. It also has several severe methodology problems. The author engaged many hours of research in a poorly conceived project that led to an excessively ineffective data set. On many pages the same action in ten cities described by one source was counted as ten expulsions (yet some other actions in many cities were counted as single expulsions for lack of lists). The author must not have liked the Holocaust, because he felt he had to include it but said nothing more about it than the generic "Jewish expulsion" description he used a hundred times. The work sure doesn't lead to the conclusion that racism is right, that the Jews have been justly judged en masse by a competent formal authority, or that these selective windows in history prove a conclusion beyond the Jews getting in trouble a whole lot with no control comparison.

6. Edom is Jewry: "Esau-Edom is modern Jewry" is said to be found in The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 5, p. 41. That claim is false. The image of this page is public and does not contain this text. The closest to the alleged quote is the historically accurate statement, "The Edomites ... by John Hyrcanus ... were then incorporated with the Jewish nation," far different from that claimed. It appears that the version above is a corruption of vol. 5, p. 208, which says, "'Esau' (=Edom) later represents Rome." I saw intermediate links suggesting that this short form evolved into the form allegedly quoted, via the unproven idea that Rome is controlled by modern Jewry; and this original stylizing explains the oddity of phrasing when punctuation is simplified.

7. Baruch Levy: La Revue de Paris (June 1, 1928) stated that it had obtained an 1879 letter to Karl Marx from someone named "Baruch Levy", a "Neo-Messianist" who was quoted as saying that the Jewish people would attain world dominion by a detailed plan. That claim is unsupported. No other evidence indicates that someone of this description ever existed, and the article is completely consistent with fabrication of an identity to propagate an idealistic narrative. To be sure, the devil does have a plan to attain world dominion through whomever he can use of any race, and that plan is being carried out along the same lines as the alleged letter, but that is not related to race but to the career of the devil as Biblically described; so, no, the system is not intrinsic to a particular people.

8. Rabbi Reichorn: A quote from "Rabbi Reichorn" at a funeral of "Grand Rabbi Simeon Ben-Iudah", allegedly 1869, states, "We have forced the Christians into wars without number." That is a fiction. Tracking this one is interesting, but it ultimately arises from a fictional novel, Biarritz by Hermann Goedsche (pen name John Retcliffe), 1868. Goedsche novelizes the idea of Jewish representatives meeting secretly in the Prague cemetery in 1860. The text appears in The Jew in the Modern World, 1995, and includes the reference to the tomb of "Grand ... rabbi Simeon ben Jehuda" and the concept, "how to turn to the advantage of our cause the great errors and sins which our enemies the Christians never cease to commit." This was echoed and modified by French periodicals Le Contemporain (1880) and then La Vieille France (1920-1921) until it reached the "Reichorn" form. (Some versions say Emanuel Reichhorn was chief rabbi of France, which is also untrue). So, no, this claim arises from an exaggerated novel, even though the satanic plans are relatively accurately stated.

9. Schneersohn in Slavyanin: A long article (meme-quoted), apparently from the obscure Russian "newspaper" Slavyanin in 2001 but not citable until a 2014 blog, has Rabbi Schneersohn saying Khazaria is Israel. This appears to be a minor tabloid that was found running "anti-Semitist" articles generally but with little evidence of its existence online. The meme is identical to the 2014 translation except for minor grammar; it appears to be an uncritical cite of publishers with no journalistic duty to accurately quote the dead. The source states that it quotes a letter published 2001, though Schneersohn died in 1994, indicating the problem. The text is prefaced with a note that despite authenticity debate it's indisputable that the goals described are accurate (implying that the concepts are more important than the veracity of the source). The Slavyanin editor and sometime city duma candidate, Vladimir F. Popov, was tried for incitement, and the paper was shut down as uncharted in early 2002.

10. Abe Finkelstein: The tale of a particular unfindable "Abraham 'Abe' Finkelstein" (though it's the birth name of singer Arthur Fields) comes from a 2006 "interview" by James Wickstrom, who was also jailed for a year for making up invalid titles for himself and others. Wickstrom and the guest never elaborate beyond "Abe" having a synagogue somewhere in New York, which has zero independent evidence. Early in the transcript is, "'I have a guest by the name Rabbi Abe Finkelstein .... You are a lying Jew.' 'Eh, you could say that, but even when we lie we tell the truth!'" Later the guest adds, "Remember, there has never been a Jew in the history of the world that ever told a lie. We always tell the truth." These two indicate the "guest" knows he's deliberately lying, consistent with Wickstrom's MO, and with deceptive nominal "disclosure" of the lie. Some errors: The alleged "rabbi" quotes include both "A good goyim" (four times), "The goyim does all the work, the goyim makes all the stuff", "There is a goyim", and "They are good-and-paid-for shabbos goy .... The rest of them are good bought-and-paid-for shabbos goy", showing that he knows both singular and plural but uses them both wrong (often in place of each other). Wickstrom also uses goyim as a singular, indicating the same error. The "rabbi" also doesn't know the word "sheqalim" and always says "shekels". The quote "We've been doing this for thousands and thousands of years, since down to Adam's time" kind of implicates thousands of years of Gentile involvement in the child sacrifice before Judah, namesake of the Jews, came along in 1797 BC. Someone intending to speak historically might have said Abraham's time. The guest says (perhaps sarcastically) Episcopalian Charlton Heston was Jewish, but the Jerusalem Post obituary rejected this. In the 17th minute the rabbi says, "Oh, Silverman, who's a good friend of mine there, Larry, he got a twofer," referring to Larry Silverstein. Yet he knows enough to paraphrase Silverstein as saying "They pulled the plug, and pulled it as they say, and so the buildings came down." A paid actor is the explanation best fitting the evidence.

11. 109 countries: Another circulating meme says Jews were expelled from 109 countries, but there is no such list; a probable origin of "109" lists 108 expulsions on 109 rows, with many admitted duplicate countries or regions. Its ultimate source, Anti-Semitism (Grosser and Halperin, 1979 ed.) lists only 81 expulsions pp. 35-38 (from 250 to 1948). If we merely said that, it'd be accurate, and comparable to persecution of Christians, Roma, or Muslims; as is, "109" now has taken on a life of its own as a false gospel.

Who does not pursue truth and accuracy pursues the work of the enemy, by wit or not.

u/JosephGoebbel5 u/RealWildRanter u/SicSemperTyrannis2

From my Swamp Ranger office I've now been cleared by all time councils to share core mechanics of time travel in a first draft (with deliberate omissions and incompletions): not to discount any other disclosures, as the relationship among all will be obvious, but just to spark this spacetime locality with sufficient minimal data to move events along. I often speak tongue in cheek about this, and will continue to be light-hearted, but the topic is also deadly serious and so this primer is in earnest.

Before we discuss time and travel, we must manage expectations about what you want them to be and do. Ultimately the simplest answer is that we want it, or us, to be and do anything, namely we want to be God. This universe is neatly set up such that this one axiom, "being God", is the only undefinable; so it is not revealed if any creature can ever "be God", or not. Mathematically, while Other remains, Self is not God. So, exploring that desire, it turns upon being and doing subsets of what God is and does. In that sense perhaps anything is communicable. We must specialize; and people basically desire two variations, experiencing the improvement of this universe, and experiencing the improvement of other universes.

What is experience? Any interaction between a conscious self and spacetime: and consciousness is the ability to reflect a spacetime subset inside self. (For simplicity we focus on human consciousness; self is itself a subset, allowing also self-consciousness.) Experience has the attribute of continuity in a path of experiences (which we will later show as timelike) that together comprise self. The path is naturally polarized into two directions, "from" and "to", by virtue of the thermodynamic law that one of two directions in any path will have the greater entropy, thus the greater complexity and thus the greater capacity to reflect (i.e., an increase of consciousness from one experience to the "next"). The state where a person has less complexity registered in the brain and mind is the "from" direction, and the greater state is the "to" direction. Improvement is generally understood as the self not just increasing in consciousness capacity, which is natural, but also increasing in the power, resonance, and harmony of the consciousness, since increased complexity might tend either to harmony (detectable order) or to disharmony. Disharmony defers desire.

