Maurice Samuel and You Gentiles

 A Jewish intellectual and writer, Maurice Samuel was known for his role as a polemicist and campaigner against anti-Semitism. Most of his work concerns itself with Judaism or the Jew's role in history and modern society, but he also wrote more conventional fiction, such as The Web of Lucifer, which takes place during the Borgias' rule of Renaissance Italy, and the fantasy science-fiction novel The Devil that Failed. Samuel also wrote the nonfiction King Mob under the pseudonym "Frank K. Notch". 

He and his work received acclaim within the Jewish community during his lifetime, including the 1944 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his non-fiction work, The World of Sholom Aleichem. He received the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish literature posthumously in 1972. Samuel died in New York City in 1972 at the age of 77.

Samuel's awards:

• the 1943 Anisfield-Wolf Award for The World of Sholom Aleichem;
• the 1944 Saturday Review of Literature Award; 
• the 1956 Stephen S. Wise Award; 
• the 1967 B'nai B'rith Jewish Heritage Award. 
• In 1964 Brandeis University awarded Samuel an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters. 
• On the day of his death, in 1972, Samuel was to have been in Israel to receive the Manger Prize for Yiddish Literature, for which he had been nominated by Israeli President Zalman Shazar. The prize was awarded posthumously in June, 1972.

Here are some excerpts from his book, "You Gentiles"  (1924):

There are two life-forces in the world I know: Jewish and gentile, ours and yours...I do not believe that this primal difference between gentile and Jew is reconcilable. You and we may come to an understanding, never to a reconciliation. There will be irritation between us as long as we are in intimate contact. For nature and constitution and vision divide us from all of you forever.

A century of partial tolerance gave us Jews access to your world. In that period the great attempt was made, by advance guards of reconciliation, to bring our two worlds together. It was a century of failure. We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers forever. Nothing that you will do will meet our needs and demands. We will forever destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which it is not in your nature to build.... The wretched fate which scattered us through your midst has thrust this unwelcome role upon us.

We Jews are accused of being destroyers: whatever you put up, we tear down. It is true only in a relative sense. We are not iconoclasts deliberately: we are not enemies of your institutions simply because of the dislike between us. We are a homeless mass seeking satisfaction for our constructive instincts. And in your institutions we cannot find satisfaction.

When Germany and England and America will long have lost their present identity or purpose, we shall still be strong in ours.

Jew and Gentile are two worlds, between you Gentiles and us Jews there lies an unbridgeable gulf...There are two life forces in the world Jewish and Gentile...I do not believe that this primal difference between Gentile and Jew is reconcilable...The difference between us is abysmal...You might say: 'Well, let us exist side by side and tolerate each other. We will not attack your morality, nor you ours.' But the misfortune is that the two are not merely different; they are opposed in mortal enmity. No man can accept both, or, accepting either, do otherwise than despise the other.

Our Jewishness is not a creed, it is ourself, our totality. Indeed, it may be fairly said that the surest evidence of your lack of seriousness in religion is the fact that your religions are not national, that you are not compromised and dedicated, en masse, to the faith.

Years of observation and thought have given increasing strength to the belief that we Jews stand apart from you gentiles, that a primal duality breaks the humanity I know into two distinct parts; that this duality is a fundamental, and that all differences among you gentiles are trivialities compared with that which divided all of you from us.

In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew. Is your God an Englishman or an American?

We belong to the One mastering God: you belong to the republic of playful gods.

You have your way of life, we ours. In your system of life we are essentially without 'honor.' In our system of life you are essentially without morality. In your system of life we must forever appear graceless; to us you must forever appear godless.

To say that a schlemiel is a luckless person is to touch only the negative side. It is the schlemiel's avocation and profession to miss out on things, to muff opportunities, to be persistently, organically, preposterously and ingeniously out of place. A hungry schlemiel dreams of a plate of hot soup, and hasn't a spoon.

If this sounds obscene, it isn't. You must remember that Jewish moral theology is NOT Christian moral theology. Despite what Christians assert, the two moral systems actually share very little in common.

 The Talmud discusses the dilemma of two men stranded in the desert, one with just enough water to survive and the other with none.  What should they do?  If one drinks, the other dies.  If both drink, both certainly die.  The conclusion, taught by the pre-eminent rabbi of all time, Akiva, is that the person with the water must drink and survive.  Tragic though it may seem, he may not forfeit his life for another, and he may not forfeit both lives for the sake of principle.  His claim on life in a time of scarce resources is non-transferable.

Here's another discussion that quotes the same conclusion. In fact, doing your laundry takes precedence over other people's lives:

If they must choose between their own animals and the animals of others, their own animals come first, before the animals of others. 

If they must choose between their own laundering and the laundering of others, their own laundering comes first, before the laundering of others

If, however, they must choose between the lives of others and their own laundering, the lives of others come first, before their own laundering.  However, Rabbi Yosei says that their own laundering comes first, before the lives of others.

Keep in mind that "Judeo-Christian morality" is a nonsense phrase. Jews consider Christians to be heretics. From the Jewish point of view, that phrase sounds like "Judeo-Heretical morality". Consider, for instance, how easily a Jew can accept abortion:

While the Talmud gives the full status of humanness to a child at birth, the rabbinical writings have partially extended the acquisition of humanness to the 13th postnatal day of life for full-term infants. The Babylonian Talmud Yevamot 69b states that: “the embryo is considered to be mere water until the fortieth day.” Afterwards, it is considered subhuman until it is born. ...After the forehead has emerged from the birth canal, the fetus is regarded as a person....

