FarmReadyElephants
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User ID: 2869
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
It's intricately woven into mystical Christianity. When we say "God is Love", the trinity shows us an icon of what love is - perfect union that paradoxically does not obliterate distinction. It is the perfect balance between dualism and monism that is the fundamental pattern of reality
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
Throughout church history, there has always been a tension between the charismatic authority of the mystics, without which the church has no blood, and the apostolic authority of the hierarchy, without which the church has no body. John Chrysostom was a mystic, fleeing Antioch for a hermitage when the church tried to ordain him a priest. After three years of prayer and fasting, he relented and allowed himself to be taken into service.
The people demanded John and adored him because of his clarity, authenticity, and authority. His popularity was reason enough for the hierarchy to promote him to Bishop. But at the same time his charismatic authenticity was a problem for the establishment church, since he could not hold back from criticizing an impious empress for her greed and materialism.
John is today remembered with great affection. The church would be diminished without him. But he died in exile.
There have been many other reformers from among the charismatic branch of the Church. Symeon the New Theologian is another example. In Orthodox Ecclesiology, we believe that we find the golden mean through this pull between the chaotic energy of the charismatic branch and the orderly authority of the episcopacy.
Typical American Protestantism is shallow and unsatisfying. It's a religion for low-openness people that like following rules and reciting answers to equations that have already been solved. Understandably, that doesn't appeal to people with a high appetite for novelty.
Buddhism has filled the gap for a lot of Americans who seek a spiritual experience with a little more hands-on ambition. It also meshes well with materialists who have a hard time assenting to metaphysical beliefs (including techies like Tyler). Don't get me wrong, Buddhism has plenty of metaphysical claims, it's just not too bothered if you don't believe them. You can still pursue various useful and/or entertaining states of consciousness without assenting to its metaphysical underpinnings.
There is a resurgence of interest in Christianity nowadays as it is the underpinning of our civilizational worldview, and this has apparently caught up with Tyler. So his answer to this dilemma is to propose a Christianity that is more like Buddhism. He calls it "Mystical Christianity", but the proposal imports the mystical side wholesale from Buddhism. It downgrades the truth claims of Christianity into a useful allegory or symbolic system. This is roughly the path that Jordan Peterson has tread, bearing some fruit.
What it ignores is that Christianity has an existing, living, vibrant branch of mystical practice of its own - the path of theosis, direct experience of God. This is maintained in the apostolic churches which have kept a practice of monasticism. Historical mystics are among the most fervently believing people in the literal truths of its doctrines. It's through this lineage that I surprised and embarrassed myself by becoming a Christian again after 18 years of absence.
I count Tyler as a friend, though it's been some years since we've spoken. I see him, along with people like Jordan Bates, as kind-hearted heathens who are drawn to the warmth at the periphery of the Christian faith through their good instincts. As a techie myself, I also had a lot of resistance to becoming a Christian. I arrived at a materialist worldview after a traumatic Protestant childhood. That materialism had been loosened by my own experimentation with Buddhism and Psychedelics. By the time I approached Christianity, I privileged a phenomenological worldview over raw materialism. Put simply, to have a model of the physical system of the world, you must first perceive the model. Consciousness is more real than particles.
My first encounter with real Mystical Christianity was through Sophrony Sakharov's short book "His Life is Mine", given to me by an Orthodox monk during a visit to a beautiful monastery in a desert valley in New Mexico. Sophrony is a modern saint who died in the 1990s and was recently canonized. He taught a practice whose apogee is witnessing the Uncreated Light, the energies of God himself. As a youth in Russia, he toyed with Buddhism, and that anecdote softened my little heathen heart towards him. I loved the way he wrote about Christianity as a quest for a foundation of being, with a God whose name is "I AM". It sounded so much more grand, creative, and fertile than the repressive moralistic Protestantism of my youth. In his writing, he is in the mystical tradition of such saints as Ephrem the Syrian, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian, and Gregory Palamas.
At any level of analysis, there is fruit in Christianity. The moral world we inhabit is Christian, it is from Christianity that secular society gets its notion of Good and Evil. So analyzing the stories and patterns of it is useful, even as allegory.
But there is perhaps something deeper if we listen to those who pursued God with all their being and claim to have found him. As a popularizer of Christian thought, Jonathan Pageau offers a counterpoint to Jordan Peterson. His Symbolic World podcast uses the patterns of meaning found in Christianity to explain the world, but he does it from a position of faith informed by the mystical Christian tradition. In particular, I know he is a fan of St. Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373) and his "Hymns on Paradise" as well as the works of Maximus the Confessor. Symbolic thinking is fundamental to the method of these saints without discounting the truth of doctrine. Maximus sees in man a microcosm of the universe, and in the universe a macrocosm of man.
