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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • Now now, they innovated by turning Facebook from the way you could see what your friends were doing on your feed into algorithmically determining exactly which batshit insane ‘news’ stories from cranks and posts from crazy people would be the most effective rage bait to specifically you once they figured out that anger and rage are the most effective way to cause retention and engagement.

    They basically scientifically perfected trolling, and figured out how to monetize it.

    Sure it widely proliferated dangerous anti science nonsense, bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, fostered the Q Anon insanity mind plague and facilitated it going mainstream, but hey, hate sells.


  • Sure Christianity has just one god, but there is an awful lot of different versions of him

    Are Mormons Christian? They say they are, many other Christians say they are not.

    One of many reasons: They don’t do the whole Trinity thing.

    According to the LDS Church, God and Jesus are separate, distinct. Father and Son yes, but in a literal sense, not as distinct manifestations of the same thing. Holy Ghost is a totally distinct entity as well.


  • The varying competing sects and later official churches did exactly that, cherry picking various texts as official canon, in either proposals or meetings of high church officials, for hundreds of years after the death of Jesus.

    The first known to propose a list of canon texts was Marcion… who was ironically deemed to be a heretic as he rejected the Old Testament God and the Old Testament itself.

    Then you had all kinds of local and regional and imperial Symposiums and Councils to decide what worked and what didn’t…

    And surprise surprise, this didn’t even achieve a unanimous consensus!

    Even today, major world and regional Christian denominations include books other consider apocryohal, omit books others consider canon, and divide or combine books differently, and a whole lot of that goes back to all of this squabbling in the 3rd century CE basically going unresolved and creating or laying the groundwork for major schisms.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon

    Check out the Canons of various Christian traditions sections.

    It gets especially strange when you end up with a canon book that explicitly quotes and refers to a book that … isn’t canon, in that particular tradition.


  • If you’re talking about the Gospel of Judas, that isn’t from the Dead Sea scrolls, but was its own distinct finding.

    The Dead Sea scrolls are a collection of texts of a cult based around a messianic figure, rooted in Judaism, but dated between the 3rd and 1st century BCE, discovered in the 1940s.

    They do not mention Judas, but are interesting in that the actual messianic figure himself seems to have written some of the texts, that he uses some of the same verses and stories from the Torah to identify himself as the Messiah that would later be used by (attributed to being used by) Jesus, that some of the texts were written by others of the same cult after his death, and show how they theologically cope with their Messiah seemingly failing his own prophecies and claims.

    The Gospel of Judas, on the other hand, is dated to the 2nd century CE and was …well, the story goes it was found in Egypt some point prior to the 1970s, then got traded around by black market antiquities dealers, spent about a decade in a safe deposit box, nearly totally disintegrated, and was eventually shown to a proper academic expert in greek and coptic, leading to it being painstakingly reassembled, radio carbon dated, linguistically verified as not being a much later forgery, and translated, first publicly widely available in English in 2006.

    The actual story in the Gospel of Judas is stunningly bizarre:

    You start off with Jesus literally mocking and laughing at all his disciples other than Judas for seemingly not understanding anything he’s ever said.

    Later, privately, Judas confronts Jesus saying that he does understand Jesus… that Jesus is from the immortal realm of Barbelo.

    Jesus then goes on to describe that yes, he was making fun of the other disciples because they think he is the Messiah of Yahweh / The God of Judaism, when in actuality Jesus is a human incarnation or avatar of a completely different divine entity, that Yahweh is actually Saklas / Yaldebaoth, a mad, malformed demiurge descended from a long line of other, superior, more wise and beneficent divine entities in an elaborate and historied pantheon (which Jesus admits his own knowledge of is not total and complete), that Saklas / Yaldebaoth falsely believes himself to be the supreme God of all reality when in fact he only has domain over the Earth, which is basically an innately evil realm, and that all humans were accidentally created with a tiny bit of the pure divine spark in them but are all here trapped and cursed to suffer as basically slaves and playthings of Saklas.

    The fragment ends with Jesus explaining that basically his master plan for saving all of mankind involves sacrificing himself to help more people realize their true inner divinity, and that he only trusts Judas, his wisest disciple, to make that actually happen.

    To me, it reads like someone took acid or shrooms and wrote a fan fiction drawing from the 4 more mainstream gospels. Its truly wild.

    The ‘Judas was actually a good guy’ part is basically a footnote compared to how totally out of left field everything else is.

    IIRC, Saklas or Saklos basically transliterates to ‘The Blind One’, which is a name you’d expect a Lovecraftian entity to have.

    https://www.gospels.net/judas