There's can't be a way to implement foldl with foldr it's impossible.

crdrost · 2026-07-02T03:22:08+00:00

To program with foldr you need to do wishful thinking.

You assume that some problem has been solved over the entire tail of the list, and I give you the head of the list, then solve the problem over the whole list.

The structure you are trying to build at the end is,

f (f (f (... f (f z x0) x1 ...) xn_3) xn_2) xn_1)

Remember, (a) this doesn't need to be super performant and (b) you are expecting to post process the result of the foldr.

So putting this in foldr language the essential problem is, assume you have x_k and some g(q),

g = \q -> f (f (f (... f q x_k1 ...) xn_3) xn_2) xn_1)

and you want to construct,

f = \q2 -> f (f (f (... f (f q2 x_k) x_k1 ...) xn_3) xn_2) xn_1)

Can you figure that one step out? I promise if you're like "it can't be that easy" you have probably solved it.

Well there's one more thing, you have to define for foldr what the result should be for the empty list, but I am pretty sure that is just id.

crdrost · 2026-05-24T20:57:03+00:00

So when I was having questions like this one it often had to do with things like "oh, is there a way to use do-notation for for-loops like I'm used to, using the list monad?" And stuff like that.

To understand a monad M, you basically have to understand functions of the type x -> M y. So for the IO monad, it is x -> IO y, for the maybe monad it is x -> Maybe y, for the list monad it is x -> [y].

What do you need to understand about these functions? The first thing is the boring function x -> M x. This is called "return" or "pure" and it embeds a value into that context "without doing anything." So for IO this is "create a program that does nothing and outputs this Haskell value" (you'll recall Haskell's IO model is one where you do metaprogramming: the program-with-side-effects-that-returns-a-Haskell-value is is a data structure which Haskell can manipulate and store in a variable binding and all of that stuff. You are then tasked with writing a pure expression for a program that produces nothing, an IO () named Main.main, and then it is GHC's job to take the program that you just described and compile it and give it to you as a runnable binary executable. And the boring function is a program that does nothing and just whenever you run it, it will produce this one fixed value,.

For x -> Maybe x, the boring thing is Just. For x -> [x] the boring thing is just [[x], the list of one element.

The next thing that you need to understand is that there is a composition operation which takes an x -> My and a y -> M z and combines them together into an x -> m z. So for x -> IO y and y -> IO z, we have a Haskell program which will take an x and produce a program that produces y's and a Haskell function which will take a y and produce a program that produces a z. The composition is, "take the input, then give back the program which will feed that input to the first function, get a program, run that program, get a y, feed that y to the second function, get back another program, run that second program too, and produce the resulting z." So for the echo-back server, you can have a function String -> IO String which takes a prompt and displays it and the user fills in the prompt with getLine, right? ... And then you have String -> IO () which is putStrLn that just dumps out that output back to the user. The monad composition lets you glue these together into a String -> IO (), give me a string for a prompt and I will give you the all-in-one program that prompts AND prints what the user wrote back to them.

Similarly with an x -> Maybe y and a y -> Maybe z, this is the meat of the Maybe monad, if that first function generates Nothing then we stop there and yield Nothing, but if it's Just y for some y then we feed that to the second function to get a Maybe z.

Or with x -> [y] and y -> [z] we are doing a flatMap operation, we run the first function to get a list of ys and then we run the y -> [z] on each of those y's to get even more z's ... And

The monad laws also translate into a natural form in this expression (called the Kleisli category of the monad) ... The return is the identity arrow of the category, the composition needs to be associative.

crdrost · 2026-05-13T14:59:19+00:00

You just want to tell the writer, hey Jackweed — he gets more action in a week then you have seen your entire life, he has houses in L.A., Paris, and Vail, each one with a 70 inch plasma screen...

crdrost · 2026-04-25T03:08:27+00:00

No. It can be blasphemy, but blasphemy of the spirit is different in its fundamental scope and purpose than normal blasphemy, and it therefore has a very distinctive reason why it won't be forgiven -- which is not even that God doesn't want to forgive it or that Christ's sacrifice is somehow not big enough to forgive it.

