I dunno. The fact that JT has a career beyond picking up tricks on the streets of Orlando could be described as miraculous.
As a believer, I say “not necessarily so.” Jesus in his first incarnation specifically avoided the powers-that-be of his time. He revealed himself directly to the disenfranchiesed and those he felt had been idelined by the rich and comfortable.
In like manner, I expect him, the next time around, to bypass the Pope, Jerry Falwell (jeez, especially Jerry Falwell) and our other human-annointed leaders and speak directly to his people. In a big way, sure; going through the “accepted channels”, nope. When the big guy’s in the house, there’s really no need for self-styled intermediaries.
So it’s not at all inconsistent for Polycarp to believe that he has a direct line to (or, more accurately, direct knowledge of) the next incarnation.
Having said this, I still maintain my reservations and questions of my previous posts. Still dying to hear a few more details . . .
I’ll bet you say that to ALL the girls!!
You’d think the PRESS would get wind of it sooner or later! 
He requires a shrubbery.
We are now, no longer the coders who say “Niiiii”
Homebrew’s previous job was as a knight in a Monty Python movie.
No, you cannot. You’re jumping the gun at this point; you must first prove that the god in question exists–the probability of his actions rest solely on the question of his existence.
Otherwise, you might as well argue whether Blondlot’s N-rays have a better chance of causing you to boogie-oogie-woogie or make you toast in the morning.
Damn. Too late with the mandatory Python reference!
In the interest of fighting ignorance, I feel I should point out that Justin Timberlake is almost 23 years old, so he can’t be Poly’s Jesus 2.0. There. Now I feel like a contributing member of society.
I can see why you call yourself skipmagic since you obviously skipped the last ten-bloody-thousand words of discussion on this topic. You know, we don’t really need a replacement for Handy but thanks for applying.
“Proving” things has no place in Baysesian statistics. Every statement has a truth value and that truth value is never zero or one.
At what point is this new religion a complete break from Christianity? I hate to mention the Branch Davidians, given the side issues I’m not discussing, but Koresh is a good example of someone who thought he was a vessel for God, or the like. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible and survived a couple gunshot wounds. Could he be the one?
As I said before, how is an undecided person to pick through all these claims of messianic powers, or whatever is claimed? The book cited in the sermon I cited makes is clear that potential messiahs are a dime a dozen.
I don’t understand how a “Christian” (as I understand the term) could argue for a lack of divinity or miraculousness in the messiah. It’s set-in-stone dogma isn’t it? Maybe if you take Christianity out of the equation, I could agree. Organized religion won’t accept this interpretation – unless they do (you heard it here first!) – so it’s automatically doubtful any truly messianic qualities can be ascribed to this as-yet undisclosed religious leader. Again, barring miraculous actions. Assuming it’s better than starving yourself in a box over London for 40 days, maybe I’ll join up.
Also, the last time I checked (:o) he didn’t appear to be dusky-blonde and blue-eyed. Unless he dyes his hair or something, which falls in line with the “anonymous Christ” mindset.
You must be reading the wrong thread, then, because the vast majority of this behemoth has been about proving one thing or another. While it’s true that you’ve thrown Baysesian statistics a few bones in your posts, it doesn’t mean that Baysesian statistics is the appropriate analytical method for determining bubkes in this thread.
It’s pretty damn evident from your offerings here that you don’t understand what constitutes proof, evidence, logic or, hell, chemistry for that matter.
Truth Seeker,
I find it strange that you are arguing that two scenarios be assigned different priors especially when we are in a Bayesian world. I though the whole idea of assigning priors was subjective!
- Why can’t I assign equal non-zero priors for both the alien scenarios?
- Why can’t I assing zero as a prior?
Re: (1), the non-trivial case, shouldn’t the evidence ultimately allow us to calculate the important posteriors? If yes, given the equal non-evidence for both scenarios, why won’t their posteriors be identical?
Got a cite for this, elderberry breath?
litost,
No statement ever has a zero value for the same reason that no statement ever has a value of 1. Remember, these aren’t really measures of probability, they’re measures of your confidence that the statement is true (or false). A statement with a value of one would be a statement which no amount of additional but contrary evidence could ever cause you to decide was not true.
