Yes, some aspects of Islam seem to be based on the views of the Ebionites, an early Christian sect who used a Hebrew version of Matthew (instead of Greek) and whose beliefs about Jesus (not God, didn't actually die, etc.) ended up in Islam.
We say now “some sect”, but today’s mainstream Trinitarians were also considered “just some sect” in Early Christianity.
It has turned out to become the mainstream view, but really trinitarianism and antitrinitarianism are both valid views of Christianity and Islam stems from the “back to the basics” antitrinitarian view.
While we’re at it, Judaism was also developed contemporarily with Christianity and not before (as is the mainstream view), because Judaism includes the teachings of the Rabbis.
Trinitarianism isn't necessarily a strictly Christian construct—or rather the idea of a godhead comprising multiple parts. "Two Powers" theology (a transcendent, unseeable Yahweh; and Yahweh-as-man) was accepted by Jewish thinkers until about the First Century AD, largely due to Christian influences. It's visible in passages like Genesis 19:24 (two Yahwehs) and most "angel of the Lord" language (e.g. Judges 6:11ff).
Alan Segal's Two Powers in Heaven delves into this in great detail.
Divine threesomes abound in the religious writings and art of ancient Europe, Egypt, the near east, and Asia. These include various threesomes of male deities, of female deities, of Father-Mother-Son groups, or of one body with three heads, or three faces on one head (Griffiths 1996). However, similarity alone doesn’t prove Christian copying or even indirect influence, and many of these examples are, because of their time and place, unlikely to have influenced the development of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.
A direct influence on second century Christian theology is the Jewish philosopher and theologian Philo of Alexandria (a.k.a. Philo Judaeus) (ca. 20 BCE–ca. 50 CE), the product of Alexandrian Middle Platonism (with elements of Stoicism and Pythagoreanism). Inspired by the Timaeus of Plato, Philo read the Jewish Bible as teaching that God created the cosmos by his Word (logos), the first-born son of God. Alternately, or via further emanation from this Word, God creates by means of his creative power and his royal power, conceived of both as his powers, and yet as agents distinct from him, giving him, as it were, metaphysical distance from the material world (Philo Works; Dillon 1996, 139–83; Morgan 1853, 63–148; Norton 1859, 332–74; Wolfson 1973, 60–97).
Another influence may have been the Neopythagorean Middle Platonist Numenius (fl. 150), who posited a triad of gods, calling them, alternately, “Father, creator and creature; fore-father, offspring and descendant; and Father, maker and made” (Guthrie 1917, 125), or on one ancient report, Grandfather, Father, and Son (Dillon 1996, 367). Moderatus taught a similar triad somewhat earlier (Stead 1985, 583).
I think I tend to agree with the conclusion—namely that it was predominantly a Jewish influence on Christology. Part of my opinion is shaped by changes in and around the First Century in Judaism which, ultimately, culminated in the Masoretic Text evicting certain parts of the text that could remotely suggest anything akin to polytheism. Deuteronomy 32 is particularly one of the most affected chapters, but curiously "two powers" theology was largely left intact.
This is a particularly interesting period in Christianity, because you had numerous influences (including what would later become gnosticism around the same time), the term "trinity" wouldn't appear in extant works until sometime in the Second Century, then the Council of Nicaea in or around the latter half of the Fourth Century establishing it as doctrine.
So, I think the evidence of a decidedly Jewish influence is quite strong and would date at least to the Babylonian captivity.
I believe Dr. Robert Alter leans toward an evolution from polytheism -> monotheism in Jewish thinking (I highly recommend his The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary); but I think the evidence for a sort of henotheism is a bit stronger and more sensible, which would better fit the sources you shared here, alongside the biblical texts.
I believe English is actually one of the only ones where cult has a negative connotation, and where sect does not. French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Russian - all of these use "cult" to mean any religious group, even in official language ("the Catholic cult"), and all use "sect" to mean "a fringe, possibly dangerous, religious or quasi-religious group" ("the members of that sect that poisoned themselves").
Oh, not even close. I speak Romanian, English, and French. For all of the others I looked up Google translations of the phrase "I think he joined a cult" - in all of them, the translation replaced "cult" with some equivalent of "sect".
Also, I noticed that for more obscure languages (including Romanian), it didn't, so that confirmed to me it's not some fully hardocded conversion - for languages where it has enough examples it understands the "proper" translation, for those where it doesn't it does the simpler thing.