While the Talmud gives the full status of humanness to a child at birth, the rabbinical writings have partially extended the acquisition of humanness to the thirteenth postnatal day of life for full-term infants. This designation is based on the viability of the infant, so the acquisition of humanness occurs later for premature infants, because the viability of premature infants is still questionable after thirteen days. Rashi, the great twelfth century commentator on the Bible and Talmud, states clearly of the fetus ‘lav nefesh hu—It is not a person.’

Even a born child is not considered viable until the 30th day of life:

Since an infant is not considered viable until after his thirtieth day of life, the redemption ceremony must take place thirty-one days after birth.

Addendum

According to this Jewish expert, the Torah says Jews must kill Christians.

Comparing Hamas and the Nazis

The two philosophies share some similarities, but are actually quite, quite different.  Hamas has entirely different intention than the Waffen SS.

Prior to WW II, Hitler had actually planned on shipping all of Germany's Jews to Madagascar.

When the Jews came up with the Haavara agreement, in which all of Germany's Jews would instead be shipped to British Palestine, the Nazis enthusiastically signed on. From that point forward, the Zionist flag was permitted to fly alongside the Nazi swastika, and any Jew emigrating to British Palestine could take ALL of their possessions with no penalties.

In addition, any Jew who remained in Germany would NOT be shipped to the camps as long as he could prove he had been sterilized. Sterile Jews were not a blood threat to the regime's future.

Hamas, on the other hand, kills Jews because Allah commands it. Part of the Islamic end-times involves all the Jews either dying or converting, to the point that even the stones and trees will cry out "Come, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him!" Nazis never said anything like that.

The two philosophies are entirely different, although the end result does share some similarities.

Meanwhile, we have ample evidence that Zionists worked hand in glove with the Nazis:

"Documents released by the Israel State Archive include transcripts from the interrogation of Efraim Zetler, a member of the Zionist paramilitary group, Lehi. Zetler was interrogated by Haganah fighters in 1942 about his activities in Lehi, which is regarded as being more extreme than the Haganah Zionist paramilitary group. Lehi was responsible for several atrocities, including the massacre at Deir Yassin. Haganah, however, was no moderate group, and is thought to have carried out the terrorist bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in 1946.

The transcript of Zetler’s interrogation revealed Lehi’s ties with the Nazis. “We will communicate with any military power ready to help with the establishment of the kingdom of Israel, even if it’s Germany,” Zetler is reported to have told the astonished interrogators. “The only condition is that we get weapons, so we can rebel against the English,” he added. “If Germany agrees to help us fight enemy number 1, the English, we’ll team up with it.” Zetler went on to say that Germany is “not an enemy of the Jews in Israel” and that Lehi would cooperate with the Nazis if it helped the underground “get this land,” meaning Palestine."

"The Zionist Activists Who Collaborated With Nazis"

Zionist Relationships with Nazi Germany

"The Secret Contacts: Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941"

"Zionist-Nazi Collaboration"

George Galloway: Zionism and Nazism cooperated

On the Existence of Israel

First, neither Israel nor any other nation has a "right to exist." The right to exist belongs to persons, not to corporations, nations, glee clubs, secret societies, governments, unions, bowling leagues, or any other group of human beings. It is an individual personal right, not an aggregate right. While Judaism has had a long history of hatred for Christians, and nearly as long a history of hatred for Islam, the faith system itself has been steadily declining for two millennia.

Historically, European Jews have not been particularly favorable to Zionism:

In fin-de-siècle Budapest, for example, where Zionism made few inroads, assimilationist spokespersons lashed out at the new movement as incompatible with the patriotism of Magyars of the Mosaic faith. Márton Schweiger, president of the Neolog (Reform) community, declared: “Every endeavor of Hungarian Jewry is diametrically opposed to the trends of Zionism. It does not dream of a Jewish kingdom but wants to merge with Magyardom while maintaining intact its ancestral religion.” Sámuel Kohn, chief rabbi of the Neolog congregation in Pest, considered Zionism “sheer folly, a dangerous craze,” predicting it would attract few followers in Hungary, since it aimed to make a nation out of a religious denomination....

As was true of their nineteenth-century predecessors, [Polish Jews] blamed Jewish cultural distinctiveness for Polish antagonism. They were particularly troubled by the gains made by the Zionist movement in the years immediately after the war, both on the international diplomatic scene and in the Jewish street. They condemned Zionism and, indeed, any effort or measure to treat the Jews as a distinctive national group, including the Minorities Treaty of 1919....

From the late nineteenth century, more than 90 percent of Budapest Jews were associated with Neolog Judaism, the Hungarian variety of Reform Judaism, which defined Jewishness as a religious identity alone. The obverse of this was the absence of support for Zionism, which attracted a smaller percentage of the Jewish population than elsewhere in East Central and Eastern Europe. Only in provincial towns, where Magyarization was less prevalent than in Budapest, was Zionism attractive to more than a handful of Jews ... Most, especially the communal leaders, continued to think of themselves as Hungarians of the Mosaic faith, denounced Zionism as a reckless folly, and minimized the scope of antisemitism.

 As for modern Israel itself, the demographics are pretty clear on how this plays out.

