What are you reading, watching and listening to? - All languages

[xxx]

it suffers a bit from the initial assumption that all conlangs were created as intentional attempts to come up with something better and more perfect than natural languages.

this only concerns philosophical (i.e. scientific) languages which have allowed the development of science (but have never led to a general language)...

[Raphael]

Reading update: It's fascinating how much information about how natlangs work Okrent introduces by starting out from the problems with trying to use various "philosophical" conlangs.

[Raphael]

Finished the book. Now wondering what to read next.

[rotting bones]

Finished the book. Now wondering what to read next.

Maybe find out whether Luhmann wrote anything specific that can move socialism closer to rationality? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TELOhLManQg I've read a few of his books, but it was all soporific cybernetic systems theory. My understanding is that Luhmann models society as an ecology of institutions. Like a natural ecology, society cannot be directed, only perturbed. This position not only seems radically incompatible with any kind of socialism to me, it also seems to be at odds with history.

Nevertheless, this guy might be the only philosopher on YouTube who correctly explains why Marxism is primarily concerned with development, and that justice is mostly incidental to that concern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdc8y5QDBTk

---

BTW I have a favorite theist now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2eEksUbf_4 I had no idea it was possible for a contemporary theologian to sound like a philosopher instead of a gangster. No wonder this guy has zero popularity.

My favorite atheist is currently Richard Carrier. I'm not sure where his book Jesus from Outer Space can be found online, so here's an interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHdLgPKv-Nc

[Raphael]

My understanding is that Luhmann models society as an ecology of institutions. Like a natural ecology, society cannot be directed, only perturbed. This position not only seems radically incompatible with any kind of socialism to me, it also seems to be at odds with history.

And, to some extent, even with the ecology it claims to be based on. Knowing you, Paul Krugman is certainly way too moderate and mainstream for your tastes, but he once had a good quip about the idea that the economy is like an ecology and therefore can't be planned from above. Quoting him from memory he wrote something like "You wouldn't plan an ecosystem top-down, would you? Yes you would. I think it's called 'agriculture'."

[Raphael]

My favorite atheist is currently Richard Carrier.

Hm, seems to be one of those "Jesus never existed" atheists. That group's arguments seem to boil down to the idea that Jesus didn't exist because he's not as well-documented as, say, Jimmy Hendrix. The problem with that is that people from ancient history are generally not nearly as well-documented as people from the 20th, 19th, or even 18th century. As Bret Devereaux put it, "the problem for the modern historian is taking a sip of meaning from the fire-hose of evidence they have; but the challenge of an ancient historian is finding water in the desert". And you can't conclude from this that there was no water in ancient times. So people who try to approach ancient history with the standards of evidence used in modern history, or in court in modern legal systems, usually make a mess of it. If you really consistently apply their standards, you'll have to throw out large parts of ancient history. So what this particular subset of atheists is doing is effectively a form of pseudoscience; which might be ok for an atheist but isn't ok for a skeptic.

[rotting bones]

So what this particular subset of atheists is doing is effectively a form of pseudoscience; which might be ok for an atheist but isn't ok for a skeptic.

Have you read his books? He has detailed arguments addressing these points.

Science has nothing to do with truth. It's all about building models and evaluating how well they are supported by the evidence. Carrier calculates that the existence of Jesus has a probability of around 0.33 based on the evidence that survived the middle ages.

The most compelling argument for me is the fact that the gospels are structured like allegories. The events are drawn from the lives of Romulus and Moses. The ends mirror the beginnings. Physics, and even common sense meaningfulness, take a back seat to the arrangement of symbols. Plus, these stories were written a lifetime after the events are purported to have taken place.

While they could represent the mythologized life of a real person, it's overwhelmingly common for such people to be invented out of whole cloth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Frum

I think classical religion is based on believing the testimony of large numbers of passionate believers. This is naive in a world where QAnon can exist. Man is the congenitally wrong animal.

[Ryusenshi]

The most compelling argument for me is the fact that the gospels are structured like allegories. The events are drawn from the lives of Romulus and Moses. The ends mirror the beginnings. Physics, and even common sense meaningfulness, take a back seat to the arrangement of symbols. Plus, these stories were written a lifetime after the events are purported to have taken place.

Which "gospel"? Luke and John are structured quite differently.

I'm not a historian, so the following should be taken with a grain of salt. But I think Jesus really was based on a real person.

Any evidence for the historical existence of Jesus is, indeed, weak. But, as Raphael said, this is the case for most figures of ancient history. A relatively obscure prophet from a backwater of the Roman empire? Well, it's no surprise that we have little evidence of him.

