It's hard to know how serious all this is, because he keeps switching between outrageous comments and then a serious voice explaining the point he's making, and why the students should think about the issue.
It might well get him fired before the end of his final year, but I suspect this will end up being a video that gets referred to a lot over the years as a great way of challenging students' viewpoints.
He taught what plagiarism is, and how to transform it into a proper citation.
He explained his attendance policy, and very clearly defined WHY.
He taught why you shouldn't trust authority blindly.
He pointed out the problem with predestination, and provides instruction on how to earn an A in a fully remote manner later in the video
This is a well crafted lesson, aimed at adults who can handle a few fucking swear words, not children. It shows respect to their new status as grown ass people in the course of doing so.
It is a lesson in empathy, and if they don't understand it, they should ask their grandparents the next time they see them on zoom.
Brilliant stuff, worthy of a tenured professor. I hope he enjoys his now accelerated, well earned retirement.
At the risk of being a terrible off topic HN commenter,
> He's taught
> He's explained
> He's taught
I'm not sure if it's technically correct (or incorrect) grammar, but I (native English speaker) found these constructs to be really difficult to parse. I wasn't sure whether it was a contraction of "he is" or "he has" as both made sense (though the second point later has context that points to "he has").
I'm not bothered, and I hope no offence is taken by this, I just thought it was mildly fascinating. I don't think I often see that "He's" contraction in English.
That's a fair point, and I've cleaned up my comment to reflect your observations. I just reduced "He's" (short for He has) to "He", as the "has" wasn't really necessary.
Indeed it’s ambiguous in isolation, but knowing that the subject is a teacher interacting with students makes it clear that the contracted word is “has”, not “is”.
Also gets around half of the fucking "transcript" being censored. Honestly, why bother "quoting" from the video when most of it is unintelligible because a lot of the creative swearing is replaced with *s?
Fantastic. Thanks for including the link. It's pretty clear he's making a point of quoting the dialogue in and out of context. His tone makes the lecture pretty engaging to be honest.
Tenure or not, is he seriously going give his students random final grades even before the first day of class (as he put it, "predestination")? Surely the school won't allow him to do this
Apparently a lot of bible thumpers go to that school and he's probably heard the predestination argument w.r.t. Covid & dying far too often. Him saying grades are predetermined is another way of challenging that viewpoint. The grades won't (or shouldn't) be assigned randomly
Later he goes on to explain how you can get an A from remote-friendly materials too.
While it's preposterous on the face of it, it's not even completely satirical since he goes on to explain the actual "rules" later for anything he "prescribes" early on.
I thought tenure was supposed to protect you from getting fired over bs?
This intro was engaging and informative, which is exactly what professors should be doing during lectures.
For me the obvious take-away here is: post-secondary education is a dying institution, and is losing relevance precisely because they don't allow professors and students to have real opinions or discussions. There should be no controversy here. Eccentric professor is eccentric - how awful!
No. Tenure is supposed to protect you from getting fired for controversial but sound research or methods. Tenured faculty can and should get fired for acting like assholes. If a professor took a shit on their desk at the beginning of each class period and then left, assigning students all 0s for grades then they'd be rightly fired regardless of tenure.
Students are paying thousands of dollars per course and tenure should not prevent them from receiving an education.
The question here is whether this is eccentricity for the sake of learning or eccentricity that inhibits learning.
The only eyebrow raising thing is the suggestion he already assigned random course grades. Absolutely the rest of it doesn’t offend me one bit. I hope the admin lets him teach remote though if he’d like.
Edit-but then I went to a college where this wouldn’t have batted any eyes. Graduating with even a C average would be respectable. Any other college in the surrounding area would consider that an A average student. And in his heyday one of my math professors would hand out truck driver applications to his calculus students with their graded tests because math and engineering definitely aren’t their fields.
As a German, I am super shocked that this a even a controversy. Here a tenured prof can do basically whatever the hell they want (as long it is not criminal like holocaust denial obviously). Science does need a certain degree freedom to flourish and a bit of eccentricity can help make the classes more lively.
A prof can not swear in front of his adult students? He is forced to teach in person during a deadly pandemic and people are even angry for him complaining about it? Insanity.
As an American, I wouldn't have been able to predict that anything in that video would elicit a complaint, let alone be deemed suspension-worthy. Perhaps I'm out of touch with ... something I'd rather not be in touch with.
The "don't come to class" part doesn't appear to be satire, yet the whole class showed up. Goes to prove his point on 50 selfish… kids who don’t give a sh* whether grandpa lives or dies.
* everything you need to succeed in this class is in the syllabus
* I'm required to be here, you're not
* If you wouldn't want to get your grandfather sick, I'm as old as your grandfather, treat me like him
* I'm wearing this ridiculous mask to protect me from you
* I will not be answering any questions in class
* I will not be tracking your attendance, while other professors might
What do you think he was saying? And how would you interpret people still choosing to physically show up to his class?
People going to class because they have to go to class? Because they were told by the school, their parents, whoever to go to class, or because they actually want to go to class and see their classmates?
Don't get me wrong, if my kid said that their teacher is old and their teacher is asking them not to go, I'd support whatever decision they made, but shifting the responsibility of your own health to kids and ignoring what that means for them is probably not the way.
> shifting the responsibility of your own health to kids
How is he 'shifting the responsibility'? It's clear from the video that he does not have an option, as attendance for professors was mandated, presumably his income is on the line.
Attendance for students on the other hand is decided by the professor, and he decided presence is not required or desired. He made it very clear that the course is designed for distance learning and there is nothing to gain from being present. What else do you suggest he could have done to protect his own health?
I rather get paid without having to work and taking any risk of illness, than doing my job and providing the students with the teaching they have paid for?
He can go for early retirement, a year of unpaid vacation, or sick leave (for his anxiety that makes it impossible to work clearly). He has a work dispute and he is taking it out on his students, instead of solving that dispute or walking away.
He was going to do work in the form of a remote class.
Good online classes are very effective learning environments. His college is probably requiring him to not make it an online class, but he’s trying to make it as online as official policy allows.
Well, if other professors are tracking attendance, that is probably enough to give the kids no choice but to go.
But I don't see where it says that all students showed up. Is it on the first class (what's perfectly understandable, as they didn't know all of that), or is it for the entire course?
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly lately, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
This guy rocks. I thoroughly look forward to aging into an cantankerous old coot who doesn't give a shit about anything and can't keep his mouth shut about the insanity all around.
In real life, the response was predictable - “I was shocked and appalled by this video. It is profane, offensive and disturbing and in no way reflects our university or its values,” President David Eisler said Thursday.[1]
In a better, more adult, timeline, as suggested by one of the replies on Metafilter[2], the response would have continued
"He went on to explain that the University reserves the right to kill off as many of its old professors as it deems expedient and requires them all to meet their deaths quietly and without fuss. "It's difficult enough to keep being paid more than any of these people without needing to meet their accusing eyes in the staffroom as well", Eisler said."
If the latter had happened, I'd be quite interested to see what remote courses I could attend at such a fine institution. Alas, we're on the worst timeline.
I can't put this into words, much like the author of the account of Jesus healing the Leper. But I think he was onto something deeper than what a literal interpretation might suggest.
There is something worth non 0 value of living in a society who accepts you despite being sick or 'dirty', and is willing to take the risk of having those who are tainted amongst them. I feel that's an attitude that comes from a place of strength not weakness. But being scared of the air is certainly not something Jesus would have been.
Except that Jesus taught his disciples not to wash their hands before eating -- a basic hygenic practice that people of his time certainly understood. However valuable his moral teachings may have been, Jesus is not exactly an authority on preventing disease spread...