More than half of all U.S. Jews belong to the two long-dominant branches of American Judaism: 37% identify as Reform and 17% as Conservative. Roughly one-in-ten (9%) describe themselves as Orthodox. Other branches, such as the Reconstructionist movement and Humanistic Judaism, total about 4%, and due to small sample sizes cannot be analyzed separately. One-third of Jewish adults (32%) do not identify with any particular stream or institutional branch of Judaism.

Notice two things: (1) Orthodox Jews represent less than 10% of the total, and (2) non-affiliated Jews (32%) plus Reform Jews (37%) make up over two-thirds of all Jews. So, the opinions of Orthodox Jews don't actually count for much. 

Younger Jews don't give a crap about Israel.

Another way of examining differences among Jewish Americans is to look at age gaps. While Orthodox Jews tend to be relatively young and feel a strong attachment to Israel, younger Jews – as a whole – are less attached to Israel than their older counterparts. Two-thirds of Jews ages 65 and older say that they are very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel, compared with 48% of those ages 18 to 29.

Neither do Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who make up over 13% of Israel's population:

Ultra-Orthodox Jews, or Haredis, burned Israeli flags Thursday while unfurling the Palestinian flag to protest the establishment of Israel.

Gathering in the Mea She’arim neighborhood of Jerusalem, a group of Haredi Jews carried Palestinian flags while chanting "Zionism does not represent the Jews.”

Later, the group, including members of the anti-Zionist Jewish group Neturei Karta, burned Israeli flags on the streets of Mea She’arim.

The protest came amid celebrations of the 73rd anniversary of Israel's establishment.

Orthodox Jews do give a crap about Israel's existence, but they make up less than 10% of the Jews in the world. While they have a positive TFR, they hemorrhage followers because Orthodox Judaism is mostly pure bull. The only reason Orthodox Judaism survives is due to the subsidies it gets from the Israeli government:

Since Israel’s founding, the ultra-Orthodox – also called the Haredim – have been exempted from military service, which is mandatory for all Jewish Israeli school leavers. The various ultra-Orthodox sects see it as a religious commandment to only study Jewish texts and separate themselves from modern society. They consequently receive government subsidies to study rather than work, along with general social services and benefits relating to unemployment, poverty and their large numbers of children.

Today the ultra-Orthodox, an umbrella term for different sects and communities, are 10% of Israel’s population of more than 8.5 million – and are growing fast.

They have strategically cultivated a role as kingmakers in Israeli politics, making or breaking coalitions based on which politicians best support their interests.

Sure, Jews over 65 identify strongly with Israel, but they will all be dead in 30 years. Meanwhile the Arab TFR is at least as high as the Orthodox Jewish TFR. At some point, the non-Jews will be majority in the Knesset, and then the whole game changes.

It’s true that Israel accepts patrilineal Jews and non-Orthodox converts as citizens, despite rejecting their status as Jews. But what is this really worth? It means that these “non-kosher” Jews won’t be allowed to get married to other Jews in Israel. They are essentially second class citizens. How exactly is that meant to comfort potential Jewish escapees of anti-Semitism? You have an escape hatch, but the escape hatch will both deny your identity, and forbid you from establishing a family.

It’s an unacceptable and humiliating possibility. Israel has a long track record of treating non-Jews — be they Palestinians, Filipino migrant workers, or Eritrean refugees — with hostility at best.

In thirty years, the Holocaust will be over a century old. It will no longer elicit a knee-jerk reaction from anyone. Zionists have spent the last half-century trying to make themselves the victims of the world, even at the expense of writing all other Jewish viewpoints out of history.  

As Zertal observes, the Jewish resistance was presented as having been organized and led solely by Zionist movements and their leaders, while the role of the Bundists, Beitarists and Communists was either downplayed or ignored. Marek Edelman, one of the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the deputy commander of the uprising under Mordechai Anielewicz, was not even mentioned. Edelman, who represented the Jewish Socialist Party (Bund), opposed Anielewicz’s decision to commit suicide (accompanied with the murder of one’s relatives). After the war, Edelman rejected the very idea that one could draw “lessons” from the Holocaust, as well as the notion that Zionism provided the “answer” to the Jewish question. He remained in Poland and achieved fame as a leading cardiologist and a key figure in the Solidarity labor movement of the 1980s. In 1946 he published one of the first accounts of the ghetto uprising, The Ghetto Fights, in Polish, Yiddish and English. The book was translated into Hebrew only in 2001.

Right now, a plurality of Jews are secular atheists who view the whole Middle East imbroglio as an ancient land dispute of no particular importance, and that will only increase in the next 30 years.

Orthodox Jews were also more likely ... [to say] that God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people. By contrast, most Jewish Americans said they did not think that either the Israeli government or Palestinian leaders were sincerely seeking peace. And most Jewish adults took the position that God “did not literally give” the land of Israel to the Jewish people (42%) or said they do not believe in God or a higher power at all (24%).

And this has been going downhill for the Zionists for a long time:

"Even before 7 October, support for Israel among American Jews – who constitute the world’s second largest Jewish population after Israel – was shifting. One poll showed that while most Jews see caring about Israel as important to their Jewish identity, more than half disapprove of the country’s rightwing government. Another found that a quarter of American Jews agree Israel is an “apartheid state”, and one-fifth of those under 40 do not think the Jewish state has a right to exist."

As a result, Israel will functionally disappear, just like Poland did. Trying to keep it alive is just pouring money down a rat hole. The Jews themselves increasingly don't care. Religious Jews, both in Israel and the US, are increasingly abandoning their faith, with more than half of children in Orthodox families simply walking away. 