Let's look at the New Testament. The oldest writings are, apparently, Paul's epistles. If we read them on their own, we see, indeed, a figure that sounds like pure myth. Paul is utterly uninterested in the life that the human person named Jesus may have lived: he presents Jesus as a cosmic figure, the celestial Messiah, the divine Redeemer. If the only testimony we had was the epistles, I'd think this "Jesus" probably didn't exist.

On the other hand, I perceive a weird tension in the gospels. Jesus sometimes does a miracle, then says "you shouldn't tell anyone this happened". Sometimes Jesus fails to do a miracle, and finds some convoluted justification. Matthew really wants Jesus to fit the prophecies, but to do so, he has to quote sentences out of context, or rely on wordplay, or rely on some irrelevant detail that nobody would remember. Why? Why this weird tension? If they were inventing a character altogether, why invent some details that don't fit, then make weird excuses for why they fit anyway?

• Why is Jesus from Nazareth? The prophet Micah[1] said that the Messiah would come from Bethlehem. Why did Matthew and Luke invent two (contradictory) stories to explain that he was born in Bethlehem but grew in Nazareth? Why not have Jesus come from Bethlehem in the first place?
• Why have Jesus be crucified by the Romans, then claim that actually, the Jews were guilty?
• Why is Jesus sometimes secretive, sometimes not?
• Heck, why is he named Jesus at all? According to Isaiah, the Messiah should be called "Immanuel".[2] Matthew even quotes him. Why the name "Jesus", then? It was a common name at the time. It means "Yahweh is salvation", which is certain appropriate; but many Hebrew names reference God anyway so it doesn't prove anything (John means "grace of Yahweh", Daniel means "God is my judge", Elijah means "my God is Yahweh", etc.). Jesus actually has the same name as Joshua, Moses's successor, but nobody tries to compare the two characters.

So, again, why? If the Evangelists were constructing the entire story as an allegory, why include all those details that don't make sense?

My answer is simple: they had to, because the story was based on a real person. Then it makes more sense. In their minds, Jesus was both a cosmic Redeemer, and a guy who really lived, and whose story had been repeated by his followers. The weird tension comes from the fact that the real-life story of Jesus of Nazareth didn't exactly fit the story of a divine Messiah: instead of a king, or a liberator, he was just a preacher who had a handful of followers, didn't really do any large-scale miracle, and died without accomplishing anything. So they had to awkwardly fit the two together.

It's especially noticeable if you read the four canon gospels in the order in which they were written. Mark... doesn't really avoid the awkwardness: Jesus is just from Nazareth, there is no explanation for that; he can't do miracles in his hometown, again without explanation; he occasionally gets angry, which could be expected of a regular guy but not from the son of God. Matthew and Luke keep the embarrassing stories but try to justify them: see, Jesus was actually born in Bethlehem; he couldn't do miracles because the people there didn't have faith; he really had to hide who he was until the time had come. By the time John was written, all first-hand witnesses were probably dead, and Jesus-as-messiah had completely eclipsed Jesus-as-a-real-person, so he felt free to modify the facts to fit his story.

To summarize: I think Jesus really existed, because the gospels do not sound like an allegory: they sound like an attempt to merge the allegorical story of Jesus-Christ the Savior with the real-life story of Jesus of Nazareth.

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[1]Micah 5:2, NIV: "But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times."
[2]Isaiah 7:14, NIV; "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel." The translation shouldn't say "virgin", but that's another story.

[Travis B.]

[snip]

You said it better than I could have. This, as a whole, is why I believe Jesus was a real person. If Jesus weren't a real person, he could have been constructed to be a perfect messiah with the perfect story behind him, but he was not.

[hwhatting]

The historicity of Jesus was discussed on languagehat a couple of years ago, referencing Carrier's theories. The discussion starts about here. There's also some links on the topic, especially on the historicity of "Acts". My takeaway was that there are some surprising arguments against the historicity of Jesus, which anyone interested in the question should know, although they didn't convice me in the end.

[Ares Land]

My own (not very educated) opinion is that the Gospels and the Acts are about 100% consistent with Jesus being a religious teacher, with a claim to the Davidic line and a messianic claim. Such characters are, besides, entirely unexceptional in Jewish history, down to the miracles.
In fact, nothing too different from the story of Menachem Schneerson.

My favorite conspiracy theory is that the Romans might have been, at one point, quite interested in Jesus and keen on coopting him as king. There's not one bit of evidence in favor of that theory of course, except that the Romans were unhappy with the Herodians and that if you re-read the the Temptation while replacing Satan by a Roman negotiator, the story still makes sense.

[rotting bones]

Thank you for the detailed explanation. I wish I had time to get into this. Unfortunately, my advisor will kill me if I did that. Maybe I'll get back to this later in the week.

I'll only address a few points for now. Feel free to tear them to shreds.

Which "gospel"? Luke and John are structured quite differently.

- The earliest gospel is structured like an allegory. I thought this was briefly discussed in the video, but maybe not. All the gospels are written with some sort of agenda.

- The name "Jesus" AKA Joshua means something like Yahweh is Salvation. Why wouldn't the Messiah be named that?

- God refusing miracles is an Old Testament trope. Same with God getting angry and symbolic fiction written as history.

I don't necessarily agree with everything Carrier says. My point is that his work isn't as obviously pseudoscientific as Raphael implied. You'll probably find some of his books on pdfdrive if you enter "Richard Carrier" in the search box. Probably not the introductory work Jesus from Outer Space though.

I checked Carrier's arguments while reading and made notes. I can't remember the details without looking them up, but I find the assumption a lot of the mainstream arguments are based on, that people wouldn't just make stuff up, to be really, really dumb. I don't know which species those scholars have been interacting with their whole lives.

[alynnidalar]

The earliest gospel

Which gospel? Do you mean Mark, Q, or something else?

[rotting bones]

Which gospel? Do you mean Mark, Q, or something else?

The Gospel of Mark. Carrier thinks Q, if it existed, can be dated to after the Jewish War. Speaking of the Jewish War, Carrier thinks the fig tree refers to the Temple:



I don't have the expertise to judge which interpretation of the allegory, if any, is the right one.

[Ryusenshi]

- The earliest gospel is structured like an allegory. I thought this was briefly discussed in the video, but maybe not. All the gospels are written with some sort of agenda.

Sorry, I haven't watched the video. Maybe later.

Well, obviously the gospels were written with an agenda. I don't deny this. What I mean is this: they don't read as if they were writing an allegory from scratch. They read as if they took an underwhelming story and turned it into an allegory. Even if some details don't make sense for the allegory.

In fact, when the gospels don't have to stick to a kernel of truth, or at least inherited tradition, it's quite noticeable. The nativity in Luke sounds really different from the rest, because it's 100% allegory and Old Testament tropes.

Another example of how the same story evolved: Jesus getting baptized by John the Baptist.

• In Mark, this is obviously an important event. It seems that this baptism is the moment Jesus became the Son of God.[1]
• In Matthew, it doesn't really make sense: Jesus was born of a virgin, he was the Son of God from birth. Why would the Son of God need to be baptized by a mere mortal? So Matthew tries to explain that story: John actually protests, "You should be baptizing me!", and Jesus says it's something that has to happen.[2]
• John mentions the connection between Jesus and John the Baptist, but doesn't mention the baptism at all.

My guess is that this baptism actually took place, or at least, it was know that Jesus used to be a follower of John the Baptist. It's likely that John had more followers than Jesus when they were alive.

If I may digress: when did Jesus become the Son of God? If we look at the texts in chronological order, it seems to happen earlier and earlier.

• For Paul, apparently, Jesus only became Son of God when he was resurrected.[3]
• In Mark, as I've just said, he became the Son of God when he was baptized.
• In Matthew and Luke, Jesus was the Son of God from the moment he was conceived.
• In John, Jesus was the Son of God from the beginning of time.[4]

- The name "Jesus" AKA Joshua means something like Yahweh is Salvation. Why wouldn't the Messiah be named that?

I said it was certainly appropriate. The problem is that the Israelites were really fond of theophoric names (see Theophory in the Bible): their names always meant "servant of God", "supported by Yahweh", "judgement of God", or something equally appropriate for a Messiah. Jesus is occasionally compared to Moses, or David, or Elijah, but not to Joshua specifically, despite having the same name. It would have been easy for writers to give the Savior a name that was even more symbolic, like Immanuel from the prophecy. But they didn't.

I checked Carrier's arguments while reading and made notes. I can't remember the details without looking them up, but I find the assumption a lot of the mainstream arguments are based on, that people wouldn't just make stuff up, to be really, really dumb. I don't know which species those scholars have been interacting with their whole lives.

I can certainly empathize. People do make stuff up. My point is that people tend to make up stuff that serves their point. When they admit something that undermines their point, it has a greater chance of being true.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1]Mark 1:10, NIV: "Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased."

