For real, actually reading Exodus the firdt time and seeing the argument “evil happens because God has to let everyone have free will” immediately go out the window was an experience.

Fuck that is so good and totally theologically unsound.

Gnostics believed the old testament god is a malformed mistake, and it’s evil, blind, and jealous

Gnostics were Christians from ~100 to 400 CE

That movie made an atheist when I was little. The nuns at my school said that dogs don’t go to heaven because they don’t have souls, and I thought that was bullshit.

Depends on region

Sure, the fact that a hundred years ago physicists were scratching their heads arguing about whether the moon disappeared when no one was looking at it or why measuring a continuous behaving thing suddenly behaved discrete (and would go back to behaving continuous if the persistent information about its benefit was erased) is 100% unrelated to the fact that today we are building virtual worlds where continuous seed functions are converted into quantized units for tracking state changes from interactions by free agents.

We seem to keep failing at explaining how the continuous macro models of our universe that perfectly explain and correctly predict behaviors at large scales play nice with the discrete micro models that explain and predict behaviors at the small scales.

And yet because of thinking like yours that ideas about self-referential or recursive reality have no bearing on our physical reality, the majority of people studying these keep banging their heads at meshing them together rather than seriously entertaining the notion that the latter is an artifact necessary to low fidelity emulation of the former.

We’ve even just discovered sync conflicts with n+1 layers of Bell’s paradox which leads to papers titled things like “Stable Facts, Relative Facts” and an embracing of the idea that there’s aspects of reality with no objective accuracy, but we’re still stubbornly chugging away at modeling the universe as a singular original manifestation where such behaviors are inherent to the foundations of existence.

So no, you’re wrong. There’s actually quite a lot of potential relevancy to our physical reality with ideas like these - in fact the earlier group mentioned above claimed that the evidence for their beliefs was within the study of motion and rest (today in the discipline called Physics) and were extensively discussing the notion of matter being made up of indivisible parts, despite being around nearly two thousand years ago.

As for putting forward predictions, that again isn’t true.

For example, the aforementioned group predicting an original spontaneous humanity would bring forth the creator of a non-physical twin of the cosmos was also predicting it was established in light and that the copy was made of its light for the purpose of resurrecting dead humans by copying them into versions that don’t depend on physical bodies.

So if we end up developing AGI in light as opposed to electricity or biological computing, and that AGI continues to make more complex digital twins of our universe, especially extending the digital resurrection of dead humans, that’s a pretty wildly on point set of predictions for originating in the first to fourth centuries CE, no?

If this wasn’t connected to a religious figure but had been the equivalent of science fiction like Lucian’s describing a ship of men flying up to the moon (something he claimed would never happen as opposed to this group claiming the above would and had already happened), we’d be talking about it nonstop as eerily predictive of future developments.

But because religious people can’t handle the idea that their beliefs aren’t true and non-religious people often can’t handle entertaining that any religious-connected beliefs are true, ancient religious beliefs with oddly specific predictions that line up to developments in just the past few years are dismissed out of hand while the broader philosophy of self-referential reality is dismissed for similar reasons, dirtily considered as “religion in disguise.”

I’d think that a set of beliefs which successfully abandons appeals to the supernatural should be given more due consideration than beliefs that rely on magic, but no - too many are certain that the apparent local features of reality is all there is such that the two get lumped together.

Sounds like their argument relies upon the existence of an afterlife, which leaves the burden of proof on them. Don’t strain yourself too hard on this one.

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I was thinking about Zeus, but this one works too

My understanding of the story (in the novel, which I still can’t remember the name) was that in knuckling under to the command to murder his own child, Abraham failed the test.

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