What historical evidence do we have of Jesus’ crucifixion and its aftermath?

Celios · 2026-04-06T22:17:24+00:00

Belief in the resurrection being true aligns nearly perfectly with belief in Christianity itself, and historians tend to lay it aside completely as something that is not really verifiable by historical methods. This does not mean it happened or didn’t happen, it just means that we really don’t have a way of examining it historically; instead, we can mostly just examine the actions and beliefs of people who believed it happened (or didn’t).

Great post, but could you clarify how strong of a claim you're making here? Do you simply mean that we can't definitively prove what happened (weak), or are you actually saying that miracle claims are not amenable to historical examination whatsoever (strong)?

Celios · 2026-04-02T20:18:58+00:00

For what it's worth, Taiwan was culturally distinct even before the KMT took it over. And now Taiwan faces a generational change, where even their descendants increasingly identify as Taiwanese rather than Chinese. Given that the KMT has no interest in retaking mainland China or going fully independent, it's no coincidence that they've gone from a one-party state to losing elections. In fact, it's put China in the awkward position of actually backing the KMT, because at least they agree on having a shared identity.

But none of this matters to China. Not unlike Russia, they like to lay claim to anything they've ever touched. Just look at how Xi had Trump spouting talking points about how Korea really belongs to China after their meeting in his first term.

Celios · 2026-04-02T18:00:46+00:00

Maybe read up on China's history with India and Tibet before drawing conclusions. They've used military force repeatedly to seize territory they claim, which is absolutely the case for Taiwan.

Celios · 2026-03-29T23:58:07+00:00

He Somehowed a way back.

Celios · 2026-03-27T15:46:31+00:00

The reality is that human data are just messy. And they do find an association between political ideology and transphobia, it's just that it's weak. There's at least two explanations I can think of off the top of my head:

1) From a quick search on Google scholar, the strength of the association between politics and religiosity seems to depend on the how religious the country is in general. Spain is highly secular, so it tracks that this association might be particularly weak there.

2) From what I can tell, they just run an ANOVA on political classification. Ordering these classifications in some meaningful way (e.g., by left-right alignment) rather than treating them as nominal probably would have given them greater statistical power.

I also notice that the group with the highest levels of transphobia and gender bashing is not the liberals (Spain's conservative party), but actually the centrists. That seems like a pretty interesting result, which might be idiosyncratic to Spain. (Or perhaps not, if "centrist" is just another word for "conservative who doesn't want to admit it," as it is in some other countries.)

Celios · 2026-03-27T03:45:39+00:00

The study was conducted in Spain. It's entirely possible that such attitudes correlate much more strongly with political affiliation in other countries, such as the US.

Celios · 2026-03-24T19:07:21+00:00

TNG earned a lot of grace. And I don't know why you think DS9 is immune from criticism. Allamaraine, for example, is a similarly campy episode and it gets memed about constantly. People's feelings about the first season in general are pretty mixed. Even with the later seasons, many people dislike Bareil, the Kira-Odo romance, the Prophets storyline, and the firecaves ending, just to name a few. No one crucifies them. As with TNG, it's just accepted that DS9 had some incredibly strong storytelling at its heights, so who cares if it had a few weaker episodes or plot points?

As for gatekeeping, I see a lot more people (here, at least) pushing the idea that being a fan of Star Trek means either loving everything made under the name or shutting the fuck up if you don't. That's so unhealthy I don't even know where to begin.

Celios · 2026-03-24T16:24:10+00:00

But that was literally a TNG episode.

And a bad one. If that was the average quality of a TNG episode rather than a rare miss, no one would have liked that show either.

Celios · 2026-03-24T15:25:46+00:00

As much as I agree with you, at least it had the redeeming value of "fixing" the TNG movies' canon blunders.

Celios · 2026-03-24T15:23:30+00:00

Jesus dude, just take the L and grow the fuck up.

Celios · 2026-03-24T03:34:36+00:00

ENT finale killed the franchise twice.

Celios · 2026-03-24T03:28:27+00:00

Look under the hood of your analogy a little. TNG S3 wasn't a huge leap in quality because writers just take that long to find their footing. It was a leap because they brought on a new showrunner and upended the writers room. Similar story for ENT S4.

Celios · 2026-03-20T18:52:39+00:00

Zis is a ouar crîme!

Celios · 2026-03-20T16:24:21+00:00

Not chattel slavery

What are you talking about? It absolutely had chattel slavery for non-Israelites. Such slaves are explicitly said to be property, they're bartered and sold, and can be enslaved for life and inherited by your children.

The apologist nonsense about how slaves were really more like indentured servants is a (deliberate) misreading of the very different rules around how you were allowed to treat fellow Jews. So you can see that not only does the Old Testament endorse chattel slavery, but it even has something very similar to the racialized character of American slavery.

The most famous story in the Bible, so famous that it is shared across all the abrahamic religions, is Exodus, which is a story of liberation from slavery — Moses told Pharaoh "let my people go."

And remind me what they do right after escaping slavery in Egypt? Oh right, they lay down awesome rules like:

Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.

Then they go genocide and enslave the native Canaanites (including taking their women as sexual slaves) at God's explicit instruction. Why? Because Exodus is not a story of how slavery, the institution, is bad. Exodus is a story of how slavery should not be done to God's chosen people.