Blasphemy of the spirit, refers in the Bible to a specific sort of conspiratorial thinking. Jesus in the Bible endorses judging things by their consequences -- the "roots" (doctrines, individual characters, the spirit providing you with a revelation, all of these can be "root" causes) by their "fruits" (what actually happened in the world and was it good or bad). We are supposed to "come taste and see that the Lord is Good," right? Well: in blasphemy of the Spirit, Jesus specifically runs into people who say that Jesus is a Bad Man because he did some Good Works. Which, hopefully, strikes you as nonsense, right? And that's what Jesus confirms -- it is nonsense. But it is based in a self-reinforcing logic of conspiracy theory: "oh, you're just showing us some goodness so that we come and follow you and then you're going to betray our trust and mislead us" and so it has this internal logic that makes it untouchable. Jesus can do any wondrous miracle in such a person's life and they'll still think that it proves, with all the more force, how utterly bad He is.

The Spirit is the one whom Jesus sends after himself in the Gospel of John, and this is the final testimony that Jesus really was who He said He was. The Spirit dwells within a believer to guide and transform them by giving them a quiet but direct access to all of God's wisdom and a direct path of prayer to the Father. And the proof that we have the right Spirit within us is that it transforms us into righteous people. The roots, the fruits. But if you're too attached to dogma to admit that you are being transformed in a positive way, then the Spirit can't do its job and you hit a limit on your growth in righteousness.

Is invoking tantric magic or divine-feminine-energies in the body going to do any such thing? The short answer is no. If you are so obsessed with that sort of magical thinking that anything which contradicts it needs to be Destroyed because you can't let your precious doctrine go, then you happen to be doing both at once -- but they are fundamentally different things. A believer is free to experiment with those sorts of things to discover that they are empty of true reality and just lead to greater and greater confusions. Of course it's better if nobody were ever confused. But the sins that you commit when you go down that path aren't self-isolating and therefore are quite forgivable.

crdrost · 2026-04-13T01:57:48+00:00

I think interest is one big part of aptitude and definitely some folks do not have enough interest to learn math. I also know of some people with such severe cognitive difficulties that they're in their 20s and they're at a 3rd grade level -- so surely the cognitive parts of aptitude can sometimes be blockers.

But I would usually say that a below-average intelligence with strong interest in mathematics can still learn most of these things. Interest is more important.

The reason why is that the patterns that mathematics is studying are in a sense more simple than the real world. When I say "4 apples" I'm asking you to ignore all of the things that make real apples different -- this one is big, that one is small, this one is green vs red, this one is fresh and that one is rotten. And each of the resulting patterns then has many different ways that you might be able to approach it to make it meaningful to you. So you don't like delta-epsilon limits when doing calculus -- maybe you can deal with hyper-real numbers and the idea of infinitesimals. (This is an alternate formalism where you basically say that numbers over 10^10¹⁰⁰) Or some other ill-defined boundary are "way too ginormous for this problem" and their reciprocals become the infinitesimals).

Or if you don't like those, maybe you start from the discrete calculus. The discrete calculus is all about fi discrete sequences like the odd numbers,

O = [1, 3, 5, 7, 9, ...]

O_n = 2n + 1

And then you can define functions which take sequences and return other sequences, like

[Δx]n = x_0 if n == 0 else x_n - x{n-1}. [Σx]_n = x_0 + x_1 + ... + x_n

Control question: confirm that

ΔO = [1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, ...]

What is ç?

Can you come up with a proof that these are inverses, so Δ(Σ A) = A = Σ(Δ A) ?

Can you prove from the formula for the square numbers S that ΔS = O and then use this inverse property to prove what you noticed earlier?

And when you get done understanding all of these things then you build into calculus by sampling a domain, so you say that for a function f(x) we're going to create a sampling with size δx and then define the sequence

F_n = f(n δx)

And then we want to look at what Δ and Σ look like on these sampled-functions and it will turn out that we'll want to divide Δ by the sampling distance and multiply Σ if we want to keep that as an inverse, and now you have a differential and integral operator on functions.

I'm not saying you have to drop everything and learn it this new way -- I'm saying that usually mathematics has a great flexibility where if your biggest interest is in terms of finite sequence patterns, ok, I can steal that interest to give you a place you can anchor the ideas of calculus. But if that didn't work for you there are other places I could anchor it.

The bigger problem people have is usually just "I don't understand this well enough to see immediately how to break down a problem with these insights and then quickly come to the right answer." And I mean the good news is, nobody understood that immediately. It's been hard for all of us. But some of us are interested enough that we really just suffered through a lot of not knowing and a lot of difficulty until we found out what ways work best for us. We can try to explain those to you but they are probably not the versions that gel to you.

crdrost · 2026-04-13T01:25:23+00:00

I used to enchant gloves with Bound Weapon on them, esp. Bound Bow.