94 percent say a person is Jewish even if they work on Shabbat, 89 percent say a Jew can be strongly critical of Israel, and 68 percent say Jews don’t have to believe in God, but an astonishing 34 percent say a person is still Jewish even if they decide to believe in Jesus as the messiah.

The number of irreligious Jews is growing:

While the Orthodox appear to be proportionally growing, Pew found even more Jews becoming more secular and unaffiliated. “Jews of no religion” — Pew’s term for people who identify as Jews and do things they see as Jewish but do not identify with the religious parts — in 2020 made up 27 percent of all U.S. Jews, up from 22 percent in 2013.

The majority of the world's 20 million Jews live in just two countries: Israel (6.9 million) and the US (5.7 million). According to Pew Research, the majority of US Jews under age 30 don't give a crap about Israel. Meanwhile, 13.7% of Israel's population is ultra-Orthodox Haredi, who oppose the existence of the secular state of Israel. That will rise to 40% by 2065. The Haredi don't serve in the military or participate in the economy in any meaningful way, they just study Torah. 

Pragmatically, this will translate into at least three consequences: first, additional resources for social welfare, as demanded by the ultra-Orthodox population, whose male component contribute little to the workforce and whose large families require social support and housing....Second, an ever-worsening separation between secular and religious educational systems, which will translate into cultural battles and rising social tensions between haredim and liberal Jews, who might be shrinking demographically, but on whose shoulders rest the burden of the country’s defense through the compulsory service in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), as well as being responsible for fiscal revenues....Third, the impact of haredi growth within the juvenile cohorts of the population and their systematic exemption from army service is already triggering a debate within the Jewish majority about the sustainability of the IDF as a “people in arms” based on a universal draft

Unless someone can drum up a 21st century Holocaust to generate interest, the secular state of Israel is in serious trouble by 2050, and probably toast before we enter the 22nd century.

UPDATE:

The elimination of the secular state of Israel wouldn't necessarily cause the death of a single Jew. Jews could emigrate from the region, or, as Rambam points out, they could simply recite the Shahada, the Muslim testimony of faith.

From a rabbinic point of view, Judaism is passed on through the mother, not through belief. Even an atheist can be a Jew. There's nothing in particular in the Islamic profession of faith that violates Jewish faith. As one Jew stated, "Personally, I am quite happy to say the shahadah in full sincerity but in the belief that prophet Muhammad was a gentile prophet and that Judaism and İslam can coexist as two approaches to the same truth. At the core, our religion is the same and I have no issue with İslamic claims to that effect."

Rabbi Fayyumi, who influenced Maimonedes, held a very positive opinion of the Koran:

"He analyzes the words of the Koran carefully, to such an extent that in the second chapter of his book he finds mystical meaning in the Shahada (the Muslim declaration of faith). A substantial part of the sixth chapter of Fayyumi’s book is dedicated to analysis and interpretation of the Koran. He concludes from this analysis that Islam is not directed to the Jewish people; rather, it is intended to provide religion and faith to the nations. Its purpose is not to abolish the Torah―just the opposite: the Koran confirms the obligation of the Jewish people to keep the Torah. At the same time, Fayyumi asserts that the Koran teaches that there are additional revelations to other nations, revelations that obligate them to their own religious systems."

Once a Jew recites the Shahadah in Arabic, his Muslim brothers will leave him alone. Islam isn't interested in a biological cleansing, just theological agreement.

There is no actual need for the state of Israel to exist. Jews can continue to live there as quasi-Muslims or move somewhere else and live quite happily.

Does AI Infringe Copyright?

That argument is being made. It's hard to see how it will succeed. Given the vast input an AI LLM needs to do it's job, it would be REALLY hard to argue that the AI use of anyone's text is copyright infringement, especially given the proprietary algorithms required to produce the output. If anything qualifies for "fair use", certainly using 500 pages as part of a 20 million page data set would qualify. Not only do the proprietary statistical algorithms add value, and differentiate the output, but even the original word-to-number conversion that preps the sentences for statistical analysis is proprietary.

The conversion of the words of the original work into numbers is already a differentiation, a transformation of the original. It is an add-on value given to the work by the people who assign the numbers, the weightings and the numerical categorizations to the words. Arguably, the number string thereby derived from a given work is its own entity, unique in value from the original work, and that's BEFORE it is fed into the algorithms. This manipulation all happens BEFORE the number string is used as input. At that point, the original author of the original work arguably no longer has a copyright claim.

To put it more succinctly, presenting a diagram of a sentence is not plagiarism. To prep a sentence for generative AI LLM input, the sentence has to be essentially "diagrammed". If diagramming a sentence is fair use, then diagramming hundreds of sentences is also fair use. The process of diagramming the sentence adds value and serves a different purpose than the original sentence served. All AI input has to be diagrammed before it can be used. That's what produces the propriety number string for input. This proprietary number string, with its unique weightings and categorizations, is then fed through proprietary statistical algorithms. The output is a unique result of the algorithms, the weighting and the original number conversion. So, what's left to copyright? The output stream? How? What people don't realize is that we cannot apply copyright to a stream of numbers output from a statistical algorithm. It's like trying to copyright the sequence of digits that make up pi. That's all generative AI does - it washes categorized, weighted numbers through a set of algorithms, and spits out more numbers. The fact that the output numbers can then be converted back into words that make sense to us is more an example of anthropomorphism than anything else. Can anthropomorphism be copyrighted? That's one hell of a stretch. Courts have always ruled that machine output cannot be copyrighted. AI won't change that.