The other comment mentions dutch- As a dutchie I'm not entirely sure they're correct that "kult" is less negatively charged than "sekte". They both take on negative connotations depending on context- "sekte" is definitely religious, while "kult" isn't necessarily, based on the van Dale dictionary. I'd say "cult" isn't always negative in english either, the term "cult classic" comes to mind.
For that matter, would you use "sect" in english and be confident it would not be seen as pejorative term? I feel it's all context dependent.
I also don't think looking through google translate with a single phrase is the right method to figure this out- for one thing I've heard the european languages are usually heavily based on legislature (eu legislature is published in all eu languages, so an excellent source of translations). In my experience google translate can be stilted and formal, so which implications and connotations a phrase or term has in different languages can definitely be literally "lost in translation".
Islam isn't based on Christianity or Judasim. Rather is the the revival/continuation of the one message which is monotheism, given to every prophet and messenger throughout history. It would not be unfound for overlap in teachings between the prophets as they are ultimately upon one religion.
While I perhaps agree in principle, I think it's also fair to say that while Islam isn't strictly based on Christianity or Judaism, it was strongly influenced by both, to the extent that the Qu'ran borrows quite a bit from the New Testament, which in turn borrows heavily from the Hebrew Bible. The overlap is not accidental, but rather intentional in order to provide a sense of credibility in their teachings.
In that sense, both Christianity and Islam view themselves as supersessionist to the respective religion that predated them, with Judaism being more or less the root of the Abrahamic tree (though you could argue that Zoroastrianism may have been the precursor for monotheism as a concept, predating them all).
The Qur'an didn't borrow anything, nor was it influenced by the previous religions. The Qur'an is a revelation from God, as was the original Torah to Moses and the Injeel to Jesus. The same accounts of history and messages would be told to the prophets from God.
The claim where Muhammad ﷺ copied from the previous books is simply not possible. An unlettered man narrating and correcting the histories/traditions of the Jews and Christians where they were few and far between in Arabia. It was pagan through and throught. Recounting their history would require a library to be available and be a polyglot in Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek (there were no Arabic Bible translation until the 10th Century).
If the motivation is to gain followers from the prior Abrahamic religions, the easiest thing to do would be to appease their view points and reaffirm what they believed, not to correct them. Not to mention the sheer volume of recounting the children of Israel and history of Jesus in the Qur'an, which does not make sense if you are copying as you would want a few lines here and there to avoid saying something wrong.
(The tone of this comment sounds firm in writing, in reality it is cordial)
This is of course wrong, Mohammed as an illiterate man can copy things because he grew up in a christian and jewish influenced society and no doubt heard the stories of biblical characters and then decided to incorporate them into his own retelling, including various historical errors that make his retelling impossible to be true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_in_Islam#:~:text=Accordin....
It is also false to say that gaining followers through appeasement is the way to go, there is not a single sect in christianity that doesnt change vital parts of the bible or how to be saved. It is far easier to obfuscate and pretend to follow christianity and then make changes later.
I appreciate your thoughtful reply, and accept it in cordiality! :) And I hope you will accept my replies in the same kindly spirit.
I think perhaps I inadvertently implied that the Qur'an was copied from earlier sacred texts, when I only meant that it was likely influenced by them ... in the same way that the New Testament was strongly influenced by the Hebrew Bible (in some cases referencing portions directly - especially regarding prophetic literature, but in other ways making very different claims). Where I agree with you is that it's simplistic to say that Islam was simply a distant branch of another religion -- it's clearly it's own tradition, but my understanding is that most Muslims would agree that it both shares common roots (i.e. a foundational understanding) with Christianity and Islam while also superseding them.
In my mind at least, that indicates that there is some narrative progression, of which Islam would see itself as the most recent, or most complete, revelation; building on what came before while also correcting it (where it is seen as erring from Allah's/God's intended message). In that sense, I think it shares a lot in common with Christianity, a religion that more or less treats Judaism the same way.
I think there are a great many prophets and messengers throughout history that preached polytheism of one kind or another. There is even one prophet who preached that no gods exist, or at least that they are unimprotsnt to the struggle for a good life - Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha.
It isn't just "dumb American's" fault. They promote different pronunciations by region. Compare Australian commercials to Usonian. Westerners don't pronounce Honda, Toyota, Mitsubishi, or Nissan correctly either and nobody bats an eye.
A regional pronunciation that's ingrained in the culture is no more or less correct, particularly for a foreign word. And the Japanese pronunciation of western brand names is similarly incorrect (mostly due to the limitations of their language but the point stands).
