long-term long-distance low-commitment casual gf

the cambrian period is TOMORROW!!!

The general gist of the versions of the story that I've heard (from how I've always heard it told at least, mostly back when I was in Sunday School) was that when Jesus went to the temple during Passover there were a bunch of people who had turned it into a marketplace where they were selling livestock, and that they were turning a location meant for worship into some kind of marketplace. Also that the money lenders were taking advantage of people while doing the exchanges, and it was generally really scummy business being done.

The message they always seemed to apply to it was "Jesus doesn't like when people try to turn houses of worship into markets, and he really doesn't like scammers and con artists. Don't sell things in church, and especially don't use it as a place to con people."

So.

The money changers are at the Temple because Ancient Judaism wasn’t like Judaism today where each synagogue is self contained. It was a temple religion. Ancient Judaism was a temple religion Hinduism and Buddhism is where sacrifices are made. For Temple Judaism with the Holy of Holies, be the time Rome colonized Judea, Jews made grain and animal sacrifices a monotheistic G-d.

Before the Romans sacked the Temple and stole our treasure (you can see a depiction of the theft on the Arc of Titus next to the Coliseum), the BeitHaKadosh, aka THE Temple in Jerusalem was the place in Temple Judaism that people came to to make pilgrimage to G-d. Just G-d. He is only there. Temple Judaism was centralized.

Come to the Temple. Spend the shekels you can afford get the portion of the right kind of goat and grain. Make the sacrifice.

Very organized.

So why are money changers at the Temple?

Well Jews live all over the world. That was true then as it’s true now.

We have for example fragments from hundreds of years before the Christian bible was written of a letter written from a Jew in Egypt to a relative in…I think it was Samaria??… talking about Passover preparation. (@prismatic-bell you know the one I mean )

So you’re a Jew from Egypt with Egyptian money and you need an unblemished goat to make a sacrifice unto the Lord your G-d, how are you going to get it? You found a good goat but the merchant only wants shekels.

The money changers do a service. If they are Jews and they do it at a fair rate? They they did it within the Commanments of G-d and enabled other Jews to serve G-d.

Jesus is an uneducated carpenter reacted like angry teenager who read a blurb about what divinity could be but who doesn’t understand that all of these things - the marketplace the livestock the money changers - can and do exist to serve G-d as it functioned in Temple Judaism.

Jesus’s response is Roman. He just reacted decided to destroy the Jewish way.

I don’t bother to entertain the “was Jesus real” question. The writer decided to write a story that distains and destroys the entire functioning of Temple Judaism.

I suspect this is in the same vein. Most people are not hanging out with Temple-era Jews and have no reason to have learned this, and Christianity itself has this weird duality where the "old testament" might be allegorical, but because the "New Testament" takes place in Roman times where record-keeping became so much better, clearly it's actually accurate and this stuff was actually said and done.

There are a couple of things that shaped what would come to be the Gospels and Acts that most Christians do not know about and that I think are really important if you want to a) understand Jesus and his first followers and b) start digging the antisemitism out of Christianity, or at least reducing it a little.

1) Jesus and his followers were all Jewish, and the split between Judaism and Christianity was long, uneven, and sometimes painful. Even after Jesus' resurrection, Jesus' followers worshiped in the Temple and their local synagogues. There was friction, but at the start nobody thought the Jesus-followers were starting their own separate religion. But a number of things happened to change this over the course of a couple of decades.

A) Paul/Saul. (He used both names for his entire life, depending on his audience--Saul among Jews and Paul among Gentiles.) Jesus' followers (including Saul/Paul) thought that Jesus was coming back soon. Once Saul became convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, he started seeking out pagans ... but he wanted them to not become Jewish. Why? Because there are several places in Hebrew Scriptures that talk about the Day of the Lord, and how "all nations" will come to Zion. IOW, people of all different ethnic/religious backgrounds will come to see the God of Israel as the best God out there. For Saul, having non-Jews who followed Jesus was proof that Jesus was the Messiah and that the Day of the Lord was here. So he wanted them to worship God, but not convert to Judaism. This caused a huge amount of friction both within the group of Jesus-followers, and also between Jesus-followers and the rest of the Jewish community.