There is nothing in the generative AI process that infringes copyright.

Addendum

If this "Office at Night" Phil Lockwood homage to Edward Hopper isn't copyright infringement, neither is AI. Every window in Lockwood's painting is a replica of an Edward Hopper painting.

Similarly, AI detection tools use the same LLM model that the generative AI itself uses. So, if generative AI violates copyright by collecting the work of many authors, then whenever an instructor submits a student essay to an AI detection tool, that instructor violates the student's copyright. The student's paper will become part of the AI detection tool's data set. Ironically, the very instructors who are concerned about AI violating copyright will happily violate student copyright in order to accomplish their own goals in reference to grading their students.

Teachers can violate a student's copyright but students get punished for using AI? SERIOUSLY?

OpenAI has initiated Copyright Shield to protect its users from copyright claims.

Tech Companies generate BILLIONS in government fines... they just don't pay them.

Boss axed 90% of staff and replaced them with AI

Virgin Births in Modern Times

When looking at the virgin birth of Christ, a few disturbing historical facts can be noted. First, due to a dramatically different understanding of how conception takes place, people in ancient times may have been more prone to accept virgin births than those living in the modern era. We have, for example, this case from the late medieval period:

In 1637 in Grenoble, France, the aristocrat Madeleine d’Auvermont was put on trial for adultery. Despite the fact that her husband had left France four years earlier, Madeleine had recently given birth to a healthy baby boy. In the face of what seemed like damning evidence she protested her innocence, claiming that she had thought—ahem—intensely about her husband at night and had conceived through the power of imagination.

Various physicians and theologians were consulted on the case and declared that this was theoretically possible. (You’d think that the theologians maybe spoke a little more forcefully than the physicians.) The child was named the legal offspring of her husband and heir to the de Montleon fortune.

But, the acceptance of a virgin birth is not limited to medieval culture. Even today, it is not uncommon for women to claim that they became pregnant without benefit of sexual intercourse:

Of 7870 eligible women, 5340 reported a pregnancy, of whom 45 (0.8% of pregnant women) reported a virgin pregnancy (table 1)

Is there any medical evidence that such parthenogenesis could take place? While most sources would say "no", there was at least one study done in the 1950s that was a little, shall we say, unsettling: 

The remaining eight pairs were examined by Balfour-Lynn (1956), who blood typed mothers and daughters and found antigens present in six daughters that were absent in their mothers, clear evidence of genetic differences. In another pair, the mother had blue eyes and the daughter brown eyes, indicating genetic differences. In the single remaining case, "Mrs. Alpha and daughter," there was apparent genetic identity in blood groups and several other genetically determined traits including electrophoretic analysis of serum. The probability of such a close match between a mother and daughter produced by heterosexual reproduction was less than one chance in a hundred (P < .01).

But, of course, if parthenogenesis happened, the child would be female, like her mother. Jesus was male, therefore not the product of parthenogenesis. True, offspring of the same sex would be necessary for typical parthenogenesis, but what if the offspring were of a true hermaphrodite? We have a 2016 study that used true hermaphroditic rabbits as the test cases:

In the literature, pregnancy cases that developed through self-fertilization were not reported in humans. However, autofertilization was detected in mammalian hermaphrodites such as domestic rabbit... The number of hermaphrodite pregnants (sic) with ovotestis reported in the literature is 14 while the number of pregnancies in these cases is 26 [7–20]. In these pregnancies, there were one premature, one immature, one stillborn and one abortion performed due to unwanted pregnancy. One baby died 2 h after the birth. There was also an ongoing pregnancy during the publication of the relevant literature. All of the babies born apart from these were healthy. All of the babies (fetuses) whose gender was reported were male (Table 1).

Hermaphrodites could exhibit female mothers with male offspring. That is a little unexpected. This report from 2009 confirms the findings:

Background: There are 11 reported cases of pregnancy in true hermaphrodites, but none with advanced genetic testing. All known fetuses have been male.

Case: A true hermaphrodite with a spontaneous pregnancy prenatally known to have a remaining portion of a right ovotestis, delivered a male neonate. The mother has a 46, XX karyotype with polymerase chain reaction demonstrating low levels of the Yq12 sequence. Postpartum androgen levels were normal.

Conclusion: Partial removal of testicular tissue may enhance fertility in hermaphrodites, and there may be a genetic basis for the progeny to be male. 

For the last century or so, Christians have had a propensity to explain the reported astronomical or meteorological phenomenon around the Gospel stories (the star of Bethlehem, the darkness at the Crucifixion, etc.) as simply a divine intervention that exhibited as a natural phenomenon. That is, the Star of Bethlehem was really a great conjunction of planets while the darkness at the Crucifixion may have been caused by a sandstorm.  This propensity was not restricted to modern Christians. Even Augustine shared this propensity: 

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [quoting 1 Tim 1:7].”  ― Augustine of Hippo, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Vol 2

Even in the Old Testament, physical reality was used to prove contact with the divine. Gideon's fleece, Daniel's vegetarian diet and the Deuteronomic warning against false prophets all use physical reality as the final test. Reality trumps human eyewitness testimony. 

