Are you saying that it's Jews themselves who are to blame for having been killed or exiled from numerous places?

One does not need to know the specific identity of God to justifiably believe that rights come from God. Suppose that I receive a handwritten letter with no name on it. By the nature of the letter, I can reasonably infer that it was sent by a human, even if I don't know what specific human it was.

GP's argument is that the nature of rights implies that they must come from God. This is because they think rights can't be taken away by others; if they could, they would be privileges, not rights. They presumably think that for a right to be inalienable, it must come from an authority above all others, like God.

You seem to think that rights only apply to specific people at specific times and places. That's fine, but it's the very point that GP was addressing—if rights are given by the government, then they're not rights at all. Restating the claim that rights are not universal does not address GP's argument.

I don't think GP's argument works when it comes to God, because it might be that rights simply exist independent of any authority. Maybe they're an emergent property of human beings, or maybe they simply exist, the way that many believe that God, the number two, or the universe itself just exist without cause. GP might not agree, but it's certainly coherent to believe in inalienable rights without believing in God.

Nothing has been seen as a core right for thousands of years, as the concept of human rights is only a few hundred years old.

Also, GPT-2 actually seems to do quite well on some of the tested languages, including word-hop, partial reverse, and local-shuffle. It doesn't do quite as well as plain English, but GPT-2 was designed to learn English, so it's not surprising that it would do a little better. For instance, they tokenization seems biased towards English. They show "bookshelf" becoming the tokens "book", "sh", and "lf" – which in many of the languages get spread throughout a sentence. I don't think a system designed to learn shuffled-English would tokenize this way!

https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.787.pdf

I find this to be a very strange reading. I never got that from the creation narrative at all. Looking through it, I only see two places that seem to be about marriage. First there's Genesis 2:22-24:

> 22. And God YHVH fashioned the side that had been taken from the man (adam) into a woman (ishah), bringing her to the man (adam). 23. Then the man (adam) said, “this one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This one shall be called woman (ishah), for from a man (ish) was she taken.” 24. Hence a man (ish) leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife (ishah), so that they become one flesh.

This doesn't mention procreation at all! It seems to say that men and women come together because they have a common origin, not necessarily because it produces offspring. You could still say that this supports heterosexual marriage, but I don't see any particular reason to read it as prohibiting other types of marriage. And in fact, it seems to work fine with gay marriage – two men or two women are also presumably from the same flesh and bones as Adam and Eve.

Then there's Genesis 3:16:

> And to the woman [God] said, “I will greatly expand your hard labor—and your pregnancies; in hardship shall you bear children. Yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.

This says something about bearing children and about male-female relationships, but it doesn't really draw the line saying that the purpose of marriage is to produce children. It also presents all of this as an unfortunate state of affairs.

I guess there's also 1:28-29:

> 28. And God created man (adam) in the divine image, creating them in the image of God—creating them male and female. 29. God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth.”

That talks about reproduction, but it doesn't say anything about marriage.

> I'm purely speaking from an academic sense here (the art of understanding what someone wrote a long time ago).

Right. I think whoever wrote the creation story was trying to provide an explanation for why the world was the way it was: why the world exists, why there are seven days in a week, why there are men and women, why they have dominance over the animals, why there's suffering, why snakes have no legs, and so and so forth. I don't think they meant for the creation story to give instructions at all, except a moral that one should obey God. I don't get the impression that the author was trying to sanctify marriage or procreation at all. If they were, it seems like they would have described Adam and Eve's wedding, they would have spent more than one sentence on the birth of their first child, and they wouldn't have presented pregnancy as a curse.

There are places where the bible gives guidance for heterosexual marriages, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all other marriages are prohibited. Most people are heterosexual, so it makes sense that the bible would talk about marriage in a heterosexual context.

There are also several verses that condemn gay sex, but I think you could make the case that it's not talking about the types of loving, committed gay relationships that we have in mind today. And also, even if gay sex is forbidden, you could still hold that gay couples are allowed to get married and adopt children, but that they should remain celibate. That's rough, but Christians commonly hold that heterosexuals aren't supposed to have non-procreative sex either. For comparison, the American Jewish Conservative movement holds that male-on-male anal sex is biblically prohibited, but all other aspects of gay relationships are permitted. And even though the sexual act is forbidden, it's also forbidden to invade someone's privacy by questioning whether they're doing it.

† I have yet to see an article like this written by a woman.