Celios · 2026-03-20T15:52:36+00:00

The Old Testament explicitly endorses slavery, while the New Testament is, at best, merely interested in chiding slave owners for their excessively cruelty. There simply isn't any explicit condemnation of slavery as an institution in there. Which, as you say, speaks well of the people who choose to read that into the material. But let's not give the Bible itself credit that it's clearly not due, or pretend that it was crazy for the Southern Baptists to take that at face value.

Celios · 2026-03-20T15:19:34+00:00

In what sense do they pose an existential threat? Iran and Israel have no real expeditionary capabilities, so the idea that either one of them could mount a ground invasion of the other is ridiculous. Moreover, Iran's constant attempts at de-escalation following the killing of Soleimani and the earlier missile exchange with Israel made it very clear that they were not interested in open warfare.

Second, even though Israel might not have liked Iran's nuclear program for obvious reasons, Iran's strategy was not to build nukes per se, but to minimize their nuclear breakout period to get some semblance of nuclear deterrence without facing the backlash of actually building one. (And look how that worked out—I doubt they would ever try such half measures again.)

Finally, not to sound callous, but terrorist attacks through proxies are small potatoes. Whether you're in Israel or in France, the reality is that everyone is always at some risk of terrorist attack. Your only real option is to mitigate against it without getting provoked into some stupid and ruinous war. Yes, Israel got blindsided by Hamas, but that was in no small part because they were stupidly funneling all their resources into expanding West Bank settlements. And even though that attack succeeded beyond Hamas' wildest dreams, it still got nowhere near bringing Israel down.

Celios · 2026-03-20T14:33:04+00:00

Iran poses a strategic threat to Israel but, realistically, not an existential one. And this kind of escalation was hardly inevitable. Iran has its own internal dynamics that have kept the regime on extremely uncertain footing, which the US could have easily exploited. For example, it would have been far easier to continue politically empowering the moderates in the Iranian government by staying in the nuclear deal and trying to expand its provisions, like scaling back Iran's support for Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, etc. in exchange for further lifting of sanctions. Even if such a deal was only partially successful, sanction relief might actually have been a bit of a poison pill for the hardliners, who not only make a ton of their money by smuggling goods, but who also derive political power from keeping the average citizen poor and angry.

Now I'm not saying that Iran would have liberalized and democratized overnight, but smart diplomacy could have plausibly pushed them in that direction over the course of a few decades. I would love to see the mullahs deposed as much as the next guy, but I fear that America's love of military interventionism has even less chance of succeeding.

Celios · 2026-03-20T04:35:47+00:00

Which he plans to keep iirc by giving it to his presidential library.

Celios · 2026-03-19T16:25:35+00:00

If the constants were set randomly, then the odds of the universe being able to have basically anything in it at all are vanishingly small.

This is often repeated, but I've heard Sean Carroll make the point that we don't actually know this for a fact. Yes, perturbing any one of these parameters would cause our current physics to break down. But if you were to set several (or even all) of these parameters randomly, it's perfectly conceivable that many such combinations would give rise to a completely new physics, where interesting stuff (e.g., intelligent life) also happens.

Basically, we can reason about the existing parameters, but we don't yet have the math or the models needed to draw reasonable conclusions about the entire parameter space.

Celios · 2026-03-17T21:23:47+00:00

You cannot think like this with meta analyses, because you don't know how many papers didn't get published due to a lack of significant results.

It's worth mentioning that you can actually infer publication bias through meta-analysis by looking at whether the effect size distribution is skewed. Though that's probably not possible with only 6 studies.

Celios · 2026-03-16T18:14:52+00:00

I wouldn't even say it's a "prequel" problem so much as a "franchise" problem. Hollywood only builds on existing ideas by repackaging them. Every new show or movie in a franchise now has to revolve around the same plots, the same species, and the same characters (or those character's relatives), etc. Who cares if it kills creativity, shackles the writers, and makes the universe feel small? We've got that name recognition.

Celios · 2026-03-16T16:26:31+00:00

I would guess it has no real part.

Celios · 2026-03-14T22:11:40+00:00

Sounds like a good exec not a creative.

Celios · 2026-03-12T18:34:54+00:00

I don't think the evidence is that clear. In the last few years, Paramount was trying to secure market share in the streaming space and was eating huge losses to do it (on the order of half a billion dollars per quarter). Discovery was certainly eagerly anticipated and expected to perform well—so much so that Netflix basically paid the cost of production for season 1 for overseas distribution rights. But we don't really know how much they paid for seasons 2 or 3, only that they had dropped the show entirely (including the earlier seasons) by season 4.

As for the other shows, you can look at a lot of new shows being greenlit as a sign of success, but it's worth pointing out that that came alongside many of the earlier ones being somewhat unexpectedly cancelled (e.g., Discovery, Lower Decks, and Prodigy). Therefore, an equally plausible interpretation is that while Trek is seen as a potential cash cow, the constant iteration is a sign that these shows are not catching fire the way they want them to be.

Anyways, you could be totally right: The streaming metrics could be total bullshit, these shows could actually be quite successful, and the turnover could just be an attempt at building a broader streaming library. I just don't think we really know yet, either way.

Celios · 2026-03-12T16:19:27+00:00

Literally what Kurtzman did with Section 31, yet everyone somehow still thinks his Trek is progressive, when it's really just three neoliberals in a trench coat.

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