(Also, the story of Jesus and the leper may have been nothing more than an attempt to talk about Jesus' miraculous powers.)
if you dont have soap rinsing your hands with water that could be contaminated by a myriad of bacteria may not be the best course of action. Even in the modern world of less-developed countries, most gastrointestinal infections come from (unclean) water, not food.
You can wash your hands if you think it is wise to, but don't make it a matter of spiritual, ritual cleanliness that you place trust in the performance of above God as the pharisees did. As you say, God can make the water a worse poison to you.
Honour your father and mother. Be just to your neighbor. Trust God above man and cultivate a loving relationship with both. The modern day godless neo-pharisees will of course, as always, ask questions and make remarks that are trite, intended to discredit people's faith, or trip heartfelt believers into contradiction. They want to maintain the social order they're scared of having overturned by a just man willing to make a real sacrifice going against its grain in a sorely needed fashion. They don't understand, so be it.
You can also wash someone's feet if you want to, but don't make it a matter of spiritual, ritual cleanliness as Jesus did.
You can also take a bath if you want to, but don't make it a matter of spiritual, ritual cleanliness as Jesus did.
Also, Christians really need to learn what "pharisee" actually means before throwing the word around the way you do. "Neo-pharisees" would imply that the pharisees were some ancient group that ceased to exist at some point. In reality "pharisee" simple means "rabbi," and the only reason the term fell out of use is that the only recognizably Jewish movement to survive the destruction of the Temple and the Jewish-Roman wars was rabbinic Judaism. Almost any Jews you meet today practice a religion that can be traced directly to the pharisees mentioned in the New Testament. Moreover, the religious movement Jesus led was closer to what the pharisees taught and practiced than it was to any other Jewish movement of that time. One easy example is Jesus' own teaching that a man who has lustful thoughts about a woman has already committed adultery in his own heart; this is the kind of broadening of Jewish law that is common in rabbinic documents like the Talmud (e.g. "yichud," a prohibition on unmarried men and women being alone behind a closed door). Jesus also taught his followers answers to common Rabbinic debates, such as the famous dispute between Hillel and Shammai about when divorce is permitted.
Jesus was not nearly as radical as some Christians think. His movement was very slightly outside the mainstream, and for the most part his focus seems to have been on avoiding blind adherence to tradition. His willingness to accept disciples who were uneducated and even outcasts was unusual, but not that unusual, with the Talmud indicating that Rabbi Akiva was illiterate until he turned 40 and that Rabbi Shimon bar Lakish was the leader of a criminal gang before he began studying to be a rabbi (you may not believe such stories, but remember that the New Testament is no more historically reliable than the Talmud). Paul taught a religion that was much more radical than anything Jesus taught, but somehow I do not think you were referring to Paul when you spoke of "a just man willing to make a real sacrifice."
Every interpretation which focuses on Jesus as a "interesting teacher" ignores half of the things he actually said and demonstrated. Paul wasn't more radical than the man who claimed to be greater than the Temple, one with the Father. Christ claimed that Abraham rejoiced for His day, Moses wrote for Him and the Scriptures pointed to Him.
He saw His own flesh as the bread of life, greater than the manna in the desert.
I am not sure we can easily comprehend how out there this was.
He resurrected people and died for the sins of every human. His teaching wasn't just a list of debates, but it was full of claims and events that you can't honestly compare to other "rabbies"
> Jesus was not nearly as radical as some Christians think
The whole thing about forgiveness, non-retaliation, redemption is very distinctive from usual Judaism though. That's one of the core aspects of Christianity.
Who is that "just man willing to make a real sacrifice going against its grain in a sorely needed fashion" threatening to overturn social order?
Also, hand washing is a matter of cleanliness period. Not spiritual cleanliness, not ritual cleanliness, not karmic cleanliness, not any other kind of something cleanliness. It is simple, ordinary, banal cleanliness.
I am not ignoring context at all. The context was:
> The modern day godless neo-pharisees ...... want to maintain the social order they're scared of having overturned by a just man willing to make a real sacrifice .......
Who is this modern day man? JetAlone, who are you talking about? And who are his opponents?
Just to clarify my comment, I was answering your second paragraph: it seemed to ignore to me the context of the original related Bible sections that started the discussion.
And that paragraph of mine was in response to this paragraph by JetAlone:
> You can wash your hands if you think it is wise to, but don't make it a matter of spiritual, ritual cleanliness that you place trust in the performance of above God as the pharisees did. As you say, God can make the water a worse poison to you.
That paragraph is very much refering to the present, not to biblical times. For some reason, contrary to what most Christians belive, JetAlone seems to doubt the usefulness of hand washing, because why bother, God can make the water into poison.
JetAlone, do you believe in a malevolent God?
In a way, I can understand it. If you have ultimate unshakable faith in God: a) You believe God will not let any harm befall you no matter how irresponsible your behaviour. b) You also believe that should harm befall you, it is inevitable, because it is God's will. But is this not called tempting God and against Christian dogma?
And you would be surprised that it was not routinely available everywhere, anytime, in antiquity. Mass consumption of soap is a very, very recent thing.
First hit from Google for “Did they use soap in biblical times?”:
>”Soap became hugely popular throughout the Roman Empire, around 100 BC to 400 AD. When the ruins of Pompeii were excavated, an entire soap factory was discovered in the rubble.”
He was rejecting ritual purification saying that your actions are more important. He agreed with all the requirements in the Torah, but not all the additional rituals gradually stacked on top (where the excessive ritual purification of his day fit).
Leprosy was viewed as a symbol of sin. This story was about Him touching a sinner and purifying them from that sin.
Let's talk about Christian theology from that perspective
Jesus spoke sternly several times about the hypocrisy and burden of those artificial rules. He pointed out how they would "strain a gnat and swallow a camel" (straining their drinking water to avoid unclean animals while enjoying camel steaks which were unclean) or meticulously paying tithe of their little herbs while taking bribes and corrupting their legal judgements or promising their possessions to God so they could avoid honoring and taking care of their parents.
He talked about how they made the Sabbath a burden and the day of rest was made for the good of mankind rather than mankind being made slave to their onerous Sabbath rituals (eg, you couldn't go more than a certain distance, but if you went out before Sabbath and laid out parcels of food, you could go the distance, then stop at your "house" for a meal and then continue on).
If Jesus was indeed the Creator and Son of God, then His establishing a ritual would be very different from an ordinary man creating a ritual.
Jesus fulfilled the ceremonial laws when He died (becoming the literal death the symbol that the lamb pointed toward). This applied to the rest of the ceremonial laws (though not the Ten Commandments else sin could not exist as it is defined as the breaking of those laws).
In effect, the many daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly ceremonial rituals were swept away. Their replacements were a single baptism when one decided to follow Him and an occasional ("as often as you do this") ritual of humility (foot washing) followed by a ritual to remind of His death (communion).
Because the teachings of the Bible are not required to be coherent with eachother. It is detrimental if they are because it reduces the flexibility of interpretation. A good dogma, can always be interpreted favorably regardless of the situation.
A good dogma is like xkcd.com, you can always find a relevant quote for any given thing.
A rigid dogma can not, therefore it is a bad dogma, therefore it does not stand the test of time.
this is a problem: your interpretations contradict.
Yes, if it was only about hygiene, this would seem strange. But the actual passages are more complex: and naturally, ignoring symbolism, ignoring the whole context, the huge difference between Law and human rules, the giant focus on sin in thousands of years of Scripture, Christ's ministry and the Law, Israel society, one can leap to any interpretation he wants.
We can also add James epistle , James 4:8-9:
"Come close to God, and God will come close to you. Wash your hands, you sinners; purify your hearts, for your loyalty is divided between God and the world."
