Interpreting Matt 22: 23-32

 

Facebook Post by Blake Ostler

Blake Ostler

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One of the most misunderstood passages in scripture is Matt 22: 23-32. It deals with Levirate marriage or the duty under Jewish Law to marry the wife to the brother of his deceased brother. In this passage, the Sadducees challenge the notion of the resurrection (which they did not accept) by asking about the quandary of who the wife will be married to in the resurrection if she has been married to 7 brothers who die consecutively:

"23 That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. 24 “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for him. 25 Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. 26 The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. 27 Finally, the woman died. 28 Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?”" NIV

Note the assumptions. Assumption #1: marriage continues after death and the resurrection. #2. Polygamy is appropriate because the brother's prior marital status does not change the duty to marry his deceased brother's wife. #3 The wife cannot be married to all 7 brothers at once in the resurrection and so the resurrection is not possible.

Note Jesus's response -- which doesn't say what Evangelicals and Catholics think it does:

"29 Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. 30 At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. 31 But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, 32 ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’[b]? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”"

Note how Jesus deals with the assumptions. First, Jesus does not reject assumption #1. He does not reject the marriage because it won't survive death. Rather, Jesus implicitly accepts that assumption. He does not reject assumption #1. Rather, he states that there is no issue because brothers will not die after the resurrection and so it is not an issue.

Second, Jesus does not reject assumption #2. Rather than argue that the notion of Levirate marriage is unacceptable because it entails polygamy, he implicitly accepts that such marriage is in fact the duty of the brothers who have a deceased brother.

Jesus rejects assumption #3 -- but not for the reason assumed by the Sadducees. Rather, Jesus rejects assumption #3 by pointing out that the Sadducees have missed an obvious fact: there will be no duty to marry a brother's wife in the resurrection because brothers will not die. Note that he emphasizes this issue by pointing out that God is the God of the living and the resurrection is to be alive after death. He states that no wife will "marry or be given in marriage" _'not that marriages don't survive death. At the resurrection people will "neither marry nor be given in marriage" -- but they will continue in the marriages they contracted under the covenant in life. In other words, Levirate marriage is not a duty in the resurrection because the first brother to whom she was married will be alive. All are like angels -- not subject to death at all in the resurrection.

Rather than attacking plural marriage or eternal marriage, this pericope actually supports the view that they are recognized by Jesus!

The worst take on this passage that I have seen is that given by Daniel McLellan who argued that it means that the author of Matthew thinks that marriage itself is not accepted by Jesus. That is a complete misunderstanding of this passage and Levirate marriage. In fact, Ruth was married to Boaz in a Levirate marriage.

2nd amendment and Charlie Kirk

 

For anyone that is interested in the FULL quote made by Charlie Kirk that is being taken so out of context, If you’re willing to read it, you may have a different opinion.

“Yeah, it's a great question. Thank you. So, I'm a big Second Amendment fan but I think most politicians are cowards when it comes to defending why we have a Second Amendment. This is why I would not be a good politician, or maybe I would, I don't know, because I actually speak my mind.

The Second Amendment is not about hunting. I love hunting. The Second Amendment is not even about personal defense. That is important. The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government. And if that talk scares you — "wow, that's radical, Charlie, I don't know about that" — well then, you have not really read any of the literature of our Founding Fathers. Number two, you've not read any 20th-century history. You're just living in Narnia. By the way, if you're actually living in Narnia, you would be wiser than wherever you're living, because C.S. Lewis was really smart. So I don't know what alternative universe you're living in. You just don't want to face reality that governments tend to get tyrannical and that if people need an ability to protect themselves and their communities and their families.

Now, we must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. Driving comes with a price. 50,000, 50,000, 50,000 people die on the road every year. That's a price. You get rid of driving, you'd have 50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of driving — speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services — is worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. So we need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. You could significantly reduce them through having more fathers in the home, by having more armed guards in front of schools. We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one.

You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I am, I, I — I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.

So then, how do you reduce? Very simple. People say, oh, Charlie, how do you stop school shootings? I don't know. How did we stop shootings at baseball games? Because we have armed guards outside of baseball games. That's why. How did we stop all the shootings at airports? We have armed guards outside of airports. How do we stop all the shootings at banks? We have armed guards outside of banks. How did we stop all the shootings at gun shows? Notice there's not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows, there's all these guns. Because everyone's armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don't our children?”