Because of this risk, time travelers have a duty to take the time traveler's oath, a simple form of which is, "I vow to use my powers only for good." Those who pledge this find their pledge rewarded; others fall prey to ever-increasing tolls of disharmony.

Now then.

Any instant of your present experience is a processing event in a path with a "from" side in which your complexity is lesser and a "to" side in which your complexity is greater. These two general directions are called past and future, and they are isomorphic to negative and positive rays just as the present is isomorphic to the zero point. This naturally allows time to be treated as a fourth dimension measurable similarly to any reference triad of relative spatial dimensions. At any instant the map of the past is called memory and the map of the future is called anticipation. Neither map is perfect. There is a difference, since the past map is of events from Other to Self and the future map is of events from Self to Other. (It's not possible to remember with perfect empathy what happened to someone else, or to anticipate with perfect empathy what someone else will do; these features only work upon Self, and in opposite directions.) Other is by observation the larger of the two, so it's more natural to repeat and retrace that which Other has delivered than it is to repeat and retrace that which Self will deliver, leading to the perception that memory is more accurate than anticipation. However, this is largely illusory, since mentally reviewing a sentence 100 times via memory after it is said has essentially the same effect as mentally reviewing a sentence 100 times via anticipation before it is said. Anticipation is constantly pouring into memory.

Time then is the primary dimension of experience, mapped from past and future but experienced as a present. Change is the experiencing of continuity upon the path in the direction that complexity and entropy increase. One map of the human takes him from the standpoint of the present, as if in a still frame of a movie. Another map of the human is from the standpoint of all time, as if a movie reel full of still frames. Both are equally valid standpoints, and isomorphic, but they affect language; for instance, the movie reel is static and does not "change", but a path from one still frame to another does involve "change".

Travel is change. You are already a time traveler and always have been, which is why I told you about the oath. In one standpoint you are always time-traveling, and in another equally valid standpoint you undergo no time travel at all. These can be called temporal and eternal, even if those are etymologically misleading. For now we are studying the temporal, in which you are traveling at the default rate of one second per second (one second-hertz). Recognizing the travel is your first task as a traveler.

Some have objected here that this much theory is boring because it describes things people are already doing. They neglect to realize that knowing the foundation of what one is doing already is what gives one the power to do things one isn't already doing. The study of linguistics may seem parched from the viewpoint of describing speech, something any child has mastered; but when it becomes a vehicle for the totality of human and divine self-revelation its potential excites inexhaustibly. So patience is required as one learns and masters one's godlike powers: any realizable result can be reached in spacetime by time travel (or in fact by the other isomorphic superpowers).

Your next task is over-unity travel, namely forward travel through time at faster than one second-hertz. It is indeed true that a second-hertz measurement is identical to a dimensionless measurement, but it's handy to use a unit to distinguish two kinds of seconds. Dynamic time (chronos) is measured in clock ticks, heartbeats, or wavelengths, via motion of objects with predictable speeds. Philosophers have long also recognized the different nature of perception time (kairos), which can use the language of "seconds", but is actually measured in the volume of mental activities (perceptions) occurring. Einstein described perception time: sit on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour, sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute, that's relativity.

So the human already has limited built-in kairos modification. The process is deliberative increase or decrease in awareness (mindfulness, awakeness). Future time travel, over-unity, simply means experiencing more than one dynamic second for each perceived second. Reciprocally, this is caused by releasing awareness, which Einstein hints happens naturally via ecstasy (standing outside of oneself). Enjoying life does result in faster approach of the future, by a factor of five or ten, because one is not focused on the moment but is literally extending it via time dilation. Besides the ecstatic state, another dilator is the release of memory, namely the suspension of detail with respect to constantly shoehorning the present into mental patterns to be retained and decompressed later. When one releases one's position in the universe and one's earnest retention of events in memory, one is most of the way to the basic unconsciousness of sleep, in which speed towards the future can be measured in thousands of second-hertz. Surprise! If you've ever slept, you've experienced future-directed accelerated time travel. The same is true when you are "in the zone" and flowing with a task.

A facile objection is that sleep, unawareness, and other logy states are considered wasteful, but that is only because of the perception that some kind of work should have been done instead of the use of time dilation. In actuality, sleep and other phases assist with the necessary task of decompressing the memory, keeping it sharp and keeping the essentials findable by random access. Therefore there is a natural circadian rhythm (itself meta-adjustable by the same methods, incidentally) that compels humans from the womb to alternate periods of under-unity and over-unity time travel, and these different periods are complementary, not wasteful. One can pattern one's life to achieve an average speed below unity, and decreasing with (future) time, but it helps if one first appreciates the power to accelerate simply by making oneself unconscious under autonomous control. The soldier who masters the art of falling asleep rapidly on demand and autonomously becoming conscious again at any hour specified in advance knows this skill. If you are comfortable with your exploration of the power to move forward in time faster than one clock second for each perception second, we can move on.

The third task would be under-unity travel, or mindfulness. This can be begun by the artificial method of irritation; but whether or not one starts that way it can be mastered by practice of positive focus. At any moment one can simply choose to force oneself to more mindfulness, to bring the memory about to record as many details and mixed images of perceptions as possible. This is the state for competitive gaming and for focus upon significant events. One assistance with directing this mindfulness is focus upon the body's autonomous systems, particularly breathing and heartbeat. Since breathing is the simplest way by which Self communes with Other, there is a qualitative difference between unconscious breathing and a breathing focused on soaking up the Spirit of God in the universe. Many find this the first effective means of achieving desires via time travel because there is a clear short-term goal, namely the focus that tends to cause better interactions with critical situations. However, it is no less valid than the means of traveling at the default speed or at increased speed relative to clock time, as increased focus has its balance of burning more energy, just as decreased focus has its balance of resting the body, and these are given as complements, not as tensions.

The epitome of under-unity travel would be near-zero travel, and this being an advanced technique we will not force it upon the casual reader all at once. The classic use of near-zero time speed is called the life review and is commonly described in perception terms as "one's life flashing before one's eyes". This happens in critical events where the need for focus is pushed beyond any previous maximum as a fight-or-flight adrenalin mechanism. The phenomenon is that in one clock second one is experiencing possibly hours' worth of perceptions spread out over one's life, usually focused on the memory side. The perception still happens in forward-travel time and therefore is not identical with past travel, but the experience is the immediate environment being probed by the Self for any and all features that might resonate with anything in memory, and the totality of memory being presented at once in an attempt to meet an unprecedented need for focus. Typically a life review happens when a rapid emergency decision is required physically or nonphysically.

Therefore the fourth task would not be to force oneself to the critical event of a life review, but to anticipate and practice it. This can be done by regulating breathing as in preparation for mindfulness, and then to take a single focus feature of one's life and bring to mind flashes of all possible memories that can be brought to bear upon it; it's possible to bundle these memories up to about ten at a time, and then with more practice to begin bundling the bundles, such that one's actual kairos speed can go factors of magnitude below unity without reaching the crisis levels of the life review. Again, this is all still forward time travel, but is an example of the range of human receptivity to its different features.

Before moving on to discussing past travel and the multiverse, it is essential that some features noted with forward travel be emphasized. The continuity of a time path is associated with your human identity, as a different path would mean a different person; and the continuity of the universe's time path is associated with the one reified universe that we experience and not with another. There are several ways to talk about other universes that work, but their common feature is that they are not reified or experienced as reality. I find the simplest description is to say that other universes are imagined and experienced as imagination.

This leads to my frequent warning that many people seek from time travel the power to change the (past) universe. If you change it, it won't be itself, and the past you that was in that universe won't be continuous with the you that is doing the changing; so the desire is for a contradiction. When people think about what they mean, by contrast with weak time-travel fiction, they usually indicate that they want a multiverse, specifically a "shift" travel from one universe to a different one. We'll get to that, but it's about improvement of perception of other universes than this one.