That is the very point of dogma beeing incoherent. Any interpretation can be derived. Therefore you need a profitable hierarchical beurocracy to tell the people the right interpretation. Every cult new and old has worked the same way.
Not really. The Scripture is very good at showing what's in our heart: we have freedom to interpret some non-obvious things wrongly, to not put effort at actually understanding it and into deluding ourselves. However especially the Gospels have a lot of very obvious spiritual teachings.
But very often the truth reason that we don't like them is not because of our intelligence(you can find genius people believing in almost every kind of faith or ideology), but because of trauma, misunderstanding or the fact that often deep down we want to be our own gods, but we just end up being slaves to our own fragility and animal-like passions.
Hebrews 4:12
"For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it pierces even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow. It judges the thoughts and intentions of the heart. "
(edit: also, my point is: if you ignore all the things you shouldn't ignore, it's easy to leap to wrong interpretations. you shouldn't ignore them!
end of edit)
Since we are discussing religion, lets invoke the problem of evil and see what theodicy GP comes up with.
What kind of god, with the ability to completely cure a horrible disease with a simple gesture, instead goes arround and publicly heals a handful of people. How do you classify someone with the ability to eradicate a source of suffering, only making use of it for a few public appearances surrounded by those who will tell the tale.
And if you respond that it is not him that healed them, it is their faith, that faith has spread far and wide on all continents since then, yet the only progress humanity has made against Mycobacterium leprae, has been since sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccination (BCG vaccine) entered the stage.
It must be really nice living in a country where the threat of leprosy is closer to a myth than to an everyday topic. One in which you are not praying to a god each day to be shielded of the threat of leprosy or to be cured of it because you have better things to pray for.
I find it amazing how some human traits are so deep that people do not realise just how human, every single description of a god is. It is a monumental failure of imagination of what a god might be. And no wonder it is so. People before the enlightenment had far fewer sources to feed that imagination. And people after, found better uses of that imagination.
God gives eternal life. In this case, the biggest problem we have isn't really sickness, or even physical death: it's separation from the Him: the Source of all that's actually good, and being enslaved to everything opposing Him.
Christ himself wasn't spared a brutal death in this life: many apostles and martyrs in a similar way, and this wasn't by accident. Earthly comfort or even health isn't the goal of christianity. Being re-united to God and stop being slaves to sin is more important: but this is a question of free will imho.
(as apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians: 1 For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. 2 Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling,..)
The faith doesn't make sense, if one believes only in the material world. It's central point is the Resurrection:
"If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied." (1 Cor 15:19)
What you stated is intended in perfect accordance with the Christian doctrine of various denominations. And if you can believe this, you will indeed live a happier more purposeful life. But not everyone can do that.
Unfortunately, this comment illustrates the issues with this line of thinking perfectly. There is no reason to strive to make life better for others or for one's self. The optimum Christian life optimises for the maximum confessed penance before death (but after baptism) in order to obtain salvation which is the optimum afterlife.
Precisely this overvaluation of afterlife and undervaluation of life results in this being called a death cult.
This is precisely why there is no empathy for the people who suffered from the pandemic. Millions died. Good for them.
To make it crystal clear, this is part of the comment that started this thread:
> But being scared of the air is certainly not something Jesus would have been.
In other words, a 76 year old man, 1 year away from retirement, the period of life one gets to reap the fruits of their labour, for whom Covid is not a mild cold, but most probably a matter of life and death, should grow some balls and behave like the omnipotent God.
It is crass.
Yet it is in accordance with Christian belief. Only a life of faith and penance after being baptized grants you a chance at salvation in the afterlife. One should face potential disease with courage, because one has faith in God. If it God's will, to die a quick death so be it. If it is God's will to survive unharmed for a few more years, so be it. If it is God's will to die a slow agonizing death, so be it.
I hope you can see how this line of thought can be nauseatingly repulsive to some people.
I don't think any mortal human should behave as he is God. It's good to try to not get sick/prevent diseases.
However, you took this sense out of context: the context is
"There is something worth non 0 value of living in a society who accepts you despite being sick or 'dirty', and is willing to take the risk of having those who are tainted amongst them. I feel that's an attitude that comes from a place of strength not weakness."
This is much more nuanced. Nobody should be forced to do this! And after all, it's someone's interpretation. The OT specifically instructed people for such diseases as you might know. Christ helped the sick not naively, but knowing he can heal them. Doing things naively is not always good.
The picture you draw sounds like a strawman of catholicism. Well, "The heart is deceitful above all things" says Jeremiah: our flesh is very proud and letting the ego go is extremely hard for it. However this is more similar to the frustration of a child wanting to create it's own society far away from parents and then going and living in the jungle in utter helplesness and self-delusion.
There is a paradoxical beauty in the eternal which is hard to even articulate and those materialistic arguments ring hollow. I can totally see how it might look like that, but I'd say it's a look from someone who haven't yet actually tasted the beauty of Christ and the faith, see the peace in the Word or the saints. I've been in a boat similar to yours many years(and yes, you can have read the Scriptures 10 times and led 200 discussions, information is just information)
So nice of you to backpaddle in the first 3 paragraphs. But the opening comment I critiqued was quite direct about the lack of Christian values of professor fearing Covid.
> The OT specifically instructed people for such diseases as you might know.
You just vindicated the professor. The students ar just as much vectors of disease as those lepers banished from the city were to the city city dwellers. The joys of incoherent dogma, you can always find an applicable quote.
Your 4'th paragraph is a space filler. Let me guess you are Eastern Orthodox. It is common for Eastern Orthodox to blame the Catholic heretics, or worse those Godless Protestants for all the bad reputation Christianity has among the non-religious. If only people knew the true Christianity, they would see the light.
As for your fifth paragraph, just no, to basically every sentence.
Excuse my sarcasm, but I really hoped you would be able to empathize with my previous comment and understand how awful the thread opener was, along with equally crass now deleted comments by podgaj and this comment by coldtea:
> On the other hand, this is life. You can die from 100 other ways, and in his age, he could die any moment anyway. At some point you soldier up and don't fuss like a baby over any danger.
Or this one by tokai:
> I rather get paid without having to work and taking any risk of illness, than doing my job and providing the students with the teaching they have paid for?
Have you maybe considered that maybe the professor is not a Christian. Maybe he is a Jew and behaving according to scripture by keeping their distance from people who are potential carriers of disease. Maybe their religion is none of our business and we should not assume strangers should behave as saints and judge them for not doing so. It truly is upsetting that pointing out the vitriol thrown towards him has failed elicit any trace of empathy towards him. And if entitled vitriol is bad, religiously moralistic vitriol is the worst.
I actually almost haven't commented about the professor: I empathize with his frustration. I commented here not because of him, but because of the misrepresentation and misinterpretation of the Gospel.
I am a protestant. Despite that, I actually wanted to defend catholicism in the sentence you reference. Because many hollow critiques of christianity draw this caricature of gloom and hopelesness which is totally contrary to it, even to catholicism imho
I find it bizarre to focus on endless discussion of hygiene and misunderstood Biblical quotes which replace the actual focus on deep problems in the fallen human nature with filler. This happens all the time: the flesh is very happy to discuss every non-important detail leaping over the actual narrative and meaning.
The problem of humans is sin and separation from God: only Christ can fill the yearning for truth, meaning and actual love, not the emotional comfort zone filler that we often call love these days and only He can save us from being slaves to sin and our passions.
There are hollow critics and there are critics that have seen how deep the rabbit hole goes and have found there is nothing of interest at the bottom.