Digital dementia

 

More than 2,400 years ago, Socrates reportedly suggested that writing itself would “produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.”

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-i-realized-ai-was-making-me-stupidand-what-i-do-now-5862ac4d?mod=WTRN_pos2&cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_176&cx_artPos=1

How I Realized AI Was Making Me Stupid—and What I Do Now

Backers of the new tech say it will free us to be creative, but studies show that avoiding mental effort can cause your brain to atrophy.

By 

Sam Schechner

April 3, 2025 10:30 am ET

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ILLUSTRATION: JASON SCHNEIDER

I first suspected artificial intelligence was eating my brain while writing an email about my son’s basketball coach. 

I wanted to complain to the local rec center—in French—that the coach kept missing classes. As an American reporter living in Paris, I’ve come to speak French pretty well, but the task was still a pain. I described the situation, in English, to ChatGPT. Within seconds, the bot churned out a French email that sounded both resolute and polite.

I changed a few words and sent it.

I soon tasked ChatGPT with drafting complex French emails to my kids’ school. I asked it to summarize long French financial documents. I even began asking it to dash off casual-sounding WhatsApp messages to French friends, emojis and all. 

After years of building up my ability to articulate nuanced ideas in French, AI had made this work optional. I felt my brain get a little rusty. I was surprised to find myself grasping for the right words to ask a friend for a favor over text. But life is busy. Why not choose the easy path?

AI developers have promised their tools will liberate humans from the drudgery of repetitive brain labor. It will unshackle our minds to think big. It will give us space to be more creative. 

But what if freeing our minds actually ends up making them lazy and weak? 

“With creativity, if you don’t use it, it starts to go away,” Robert Sternberg, a Cornell University professor of psychology, told me. Sternberg, who studies human creativity and intelligence, argues that AI has already taken a toll on both.

Smartphones are already blamed for what some researchers call “digital dementia.” In study after study, scientists have shown that people who regularly rely on digital help for some tasks can lose capacity to do them alone. 

The more we use GPS, the worse we become at finding our way on our own. The more we rely on our stored contacts, the less likely we are to know the phone numbers of close friends, or even our spouse’s. 

Most of us don’t worry about not learning phone numbers anymore, if we’re old enough to have ever learned them at all. But what happens when we start outsourcing core parts of our thinking to a machine? Such as understanding a text well enough to summarize it. Or finding the words that best express a thought. Is there a way to use these new AI tools without my brain becoming mush?

Like AI itself, research into its cognitive effects is in its infancy, but early results are inauspicious. A study published in January in the journal Societies found that frequent use of AI tools such as ChatGPT correlated with reduced critical thinking, particularly among younger users. In a new survey of knowledge workers, Microsoft researchers found that those with more confidence in generative AI engaged in less critical thinking when using it.

“Tools like GPS and generative AI make us cognitively lazy,” said Louisa Dahmani, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, who in 2020 showed that habitual use of GPS navigation reduces one’s spatial memory. “While it’s possible to use these tools in a mindful manner, I think that most of us will take the path of least resistance,” she told me. 

Adopting tools for brain work—a process called cognitive offloading—has been largely an engine of human progress. Ever since Sumerians scratched their debts into clay tablets, people have been using stone, papyrus and paper to outsource their memories and conceptions of everything from theorems to shopping lists.

ILLUSTRATION: JASON SCHNEIDER

Opportunities for cognitive offloading have multiplied lately. Paper calendars have long kept appointments; digital ones send alerts when they are happening. Calculators add up numbers; Excel spreadsheets balance whole budgets. 

Generative AI promises to boost our productivity further. Workers are increasingly using it to write emails, transcribe meetings or even—shhh—summarize those way-too-long documents your boss sends. By late last year, around a quarter of all corporate press releases were likely written with AI help, according to a preprint paper led by Stanford Ph.D. students. 