The primary mechanism we have for experiencing whatever is truly "real" about alternate universes is then our experience of imagination: sufficient for most purposes, and, as shown, when insufficient the reason being usually the contradictoriness of the thing being asked. Someone asked to use my time machine to "see" the Big Bang, except that the Big Bang was invisible because too hot to emit light originally; and even then it could only be "seen" not by being there (in our present bodies anyway) but from a safe distance. So be careful what you ask for.

The application is then that in discussing past time travel we must distinguish between gaining more information and experience of interaction with the past, and "changing" it (which would be defined as experiencing a plurality of alternate universes). Again, people don't want to have to build an entire second universe from scratch when they ask this, they just want "simple" tweaks made to the past of what is effectively this universe, while ignoring the butterfly effect (an advanced study). The best approach to this is to gain more and more experience of the alternate universe by imagination, as that is the best method so far shown to reify any multiverse.

So when we continue our lessons we will take up past time travel, which would include topics such as the time-travel properties of inanimate objects as they affect the past, whether zero-speed travel is real, the limitations of negative-speed travel, and the use of entangled (wormhole) travel.

Seeing as the community appears to prefer to build its consensus more irregularly I'll try this one by putting my thoughts out first and taking the heat rather than trying to formalize the order of discussion.

[Rule 0:] This is a forum for free thinking and for discussing issues which have captured your imagination. Please respect other views and opinions, and keep an open mind. Our goal is to create a fairer and more transparent world for a better future.

Rule 1: Be respectful. Attack the argument, not the person.

Rule 2: Don't abuse the report function.

Rule 3: No excessive, unnecessary and/or bullying "meta" posts.

[Rules 4-10:] Disclaimer: Submissions/comments of exceptionally low quality, trolling, stalking, spam, and those submissions/comments determined to be intentionally misleading, calls to violence and/or abuse of other users here, may all be removed at moderator's discretion.

First point is that given Paleo's statement that I posted separately, it would appear that admin is in fact ready to mod up those we choose, but it would appear that we need to be at least a little formal about it first, so this discussion might help that eventual occurrence.

Next, it seems clear to me that not everyone sees these rules the same as I do, so it would be appropriate to flesh them out a bit more among ourselves as we are getting ready for more formality, if we are.

In particular, if you feel my description calls you out for your own behavior (it might), and if you think your behavior should continue to be allowed and should be regarded as free for anyone to engage in, you'll want to comment now. (It would be silly to go around raping in a community where the law is "no rape", to act as if rape should be normalized, and then not to participate when the community starts to talk about electing a sheriff to punish rapists.)

1. [Also 0.] Respect seems to have a simple objective test of no personal attack or namecalling. I've found it helpful to permit indirect concern (if there's a known rapist then speaking indirectly about rapists at least allows the level of respect to keep it at arm's length from attack and namecalling) and to be hard-line about direct statement ("you're a rapist", "you destroy community").

2. Straightforward, unless mods lie about reports, for which there is no beneficial reason. Reports must be credible and not just an attempt to punish another (or even to start a dialogue, which should be started through modmail instead).

3. This literally says any post whatsoever that is not about conspiracies directly but is about the forum itself (and for the most part we don't have established "conspiracies about the forum" so I wouldn't encourage the blurring of that line) can be deleted immediately if viewed as bullying or unnecessary; so any meta post should be extra respectful and objectively justifiable. (I see that while writing this I'm speaking about some things with two levels of indirection by comparing them to racism; I think that's passable for a meta.) Further, even if that's the case it must not be excessive meta, such as a couple times a day, because why in a non-emergency would people need to make several meta posts in a day?

4. Very low quality can be deleted freely; this would suggest to me, for instance, the meme with very little graphic improvement and very little title interest, as it's unlikely to provoke new conversation.

5. Trolling is vague, but I define it as disruption, behavior that doesn't fall in another category but is clearly uninterested in pursuing the community goal (rule 0) of fairness and transparency. Focusing on another user's past elsewhere on the forum, for instance, is not a matter for Conspiracies mods but for mods of the community where the behavior occurred; focusing on the past of this forum would only be submitted as a request for specific action from the mods, because complaining without an action plan is basically borderline disruptive.

6. Stalking refers to continuing to interact with a person after the person has clearly indicated a request not to interact in a first page.

7. Spam generally means unsolicited, and in the Content Policy it includes consistent promotion of outside websites or of agendas (I did discuss this with a contributor in another forum, he knows who he is, so I'm not saying something new). (When I arrived at Scored I found from core mods that it was okay for me to inconsistently promote the website that has the same name as my handle.) We might draw a line between theory and agenda as relating to facts versus propaganda.

8. Intentional misleading allows mods to judge insincerity via demonstrations of illogic. I usually try to state the illogic publicly before taking action to see if the person responds positively, as it may just be a lapse rather than an intent.

9. Calls to violence are easily handled.

10. Abuse of others, although already handled under disrespect (including attack and namecalling), also includes categories like gaslighting.

I say this because it's possible for a community to rally around a full statement of its goals for itself without spiraling into anarchy (even if there are nitpicks about details). If there were actually a trend to change some of these rules (as opposed to discuss their interpretation), that would be different and probably shouldn't be engaged until a new mod team is ramped up. But we should already all be here because of nominal agreement with them. And, if anyone is already not following the rules as common consent would interpret them, that person is singling himself out, via continuance, for separation from the community that has a different common interpretation. Obviously my voice doesn't create common consent, but any voice contributes to it.

So that's my thought for this forum for this day.

Discuss.

'Burden of proof is on the one making the positive claim. Lack of belief is not a claim. There is no compelling, falsifiable evidence for the existence of any god of religion. That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. It's why I can say "there is no god" without having to prove there is no god, because such a statement is not making a positive claim. Until you can prove there is a god of religion, I do not need to prove there is no god. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It's why unearthed diaries of ordinary people doing ordinary things is valid evidence of the ordinary. But an ordinary book telling of extraordinary deeds is not valid evidence of said deeds, because a book written by men is not extraordinary evidence.'

The top reply to the post above has remained my own, as follows:

Thank you for getting this community started, we might get to continue our prior conversation in the archives of Christianity.

I'm not going long on it right now, but I'll keep it in mind and might get back to you on an occasional basis.

For now I'd say let's back away from the concept "god of religion", as that entails assuming certain attributes to this concept that you don't want to define.

There is compelling, falsifiable evidence for the existence of things; for measurable differences in magnitude between these things; and for one such thing to be necessarily the greatest of all of them (for instance, the spacetime cosmos is greater than any thing it contains).

Therefore I assert it proven that some greatest thing exists, even if it is not a "god of religion".

(There's also a side line: you effectively define "there is no god" as "I have no evidence of god". If both god and evidence of god existed, but you just hadn't been given that evidence yet, it would be false to believe there were no god even though you had no evidence of god. Therefore the two statements are not the same and you're defining your atheism effectively as agnosticism. A true atheist makes a positive assertion that a god as he defines it is a contradiction, so your finesse against that necessity makes you an agnostic because you assert having "no knowledge". But that might not be the important point.)