Catholicism has it's own unique flavours of gloom with purgatory. But the issue beeing critiqued is non-specific to any branch of Christianity. It is a core at the root of all Abrahamic relicions. All Abrahamic religions have a morality core. Morality of people is a prime concern of these religions. The moral framework is primary component of the dogma. Yet that very core is hollow.
I have detailed in a separete comment why the focus on hygiene was on point.
You claim that others do not get the narative and the meaning. Make no mistake, we get it. I am perfectly capable of playing your role in this debate. I have done so in the past plenty of times. In this entire debate I have not once denied the critique of hypocrisy with regards to pharisee rituals, nor have I denied that there is value in overcoming fear of disease. (These two are the relevant fragments to the discussion.) I have simply rejected that any if this is relevant to the professor's situation. I have critiqued the moralistic vitriol thrown his way. And I have rejected the notion of religion providing a foundation for morality.
We can discuss at length the various profound implications of each passage of the scripture. There are many great moral lessons to be extracted from Abrahamic religions as there are from any other supernatural fiction and a good interpretation can go a long way. But that is irrelevant for this thread, both me and betterunix2 were sarcastically critiquing the daft moralistic comment about the professor being "scared of air".
As for your last paragraph, you are free to believe whatever you want, and for as long as you are able to believe it, it will be wholesome for you and your peers of same belief. And rather gruesome for everyone else. I understand perfectly how liberating and empowering being a believer is. Eternalism is incredibly alluring. It provides the structure to keep chaos at bay. It is far more stable than other stances.
But just as you have found your eternalist fix, others have found their own different and incompatible eternalist fix. And others are fine navigating the stormy seas of other stances.
Well, we can't and we shouldn't find agreement if our base beliefs are different. I only also disagree with any vitriol against the professor.
I have my doubts: even the comment you were critiquing, it seems to me that you read it with bad faith, assuming ill intentions which leads me unconvinced that you could argue objectively from the Biblical viewpoint in other cases.
I had my share of non-christian worldview for many years, so there is sadly not much surprising about your arguments except for the stubbornness in applying interpretations on Scripture that no normal christian through the ages or even scholar probably held.
I know we all go through different periods in our lifes, so I hope you find Christ again. He loves all of His lost sheep. See you.
It is about the actual purpose of the Law and it references ritual purification. It's about human traditions vs God's Law. We don't need to wash our hands as a spiritual ritual before eating, we absolutely can wash them if it makes sense to wash them, e.g. hygiene.
Read Mark 7:
1 The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus 2 and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. 3 (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. 4 When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.[a]) 5 So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?”
larger second EDIT:
The focus is of course, spiritual, and it is on the actual things that defile people, for example:
20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. 21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”
I tried to explain this too, but these airwaves are sadly dominated by people vehemently motivated to buttress the narrative that Christians are or should be against any form of hand washing if they were consistent. I think this case (among others) would be a pretty good litmus test to root out people who don't want to understand and, however intelligent or civil, are just not emotionally ready to discuss it.
I can understand to some degree why they act as they do; they honestly think lots of people will tragically die and have their rights trampled on if they don't generate enough apostasy or prevent enough conversions to deter the Christian worldview from regaining enormous appeal. Being an anti-christian culture warrior feels rewarding. I should know, I used to be one. The simple matter I eventually discovered as I got older is, there is no life, no justice, no joy, no freedom, no rights, no good, nothing worth having without a sincere relationship with the Creator of all these things. I can't just generate these virtues and hoard them for myself, they ultimately came from something greater than me.
For your first paragraph, the airwaves are not filled with anything. There is no narrative that Christians are or should be against hand washing. Betterunix2 made a comment referencing an unrelated passage showing intentionally poor hygiene in order to reject the idea that the fearlessness of God in the presence of a human disease should be a guidline for behaviour in the current behaviour. People are not God, and are rightfully afraid of disease.
That passage is about how action is more important than ritual. That ritual was built on superstitions which were built on observations that cleanliness resulted in better life outcomes. Over time people forgot the reasons behind the (healthy) ritual. The moral of that passage is that interpersonal behaviour is more important for salvation than conformance to rituals. It is replacing one superstition.
On the other hand, in a paralel thread, you are pushing that very idea you are complaining about.
> You can wash your hands if you think it is wise to, but ...... God can make the water a worse poison to you.
Christianity already has enormous appeal, it is literally the most widely practiced religion in the world. I never said Christians are against hand washing, I said that Jesus taught his disciples, who lived before Christianity was a religion (if you asked the disciples what they practiced they would have all said "Judaism"), that they need not wash their hands before eating. This is recorded in the gospels, so if you have some kind of problem with it then your argument is not really with me.
I also take issue with the idea that there is no joy or value in life unless someone has a "sincere relationship" with the Christian deity. There are plenty of happy, healthy, and fulfilled atheists, not to mention the many polytheists and idolaters who live equally fulfilling, joyous, and righteous lives. You do not have to agree with how anyone else approaches life, but to claim that only the Christian deity can bring meaning, worth, freedom, or good to a person's life is the darkest worldview I can imagine. Christianity is the world's most popular religion but the majority of the world is not Christian. Do you actually think that non-Christians live depressing lives dominated by evil and unjust practices?
Any virtuous things non-Christians have ultimately come from God. Non-Christians' lives, like anyone else's, are dominated by whatever they choose or allow to. What they do lack (in varying degrees) is vision and faith acting like a compass to regularly re-direct their lives completely towards the source of all good. Willfully serving a passion for anything other than God is the archetype of any unjust practice, which necessarily self-inflict meaningless pain. Honesty, humility and love naturally act as pointers to better temperaments and a truer faith which in their fullness will bring one to accept Christ's sacrificial love which destroyed death for all human beings, and seek His Church. This choice begins a long, perilous struggle to be united with God.
For today, I pray that you and yours will not imagine nor try to imagine any worldview darker than the Gospel for the entire day, for there is none brighter.
JetAlone, your second paragraph is a tipical example of why nonchristians find it unpleasant to engage in discussions, especially on religious topics, with devout Christians. I do not believe there is a way to convey to you what a nonchristian feels reading that second paragraph.
Today's judaism is very different from Second Temple judaism. My impression is that it is probably more different from it than some forms of Christianity, e.g. Eastern Orthodoxy. It seems that it has evolved as a reaction against Christianity and morphed into a very different religion.
"It seems that it has evolved as a reaction against Christianity"
Citation needed.
Pretty much all secular scholarship I have ever seen on this topic has concluded that both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity were reactions to the destruction of the second temple. Rabbinic Judaism is the direct intellectual and religious descendant of the pharisee sect, and has always stood on its own merits. The only rabbinic tradition that definitively developed in response to the rise of Christianity is the birkat haminim, a prayer that was used to "out" secret Jewish Christians before the final split between the religions. Beyond that, all there is are attempts to deal with / respond to persecution of Jews and Jewish institutions by Christians in later centuries (e.g. the fixing of the Jewish calendar after Christian Rome disbanded the Sanhedrin).
Don't overstate the importance of Christianity to the early rabbis. Rabbinic literature is generally dismissive of non-Jewish religions and Jewish Christians like the Ebionites were seen as heretics -- a term the rabbis used for non-rabbinic Jewish movements of the Roman era (of which there were many, none of which have survived).
As for the Gospel, it does not really matter what people thought hand washing was for -- ritual washing hands did improve their hygiene, just like ritual bathing. Jesus told his followers not to bother, and it does not matter whether or not he understood the hygiene implications, because not washing their hands was still detrimental to hygiene.
He wasn't talking about the hygiene of washing hands. He is God, he understood. He was making an obvious point about human traditions a which the Gospels even clarify with context.