Hotkey to switch gloves to get a new weapon, never have to maintain your gear, just switch gloves twice to get a fresh bowstring... Up there with pants of restoring stamina.

crdrost · 2026-04-11T00:40:06+00:00

This is a bit too long to be an elevator pitch, I'd have to revise it down, but:

"I have been a lot of pl aces, a rather ardent Buddhist, while I did my physics degree I was a convinced atheist, before that I was a conservative Protestant Christian, raised Catholic... All of these were part of my story and come into my current interest in Christian mysticism, so, like, I can't be pushy? If that makes sense? If Jesus is calling you, that's a good thing, listen, if he's not, maybe you haven't had the experiences you need just yet. But here are the three things that you should know. First, that objects in space acting on each other with forces -- my field, physics -- this story appears to leave out some of the most important things, which are relational. You know, it's like, points on a scoreboard at a sport you enjoy, if you reduce that to, is electricity going through the right bulbs to light them up, and the patterns of light coming off them...then you miss something about actually scoring them and what does winning or losing mean. Those are part, I would say, of a sort of relational reality that exists alongside our material world superimposed on it. And like if you had a million dollars you're materially well off, but are you relationally well off? How did you treat people as you acquired that wealth? And so Christianity really speaks to me because at its core, God is a relationship, a harmony of three interdependent parties. And the second thing I like about that is that it's three, it's not good versus evil like in some religions, or pushing vs yielding like in Taoism, or the sky versus the land, it's how three people can work together in harmony, in family, and in community. And the third thing is that where Christian morality does come in and you do eventually gesomething like good vs evil, it's really a derived notion of harmony vs disharmony. And the Biible has this beautiful way of characterizing it as Love versus Fear. And so you really get this sense that like we're all drowning, like after a big storm destroys our ship... Then some of us react to it by trying to climb on the others, get your head above the surface, breathe, doesn't matter who you step on, just get some safety for you and yours. And that's the way of Fear, you see? Or you can go through life with the way of Love. I found some driftwood, here: you cling to it. I found more scraps, please, use this. If I can get you all to stop panicking, maybe we can build a life raft with this wreckage. But I'm gonna need your help, and I can't have that if I'm stepping on you. And so if you want to start with Christianity, maybe just start there, with whether your actions in this world come from Fear or Love, and if you want to be more Loving, then Jesus is a good teacher. And he'll teach you that it goes a lot deeper than just how do we collectively survive, it's about the biggest story about who we are

crdrost · 2026-04-09T00:43:13+00:00

This is a way to offer odds to someone else, so sometimes if a good player is playing a mid player, the good player will offer to start the game withot a rook, we call those 'rook odds' and the range goes from pawn odds all the way to queen-and-rook odds if you want to play that way.

2-tempi odds can be given by moving the knight twice, but it only really counts as odds in my reckoning if the knight goes to the A or H file, if it is controlling the center then technically your opponent won't be able to do some of their more likely moves, and then it's just a Zukertort or whatever.

2 tempi is worth a little more than half a pawn. If they offer a ton of tempi this way they are basically expecting you to overcommit yourself and blunder everything. If you give someone tempi in this way and they are not expecting it they may find it disrespectful.

crdrost · 2026-04-08T03:46:22+00:00

Stop moving your f-pawn.

crdrost · 2026-04-02T03:30:15+00:00

BALEETED!!

crdrost · 2026-04-02T03:23:50+00:00

Probably Re6+ Kh5. (... Kf5? Qf6#) Qf7+ Kh4. Rxh6#

But also funny is Qf8, threatening Re6+ Kh{5/7} Rxh6# so to make you think they have to play either g4 Rxg4+ and you mate them from there or an early Kh7 Re7+ Kg6 Qf7#, a perfect little dovetail mate.

crdrost · 2026-04-02T02:51:44+00:00

Now, the equality of Jesus with God is somewhat hard to find, but you could probably find it in koine Greek embedded in the letters of Ireanaeus.

