#American King James Version Bible

[officialyourdailyinspiration]

Ordo Salutis: Regeneration

3 Jesus answered and said to him, Truly, truly, I say to you, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

4 Nicodemus said to him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born? 5 Jesus answered, Truly, truly, I say to you, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Marvel not that I said to you, You must be born again. 8 The wind blows where it wants, and you hear the sound thereof, but can not tell from where it comes, and where it goes: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. — John 3:3-8 | American King James Version (KJVUS) The American King James Version is Produced by Stone Engelbrite. It is a simple word for modern word update from the King James English. Cross References: Psalm 135:7; Ecclesiastes 1:6; Ecclesiastes 11:5; Ezekiel 36:25-26; Matthew 19:24; Matthew 21:31; Mark 9:47; John 1:13; Romans 7:18; 1 Corinthians 15:50

#Jesus #Nicodemus #new birth #regeneration #John 3:3-8 #Gospel of John #New Testament #KJVUS #American King James Version Bible #Stone Engelbrite

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How plausible sentence generators are changing the bullshit wars

This Friday (September 8) at 10hPT/17hUK, I'm livestreaming "How To Dismantle the Internet" with Intelligence Squared.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

In my latest Locus Magazine column, "Plausible Sentence Generators," I describe how I unwittingly came to use – and even be impressed by – an AI chatbot – and what this means for a specialized, highly salient form of writing, namely, "bullshit":

https://locusmag.com/2023/09/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-plausible-sentence-generators/

Here's what happened: I got stranded at JFK due to heavy weather and an air-traffic control tower fire that locked down every westbound flight on the east coast. The American Airlines agent told me to try going standby the next morning, and advised that if I booked a hotel and saved my taxi receipts, I would get reimbursed when I got home to LA.

But when I got home, the airline's reps told me they would absolutely not reimburse me, that this was their policy, and they didn't care that their representative had promised they'd make me whole. This was so frustrating that I decided to take the airline to small claims court: I'm no lawyer, but I know that a contract takes place when an offer is made and accepted, and so I had a contract, and AA was violating it, and stiffing me for over $400.

The problem was that I didn't know anything about filing a small claim. I've been ripped off by lots of large American businesses, but none had pissed me off enough to sue – until American broke its contract with me.

So I googled it. I found a website that gave step-by-step instructions, starting with sending a "final demand" letter to the airline's business office. They offered to help me write the letter, and so I clicked and I typed and I wrote a pretty stern legal letter.

Now, I'm not a lawyer, but I have worked for a campaigning law-firm for over 20 years, and I've spent the same amount of time writing about the sins of the rich and powerful. I've seen a lot of threats, both those received by our clients and sent to me.

I've been threatened by everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Ralph Lauren to the Sacklers. I've been threatened by lawyers representing the billionaire who owned NSOG roup, the notoroious cyber arms-dealer. I even got a series of vicious, baseless threats from lawyers representing LAX's private terminal.

So I know a thing or two about writing a legal threat! I gave it a good effort and then submitted the form, and got a message asking me to wait for a minute or two. A couple minutes later, the form returned a new version of my letter, expanded and augmented. Now, my letter was a little scary – but this version was bowel-looseningly terrifying.

I had unwittingly used a chatbot. The website had fed my letter to a Large Language Model, likely ChatGPT, with a prompt like, "Make this into an aggressive, bullying legal threat." The chatbot obliged.

I don't think much of LLMs. After you get past the initial party trick of getting something like, "instructions for removing a grilled-cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible," the novelty wears thin:

https://www.emergentmind.com/posts/write-a-biblical-verse-in-the-style-of-the-king-james

Yes, science fiction magazines are inundated with LLM-written short stories, but the problem there isn't merely the overwhelming quantity of machine-generated stories – it's also that they suck. They're bad stories:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence

LLMs generate naturalistic prose. This is an impressive technical feat, and the details are genuinely fascinating. This series by Ben Levinstein is a must-read peek under the hood:

https://benlevinstein.substack.com/p/how-to-think-about-large-language

But "naturalistic prose" isn't necessarily good prose. A lot of naturalistic language is awful. In particular, legal documents are fucking terrible. Lawyers affect a stilted, stylized language that is both officious and obfuscated.

The LLM I accidentally used to rewrite my legal threat transmuted my own prose into something that reads like it was written by a $600/hour paralegal working for a $1500/hour partner at a white-show law-firm. As such, it sends a signal: "The person who commissioned this letter is so angry at you that they are willing to spend $600 to get you to cough up the $400 you owe them. Moreover, they are so well-resourced that they can afford to pursue this claim beyond any rational economic basis."

Let's be clear here: these kinds of lawyer letters aren't good writing; they're a highly specific form of bad writing. The point of this letter isn't to parse the text, it's to send a signal. If the letter was well-written, it wouldn't send the right signal. For the letter to work, it has to read like it was written by someone whose prose-sense was irreparably damaged by a legal education.

Here's the thing: the fact that an LLM can manufacture this once-expensive signal for free means that the signal's meaning will shortly change, forever. Once companies realize that this kind of letter can be generated on demand, it will cease to mean, "You are dealing with a furious, vindictive rich person." It will come to mean, "You are dealing with someone who knows how to type 'generate legal threat' into a search box."

Legal threat letters are in a class of language formally called "bullshit":

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on-bullshit

LLMs may not be good at generating science fiction short stories, but they're excellent at generating bullshit. For example, a university prof friend of mine admits that they and all their colleagues are now writing grad student recommendation letters by feeding a few bullet points to an LLM, which inflates them with bullshit, adding puffery to swell those bullet points into lengthy paragraphs.

Naturally, the next stage is that profs on the receiving end of these recommendation letters will ask another LLM to summarize them by reducing them to a few bullet points. This is next-level bullshit: a few easily-grasped points are turned into a florid sheet of nonsense, which is then reconverted into a few bullet-points again, though these may only be tangentially related to the original.