You must mean hundreds or thousands, right? Modern homo-sapiens are not hundreds of thousands of years old.

> Have you read the Quran? Reading it is essential to understanding Muslims and their faith. It is first and foremost an anti-christian book, and the faith is foremost anti-christian. Just as christendom at one time was foremost anti-pagan.

I've only read parts of the Quran in translation, and I wouldn't say that I understand it that well. It's not organized in a narrative structure like the bible, and there are a lot of parts that are impossible to understand without outside knowledge, like a surah that condemns Abu Lahab but doesn't explain who he was [1]. The Quran is not really the sort of book that you can just read on its own without guidance and expect to understand.

So, with the preface that you should take what I have to say about the Quran with a grain of salt, I'm not sure how you could take away that it's primarily an anti-Christian text. Yes, it criticizes Christians and Jews a lot, but it also has good things to say about them. For example:

"Indeed, the believers, Jews, Christians, and Sabians—whoever truly believes in Allah and the Last Day and does good will have their reward with their Lord. And there will be no fear for them, nor will they grieve." [2]

The main villains of the Quran are polytheists (like Abu Lahab). It talks about them a lot more and never has anything good to say [3]. By contrast, the New Testament barely even mentions polytheists or pagans – most of its criticism is directed against Jews.

Muslims traditionally believe that Jesus was the messiah, that he was born of a virgin, that he performed miracles, and that he's going to return and rule the world in a future era [4]. It's also said that Muhammad was identified as a prophet by a Christian monk named Bahira [5]. Early on, Orthodox Christians identified Islam as a heretical form of Christianity, not a different religion [6]. These do not seem like traits of a religion that is foremost anti-Christian.

[1] https://quran.com/111

[2] https://quran.com/2/62

[3] https://quran.com/search?query=polytheist

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_in_Islam

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahira

[6] https://archive.org/details/johnofdamascuson0000saha

It doesn't. Judaism holds that the soul starts out pure, having been made in the image of G-d, and it only becomes impure through wrongdoing. All humans are born with an impulse to do evil, the Yetzer Hara, but we're also created with the power to overcome it. And when we have done evil, we have the ability to atone and return our souls to the pure state they were created in. That happens, for instance, on Yom Kippur.

The context of the verse from Ezekiel is:

> O mortal, when the House of Israel dwelt on their own soil, they defiled it with their ways and their deeds […] So I poured out My wrath on them […] I scattered them among the nations […] But when they came to those nations, they caused My holy name to be profaned, in that it was said of them, “These are GOD’s people, yet they had to leave their land.” […] Say to the House of Israel: Thus said the Sovereign GOD: Not for your sake will I act, O House of Israel, but for My holy name, which you have caused to be profaned among the nations to which you have come. […] I will take you from among the nations and gather you from all the countries, and I will bring you back to your own land. I will sprinkle pure water upon you, and you shall be purified: I will purify you from all your defilement and from all your fetishes. And I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit into you: I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh;" https://www.sefaria.org/Ezekiel.36.17-26

Ezekiel lived during the Babylonian exile. At face value, the text is saying that the people of Israel have been exiled because of their sins, but it makes a prophecy that G-d will cause them to stop sinning and return them to their land. That eventually did happen under Cyrus the Great. This is a constant cycle in the bible: When things are good, the Israelites forget G-d's teachings. Then something bad happens, but G-d redeems the Israelites from their suffering, which leads them to follow G-d again. Then thing get good again, and they start to forget G-d once more...

When it says that G-d will give the house of Israel a new heart, it's not (at face value) saying that individual people will literally receive new spirits (or otherwise be metaphysically transformed). Nor is it saying that G-d will literally sprinkle water on them. These are poetic ways of saying that the house of Israel will stop worshiping idols (etc), the same way that happened many times before in the Torah. You can of course add a layer of exegesis and make it about individual believers today instead of the nation of Israel in Babylonia of the 6th-century BCE. That's fine, the rabbinic tradition does that sort of thing all the time too. But at that point you're firmly in Christian territory and not in the space shared between Judaism and Christianity.

Pokémon is 28 years old, so people now in their 30s would have been the core demographic of Pokémon fans at the start. I would expect them to be the most loyal fans, no "despite" needed.

> How is this any different than Digimon?

The criticism I've seen is of specific creature designs that look very close to those of specific Pokémon. I don't particularly care about that either – but the criticism is not just that it's another mon collection game.