Add: With thanks to the community and moderator, the following summary of the assertions in salient threads is presented.

https://scored.co/c/Atheist/p/141reluACp/-burden-of-proof-is-on-the-one-m/c/4OUfR2Rkd1Q

1. If nothing exists, nothing can be proven (Provine).
2. Things exist (Descartes).
3. Things are measurable (Democritus).
4. A greatest thing can be detected, defined according to its measurability (Adler).
5. Things have causes (Aristotle).
6. An infinite past sequence of causes is impossible (some cause is primal and/or final) (Plato).
7. An immeasurable first cause can be inferred that leads to the causing of all things (al-Ghazali).
8. All that is or ever can be, by definition, includes the combination of first cause and greatest thing; call this entity "Cosmos" (Sagan).
9. The Cosmos contains meaning (defined as complex specified information) (Meyer).
10. Earlier states of the spacetime universe must contain, in seed form, all the meaning present in later states; call this relationship "Determinism" (telling what to do or think) (Edis).
11. The first cause must contain meaning that leads to the meaning of all things (Dembski).
12. The Cosmos contains life (defined loosely as meaningful self-replicating structures) (Watson-Crick).
13. By conservation of information, life can only arise from previous meaningful self-replicating structures, even if these structures are not recognized.
14. The Cosmos contains consciousness (defined loosely as living neuronal patterns measurably associated with given things).
15. Consciousness changes (call this process "Thought").
16. The Cosmos contains morality (defined as consciousness associated with self-helping or self-harming events).
17. The first cause must contain life, consciousness and thought, and morality, that lead to these attributes of all things.
18. The probability of these attributes arising from their absence is mathematically absurd, such that every origin theory instead describes some attribute container as a first cause (Tipler et al.).

https://scored.co/c/Atheist/p/141reluR7d/science-methodology-vs-faith-met/c/4OUfR2U0ayw

https://scored.co/c/Atheist/p/141reluR7d/science-methodology-vs-faith-met/c/4OUfRBqFAUS

19. The origin of conscious, moral humanity has been measured as being less than about 1 million years ago.
20. The Hubble age of the flat universe is about 9 billion years (NASA).
21. The oldest star cluster age by brightness measurement is 11-18 billion years (also NASA), or by another source 12-14 billion.
22. Since these two measurements contradict, neither can be accepted as settled; resolutions disagree.
23. A third measurement of light age by lightspeed decay is less than 1 billion years; this too cannot be accepted as settled (Magueijo et al.).
24. Since the primary origin theory (BBT) assumes lightspeed invariance, lightspeed decay is not an unscientific theory.
25. Dark matter is a hypothetical substance that has no observable effects other than to allow the Hubble age to agree with the brightness age.
26. The existence of dark matter cannot be accepted as settled given that lightspeed decay is another theory accounting for the same effect but with greater explanatory power.
27. Review of evidence of each potential age, including under 1 billion in the younger theory, is warranted to seek a more settled resolution.
28. Gen. 1:1 is consistent with measurable conclusions about the first cause and with the younger age (Morris).
29. Gen. 1:3 is consistent with the 1-second mark in BBT where sound and light photons come into being.
30. Gen. 1:1-5 is consistent with the first 24 hours of BBT.
31. Gen. 1:1-2:4a as a whole is a theory consistent with the younger age theory.
32. Any conclusion about universal age must reject some current theory (BBT, Hubble constant, cosmological constant, etc.) and so no theory is final and all theories are tentative until this happens.

https://scored.co/c/Christianity/p/15HbknaXa9/x/c/4OXGESifXDG

33. The Universal Pantheist Society is a 501(c)(3) recognized "religion" defining its god as having existence, eternality, omnipresence, divinity, sacredness, and immanence.
34. The Cosmos has all the attributes of the pantheist god, and is thus a god of religion.
35. Christian panentheism is a Christian religion defining its god via the Apostles' Creed as having existence, immanence, omniefficiency, anointing (defined as unique purpose), and spirituality (defined as meaning).
36. Historical documents preserve mundane events with sufficient accuracy to be admitted by historians as evidence for generalized claims such as the existence of Jesus of Nazareth.
37. Historical evidence shows the Cosmos contains Jesus of Nazareth and that his existence is uniquely purposeful in history.
38. The Cosmos has the attributes of existence, immanence, omniefficiency, purpose (via its containment of Jesus), and meaning, and is thus a god of a Christian (Apostles' Creed) religion.

https://scored.co/c/Atheist/p/15HbpWW1qq/compelling-falsifiable-evidence-/c/4OXGXWGEga3

39. Manuscript evidence indicates that by the 50s AD there were several broadly circulating, widely agreeing full testimonies about Jesus.
40. Historical document accuracy is tested by fit, independence, embarrassability, dissimilarity, idiom, and coherence.
41. By these criteria, these and other documents about Jesus have a high measurable accuracy.
42. Primary sources include Syriac Matthew, Mark, Greek Matthew, Luke-Acts (a 2-volume work), Tacitus, John, Josephus, and the Talmud.
43. Secondary sources include Thallus, Mara, Phlegon, Philopon, Lucian, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Celsus, and Tertullian quoting Tiberius (not counting 22 other NT documents and other patristics).
44. The preponderance of historical documents indicates the historical Jesus is a person who had a unique self-conception and character.
45. Jesus's self-concept, each detail attested by multiple independent sources, included being Christ, unique Son of God, unique Son of Man, king of God's kingdom, unique teacher of Israel, unique forgiver of sins against God, and a wonder worker.
46. The evidence Jesus claimed these things is fully comparable to the generally accepted historical evidence that others like Julius Caesar claimed these or similar things.
47. The same evidence shows Jesus had high personal morality, sanity, and character with no signs of deception or lunacy.
48. Theories that Jesus's self-concept was inaccurate do not account for the historical fact that that self-concept was attested and therefore conceived by someone at least as unique as the self-concept itself was.
49. The accuracy of Jesus's self-concept, in which he had access to powers of the Cosmos, is the theory with best explanatory power.
50. CFE has now been demonstrated that the Cosmos (first cause and greatest thing), containing Jesus, constitutes the God of robust Biblical religion.

Compiled from my thoughts on a thread created by u/Tetartos_Ippeas and copied from c/4thHorsemanNews.

https://x.com/0ccultbot/status/1982390502260343218 [According to Michael Relfe and Andrew D. Basiago, the CIA has been involved in time travel operations as far back as the 1960s.]

Station identification: Remember, I larp as high-effort high-IQ. Let's continue having fun with it.

I'm allowed to reveal a few things about time travel but obviously all time travelers are agreed on the actual time when Massive Disclosure happens and (checks watch) it hasn't happened yet. Once it happens I'll be there to help guide.

Always beware claims that "I've been time traveling since X". What they mean is that some present, or future, event allowed them to time travel back to X and then they backdated their claim. For instance, if (when) the future me gave the 1971 me a book [Webre's 2005 Exopolitics, according to Webre] then I too could claim I've been time traveling since 1971 but it was actually the future me.

The guy you're quoting [Basiago on Noory's Coast to Coast] is obviously twisting things just a little to take the heat off the real time travelers, much like flat earthers take the heat off the real Antarctica research. You can't actually send a book back in time you can only send the contents. All you need is a reception frequency in the past that can see the book you're sending. The time travelers don't want you to know how easy those past receptor fields are to find as they are regular constructs of the activity of any human mind. We just don't think of them as such so we don't see the time travelers talking to us.

Time is a construct that can be dispensed with as an explanation. I'm still working on how Minkowski (who was smart enough to teach Einstein) differed from Euclid on how to insert time into the dimensions; that's my current avocational pursuit. That means there are two easy ways to construct time and they roughly correspond to the static forever and the experiential flow (the future potential pouring into the past actual as human anticipation becomes human memory). But there are other more exotic ways, and the Big Bang and black holes give hints; these are the ones that allow time travel. When I grow up I'm going to be a black hole miner. But first I must master that Minkowski spacetime.

Yes, CTCs [closed timelike curves] are wormholes, you just need to open up any of those M-theory dimensions beyond the Planck distance. The reason these paradoxes don't happen is that there's only one live universe we're dealing with (Novikov) and those paradoxes commit the common fallacy of mistaking the multiverse for true time travel. (If you want multiple timelines you need a multiverse and time travel will not help you; I have less experience with those.) Godel proved that he was always right except when he was wrong, that's incompleteness; so it's true that there are always incomplete aspects to time travel, but they don't affect the real practice at all just like infinity doesn't affect computing. In particular when you send the information back, the unexpected egg (apparent paradox) demonstrates that the recipients cannot know completely that it's legitimate and that's why it's sufficient to transmit substantially rather than perfectly. Cassandra in mythology knew "perfectly", which makes her a goddess rather than a human, but her listeners could not know perfectly (and so in that exaggeration they refused even substantial knowledge). Anyway, that also explains the evidence, namely it's so ubiquitous that it's been mistaken for other phenomena and ignored. The evidence for time travel is then something you can accumulate substantially but (as to any event) not perfectly until the event is completed and the loop closed; for instance, the (future) Official Disclosure event won't be believed if I gave you the correct date so it doesn't matter, but when it happens the past confirmations will all be there.