B) As time went on, Jesus' followers went from "he's the messiah" to "he's the Son of God." Claiming he's the messiah was one thing; sure, if he were really the Messiah, why did he die and why aren't we living in a perfect Messianic Age? but still not a huge deal. There were a lot of would-be messiahs running around Judea in that era. But claiming he's the Son of God ... that's blasphemy and breaking the commandment of monotheism.

Together, these two factors (and probably others) eventually led to Jewish synagogues telling their Jesus followers that they couldn't be Jewish and a follower of Jesus; they had to pick. If you wanted to worship Jesus, you could not belong to your local synagogue. For every group, there comes a point where an offshoot or faction is so different from the original group that you can't really call them part of the same group any longer. This was deeply painful to the Jewish Christians who had to choose, and was apparently a fresh and major issue as the Gospels were being written.

Both John and Matthew have passages and story details that don't make sense if you're just looking at Jesus' life, but make a ton of sense if you realize that the people writing the Gospels are putting their own pain and anger at being thrown out of the synagogues back on the Jewish leadership that Jesus faced. Like the story of the man born blind in John 9-10. Jewish religious leaders weren't focused on rooting out people who followed Jesus during Jesus' own lifetime; we know this because a lot of Jewish religious leaders invited Jesus to their houses and considered him a fellow rabbi. But it was happening in the 70s and 80s.

This separation--and the pain and anger it caused--deeply shaped the way the stories in the Gospels and Acts are told. If you do not keep that in mind as you read these stories and think about them, you are going to swallow antisemitism without realizing it.

2) The second major thing that shaped the Gospels and Acts was the destruction of the Temple in 70CE and the mass enslavement and deportation of Jews from Judea that followed.

Both Judaism and early Christianity had the Temple in Jerusalem as their focal point. When the Romans razed it to the ground, both groups had to figure out "what do we do without the Temple and the sacrificial system?" Jews put the synagogues and the rabbis as the center of Jewish life. Christians responded by saying that Jesus' death was the fulfillment of the ancient sacrificial system, so it didn't matter any longer (cf. the Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament). These are very different answers, which drove the two groups further apart and also started Christianity down the road of Supersessionism. Supersessionism, in a nutshell, is the idea that the Jews were only important to set up Jesus, and that Christianity has replaced them as the fulfillment of God's plan and as God's true people. So Jewish history and literature and religion only matter insofar as they point to Jesus and Christianity. I hope you can see how antisemitic this is?

As for the mass enslavement and deportations ... in the chaos of that, all the Jewish Christians who had maintained a Jewish identity died or disappeared. The only Jesus-followers left were the Gentiles. And they had no reason to like Jews and a lot of benefit to saying "yeah, we're Not Like Them, and we don't blame Rome for crucifying our God, we blame Them!" And that is what was going on when the Gospels and Acts were written. And it shaped how those stories were told.

Now, if Christianity had stayed a tiny weird mystery-cult, none of this would matter. But Christianity made a devil's-deal with the Roman Empire--give up some major theological beliefs (such as pacifism) in exchange for power. The Roman Empire already hated Jews because Jews refused to give up their culture and meld into the dominant Roman culture. And so Christianity took the most antisemitic possible interpretation of stories that were already hostile to Jews and made the worst possible readings the Standard Interpretations. And from that flowed centuries of murder, rape, torture, and theft.

And if you don't pay attention to this, you will blithely continue on in those antisemitic readings of the text.

from a red dwarf that appears to be older than the universe, to supermassive black holes forming way too early in the universe, to a supermassive black hole speeding across the universe (what kind of energy could have possibly been used to fling something of that mass at that speed?), to dark matter and dark energy apparently existing but refusing to show themselves, to quantum mechanics and general relativity not getting along despite being our two most reliable theories of physics experimentally, to the weird coincidence that any detector capable of detecting a graviton would have to be so massive it would collapse into a black hole (in fact, exactly massive enough to do so).

a number of these were known facts in the 20th century, but so many of them have built up since then that is throwing our neat little models of everything into chaos. WHICH IS AMAZING, BECAUSE IT MEANS THAT SCIENTISTS CAN NOW MAKE NEW THEORIES ABOUT HOW THINGS WORK BASED ON THE RAPIDLY EMERGING DATA!

that is the difference between a shepherd guarding dog and a shepherd herding dog. Herding dogs are NOT part of the herd, they use modified hunting techniques to bully the herd into moving where they are meant to go. They are built for speed and agility, often as small as 35 to 45 lbs, and are absolutely no match for a wolf. Plus, the herd doesn’t trust them, is suspicious of them, which is how the herding works

And you're like well. I'd rather trust myself to the fate of the world than anyone else. And I'd rather not let anyone else suffer the Torment Nexus just because of my own feelings. That seems kinda selfish. Alright sure.