The Scripture is full of similar scenes. Peter sees a vision with a sheet with unclean animals ready for eating. The focus was on evangelizing the people who eat those foods tho: the gentiles.
The destruction of the Second Temple was prophesied by Christ, and apostles started serving in the Church only 50 days after His resurrection, on Pentecost. So yes, rabbinical judaism has been a reaction to the destruction of the second temple, but the Church was already active and persecuted in the center of the roman empire, many epistles were already written and there were churches through greece and rome
Rabbinic Jews do not claim to practice Second Temple Judaism, they claim to practice a religious tradition that followed from the pharisee sect that existed during the Second Temple period. Orthodox Jewish scholars will openly tell you exactly how common modern practices like the Passover Seder developed after the destruction of the temple. There is nothing controversial about it; Judaism as alive and dynamic as Christianity or Islam. Religions change over time because cultures, societies, and the realities of life change over time.
Really though, what makes you think any form of Second Temple Judaism could have survived the destruction of the Second Temple? Moreover, if Jews could find a way to keep Judaism alive in some form after the destruction of the First Temple, why should it be surprising that some form of Judaism was kept alive after the destruction of the Second Temple?
Christianity is what actually fulfilled Second Temple judaism. There was no need for such a Temple anymore, as now people themselves were becoming living temples. Lord Jesus, apostle Paul and Hebrews explain all of this way better than I can.
Obviously rabbinical judaism believers see themselves as the actual following: and that's where we disagree. However their explanation seems stranger than the christian one: we stopped having major prophets because the Son of God Himself came to reveal the Father and to save us, we don't need animal sacrifices and a Temple from human hands, because they were just a shadow to the Cross, prophesies from OT were fulfilled with the promised Messiah.
The rabbinical judaism: they don't have prophets, because ..? Why would God let their temple be destroyed, if they were right about Jesus? Where is their messiah?
For Jews the Christian position is even more bizarre. Why did God wait for the Second Temple to be destroyed to send Jesus? Why not right before the First Temple was destroyed? Why did it take decades after the death of Jesus for the temple to be destroyed, and why did his disciples continue to make offerings there after his death (according to Acts)? Why did the prophets say that the messiah would bring about world peace and a universal knowledge of God, if the actual messiah would die without fulfilling any of that and leave the world waiting century after century for a "second coming?" What are those prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, and why do you think that any of them are about The Messiah? Why do you accept the writings of Paul, who never met Jesus and whose only claim to authority was his own assertion that he saw Jesus in a vision? What exactly is the trinity (note: do not commit heresy with your answer)?
You asked where the Jewish messiah is, but like the old joke goes, for Jews the problem is waiting and waiting for a messiah that has yet to come, but for Christians the problem is that the messiah came and the world did not change.
Obviously rabbinic answers are not going to be very satisfactory or convincing to you; if rabbinic teachings made sense to you then you would have converted to Judaism by now. That said, rabbinic teachings are not a secret, so here are some answers to your challenges:
The animal sacrifice system was, according to rabbinic teaching, sufficient but not necessary to atone for sin. Among other things Jews point out that during the Babylonian exile there was no temple in Jerusalem and no sacrifices being offered, but that God did send prophets to explain to the Jewish people how they can deal with sin while in exile and without sacrifices. Another point is that when the sacrificial laws are stated, non-animal sacrifices are explicitly described; poor people could, for example, offer just a handful of flour if they could afford nothing better.
Why did God let the temple be destroyed? For the same reason the First Temple was destroyed. The Jewish people were punished for their national sins. In the case of the Second Temple, part of the national sin was dividing into competing factions who would sometimes try to use the oppressive Romans as a means to undermine competing sects.
Why are there no more prophets? In fact the rabbis do not have a single answer, it remains unclear in rabbinic tradition. Is that a problem? There are plenty of unclear, unanswered questions for Christians too; why is Jesus taking so long to come back? That said, some rabbinic answers include: the Jewish people are being punished for national sins; the true end of prophecy was the destruction of the First Temple, with subsequent prophets only repeating earlier prophecies; the prophets were sent at a time when the temptation to turn to idolatry was particularly strong, but that temptation diminished when the Jews returned to Israel and began building the Second Temple.
Maybe none of that works for you, and that's fine -- Jews are not actively seeking converts, so the opinion of non-Jews does not really matter; the Jewish view is that Judaism is for Jews and that the rest of the world only needs to hold to a handful of common sense morals (like not murdering each other and settling disputes in peaceful courts; I assume that much makes sense to you).
Well, did Jesus tell his follows that they should not be hypocrites who wash their hands because they blindly follow traditions and that they should instead wash their hands because it is good for their health? No, he simply taught them not to bother washing hands before eating.
Moreover, Jesus is recorded elsewhere as having taught his disciples a practice of ritual foot washing (involving washing another person's feet), which remains a practice among some Christians to this very day. He even went on to explicitly indicate that foot washing is spiritually important. Jesus also taught his followers to practice a form of ritual bathing, clearly given spiritual significance and clearly a variation of Jewish ritual bathing, that remains widely practiced by Christians today: baptism. So, if we accept the account of the gospels, it would seem that Jesus was not really opposed to washing rituals in general, nor to treating ritualized washing as a matter of spiritual significance, he just had a different concept than the mainstream Rabbinic tradition.
I mean, it's simply very strange to read this through the lens of some kind of "rules of hygiene" outlook. Nobody took it that way: jews weren't some kind of naive children, traditions and rituals were deeply embedded in their culture. The gospel account gives the actual context and explicitly shows it has nothing to do with hygiene. He never tells them not to wash their hands: I've had OCD so at least to me it's painfully obvious it's more like "don't do X hoping this will clean your soul", they explicitly talk of defiling which is a spiritual concept.
Christ was not against the concept of God's ceremonial rules/law: after all, He was the one instituting it in the beginning, my understanding is that He was against hypocrisy and burdening people with custom rabbinic rules instead of focusing on the spirit of the Law.
You can just take a look at the excess of some modern rabbinical judaism ceremonial rules for proof.
Again: it's very hard for me to understand how you can read those passages with such a strange mindset: material things were often just shortcuts to spiritual conversations, they already had thousands of years of Scripture in that direction
The point of the hygiene optic is just that. The all knowing, all powerful, all loving God incarnate by definition should know all about hygiene and germs and quantum gravity and Pokemon and Covid and everything, by definition.
Yet, instead of teaching people about hygiene, God chooses to condemn the world to 1500+ years of easily preventable infantile death and all other kinds of suffering. Because, don't worry, afterlife is awesome, unless you go to hell like most people.
A soul is infinitely more important than a temporal sickness and God is infinitely more merciful and wise than our limited capacity/knowledge can comprehend. And yes, Christ came to destroy death on the Cross: and yet, before His resurrection He lived through every joy and pain other humans do. And I am glad that He did gave His words of Life, flesh and blood, instead of a biology textbook.
John 3:16-21
"16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. 19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God."
As I said elsewhere, he just replaced one superstition with another superstition.
You are correct that the meaning of that passage is to critique hypocrisy, but in doing so, the nugget of actually valid advice that was accidentally embedded inside a superstition, was extirpated.
Jews 2000 ago, did not have notions of sanitation. They did not have germ theory. They happened to stumble upon a healthy practice and superstitions were built around that practice. They never had statistics or the scientific method to determine the effect of washing hands. Someone simply did so, managed to avoid some disease, then told others that by doing so managed to stay in God's grace. And so, a healthy practice became a ritual. Time passed and the origin of the ritual was forgotten. Jesus comes, and rightfully tells everyone that said ritual is irrelevant for God. Instead here is a bunch of other different superstitions.