Anyway the wormhole mechanics for time travel are (as I said) about the bits not the atoms, which are processed via spacetime entanglement. The wormhole mechanics for teleportation are the atoms not the bits (unlike the imaginations given here), so they are a different story and they are processed via higher-dimensional transfer just like in Flatland.

"Euclidean" is a bit of a retronym for non-Lorentzian spacetime because you need a word for when time is additive instead of subtractive and so that's what I called it even though applying Euclid to time was a later development. Time follows all the Euclidean postulates anyway so it's natural to say [pseudo-Euclidean]. I don't say Minkowski is dispensable, rather he and Euclid (Newton) are two primary ways to view time and I don't have a good enumeration on all the major ways yet. For instance, the life review of an NDE is clearly a transtemporal event.

Black holes are not effective time travelers. (Yet.) They permit limited travel via Hawking radiation (I highly distrust the proposed alternative, exotic matter), which is basically the completely least efficient method of time travel; if you trace the antiparticle back in time you find it again at a much earlier instant outside the past event horizon. Black holes are important because they teach us about building white holes, which are the real winners. I suppose white holes could be effectively harnessed for time travel (hadn't thought about it) but they are mostly for zero-point energy tapping and may also allow more accurate multiverse access than otherwise. (Hartle found a theoretical Planck-sized closed universe attached to the Big Bang white hole via "quantum" tunneling, so that may be an example of how to connect the multiverse; it's still theory, and could be wrong, but is a great idea so far, better than say Tipler.)

What I claim to know about physics is that Einstein was right and "quantum" physics is bunk because its descriptions are deceptive even as its math is mostly right. It's deconstructionist; the cat is either alive or dead, never both (that would be multiverse again instead, not "quantum fluctuation"). I suppose I need a grant so I can work out the full math instead of keeping it at the conceptual level. (Also I've pointed out evidence of Magueijo lightspeed decay, which has the benefit of changing all kinds of math and bringing it into agreement with young-earth creationism.) But when I need to bring in those anomalies I try to be direct about them.

I had to look up Henri-Louis Bergson, yes, that's a philosophical description of xyz-t spacetime as opposed to xyz+t. But in xyz+t, in Planck units, Hartle and Hawking proved, there really is some kind of transcendence of the sequentiality of time and some kind of stasis, and that's what I've been working on getting my head around. Obviously, since memory increases with "forward" time, that's the entropic arrow and that's why we call it "forward"; but I call it the future pouring into the past and that's a bit of a backward description, properly reflecting the antitime effect that is going on. (Hawking calls this lightcone pour "pear-shaped", but I call it chocolate-chip-shaped.) No disrespect to any of three laws of thermodynamics of course, it's just a different frame of reference.

Naturally black hole mining is like interstellar travel or space elevators, something you need perhaps centuries to work on, which is why I'm doing it now and relying heavily on help from future me and others. At heart it's a simple application of Tipler.

So receptor fields and wormhole rides are, above, two different things. The first, time travel, absolutely requires consistency between source and target because you want both, departure and arrival, because time travel departure without arrival is exactly the subject of Asimov's story "Blank!". So you need long entanglement, in the same way the other article just described what they're calling "quantum teleportation" over phone lines but is really just spatial entanglement. Time travel is temporal entanglement, put simply. Now, since H. G. Wells pointed out that everyone knows how to time-travel "forwards" because they do it every day, the real game is what it means to time-travel "backwards", so let me focus on that one: target "precedes" source. Since we already "know" the past the target cannot be something contradictory to what we "know"; but remember that memory and anticipation are the same effect and have the same imperfections and limitations (with slightly different application due to sign change). If you want to be in the past (like when I traveled to Dealey Plaza for 1963-11-22, but I was a couple minutes off on my best try so didn't get the good stuff), it's not you that the past interacts with but the bits that represent you, and those bits are going to (1) be consistent with what we now know about the past and (2) be sufficient but not complete (because otherwise you'd have the Cassandra paradox instead of the unexpected egg). You can't send artifacts back like in Tenet, that would be antimatter and so would need shielding and be somewhat prohibitive; from your position in the present what you can do easily is to influence the formation of the artifacts that are already there, like in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Receptors are necessarily Shannon information constructs, which include humans, angels, computers, DNA, crystals, etc. The information is transmitted by a resonance between source and target that has sufficient mathematical identity to be successful (mental note: separate the error-correction channel next time). The actual resonance appears primarily to exist in the M-theory dimensions in Calabi-Yau manifolds (I keep forgetting those guys), and then rather like RNA bases self-pairing the unique manifold representing a certain travel event pairs itself with a sufficiently similar manifold in the target time and the resonance and transfer is achieved.

The second one, wormhole rides, is only about ordinary teleportation. The part about a physical transporter is just all bogus, Star Trek meets The Prestige. It's not done with big tech constructions and portals, it's more like flying, you just catch an updraft called a wormhole and your body will hold itself together if you get a strong enough one. They're everywhere too. I have a little trouble doing it (kind of like hula hooping) but I know people who have done it. Obviously Roddenberry never realized that the Enterprise would've already beamed up all the gold in Ft. Knox if the dilithium were working as advertised, so that would never work in most freewill universes. That's why it's not about the tech or the inanimate but about the living being that is transporting; only things like humans have the tech within them to be able to do transport because they are alive and thus connected to the opening of the additional dimensions via biotic process (you didn't think it was just about eating, excreting, and reproducing, did you?). Thus Neo's deja vu cat is better explained. Most modern science regards discussion of "spirit" as pseudoscience, but Futurama pointed out that if you say something that sounds more scientific like "lifeforce" they are fine with that instead even if it's just code for the same thing. So the scientific basis of "lifeforce" (spirit) is just that there must exist measurable phenomena in these additional dimensions that uncurl them beyond the Planck distance. If an Abbott Flatlander thinks he has only two dimensions, a Spherelander would tell him his body actually has a tiny extension or "depth" in a third dimension, and movement forward and backward in the third dimension is Flatland teleportation; and if the third dimension is warped via Calabi-Yau manifold then the teleport puts you in a different connected place (compare Dewdney's Planiverse).

Think about what you want to use this for.

The best text on time travel is Revelation and the best text on space travel is Ezekiel; get to know those books closely and you'll see where the details come from. The time travelers have not permitted the general laws to be stated yet but there are great approximations and the central code is in those two books to start with.

Tesla was Eastern Orthodox, so you're allowed to talk to him and he might even get back to you on it. Great time-travel joke, fren! Watch out that past me doesn't steal it and claim priority.

Compiled from earlier discussion.

Ancient Near Eastern Studies 44, 2013, describes the excavation of the Nerkin Naver burial mounds ("Lower Graves"), Armenia, dated to 23rd to 18th century BC, including many individuals, horses, pottery, and weapons including daggers; some hydria jars are pictured in the article with triangular patterns around the edge that form polygrams when viewed from the top, including a 13-point polygram and those of larger order. The blog "Art, Tradition, and Trend of Armenia" claims to show a round dagger handle from this excavation that, similarly, forms a hexagram when viewed from the top, and it holds that this is the earliest occurrence of this symbol. (Saturn's phenomenon is a hexagon, not a hexagram, and other sources are later.) There does not appear to be another easily accessible original source for the dagger claim; but, given the journal's complementary art, there is no reason to doubt that Armenia can boast the oldest known hexagram and that local art preserved this shape for some time within that Bronze Age culture.

It is clear that the hexagram has been rediscovered at multiple times in history as well. Like many other symbols and like many etymologies of words, the proof of connection or disconnection between two historical threads of the same symbol is not always straightforward. The next task is to establish whether Jewish use of hexagrams is connected to the Biblical reference to the "star of Remphan". I'd say no because hexagrams are not associated with Judaism early enough and the Biblical reference is understood as to a heavenly body and its guardian demon rather than to geometric symbology. I'd also say no to the idea that the hexagram is two Paleo-Hebrew (Phoenician) daleths superimposed defectively to spell "David", again due to lack of proof of such early adoption.

However, this is for those interested. To confirmed racists it won't matter.

What is the origin of the star of David's association with the Israelites?