The Western world encompasses many more languages than English. My mother language is Spanish and we pronounce most Japanese names correctly. It helps that both languages have the same 5 vowels and a similar set of consonants.
Japanese is not hard for English speakers. I bought two lots of minidiscs from Japan and was listening to them before recording over them and my wife was somewhat surprised at how singing Japanese does not sound all that foreign to her. Chinese, in the other hand, really does sound different, and personally I find the sounds of French much more difficult.
The problem are the vowels. Germanic languages are notorious for having a large number of vowels that may not even be consistent across dialects. Add the funky English spelling, and it is no wonder that English speakers will mangle Japanese names beyond recognition.
But yes, Japanese has pretty simple sounds and prosody and it is easy to pick up. I studied French for 5 years, and I could never get the pronunciation right. I know how words should sound, but my mouth just refuses to do it. I also studied one year of Chinese, and while I enjoyed it a lot, good god is the phonology difficult with all the weird consonant and the tones.
Going in the other direction, the official spelling of Pfizer in Korea is 화이자, which sounds a bit like why-jah. A game of telephone going through Japanese, which somehow stuck.
I am willing to entertain the possibility that specific supplements don't work, but saying that all supplements don't work for all people _must_ be an exaggeration.
Obviously, some things work for at least a subset of people. I admit it is hard to distinguish real effects from placebo, but stuff like... creatine, which someone mentioned earlier do work.
Kind of scaremongering. Yes, quality varies, but if you really want to be diligent it's easy to find what the good brands are, that are getting tests, have certifications, etc.
Most of the vitamin supplements are cheap to make, there's really no reason for the manufacturer to risk it with adulterated product.
Nothing on this page sounds like a resounding endorsement:
> An athlete should never consider any dietary supplement to be 100% safe. No third-party testing company can test for every possible prohibited substance. The NSF Certified for Sport program reduces, but does not eliminate, risk for athletes. It is still up to each athlete to determine whether they want to take the risk of using dietary supplements and USADA does not approve or evaluate dietary supplement products.
It also seems focused on illegal substances, not the purity of the product.
Sorry but this Forbes article is simply frustratingly wrong. So many people are deficient in Vitamin D. Of course it's preferable to take in 15 minutes of sunlight with exposed skin every day but that's not an option for most people. I can share 2 scientific studies (not Forbes) showing how there was an inverse relationship between covid mortality and vitamin-d levels.
I understand that something being "linked" to something is not a concrete recommendation to take a supplement, but the risks are very low, and the benefit is very high in my opinion, based on this research.
You’re assuming that leaders of these countries are largely benevolent. They’re optimizing for their own interests. Bringing manufacturing into these countries will only introduce new competitors to their rule over time. Think of Saudi for instance, they can bring manufacturing and they import workforce if necessary from India , Africa, Asia and Europe but they won’t. They’re happy with the oil sector because that’s easy to control.
What's the difference between China, India, and the early western country vs these countries then? Why is this unique to a limited subset who have the potential become a big player in manufacturing?
Nigeria is projected to have a population in the top 3 (china, india, then nigeria) in the next 30yrs. The population excuse will soon not be good enough anymore.
A strong culture of corruption and self-interested politicians is pretty common but I feel like there's some lack of proper messaging or a lack of simple interest in having big goals. There seems to be a defeatist culture in many of these places, where they are so used to the status quo they forget they still have a choice if enough people cared.
Maybe brain drain is the true killer in our global economy. The smart kids don't even bother, they just move to the west or help India/China.
>What's the difference between China, India, and the early western country vs these countries then? Why is this unique to a limited subset who have the potential become a big player in manufacturing?
Mostly revenues from natural ressources.
Rents allows much more centralized control of the political and economical equilibrium in the country. And it's easier to manage.
Despotic regimes that industrialize (like China or Vietnam) usually do it out of necessity : either because they can't make enough out of natural ressources to provide sufficiently to their subjects or because they need to have some level of strategic independence.
The leaders of Vietnam are - well, it's complicated and there's a lot of corruption and weird cultural stuff to overcome. I don't mean Vietnamese cultural stuff, I mean the culture of the Vietnamese government.
But somewhere behind that I do believe they have a vision for the country. I have lived here for 5 years now and I see a country going though a rapid transition from extreme poverty (just 20-30 years ago) to now, in places like Da Nang, Quy Nhon, Dalat, parts of HCMC and Hanoi, being fairly developed and rapidly becoming more so. Apparently they have lifted a million people per year out of extreme poverty for the last 30 years and there's a rapidly growing middle class too.
