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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • You have to be really careful to distinguish between the position that the canon is temporarily, functionally closed and that it is closed permanently. You can definitely find plenty of people who support the strict position, but I believe that it is less popular than the looser position overall, especially when looking outside of Christian apologetics circles.

    There’s a few good reasons to think that the canon is only temporarily closed, not permanently closed:

    1. The Bible wasn’t canonized or seen as a single book until after Revelation was written, so it is unlikely that John had the whole Bible in mind.
    2. Revelation says that the restriction is on “the book of this prophecy”, i.e., the book of Revelation itself. Even if you correctly consider that “prophecy” is more than just foretelling, there are parts of the Bible that don’t count as that.
    3. If you read them carefully, you’ll see that Deuteronomy and Proverbs do not say anything against saying God’s words in a different way or recontextuallizing them to apply them to a different situation. The problem only comes about if you change the meaning of the message.
    4. At least according to both Claude and GPT, the idea of a strict closure didn’t take root until the Reformation (about 1.5 millennia later).
    5. A non-strict interpretation fits better with the fact that the story of the Bible is not yet finished. If the story is unfinished then it’s likely that God will do more works which ought to be recorded. For example, it would probably be helpful to the people living through the great tribulation to know what the actual history was that led up to that event.




  • linguists have estimated something like 31,000 languages have existed in human history (and that’s the lowest estimate). Currently, there are roughly six thousand languages spoken in the world. We don’t know exactly, because we’re just beginning to classify some languages in remote locations. But using conservative figures, something like 81% of all human languages have become extinct.

    What worries linguists, however, is the current rate of language death in the world. Over half the languages spoken today have fewer than 10,000 speakers; that’s about like the population of Wasilla, Alaska. Around 82% of languages have fewer speakers than there are people in Waco, Texas. Linguists estimate that at least half the world’s languages will become extinct in the next one hundred years. That means, on average, a language is dying about every two weeks.

    Taken from a page on the University of Houston’s website.





  • You have an interesting method of not asking in disrespect, so I’ll just reply this once and leave it at that.

    Christianity is based largely around the idea of faith. If God made it so plainly obvious what he was doing that there were no competing views or religions, then Christianity could no longer be about faith.

    So how do we know when we are putting our faith in the right thing? Well that would come down to various other factual arguments that, when taken in unison, point to the reliability of the Bible. I, for one, like the minimal facts case for the resurrection and the fact of all the manuscript evidence showing that the message of the Bible is effectively the same as it was in the early church.

    Do I think that my understanding of the Bible is the only one true understanding? No, that would be very silly and presumptuous of me to think I alone somehow got it all figured out. But that doesn’t mean I’m not close, and the fact that there are others who believe like I do means in more likely to be at a reasonable understanding of the truth of the matter than I would be otherwise. But even if everyone else in the world was wrong wouldn’t really matter here, would it? The only thing it means is I would need to be cautious.


  • It’s an interesting enough read, however, the only thing I saw that was indicative of Christian belief was his desire to create and lead a church. However, plenty of cult leaders have already done the same. What makes him a real Christian and not just another brand of cultist along the lines of Mormonism or Jehovah’s Witnesses?

    I see JP’s public presentation of Christianity as actively steering people away from what it really is. He focuses far too much on a mythologized, deistic form of Christianity and far too little on the beliefs that set Christianity apart. So, regardless of what he might think he believes in secret, I will continue believing, until things change, that someone who has intentionally given such a flawed interpretation for as long as he has cannot truly be called a Christian.


  • I’m a Christian myself and have listened to a couple of Peterson’s lectures on the Bible and I see him as someone who approaches the Bible with the mind of a conspiracy theorist or a New Age believer. He makes grand claims while using a handful of loosely related facts to support his beliefs and could care less about using a more rigorous approach. To him, any and all notable pieces of imagery in the Bible actually play important archetypal roles for fundamental principals in our grand cosmic reality

    I believe JP has at the least strongly implied that he doesn’t actually believe in the truth of the Bible, that he is agnostic towards an actual God, and that he instead uses Christianity more as a vehicle for understanding his own set of beliefs. So, to answer your question, you could fairly call him a Cultural Christian, but it would be very unfair to call him an actual Christian.