This whole tangent started in an effort to demonstrate that there are degrees of irrationality. One way to think of this is, as someone put it earlier in the thread, how much of what you thought you knew about the universe do you have to throw out in order for the statement to be true. The more stuff you have to throw out to believe a particular proposition, the more irrational it is to believe in that proposition. Frankly, I find this idea unremarkable. I find it far more irrational to believe that Paris Hilton is God than I do to believe that there is a God. Both statements assume there is a God and you may argue that that makes both statements highly unlikely to be true. But it seems to me obvious that, since both statements assume there is a god, the statement that Paris Hilton is god has a much lower probability of being true.
The bottom line here – and what most people who don’t get it seem to be choking on – is that you simply cannot assign a value of zero to any statement made about the physical universe. It can be as arbitrarily small as you like, but it can’t be zero. Note that this is true even for statements for which you have no evidence. I can make a random statement about life in some arbitrarily selected solar system in the Andromeda galaxy and it will still have a non-zero truth value.
There is a bit of debate about how you pick your initial truth values, but for our purposes, it isn’t really relevant. The key point here is that since they can’t be zero, you can still be twice as confident that one extremely unlikely statement is true as compared to some other extremely unlikely statement. That you’re better than 99.9999999% certain that both statements are actually false doesn’t really matter.
As for the rest of your post, I’m not really sure if you’re referring to your example or some of mine.
A) Justin Timberlake isn’t that untalented. N’SYNC is awful, but his solo album Justified is actually really good. No, seriously, have any of you heard it?
B) He’s still not the second coming. From Poly’s description it’s obviously Aaron Carter, young teenage brother to Backstreet Boy Nick Carter, whose attempts at a career of his own haven’t really been successful. Obviously, he’s moving away from the musical field and trying to break in to the “I am Jesus” field. Has this kid got a future or what?
LC
Let’s not be nasty here.
Dude. You just quoted the best lexicon of all time. You know what this means, don’t you? The proverbial camel’s back has been broken. I’m turning gay and joining your harem. When’s the next train to Montreal?
Man, this thread took off! Every time I get a few minutes free to start answering people, I end up spending it reading the ongoing discussion. I have no intent of copping out on the post I promised, but this one will attempt to respond to discussion this far, and then be followed by the one that I promised.
Let’s start out by dispelling a few speculations. First, I had never heard of the movie that Moriah mentioned, and certainly would not risk my place on the SDMB to shill for it even if I had. Second, I was not conducting an experiment of any sort, though I do admit to phrasing my claim in a most startling manner. When I clarify what I was saying, below, I want to make it very clear that I am in no way weaseling on my earlier statements, but rather making clear what I intended to say in the first place. (I know there are a couple of people who will not accept that, but it is in fact exactly what I intended from the get-go.)
While I appreciate the comments Diogenes has posted toward the vindication of my sanity, I have to raise one issue for him. He describes “supernatural” as equivalent to intrinsically impossible. I object to the idea that there are categories of “natural” and “supernatural” and that the world only supports the first, for almost exactly the same reason as I object to the categories of “natural” and “unnatural” as descriptors of human behaviors. “The world goes as it will, and not as you or I would have it,” to quote an author I’ve always liked.
I believe that you are committing the fallacy of uniformitarianism in presuming the absence of real “supernatural” events (using the term in the everyday sense of something contrary to everyday experience that is attributed by humans to an act of God, gods, angels, demons, or whatever). While it is likely that many events claimed to have been acts of God are actually the products of legend building and human imagination, it is quite possible that in unusual circumstances, unusual events may occur (catatrophism in the strict sense).
The eruption of Tambora brought about unusual weather, the kind that would have been considered portents in a superstitious time. More recently, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens gave us a small taste of what Tambora produced. Either the Chicxulub impact or the Deccan Traps, or a combination of the two, caused the extinction of the Mesozoic fauna. These were highly improbable events from an actuarial standpoint, but did occur, with unique effects.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, I take St. John’s view that the “miracles” of Christ were signs – and whatever the explanation behind them, they still function as signs. Where I’m going with this is the idea that a highly unusual circumstance may result in highly unusual consequences – the extraordinary events that require extraordinary explanations. Assume for the moment that orthodox Christianity is correct in identifying Jesus as God the Son, constituent part of the Trinity, in human form. In such a case, there is no limit other than that He imposes on Himself as to what He may do. In point of fact, He generally refrains from doing anything a human being could not, with a number of obvious exceptions (which I’m sure someone will list).