Of course, from those areas, you can just drive 50km (or even just down a side street in a big city) and be in an area that seems like it hasn't been touched by development, although you can still probably get a 200mb internet connection in these places. And there are entire provinces that are still very poor. It's a big and complicated country on a winding but largely positive trajectory. Don't dismiss the leaders here in the same breathe as the Saudis. They have their own highly complex and developed culture, with both good and bad sides, and you need to take the time to understand it before you can comment on it.
If I was in industry, I would bet on this country as being a good place for manufacturing. Right now, for low-medium tech stuff. But in ten or twenty years I predict this country will be a high tech manufacturing hub.
My fear is that while wealth has increased greatly in Vietnam, it has dragged along with it major shifts in motivation (greed) and happiness (materialism) and a reduced value of community… a shift that, (cynically on my part), may be more in the leaders interest than in the peoples. Ah capitalism.
But this is not just an issue with Vietnam, it can be true in any country… just more visible amidst the transition that I saw a small small bit of in the early 2000s there.
Is the transition “good” in an ultimate sense? I (with you) hope so… but my gut says otherwise. Do the weeds grow faster than the grass when fertilizer is thrown down? We’ll see. All the best to you.
(I agree with your core point that from a western perspective, high tech manufacturing in Vietnam likely makes good sense as a China diversification play.)
I would take inflation that can be managed over the alternative that could have happened had the government not intervened. However and if I understood things correctly, it appears that banks, financial entities and ultra rich individuals got money absolutely for free; no strings attached. The rest of the population got stimulus checks , asset prices appreciation followed by inflation which will eventually eat away any appreciation at best if not do more damage. I don’t think society will appreciate this deal in the long run. Desperate politicians and ideologues will exploit this imbalance.
> banks, financial entities and ultra rich individuals got money absolutely for free
[citation needed]: please distinguish between gifts and loans, bearing in mind that a loan written off other than in bankruptcy can be counted as a gift.
There is a big problem that most of the consumer spending goes through Jeff Bezos who gets to keep a percentage of it, but that's not the same as directly giving him money, and happens regardless of the stimulus or not.
There are books are “smooth” readings. Page-turner as they say. And then there are other books that one feels like one is wrestling with the author. An example of the first category for me is “The C Programming Language” it’s a great read, beautiful writing even if you’re not interested in C. An example of the second category is “The Power of Habit”. I couldn’t finish it. The parts that I read could have been said in a paragraph or two but that would have resulted in an article and not a book; no gain in that, is there, sometimes I wonder.
I am afraid that severe climate change might lead to a future with fewer or no borders. Not having borders isn't necessarily going to be great. Nationalism will not go away as long as there are humans. We may have different labels for it but the effect will be the same.
The two mentioned in the article met the FDA definition of remission. It doesn’t say, how many improved in general. This is important specifically since the sample size of the trial is small.
It's the important & useful of the two endpoints they measured. Anything will have a positive effect on depression if it comes with a lot of high-tech vodoo and people in lab coats. Only it won't last and it will the "yeah, I guess I'm feeling better"-level of improvement.
It's quite possible humanity has survived because most people never get depressed. You need to be quite clear about definitions to have a meaningful conversation on this.
Yes. And given the prevalence of continued prevalence of depression, there might be some evolutionary benefit for the genes that also cause depression.
No clue whether it's the depression itself, or whether that's just a side-effect of something else that's useful.
fascinating. He discovered hash tables after he released TurboPascal 1.0 and used them 2.0; https://youtu.be/K3qf8gRFESU?t=3265. So perhaps Anders of TurboPascal 1.0 can't pass certain leetcode challenges :)
IIRC, hash tables came with Turbo Pascal v4.0 and not with v2.0 (4 years between v1.0 and v4.0). Interestingly I can't remember what the difference was between v1.0 and v2.0 but looking at the release dates I think there wasn't much…
Borland Pascal v7.0 27th October 1992
Turbo Pascal for Windows v1.5 8th June 1992
Turbo Pascal for Windows v1.0 13th February 1991
Turbo Pascal v6.0 23rd October 1990
Turbo Pascal v5.5 2nd May 1989
Turbo Pascal v5.0 24th August 1988
Turbo Pascal v4.0 20th November 1987
Turbo Pascal v3.0 17th September 1986
Turbo Pascal v2.0 17th April 1984
Turbo Pascal v1.0 20th November 1983
"Borland says version 4.0 will outperform previous versions in compilation speed and efficiency. I compared 3.0 and my preliminary version of 4.0 in compiling the CALC.PAS program provided with Turbo Pascal. On a 4.77 MHz IBM PC with 512K bytes of RAM and an 8087 co processor, version 3.0 took 15 seconds to compile the 1272 line program. Turbo Pascal version 4.0 took just 10 seconds to compile a slightly different 1273 line version of CALC.PAS."