What comes next? The reference letter becomes a useless signal. It goes from being a thing that a prof has to really believe in you to produce, whose mere existence is thus significant, to a thing that can be produced with the click of a button, and then it signifies nothing.

We've been through this before. It used to be that sending a letter to your legislative representative meant a lot. Then, automated internet forms produced by activists like me made it far easier to send those letters and lawmakers stopped taking them so seriously. So we created automatic dialers to let you phone your lawmakers, this being another once-powerful signal. Lowering the cost of making the phone call inevitably made the phone call mean less.

Today, we are in a war over signals. The actors and writers who've trudged through the heat-dome up and down the sidewalks in front of the studios in my neighborhood are sending a very powerful signal. The fact that they're fighting to prevent their industry from being enshittified by plausible sentence generators that can produce bullshit on demand makes their fight especially important.

Chatbots are the nuclear weapons of the bullshit wars. Want to generate 2,000 words of nonsense about "the first time I ate an egg," to run overtop of an omelet recipe you're hoping to make the number one Google result? ChatGPT has you covered. Want to generate fake complaints or fake positive reviews? The Stochastic Parrot will produce 'em all day long.

As I wrote for Locus: "None of this prose is good, none of it is really socially useful, but there’s demand for it. Ironically, the more bullshit there is, the more bullshit filters there are, and this requires still more bullshit to overcome it."

Meanwhile, AA still hasn't answered my letter, and to be honest, I'm so sick of bullshit I can't be bothered to sue them anymore. I suppose that's what they were counting on.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/07/govern-yourself-accordingly/#robolawyers

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #chatbots #plausible sentence generators #robot lawyers #robolawyers #ai #ml #machine learning #artificial intelligence #stochastic parrots #bullshit #bullshit generators #the bullshit wars #llms #large language models #writing #Ben Levinstein

[boybff]

wait hiiiii hi hello bestie i didn’t know u like video essays!! i’ve been trying to find more to watch recently, do u have any other recs? about any topic 👀

HIIIIII bestie Robin, are you ready?? After harvesting my Youtube subscription and liked video lists here is what I have compiled. I'm gonna put my current top 5 video recommendations and then the rest of the list, under the cut, is organized by creator.

Why Are There So Many Confederate Vampires

The art of religious interpretation (midnight mass vs god’s not dead)

Defunctland: Walt Disney's City of the Future, E.P.C.O.T.

Hogwarts Legacy, JK Rowling, and Trans Advocacy

Cultural Inspirations in Avatar: The Last Airbender Book 1 - Water 

CHANNELS

biz barclay - hilarious, brilliant, my best friend who drinks wine and weaves me long insightful stories while sitting on the dresser or in the bathtub. The vast amount of knowledge, historical 

understanding snapewives: religion, fandom, sociology, & erotica

Goncharov (1973) video essay

The art of religious interpretation (midnight mass vs god’s not dead)

Xiran Jay Zhao - Author of one of my FAVE YA novels, “Iron Widow” (which is a MUST read). I always want more avatar content that focuses on cultural inspirations from trusted sources. Xiran taught me so much about the avatar universe I already loved as well as valuable critiques. They also do retellings of historical events such as- Bisexual Han Dynasty Emperors and Forgotten Warrior Queen - Fu Hao.

Cultural Inspirations in Avatar: The Last Airbender Book 1 - Water 

Cultural Inspirations in Avatar: The Last Airbender Book 2 - Earth 

Cultural Inspirations in Avatar: The Last Airbender Book 3 - Fire 

Fundie Fridays - Jen, a leftist queer feminist, and her husband James examine different aspects of Christian fundamentalism, American conservative politics and pop culture. She has remade a lot of her older videos so make sure to watch the updated versions! She was also featured in the Amazon docuseries “Shiny Happy People” which I would HIGHLY recommend. 

Vacation Bible School of Rock (3 part video series History of Contemporary Christian Music)

Ken Ham’s Creation Museum & Ark Encounter

Ask a Mortician - Caitlin Doughty!!! The adult Wednesday Addams we should have got. So compassionate, informed, and moving!! I love her work and she has taught me so much about what it means to have a relationship with death and grief. Her work deals with heavy topics and you can tell she does this work from a deeply respectful, informed place. 

The Lake That Never Gives Up Her Dead

Let’s Visit the Churches Made of Human Skulls

Why are Black and White Funeral Homes STILL Separate? With Dr. Kami Fletcher

Iconic Corpse Series

Princess Weekes -  Nuanced video essays on pop culture, race, feminism, and other social issues. Takes time to break down complex concepts, their origins and material consequences. The essay on confederate vampires and the connection later made to sci-fi media like Firefly were so paradigm shifting to me!

Why Are There So Many Confederate Vampires

The Magical Negroes of Stephen King

Ro Ramdin - Poetic, biting, and introspective essays on pop culture. 

Do Celebrities Hate Their Fans? (Doja Cat, Frank Ocean)

Hogwarts Legacy, JK Rowling, and Trans Advocacy

DefunctLand- History of extinct theme parks and themed entertainment experiences. 

Defunctland: Walt Disney's City of the Future, E.P.C.O.T.

Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery

Mina Le - Fashion, movies and pop culture

WHY IS EVERYTHING SO UGLY: The Curse of Modernism

FAIRYTALE COSTUMES: it’s giving renfaire but why?

Quinton Reviews - Extensive videos covering niche topics, most popular for Nickelodeon deep dive retrospectives.

How Documentaries Lie to You

The ICarly/Victorious Saga Playlist

TheEpicNate315 - yea i fucking love endless hours of useless skyrim lore because the conspiracies are so deep and I have to do 0 of the research to get all of the information years of scouts worked to piece together! 