All of this is really not very relevant to the New Testament. Sadly I feel people back then had in some ways a better grasp of symbolism, proverbs and Scripture than us today.
"Scared of the air" is a phrase I've only heard covid deniers use. Most people understand that in fact we're scared of the deadly viruses floating in the air, which are a real thing that one should be scared of, and framing it to sound absurd like that is dishonest.
Why would you be scared of anything when you are God?
Fear of disease is a normal biological response present in many other animals. The fact that we manage to overcome this fear through social conditioning is laudable because in several cases, the fear is worse than the disease.
But in this age, that should not be the approach we take, because we have a far better alternative available. We have a growing arsenal of tools to make use of the best approach: genocide against the diseases. We did it against small pox. We can do it again.
The covid pandemic proved two things about our policy management, under both administrations in the US.
First, regardless of what tools are in our arsenal, we the people, will only be allowed to use whatever tool those in power allow. Trump bashed vaccines. He pushed monoclonal antibodies. Biden won't allow the use of traditional vaccinations such as Covaxin. “We have enough vaccines, the best vaccines available, in the United States,” Fauci, the chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, said in response to a question about Covaxin during his Thursday interview with Adrienne Bankert on NewsNation’s “Morning in America.” https://www.newsnationnow.com/health/coronavirus/vaccine/cov.... Many of those who refuse to be vaccinated do so because they don't trust the vaccine tech. Even if they are wrong in that mRNA is safe (the point of this post is not to debate that; please don't get caught up on that detail), we have a perfectly good weapon in Covixan, but we're not allowed to use it because the orthodox leading society won't allow us. This causes those in the unclean camp to take an already defense posture to new levels.
Second, the general public is anti-science and pick their side no matter what. For example, we can't wipe out Covid like we did Polio or Smallpox for the simple scientific reason that Covid has animal reserves in which it may escape and mutate.
Further we can't have adult conversations around policy. Under Trump any one discussing anything other that an absolutely open economy was vilified. Under Biden anyone saying that the evidence does not support individuals under 40, especially males, getting the double shot or boosted, is immediately going to be downvoted on whatever social media on which they comment. The fact that a male under 40 is 4x more likely to suffer heart damage from the shot than the disease, the fact that the same individual has little chance of hospitalization or death from the disease, the fact that those with mRNA vaccines still spread Delta at meaningful rate, the fact that Omicron rips through both populations are to be ignored because nuance is too much. It is too hard. The current orthodox view, regardless of the bent, of a particular social media rules the day. All others, the heterodox, are nothing more than a vector of disease, either of the mind as the right says or the body as the left says.
As to our ability to eradicate Covid, I don't think the science actually supports the view. https://www.quantamagazine.org/will-we-ever-eradicate-covid-.... If we hold to the idea that we can eradicate it and that the only thing preventing us from doing so is the anti-vaxxers, we're going to get into a religious war where both side devalue the lives of their enemies. This is how rhetorical vitriol turns into physical violence. I hope we can steer clear of that.
In general, the orthodox overestimate the chances of hospitalization relative to reality, https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat.... Since they are leading the policy charge, their warped view is making it all but impossible to discuss things rationally.
Covaxin is a traditional deactivated virus. It is less likely to cause damage from the protein spike as shown by the lower prevalence of heart damage in Covaxin population vs mRNA populations. As a person with a family history of heart issues, I don't want to throw another factor into the mix.
Also, as a person with some understanding of AI/ML, I don't like the mRNA's approach of training the body on only one data point, the spike. I want to the body to pick up on data that we either don't know about, or don't think is useful. The body is more likely to do so since it has access to whole virus.
Do you have anything in support of the claim that it is less likely to cause damage from the spike protein? A inactivated Sars-cov2 vaccine contains the spike protein just as much as the actual disease. The mRNA vaccine leads to the production of just that protein.
Do you have data on comparable sizes of populations that Covaxin is safer. I have not seen any such data so far.
Also, for antibody production, the spike protein is the only relevant part because antibodies only target surface features of a pathogen. The spike is the only relevant surface feature.
The rest of the virus is only relevant for T-cell based imunity, and indeed according to (1), Covaxin does induce T-cell based imunity, while, not sure but AFAIK, mRNA vaccines do not.
Anyway, I do support the idea that people with a strong preference for an alternative vaccine that is approved for entry visas, should be permitted to receive the alternative.
My thesis is that people have the right to use a medicine that is effective. Covaxin is such a medicine. As to the particulars as to why I or others would prefer one over the other, it doesn't matter. US medical policy should allow Americans to use a medicine created by an American Governmental Agency, the NIH, if we so choose. So far, the US government is mandating brand affiliation. This is ethically wrong.
> My thesis is that people have the right to use a medicine that is effective.
Yeah, I can agree with this.
Was covaxin deemed effective by the US? Not all countries agreed on it.
By the way, the COVID vaccines are a more complex issue because they are all currently rationed. If their situation change, I'm sure your choice will get more diverse.
Other than an adjuvant developed by NIH to increase the efficacy of Covaxin I do not see why you claim Covaxin itself was developed by NIH. AFAIK it was developed by Indian agencies.
Other than that, I agree with this comment.
But it is not a new problem. It is a very old problem, since way way before the pandemic. There is no pandemic related evil here. FDA restricts the import of foreign cheaper drugs for various reasons including patents.
For one, vaccine tourism is a thing, so people with the neccesary resources can go and get an alternative.
Is there really a popular demand in the USA for the Indian vaccines?
You are the first person I hear demanding access to an alternative existing vaccine.
I am all for that. As long as the effectiveness and duration of the option has been measured, people who desire said option should be allowed access to said option. Measuring is important in order to prevent scams like homeopathy.
But if it is good enough for a visa it should be good enough for someone with a really strong preference. No reason to subsidize it though.
FDA approval has been a pain point since way before Covid. See the approval of generics, expired patent drugs, Skrelli. That is something the US has to fix regardless of the pandemic.
Here's the trouble with vaccine tourism and policy conversations. Up until a few months ago, the US would not accept Covaxin as a shot for entrance into the US (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/us/coronavirus-vaccine-co...). Since then, the WHO has accepted Covaxin under emergency use. The US might, and I repeat might because I cannot find evidence to support this claim, allow Covaxin to allow students into the US.
Again, since I can't find information in the affirmative, I believe that had the mandate gone forth throughout the land, even if I flew to Mexico to get the shots, I still wouldn't qualify on the mandates. No one would. The Covaxin shot is not part of the orthodox tradition now. Even though a cloister of scientists at the NIH, part of the greater church body of the Shot, designed it. Essentially we are told that the Covaxin shot is for the unclean foreigner as a grace dispense from the church of the West. True believers in the West, however, must drink from the approved wine of mRNA.
Further, requiring vaccine tourism is a terrible policy. I can work from home. I can afford a red-eye to Mexico (since that is the closest country to the US that dispenses the shot). That is great; I have privilege. What do we do with some 50% of blacks in NYC that lack the ability to do the same?(https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/nyregion/covid-vaccine-bl...) [Yes, according to the article the number is 28% of blacks have both shots, I'm assuming that number has increased since the writing of the article]. Why should we deny importation of medicine that is effective and was designed by the US? The best I can discern is simply because acceptance of the mRNA tech is now a shibboleth for orthodoxy. It is the homoousion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoousion) of our day.
It’s worth adding that Operation WarpSpeed *also* helped get the rna vaccines faster.
So Trump, with all his garbage spoken policy, behind the scenes was attempting to speed up vaccine research; and later, once either it wasn’t his pride as supreme commander on the line, or when he realized his speaking was where all the harm came from (with regard to covid), he changed his speaking and is now explicitly promoting the vaccines.
