Quotes from Shades of Sheol
âGood literature is often evocative, using imagery and metaphor to stimulate the imagination rather than prosaic description to satisfy the intellect. This has the great advantage of enabling the reader to enter creatively into the experience of the author, and more than outweighs the resultant imprecision and possible misunderstanding. But of course imagery by its very nature cannot be pressed too far. Old Testament descriptions of death are often imaginative and evocative rather than prosaic and specific. This allows us to understand the ancient Israelitesâ attitudes to death more than their beliefs about it. Nevertheless, the imagery and metaphor used inevitably reflect certain beliefs, and it is useful to attempt to trace these.
Further, in all human life, concepts from the cultural background may be taken up and used without acceptance of their underlying ideology. Today people from all walks of life talk of an Achillesâ heel, Cupidâs arrows, or the fates, or use adjectives like âtitanicâ and âpromethean,â without believing the Greek mythology which underlies these terms. Christians have often celebrated Halloween as a harmless folk festival, without worrying about its roots. Thus Israelâs use of certain terms need not imply acceptance of the mythology associated with [it] by other peoples. Neighbouring cultures used terms like death, pestilence and plagues to represent deities, but the Hebrew usage does not necessarily echo this.â â pg 25
âThe most important Hebrew term for the underworld is clearlyâŠâSheolâ⊠for several reasons: (a) It is the most frequent, occurring sixty-six times. (b) It always occurs without the definite article (âtheâ), which implies that it is a proper name. (c) It always means the realm of the dead located deep in the earth, unlike other terms which can mean both âpitâ and âunderworld.ââ -pg 70
Shades of Sheol: Death and Afterlife in the Old Testament by Philip S. Johnston
BookTuber Tuesday: Iron Flame, Victorian Dime Novels, & the “Fast Fashion” Problem in Publishing đ€Šđ»ââïž
“Making God” by Emily Gorcenski
The central problem with Singularity theory is that it is really only attractive to nerds. Vibing with all of humanity across the universe would mean entangling your consciousness with that of every other creep, and if youâre selling that vision and donât see that as an issue, then it probably means that youâre the creep. Kurzweilâs The Singularity is Near is paternalistic and at times downright lecherous; paradise for me would mean being almost anywhere heâs not. The metaverse has two problems with its sales pitch: the first is that itâs useless; the second is that absolutely nobody wants Facebook to represent their version of forever.
Of course, itâs not like Meta (Facebookâs rebranded parent company) is coming right out and saying, âhey weâre building digital heaven!â Techno-utopianism is (only a little bit) more subtle. They donât come right out and say theyâre saving souls. Instead they say theyâre benefitting all of humanity. Facebook wants to connect the world. Google wants to put all knowledge of humanity at your fingertips. Ignore their profit motives, theyâre being altruistic!
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In recent years, a bizarre philosophy has gained traction among silicon valleyâs most fervent insiders: effective altruism. The basic gist is that giving is good (holy) and in order to give more one must first earn more. Therefore, obscene profit, even that which is obtained through fraud, is justifiable because it can lead to immense charity. Plenty of capitalists have made similar arguments through the years. Andrew Carnegie built libraries around the country out of a belief in a bizarre form of social darwinism, that men who emerge from deep poverty will evolve the skills to drive industrialism forward. Thereâs a tendency for the rich to mistake their luck with skill.
But it was the canon of Singularity theory that brought this prosaic philosophy to a new state of perversion: longtermism. If humanity survives, vastly more humans will live in the future than live today or have ever lived in the past. Therefore, it is our obligation to do everything we can to ensure their future prosperity. All inequalities and offenses in the present pale in comparison to the benefit we can achieve at scale to the humans yet to exist. It is for their benefit that we must drive steadfast to the Singularity. We develop technology not for us but for them. We are the benediction of all of the rest of mankind.
Longtermismâs biggest advocates were, unsurprisingly, the most zealous evangelists of web3. They proselytized with these arguments for years and the numbers of their acolytes grew. And the rest of us saw the naked truth, dumbfounded watching, staring into our black mirrors, darkly.
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Longtermists offered a mind-blowing riposte: who cares about racism today when youâre trying to save billions of lives in the future?
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Humanityâs demise is a scarier idea than, say, labor displacement. Itâs not a coincidence that AI advocates are keeping extinction risk as the preĂ«minent âAI safetyâ topic in regulators’ minds. Itâs something they can easily agree to avoid without any negligible impact in the day-to-day operations of their business: we are not close to the creation of an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), despite the breathless claims of the Singularity disciples working on the tech. This allows them to distract from and marginalize the real concerns about AI safety: mass unemployment, educational impairment, encoded social injustice, misinformation, and so forth. Singularity theorists get to have it both ways: they can keep moving towards their promised land without interference from those equipped to stop them.
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Effective altruism, longtermism, techno-optimism, fascism, neoreactionaryism, etc are all just variations on a savior mythology. Each of them says, âthere is a threat and we are the victim. But we are also the savior. And we alone can defeat the threat.â (Longtermism at least pays lip service to democracy but refuses to engage with the reality that voters will always choose the issues that affect them now.) Every savior myth also must create an event that proves that salvation has arrived. We shouldnât be surprised that theyâve simply reinvented Revelations. Silicon Valley hasnât produced a truly new idea in decades.
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Technologists believe they are creating a revolution when in reality they are playing right into the hands of a manipulative, mainstream political force. We saw it in 2016 and we learned nothing from that lesson.
Doomsday cults can never admit when they are wrong. Instead, they double down. We failed to make artificial intelligence so we pivoted to artificial life. We failed to make artificial life so now weâre trying to program the messiah. Two months before the Metaverse went belly-up, McKinsey valued it at up to $5 trillion dollars by 2030. And it was without a hint of irony or self-reflection that they pivoted and valued GenAI at up to $4.4 trillion annually. Thereâs not even a hint of common sense in this analysis.
[Via]
GABBLER RECOMMENDS: TikTok Roman Empire Trend Shows How Pervasive Misogyny Informs Historical Record
The presumption that women arenât interested in these histories comes from these biases, but itâs not an innocent one. Even if we put aside all of the other issues Iâve outlined here, the impact these biases have on the study of antiquity is alive and well. I regularly watch male colleagues as their eyes glaze over while female colleagues talk about their work on social histories of the Roman Empire or the pitfalls of ancient reception, while men I meet in my life outside academia assume their cursory knowledge based on this imagined past is equivalent or superior to my knowledge after a decade of training. Iâve sat through too many disrespectful Q&As to not understand the consequences of the possessiveness men hold over Rome in how it affects womenâs abilities to engage with ancient history. This article doesnât even scratch the surface of how these issues are amplified for scholars who occupy intersecting identities as people of color, or members of the LGBTQIA+ community, or are disabled (like myself), topics that responses on TikTok have also grappled with as the trend gains popularity. The imagination of ancient Rome affects people in far more ways than gender.
And Iâm sick of it.
Iâm not accusing the men featured in TikTok videos of harboring these feelings about gender, race, or imperialism. However, to ignore the subtext of this trend would be to pass up an opportunity to discuss the presence of the ancient world in our modern lives, and all the baggage that comes with it. So, I have to ask: how often do you think about why we think about the Roman Empire?
[Via]