FOSS enthusiast, Linux user, Android enthusiast, Transformers fan (he/him)

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Cake day: December 29th, 2023

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  • Fergie Chambers, a 39-year-old self-proclaimed communist with a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Chambers’ wealth comes from his father’s family’s company, Cox Enterprises, a global conglomerate with automotive and media holdings, including AutoTrader, Kelley Blue Book, Cox TV, the political site Axios, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. With a fortune of some $26.8 billion, the Cox family, a powerful force in Atlanta philanthropy, made the second-largest contribution in 2022 toward the training facility, with their foundation providing $10 million of a planned $60 million in private funding. (Georgia taxpayers are putting up $31 million.)

    In contrast, Chambers estimates he’s donated “a couple million dollars” in the last year to groups opposing the very facility that high-profile members of his family want to be built. Not only has he financially supported signature gathering for the referendum, he’s sponsored buses to shuttle protesters to the site, and contributed “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to funds that paid for bail and lawyers for those who had been arrested.

    While the broader Cox family’s political reputation is squarely centrist, Chambers’ is somewhere in the vicinity of Chairman Mao. When we spoke—after a few weeks of phone tag that involved me missing some pre-dawn calls back from Chambers—he seemed to relish defying mainstream orthodoxy, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin “one of the better statesmen of our century,” and describing Hamas’ October 7 attack as “a moment of hope and inspiration for tens of millions of people.” While he denies a recent claim in Los Angeles Magazine that he chants “death to America” every day, he allows that the idea is more or less true. “I think the most important thing for the prosperity of humanity is the destruction of the US,” he told me.






  • Why would the assumption be that acknowledging the existence of Jesus makes you Christian? And how is not being Christian weakening my claim?

    Non-Christian sources used to study and establish the historicity of Jesus include the c. first century Jewish historian Josephus and Roman historian Tacitus. These sources are compared to Christian sources, such as the Pauline letters and synoptic gospels, and are usually independent of each other; that is, the Jewish sources do not draw upon the Roman sources. Similarities and differences between these sources are used in the authentication process.[82][83][84][85] From these two independent sources alone, certain facts about Jesus can be adduced: that he existed, his personal name was Jesus, he was called a messiah, he had a brother named James, he won over Jews and gentiles, Jewish leaders had unfavorable opinions of him, Pontius Pilate decided his execution, he was executed by crucifixion, and he was executed during Pilate’s governorship.[33] Josephus and Tacitus agree on four sequential points: a movement was started by Jesus, he was executed by Pontius Pilate, his movement continued after his death, and that a group of “Christians” still existed; analogous to common knowledge of founders and their followers like Plato and Platonists.[86]

    Serious historians of the early Christian movement—all of them—have spent many years preparing to be experts in their field. Just to read the ancient sources requires expertise in a range of ancient languages: Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and often Aramaic, Syriac, and Coptic, not to mention the modern languages of scholarship (for example, German and French). And that is just for starters. Expertise requires years of patiently examining ancient texts and a thorough grounding in the history and culture of Greek and Roman antiquity, the religions of the ancient Mediterranean world, both pagan and Jewish, knowledge of the history of the Christian church and the development of its social life and theology, and, well, lots of other things. It is striking that virtually everyone who has spent all the years needed to attain these qualifications is convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical figure."

    The idea that Jesus was a purely mythical figure has been and still is considered an untenable fringe theory in academic scholarship for more than two centuries,[note 4] but has gained popular attention in recent decades due to the growth of the internet.[8]

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus