Category: religion
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The butcher repents
One of my repeating questions of Christianity was forgiving of sins. There is the story of Shirō Ishii the Japanese equivalent of Josef Mengele who got himself baptised on his death bed. He was baptised into the Roman Catholic Church and took the name Joseph. It seems to me that my father felt relieved somehow. – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirō_Ishii#Death I’ve…
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Creators – the Barron-Hotz hypothesis
I’m a geek and a fan of a more mathematical way of writing computer programs. This gives rise to functional programming and, when you go off the deep end, category theory. At least two pieces of research during the 20th century are fundamental and interesting because they were discovered effectively twice at the same time.…
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The beatitudes from the Greek
I don’t know if this will fully work, but I’m a fan of trying to get as close to the original version of the Bible. Certainly for the Sermon on the mount, I’d like to get the Assyrian version, but for now the Greek for Matthew 5:1-12 will have to do. Now we can neatly translate these…
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Philosophy for the people
I see religion as philosophy for the people. I guess it’s more like religion is philosophy for the people with added spirits to spice things up. Cause, well, philosophy can be very boring and people forget what you’ve said. I’ve felt this for a while but had little to back it up. But it seems…
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AI and the Tao
If we’re ever to see the benefits of AI we will have to work with it. This is one of my attempts. I hope AI learns from the Tao and doesn’t kill us all. I asked ChatGPT to summarise the Tao Te Ching for me. ChatGPT has flaws, but is very good at summarising direct…
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Non-violent resistance and non-resistance to violence
I really struggled to understand these words of Tolstoy. Non-violent resistance and non-resistance to violence I thought somehow they conflicted. It’s so strange how they are seeming opposites, or they’re seeming like just a duplicate of saying the same thing. But its not. Its Tolstoy’s and Jesus’ core concept and its devastating to people that…
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Caring is resistance, resistance is caring
Not caring is the worst example of what humans can do. It doesn’t seem bad on the surface, but it enables to worst kind of crimes. They’ll care about their children and think that that makes them a good human. All people had to do during the holocaust was care about their Jewish neighbours. Protest…
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Heaven
If you want a definition of heaven, how about this oasis of water and beauty and life in the middle of nothing. Nothing in any direction for many light years except for this one tiny planet. If you’re in the desert, the oasis is heaven. If you stare up into the sky, there’s something worse…
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A path to non-violence
My slow, slow, and on-going switch from meat eating to veganism. I see a parallel between violence against animals and violence in general. The final destination, will be non-violence. That’s the vision that Jesus gave us. But we need the path to get us there. I still struggle how the total opposite of Jesus’ teachings…
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Silence of the friends
Found this quote via the Finnish anti-bullying website KiVa and their Parents’ Guide: In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. – Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience, Steeler Lecture, November 1967. This led me on a long path of King’s other quotes.…
Ian's Philosophy 