abrenuntio

Disobedience to the Law and defiance of the Lord, in contrast to God's own faithfulness, are not just features of the 21st century, but of human history in its entirety. It is the theme of the Bible, right from the first pages.

It ranges from simple stupidity and willfulness, "knuckleheaded" attempts to bring about God's promises on our own schedule using our own worldly means; to full-blown apostasy, idol worship and open rebellion; to the particularly sinister theme of a "counterfeit religion". All of it leads to bad outcomes, sometimes determining the rest of history, and none of it ever derails God's good promises coming to full fruition in their own time.

To answer your question: in my understanding, Scripture sees a good-natured, obedient kind of zealotry in a positive light. But this zealotry rarely makes the headlines.

We possess hand-copied manuscripts originating from a wide range of ages, cultures, languages and personal tastes. They are far from word-by-word accurate literal copies, yet all these copies are fundamentally sound to the ears of modern day devout Jews and Christians.

My claim is that, by grace, both cults have successfully, over the course of many millennia, sniffed out loose but sound translations (even if they don't like the style or certain choices) from deliberately deviant translations.

I would say LXX and Hebrew versions share a common theological vision. None of the examples mentioned in this article convince me otherwise.

Example: bringing the Law to the nations and bringing fear of the Lord to the nations refers to the exact same future, because fearing the Lord is a positive thing in Scripture. Israel itself was to be a spiritual sign of mankind fearing the Lord. And that future came to pass. God is bringing fear to the nations. Not the trembling fear for a dangerous oppressive army, but wholehearted conversion. By the time Messiah arrived, Jerusalem was already visited by eager "phoboumenoi": pagan "God-fearers" who had understood that the creator God of Israel was not like any of the pagan "gods".

An example of a translation truly deviating is for instance that made by Jehovah's Witnesses. An example: they translate ruach as "active force", not as a one-off choice because some human translator on some particular day in his own cultural context thought it just sounded better, but because JWs reject trinitarianism. You will not find a single actual Christian (or Jew!) accepting this as a (systematic) translation choice.

In fact, it's a testament to the divine inspiration of Scripture that Christians and Jews have never relied on an absolutely letter-for-letter standardized text to know the voice of their Shepherd.

Belt and suspenders protection it is.

Call it Houdini already.

From the Wikipedia page on the Catholic Church: "By means of Catholic charities and beyond, the Catholic Church is the largest non-government provider of education and health care in the world."

Just yesterday I went to see a presentation of a priest appointed to a massive parish in the rural area of South Sudan, setting up schools and bringing in aid.

Because of Krazam it took me a minute or two to accept that this now exists for real

I'm personally rather fond of Java, but even this (or the shorter `Predicate`) still can't compete with the straightforward simplicity of a type along the lines of `string -> bool`.

No. The Bible says nothing about a European secular nationalist movement called Zionism. Certainly nothing positive.

Some Orthodox Jews are very active against it, on very sound religious grounds.

Not sure whether an index is still pragmatic.

But I hope the Catholic Church of the future will take the defense of its flock more serious again. Many books (and movies and TV series...) out there contain downright evil ideas, sometimes presented in dishonest ways. Perhaps some organized, ecclesiastically sanctioned system of reviews to guide readers would be feasible?

No opinions on the ship itself, but the social proposals are very interesting :-)

Earth biomes will be kept intact with respect to their natural evolution. But human society will be treated as an amoral engineering problem seeking to optimize a few measurable parameters chosen up front. There is little sense in this proposal that human beings will bring along with them original sin or whatever you want to call it. But what allows human beings to flourish and keeps societies together, especially in conditions of scarcity (very much unlike the conditions of say the past half century), may not be obvious to the project planners.

In fact, much of what has been handed down to us in the legal and opaque cultural and religious traditions that have successfully survived such stresses in the past, is gleefully discarded.

The social engineering proposed is of the most dystopian and heavy-handed variety: it involves taking a group of volunteers to Antarctica to format them to a supposed sociocultural blank slate, followed by "characteristics monitoring". Despite the apparent care for superficial day-to-day happiness, human beings are to be indoctrinated to see themselves as discardable resources. They are not just governed with "mere" discipline, but with a program of violent population control (e.g. "maximum 2 childrens", "not necessarily with the same partner", "euthanasia", "not owned by the individual", ...).

So humans on Chrysalis will decide over every single aspect of life and death, not for themselves but for each other. But this time, unlike all earlier times, it will work because they're going to keep "governance architecture liquid, horizontal and inclusive" and "open source communities" and "not ethically compulsory" and based on "deep scenario exploration".