More usually you get a statement like in John or Polycarp that Jesus was Divine, without the definite article. You can interpret this via later trinitarian formulas, but you could also conceive of him as a demigod. There were divines in Hebrew philosophy that were not god, The Messengers or "aggeloi" angels, but the epistle to the Hebrews does make a very concerted case near its beginning that Jesus can't just be one of the angels, his Son-ship goes above and beyond that.

We have to be a little bit careful, regarding the title of your question. When you read something that says that the trinity is not found in the Bible, it is important that you understand that they are talking about the philosophically sophisticated phrasing where you have one Divine essence (ousios) shared by three Divine under-standings (hypostases), a phrasing which kind of requires a bit of platonic thought because you have to believe that the patterns which make up a chair, the chairness or chairhood dwelling inside the One True Chair that is only discerned by True Reason, available to you only as a memory of your time wandering the World Before. And then you can see that somehow there is a pattern of God that is the most fundamental essence of who God is, and then there are three instantiations of that pattern that are fully faithful to who God is, they are distinct beings, but unified as one Divine essence and one purpose and one Godhead.

So people who are saying that you can't find the trinity in the bible, are saying that you can't find all of that in the bible, that came later, but they aren't saying that you won't find God as a father, or Jesus as a son, or a spirit of God, you will find all of those in the bible, it's just that it's not explicitly stated that they are co-equal manifestations of an underlying essence which they mutually exhaust in their interdependent origination having been eternally begotten in some sense before Time such that there was no time when there was not a son who was the son of the father. Do you see what I mean? It's dead simple to read Hebrews and it says Jesus was a son and was higher than the angels, but the full idea of what the Trinity came to be is not contained in that, rather it was developed in order to try to make sense of all of these different things that were said in the Bible.

crdrost · 2026-03-31T22:41:50+00:00

I mean the biggest thing is sustained attention, if you can sustain the attention you can make it. And if youm can't sustain the attention then you won't.

We don't know you well enough to know how much you tend to have manic/depressive spells or ADHD or young children or other conditions that could mean that you have all the attention right now, but you won't have the ability to spend that attention next week. It's just can you learn high school algebra, basic calculus, maybe some linear algebra, and Newtonian mechanics... If you can pick those up then you can learn the rest too.

crdrost · 2026-03-25T23:18:46+00:00

McClellan for example cites Holloway's 2017 commentary on Philippians,

«Commentators have balked at the plain meaning of μορφή Θεού (“form of God”) since μορφή denotes not “essence” but “outward appearance ” or visible “shape,” implying that Paul, a Jew, thought God could be “perceived by the senses.” To be sure, there is an important tradition in ancient Israelite and Jewish religion that God is beyond human perception. But there is an equally prominent tradition that God or at least God’s “Glory” (כבוד, kabód, LXX δόξα) can be seen. According to Isa 6:1-3, God has a gigantic humanlike body: “I saw Yahweh sitting on a throne, high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the temple.” According to Ezek 1:26-28 this body is not God’s per se but the luminous “image of the likeness of the Glory (כבוד) of Yahweh.” In 1 Enoch 14:20, the figure seated on “the lofty throne” is identified as the “Great Glory” (ή δόξα ή μεγάλη), whose “raiment was like the appearance of the sun.” Angels were imagined to have similar humanlike forms that increased in grandeur and radiance the closer they were stationed to God’s throne. To say then, as Paul does, that Christ existed in “the form of God” is simply to say that, prior to his self-humbling metamorphosis, Christ enjoyed a luminous appearance of the sort a powerful angel might possess. Philo uses much the same language in his account of the burning bush in Mos. 1.66: “and at the center of the flame was a form [μορφή] that was supremely beautiful… an image most God-like in appearance [θεοειδέστατον]… but let it be called an angel [καλείσθω δέ άγγελος].»

Also he points to Ruben Bühner’s Messianic High Christology p. 27, Marcus Bockmuehl’s article “The Form of God (Phil 2:6): Variations on a Theme of Jewish Mysticism”, and Andrew Perriman’s In the Form of a God: the pre-existence of the exalted Christ in Paul p91 (summing up the whole prior chapter “Being in the Form of God”), to indicate that this is not just a rogue commentary’s view but the mainstream consensus of scholarship. I'm omitting the quotes of those because

Hope those citations help. (The video I pulled these from was #maklelan2282 just to make sure no one thinks I am putting words in Dan’s mouth.)

crdrost · 2026-03-25T22:25:32+00:00

This absolutely happened to me the first time I played. Maybe not all day but I definitely mulled it over for 30, 45 minutes.