IMO Pageau's project is more flexible and more creative than Peterson's, despite the fact that it is more traditional (or perhaps, because of it). Ephrem's works have inspired people for 1600 years, and I don't believe Peterson's will last that long.
My suggestion for people like Tyler who are interested in mystical Christianity is to go meet some monks. If you've given thousands of hours to listening and practicing Buddhism, then perhaps try a few hundred encountering the Christian version. Give the tradition a little respect. Read a book or two, spend a weekend at a monastery, buy a prayer rope and try the Jesus prayer.
I would love to see a subculture of tech kids pivot from Jhana-maxxing to pursuing the Uncreated Light. Perhaps Silicon Valley ambition can create a bumper-crop of saints.
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
Thing is, you don’t have the option to flake out on a child when they no longer suit you
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
Edgy sacred-values trolling plays a lot differently in communities where nobody has kids than the opposite. Most of the people harshly opposed to Aella online aren't the same people living in her Berkeley circles
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
Sexual nihilism is considered harmful. There's a reason why the rationalist community has a very low TFR - I wouldn't be surprised if it were as low as 0.1.
There was a rationalist adjacent group in a certain city that banned Aella from their events, and I remember her complaining about it a few years ago. But that subgroup had a TFR of closer to 2.0. They didn't want someone throwing sex parties, being an open prostitute, and debating whether-or-not pedophilia was really that bad around their kids. She felt hurt, her friends felt the need to defend her, but its an unavoidable side-effect of basic social hygiene.
Sex is an incredibly powerful psychological force. People kill for sex, people die for sex, people throw away their careers for sex, they lose a fortune for sex, the commit crimes for sex, they bully people for sex. Jeff Bezos pissed away ~$40 billion to upgrade his lay. The best we've been able to do is cage that energy and channel it for pro-social and pro-civilizational ends.
People like Aella are smart enough to reason through the second and third order consequences of their actions. They just don't. Probably because they are directly benefiting from lighting civilization on fire. Cool. The rest of us don't have to put up with it.
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
And I thought The Motte could only by riled up this much by transwomen.
In some ways, Aella seems like a trans-transwoman — her sexuality and content is more typical of transwomen than of women. The rationalist community has a pretty high transwoman/woman ratio, so its predictable that the few women who are around have more masculine traits and interests.
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
This isn't to say she's a bad person or should be mocked or bullied, just that you should take her opinions on sex and romance with a grain of salt.
She is smart enough to know that the lifestyle she advocates is bad for most people and bad for the groups that she is a part of. They do more harm than good at the individual and communal level. And she still pushes them because she makes a living in the attention economy.
I guess being a selfish antisocial grifter doesn't make one a "bad person" on its own, but it's certainly not a good start.
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
I've always wondered who were the psychos poisoning their own lawns in order to prevent beautiful flowers from growing
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
I find it far easier to believe that "I had trans feelings as a kid" is a retrospective gloss, or even deliberate self deception, than that a child has specifically "transgender" feelings.
I definitely wanted to be a girl in some capacity as a child. But that's a desire, not an identity. I didn't "feel like a girl". That would be an incorrect interpretation of the feeling. I agree, someone of one sex cannot have any idea of what it feels like to be the other one.
How confident are you that you're not falling into a typical mind trap? (Scott references phantom sensations and "body maps," and phantom limb syndrome researchers found ~60% of transmen reported experiencing phantom penis sensations, when surveyed.
After more than a decade of masturbating to exclusively trans-porn, I did sometimes experience a "phantom vulva" sensation while masturbating, cross-dressing, and getting high on weed and whippets. But the power of repeated fantasy is probably enough to do the job on its own for a number of people. Autosuggestion is a hell of a drug.
Personally, I view the trans phenomenon as more of a disorder of desire than identity. The dominant social script confuses desire for identity
Nowadays I don't even masturbate. I just have sex with my wife and I never get any sensations or desires anywhere in the ballpark of this.
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
Christ is risen, my friend!
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
I was under the impression that we do have a identification system for citizens. My newborn has to get a SS# to be added to my health insurance
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
Russia's strategy up until the 2014 revolution was not expanding their borders (although Kiev was Russia from 1686 to 1991!), but in exercising soft power and diplomacy in Ukraine. They lost the soft war, so had to settle for a hard one.
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
Try to beat our Iraq kill ratio
Is this true? I would think the genetic distance between two Europeans to be smaller than that between a European and an SS African. The last common ancestor between any two Europeans is much more recent than between a European and a Sub-saharan African (something like 1,000 years ago vs 80,000 years ago).
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
We'll see how long Congress lets him hold the line. I'm optimistic that there's still enough fresh bravado in the Republican coalition to hold out for long enough to allow Trump's pressure to work.
