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OK, so the vast majority of mRNA vaccine components (i.e. lipids, PBS and sucrose) have been in use in various medications for decades. The only active component that could be considered novel is a strand of mRNA that encodes the SARS COV 2 S protein. Do you know what else mRNA is in? EVERY ORGANISMAL CELL ON THE PLANET. Every time you eat, breathe and drink you ingest mRNA. Your gut microbiome produces billions of strands of foreign mRNA inside your body every day, which can and do cross the gut epithelium into the bloodstream. Also, the mRNA from the vaccines is cleared from the body in around 72 hours, the spike proteins encoded by them in 21 days. So, given how ubiquitously and frequently your cells encounter foreign mRNA molecules, and that no component of the vaccine actually persists in the body long term, by what mechanism would the mRNA cause an adverse reaction years after the fact? I mean, no one knows if you sprout wings out your butt 30 years after drinking Monster Energy, but there's not really a mechanism that would lend itself to that being a realistic concern.

WARNING: Off-topic rant about to begin. Feel free to ignore. <start rant> It is all just so stupid that I think people fight against mandates not because of something they believe in, but because they enjoy being angry about something. I laugh every time I see a video of someone on a plane who sits in their assigned seat, makes sure their tray table is secured & their seats are in the upright and locked position, has their approved-size carry-on luggage properly secured in the overhead or under the seat in front of them, turns their cell phone to airplane mode, opens their window shade, fastens their seatbelt, then throws a hissy fit because they are asked to wear a piece of cloth over their nose and mouth. Clearly it is not personal freedom they are fighting for, but the right to berate flight attendants who didn't make up the rules in the first place. Same thing with vaccine mandates. People who don't want a business owner to be able to require they meet safety standards insist business owners should be able to deny serving people who are gay. Vaccines make your balls shrink, they cause more deaths than COVID, they don't work, they were developed too quickly, they are an unproven technology, they'll cause your workforce to quit, they'll result in Armageddon! Are people who fight against vaccine mandates also fighting against training mandates, hand washing mandates, speed limits in the hospital parking lot, uniforms, complete documentation, and the literally thousands of mandates from government that cover hospital operations? These people exhaust me. <end rant>

Why are you talking about the scientific evidence for the veracity of peoples beliefs in the past? What Peterkin is driving at is the evidence for what people believed in the past.... like a historian. You are barking up the wrong tree here. You need to step outside of your own bias and judgementalism in order to understand how religious ideas emerged in the past. You are judging the past through an emotive modern lens... you need to put yourself in the shoes of the people of the day. Your language is inappropriate for a rational, dispassionate discussion in the historical foundations of religion.

Luckily, we do what we do, in spite of all of it being pointless. You can find short term reasons to do things, that are pointless in the long-term wider picture. If people like the idea, than that is the point. Even if they are wrong. What's the point of looking at images of the universe just after the big bang? It doesn't get you any tangible reward. Even though it's academic, we would still like to KNOW. It might be pointless to seed another planet, it will never benefit us, but people would just like to know that life has a second chance. It's pointless in absolute terms, but it's nowhere near as pointless as other stuff we spend money on. In some cases, the silly amounts of money spent IS the point. Very few people would give the Mona Lisa a second look, if it wasn't for the fact that it's probably worth a billion in today's money.

....and, ahem, not relevant either, for the reasons just expounded by @String Junky 😉 A good historian should be able to review evidence dispassionately, whatever his personal sympathies. Your point about the rules for capital punishment is presumably why the gospel story includes that interrogation of Jesus by Pilate as to whether or not he considers himself a king and why Pilate (in the story) fudges it by inscribing "The King of the Jews" on the cross, to make the execution look legitimate, even though he doesn't believe it.

Thank you for that. Anthropology, history and mythology are interesting. I've learned a few more interesting facts while looking things up for this thread, so it's not been a waste as far as i'm concerned. My original source for early Christianity was Gibbon, and his sources were contemporary Roman archives. Very little was written about Judea before the revolt of 67CE - certainly no splashy miracles were recorded. But that doesn't really clash with the gospel stories, since the apostles keep their leader's miracles 'in the family' as it were; even the leper and the dead man were down in the poor people's marketplace. Jesus never did walk across Herod's swimming pool; never gave a command performance. Reformers, prophets, preachers were common. Mostly unremarked, unless they were seen as a threat to public order or the establishment. They would not, generally, have been regarded as a threat to Rome. The local governors and priests did not have the authority to decree capital punishment against blasphemers - which, in any case, they would have done by stoning. Crucifixion was a Roman method, usually reserved for sedition and insurrection. So, at some point in this time-line (I'm guessing more like a few decades into the Christian Era, rather than BCE), some rebellious voices are being herd briefly, silenced, then heard again someplace else. And all of those stories are later folded into the stories of religious reformers, miracle workers, healers, teachers, opposers of the status quo. Remember that in the Judean tradition, religion, national identity and legitimacy of rule are all intertwined. All the OT prophets kept exhorting the kings for breaking faith with their god and that's why they lose wars... against way bigger, better armed, better supplied, and better organized imperial armies. For them, adherence to religious law is intensely political. It's not hard to imagine, in the years leading up to that disastrous revolt, would-be religious reformers preaching sedition. (BTW - there is nothing warm and fuzzy about martyrdom. People who believe that deeply in something have a reason as well as a need.)