The key to me in this is that, if there is an active God, phenomena may well occur in consequence of His plan – and it’s even logical to conclude that all that happens is a part of His plan. An otherwise not evident singularity in the operation of natural law is not a violation of that natural law – heating a substance follows a natural trend up to a point where it suddenly melts or boils, an abrupt change of state. Scripture does not explicitly say that Jesus fed the 5,000 by miraculously multiplying five loaves of bread and two fishes, nor that He transformed water into wine at Cana. What it does say leads believers to conclude that – but the specifics are that He took the bread and fish and distributed it, and everyone ate heartily with twelve baskets of leftovers, and that He directed that water be poured into earthenware jugs, from which, later, excellent wine was taken.
Nor, may I point out, does the Bible specify exactly what happened at the Resurrection. He is dead and in the tomb, then He is alive, outside the tomb, and appearing to folks, the tomb is empty, with the stone rolled away, and the graveclothes are folded neatly. He is clearly not an immaterial spirit – but the stories suggest that whatever He is, it’s not a human body resuscitated à la emergency room workers today. Paul in I Corinthians 15 goes into detailed speculation on what the “spiritual body” of the Resurrection is.
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Now, I’m quite clear that any belief other than “[Jesus] will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead” is quite heterodox. But, and I call Izzy to witness on this, Jesus’s First Coming was not what the Jews expected. And Jews today do not accept Jesus as Messiah specifically because the prophecies they saw as predicting the Messiah largely do not fit Him. While we can point to Old Testament quotations that find fulfillment in Him, they are generally not the ones that predict the Messiah for Jews.
In fact, the idea that Jesus is God Himself, specifically one Person of Three Persons in One Godhead, is quite simply blasphemy to Jews. They are usually too courteous to say this to Christians, but in point of fact, it’s on a par with how we’d feel at a graphic description of Jesus and the Twelve having an orgy with Mary Magdalene and Mary and Martha of Bethany, or the sort of claim I made.
==========
Here is the point at which my apparent weasel comes in. Because in saying that what I believed about the Second Coming, I am explicitly not talking about a bodily return of Jesus of Nazareth, on the mighty clouds of joy or anything else.
Rather, I’m looking at what Jesus did – not from a soteriological viewpoint (i.e., the Atonement) but the practical, everyday events of His life and its climax.
And I believe that we have so completely lost track of what He was up to, what His teachings and expectations were, that God needs to repeat the teaching process, quite possibly complete with a martyrdom, to attempt to recall us to His will. This is probably as shocking a statement as anything else I’ve said here – but I think it’s borne out by the sorts of things that gobear and lissener have linked to in past Pit threads, by some of the statements that supposedly devout Christians have said (e.g., “Anyone who is merciful is going against Christ” – a “devotional” that His4Ever found on the Net and posted on the Pizza Parlor), by the fact that many of my supposed brothers and sisters in Christ are more inclined to condemn me for heresy than to discuss what it is I have on my mind that made me say something so shocking.
Is this guy Jesus Himself come back? Quite likely not – though “with God all things are possible.” I would point out that the first time around, He spent 30 years in obscurity, with only the (questionable) Nativity stories and the age-12 Temple story lighting small spots, before He began His public ministry. So having Him born and grow up as a human being is not at odds with the suddenness of the Second Coming prophecies if you should take them literally – by that standard, when He is ready, He will manifest Himself in glory on the clouds. As for how He can be a Resurrected Spiritual Body in Heaven and also be reborn as a human being, I’d simply suggest that any belief system that can accommodate the Incarnation in the first place should not boggle at that idea.
But I believe that He will teach, with authority, today as Jesus did then – that He will fulfill that part of Jesus’s role (from the First Coming) for our day and age. And that His teachings will match up with the core of Jesus’s teachings – the stuff Jayjay pointed out. (BTW, Jayjay, you were very close to my teachings – it’s not that those are the only two laws, but that they are the normative laws to which all other rules and customs must conform, or be themselves sinful. Are the Ten Commandments thrown out? Absolutely not – but be careful to apply them to your own life in a way that matches the Two Great Commandments, and avoid like an incurable disease the temptation to try to apply them to somebody else’s life, to tell him or her what he/she is doing wrong.
I will observe quite explicitly that the kid never claimed any role of the sort I’m suggesting – but for reasons I’ll get into in the “biography” post, I believe that he will end up fulfilling the Teacher of Righteousness for our Days role.
And this should be something that Christians should jump to agree with – because what he ends up saying will be what Christ said back then (skipping over the hyperbole, concessions to Jewish beliefs of the day, and other stuff that badchad keeps offering up).