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
But I don't think other Republican primary candidate wins the 2016 election
Trump had high unfavorables and was hammered by the media. I think it's reasonable that a normal Republican (Ted or Jed) could have won after 8 years of Obama, though ultimately with a different voter coalition
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
Interesting, thank you. That does give the President some short term discretionary leverage. But looking out on a longer timeline, Congress has the power to write spending bills that the President cannot stop
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
This looks like it fits in with Trump's strategy to increase executive power by refusing to spend funds that Congress has appropriated, like how he shut down USAID. This is still a legal gambit on Trump's part, and it's not clear that he will get away with it.
If he does hold back aid for even a short period of time, the media response will be withering. Zelensky is popular. Does he have enough time before the midterms to weather the storm and pressure Zelensky to come to the table?
People have commented that Zelensky's casual attire and his debating Trump and Vance in front of the media seems disrespectful or challenging to Trump. That's because it is. Contrary to Trump's claim that he has no cards, he does have a card - his popularity in Western media and the US congress. Trump has a thin margin in Congress and foreign policy is an area where a few Republicans are likely to peel off in support of popular wars.
Zelensky is betting that he is more powerful than Trump where it matters. If Trump has no power to withhold ongoing support from Zelensky, then it is Zelensky, not Trump, that controls American Ukraine policy. The press conference and its fallout serves as a test of strength where Zelensky challenges Trump and then gauges the results to see if his assumptions are correct.
That still doesn't give Zelensky a path to achieving any maximalist war objective. But it does give him a path to retaining the status quo of indefinite American material support, which seems good enough to him for the moment. Trump may be the elected President of the United States, he may be taller, better dressed, and more objectively correct about the best path forward. But in an open democracy it is popularity that matters - not any of those other things. And the contest pits Trump against America's most beloved political celebrity of the last three years.
It's no accident that Zelenksy looks like a character from a Marvel movie (strong resemblance to Hawkeye in particular). It is a persona designed to appeal to the American public. The President has a few explicit powers that a celebrity does not. But when it comes to swaying the US congress, it is an even battle ground - popularity vs. popularity, celebrity vs. celebrity. Zelensky thinks he can get 51 votes in the Senate and he's not going to sign any compromise agreement until he is reasonably sure he will lose.
I just can't take the 1938 analogies.
In Russia and Ukraine, you have two countries that are reproducing well below replacement. The men that are dying will not be replaced. Hitler's plan was to depopulate Eastern Europe through mass starvation and then fill it with Germans. Russia's TFR is 1.8. The comparison is incredibly silly.
Nothing in the last three years makes me think that Putin has the resources, manpower, or desire to roll over Europe.
Russia has a clear causus belli with America extending our military footprint into Ukraine. And they have given us decades of warning that they would treat it as such. Kiev was the site of the founding of the Russian people, and it was a part of the modern state of Russia from 1686 to 1991, longer than the USA has been a country. Crimea was its only warm water naval base, and had been so for centuries.
Russia is not Nazi Germany, or even the USSR for that matter. It's not some intransigent ideological foe. It's a self-interested country going out of its way to act as predictably as possible and we can negotiate with it to our mutual interest. The United States is entirely in the driver's seat in how our relationship unfolds.
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
It's qualitatively different for women. They are much easier to identify and they are weaker per unit body mass. There is less ambiguity about whether or not you can win a physical contest against them. And there is a built in reason why men would WANT to risk a physical conflict with them.
My ex had lived in SF for a time. Like most SF women, she dressed in a way to hide her sexual desirability and tried as much as she could not to walk alone through the city. Unfortunately, she was somewhat good looking and you can't hide a pretty face.
Short kings are more vulnerable than guys with bodyguard physiognomy, sure. But vulnerability isn't as core a part of their experience as it is for women. For women, it runs deep. Culturally, genetically, biologically - hundreds of thousands of years of vulnerability. If you could read the biography of every one of her ancestors that passed on her mitochondria, you would read many stories of warbrides and rape. Every culture has stories about the greater vulnerability of women, because every culture has experienced it.
For a man, the worst that usually happens is that you die.
FarmReadyElephants
1yr ago
The language issue makes it hard to argue for your daughters rights in the more substantive cases. When the powers that be tell your daughter to be nice, or that her request for different rooming is a civil rights violation, how can she argue her case if she can't say "I shouldn't be forced to room with a man."?
The language issue prejudices all other issues. Powerfully. That's the point - to shape people's perceptions. To argue more substantive issues without pushing back on language requires pages and pages of qualification and apology, which is the situation we have now.
A normie Protestant friend of mine used to say "I don't believe in God the way I believe in gravity, I believe in God the way I believe my wife loves me".
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