Like INow and Genady, I suspect the problem is the many levels of 'translation'. The ideas have to be translated to language in one person's brain, according to his/her own personal cipher. This language then has to be translated back into ideas by the listener/reader, according to his/her own, totally different cipher. And that is when only two people are involved in the exchange of ideas. I would imagine an exponential increase in difficulty when more people are involved. When you learned English, Joigus, did you first translate the English language to your native Spanish, before further translation to 'ideas' ? ( both you, and your teacher did a great job, by the way ) I have been speaking English for ovr 50 years, but to this day, when I perform simple math operations ( +,-,/,* ) in my head, I do so in my native Italian. ( always thought that was a little weird )

Words from the speaker are like a bucket of paint being thrown toward us. The receiver or listener is then a screen through which that paint passes. Each screen differs based on innate abilities and past experience, and it’s only after being screened that the listener observes the splatter pattern and colors in an attempt to decipher what the painter threw. Plato’s allegory of the cave. We don’t ever see the object directly, only the shadow it casts into our minds.

Spoken like a true athiest... Edit... Not a criticism

Thanks. I think Peterkin is approaching the subject with the correct approach for which the Religion forum was intended. Some people seem to have religious PTSD from their own experiences, and seem unable to separate a purely historical investigation from the mess of their own internal conflicts with it.

Well Katie did an excellent makeover on your English. I'm tempted to be a bit facetious, "What do you mean ?" Actually I'm not sure what this thread is about, but I'd like to add that there is a big difference between 'meaning' and 'information' in that meaning usually includes things like implications and connections to many other factors and pieces of information.

The mathematical support for my fanciful description is the experimental violation of ‘Bell’s inequality theorem’ which supported the EPR version of entanglement where the observation of one of an entangled pair has no affect on its remote partner, especially, not simultaneously in all reference frames. The experiments of John Bell and Alain Aspect demonstrated an inequality not permitted by the EPR effect where the quantum identities of the entangled must have been statistically in a state of correlation prior to observation. This invalidated Einstein’s insistence of ‘no spooky action at a distance’ but it did support Schroedinger’s calculations suggesting that entangled particles are in a state of superposition where both share a common quantum identity. Schroedinger doubted the correctness of his own calculations resulting in his thought experiment with the dead/alive cat. This is where I don't agree. Entangled particles are in a state of superposition which means they share mix of both possible identities rather than having individual quantum states. Prior to observation, the observer does not know which is which or which is where because they are in a mixed state of identities and their locations are indeterminate until observed.

I thought he did. Are you actually reading the replies ? Is your animosity towards people who arrive at differing conclusions after proper analysis, clouding your reaing comprehension ? ( no, I didn't give you a down vote )

Well, OK-- one attempt: A Model is an artificial construct, often mathematical, which represents a real world phenomenon, and which predicts the real-world outcome that is expected to result from a real-world input.

Others already correctly noted that this bogeyman argument hasnt come to pass in essentially any situation where it’s been discussed. I think less than 2% of those threatening to resign actually did. Same with NYC firefighters, teachers, and healthcare workers in other regions. How about you confirm quit rates are actually rising before using it as an argument against healthcare workers vaccinating? Reasons generally involve being misinformed and ignorant of the facts. Those who know most are most likely to vaccinate. Those who know least are most likely to avoid it. You mean the same government who already mandates other vaccines for those very same workers and has for decades? Actually, my view is that unhealthy people seeking care should not be subjected to unvaccinated healthcare workers and that healthcare workers who don’t get vaccinated ought to find another profession where their refusal to vaccinate isn’t further raising the risk for already high risk individuals. I guess it’s a good thing then that I’ve shared my reasons for that dismissal and presented reasonable arguments in support of it.

Given the almost 12 different threads where your misconceptions and seeming inability to grasp scale or probabilities and how very many times you’ve already been corrected, and given how you just keep repeating the same silly claims over and over and over … yes. A little humor seemed appropriate.

Like moving into Taiwan or Hong Kong while we’re distracted, perhaps? I can see that, but feel they’re not that tone deaf and wouldn’t do that the same time global media is covering them nonstop with the Olympics.

Sorry, I tried hard to type some sarcasm in there but it doesn't always come thru So let's see if I have the facts straight. Jesus was possibly/probably a real human. He had some sayings that have lived on. There are no known writing examples of any kind that date to his time alive. Most of the credible sounding stuff are about the years from the time he was 30 years old. I would assume Jesus (if God) could write. Even if not about himself he could have written about his philosophy and he could have written so much that we might still find scraps today. There is not a single artifact that can be attributed to arguably the most important human that ever "lived". Not one!! But the necessity of faith is the lack of evidence. The less evidence the more faith you must have. The more evidence the less faith you need.

After reading and thinking, I'm getting a "third" answer. It is not Yes or No regarding the OP question. My feeling rather is, Doesn't matter because humanity will not do it anyway.

You seem fixated on the idea that this discussion is about you and me. It's not really about that, sorry. I'm more interested in the mechanics of this scenario and discussing the potential consequences. So perhaps you can see beyond the personal tit-for-tat for a change and analyze this situation objectively?