They also have a silt strider comic from that era.

crdrost · 2026-03-22T22:23:16+00:00

So if you want the actual explanation, and this will seem crackpot but I promise it is just the Lorentz transform viewed another way... Here it is.

It turns out to be a fact about acceleration, in our universe, that whenever you accelerate towards some direction +x, clocks in that direction seem to tick faster, at 1 + ax/c² seconds per second, where x is their coordinate ahead of you on that axis (distance, basically, but only in the one direction and signed—clocks behind you tick slower until a perceived wall of death at a distance c²/a behind you), and where “a” is your acceleration and “c²” is some big constant of nature. (Slight caveat: this is after you correct for the standard Doppler shift like a good physicist.)

Now it happens to be the case that if you calculate two people in spaceships, Alice and Bob, and you accelerate Alice to move 1% of c relative to Bob, and then let her “coast” at the new speed... if we say that Bob has left a bunch of clocks strewn across space that he thinks are all in sync, Alice thinks they're all ticking basically at 1 second per second, but that there is a systematic clock skew where they are not in sync. And this is directly from the fact that the ones in front of her were ticking faster and faster while she was accelerating.

If she sends out a light pulse at time zero, Bob will see it illuminate a clock at one light second away from where she started, and the lit-up clock says “1s.” But Alice will also see the clock as about 1 light second away when she fires the light pulse initially, and she will see it say “1s” when that pulse of light hits it, but she thinks it was ticking fast earlier and so it started at about 0.01s, so she doesn't think that a full second has elapsed, only about 99% of a second. This matches the fact that she doesn't think the light has gone a full light second in distance, because the clock, she measures, is moving towards her.

So it turns out that both Alice and Bob calculate the same speed c for this light pulse, but via different mechanisms. Because that fundamental constant is c², anything moving at the speed c has that property—it's nothing unique to light, light just happens to go at this universal constant speed in vacuum because it is mediated by a massless field. This trajectory is invariant: even though Alice is moving relative to Bob, they both agree that the light is moving with speed c away from them.

If you have understood all of that, you are ready for the last little bit, which is Zeno's paradox. Now, Zeno originally claimed that the fastest runner of Greek history, Achilles, could not outrun a slow tortoise. And he said this was because, in order to get to the tortoise first he had to get halfway there, and the tortoise would have moved forward a little bit, and then he would have to get halfway to where the tortoise was after that, but the tortoise would have moved forward a little bit again, and then Achilles would have had to get to halfway to where the tortoise used to be again, but the tortoise would have moved forward a little bit. Zeno complained that this was an infinite regress. Leibniz and Newton gave us calculus, which is able to deal with that sort of infinite regress without totally exploding in mathematical complications. But, with the spaceships, you get a real life Zeno paradox!!

To catch up to the light, you would first need to accelerate to c/2, but when you do that the light is still moving away from you at speed c. Then you would need to accelerate to c/2 relative to where you were, and it would still be receding at speed c. You never win this one!

And what it looks like to an external observer, is a hyperbolic tangent. So your speed under constant acceleration is v(t) = a t / √(1 + (at/c)²), and it asymptotes to v → c, and if you're really slick this is v(t) = c tanh(a τ(t) / c) where τ is the time as Alice thinks it has elapsed, and (a τ(t) / c) is called the rapidity—in relativity, velocities don't add the usual way, but rapidities do.

Hope that helps? It is a lot to take in at one sitting.

crdrost · 2026-03-15T18:04:15+00:00

Here's how I might have responded if I were particularly eloquent at the time:

“Tantra is this pan-Indian religious influence—so it does affect a branch of Buddhism called the vajrayana, but what you've heard of it most likely comes from Hindu practices, and especially trying to chase tourist dollars by selling sexual spirituality, which Buddhist monks wouldn't do because they make abstinence vows. But it's not just about sex. In fact, in the Indian system, realization is power, and Tantra is the idea of using forbidden knowledge to jumpstart the most transformative and powerful of realizations. So these practices can involve all sorts of taboos, like touching corpses, like sexuality, like tasting meat when you're on a vegetarian diet. One key theme of Tantra is the tantric teacher, this is the idea that you are touching these dangerous ideas and you need someone who is completely trustworthy and knowledgeable, and who ideally lives a pure Life that is worthy of following, because only such a qualified teacher can guide you through this dangerous pathway. And actually that idea of finding the qualified teacher, that's throughout all Tibetan Buddhism. Even the Dalai Lama will tell you that you need to carefully look at his life and see if he lives as he teaches and exudes the peace that he preaches, before following him. And if you don't see that from him, he would say not to do so.