[2]Matthew 3:14, NIV: "John tried to deter him, saying, I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me? Jesus replied, Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness."

[3]Romans 1:3, NIV: " his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead"

[4]John 1:1 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made."
John 1:14 "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth."

[rotting bones]

I will try to argue on behalf of Carrier's interpretation without necessarily committing to it or looking things up. I reserve the right to change my mind once I do.

Well, obviously the gospels were written with an agenda. I don't deny this. What I mean is this: they don't read as if they were writing an allegory from scratch. They read as if they took an underwhelming story and turned it into an allegory. Even if some details don't make sense for the allegory.

I'm not sure the writers of the bible were sensible to such subtle distinctions. God also does things in the Old Testament that make him look ridiculous in hindsight. Joab is killed clinging to the horns of the altar; not to mention the story of Balaam's Ass. (Edit: I had to mention God's bet with Satan in Job. Sorry.) The Old Testament was written by Jews, and it makes them sound awful. Awful in contrast to "good things" like God's command to carry out genocide against the Canaanites. The Song of Songs is just anonymous porn that got added to the bible for Reasons.

In fact, when the gospels don't have to stick to a kernel of truth, or at least inherited tradition, it's quite noticeable.

Carrier says there are too many issues with taking most of the events seriously. For example, Jesus vandalizing the Temple sounds mundane, but there was too much security on the premises to let an itinerant preacher pull that off in broad daylight. That story is a minor miracle all by itself.

Consider that there were wannabe Messiahs in Vanuatu claiming to be John Frum, copies without an original. Plus, there are still Messiah myths in Rabbinic Judaism independent of particular Rabbis who were considered to be Messiahs.

I think Carrier's timeline goes something like this:

1. In the beginning, there's a hodgepodge assortment of Messiah legends.

2. Itinerant preachers attempt to emulate (1). All fail.

3. (1) coalesces into Cosmic Jesus myths. These don't refer to any particular preachers.

4. Cosmic Jesus isn't popular enough. The struggling church rewrites (3) as history. This history draws on Old Testament tropes including Moses and Elijah, Proculus seeing Romulus after his disappearance, and a few non-specific rumors about (2).

If the mainstream theory is (1) -> (2) -> (4) -> (3), Carrier considers the possibility (1) -> (2), (1) -> (3), (2) & (3) -> (4).

At this point, Carrier tries to apply Bayesian Statistics to estimate the probability of a real Jesus, the details of which I'm blanking out on. Since it's historically common for Jesus-like figures to be invented, the prior probability of his non-existence is high. In this sense, the argument from cargo cults gets accorded more weight than usual.

If I may digress: when did Jesus become the Son of God? If we look at the texts in chronological order, it seems to happen earlier and earlier.

• For Paul, apparently, Jesus only became Son of God when he was resurrected.[3]
• In Mark, as I've just said, he became the Son of God when he was baptized.
• In Matthew and Luke, Jesus was the Son of God from the moment he was conceived.
• In John, Jesus was the Son of God from the beginning of time.[4]

IIRC Carrier says the story of a young Jesus are simply missing the earlier you go. These blanks are filled in by later inventions.

He thinks that with time, the gospels go from allegorical to historical. IIRC Mark explicitly warns readers not to take his gospel literally. This injunction is reversed in a future gospel.

Edit: I looked this up because it's important to falsify it if it's wrong:

I said it was certainly appropriate. The problem is that the Israelites were really fond of theophoric names (see Theophory in the Bible): their names always meant "servant of God", "supported by Yahweh", "judgement of God", or something equally appropriate for a Messiah. Jesus is occasionally compared to Moses, or David, or Elijah, but not to Joshua specifically, despite having the same name. It would have been easy for writers to give the Savior a name that was even more symbolic, like Immanuel from the prophecy. But they didn't.

In Joshua, God destroys the Canaanites. In the gospels, God pronounces judgment against mainstream Judaism.

Why did Vanuatu settle on the name John Frum instead of drawing from the local cult that his worship was based on? John and Joshua were very common names at the time.

[rotting bones]

BTW as for John the Baptist, that story might be an attempt to incorporate the ritual of baptism into a Jewish sect. IIRC Baptism was a common ritual practiced by Mediterranean cults at the time.

[zompist]

Various things...

1. I don't know this particular skeptic, but I always wonder what this line of argument is supposed to prove. If Jesus didn't exist, does Christianity suddenly disappear? Why does this even matter?