The Skyrim Mysteries Iceberg (Part 1 of 4)

The Fallout Mysteries Iceberg (Part 1 of 2, incomplete series)

Mike’s Mic - Silly, goofy, and thorough breakdowns of nostalgic TV shows

Any of his unhinged recaps - LOST, Pretty Little Liars, Glee

Tiffanyferg - Media criticism and commentary

Internet Analysis Series 

Zoë Ligon - sex educator, artist, and writer, who also owns SpectrumBoutique.com, a health and education oriented sex toy store. Such a special place in my heart for her!! Her bondage mini-documentary with Midori was so touching. 

Sex Stuff | Japanese Rope Bondage with Midori

Channels Newer to Me

Broey Deschanel - a mixture of film analyses, retrospectives, politics and just absolutely overthinking anything to do with pop culture

Elvis (2022) and the Utter Mediocrity of Biopics 

Meeptop - rambling about movies and stuff

Who is Dahmer Even Made For?

LadyJenevia - discussing entertainment media content including films, television series, etc. Expect to find reviews of recent cinematic releases, video essays on older releases, and interviews with talent from the film/television industry

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and The Art of Hiding in Plain Sight (Netflix Review/Video Essay)

As a disclaimer, I am not endorsing any creator fully and if you see someone you think I should not promote please reach out to me so I can edit this list. As a general rule of thumb the more I had to write about someone, the more informed the recommendation.

#if you read/watch this monster list thank you and I hope you enjoy!! #you can really see my niche interests displayed here lmao #send me asks if you have questions! or have recommendations for me!! #boybff reccomendations #video analysis #video essay reccomendations #video essay #YouTube recommendations

[morbidology]

James Byrd Jr., a divorced father of three and former salesman, was renowned for his infectious positivity and sociable nature. Whether it was a lively gathering or a mundane day, James infused life into every moment. Often, he could be spotted singing and dancing while tending to his lawn. “He was the funniest person you’d ever want to mee,” recollected Flora Bartee, a neighbour of James’ parents. “Everyone around here knew him. There was no ingrained hatred or anything like that,” recollected his sister, Clara Taylor.

Despite a turbulent past that included a six-year prison stint for theft and parole violation, James was determined to redeem himself upon his release in 1996. Settling into an apartment at the Pineview public housing project in Jasper, Texas, he seemed to be on an upward trajectory. However, an arm injury sustained years prior and a seizure disorder rendered him unable to work, relying solely on disability benefits. To supplement his income, he took up lawn-mowing gigs around town.

On the 7th of June, he attended his niece’s bridal shower at his parents’ home in Jasper. Before leaving, he gave his older sister, Stella Brumley, a big hug and she reminded him to get ready for Father’s Day. It was family tradition that all eight of the siblings would gather for the Sunday service at their parents’ church. “I got my suit in the cleaners. I’m going to be ready,” he reassured his sister and headed down the driveway, ready to walk home.

As he walked down the dirt road, three men pulled up alongside him in their truck. They were: 31-year-old Lawrence Russel Brewer of Sulphur Springs, 23-year-old Shawn Allen Berry of Jasper and 23-year-old John William King, also of Jasper. All three men had served time in prison and had ties to the Ku Klux Klan or the Aryan Brotherhood.

The Aryan Brotherhood got its start on the West Coast in the 1960s. It boasts of members throughout prisons in the United States and exhibits an intense hatred of African Americans and Jews. They considered prison ripe recruiting grounds for the organization. The Aryan Brotherhood has ties to the Aryan Nation, an Idaho-based paramilitary organization that advocates racial violence and white supremacy.

James jumped into the truck bed and the men first of all drove to a convenience store east of Jasper. There are a number of different versions of events as to what happened next in regards to who was driving the vehicle and who decided James’ fate. What is known, however, is that the men drove James up to a small clearing in the woods on Huff Creek Road. Here, James was dragged from the truck and severely beaten, urinated on and defecated on.

During the beating, John reportedly said: “We’re starting The turner Diaries early.” The Turner Diaries was written in 1978 by William Pierce, the head of the National Alliance, one of the largest and most organized neo-Nazi groups within the United States. It is kind of like a bible for right-wing extremists and calls for the violent overthrow of the Federal government as well as the systematic killing of Jews and people of colour.

Following the brutal beating, James was spray painted on the face and then chained by his ankles to the pickup truck, a symbolic remnant of slavery. The men then drove the truck, dragging James behind it. The three men didn’t stop driving as James’s flesh ripped from his body as they weaved from one side of the road to the other side.

They didn’t stop after they came around a sharp turn and James’s body bounced into a ditch at the side of the road, hitting the ragged end of a concrete culvert just below his arm. They didn’t stop when the impact ripped James’s arm, shoulder, neck and head from the rest of his body. They continued to drive for a further mile with just half of James’s body. They finally stopped the truck after three miles, when they ran out of paved road.

After investigators arrived at the church where James’s mutilated body was found, they set up the task of identifying him and retrieving the rest of his body. It wouldn’t be long until his other remains were discovered. His head, neck, and right arm were recovered along the road leading up to the church. There were smears of blood running along the road as well as James’ dentures and pieces of flesh that had ripped from his body here and there. Along the bloody trail, investigators found James’ tennis shoes, shirt, wallet and keys.

The trail of James’ life coming to a cruel end was clear. His blood was smeared along more than two miles of country road.

The three killers were quickly identified and apprehended. They all stood separately and were convicted. Brewer was executed in 2011, following by King in 2019. Berry was sentenced to life in prison and will be eligible for parole in 2038.

#James Byrd Jr #True Crime #Racism #Civil Rights

[tajcox]

“How art thou fallen from heauen (o Lucifer) thou faire mornige childe? hast thou gotten a fall euen to the grounde, thou that (notwithstondinge) dyddest subdue the people?”

-The Coverdale Bible 1535

“How art thou fallen from heauen (O Lucifer) thou faire mornynge childe? how hast thou gotten a fall euen to the grounde, and art become weaker then the people?”

