I’ve been staying home sick with some horrible cough for about 3 weeks now.\u00a0 One would think that this would be quite conducive to blogging, but when I’m running a fever I find it hard to concentrate enough to produce mental output.\u00a0 (Mental input<\/em>, like books and movies, is fine).<\/p>\n Fortuantely\u2014either because of taking antibiotics, or for some other reason\u2014I’m beginning to feel much better, so here’s a post, consisting of links which I’ve found interesting since the last time<\/a> I did links:<\/p>\n Isn\u2019t it terribly frightening to believe in the Devil?<\/strong> I’ve been staying home sick with some horrible cough for about 3 weeks now.\u00a0 One would think that this would be quite conducive to blogging, but when I’m running a fever I find it hard to concentrate enough to produce … Continue reading \n
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\nThe sad thing is that there are probably human teachers who grade this superficially.\u00a0 Although, even they could probably tell if the sentences didn’t actually fit together in any way (besides beginning with words like “Moreover”).
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\nOut of curiosity, I just went and checked the webpage of the discern<\/a> program to see what their alogorithm was.\u00a0 It’s machine learning based on sample essays which are already graded.\u00a0 Oh my.\u00a0 That means neither the student nor the classroom instructor will even know <\/em>what criterion the machine is using.
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\nDarby was one of the first people to teach that Christians would be raptured into heaven 7 years prior to the Second Coming of Christ, a belief almost completely unheard of prior to Darby.\u00a0 This is part of a detailed scheme called Dispensationalism<\/a>, popular in American Fundamentalist circles, which is based on that idea that apparent contradictions in the Bible should be resolved by assigning different texts to one of seven different covenants or “dispensations” in which God treats people differently.\u00a0 This way of thinking leads them to construct an elaborate timeline of End Times events (a suprise Rapture, followed by 7 years of Tribulation, followed by the Second Coming, followed by 1000 years of The Milennium<\/a> [this one at least has a\u00a0 foundation in a literal reading of the Book of Revelation], and then finally <\/em>the Final Judgement).\u00a0 Oddly enough, people think<\/em> that this elaborate scheme comes from reading the Bible literally as a fundamentalist should, even though no one who read the Bible without influence from Darby would ever come to this elaborate scheme on their own.
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\nMore relevantly to this letter, Darby went on to found a small denomination<\/a> of his own which excommunicated nearly everybody else.
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\nYou\u2019re looking at me as though I\u2019m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It\u2019s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so<\/em> removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"