FarmReadyElephants
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User ID: 2869
FarmReadyElephants
7d ago
I think what holds back Orthodoxy spreading in the West is the ethnic churches.
Is this based on your own experience? Because I received a warm and personal welcome in Orthodoxy, despite the presence of ethnic diasporas.
FarmReadyElephants
7d ago
We have a little one, and thankfully the Godparents and other people around church have been willing to watch him for a bit. It helps give us a break.
Getting the kids baptized is a chance to form an alliance with an older couple or another family at church. It may make things easier
FarmReadyElephants
7d ago
For me, the appeal of Orthodoxy was two fold. First, it takes itself seriously. The priests for the most part believe in God. Faith is contagious, and I have a hard time believing in something that the adherents don’t even believe themselves. My first experience in Orthodoxy was a candle lit, pre-dawn liturgy at a monastery, and the hieromonk said every prayer of the liturgy as if it mattered.
The second appeal was its personal ethos, as opposed to the more institutional ethos of the Catholics. I did my catechumenate in Berkeley and I would stay after church and talk with people for hours. The priest would often take me out for coffee after coffee hour. He’s not the most impressive priest, a little socially awkward, and one of our few celibate clergy. But he gave me plenty of time and attention.
In my years of spiritual wandering, I most frequently visited Catholic Churches but I never made a friend, or even had a conversation that I can recall
FarmReadyElephants
7d ago
I didn’t believe that Christ actually rose from the dead when I started exploring Orthodox spirituality. How are you supposed to marry someone before the first date?
I suppose his point is that we rely on faith for a variety of normal human interactions. The true subjective inner state of his wife is not amenable to the scientific method, though he had grown to trust it over time. The love of his wife can be a pragmatic reality, even a core belief around which he built his life, without being capable of inductive inquiry or deductive proof.
FarmReadyElephants
8d ago
But at the end of the day, it's very hard to actually pull myself out of a strictly material belief system, too, I guess.
Phenomenology makes more sense to me than materialism. It was the phenomenological lens of Jordan Peterson that first spoke to me from a Christian perspective. I was already a Buddhist and I was used to navigating existence from a standpoint of phenomenological empiricism.
As a phenomenological empiricist, I could say that states of consciousness matter, and things that I do could predictably alter my consciousness. I could try different kinds of meditation or take a face-melting dose of mushrooms and reliably change my experience of existence.
The alternative to phenomenology is some kind of materialism. But materialism usually leads to some kind of nihilism. If matter is more real than consciousness, then the things that intuitively matter to humans are really meaningless. Love is just chemicals, beauty is just electric signals in your brain. It is the worldview of Neil DeGrasse Tysonism, and I don't find it particularly appealing.
Ultimately I decided on faith to not be a nihilist. I decided that love matters, beauty matters, and the people I love matter. I decided it was good to act in the world to bring about more good. And it seemed to me that phenomenology was an intellectually rigorous philosophical framework to act from, since consciousness is prior to any physical model of the world.
From there, Christianity was not so far away.
FarmReadyElephants
8d ago
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".
FarmReadyElephants
8d 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
8d 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
11d ago
Thing is, you don’t have the option to flake out on a child when they no longer suit you
FarmReadyElephants
11d 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
11d 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
11d 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
11d 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
14d ago
I've always wondered who were the psychos poisoning their own lawns in order to prevent beautiful flowers from growing
FarmReadyElephants
20d 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.
The prayers of the church help inform the people. In the liturgy, we are constantly praying to God in the name of "The Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit". If you attend vespers, you will hear the hymn Gladsome Light: "having come upon the setting of the sun, having seen the light of the evening, / we praise the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: God."
This is one reason why it is important to have most worship in the vernacular language
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