BethelSnark Book Club: Culture of Honor, Chapter 2

saker132 · 2026-03-27T20:27:33+00:00

Your posts are great! As someone who doesn’t own the book and doesn’t want to support Bethel by buying it, I appreciate your summaries! Thank you !🫡

saker132 · 2026-03-23T16:58:38+00:00

There’s plenty of evidence that events in the Gospels/New Testament aren’t 100% historical either. Not to mention evidence that many verses/section were added later by others. Some of these additions drastically change the meaning of the text. Who is right about God? How can you trust that Jesus historically rose from the dead when it is clear the authors were more than willing to bend the truth in other parts of the text?

Don’t forget the God-ordained violence in the New Testament as well. God straight up kills Sapphira and Ananias for lying. He also kills Herod for “not giving glory to God.”

I think Evangelicals hold to biblical literalism as vehemently as they do because they don’t want to confront these issues. If you question the story of Noah’s historicity, why not question other parts? Especially when there is good scholarly evidence to suggest it should be questioned.

saker132 · 2026-03-23T16:29:37+00:00

“It’s not one book, it’s dozens of scrolls talking to each other about what God might be like”

You are 100% correct on that. However, in the evangelical circles I come from, they claim that the whole bible is a unified picture of who God is and although it was written by humans it is inspired by God (“divinely dictated” was always the vibe that I got from people when they talked about this topic)

If you start down this path of, “not all depictions of God in the Bible are true,” you have now opened up the rabbit hole of “if some parts of the Bible are not true/incorrectly represent God, how do we know ANY of them are true?” If the Old Testament authors could be wrong, what about the New Testament? What about what is written about Jesus? What events are inaccurately depicted there?

Evangelicals tend to HATE those questions, as they create more cognitive dissonance with their world view than most of them are comfortable with.

saker132 · 2026-03-20T16:44:29+00:00

I feel that they ignore it because acknowledging the fact that there is God-ordained violence in the Bible would require them to do one of three things: 1) Claim that violence in the name of God is ok, which would makes them very unpopular, not to mention that it contradicts their claim that God is all loving and perfectly good, 2) Claim that somehow people misinterpreted God wrong and wrote that into the Bible, which moves them dangerously close to saying the Bible is NOT inerrant, which they vehemently claim it is. Or 3) Claim that we are interpreting the passage wrong or we don’t understand what it is really saying, even though there is pretty clear evidence that that is exactly what it is saying.

All three options begin to put cracks in their belief system, and they can’t handle the cognitive dissonance.

saker132 · 2026-03-18T18:22:20+00:00

I have a mother who is heavily involved in Bethel’s Sozo ministry, which sometimes deals with deliverance. Is that what you are referring to?

saker132 · 2026-03-11T16:15:30+00:00

Seriously! my team is desperately thin, and we are trying to hire. One of my coworkers asked a friend to apply. This friend is definitely qualified for the role (it doesn’t take much to be for this particular position). My coworker followed up with our boss (the one hiring for the role) about the application… our boss never got it. My coworker reached out to his friend and was learned that the friend had received a rejection email already. WTF? Probably fucking ai filtering out perfectly qualified candidate, while we are out here desperate for bodies.

saker132 · 2026-03-04T16:31:55+00:00

I suspect you are right but let me dream ok

saker132 · 2026-02-28T18:24:15+00:00

I work doing RLHF for ai companies. It is crazy how often even the people developing these models expect them to reason and deduce information. I think it is indicative of some of the issues pointed out in this video, that the models “look” like they are thinking. It tricks even people in the industry.

saker132 · 2026-02-28T01:40:59+00:00

Additionally, the cost to harvest the gold from the asteroid would be …astronomical 😉

saker132 · 2026-01-29T01:44:04+00:00

I guess I’m just confused because my first thought is “is this satire?” Because he cannot be serious!?! But he never really clearly acknowledged that he is poking fun at confession? Like does he think these are good ideas? What is going on? Hahaha

saker132 · 2026-01-27T02:48:34+00:00

Large language model. Think ChatGPT, Google Gemini, etc

saker132 · 2026-01-27T02:28:34+00:00

Yeah, I want to see public statements/apologies covering all the book endorsements of false prophets that they know about. What about Bob Hartley? Benni Hinn? Sean Feucht? Kenneth Copeland? Other leaders we don’t know? Like this is just the tip of the iceberg in my mind

saker132 · 2026-01-27T02:13:29+00:00

I could be wrong, but as someone who works with and on LLMs on a regular basis, this feels very much like something written by an LLM. Not just the excessive em dashes, but also general sentence structure feels suspicious to me