FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
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User ID: 1739
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
20d ago
The word holocaust was not in use yet at the time he wrote that book.
While Eisenhower did not talk about it specifically in that book, he was aware of gas chambers and crematoria. In 1944 he received a report from Captain Yurka Galitzine on the Natzweiler concentration camp that specifically mentions mass executions (by firearm), experimental gas chambers, and crematoria.
Colonel William Quinn wrote a detailed report on Dachau that Eisenhower received in 1945 that described the gas chambers and crematoria in detail, with photographic evidence. The report also references a contemporaneous account, a diary of an internee who recorded his experiences.
The contemporaneous documented testimony and photographic evidence seems pretty overwhelming.
It's possible that those on the left value being skinny and attractive more than those on the right do. The urban left is more likely to be interested in casual sex with strangers, and more likely to be going from relationship to relationship as opposed to settling down with someone. Also more likely to get divorced and try to find a new partner. With that environment in mind, it is advantageous to maintain your attractiveness so you can continue to attract mates.
In contrast, the further to the right you go the more likely you are to have a culture valuing finding someone to settle down with and start a family. Once you've bagged a mate and said your vows, staying physically attractive is much less important for your day to day happiness. What's more, on the right you're more likely to have broad family and local networks to fill your social needs: people who don't need to find you attractive to be in your life. For the urban left, I can imagine you have to build your social network more from fostering relationships with new people rather than leaning on your family and the people who have known you since you were a kid.
All that is speculative, of course. What I can confirm is that in right wing cultural spaces if someone is fat they'll usually say something like "I love to eat, that's why I'm fat!" or "I know being fat ain't healthy, but eating food is what makes life worth living." It comes from a place of personal responsibility, including the personal responsibility to accept the consequences of your actions and the trade-offs you have made.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
The thing that I took away from SMTM that seems most important is that something weird is going on, and it's getting worse despite our best attempts to fix it. People are getting fatter and fatter, and as a society we've been putting more and more resources into not getting fat. This does seem mysterious, and I do think something more is going on then just "food is cheap and corporations make food taste great".
Until someone figures out what that thing is definitively, though, the best I can do is employ willpower to try not to get any fatter than I am now.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
I can see an argument for saying that the obese are people with a chronic disease tautologically: arguably being obese is a disease, and it's certainly not an acute condition (nobody gets obese overnight, and nobody stops being obese overnight). Of course if you take that perspective then I'm not sure how you can square it with "fat pride." Nobody goes around being proud of having multiple sclerosis, or saying that goiters are beautiful. And the fact that it is a chronic disease does not absolve someone of responsibility for acquiring that condition: cirrhosis of the liver is another chronic disease that is almost always the result of personal choices.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
If I was them I would be them and not me. I cannot think of a meaningful sense in which you could say "If you were them".
I'm sympathetic to the idea that environmental or genetic factors may make it more or less difficult to not make choices that will give you a chronic disease. That would change the level of responsibility, but unless someone held a gun to your head you've still got some responsibility.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
21d ago
The ultimate nature seems to be that some things are aversive and some are attractive. This is not subjective, it is an objective property of the specific subject/object system in question. That is to say, it can be objectively true that different organisms have different needs.
We can only identify what something needs (or what would be attractive for something) if we have an understanding of what that thing is: of it's nature. If it has no nature, then it's nonsense to say that there are things it needs. Needs or else what? Or else it will not fulfil it's nature?
It sounds like it is not the case that all the things you think are sacred are considered sin by the Catholic Church, nor are the things they call divine and sacred the things you'd call skill issues. It looks to me that your primary divergence with Catholicism is the morality of transhumanism.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
21d ago
The question is, without a solid goal of "perfection" you can't really meaningfully pursue it. One man cuts off his own leg because he believes that will make him more perfect, is that glorifying God through an act of self-creation? If your goal is merely to transform, then cutting off your own legs is as good a goal as growing five more of them. But if your goal is perfection, to get better and better, to "grow great enough to Glorify god in greater ways" then you need a fixed goal to be working towards. Chesterton put it well in Orthodoxy:
This, therefore, is our first requirement about the ideal towards which progress is directed; it must be fixed. Whistler used to make many rapid studies of a sitter; it did not matter if he tore up twenty portraits. But it would matter if he looked up twenty times, and each time saw a new person sitting placidly for his portrait. So it does not matter (comparatively speaking) how often humanity fails to imitate its ideal; for then all its old failures are fruitful. But it does frightfully matter how often humanity changes its ideal; for then all its old failures are fruitless. The question therefore becomes this: How can we keep the artist discontented with his pictures while preventing him from being vitally discontented with his art? How can we make a man always dissatisfied with his work, yet always satisfied with working? How can we make sure that the portrait painter will throw the portrait out of window instead of taking the natural and more human course of throwing the sitter out of window?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
21d ago
I'm not arguing so much as explaining. Most people don't know about Natural Law, but it underpins an enormous amount of Western thought. I always like to clue people in about it whenever I get the opportunity, though I don't expect them to agree with Natural Law just by understanding it.