This is odd and some modern newspeak to me. Trump was pro vaccine and went on about how they would get vaccines out at record time while he was being actively mocked by medical doctors that could never happen. And you had Biden and his admin saying they would be hesitant to take the vaccine.
It wasn't until the companies waited until right after the election (almost immediately, and the timing set off all kinds of alarm bells for a lot of people) to announce the vaccine was ready that the narrative flipped, and even then I dont seem to recall Trump personally being skeptical of the vaccines. Do you have a link to that?
He never outright said that the vaccine wasn't a good idea, but he was against lockdowns and generally reduced the concern about the virus.
A large part of the president's job is delivering messages to the public; and, overall, Trump's message is "nothing to fear" - which was accurate in the sense that he was throwing resources at getting a fix, but HORRIBLY INACCURATE when it comes to the personal efforts people could do to protect everyone.
There's a reason that Red States didn't lock down as much and had higher case rates per capita, in general, and still do. The 12 disinformationists may have the most to blame about the anti-vaccine statuses; but the president didn't do any favors.
This is alot of words to repeat what i said. He never came out against vaccines and even supported them recently (to right wing ire). He clearly views their existence as a credit to him and will likely campaign on that point in 2024.
We absolutely can wipe it out with suficient motivation and the current impefect tools, regardless of the existence of animal reservoirs.
It is just more difficult, but absolutely possible.
I agree however, that nuanced discussion has been poisoned.
However, AFAIK, the things you list as facts in your last paragraph are simply wrong. Those are big claims, you claim are facts, that require citations.
He's 74 and retiring at the end of this year, he lives in a state that does not mandate wearing a mask (nor a vaccination) and he's forced (along with the students) to go back to in-person teaching despite covid still circulating and the latest, more contagious covid variant emerging.
Now he's quite colorful in his choosing of words, but then again, so are many showpeople that a lot of people like and follow (think of John Oliver for example) and I don't see that much of a difference.
NGL, I'd choose different words but I fundamentally agree with his underlying point: keep social distancing.
This guy is the type of teacher we need more of. Great sense of humor, connecting with students and presenting material in a fun/easy to understand way. Bravo!
> from anyone who wasn't tested negative a couple of hours ago
A test a couple of hours ago may not count for much depending on what they've been doing in the last few days as the tests don't pick up infections for 2-10 after contact, and you may be infectious before the tests pick up the disease.
right. we can't figure out the testing status of strangers anyways, so it's the optimal strategy to avoid contact with people as much as possible. F.e. I do the following:
You're essentially trying to tank your immune system by doing this. Unless you're especially in danger from Covid (maybe like the professor in this video) you shouldn't avoid training your immune system by exposing it to the outside world unless you want to get very sick when the virus finally does find you.
Obviously it should be done within reason, please don't swim in radioactive waste.
if anything I already went through COVID and my immune system easily beat it because I took care of it all these years by eating healthy food, sleeping well, exercising a lot, etc..
but I don't want to expose it to the virus just because it can beat it again. enough is enough.
The parent has a good point that it may not be an optimal strategy the avoid all contact. This is because - so long as it is not overwhelmed - your immune system is strengthened and immunity boosted by contact with pathogens. If you already have immunity provided by a prior infection or vaccination and you are otherwise healthy, then it may make sense to maintain that immunity by continued contact with the virus.
I have no idea what you've become. I've learned to understand that there are not binary outcomes dies / is perfectly fine, but a spectrum in between from "won't do well for a long time, maybe forever" up to "all well after a few days".
You're overlooking the somewhere between 1% and 30% chance of becoming disabled from Long Covid. I've been unable to sustain vigorous activity since March 2020, and it's dropped me from the workforce. I used to be on my feet making gears 8 hours per day.
There's more to this than the risk of dying. It would be far, far better for my family, financially, if I had died.
> You're overlooking the somewhere between 1% and 30% chance of becoming disabled from Long Covid.
As a Daoist how can I not see the good in this? Maybe now now that everyone knows they can suffer a chronic disease they will find a cure for those of us suffering with ME/CFS for all these years?
This is the arrogance that amazes me. Suddenly everyone cares about chronic disease. the ME/CFS community has been crying for help for years. Am I glad this happened to you or anyone? No. But as I said, maybe some good will come out of it.
By the way, if you want to get out of your situation the only answer is nutrition.
Why do they not allow him to teach remotely? Have all the students in the classroom and have him appear on a projector screen and interact with the class that way.
This would solve the Covid exposure risk for him. It would solve the various other issues the students suffer due to lockdown.
It'd probably just be a TA turning on a video if the college is, at all, set up for modern learning. It's actually a really good solution and I'm surprised they haven't done it - ... Banning it kinda sounds like a college being a bad college for the professors. (You can be prestigious and also bad, in fact, it seems like the industries people desperately want to work tend to have the worst work cultures, so it wouldn't surprise me, e.g. zoos (basically zero pay) or the game industry)
On the other hand, this is life. You can die from 100 other ways, and in his age, he could die any moment anyway. At some point you soldier up and don't fuss like a baby over any danger.
It's about calculating risk and taking responsibility for that risk. Every person does it for themselves.
You only soldier on if the predicted payoff is big enough, or if the estimated risk is small enough, or if you simply ignore the process altogether.
It's his life, his exposure to danger so he can fuss as much as he wants.
This kind of comment really betrays a sort of pre-scientific defeatism. Just because you can die in stupid ways does not mean you should die in stupid ways.
Omicron isn't worth fussing over though. It's equivalent to a common cold. The South Africans have been saying that from the start and can't understand why nobody listens to them.
The South Africans have not been saying that at all.
They have said it's somewhat milder and results in lower rates of hospitalisation, but that it's still a serious disease and that the increased infectiousness can result in the same number of people hospitalised (or more) because it cancels out.
In fact, South Africa's Omicron-driven wave peaked at just under 10 000 hospitalised, comparable to around 15 000 hospitalised for the Delta-driven third wave. [0] And this was in a population with extremely high seroprevalence and a 400/100k death rate with nearly 300 000 dead.
"The South African doctor who first spotted the new Covid variant Omicron, Dr. Angelique Coetzee says the United Kingdom is “panicking unnecessarily”. She describes the symptoms of the highly mutated variant which has sparked global panic over fears that it is more contagious than other strains as “extremely mild”."
Hospitalized with Omicron is effectively meaningless. Over half the people in the UK classed as hospitalized with Omicron definitely caught it in the hospital itself, and most were asymptomatic. The word doesn't mean what it normally means.
You are selectively cherry-picking data here. Dr Coetzee is one doctor with a relatively small number of patients, and she was always clear in stating that her observations were for her patients only. Nor has she or any other set of prominent South African doctors or scientists claimed that Omicron is no worse than the common cold.
Dr Coetzee was also clear to state that her patient base was all relatively young in a country where many of the elderly have been vaccinated and there are high rates of seroprevalence amongst the youth. A level of seroprevalence that was bought at the cost of one of the world's highest death tolls from the virus.
The broad studies that have been done suggest that Omicron may have been about 70% less likely to cause severe disease than Delta in South Africa. As for "hospitalized with Omicron is effectively meaningless", they found that the risks of death once hospitalised were the same for Omicron and Delta. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268116v...
They also caution that it's preliminary research without the ability yet to rule out other contributing factors. For instance, when Omicron hit South Africa it was in between waves and at the tail end of a massive and devastating Delta-wave, which created substantial seroprevalence in urban areas. This is unlike the case in the US and Europe, where a Delta and Omicron wave have coincided. South Africa's Omicron wave also peaked and subsided extremely quickly, faster than is being seen in Europe and the US.
Many of the elderly in the most affected areas had also been vaccinated, and they further caution that they can't predict Omicron's behaviour in a population with relatively low vaccination and low seroprevalence levels.
Again, even if Omicron is substantially 'milder' than Delta, with the right conditions it doesn't matter because the increased infectiousness is enough to overwhelm hospitals anywhere. As we're seeing in the UK, parts of Europe, and all over the US.
"Nor has she or any other set of prominent South African doctors or scientists claimed that Omicron is no worse than the common cold."
No? She said "They really don't get that sick ... they're happy ... they're all happy". The symptoms and severity match that of a mild cold or more or less any low severity seasonal bug: "muscle aches, fatigue, a scratchy throat and night sweats".
This particular doctor has been interviewed on TV news to describe Omicron and has seen quite a few patients who had it. What exactly is your definition of "prominent"?
"they found that the risks of death once hospitalised were the same for Omicron and Delta"
That's what you'd expect, right? It means that of the people who are turning up with one of the two at the front door (vs getting it in hospital), they are being admitted based on clinical need not a random coin toss. I don't quite see why you think this says anything about severity amongst the general population.
"They also caution that it's preliminary research without the ability yet to rule out other contributing factors ... they further caution that they can't predict Omicron's behaviour in a population with relatively low vaccination and low seroprevalence levels."
See, this attitude is why so many people have learned to ignore researcher's claims about infectious diseases. In March 2020 "preliminary data" was used to justify incredibly extreme measures. Now it's being used to justify keeping them. The pseudo-scientists that dominate public health have no consistent principles and nothing they say can be taken at face value.
As for the latter part, of course they can predict it. South Africa is only ~25% vaccinated which compared to western countries is indeed relatively low. As for seroprevalence, what do you think vaccines are meant to create? The only scenario in which information from actual doctors in South Africa is misleading is if vaccines make Omicron drastically worse. Is that what you're arguing?
This is ridiculous, you're not discussing this in good faith.
Without any actual expertise in this area you reject out of hand the results of an actual scientific study looking at hospital admissions across the entire country and instead prioritise that of a single GP, just because it aligns closer to what you want to be true. You're also selectively quoting her words, as she never said that the severity matched that of a 'mild cold', as well as leaving out that she only saw a relatively small number of patients, who were young, and none that were hospitalised.
Nor are the results in one place automatically transferable to another, given differences in population density, recency of infections & vaccinations, movement, and other factors. We're already seeing that difference, where the US, UK, and EU are seeing much higher hospitalisation rates, older patients, and a longer wave duration with Omicron than South Africa did. So even if it is milder than Delta, hospitals are still being overwhelmed.
Everyone wants a way out of this as soon as possible. But wishful thinking isn't a useful strategy against a virus.
Please don't toss around naive insults like "not arguing in good faith". I am arguing in excellent faith. Claims like I'm believing what I want to believe are especially stupid because they're so easy to turn around - you're clearly desperate to believe COVID is not a mild disease.
OK, you really don't like that South African doctor and think she's some sort of outlier. Today we find this story reported by the BBC of all places:
South African scientists - praised internationally for first detecting the Omicron variant - have accused Western nations of ignoring early evidence that the new Covid variant was "dramatically" milder than those which drove previous waves of the pandemic.
Two of South Africa's most prominent coronavirus experts told the BBC that Western scepticism about their work could be construed as "racist," or, at least, a refusal "to believe the science because it came from Africa".
"It seems like high-income countries are much more able to absorb bad news that comes from countries like South Africa," said Prof Shabir Madhi, a vaccine expert at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand.
"When we're providing good news, all of a sudden there's a whole lot of scepticism. I would call that racism."
Prof Salim Karim, former head of the South African government's Covid advisory committee and vice-president of the International Science Council agrees.
"We need to learn from each other. Our research is rigorous. Everyone was expecting the worst [about Omicron] and when they weren't seeing it, they were questioning whether our observations were sufficiently scientifically rigorous," he said, while acknowledging that the sheer number of new mutations in Omicron may have contributed to an abundance of scientific caution.
And it goes on like that. Omicron is "less severe, dramatically" etc.
Hospitals have never been overwhelmed by Omicron, and arguably not for COVID at any point, but the word "overwhelmed" is so vague and so heavily abused that it's not worth arguing over that.
As I said above already, hospitalization stats for Omicron don't mean anything. In the UK more than half of all "hospitalized" Omicron cases caught it in hospital and of those, most are asymptomatic.
Yes, people can catch infectious bugs like colds and flu-like illnesses in hospital. It's a building full of sick people, it happens. That doesn't mean there's a crisis in the population.
It doesn't seem to hold for deaths, but 80+yos with a booster have lower hospitalization and ICU rates than 12-29yos with no vaccination. Tables 6 and 8.
Wish it was possible to know how they define a Covid hospitalisation. Here in the UK, it literally means "someone admitted to hospital who tested positive for Covid".
It sounds plausible, as the AHS definition of a Covid death is:
"A death resulting from a clinically compatible illness, in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death identified (e.g., trauma, poisoning, drug overdose).
A Medical Officer of Health or relevant public health authority may use their discretion when determining if a death was due to COVID-19, and their judgement will supersede the above criteria.
A death due to COVID-19 may be attributed when COVID-19 is the cause of death or is a contributing factor."
Alberta is publishing some very detailed tables which suggest that the death rates may be comparable, though they don't directly support the above claim: https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
(i.e. boosted 70-79 is lower than unvaxxed 12-29, though death rates rise steeply in 80+).
I hope you saw the part where he was retiring at the end of this year?
I don't know if you remember, since time has stopped, but before Omicron, it felt like we had defeated covid. Vaccinated people basically weren't getting sick from it anymore, everything was good - and then everyone got sick.
He probably thought it was safe and over.
Evidence: we're hearing about his rage now, implying there wasn't that rage during the Fall semester.
You're welcome to hate on him all you like, though, it's a free country.
The only difference is that the Nazis call Jews "disease vectors" based on their religion, not their action. And that is prima facia racism. He's referring to people's actions, not their ethnicity, religion, gender etc.
There's a lot of people now claiming to be suffering Nazi-esque oppression because they have to show proof of vaccination at places like bars, sporting events and other mass gatherings. They have a choice to go or not go to a bar. They have a choice to get vaccinated or not. Jews in the 1940 did not have that choice and that is the crux of the difference. Plus, comparing denial of dinning service against death camp is super cringe.
Please don't take this as a slam against what you wrote, I agree with what you're saying. I'm just sick of people protesting vaccine card mandates and wearing Jewish stars on their jacket.
> It felt like we had defeated covid? Whaaaat? Vaccinated people WERE getting sick with Delta.
At this point, this seems intentionally obtuse. If 1 in 1000 people who are vaccinated got covid before omicron and 1 in 100 vaccinated people got omicron, there is a meaningful difference in experience.
These kids are paying tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education.
If the job is too dangerous for grandpa, perhaps he should retire now so that these kids can actually learn AND he can be safe. Instead of, ya know, bilking an extra year of salary.
The video is neither particularly funny nor infuriating nor interesting whatsoever. It's mostly an 75 year old dude who's pissed off about having to give a class during covid, which is understandable. He swears a lot. End of story
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It's hard to know how serious all this is, because he keeps switching between outrageous comments and then a serious voice explaining the point he's making, and why the students should think about the issue.
It might well get him fired before the end of his final year, but I suspect this will end up being a video that gets referred to a lot over the years as a great way of challenging students' viewpoints.