The Israel Review of Arts and Letters, 1998, No. 106 (a quarterly magazine published by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs) compiles evidence and research from Gershon Scholem beginning with a Galilee synagogue archstone containing a hexagram dating to about 300. The difficulty is that the proven association with "Solomon's seal" (which predated the name "star of David") is largely Islamic and certainly later than this stone. Thus we have two strands that seem to have converged, the symbol itself in Judaism, and the legend of a great king (Solomon) having a magic ring with a geometric signet.

The pentagram however is better-attested further back. Fiscal seals in Jerusalem have been found back to the eighth century BC, and by the third or second century several such seals had adopted pentagrams surrounded by the five letters of "Jerusalem", Biblical Archaeology Review 39:6, 2013. Pythagoreans popularized the pentagram with the five letters of "hygeia" (health) around it, which indicates a good connection to the Jerusalem pentagrams.

Visual Mathematics, an open-access university journal, contains an interesting paper citing Scholem as saying that both pentagram and hexagram were popular in the Second Temple era, and citing the Renaissance under Ezra and Nehemiah as a possible cultural contributor for this overlap with the symbols known to Pythagoras. (It also states that the first Shield of David (Magen David, now interpreted as "star") was actually a representation of the 72 names rather than a star, namely, a formal depiction of the text Ex. 14:19-21. So the "shield" concept also preceded the "star" concept and ties back to this name set as used in kabbalah.)

Thus, since the question actually contains a wealth of questions depending on how it is expanded, this seems to be an accurate tracing of the Jewish connection with polygram stars. First, the Pythagoreans discovered the pentagram and popularized it as a symbol for the 5-letter word "health"; then, through the cultural influence of Babylon upon the 5th-century Judah, it eventually became adopted by the Jews as a symbol for the 5-letter spelling of "Jerusalem"; then, through its continuing use as an ornamental, the hexagram was recognized as a variation of the pentagram and also became used as an enduring symbol in Galilee by the 4th century AD; then it became more and more adopted as a symbol for the Jewish people at large.

Again this excludes the "star of Remphan" text from direct contribution to the chain due to dates, but does provide a very plausible explanation of the eventual association. A very interesting question to me is how it became universally accepted that polygrams and the like represented the undistinguished points of light from the heavenly bodies we know as stars, because this connection is not at all intuitive. Alternate theories of all kinds are of course possible and should be stated.

A little more insight on the Amos reference. First note that in 5:8 God made Kimah and Kcil (the Pleiades and Orion), so Amos's attention to astronomy is in the background. Now here's 5:26 NKJV, and Stephen's paraphrase in Acts 7:43:

You also carried Sikkuth your king and Chiun, your idols, the star of your gods, which you made for yourselves.

You also took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of your god Remphan, images which you made to worship.

Stephen quotes the Septuagint, which revocalizes the first clause, replaces Chiun with Remphan (many variant spellings exist), and swaps second and third clause. My insight this time around is that Amos is so hard to translate, and the grammar is so sketchy, because of the fact that virtually all the words were puns! Most of them can be revocalized either as common words or as names of deities. Thus he is primarily deriding Satan's penchant for naming things ambiguously to confuse people; and yet as his secondary audience we get confused too.

This suggests that the best reading is to preserve the pun by translating everything as common, and then revocalizing everything as idol names. Amos is saying these two things, in free translation:

And you carried the tabernacles of your king, and the pedestal of your semblances, the star of your gods, the which you made for yourselves.

And you carried Sikkuth for your Moloch, and Chiun for your Zelem, Kochba for your Elohim, Asherah you made for yourselves.

That means the statement is logically accurate as it refers to appurtenances of idolatry as well as to names of idols and their relationships. Therefore when you get to Acts, Remphan/Chiun is not intended to be the only god in the passage just because he's the one with "god" next to him; it's a laundry list of puns worthy of Rush Limbaugh. Chiun (like Moloch) is still significantly easier to track than others: he seems to be Kaiwanu, an Assyrian name for Saturn; and Remphan seems to be someone the Septuagint editors would find more accessible to their audience, for which the Rephaim (giants, Titans, etymologically from Saturn) have been suggested. In Amos and in the Septuagint, idols/images is plural and so it's natural to read "Remphan, images" as "the Titans the idols".

But we hold that the comma in Acts after Remphan is also inspired, which adjusts the poetic enjambment of the clause, so not only are the Titans connected with images, they are also connected (both by the comma and by the inversion) with being gods behind a star.

In short, for the star portion, the literal meaning supplied by Amos and Acts is: (1) they carried a star of idol gods, meaning some appurtenance of idolatry; (2) this was also punned on by naming idols Kochba and (false) Elohim; (3) the Titans, being Rephaim, were some of the gods associated with use of a star in worship. It's not necessary for the pedestal and star to remain singular either.

Since this is mid-8th century and there is no evidence of Jewish pentagrams and hexagrams at this time, and since it refers to contemporary idols, it does not appear that this is looking forward to future use of polygrams, but to some other item that would be used in idolatry like tabernacles and pedestals, that can be called a star, and that would be associated with Rephaim or Titans, the few giants left in the land after David's time, as well as with false Elohim in general. (I'd held that there was little idolatry of giants among the Israelites, but this may speak against that.) Also, the usage was widespread enough that Kochba (star) had become an idol name in its own right, not just a title, like Asherah. The association with the planet Saturn is present and upheld by the Septuagint, but it is not as a central genius but more as a member of a pantheon of whatever idolatries the devil can inflict on the covenant people. What type of physical star might meet all these criteria in the 8th century .... Because of the comma in Acts (not in the Septuagint), it's proper to call it the star of Remphan, or even the star of the Titans or of Saturn, but it is neither the hexagram, nor the hexagon on Saturn's north pole; it is some physical artifact of idolatry more fitting to that time.

I looked for what artifact would have the features described, connoting a star but without our modern polygram symbolism. Tracking the word "kochav" through Scripture (probably a reduplication for roundedness, rolling, like "Gilgal" meaning rolling and Mehri "kubkob" meaning star) was instructive, because the stars are conceived of as an order of entities that we could broadly class among angels. They sing for joy at God's creation, they fight over men's battles, some of them can fall or become dark in a spiritual sense, etc. Was there any class of star entity that was idolized in Israel at this time?

Yes, there was, the bronze serpent Nehushtan, which was later destroyed as a provocation by Hezekiah under the guidance of Isaiah, who so often echoes and follows Amos. This symbol of one snake on a pole was built by Moses at God's command as a means of grace to bring physical healing, and then it became an object of idolatry. The "serpent" involved was probably more than a garden snake; rather, a "seraph", the being that guards the throne of God, that is fiery and winged and often manifold in form. So we know Israelites were literally worshipping this bronze serpent on a pole at the time Amos speaks of a "star" (point of light) that contextually means a manufactured idol representing the angel Satan (as Khiun, Saturn). Just as the Asherah pole is the most natural object described as the pedestal, the serpent is the most natural object to be described as the star-prince worshipped alongside the pedestal.

The poled snake also fits the history necessary for the gravity of Amos's and Stephen's charge. Nehushtan is attested as the first evidenced artifact in history of the single snake-pole motif, ordained by God, and pointing back to the Garden (snake in tree) and forward to the cross (sin-bearer upon tree); so Satan's interest in seizing and twisting this symbol is natural. In time it became the rod of Asclepius, associated with pharmaceutical healing, the typical counterfeit of God's healing.

Further, the allied sign of two snakes on a pole has its own separate history and, like pentagram and hexagram, is distinct but confusable. The two-snake caduceus, often with wings, is an older artifact than Moses, being found about 2100 BC as a symbol of Ningishzida from Sumer. (His vase depicts two snakes on a pole as well as two dragons each holding poles.) This is taken as the symbol of "messengers" (angels) in general, specifically Hermes, and often by confusion misapplied to medicine as well. This fits naturally with Satan's desire to corrupt the story of the tree and the serpent.

