Xhieron

Me too.

I’ll also vote if he’s not.

Blue all the way down the ticket. Fuck the agitprop. Save the Republic.

I can’t even read this stuff anymore and not picture a drunk/high homeless kid getting righteously thrown out of a stolen truck.

It’s a broad generalization, but it’s not really a matter of opinion. We can scan people’s mouths and faces when they talk (and have in order to demonstrate this stuff). I think the last example probably only applies that way in particular circumstances though, since English speakers automatically group, contract, and arrange certain phonemes in certain orders (e.g., I’m not, I ain’t, but never I amn’t–and in real speech “I ain’t” is almost always one syllable). In this example, more frequently my country ass contracts the first syllable of “gonna” away instead of the second, so “I’m 'na head to the store; y’all need anything?”

The hot potato example just stands for the premise that in real speech the t at the end of hot and the p at the beginning of potato slur together, and if you deliberately enunciate both consonants, you sound like you’re reading to a transcriber. Compare the way a normal person says “let’s go” to the way you sound if you force separate the words: you sound like you’re doing a Mario impression.

No, sorry. I try to be deferential when talking about this stuff, but this is pretty cut and dry, and I’m afraid you’re just wrong here. This is Greek–not theology. πίστις is the word we’re talking about. It shares the common root with πείθω–“to persuade” (i.e., that evidence is compelling or trustworthy). πίστις is the same word you would use in describing the veracity of a tribunal’s judgment (for example, “I have πίστις that the jurors in NY got the verdict right/wrong”). The Greeks used the word to personify honesty, trust, and persuasiveness prior to the existence of Christianity (although someone who knows Attic or is better versed in Greek mythology feel free to correct me). The word is inherently tied up with persuasion, confidence, and trust since long before the New Testament. The original audience of the New Testament would have understood the meaning of the word without depending on any prior relation to religion.

Is trust always a better translation? Of course not–and that’s why, you’ll notice, I didn’t say that (and if it were, one would hope that many of the very well educated translators of Bibles would have used it). But I think you can agree that the concept is also difficult for English to handle (since trust in a person, trust in a deity, and trust in a statement are similar but not quite the same thing, and the same goes for belief in a proposition, belief in a person, and belief in an ideal or value, to say nothing of analogous concepts like loyalty and integrity).

The point is that πίστις–faith–absolutely does not mean belief without evidence, and Christianity since its inception has never taught that. English also doesn’t use the word “faith” to imply the absence of evidence, and we don’t need to appeal to another language to understand that. It’s why the phrase “blind faith” exists (and the phrase is generally pejorative in religious circles as well as secular ones).

Now, if you think the evidence that convinces Christians to conclude that Jesus’ followers saw Him after His death is inadequate, that’s perfectly valid and a reasonable criticism of Christianity–and if you want to talk about that, that would be apologetics.

In any event, if you’re going to call something bullshit, you better have a lot of faith in the conclusion you’re drawing. ;)

The way faith is treated in the First Century doesn’t translate well to modern audiences. Having faith of a child isn’t an analogy to a child being gullible. It’s an analogy to the way a child trusts in and depends on his parents. Trust, arguably, would be a better translation than faith in many instances.

Faith for ancient religious peoples wasn’t about believing without proof. That would be as ridiculous for a First Century Jew as it is for us. Faith is being persuaded to a conclusion by the evidence.

These are all really excellent questions. My son skipped a grade early in gradeschool, and I am fortunate enough to have a friend who had a similar experience as this young lady (albeit not to the same extent) being hyper-accelerated through school, so we were able to interview him about his experience when making decisions about how to handle our exceptional kiddo’s education.

It was not a fun conversation, and as a result we elected to just let our son take advanced classes when possible and not really push to have him skip additional grades or do any of the wacky stuff with enrolling in college as a child or what have you. Of course we’re going to push him to take stuff that is challenging whenever possible, and I’d love for him to graduate high school with as much college credit as possible–but I’m not about to steal his youth in pursuit of putting a PhD on his wall before he’s old enough to vote.

The short version is that our friend was a very miserable child. His advancement essentially meant he had no peers, and especially among teenagers, the acceleration just put a bullseye on his back, since the people who surrounded him either resented him or saw him as a target for bullying. Even professional educators at times resented him. He was adamant that it was a thing he would never put his own children through.

Is that a typical experience? I have no idea; after all, being a child in higher education is already well outside ordinary experience. But the story was enough to make me worry for the child whenever I read a headline like this.

Thanks to this post I now identify as a lost bat. I consider it a marked improvement.