- The Great Bible 1539

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning? and cut down to the ground, which didst cast lots upon the nations?”

-Geneva Bible 1560

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!

- King James Version 1611

“How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low”

-English Revised Version 1885

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O day-star, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, that didst lay low the nations!”

-American Standard Version 1971

“How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations!”

-New International Version 1973

“How you are fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How you are cut down to the ground, You who weakened the nations!”

- New King James 1982

“How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low!”

- English Standard Version 2002

Be careful!! God had made the Bible to be understood plainly. Overtime men had changed words and or phrases thinking that it’s a necessity to be more plain, while in reality their mystifying that which is plain due to traditions. Gods word as a whole, is a perfect chain, one portion linking into and explaining another. True seekers for truth need not err, for not only is the Word of God plain and simple in declaring the way of life, but the Holy Spirit is given as a guide in understanding the way to life therein revealed.

#seventhdayadventist #jesus christ #bible verse #christianity #christians #god #religion #scripture #biblical #god's love #love #faith in the lord #faith in jesus #faith in god #keep the faith #christian faith #faith #faithinchrist #bibleverse #bible reading #biblestudy #the bible #bible scripture #bible quote #bible study #bible #bibleprophecy #10 commandments #holy bible #christian bible

[vital-information]

"In 1946, the term 'homosexuals' appeared for the first time in an English Bible. This new figure appeared in a list of sinners barred--according to a verse in the Apostles Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians--from inheriting the kingdom of God. The word change was made by leading Bible scholars, members of the translation committee that labored for over a decade to produce the Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible. With an approach inspired by text-critical scholarship, many of their choices upset readers of the older King James Version, the favored Bible of Protestant America since the colonial era. Amid the outrage over other changes--to the red-letter words of Jesus and the old Shakespearean idiom--another modernizing innovation went virtual unremarked. Two enigmatic Greek nouns, referenced in the King James as 'effeminate' and 'abusers of themselves with mankind,' now appeared as a single, streamlined 'homosexual.' Subsequent Bible commentaries approached the new term as age-old tradition...

Some Bible readers, however, responded with surprise to this textual change. In everyday use, the verse in I Corinthians had other meanings. The author of a 1956 advice book on how to write sermons recounted the embarrassing tale of one minister's well-loved sermon. That sermon, delivered on various occasions, expanded on the 'general meaning' of the Apostle Paul's reference to the 'effeminate,' which the pastor took as warning against 'the soft, the pliable, those who take the easy road.' The take-away point was that Christians must undertake the difficult path of faith. It was a fine sermon, or so the pastor thought, until he read the RSV. He discovered 'to his amazement and chagrin; that 'effeminate' was translated 'homosexuals.' The confusion was a lesson, the author of this advice book chided, on the need to use recent translations. A check through earlier Bible commentaries confirms that outdated reference tools may indeed have contributed to this pastor's error. An eariler edition of The Interpreter's Bible, published in 1929, said nothing at all about homosexuality in its commentary on the same verse in I Corinthians. It noted that the Apostle Paul was keenly aware of the 'idolatry and immorality' of the pagan world. However, the named vice that so perturbed the apostle was 'self indulgence of appetite and speech,' an interpretation that more readily fit with the pastor's call to a disciplined faith. If Christianity did indeed set itself against homosexuality from the first, then this popular Christian reference text neglected to make that prohibition clear.

Several scholars of American religion have puzzled over the peculiar silences of early twentieth-century Christian texts on the topic of same-sex sexuality. After surveying the published Christian literature of that time, Randall Balmer and Lauren Winner concluded that during those decades, 'the safest thing to say about homosexuality was nothing.' They note that even the published commentary on 'sodomy,' which would seem to be the clearest antecedent to later talk about homosexuality, yielded little that would illumine a long tradition of same-sex regulation. Although many Bible reference tools mentioned that damnable 'sin of Sodom,' the muddled and circular commentary on this 'loathsome vice' offered little that clarified its nature. Historian Rebecca Davis, on her own hunt to find Christian teachings about homosexuality, similarly notes the profound absence in early and mid-twentieth century Protestant literature--and especially in the writing by conservative fundamentalists. 'The extant printed record,' she observes, 'suggests that they avoided discussions of homosexuality almost entirely.' Adding further substance to this void are the findings from Alfred Kinsey's study of the sexual behavior of white American men, conducted between 1936 and 1946. The study suggested that Christians, although well acquainted with the sinfulness of masturbation and premarital intercourse, knew very little about what their churches had to say about same-sex acts. 'There has not been so frequent or so free discussion of the sinfulness of the homosexual in religious literature,' Kinsey wrote. 'Consequently, it is not unusual to find even devoutly religious persons who become involved in the homosexual without any clear understanding of the church's attitude on the subject.' Before the 1940s, the Bible's seemingly plain condemnation of homosexuality was not plain at all.

...

What this book [Reforming Sodom] shows is that the broad common sense about the Bible's specifically same-sex meaning was an invention of the twentieth century. Today's antihomosexual animus, that is, is not the singular residue of an ancient damnation. Rather, it is the product of a more complex modern synthesis. To find the influential generators of that synthesis, moreover, we should look not to fundamentalist preachers but to their counterparts. Religious liberals, urbane modernizers of the twentieth century, studiously un-muddled the confused category of 'sodomitical sin' and assigned to it a singular same-sex meaning. The ideas informing this shift germinated out of the therapeutic sciences of psychiatry and psychology, an emerging field of the late nineteenth century that promised scientific frameworks for measuring and studying human sexual behavior. Liberal Protestants were early adopters of these scientific insights, which percolated through various early twentieth-century projects of moral reform. Among the yield from the convivial pairing of medicine and morality was the midcentury translation of the RSV. The newly focused homosexual prohibitions evidenced the grafting of new therapeutic terms onto ancient roots. The scores of subsequent Bible translations produced in later decades adopted and sharpened the RSV's durable precedent. In the shelves of late twentieth-century translations and commentaries--none more influential than the 1978 New International Version, which quickly displaced the King James as America's best-selling Bible--American Christians read what might be called a 'homosexualized' Bible. Instead of the archaic sinners and enigmatic sodomy talk found in the King James, these modern Bibles spoke clearly and plainly about the tradition's prohibition against same-sex behavior. The subsequent debate about the implications of these self-evident meanings overlooked a nearly invisible truth: the Bible's plain speech about homosexuality issued from a newly implanted therapeutic tongue."

