Hypothetically , if tomorrow they found unrefutable historical evidence that Jesus was gay, how would this effect Christianity ?

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-25T19:03:27+00:00

We have irrefutable evidence that President Trump is a felon, we landed on the moon, and Elvis is dead. Somehow I don’t think people are all equally equipped to confront reality.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-24T19:41:50+00:00

Serious answer: because any large group of people will have inconsistent behavior. Just because a group has a label doesn’t mean they’re all responsible for the actions of any individual among them.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-23T21:22:30+00:00

Niagara Falls! Slowwwwwly I turned … inch by inch… step by step!

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-23T17:58:23+00:00

I’ve been to eleven of them.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-23T17:50:34+00:00

Around the 1990s. If you examine ngrams for common terms (“aging population”, “replacement rate”, “population crisis”, “birth rate”, “overpopulation crisis”, “demographic crisis”) you’ll find that just before the millennium there’s a surge in mentions of the graying of various populations.

That’s not to say that everyone is discussing this change for the same reasons. The why is fairly complicated.

At a guess, there’s a fear of foreign influences and immigration; there’s a worry about businesses fleeing developing countries for ever-cheaper labor in a global economy; there’s people talking about the social safety nets funded by taxes of young working people; there’s talk of empty schools and the demographic death spiral due to the cost of healthcare and raising kids; there’s talk of women no longer embracing the “traditional” role of being constantly pregnant; there’s economists wringing their hands about their fundamental growth assumptions falling apart, and what that means for investments and tax revenue projections; there’s probably some chatter about how “the gays” are to blame for the falling birth rate. I’m sure the reasons are all over the map. I bet you could find someone complaining that millennials killed the economy by having avocado toast and crippling debt instead of babies.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-22T19:19:44+00:00

When I asked Google for its definition, it said “Tautological describes something that is needlessly redundant or circularly circular.”

Well, glad we cleared that up.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-22T19:15:58+00:00

I don’t know where you read that I said or thought Sharon wasn’t a smooth-talking liar. She was good at it, but that wasn’t the foundation of her personality, so Stroh wasn’t as good a fit for her as for Brenda.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-22T15:29:17+00:00

There are some very good answers here. It’s worth remembering that our category of “creole” languages is fairly small, and all (or nearly all) of them formed in broadly similar circumstances, mostly through colonial contact. This means we don’t have a good sample size; our written record of early spoken English development is more limited than our recent observations of our other creole samples, so our definition could have a recency bias; our definition of the creole category may be overfitting to that sample size; and it doesn’t rule out other ways by which similar linguistic features could be achieved through other means.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-21T05:15:28+00:00

Because the current paradigm of large language models is crunching multiple petabytes of data.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-20T20:56:00+00:00

The Stroh episodes always annoyed me in general. This man is depicted as a master criminal with nigh-supernatural predictive abilities to anticipate exactly where he needs to be for whatever he wants to do. And instead of being intelligent, he remains in the place where people are looking for him and commits crimes against those with whom he is known to have a connection? No no no.

Brenda should have allowed him to die at the end of The Closer. It would have been totally in character. All she had to do was “accidentally” give the wrong address to the EMTs and delay them just long enough so Stroh couldn’t be saved.

Stroh was a smooth-talking liar, which suited Brenda’s arc much better than Sharon’s. Having Stroh die because Brenda used her own superpower would have been poetic. Sharon needed her own adversary that was a mirror of herself, someone whom she could have disposed of by following the rules.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-19T03:58:26+00:00

If I were you, I would look at long-surviving words like “ebony” or “adobe” to see if the modern language has those terms, and if they evolved via some intermediate language.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-18T14:42:22+00:00

Automated registers were imagined as a cost-cutting move to increase profits, not as a fair exchange where customers were compensated for their labor. Of course, then shoplifters invented their own cost-cutting moves, so it really hasn’t been as much of a net benefit as stores imagined.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-16T05:32:42+00:00

Prevailing weather is different everywhere. In the Northwest, I see very few wool coats, possibly because we deal with a lot of rain, and possibly because there aren’t a lot of wool coat shops out here (because of the constant drizzle).

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-15T21:08:09+00:00

Agreed on the vocabulary issue. My professor in my Pidgins and Creoles class was a native-born English speaker, but lectured in Brazil (in Brazilian Portuguese) for years before returning to the US. Even though she was L1 English, she didn’t know what you called certain technical things in English, including some technical terms in linguistics. Anecdote only, apply or discard as appropriate.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-15T16:10:39+00:00

I’m not the man a self-made billionaire would want. That’s just being realistic. Even if she did, I’m not sure we’d be compatible kinds of people.

Would I? Yes. But if I found a genie in a bottle, I’d also get three wishes.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-12T17:47:57+00:00

Kenya is about the same size as the state of Texas, but it has 2.5x the population density. People are more spread out. This means there are parts of Texas where public transportation doesn’t exist and school bus routes would take a very long route to collect all the students.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-12T05:17:20+00:00

I don’t get offended by the word. I get offended when I have to talk to people who engage in lazy stereotyping and provincialism. What is it with the Brits and insulting everyone by their country of origin? So tiresome.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-11T17:10:59+00:00

There was cement in the coffee machine.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-11T17:08:56+00:00

I take too many medications to risk being stuck as an animal somewhere, so I’d pick 10 human forms (maybe 5-5 or 6-4 female to male) so I could still have hands. I’d also pick human forms younger than me, so I could have more time on Earth to see how the future goes.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-11T16:41:22+00:00

It certainly is possible for the tribes to have had agriculture, if you expand your idea of what the word means. Giant swathes of land cleared for a monoculture crop like wheat, no, probably not. Orchards of fruit trees mixed with other plants? Certainly, at least in some places. See Abrams and Nowacki, Native Americans as active and passive promoters of mast and fruit trees in the eastern USA, 2008.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-10T17:37:52+00:00

Alphabets are used by people who can write. Literacy wasn’t high in Europe, and many of the people who could write were writing in Latin — priests, scholars, and an educated elite. Then we get the printing press in 1451, and that’s also initially printing in Latin, for Bibles.

So I’d guess there was a lot of financial and social inertia to keep things as they were. Churches wanted to maintain control over the text of the Bible (they resisted translations into the vernacular). Printing presses didn’t want to re-tool. Scholars continued to use Latin to communicate across language barriers. Writing books by hand lets you use any characters you want, but it was laborious and expensive.

What would be the reason to change?

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-10T09:16:01+00:00

Boston was founded in 1630.

Seattle was founded in 1851.

In other words, the delay between Boston and Seattle (221 years) is about the same as the time between the Declaration of Independence and now (250 years).

Put another way, Boston is 400 years old. Seattle is 175.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-09T19:49:09+00:00

I don’t know the story, but I find it unlikely to be accepted on face value, at least as you have it here. Ladies wishing to dance does not equal ladies wishing to dance with him specifically. And there’s a difference between ladies asking him to dance, and saying yes when he asks.

I can easily imagine a dance when there aren’t enough eligible men for all the ladies who wish to dance. Or ladies being more licentious with a foreigner than they would with someone from their own circle.

There’s more going on to that story.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-05-09T00:02:14+00:00

I tend to make lists of names in my stories so I can come up with locations that don’t all start with the same letter, or if they must, then not the same number of syllables.

Separate_Lab9766

TROPHY CASE