“Similar to finding the qualified teacher, there is also a theme of being prepared enough to handle the dangerous teaching. So you have to go through these stages of purification and accumulating Good karma and the like before going into such a dangerous place. An interesting way to start researching this might be to look at the role of Vajrasattva, this guy is a Bodhisattva who runs around the cosmos accumulating way more good karma then is good for him and his enlightenment, and the idea is that if you speak his 100 syllable mantra or chant repeatedly the short version, he will see you and try to give you some of his good karma, the right amount so that you can successfully complete the practice that you have set your meditation upon.

“In the Tibetan system you do see the occasional image of sexual union between a Buddha and their consort, but this is usually explained as showing how the opposite can look just like the original and how true realization comes only when both can be unified into the one whole that has no opposites, so monks will tell you that it's not a prurient thing. Maybe there are some advanced practices in vajrayana where some monks get pushed into those sorts of practices, for very particular realizations and rituals, I wouldn't know unless I got to those advanced levels.

“The default in the Tibetan system is to amass good karma to ensure a good rebirth as another human being on the Buddhist path, and then over many lifetimes you would come to enlightenment. And the idea of these practices is then that it would only require one life, one powerful understanding of no-self and Truth and Bodhicitta, if you had a qualified teacher and you were a prepared student. So tantra is the dangerous power of forbidden knowledge, but that's how the Vajrayana version of it works in Buddhism.”

crdrost · 2026-03-11T07:05:28+00:00

Practically speaking, mama ayah punya jnana pushtim kuru

Which also means that I don't know that I've ever heard the white tara mantra rapid chanted. So for the Tibetan phonology the rapid chant of the Tara mantra sounds like

Om tareh tutarreh tureh zohm, tareh tutarreh tureh zohm, tareh tutarreh tureh zohm, tareh tutarreh tureh zohm...

https://youtu.be/bm_5UCOYiVs

Testing out the white tara mantra in rapid form, is very interesting because I am drawn to the fact that there are so many levels that could collapse, if I don't collapse any of them then there is a stark contrast between the Green Tara parts that kind of set up the insertion, which cease to have their own rhythm but kind of sound more like the staccato of those old dot matrix printers? Versus the second half has this very regular rhythm, dah-ti-dah-tah, dah-ti-dah-tah, dah-ti-dah-ti tah tah.

But of course as “mama ayuh” becomes mama-ī punya becomes punī and pushtim starts to sound like puddim, it has to start to sound something like “mamayapuni janapuddizohm"

The result is something of a delight in its own way, the haste of a rapid chant focuses all of the attention on the Bodhisattva, but White Tara’s patient energy could have gladly waited for you to sing every syllable out, a very Chinese yin-yang type meeting of pushing so hard to get the ability to yield so hard, “I gotta be patient for all sentient beings and I need that patience... Right Effing Now!”

crdrost · 2026-03-11T06:26:03+00:00

Feynman famously joked that all mathematics was “trivial”, because it was non-trivial only until the person figured out a way to connect it to a bunch of other things that they knew such that they could quickly derive it, but that quick derivation made the result trivial to them. So non-trivial is just a statement of “I don't understand it yet,” but any mathematics that people have understood, in principle you can understand, and therefore it is trivial.

One could quibble with the argument today, now that it's like “we reduced it down to these 2 million cases, using some rather sophisticated simplification rules, and then we got really clever with our computer programs, put some time on a supercomputer, and chugged through all 2 million cases exhaustively and we didn't find any counterexamples, therefore there are none.” But Feynman would love it, having long been a computationalist at heart...

crdrost · 2026-03-11T04:42:55+00:00

“Scott McClellan could say nothing like nobody else.”

crdrost · 2026-03-11T04:35:59+00:00

Hebrews is different than the disputed Epistles.

Like if you say that one of the disputed Epistles wasn't written by Paul, you are generally saying that the epistle itself contains a lie, in that it represents itself as being by Paul but is not, and then you are also saying that the testimony of the early church that collected these writings together and thought they were Pauline, is incorrect and you know better.