Heather R. White, Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights

#queer history #did you ask to be made holy

[tanadrin]

i was listening to an extended podcast interview with dan mcclellan and he was talking about how the LDS church really finds itself in a pickle regarding the king james version of the bible--the KJV is a bad translation, especially for modern times, one which obtained historical prominence in american protestantism really through a fluke during the second great awakening, but the other mormon standard works, especially the book of mormon itself, are so steeped in kjv-esque language that it can't really abandon the kjv without losing a lot of the intentional literary resonances in those other texts. not to mention the role that using the kjv plays in a sort of legitimacy-building effort with other protestant denominations.

but other languages into which mormons translate their scripture for the purposes of proselytization don't have anything like the KJV--that is to say, they don't use an intentionally archaizing, hard-to-understand version of the bible that nevertheless forms an important part of both general literary history and specifically has outsized cachet in local protestant churches. the kjv is a really weird literary object!

[perfectlyineffable]

A Companion to Owls

The season 2 episode 2 minisode title was one I didn't recognise at first, and after a quick bit of digging I found something interesting.

The line is a reference to Job 30:29, variously translated as “I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls” (King James Bible), “I am a brother to jackals, And a companion to ostriches” (American Standard Version), or “I have become a brother of jackals, a companion of owls” (New International Version). I'm inclined to believe the King James Bible is what's being used here, both because of the precision of the words in the title, and the clause before it.

The words themselves are, I believe, spoken by Job, talking about his new horrific place in life as a result of the bet, so obviously it's very appropriate to the Bible story that serves as the setting to this minisode. In particular, the line apparently means “my loud complaints and cries resemble the doleful screams of wild animals, or of the most frightful monsters” (i.e. I am alike to the lowest of the low, and I am not listened to and perhaps instead feared).

For the ‘dragons’ translation, it’s worth remembering that “according the 1828 Webster's Dictionary, when used in scripture, 'dragon' seems to refer to a large serpent”. Who do we know that that might refer to?

So while the line is spoken by Job originally, as a minisode title it might as well be talking about Aziraphale - his fears about having fallen/become a demon (his assumption on the rock afterwards) and his new reality about now existing in a grey area on Earth, as a metaphorical brother to (or on the same, low level as) Crowley/Crawley.

(This meta was written late at night after some quick googling, and posted while at work, so apologies if I've made any errors - I'm not a scholar of the Bible by any stretch of the imagination. Feel free to correct me if you have any better Bible knowledge!)

#a companion to owls #meta #freyja talks #job #aziraphale #anthony j. crowley #season 2 spoilers #good omens season 2 #season 2

[officialyourdailyinspiration]

A Prophecy Against Tyre

1 And it came to pass in the eleventh year, in the first day of the month, that the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2 Son of man, because that Tyrus has said against Jerusalem, Aha, she is broken that was the gates of the people: she is turned to me: I shall be replenished, now she is laid waste: 3 Therefore thus said the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against you, O Tyrus, and will cause many nations to come up against you, as the sea causes his waves to come up. 4 And they shall destroy the walls of Tyrus, and break down her towers: I will also scrape her dust from her, and make her like the top of a rock. 5 It shall be a place for the spreading of nets in the middle of the sea: for I have spoken it, said the Lord GOD: and it shall become a spoil to the nations. 6 And her daughters which are in the field shall be slain by the sword; and they shall know that I am the LORD.

7 For thus said the Lord GOD; Behold, I will bring on Tyrus Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, a king of kings, from the north, with horses, and with chariots, and with horsemen, and companies, and much people. 8 He shall slay with the sword your daughters in the field: and he shall make a fort against you, and cast a mount against you, and lift up the buckler against you. 9 And he shall set engines of war against your walls, and with his axes he shall break down your towers. 10 By reason of the abundance of his horses their dust shall cover you: your walls shall shake at the noise of the horsemen, and of the wheels, and of the chariots, when he shall enter into your gates, as men enter into a city wherein is made a breach. 11 With the hoofs of his horses shall he tread down all your streets: he shall slay your people by the sword, and your strong garrisons shall go down to the ground. 12 And they shall make a spoil of your riches, and make a prey of your merchandise: and they shall break down your walls, and destroy your pleasant houses: and they shall lay your stones and your timber and your dust in the middle of the water. 13 And I will cause the noise of your songs to cease; and the sound of your harps shall be no more heard. 14 And I will make you like the top of a rock: you shall be a place to spread nets on; you shall be built no more: for I the LORD have spoken it, said the Lord GOD.

15 Thus said the Lord GOD to Tyrus; Shall not the isles shake at the sound of your fall, when the wounded cry, when the slaughter is made in the middle of you? 16 Then all the princes of the sea shall come down from their thrones, and lay away their robes, and put off their broidered garments: they shall clothe themselves with trembling; they shall sit on the ground, and shall tremble at every moment, and be astonished at you.

17 And they shall take up a lamentation for you, and say to you, How are you destroyed, that were inhabited of seafaring men, the renowned city, which were strong in the sea, she and her inhabitants, which cause their terror to be on all that haunt it!

18 Now shall the isles tremble in the day of your fall; yes, the isles that are in the sea shall be troubled at your departure.

