Maunderings

Author/illustrator Trung Le Nguyen has been live posting reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time on bluesky and just hit the first proposal. The replies are basically the sickos meme

2) any vegetable is better than no vegetable

"oh, that's easy! it's because they're fundamentally Bad people who want to hurt others and choose their beliefs to justify that! :) hope this helps"

or

"they just don't have access to the same information we do. look at this person who was raised in a cult! don't you feel sorry for her?"

and like, yes, fine, some people were in fact raised in cults, but what i wish people would understand is that the bulk of it is just normal human flaws, like:

they want to believe stuff that makes them feel smart and cool and like they've figured everything out (you also do this)

they want to believe stuff that makes them feel like their emotions are justified and grounded in reality, and that the people they want to hurt deserve to be hurt (you also do this)

they form conclusions before they've processed all the relevant information, and cling to that first impression even when new info comes to light (you also do this)

they pick up beliefs from the people around them because they want to be liked and fit in, not because the beliefs are good or true (you also do this)

they come up with reasons that the stuff that benefits them (and the people they like and identify with) is actually overwhelmingly best for everyone and obviously the right thing to do (you also do this)

they pay more attention to stuff that supports what they already believe and avoid looking in places that might show them otherwise (you also do this)

they listen to people who talk like 'one of them' and ignore others (you also do this)

they come up with reasons to dismiss people with conflicting viewpoints as obviously in bad faith or ignorant or a shill or evil (you also do this)

they fail to take their own beliefs seriously sometimes, and take their beliefs way too seriously other times, in a selective way that lets them do the things they already wanted to do (you also do this)

the very ways they construct the ideas of 'knowledge' and 'wisdom' and 'belief' and 'understanding' are biased so that what they don't want to believe comes under lots of scrutiny and what they do want to believe receives less (you also do this)

you, dear reader, are presumably right about everything and were correct to die on every hill you've ever died on, but the difference between you and someone who's wrong about important stuff doesn't look like "well they're inherently evil and i'm not", it probably looks like a combination of:

natural environment (they would have been exposed to different information than you regardless of their choices)

being in the right place at the right time (your particular profile of flaws and virtues happened to be what was needed to lead you to the right conclusions, they had the opposite experience)

random luck (you doubled down on what felt right to believe but wasn't, but it turned out to be inconsequential, or even right for different reasons, while they doubled down on what turned out to be a horrible mistake distorting their entire worldview)

you do less of the things in the previous list, and over time the difference between you and them adds up

and, look, i also do these things. the nicest and most thoughtful people i've ever met do these things. if you meet someone who never does any of these things, i dunno, give them a fucking medal or something.

basically they all stem from a massive eruption of a volcano on the island of santorini off the coast of greece. the ash then floated over to egypt which kickstarted the plagues

1) blood: the ash carried the mineral cinnabar, which has the capability of turning water red

2) frogs: the ash also had many toxic and acidic substances so naturally, all the frogs are gonna flee the river

3) lice: given what was going on insects would have burrowed into dead animals/peoples skin and laid eggs, which then hatched

4) beasts: everything is getting poisoned from the ash and toxins, causing animals to freak the fuck out/die

5) pestilence: toxins again

6) boils: the ash would have caused storms that carried acid rain which when it fell, would irritate peoples skin causing boils

7) hail: the storm again

8) locusts: again with the insects and the amount of dead bodies and such which attract more insects. a lotta insects basically.

9) darkness: the ash covered the sky, blocking out the sun

10) slaying of the first born: given that children’s bodies were found in higher numbers than others, some archeologists think they may have been sacrificed to stop all the destruction, but they aren’t 100% sure about that. this is just me but I would say another possibility is that babies/kids are a lot more susceptible to toxins and shit, so while an adult may have been fine or gotten a bit sick, it might have been very dangerous/deadly for kids or babies

the volcano would also attest for the parting of the sea weirdly enough. the red sea was in fact the ‘reed’ sea, and was very shallow, probably waist deep or so. given the amount of shit dumped into the ocean from the volcano, this wouldve caused a tsunami to head towards egypt. the water would get sucked out from the reed sea right before the tsunami hit, letting people pass it easily, then the actual tsunami would hit, fuckin up anyone who tried to follow.

another theory is that the red water was caused by algae, which would cause the frogs and stuff to jump out as well. the algae also carried substances toxic to animals so if they ingested any they’d get sick and die, so more insects. in this theory there was a sand storm coincidentally that caused the rest

But they didn't. The overwhelming scholarly consensus is that they are literary devices in a origin myth.

It may surprise you to know (I didn't think it would, but given the notes on this post, maybe it will after all) that there is significant academic debate as to whether the Exodus tradition has any historical merit at all.

Israel Finkelstein, former director of the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and one of the most prominent historians of the ancient Levant, wrote: "There was no mass Exodus from Egypt. There was no violent conquest of Canaan. Most of the people who formed early Israel were local people—the same people whom we see in the highlands throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages." (p 118. The Bible Unearthed)

Others have taken a slightly more agnostic stance, and engaged with the Exodus as an exercise in memory-making, like Nadav Na'aman does in his excellent article, "The Exodus Story: Between Historical Memory and Historiographical Composition". There he comes to the conclusion that the Exodus story is a cultural memory of Egypt's departure from Canaan, not the escape of the Israelites as related in the Pentateuch.

There are dozens more peer-reviewed articles on the historicity of the Exodus that I could link you to now. Hundreds that I don't have on hand. There's even been significant scientific pushback on the natural cause theory of the Ten Plagues, with physicist and theologian Mark Harris, University of Edinburgh’s Lecturer on Science and Religion, taking the whole idea out to the woodshed in his article "How did Moses part the Red Sea? Science as salvation in the Exodus tradition".

(It's also worth nothing that Siro Trevisanato, the microbiologist who put forth the Minoan Explosion hypothesis in The Plagues of Egypt: Archaeology, History and Science Look at the Bible, refers to skeptics of Biblical historicity as "Bible deniers" in his book. Not disqualifying, but illuminating.)

I'm not using this post to Take A Stance on whether there is a kernel of truth to a folk memory that an ancient group of people used to formulate their identity. That's an ongoing scholarly conversation! But I am using the historicity debate to underline the fact that we don't even know if the framing device AROUND the plagues is true.

Every single person on this website has access to way too many scholarly resources for us to post with wide eyes about how literal miracles from the Bible have been proven. Particularly when even the "sources" cited in the post (The Independent and Time Magazine, respectively) make certain to point out that the timeline of the Exodus is debatable to say the least, and might disqualify the Santorini eruption entirely.

More on CPR survival rates.

Anyway, while we're all counting his odds on fingers and toes, why don't we do some good:

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