Christians do not use divine revelation to confirm experimental science, that is, we do not say, "well the experimental results must be accepted as correct because experiment conforms with what God says." Similarly, only the most fundamentalist of Christians say, "We reject any experimental result which does not conform with Biblical revelation." Rather, we use experimental science as the norm which serves to confirm divine revelation: "this event could have happened as the Bible reported, because we have experimental evidence which supports the possibility that the divinely inspired eyewitness testimony could be true." 

The physical world is the norm which norms the Bible. Even the Bible, both Old Testament and New Testament, attests that this is the appropriate way to approach the Divine Word. 

But, while the biological phenomenon of virgin birth can now potentially be explained via experimental science, it is doubtful that Christianity will allow biology to explain the miracle. 

Why Atheists Should Become Christians

Christianity has been doing a deep-dive study of personal relationships for 2000 years. In fact, Christianity was the formal logical system which first invented the term "person."

Even if you don't believe Jesus is God, the results of a long-term study performed across multiple cultures for two thousand years is going to be a bit more reliable than something some yahoo just thought up last week while reading Kerouac. The beauty of Christian teaching isn't the Christ-elements, so much as it is the consistency of the personal relationship teachings. Any teaching which hasn't changed for 2000 years is probably something we need to keep, at least until we fully understand everything it is doing in the culture.

Jesus Christ on Families

You know, when you think about it, it is really hard to come up with a quote from Jesus in the Gospels in which He praises families.

He just doesn't do it. He tells people, in multiple places, that they should abandon their families, and that families are sources of strife and division. But, apart from mentioning - in the context of divorce - that a man and woman will leave their families to cleave together, He just doesn't seem very interested in families or kids. 

If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.

Jesus told a would-be disciple who wanted to show basic decency to his deceased father, “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Luke 9:60). He commanded his disciples: Leave parents, siblings, spouse – even “hate” them – and follow me. When his own mother and brothers came to see him, Jesus’ reaction was terse: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Looking at those seated around him he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:31–35).

Nor was He that big of a fan of heterosexual marriage. When He gave the teaching on divorce, the disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”

Now, if the disciples had misunderstood him, this was a perfect chance to correct the disciples' misunderstanding. But, Jesus does not use this opportunity to go into a panegyric on marriage and how wonderful it is. Instead, he essentially agrees with them and starts praising celibacy:

11 But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. 12 For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

That is pretty weak sauce on heterosexual marriage. He upholds the Old Testament teaching that heterosexual marriage is acceptable, and parents should be honored, but I cannot think of a passage where He praises marriage, or even praises motherhood or fatherhood.

When He wants to say something nice about mothers, He doesn't talk about human mothers. He talks about chickens. When a mother asks Him to cast demons out of her daughter, Jesus essentially calls her a bitch. 

The epistles are really not any better. The best Paul can say is to honor the marriage bed. Get married only if you aren't good enough to be celibate and you don't want to burn (in hell). Paul explicitly says that family formation is an impediment to holiness. He finds it necessary to point out that marriage is not actually a sin. That's as positive as he gets about it. What a rousing endorsement of a divinizing, deifying sacrament! "Hey guys, I guess you can do it if it is truly the only way to avoid eternal damnation, and technically, it isn't actually a sin.... so.... " 

A woman should not be enrolled as a widow if she is not at least sixty years old. In addition, she must have been married only once, 10 and have a reputation for good works by bringing up her children, offering hospitality to strangers, washing the feet of the saints,[d] helping those in distress, and being active in all kinds of good work.

11 However, refuse to enroll younger widows, for when their passions distract them from the service of Christ, they will want to marry again 12 and will incur condemnation for having broken their original vow....If any woman believer has relatives who are widows, she must assist them herself. The Church should be free of such burdens and consequently able to assist those who are widows in the true sense.

...he who marries the virgin does right, but he who does not marry her does better (1 Cor 7:38)

The Gospels were not designed to build up family ties. Quite the contrary. Jesus specifically set out to DESTROY family and tribal ties. The ancient world was rife with nepotism and tribal conflict. Every negative event generated some version of the Hatfields and the McCoys. That kind of ancient tribalism, in which every person was required to put family and tribal honor first, was not only common in every society known to man, it is also is the antithesis of the Gospel.

Jesus set out to destroy tribalism. By preaching to non-Jews, He even attacked traditional Judaic tribalism. He succeeded in His goal. Indeed, that destruction of nepotism is part of the reason why Christianity has been so successful: Christians are required to stop engaging in nepotism, stop worrying about family honor, and instead put non-family members on an equal footing with family members. 

Today, the anti-family, anti-tribal Christian message has been so wildly successful that the world suffers from the opposite problem. Family has now been relegated so far into the dust heap of history that the majority of people in the first world no longer even form families. But, because this problem was completely unknown to ancient societies, the Bible has almost nothing to say about how to improve or increase family formation.  

TLDR

Jesus only talks about works as a means of salvation, He never mentions grace at all, much less grace as a means of salvation.

Jesus' parables about wedding feasts always involve torture, punishment and death. Apart from a reference to honoring one's mother and father, he has nothing kind to say about parenthood. Apart from a statement that marriage is indissoluble, he has nothing kind to say about marriage.

In addition to his decidedly negative attitude towards marriage, Jesus never praises the begetting of children or the work of family formation. Instead, his references to family again primarily describe family as a place of combat and violence. He encourages people to abandon their families if family members sin.

For Jesus and Paul, celibacy is the highest good. If the world had been successfully evangelized, and all Christians had followed this highest path to holiness, the human race would have disappeared from the planet by 150 AD.