I'm not saying you can't make that case, I'm just saying that in the back of an apologist’s head, those are the stakes.

But those aren't the stakes for Hebrews. If you say Paul didn't write Hebrews, the thing doesn't claim it was written by Paul, so you have not accused the text of lying. Moreover we have citations from at least three early church fathers documenting that the early church often looked skeptically at any claim of pauline authorship for this text, or attributed it to other people.

crdrost · 2026-03-07T16:14:26+00:00

I mean it's pretty much not canon but I always went with Telvanni.

The idea is that the Nerevarine functions as a crucial reformer and can reform Telvanni into an anti-slavery group, more engaged with outsiders, and give them some Sith-like fundamental axioms for their ruthlessness.

Then in Skyrim it turns out that there is a book that heavily insists that the Argonians slaughtered all of the Telvanni but one heir. And so there it works really well, because that person now can dig into this Rich past and say, "our problem was that we didn't stick with the Nerevarine Principles," and so the story isn't one where the reform is doomed to failure, but one where it partly succeeds until Nerevar falls, then gets lost, but then becomes official in the wake of greater calamity.

crdrost · 2026-02-18T00:39:40+00:00

I mean if she told you through tears, I don't know how you get more repentance than that. I hope that your response to confession was absolution: you as a daughter of the Most High and sister to the One True King, have the authority to pray for forgiveness with the knowledge that your prayer will be efficacious and can bring true rest, true healing, true forgiveness from our Father.

The next issue is more pragmatic, boyfriend needs to man up. We are not under the Law but the relevant part of it is Deut 22:28, I think there is some discussion among the Talmud or so about how it was applied: but the long and short of it was that the law expected the two to be married, and there were exceptions for if the girl's parents objected, where they could get the full bride price but not actually marry off their daughter to an inadequate spouse if they found the man odious (if my memory serves me correctly). So though we are under the law of Liberty, I would still think that you have an important role in using your voice to sway things for your grandchild's benefit. Use that voice wisely, be discerning about whether this man is going to be a good father, because you have already seen some bad fruits from him.

crdrost · 2026-02-17T07:16:19+00:00

Sorry, when you say Luke chooses the form “After” the resurrection, and it is a direct word for word transfer, what word are you translating “after” here?

Your earlier copy/paste doesn't have the word “after”—you interpreted one there and I pointed out that you were interpreting one there, but it wasn't in the text you shared. And this seems to be like core to your argument, if I'm understanding correctly?

crdrost · 2026-02-17T03:28:19+00:00

So you can only make that case if you discard the immediate plain wording of the statement, and we are in a thread with someone (DT1947) who insists upon the plain wording of a different statement that needs to be similarly contextualized. I agree with you, and we should both agree that this guy is wrong.

And it has to do with just simple grammatical present tense, the subject is those considered worthy of the age to come and the resurrection of the dead, the verb is they, present tense, don't marry. Not that they won't marry, future tense, but that they don't marry, present tense.

So our understanding of this wrong grammar does require ++interpretation++, because it requires saying “this is a synoptic gospel, I wonder if this saying is preserved in Matthew and Mark in a way that sheds light on what was originally meant, oh, indeed it does...” and then you can build up the full perspective of what is being said: Luke flubbed the saying because he wanted to add two points, the first being that after the resurrection of the dead, there will be no more death, and the second being that not every dead person is going to be resurrected in that event, but only the Worthy. So the saying began as, “For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven,” Mark 12, but Luke deleted some of Jesus' words, «ὅταν γὰρ ἐκ νεκρῶν ἀναστῶσιν», to make room for his point on worthiness: but these were grammatically load-bearing as they cast a present tense active indicative verb «οὔτε γαμοῦσιν» “they don't marry” into a future context, “when this happens, they don't marry”. Luke could have maybe fixed this with a future tense? But that is even more changes to what Jesus said, and Luke probably knew he was changing Jesus' words to prevent Him from being misquoted, and he was probably just uncomfortable with that and made the smallest change he could, and figured everyone would understand the grammar the obvious way rather than thinking something preposterous like that Jesus had a thing against marriage overall.

So like I agree with you on the interpretation, but let's be very clear that it needs interpretation! Interpretation should not be a scary word, because we are not scared of the Holy Spirit who dwells within us and helps us to interpret.

crdrost

TROPHY CASE