• 3 Posts
  • 700 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 5th, 2023

help-circle








  • So it’s fairly likely it really was only a couple, but they were already devout and already had teammates to go and start this new church, which explains their success and gumption in starting a new church. Within a few years the descriptions of Jesus post-crucification become more and more elaborate and more and more robust against doubt. Essentially, as the disciples encountered resistance to their word, their stories became harder and harder to refute. Afterall, what’s a little embellishment when you’re trying to save people’s souls? In the earliest gospels we have, Jesus is only seen by a few people and he ascends almost immediately. It’s not until the later gospels that we get Doubting Thomas and Jesus walking around for 40 days before ascending.


  • The way statistics work, 1000 people is more than adequate for a population the size of Israel. It’s honestly overkill, if anything. The real question is “are the respondents a representative sample?” That is, is the way you chose who to question and how to question them introducing any systemic bias in your results? For this survey, if everyone lived in the West Bank, that would be a clear source of bias in the data. But if people are randomly selected by, say, phone number, then you would have to worry about more subtle biases before agreeing that the data is sound.



  • He was a doomsday prophet.

    He claimed God was about to show up and judge everyone for their sins and then start a new world order. But then he got killed by the state and one or two of his followers had hallucinations of him a few days later (more common than you think). They essentially then rationalized WTF him coming back from the dead meant, and that morphed into Jesus being God. The first few decades after his death was a whirlwind of arguing about the “true” nature of Jesus and standardization within the baby church. Over the next few centuries there were more arguments that were less fundamental than turning Jesus into a God, though being a religion, the arguments were insane and fierce. Cue to today and we have a bunch of sub-versions of Christianity and even a whole spin-off religion.




  • Liz@midwest.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyzFor the little guys.
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    23 days ago

    It’s my understanding that ecologists generally agree we could eradicate human-biting mosquitos and it wouldn’t cause any real problems. Yes, other species eat them, but they’re not a critical species in any ecosystem, apparently.

    You know how there’s those stories of scientists introducing a species into an ecosystem for one reason or another, and all sorts of unintended consequences happen? Ever notice how those stories are all from around the 1950s and earlier? It’s because we actually got pretty good at thinking through all of the possible significant impacts. We only introduce/eradicate species now when we know doing so is a good idea and have worked through the consequences. But I want to be clear that I agree with your sentiment. You shouldn’t intentionally change an ecosystem without serious planning and consideration for what will happen when you do.