19 For thus said the Lord GOD; When I shall make you a desolate city, like the cities that are not inhabited; when I shall bring up the deep on you, and great waters shall cover you; 20 When I shall bring you down with them that descend into the pit, with the people of old time, and shall set you in the low parts of the earth, in places desolate of old, with them that go down to the pit, that you be not inhabited; and I shall set glory in the land of the living; 21 I will make you a terror, and you shall be no more: though you be sought for, yet shall you never be found again, said the Lord GOD. — Ezekiel 26 | American King James Version (KJVUS) The American King James Version is Produced by Stone Engelbrite. It is a simple word for modern word update from the King James English. Cross References: Leviticus 14:41; Deuteronomy 13:16; 2 Samuel 5:11; 2 Chronicles 32:27; Ezra 7:12; Isaiah 5:28; Isaiah 5:30; Isaiah 8:7; Isaiah 14:12; Isaiah 23:5; Isaiah 41:5; Jeremiah 4:13; Jeremiah 20:4; Ezekiel 16:46; Ezekiel 21:22; Ezekiel 25:7; Ezekiel 25:17; Matthew 11:23; Luke 19:43; 1 Peter 5:5; Revelation 18:21-22

#Lord #prophecy #Tyre #Ezekiel 26 #Book of Ezekiel #Old Testament #KJVUS #American King James Version Bible #Stone Engelbrite

[americanbrffan]

Why does it even matter if they were tourists? To me, that’s such a stupid talking point, to be honest. If I were a tourist or a bystander there for example & even if I wasn’t a fan of William, I imagine I still would have loved to have caught a glimpse of the heir to the british throne just because I’m interested in history. That’s Queen Elizabeth II’s grandson. That’s the next King in the line of monarchs that included Henry VIII, etc. The most famous playwright known to man, William Shakespeare, wrote plays about that monarchy. There’s a King James Version of the Bible. People still refer to the Victorian era when talking about a certain aesthetic, among other things. Maybe a lot of people there were just curious to see Diana’s son. And what about it? We’re not saying William is still the hearthrob that he was in the 90s, but he’s the heir, he’s the next king. People being curious about him comes with the position. They aren’t popstars and this isn’t a competition of who has more fans, although sometimes it feels like that. Like, so what if they were tourists? It’s such a stupid argument to me lol.

The fact is NYC is *always* filled with tourists. According to my godmother, a Manhattan native, the only way to tell tourists from New Yorkers is by how fast they walk. 🤣 And unless a New Yorker actually *wants* to be in a touristy place (as she had to be when we visited-lol), then they'll do everything they can to stay away.

All to say - (1) New Yorkers who made their way to Station 10 were there because they *wanted* to be. (2) American tourists who went there did so because Prince William's the most popular international figure among Americans. If you're visiting NYC and hear he's gonna be somewhere, of course you're going to try to see him! And lastly (3) If you're an international tourist and hear Prince William's visiting, as you said, who wouldn't want to meet the next in line to the British throne?

I have to hand it to everyone who was downtown yesterday because I've got to imagine it was a logistical nightmare with security barriers everywhere due to William, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and President Biden within a few miles of each other.

[adtothebone]

That this $60 all-American Trump Bible uses the King James* Version because it’s in the public domain and also adds non-Bible content (Lee Greenwood lyrics!?) makes this latest grift even skeezier.

*King o’ England

#Youtube

[talenlee]

KJV Supremacy And Antisemitism

KJV Supremacy And Antisemitism

If you ask an American Christian (in this case used to refer to the type of Christianity, not the type of American) about the conception of ‘Christianity’ you will usually see a definition of Christianity that is unconsciously structured around a set of concentric circles, where each layer in you progress, the more and more legitimately Christian the remainder is, depending on what the current threat is. If you’re looking at things where there being lots of Christians is a good thing, ‘Christian’ includes everyone who even says ‘god damn’ at some point, even if the last time they went to church was inhaling near a parson on the train. If it’s important to exclude people (because of, say, their disagreement with you on whether or not gay people should be burned alive), then suddenly, the mindset wants to pull back, across different boundaries of ‘really’ Christian.

Some of these boundaries are obvious and some of them are less obvious. People who never attend church, they’re not really Christian, even if they claim to be. People who attend church very rarely, they’re less Christian, but they are in a different layer to the first group. And you can go further and further into the layers of this horrible onion and find really specific nitpicky things that legitimise the American Christianity of a person, you’re going to find one particular boundary that’s been set up is about choice of Biblical translation. What’s more, amazingly, the translation that seems to centralise this mindset the most, and one of those dog-whistles that shows you’re dealing with the Shithead Brigade is a deference and reverence reserved for one, particular, correct translation of the Bible: The King James Version.

Man, America loves its kings.

The King James Version of the Bible was first put together in the early 1600s, and for the time, there’s a lot of conservative writing. The idea was to make it so that the Bible, when read aloud in public, would convey a proper tone of seriousness and importance, which meant that even for the day its grammar and word choice was pretty pompous. It’s that particular Biblical Speak which is only really grammatically coherent for a period just before the King James Bible was written, and it’s where you get a lot of thees and thous and evereth they dideth the thingeth.

It’s also a translation with a lot of problems!

One particular problem is that it flattens out some terms. This can happen in any translation naturally; for example, when we translate Magic: The Gathering cards to Japanese, while we in English have a bunch of different terms for different, specific types of undead like zombie, skeleton, ghost, spirit, wight, ghoul and ghast, these terms are all kind of just covered by a single word in Japan, which created some challenges in translating these card names meaningfully in other languages. That’s okay, translation is an art, not a science, but you can see a lot about what people do and don’t translate.

Sometimes this is about one language being more specific than another; in the Bible’s base text, there are about fifteen different words that the KJV translates into English as ‘Prince.’ More damningly, there’s one word that gets translated as ‘servant’ when one type of person has them, and translated as ‘slave’ when another type of person has them, which is pretty explicitly an ideological choice. This serves to obscure the role of slavery in the Biblical text, and also, tends to ambiguate the way that slavery works. Another fun one is that Hades and Gehenna, two different ideas in the original text, are invoked, they both get translated in the KJV as ‘Hell,’ a subject on which the Bible is normally pretty sparse.