Accordingly, this suggests the actual symbol Amos associates with this star-prince is the single poled snake. The most common modern equivalent of this star upon the rod of Asclepius is in fact the dollar sign ($), not the asterisk (*). (In part the dollar sign incorporates iconography of the letters "US", but its origin is diverse and testifies to input from the staff of healing.) I submit that the Star of Remphan is now the Almighty Dollar, and that it thereby refers to Satan's merchandising of all kinds of humans, a conclusion that will probably sit well with some readers.

Rephaim also can mean "Healers", to further build the chain.

So let me translate Amos with hyphens to try to accommodate his puns with words that can most indicate his intent in modern speech. I'm leaning toward the relevant clauses being "the Satyr-pole of your Shade-images, and the Serpent-lightpoint of your Baal-gods, the Asherim-things you made to worship". Then Stephen says it in authoritative reinterpretation, "the lightpoint of your gods the Titan-healers, the images, the things you made to worship". The "point of light" is not an asterism but a shining entity. (I don't know enough about Sikkuth to finish the translation.)

Continued.

In honor of u/Tetartos_Ippeas I will occasionally repost from other fora to c/Conspiracies. This one is in light of a comment by u/no_ez.

This is expanded from an earlier post via my attempting to keep the most important details without imbalance (even though editorial decisions are unavoidable and the current list is Amerocentric).

• Constantine didn't like other Catholics and founded Roman ("Lateran") Catholics, 312.
• Roman Catholics under Damasus I and "antipope" Ursinus I didn't like each other and were briefly two churches, 366-367.
• Roman Catholics didn't like Nestorius whose church got called Church of the East, 424.
• Roman Catholics didn't like Cyril of Alexandria whose church got called Oriental Orthodox, 451.
• Roman Catholics didn't like Abraham I whose church got called Armenian Apostolic, 607.
• Roman Catholics didn't like Michael I whose church got called Eastern Orthodox, 1056.
• Roman Catholics under Innocent II and "antipope" Anacletus II didn't like each other and were briefly two churches, 1130-1138.
• Roman Catholics didn't like Peter Waldo whose church got called Waldensians ("Huguenots"), 1215.
• Roman Catholics under Urban VI and "antipope" Clement VII didn't like each other and were briefly two churches, 1378-1417.
• Roman Catholics didn't like John Wyclif whose church got called Lollards, 1381.
• Roman Catholics under Gregory XII, "antipope" Benedict XIII, and "antipope" Alexander V didn't like each other and were briefly three churches, 1409-1417.
• Roman Catholics didn't like Jan Hus whose church got called Moravians ("Hussites"), 1415.
• Roman Catholics didn't like Martin Luther whose church got called Lutherans ("Evangelicals"), 1521.
• Lutherans didn't like Conrad Grebel whose church got called Anabaptists, 1525.
• Lutherans didn't like Huldrych Zwingli whose church got called Zwinglians ("Calvinists"), 1529.
• Henry VIII didn't like Roman Catholics and founded Anglicans ("Episcopals"), 1534.
• Menno Simons didn't like Roman Catholics and founded Mennonites, 1536.
• Shimun VIII didn't like Church of the East so Roman Catholics founded Chaldean ("Malabar") Catholics for him, 1553.
• John Knox didn't like Roman Catholics and founded Presbyterians, 1560.
• Anglicans didn't like Richard Fitz and John Browne whose church got called Congregationalists ("Brownists", "Independents", "United Church of Christ"), 1567.
• Roman Catholics didn't like Gaspar van der Heyden, Jean Tan, and Joannes Polyander, whose church got called Reformed, 1571.
• Anglicans didn't like Henry Barrow and John Greenwood whose church got called Separatists ("Barrowists", "Pilgrims"), 1587.
• Anglicans didn't like John Smyth whose church got called Baptists, 1607.
• Johann van Oldenbarnevelt didn't like Calvinists and founded Remonstrants ("Arminians"), 1610.
• Henry Jacob didn't like Anglicans and founded Calvinist ("Particular", "Reformed") Baptists, 1616.
• Anglicans didn't like Hamlet Jackson and Dorothy Traske whose church got called Seventh Day Baptists, 1616.
• Congregationalists didn't like Roger Williams whose church got called American Baptists, 1638.
• Gerrard Winstanley and William Everard didn't like Anglicans and founded Levellers ("Diggers"), 1649.
• Anglicans didn't like George Fox whose church got called Friends ("Quakers"), 1650.
• Paul Palmer didn't like other Baptists and founded Free Will Baptists, 1702.
• Alexander Mack didn't like Roman Catholics and founded German Baptists ("Church of the Brethren"), 1708.
• Roman Catholics didn't like Jakob Ammann whose church got called Amish, 1712.
• Roman Catholics didn't like Cornelius Steenoven and Dominique Varlet whose church got called Old Catholics ("Independent Catholics"), 1724.
• Eastern Orthodox didn't like Cyril VI so Roman Catholics founded Melkite Greek Catholics for him, 1729.
• Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine didn't like other Presbyterians and founded Associate Reformed Presbyterians ("United Secession Church", "United Free Church"), 1733.
• Anba Athanasius briefly didn't like Eastern Orthodox so Roman Catholics founded Coptic Catholics for him, 1741.
• Thomas Nairn didn't like Presbyterians and founded Reformed Presbyterians ("Covenanters"), 1743.
• Other Baptists didn't like George Whitefield whose church got called Second Baptist ("Separate Baptists"), 1743.
• James and Jane Wardley didn't like Quakers and founded Believers ("Shakers"), 1747.
• John Wesley didn't like Anglicans and founded Methodists ("Wesleyans"), 1784.
• Martin Boehm didn't like Mennonites and Philip Otterbein didn't like Reformed, and they founded United Brethren, 1800.
• Barton Stone didn't like Presbyterians and founded Churches of Christ, 1803.
• Methodists didn't like Hugh Bourne and William Clowes whose church got called Primitive Methodists, 1807.
• Presbyterians didn't like Thomas Campbell whose church got called Disciples of Christ, 1809.
• Anthony Groves didn't like Anglicans and founded Plymouth ("Open") Brethren, 1825.
• Quakers didn't like each other, and their churches got called Orthodox Quakers ("Friends United Meeting") and Hicksite Quakers ("Friends General Conference"), 1827.
• Reformed didn't like Samuel Frohlich whose church got called Apostolic Christians ("Evangelical Baptists", "New Anabaptists"), 1830.
• Lutherans didn't like Johann Scheibel whose church got called Wisconsin Synod ("Independent Evangelical", "Old") Lutherans, 1832.
• Reformed didn't like Hendrik de Cock whose church got called Christian Reformed, 1834.
• Other Lutherans didn't like Carl Walther whose church got called Missouri Synod Lutherans, 1839.
• David Welsh, Thomas Chalmers, and Robert Candlish didn't like Presbyterians and founded Free Church of Scotland, 1843.
• Albany Conference didn't like Baptists and founded Adventists ("First-Day"), 1845.
• William Johnson didn't like other American Baptists and founded Southern Baptists, 1845.
• John Wilbur didn't like Friends United and founded Conservative Friends ("Wilburite Quakers"), 1847.
• John Darby didn't like Open Brethren and founded Exclusive ("Darbyist") Brethren, 1848.
• Methodists didn't like James Everett, William Griffith, and Samuel Dunn, whose church got called United Methodist ("Reform"), 1849.
• Gilbert Cranmer didn't like Adventists and founded Church of God (Seventh Day), 1858.
• Southern Baptists didn't like James Graves whose church got called Landmark Baptists ("Bride"), 1859.
• Other Methodists didn't like Benjamin Roberts whose church got called Free Methodists, 1860.
• Jonathan Cummings didn't like Adventists and founded Advent Christians, 1860.
• Ellen White didn't like other Adventists and founded Seventh-Day Adventists, 1863.
• William and Catherine Booth didn't like Methodist Reform and founded Salvation Army, 1865.
• George Hoffman didn't like United Brethren and founded United Christians, 1877.
• German Baptists didn't like Samuel Kinsey whose church got called Old German Baptists, 1881.
• German Baptists didn't like Henry Holsinger whose church got called Brethren Church, 1882.
• Baptists didn't like Richard Spurling whose church got called Church of God ("Cleveland"), 1886.
• Charles Spurgeon didn't like other Baptists and founded Independent ("Fundamental") Baptists, 1887.
• Albert Simpson didn't like Presbyterians and founded Christian and Missionary Alliance, 1887.
• Donald MacFarlane didn't like Free Church of Scotland and founded Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, 1893.
• William McAlpine, William Simmons, and Bishop Johnson didn't like other American Baptists and founded National Baptists, 1895.
• Charles Parham didn't like Methodists and founded Apostolic Faith ("Assemblies of God"), 1895.
• Joseph Widney and Phineas Bresee didn't like Methodists and founded Church of the Nazarene, 1895.
• Baptists didn't like Charles Jones and Charles Mason whose church got called Church of God in Christ, 1896.
• Benjamin Young, Benjamin Irwin, and Abner Crumpler didn't like Methodists and founded Fire Baptized Holiness ("Pentecostal Holiness"), 1896.
• Southeastern Kansas Fire Baptized Holiness Association didn't like Fire Baptized Holiness and founded Bible Holiness ("Wesleyan Fire Baptized Holiness"), 1898.
• Nicholas Tolstoy didn't like Eastern Orthodox so Roman Catholics founded Russian Catholics for him, 1905.
• William Fuller didn't like Fire Baptized Holiness and founded Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God, 1908.
• James Wedgwood didn't like Roman Catholics and founded Liberal Catholics, 1917.
• Karel Farsky didn't like Roman Catholics and founded Czechoslovak Hussites, 1920.
• Watson Sorrow and Hugh Bowling didn't like Pentecostal Holiness and founded Congregational Holiness, 1921.
• Aimee Semple McPherson didn't like Assemblies of God and founded Foursquare, 1923.
• Union Bible College and Oregon Yearly Meeting didn't like Friends United and founded Central Friends and Evangelical Friends, 1926.
• Geevarghese Ivanos didn't like Eastern Orthodox so Roman Catholics founded Malankara Catholics for him, 1930.
• Baptist Bible Union didn't like other American Baptists and founded Regular Baptists, 1932.
• Seventh-Day Adventists didn't like Victor Houteff whose church got called Davidians, 1934.
• Herbert Armstrong didn't like Church of God (Seventh Day) and founded Grace Communion International ("Worldwide"), 1934.
• Gresham Machen didn't like other Presbyterians and founded Orthodox Presbyterians, 1936.
• Carl McIntire, Oliver Buswell, and Allan MacRae didn't like Orthodox Presbyterians and founded Bible Presbyterians, 1937.
• Louis Bauman and Charles Ashman didn't like German Baptists and founded Grace Brethren ("Charis"), 1939.
• Roman Catholics didn't like Carlos Duarte Costa whose church got called Brazilian Catholic Apostolic, 1945.
• Liberal Catholics didn't like other Liberal Catholics and founded Liberal Catholics International, 1947.
• Hilmer Sandine didn't like other Congregationalists and founded Conservative Congregational Christian Conference, 1948.
• Roman Catholics didn't like Michel Collin whose church got called Apostles of Infinite Love, 1951.
• Harry Johnson didn't like other Congregationalists and founded National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, 1955.
• Glenn Griffith didn't like Church of the Nazarene and founded Bible Missionary, 1955.
• Benjamin Roden didn't like other Davidians and founded Branch Davidians, 1955.
• Toma Darmo didn't like Church of the East and founded Ancient Church of the East, 1964.
• Chuck Smith didn't like Foursquare and founded Calvary Chapel, 1968.
• Marcel Lefebvre didn't like Roman Catholics and founded Society of Saint Pius X, 1970.
• North American Christian Convention didn't like Disciples of Christ and founded Independent Christians, 1971.
• Jack Williamson didn't like other Presbyterians and founded Presbyterian Church in America, 1973.
• William Kohn didn't like Missouri Synod Lutherans and founded Evangelical Lutherans, 1976.
• Clemente Dominguez y Gomez didn't like Roman Catholics and founded Palmarian Catholics, 1978.
• Calvary Chapel didn't like John Wimber whose church got called Vineyard, 1982.
• Clarence Kelly didn't like Society of Saint Pius X and founded Society of Saint Pius V, 1983.
• Francesco Ricossa didn't like Society of Saint Pius X and founded Institute of the Mother of Good Counsel, 1985.
• Alexander Murray didn't like Free Presbyterians and founded Associated Presbyterians, 1989.
• Roman Catholics didn't like George Stallings whose church got called African-American Catholics, 1990.
• David Bawden didn't like Roman Catholics and founded Conclavists, 1990.
• John Whitcomb didn't like other Grace Brethren and founded Conservative Grace Brethren, 1992.
• Lucian Pulvermacher didn't like Roman Catholics and founded True Catholics, 1998.
• Mike Bickle didn't like Vineyard and founded International House of Prayer, 1999.
• Free Church of Scotland didn't like Free Church Defence Association whose church got called Free Church of Scotland (Continuing), 2000.
• WordAlone Network didn't like Evangelical Lutherans and founded Lutheran Congregations, 2001.
• Robert Nemkovich didn't like Old Catholics and founded Polish National Catholics, 2003.
• Oscar Michaelli didn't like Roman Catholics and founded Catholic Apostolic Remnant, 2006.
• Paull Spring didn't like Evangelical Lutherans and founded North American Lutherans, 2010.
• Keith Boyette didn't like United Methodists and founded Global Methodists, 2022.
• Laurent Mbanda didn't like other Anglicans and founded Global Anglicans, 2025.