I just ran this on a Fedora machine and connected to Windows using rdesktop. It works and it's amazing. I like it. The Internet will surely be confused today with a surge of traffic from Internet Explorer 5. Incidentally, google.com still loads and allows searching; bing.com does not load.
google is, ironically, one of the few remaining "major" sites which support http.
i'm a bit of a browser historian, so i regularly browse the web in everything from mosaic, to ie3 and netscape, firefox 3.x, and all the modern-day favorites such as links and w3m.
so i started building my own websites with all the oldies in mind. it takes some tweaking, but not that much, and i enjoy strolling^Wsurfing down memory lane, looking at that gorgeous ie3 menubar, which was replaced with a flat gray in ie4, or writing something in opera 12.x.
For IE5, there's two distinct obstacles to serving https.
1) It's unlikely to accept any x.509 certificates you can get issued under today's CA/B guidelines; and I'm also not sure how many CAs from then are still valid, either because they had too small of keys or they expired
2) I'm not sure if ie5 supports TLS 1.0 and if it does, it's probably not by default, because that how things were back then.
Given these conditions an https handshake is highly likely to fail, and as the server operator there's no way to provide useful information to the user in that case. If they go to your http site and you redirect them to a handshake error that you know they were going to see... That's not useful. You could be secure and not provide service... but then again, your redirect could be MITMed cause http. Or you could provide a useful service with no security.
This is a choice, not a vulnerability.
This doesn't open up any new way to attack a modern client. Modern clients would have google.com HSTS preloaded and not use http at all. But even if that's not available, a MITM that fiddles with the User-Agent to avoid getting a redirect could have fetched the search results via https and proxied them back via http, as long as the client made an http request.
Edit to add: if you could get a cert IE5 would accept, it likely wouldn't be acceptable by modern clients, so you'd need to distinguish clients from the TLS handshake (although, I guess it really is an SSL handshake for ie5?). There's no client identifier in there, but you can certainly tell the difference between modern and ancient; it gets trickier to tell the difference between ancient and pretty old or pretty old and trying to do a fallback handshake.
Only www.google.com and other subdomains are preloaded unfortunately.. I’m having trouble quickly googling the reason (is that irony?) but from memory a Googler said that they had a lot of internal stuff hosted above google.com they couldn’t make https (HVAC controllers and such?)
Both. If you can stop a https redirect by rewriting the user agent header, it can be used to track the Google searches for example. HSTS would help if the browser did connect to the https website recently, but it looks like a security vulnerability to me.
I just realized after writing this comment that if you can rewrite http headers, you can also stop the redirect so perhaps it doesn't matter.
On the one hand, it’s a sign of technical prowess to be able to accommodate browsers going that far back.
On the other, it’s kind of embarrassing not to have a barebones version of your website load in case an old browser is detected. IE5 had Ajax after all, what more does a search box really need? The answer? Endless tracking and cookies and phoning home. God forbid someone uses a browser we can’t use to collect infinite metrics.
I realize that it probably doesn’t pay, but it wouldn’t be that difficult to implement just a form to type queries and a basic html result page that works without javascript.
Welcome to my Friday nightmare. Some update broke dropdowns on IE9 because, apparently plain form select HTML is no longer a viable thing because we can't beautify it. Why my erp to UPS connector needed beautification I don't know. I call, they know, everybody using IE (as required by this connector) is down. Great. Patch rolls in the morning and suddenly looks like chrome is supported.
I think it's ironic. Microsoft since the dawn of time has been known for backwards compatibility in Windows. They would go out of their way to ensure random 16 bit apps with bugs and major issues continued to work through years of major upgrades to Windows. Raymond Chen has written countless stories of the hacks upon hacks they had to keep running through the years: http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplech... So now to see it all abandoned as Microsoft is pulled into the age of web applications is kind of amusing.
While breaking backwards compatibility with user space apps is frowned upon, I can’t imagine Linus approving adding old bugs so that buggy programs can still work.