Fact is, Biblical translation is hard. There are words in the Bible that appear in no other text, anywhere, and whose meaning we have to kind of guess at. Sometimes that guess is easy, sometimes the guess is a bit broader. I’ve talked about Shamgar, Son of Anath, a folk hero who murdered a bunch of people with a ?????. The typical translation of that ????? is ‘ox goad,’ but we have a term for an ox goad, and it’s not that term.

These are known as hapax legomenon, which is also a great name for a military rank that’s meant to look like some kind of cube-shaped chicken. There are a lot of these in ancient texts, and when you translate them, there’s different ways to handle that. None of these methods, though, can convey to you what the original text meant – and in English, we don’t have a meaningful literary way to convey ‘untranslated,’ or ‘untranslatable.’ It’s funny, it’s a byproduct of our position in the world, this supremacy we’re used to that there’s an implied relationship to other languages that you shouldn’t have to see untranslated words, that you should be able to convey everything in English alone.

But that’s general translation problems. Because these American Christian mindsets that anyone using a non-KJV translation are ultimately, as with almost every time I talk about this fundie stuff, conspiracy theorists. The idea runs that any translation after the KJV is corrupted, because it changes God’s word. How do you know it changes God’s word? Because it’s not the KJV. But, you might try to futilely argue, the KJV is just a translation, it’s not the core text. But, but the response comes, if there’s a difference between the translations that implies the KJV is wrong, and that can’t be the case.

Some of these folk commit to the next step, which is to say that the King James Version of the Bible is divinely inspired. This perspective is ridiculous if you’re outside of the space, but you gotta remember, this is a community that leaps to magic really quickly to explain things. But some don’t, and the lack of willingness to commit to that is tied to instead trying to demonstrate some scholarship that undermines other, later translations.

Funnily enough they very rarely point out those problems I underscore – you know, the way that some translation is impossible. Instead, it’s much more likely to pick around specific points of doctrine that the KJV kinda enforces (there’s a whole argument about the positioning of a comma representing the trinity) and therefore, the lack of those specific points mean the new texts are an attempt to lure Christians away from true things and undermine these important doctrines (that can be undermined by the moving of a comma).

But okay.

So why.

Why did the Bible only get perfected when it was translated into English, and why is it every subsequent translation is in fact an evil permutation enforced by Roman Catholics or liberal Protestants, depending on who you ask. Who benefits from this, you ask.

And then they take a deep breath and whisper the Jewwwwwwwwws–

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#FundieStuff

[starspanner]

The John Verses from Nona the Ninth

Mostly using the New Oxford Study Bible, a Catholic edition, double checked with other editions. 

20:8 -- Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed.

5:20 -- The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be astonished.

15:23 -- Who-ever hates me hates my father also.

5:18 -- For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the sabbath, but was also calling God his own father, thereby making himself equal to God.

8:1 -- while Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Some editions kind of mush this with the end of 7:53 -- And they went back, each to their own home.

5:1 -- After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

19:18 -- There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them.

3:20 -- For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so their deeds may not be exposed.

9:22 -- His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue.

1:20 -- He confessed and he did not deny it, but confessed, "I am not the Messiah."

5:4 -- Is a verse NOT FOUND in some modern Catholic bibles. The Oxford simply ignores its existence. My New American Bible Fireside Study Edition says: "Toward the end of the second century in the West and among the fourth-century Greek Fathers, an additional verse was known: 

'For [from time to time] an angel of the Lord used to come down into the pool; and the water was stirred up, so the first one to get in [after the stirring of the water] was healed of whatever disease afflicted him.' 

This verse is missing from all early Greek manuscripts and the earliest versions, including the original Vulgate. It's vocabulary is markedly non-Johannine." Ronald Knox retains it with almost that exact wording in his translation, and merely adds in a footnote, "This verse is omitted in some manuscripts."  My King James bible includes it.

#The John verses looked up and written down #no spoilers beyond that #Nona the Ninth #nona the ninth spoilers #Nona Spoilers #still tagging for spoilers #tlt #yes I have many bibles wanna fight about it? #haven't finished the book yet #but I've been curious about these verses

[papirouge]

im interested in converting to christianism but im confused as i dont know what are the differences between christians, catholics, orthodoxes and protestants. how do i chose? how do i know which one is the correct one? i heard there are also several different bibles? i got one free "the bible" in my non-christian country christians and i dont even know which version it is

Basically speaking, the biggest crux of opposition between Catholics and Protestans is that Catholics worship Mary, pray with idols and sustain the idea the Mary remained virgin AFTER Jesus birth, when the very two commandments and Matthew 12:46-50 contradict such positions😭 They also have a whole literature called Cathechism where they establish a set of rules and you'll often see Catholics pull it out to explain their doctrine...to defend their belief system going against what Bible explicitely condemns (ex: praying for the dead, idols, saints worshipping, etc).

Protestant have their whole share of questionnable beliefs too - especially USAmerican evangelicals. They're the ones who've been managing the church like a whole business - which is ironically what they've been accusing the Catholics of doing during the Roman Catholic Empire era lel. They don't have the same concern about social issues as Catholics do (in Europe, many NGO are Catholics, and help the poor, offer shelter, etc) ; they tend to be quite hypocrite too : like they'll go off against gays and abortion but will be silent about any social injustice they'll snarkily downplay as "woke culture".....

I'm not familiar with Orthodoxy but it comes off as Catholicism lite™️

And you don't have to "choose" any denomination, anon. There are thousands of Christian denomination, which is a heresy. There shouldn't be any divison within the Church. No denomination is "correct" in the sense that there shouldn't be any to begin with.