So you enter the Torment Nexus. Each level has you pressing buttons like, [abduct innocent scientists to your vat: chances of humanity's survival increases by 0.005%] [everyone disliked that] [congrats! your moral goodness has decreased!].

The later levels get even worse. [blow up Antarctica: chances of humanity's survival increases by, ummm who knows ????] [total humans negatively affected: ????] [congrats! you're an ecoterrorist!].

Then you reach the final level. It reads: [through this door you'll break the news to your friend that he needs to die.] And you're like, wait he has to die??? I have to tell him?? But that's incredibly fucked up. After I went through the Torment Nexus as well. But it's the last level. So oh well. I can do this I suppose. Rather me than anyone else.

You enter the level and you friend is standing next to a cliff. You go over to him and say, hey this really fucking sucks but I've just learnt you need to jump off the cliff. Then we might be able to save humanity for real though. Maybe billions of people can survive if this works.

You signed up for this. Not did you agree to enter the torment nexus, you walked up to it and got on while everyone was still debating. You bribed the guards to get into the torment nexus. You looked around and realised "damn, none of you will get through level one of the torment nexus, guess I'll have to do it myself"

And then you're finally through the torment nexus and it's like [congrats! You've finished The Torment Nexus! Did you win? Find out in 26 (twenty six) years!]

So now you gotta make sure that all (most) (some) of you actually make it the next 26 years. Which is when you get hit with [bonus level: prison break! Unlocks Hard Mode: keep earth alive while on the run] so you just sigh and try to kidnap new scientists and bribe government officials to share food and please not throw bombs at each other

anyway, the drying rack - it was about the size of a normal clothes drying rack, big old thing just for lingerie, specially for a girl that doesn't wear much of it. Like. I'd need to go through a month of daily lingerie changes to cover it! well, maybe not a month, but at least a fortnight. wasn't immediately obvious what made it lingerie specific either. Just looked like a normal drying rack to me from the picture he sent. but supposedly it would only dry lingerie. sounds like a problem, not a selling point, but they were really trying to make it one. a selling point, i mean.

It was ridiculously expensive, too. I mean it was about a hundred and fifty quid, which is insane for a drying rack. especially one that can only do lingerie. especially for a girl that doesn't wear that! the company's website - i forget what they were called. something like "look fancy" but phrased weirder. anyway their website said that they had no control over this - which i don't believe for a moment - and that it was because of some old and obscure law.

we're talking *old* old. but apparently it was still technically in place. some law from the middle ages requiring markup on products liable to tempt people into committing any of the seven deadly sins. they claimed that a lingerie drying rack was too lustful to scoot past this law. strangely, I've bought far more lustful things for far less money, so i think they just wanted to scam people.

oh and i haven't even said the name yet. they called it "the dryngerie". that's not a pun, it just thinks it is! who names a product a portmanteau that doesn't even work! and i mean. i like a good portmanteau. i have a bit of a penchant for them myself - a penchanteau if you will - but this just doesn't cut it. it's like making a car that only goes slow and calling it "the moow" from "move slow".

anyway, i keep digressing. so he ordered this online, and about a week (!) later it arrived. and it was flatpack. i had to construct the damn thing myself. but it was just a box of more than 100 different tiny parts, and the instructions...

it feels charitable to call them instructions. they were encoded, somehow, for some reason. they were in a random order, for starters. sometimes what should have been several instructions was folded into one, sometimes what should have been one was split across several. a few were ciphered, one was backwards - three were missing entirely!

after about an hour struggling with the code, i decided to look online, found some people trying to do the same thing. a couple of them posted in forums asking for help and then just said they'd managed to figure it out without an explanation, fat lot of good they were. but i managed to eventually figure out everything and compile it into a single document. it took 4 hours. not building it. figuring out what the instructions were.