But these short-term gains may have long-term costs. George Roche, co-founder of Bindbridge, an AI molecular-discovery startup, told me he uploads several scientific papers a day, on topics from botany to chemistry, to an AI chatbot. It has been a boon, allowing Roche to stay on top of far more research than he could before. Yet this ease has begun to trouble him. 

“I’m outsourcing my synthesis of information,” Roche told me. “Am I going to lose that ability? Am I going to get less sharp?”

Hemant Taneja, chief executive of Silicon Valley venture-capital firm General Catalyst, which has invested in AI companies including Anthropic and Mistral AI, concedes that while AI technology offers real benefits, it may also compromise our thinking skills.

“Our ability to ask the right questions is going to weaken if we don’t practice,” Taneja said. 

These risks could be greater for young people if they start offloading to AI cognitive skills that they haven’t yet honed for themselves. Yes, some studies show that AI tutors can help students if used well. But a Wharton School study last year found that high-school math students who studied with an AI chatbot that was willing to provide answers to math problems trailed a group of bot-free students on the AI-free final exam.

“There is a possible cyberpunk dystopian future where we become stupid and computers do all the thinking,” Richard Heersmink, a philosopher of technology at Tilberg University in the Netherlands, told me.

Let’s not panic just yet. Humans have a history of issuing dire predictions about new technologies that later prove to be misplaced. 

More than 2,400 years ago, Socrates reportedly suggested that writing itself would “produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.” It would be hard to suggest, however, that the benefits of writing and reading don’t outweigh the costs. 

 Since then, new technologies, from the printing press to the knitting machine to the telegraph, have all provoked objections about their impact on individuals and society—with varying degrees of prescience. But there is no stopping progress. 

With the AI future on our doorsteps, what do scientists say we ought to do to keep our minds spry? The basic principle is use it or lose it. Writing is a good way to practice thinking and reasoning precisely because it is hard. 

“The question is what skills do we think are important and what skills do we want to relinquish to our tools,” said Hamsa Bastani, a professor at the Wharton School and an author of that study on the effects of AI on high-school math students. Bastani told me she uses AI to code, but makes sure to check its work and does some of her own coding too. “It’s like forcing yourself to take the stairs instead of taking the elevator.”

Mark Maitland, a senior partner at the consulting firm Simon-Kucher, said that although his staff now uses AI transcriptions of meetings, he asks his team to take handwritten notes, too, given research that taking notes leads to better recall.

“It’s easy to become lazy if you think something else is doing it for you,” Maitland told me.

I’m now leaning into mental effort in my own life, too. That means I make myself turn off the GPS even in unfamiliar places. I take handwritten notes when I want to remember something. I also resist my kids’ demands to ask ChatGPT for a made-up story and encourage them to create their own instead. 

I’ve even started writing my own French-language emails and WhatsApp messages again. At least most of the time. I’m still busy after all.

Sam Schechner is a technology reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s Paris bureau.