And yes, there are countless versions of the Bible. I often see debate of USAmericans as of which version is the best (King James Version, NIV, ESV, NASB, etc.) and all of this so.....pointless and tone deaf? 1 BILLION of Christian and there you have, a handful of self centered english speaking Americans arguing over one (1) version of the bible just because...?

Real talk anon: unlike what's often being said, the Bible can be altered. Look at the Jehova Witnesses. Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons.... Even during slavery, slave owners cropped some Bible passages (about freedom) to not give ideas to slaves....

Yes, the Bible is the Word of God, but these words on a paper can be altered and manipulated. The Bible isn't some sort of magical book turning any person reading it a Christian granted you read the "right" version. Some atheists have read the Bible more than actual Christians. I knew an agnostic Christian theologian student ; she was studying the Bible while not being Saved herself. Jehova Witnesses do think that "their" bible is the real deal. Same for Mormons or whatever other Christian sect.

That's why THE HOLY SPIRIT is so important. Because while human can twist and alter words written on a book, the Holy Spirit will never lie and no one can bend it over falsehood. That's precisely why Jesus is called "the Word" "made flesh" (John 1). By PRAYING and asking the Holy Spirit for guidance, you can be set free from the bondage of falsehood and He will guide you towards truth.

I've read/watched plentiful of testimonies from former Mormons/Jehova Witness/7th Day Adventist/witches/satanists, etc, etc and guess what? Not a single one said "I read the KJV version of the Bible and realized I was wrong". It just....doesn't work this way. They instead went to a point were they got troubled in their belief, prayed, and asked for the Lord to show them the way. This leap of faith happened because of the Holy Spirit ; the change of heart that changes us from sinners to repentance comes from God, not a Bible version.

You'll be good with your random Bible anon. It's already a blessing you've got one between your hands. Just rely to the Lord, not a name stamped Bible version to build a real relationship with God. First Christians didn't have any Bible to build up their walk with God (could they even read?). Yes, the Bible is extremely helpful, but it shouldn't be the be all and end all of Christianhood.

#answered #Christian

[filmcentury]

Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise. — George Whitman (1913 – 2011), American proprietor of Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. — Holy Bible, Hebrews 13.2 (King James Version)

#george whitman #quotes #holy bible #karma yoga

[gatekeeperwatchman]

Is a Unicorn a Pagan belief followed by the GOP and How did they find their way to ideologies of American History? Unicorns In world mythology and folklore, a fantastic animal usually portrayed as a small horse like creature with a single horn protruding from its head. In European mythologies the unicorn is usually viewed as a beneficent being. A medieval description of the fantastic animal is found in Le Bestiaire Divin de Guillaume Clerc de Normandie.

The Unicorn has but one horn in the middle of its forehead. It is the only animal that ventures to attack the elephant; and so sharp is the nail of its foot, that with one blow it can rip the belly out of that beast. Hunters can catch the unicorn only by placing a young virgin in his haunts. No sooner does he see the damsel, than he runs towards her, and lies down at her feet, and so suffers himself to be captured by the hunters. The unicorn represents Jesus Christ, who took on Him our nature in the Virgin’s womb. . . . Its one horn signifies the Gospel of Truth.

The European belief in unicorns stems in part from ancient pagan Greek sources as well as the Septuagint versions of the Hebrew scripture. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, the Hebrew word reem, which might mean a wild ox, was translated monokeros (one-horned). This rendering was followed in later Latin versions of the Bible, which in turn influenced English translations such as the King James Version. The Book of Numbers (23:22) says: “God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn.”

The Revised Standard Version of the Bible in its translation of the verse substitutes “wild ox” for unicorn. One medieval Jewish folktale said the unicorn had perished in Noah’s flood because it was too large to enter the ark. Another Jewish folktale argued that God never destroys his own creation; if the unicorn was too large to get into the ark, then God would have let it swim behind the ark.

Along with the unicorn as a beneficent symbol, such as Jesus Christ, the animal was also identified with evil and death. In The Golden Legend, a series of saints’ lives by Jacobus de Voragine written in the 13th century, the “unicorn is the figure of Death, which continually followeth man and desireth to seize him.” Death rides a unicorn in some late medieval Books of Hours. In the Ancrene Riwle, a 12th-century book of rules for nuns, the unicorn appears as a symbol of wrath, along with the lion for pride, the serpent for envy, and the bear for sloth.

The Church Fathers at the Council of Trent, held in the 16th century, forbade the use of the unicorn as a symbol of Christ. One legend they cited was from Leonardo da Vinci’s Bestiary, in which the artist made the unicorn a symbol of lust. The unicorn’s horn was thought to have magic curative powers; many late medieval monasteries and cathedrals were believed to possess them, and they appear in inventories of Queen Elizabeth I and other monarchs of the period. Powders purporting to be made from crushed unicorn horns were sold by apothecaries.

As late as the French Revolution the unicorn was believed to exist, and a “unicorn’s” horn was used to detect poison in food fed to royalty. In Chinese mythology the unicorn was one of the four animals of good omen, the others being the phoenix, the dragon, and the tortoise. According to one story, when Confucius was born, a unicorn spit out a piece of jade with the inscription announcing the event: “Son of the essence of water, kingdoms shall pass away, but you will be a king, though without a throne.” James Thurber, in his Fables for Our Time (1940), includes a comical episode called “The Unicorn in the Garden.”

https://occult-world.com/unicorn/

From: Steven P. Miller Jacksonville, Florida., Duval County, USA. Instagram: steven_parker_miller_1956, Twitter: @GatekeeperWatchman1, @ParkermillerQ, Parker Miller Stevens (Gatekeeper1) …@StevenPMiller6 Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/gatekeeperwatchman URL: linkedin.com/in/steven-miller-b1ab21259 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ElderStevenMiller; #GWIG, #GWIN, #GWINGO, #Ephraim1, #IAM, #Sparkermiller, #Eldermiller1981