This leaves out movements, including both cults, and movements like evangelical and born-again; it also leaves out much that could be said (including lateral transfers, mergers, and dissolutions), but I'm trying to focus on schisms that are close to the trunk.

Should c/Conspiracies jointly petition admin for new moderation as opposed to it remaining an unmoderated Wild West?

Please answer YES or NO in separate main comments below, with any reasoning as desired.

This poll methodology is recognized to be unscientific but is better than nothing. Thank you for your responses.

Add: There is now a megathread. I would still appreciate contributors taking the time to add a YES or NO here to gauge interest on this specific question (thank you early adopters).

Before I was informed of the sudden death of u/Tetartos_Ippeas, founder of c/4thHorsemanNews, I posted to Meta:

I didn't realize how much c/Conspiracies was lagging, but its top post was once +1370 and current posts are running only up to 3% of that.

The incredible u/axolotl_peyotl is about 15 months gone, and the last human moderation there was 8 months ago by the also-disappeared, eminently-competent u/clemaneuverers.

A few folks are discussing a revival attempt, including focused weekly roundtables, and I pointed out there's also a few interested folks at the new c/4thHorsemanNews (which has started off on the right foot but will face the ordinary attrition challenges of new fora).

I'd like to hear what interested parties suggest. Obviously, if u/Paleo or someone feels comfortable adding u/Neo1 and myself to the mod list as caretakers to see if anyone more ready-willing-able comes along, that seems like it would help with a few things like stickies and viability. There are certainly better ideas available.

It just seems like some administration/moderation step should be taken to revive the community. Yes I know all our conspiracies have come true and gone mainstream but we need space to find more!

The above post then leads to further direction:

It seems that this community has sufficient mass to consider the question of whether it wants to remain unmoderated (no stickying, standard-filter deletion only, no index or sidebar changes), or whether it wants to have new moderation.

This question can be considered deliberatively, and obviously without any community appointment everyone has an equal opportunity to discuss, to meta-discuss by analyzing discussion, or to go anywhere up the chain.

The fact that admin appears to have locked down c/4thHorsemanNews protectively after the credibly reported death of its sole moderator (see the link above) suggests that the healthily robust group of users that posted there will find their way here in time as well, allowing broader discussion, seeing as there's much overlap between the two communities.

I don't find a need to direct any particular answer to the question, but I do want the discussion to flow and achieve consensus. Besides myself and u/Neo1, it also appears that u/Thisisnotanexit and u/JosephMalta have hats in the ring. So I'm interested in helping discussion proceed as a volunteer, but I also have the same rights and powers as anyone else to influence community consensus.

Add: There is now a megathread.