Musk on the future

 https://x.com/theallinpod/status/1965595045932986450

Summary of @elonmusk’s 44 minute interview at the @allinsummit

: Government: • Elon hasn’t been back to DC since May, “The Government is basically unfixable.” • “If AI & Robots don’t solve the National Debt, we’re toast.” Optimus: • Tesla is finalizing the design of Optimus Gen 3. “It’s going to be a very remarkable robot.” • Optimus Gen 3 will have the manual dexterity of a human. • Optimus Gen 3 will have an AI mind that can navigate, and comprehend reality. • There is no supply chain for humanoid robots, Tesla is making everything from scratch. It requires a lot of vertical integration. • All of Optimus’ actuators are made in-house by Tesla. There are 26 actuators, per arm. • Elon reiterates: “If Optimus is successful, it will be the biggest product, ever.” • Production Cost of Optimus, once 1M units/year are achieved is around the $20,000 range. • The AI chip for Optimus will be expensive, potentially $5-6K , maybe more. • Price of Optimus will be a function of demand. • Tesla had to design Optimus’ every electric motor, gearbox, and the controlling electronics from scratch. • Creating Optimus is harder than making Model S/3/X/Y/CT, but not harder than Starship. • The forearms and hands of Optimus are majoirty of engineering difficulties of the entire robot. • Optimus LLM will be included, no added subscription. AI4, AI5, AI6 & FSD: • Tesla is currently finalizing the design for AI5. It will be an immense jump from AI4. • AI5 will be 40x better than AI4 in some metrics. • Tesla is working so closely on the AI Hardware, and Software this time around. Both teams are co-designing the chip. • AI5 has 8x more commute than AI4. • AI5 has 10x more memory than AI4. • AI5 has 5x more memory-bandwidth than AI4. • Elon is confident AI4 chips will still be able to achieve self-driving safety that is at least 2-3x of a human, maybe even 10x. • FSD 14 will be released in a few months. • V14 will be the biggest upgrade to Tesla’s software since V12. • FSD 14 will make the car feel sentient, by the end of the year. Starlink: • New spectrum deal will allow SpaceX to deliver high-bandwidth connectivity directly from the satellites, to the phone. • Current frequencies aren’t supported in current phones. Hardware changes are needed. • Chipsets need to be modified to add the new frequencies. • The phones capable of using this new frequency will ship in two years. • You will be able to watch videos anywhere in the world. • These frequencies required will work inside a building, it won’t cut off. • You will be able to have a Starlink Account instead of a Verizon/At&T account, but it won’t put other carriers out of business. • SpaceX may buy carriers to gain more spectrum. “It’s not out the question, it may happen.” Starship: • SpaceX will recover Starship starting next year. • There is only one V2 Starship left. • V3 is a radical re-design, initially it might go through some teething pains. • V3 is capable of over 100T to orbit, fully reusable. • Starting in 2026, SpaceX will demonstrate fully reusability next year, catching both booster and ship. • Elon thinks a self-sustaining life on Mars can be achieved within roughly 25 years. AI: • A rough rule of thumb is 10x more compute will double the intelligence. • Elon thinks we will continue to see intelligence scale all the way up to where most of the power of the sun is harnessed for compute. • Human Intelligence is currently plateauing due to low birth-rates and population declines. It will eventually start declining. • Elon guesses AI will be smarter than absolutely everything starting next year. • By 2030, Elon guesses AI will be smarter than the sum of ALL humans.

https://x.com/niccruzpatane/status/1965715723126493544

Moon landing explanation

This film explains all the controversies about the Apollo moon landings.

https://x.com/Erdayastronaut/status/1895156906894770212

Everyday Astronaut

@Erdayastronaut

There are honestly some decent and common questions about the Apollo program’s moon landings that I figured we should check out ourselves. Because there’s no denying things from the Apollo program look unusual and are quite literally foreign to us in all other contexts. Enjoy 10 months of research, work, dozens of animations, 9 hours of 6k dialogue that took up 3.1 terabytes of hard drive space and MOUNTAINS OF LOVE covering the most incredible journey in all of human history (so far), the Apollo Program. Send this to anyone who watched the Bart Siebrel video on

@joerogan

, and maybe

@elonmusk

, you should make Joe watch this so he has answers to his questions. 00:00:00 - INTRO 00:04:40 - APOLLO 17 LIFTOFF FOOTAGE 00:19:05 - WHY DON'T WE SEE STARS 00:25:40 - LUNAR SHADOWS 00:32:00 - CROSSHAIRS BEHIND OBJECTS 00:34:10 - WHY DID THE FLAG WAVE 00:38:00 - ASTRONAUTS ON WIRES 00:47:15 - FOOTPRINTS / PROP ROCKS 00:49:05 - MOON ROCK OR WOOD 00:51:35 - VAN ALLEN BELT RADIATION 01:12:55 - LOST APOLLO 11 TAPES 01:07:55 - DID NASA FAKE FOOTAGE 01:19:30 - LOST SATURN V PLANS 01:23:00 - THE LUNAR LANDER'S THIN SKIN 01:27:50 - LUNAR ROVER DUST 01:29:30 - OTHER PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE 01:37:20 - DID ANYONE ELSE TRACK THE MISSIONS 01:40:15 - THE SOVIETS' REACTION TO APOLLO 01:42:10 - ORBITAL MECHANICS OF APOLLO 01:51:15 - DELTA V OF APOLLO 02:04:30 - WHY HAVEN'T WE GONE BACK 02:14:30 - SUMMARY