2. Raphael's point is good: you can't interrogate ancient records like a police report. Jesus' life is not well documented, but it's way, way more documented and earlier documented than nine tenths of antiquity. Our records of the Buddha are far far worse. Our records of David are far worse. Or Confucius, or Laozi. Or Sargon. Or Narmer. Or Ben Zakkai. Or Zoroaster.

If you looked at every ancient text with the same nothing-can-be-proven skepticism, then we know nothing about ancient history. It's just as huge an error as deciding that the texts we have are dictated by God.

Note that even for so important a figure as the Persian emperors Cyrus and Darius, we don't know where the hell they came from. We have stories from multiple sources, all contradictory. We can't prove that Darius was an Achaemenid at all. For that matter we can't prove that there was an Achaemenes. When even emperors can't be closely documented, it's foolish to get tied up in knots over how much we know about some prophet.

3. People make up things, including legends. But you know, we can study legends and mythmaking. We can trace the spread of ideas, and the sophistication of narratives. Looking at QAnon nonsense is instructive, precisely because they're not very good at mythmaking. Half of it is cribbed from 1970s/80s sci fi thrillers: evil conspiracies, clones, electronics snuck into vaccines. They invent stories about JFK's son, but they didn't invent JFK. A historian could distinguish a 2010 wackadoodle theory from a 1910 wackadoodle theory based on such clues.

4. There is no need to invent prophets out of nothing, because they're a dime a dozen. There's a bunch of them in every country, in every decade. Religions don't arise out of the quantum foam, they're started by someone.

5. Josephus mentions five messiahs in the 1st century besides Jesus. Another one appeared a century later (Simon bar Kochba), and he had the support of Rabbi Aqiva, a major figure in the rabbinic tradition. For that matter, the "Teacher of Righteousness" of the Qumran sect, though not called a messiah, sure sounds like one. If you had a charismatic teacher and wanted to distance him from the Temple sect, it was almost inevitable to claim messiahhood.

6. Almost everyone in the Middle East had theophoric names; it wasn't just a Hebrew tradition.

7. I understand you're paraphrasing Carrier's theory and not responsible for it. But the chronology just doesn't fit, because "cosmic Jesus" was a fairly late phenomenon. I suggest reading Bart Ehrlich's Lost Christianities, which fills in what we're generally not taught: all the versions of Christianity that lost out to orthodoxy. There was not just one group sitting there inventing the Jesus of later Catholicism. There were multiple groups with dizzyingly varied ideas about Jesus, and the basics of orthodoxy weren't agreed on till centuries later. Some of those groups rejected Paul, BTW.

8. I mostly agree with Ryusenshi's comments about the oddity of what details survive in the gospels Mythmakers don't invent details that contradict the myth they're trying to build; it's much more likely that they're incorporated because they're widely known and have to be accepted. (You can believe that Elvis is still alive, but you're unlikely to believe that rather than being a musician he was a chartered accountant.)

9. I would say, though, that if you take a religion's origin story and strip out all the supernatural bits, you still can't treat it as a mostly-factual story. There are people who have combed over the gospels deciding what was "really" Jesus's words. It seems quixotic to me. It seems like an invitation to only list the things the compiler likes. Again, it's worth looking at (say) Herodotus, and comparing him to Ctesias and Xenophon. Even discussing events not too far in the past, they don't agree and sometimes they're obviously spouting propaganda-- but we don't know whose. And these are our best sources!

10. Romulus ?? Does he give any evidence that Roman civic mythology was of any interest in Greece, much less the Middle East? The NT writers were obsessed with linking (and liberally reinterpreting) Old Testament stuff, but I don't see that they, or any other Jews, gave a crap for even Greek mythology.

11. It's common to doubt that Jesus claimed divinity, especially when the motive is to turn him into a staid, careful prophet. (Much as Islam does!) But messiahhood was a pretty common idea, gods and men-becoming-gods and things-in-between-men-and-gods were common ideas. It's interesting that Luke actually shores up his nativity story with an appeal to Zoroastrianism (the magii). If Jesus didn't claim anything besides wisdom, why didn't he just end up as a rabbi, or at most a Zealot?

[Raphael]

(You can believe that Elvis is still alive, but you're unlikely to believe that rather than being a musician he was a chartered accountant.)

You could always combine those two approaches into the idea that after he faked his own death, he started a new life somewhere as a chartered accountant, though...

[hwhatting]

(You can believe that Elvis is still alive, but you're unlikely to believe that rather than being a musician he was a chartered accountant.)

You could always combine those two approaches into the idea that after he faked his own death, he started a new life somewhere as a chartered accountant, though...

He just decided to cut out the middleman...