Larry Sanger
π€ SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I think I'd read a gospel to my sons in the previous couple of years as part of homeschooling.
It was not unfamiliar, but when I went over the Old Testament stuff, that gave me new perspective on the gospel.
By the time I wouldβeven before I finished Matthew, I believe, and certainly before I finished the Gospelsβ
had been converted, essentially.
Interesting.
It was actually going through systematically the Old Testament and trying to get all of my questions answered.
Not to say that I believed the answers right away, because of course I didn't.
But I was just impressed that...
Well, two things.
First of all, I didn't realize that people asked my questions and really cared about them and like really went to town on them in great depth.
Sometimes, you know, the way they did it in like personal blogs or podcasts.
They were like too devotional for me, not really interesting or philosophical, focused on the hard critical stuff that needs to be done first, at least for apologetic purposes.
But there were some, you know, some resources online that were really shockingly cogent and
I finally came to realize after going through several books of the Old Testament and just systematically asking my questions and getting answers that...
You know, there is a 2,000-year-old history of thinking about these things.
And it's not just a matter of, you know, studying the Bible and, I don't know, riffing on myths or something like that.
I don't know what I thought about what exactly...
theology involved.
But at a certain sort of basic level, a lot of times what's going on is answering the hard questions that people have as they read the Bible, which is exactly what I was doing.
Or have a good LLM.