Are Animals Rational?

Do animals have the use of reason? 

research has shown that animals can remember specific events, use tools and solve problems. But exactly what that means – whether they are making rational decisions or simply reacting to their environment through mindless reflex – remains a matter of scientific dispute.

Cameron Buckner, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, argues in an article published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research that a wide range of animal species exhibit so-called “executive control” when it comes to making decisions, consciously considering their goals and ways to satisfy those goals before acting.

There are many examples of animals using what appears to be rational decision-making:

Jacob Beck (2012) relies on pigeons’ abilities to compare quantities to argue for nonconceptual content; Sidney Carls-Diamante (forthcoming) appeals to octopus behavior and physiology to defend embodied cognition; Richard Moore (2016a) refers to ape gestural communication to rethink the requirements for intentional communication; Andrew Barron and Colin Klein (2016) appeal to insect cognition research to defend new theories of consciousness; Sarah Vincent, Rebecca Ring, and Kristin Andrews (2019) cite dolphins’ social practices to argue for the existence of norms that do not require metacognition.

In addition, philosophers of animal cognition can examine the epistemology and methods used to justify the claims that arise from the science. Research into animal cognition has resulted in surprising claims about animal capacities, such as sociality in garter snakes (Skinner & Miller 2020), tool-use in ants (Maák et al. 2017), mirror self-recognition in fish (Kohda et al. 2019), empathy in rats (Bartal et al. 2011), social learning in fruit flies (Danchin et al. 2018), episodic memory in dogs (Fugazza et al. 2020), addition and subtraction in bees (Howard et al. 2019). How should we evaluate such claims?

If animals have the use of reason, as St. Thomas avers, then Catholic theology has a problem. Catholic theology specifically says only human beings, angels and God have the use of reason. Because humans have the use of reason, the fall of humanity requires sacraments be applied to human beings for their salvation.

But, if animals can reason, then the brokenness of reality means animals are in peril of hell via their immortal rational souls. That is, if animals have immortal rational souls, animals can go to hell (yes, even dogs can go to hell). So animals ALSO need sacraments. But no liturgical Christian denomination has ever applied sacraments to animals. From the non-liturgical, Protestant perspective, animals cannot read, they cannot proclaim with their mouths that Jesus is Lord, they cannot know Jesus through Scripture, and thus they cannot fulfill the conditions necessary for Protestant salvation either. 

If animals can reason, if animals have rational souls, then all animals go to hell.

Christian Colleges Can't Be Woke

Over 40% of the colleges closed since Covid are Christian. The reason is straightforward.

Most college students are female, most college administrators are female. Women value relationships over truth. That's why most colleges are going woke - women always worry about building family relationships. Colleges aren't designed to be about families, they are designed to seek out the truth.

But, as women dominate the college experience, they have to go woke, because ... female. Inclusion. Equity. That's purely a female perspective on the world. Colleges turn into matriarchal, mother-child relationship models. In the whole history of the world, there has never been a successful matriarchal society.

Woke is not compatible with Christian. The two world-views don't mesh. Ironically, even though Christianity is dominated by women believers, Christianity is male-centered, it is dominated by a search for truth.

Christianity is a Father-Son relationship, not a mother-child relationship. Male-centered Christianity is inimical to woke. A father scourges his child, intentionally exposing children to certain levels of danger to harden them for life and help them gain experience in dealing with life's difficulties, while mothers coddle children. Endlessly coddling a child ultimately destroys the child. Jordan Peterson talks about the devouring mother as a Jungian archetype. There's a reason the Hindu deity of death and destruction is Kali, a goddess, a female.

So, Christian college enrolment is necessarily going to drop because there's no way to square those two competing world-views. You cannot have women run an institution designed to be run by men. It doesn't work.

AI Detectors Don't Work

 Artificial Intelligence essay generators, like ChatGPT, are designed to simulate human essay writing. The better the AI generator, the more difficult it is to distinguish its essays from that of a human author. The whole point of the generator is to be indistinguishable from human authoriship.

AI generators are simply deep statistical analysis engines. Each word in the English language is assigned a numeric value, then  statistical engines use large language data to correlate word frequency and distance from each other in sentences. When a string of words is supplied (a question), the engine turns the words into numbers, use the numbers as input, correlates what a reply sequence should look like, and spits that reply sequence back. The numbers are changed back into words right before the words appear on your screen.

All the AI generator does is mindlessly mirror back to us our own Q-A sequences. Ultimately, everything an AI generates was in some way human-generated, both by programmers and by the vast audience of essays the statistical engine was trained on. 

So, how well do these detectors work?

If a non-native English speaker writes an essay, it will be flagged as AI-generated. Stanford University's study indicates AI-detection tools commonly flagged international students. 

The University of Pittsburgh was one. In a note to faculty at the end of June, the university’s teaching center said it didn’t support the use of any AI detectors, citing the fact that false positives “carry the risk of loss of student trust, confidence and motivation, bad publicity, and potential legal sanctions.” 

Every AI generator has political biases, with ChatGPT being the most far left

AI-generated content probably cannot be copyrighted, according to the US Copyright Office. There have been very few court cases, so no one knows where this will end up. But the first court ruling on the subject agrees with the US Copyright Office. 

On the other hand, AI generators claims the right to use anything you input as its own, in perpetuity:

“perpetual, revocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully paid, transferable, sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, create derivative works”

Now, is this all that different from Raphael or Michelangelo claiming as their own work created by their assistants? Or Ph.D.s claiming as their own work done by their grad students or postdocs?

Film credits often list the names of dozens of talented people who contributed to the creation of a film, but typically just one copyright owner — namely, the film company that produced it.

AI pattern-matching tools can discriminate against the poor and disabled. 

AI detection tools may be impossible to create:

"Considering those factors, it might well be impossible for humans to create tools to identify AI-generated text with 100 percent accuracy and reliability, something the paper alluded to: "Our findings strongly suggest that the 'easy solution' for detection of AI-generated text does not (and maybe even could not) exist. Therefore, rather than focusing on detection strategies, educators continue to need to focus on preventive measures and continue to rethink academic assessment strategies (see, for example, Bjelobaba 2020). Written assessment should focus on the process of development of student skills rather than the final product."

And AI-generated watermarks can be spoofed: 

"For a sufficiently advanced language model seeking to imitate human text, even the best-possible detector may only perform marginally better than a random classifier. Our result is general enough to capture specific scenarios such as particular writing styles, clever prompt design, or text paraphrasing. We also extend the impossibility result to include the case where pseudorandom number generators are used for AI-text generation instead of true randomness. We show that the same result holds with a negligible correction term for all polynomial-time computable detectors. Finally, we show that even LLMs protected by watermarking schemes can be vulnerable against spoofing attacks where adversarial humans can infer hidden LLM text signatures and add them to human-generated text to be detected as text generated by the LLMs, potentially causing reputational damage to their developers."

You can fool the detectors by running your AI-generated content through a paraphrasing engine like undetectable.ai, Quillbot, or HideMyAI. The detector abilities are so bad, that OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, have shut down their own AI detector. 

Instructors at the high school and college level are deeply concerned. They cannot believe they cannot reliably determine what is AI-generated and what is not. But, the fact is, they cannot determine the differences with any reliability. If a student uses AI text generators from Day One, the instructor will not see a sudden change in writing ability. No tool will reliably allow detection of AI text generation. The business that employs the graduate will undoubtedly use AI to streamline text-writing tasks, so there isn't much point in penalizing a student for using AI, nor is there much of a way to do it even assuming the professor desired it.

Between automated learning platforms, like Khan Academy, streaming video from Youtube, AI text and image generators, and the fact that certifications are replacing college degrees, instructors are losing the thread that explains why they exist.

Addendum (is modern academia just an elaborate form of hazing?):

However, AI models may be able to learn how animals communicate

Vanderbilt has shut down TurnitIn's AI detector for being too unreliable. One test showed only 68% accuracy in AI detection.

The University of Kansas recommends against TurnItIn's tool

July 2023: MIT Tech Review, AI Detection tools are easy to fool

Sept 2023: OpenAI admits AI Detection tool doesn't work.

October 2023: GoldPenguin, AI Detectors don't work

October 2023: ZDNet, AI Detectors, 80% accuracy at best

Report says AI can always beat detectors

HowToGeek: How AI Detection Works (hint: it also uses LLM)

AI is becoming ubiquitous, it is now present in all major mail/search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo)

Students are using AI to create college application essays

Four colleges have turned off AI detection (Vanderbilt, Michigan State, Northwestern and the University of Texas at Austin):

“Turnitin’s technology is not meant to replace educators’ professional discretion. Reports indicating the presence of AI writing, like Turnitin’s AI writing detection feature, simply provide data points and resources to support a conversation with students, not determinations of misconduct.”

One recent study from Stanford found that seven AI detectors incorrectly flagged more than half of essays written by non-native English students as AI-generated, whereas the results were “near-perfect” for English speakers. Turnitin was not one of the services tested in the study.

OpenAI has initiated Copyright Shield to protect its users from copyright claims. 

Applicants use AI essay generation to apply to colleges

Half of all students use ChatGPT to cheat.

Elon Musk's Neural Link has volunteers. Also, the Humane AI pin

Experts cannot reliably distinguish what constitutes "evidence-based" statements.

The Embarrassment of JPII's TOB

JP II's TOB was - according to JP II himself - definitely incomplete. Putatively about sex, it managed to go through ALL of the TOB general audiences without once addressing either the place of children or the place of suffering in the "theology" of the body. Indeed, even when JP II points out the incompleteness in his last audience, he still omits mention of children or family:

These reflections do not envisage a good number of problems which, because of their object, belong to the theology of the body ( as, for example, the problem of suffering and death, so important in the biblical message.

How in the name of Sweet Fanny Adams do you discuss a "theology" of the body, a theology of human sexuality, without addressing the ultimate biological goal of human sexuality (children) or the ultimate biological conformance of the body to Christ (suffering)???

So, in that sense, TOB was not only incomplete, but also repetitive and mostly puerile. As far as the Church is concerned, TOB was deprecated the moment it was launched. It is nearly impossible to find any Church document which references (i.e., footnoted) any of the "TOB" general audiences. Even JP II himself refuses to refer back to them. The entire sequence of audiences just fell off the boards and disappeared right after it was delivered.

As for Church teaching, celibacy continues to hold pride of place.

Sex continues to be primarily a remedy for concupiscence.

Marriage continues to hold a sad and distant second place to the height of human sexual expression, that is, celibacy and religious orders.

Lay people went crazy for it, but the Church, in her official teachings, ignores it. It appears to be an embarrassing interlude in JP II's pontificate.