From a 'considering second-order effects' perspective, 'curing' someone's mind to make them accept their existing body opens a slippery slope to those who do not accept 'Natural Law' to 'cure' their workers of the desire for humane working conditions.
The same can be said the other way: 'curing" someone's body by radically transforming it into the opposite gender opens a slippery slope for those who do not accept Natural Law to 'cure' their workers by giving them new body forms that make them better workers. The solution in either case (assuming we have such powerful technology) would be to keep to a Natural Law ethic which would oppose radical modifications of the human mind from what is normal (for instance, modifying a mind not work for 16 hours a day without a break and not mind it) or the human body (by, say, modifying a body so that they are 50% more efficient at their job by giving them six arms, twelve eyes, and three brains or something).
Again, that is begging the question of whether a trans person, prior to medical interventions, is a 'natural human'.
Well they are physically "natural". They have all the parts and pieces a male should have (as opposed to someone with an intersex abnormality). Given the healthy and natural body, the question becomes whether this natural body is actually unnatural because the it does not match the mind, or if the mind is unnatural because it does not match the body.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
If I was them I wouldn’t be me, as you’ve said, so it’s a pointless statement to say “if you were them”. It’s like sayin “If X was Y, then X would be Y.” Which is tautologically true, but provides us with no new information. If I was a cat I’d be a cat. If I was Hitler I’d be Hitler. If my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
Yes, if I was them I would be them.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
The "I know this will cost me my political future, but I'm not going to subvert the Constitution" Mike Pence.
Eyewitness evidence is waaaaaaaaaaay better than archeological evidence when it comes to history. Ask any historian what they would rather dig up: a clay tablet with a contemporary account of an event, or a bunch of pot shards. Better yet, ask them if they’d rather have an ancient Akkadian magically transported to the modern day to talk to, or to find a new pile of old foundations and grave goods from the same era. Eyewitness wins every time.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
20d ago
The Claim of "the holocaust" is that the Germans uniquely set out to kill every jew in Europe, did so on an industrialized scale and with an efficiency never seen before in human, history, and that it is in a category of horror beyond any other genocide to ever exist including the Great Leap forward, Hoomodor, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and CERTAINLY worse than the Soviet mass killing and expulsion of the German Diaspora post 1945.
The claim of the holocaust is that the Germans acted in a systematic fashion to kill millions of non-combatants, primarily Jews, during WWII. It is certainly not the claim that this is the worst thing that any society has ever done. I believe the standard holocaust "narrative" completely, but I would consider the Great Leap Forward, Holodomor, Killing Fields, the soviet Great Purge, just about everything Japan did to China, the Great Terror of the French revolution, the War in the Vendee, and a great many other historical events equal in kind to the holocaust, with a few greater in degree.
And the testimony of Eisenhower, in his autobiographies and public speaking, and the testimony of the US Army investigations into the camps, and the testimony of thousands of survivors, all seems to point to the fact that Germany killed millions of non-combatants, mostly Jews, on purpose. Primarily through starvation or being shot, but they also definitely killed people in gas chambers as well.
They certainly do not portray the camps as workcamps for enemy aliens. Eisenhower portrays them as "horror camps" where Germans showed "brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency" and whose residents experienced "conditions of indescribable horror". At no point does he blame the conditions in the camps or the starvation of the camp inmates as being the result of collapse, or a loss of life support function during the onslaught of war. Find me the quote where he refers to them as standard work camps, or puts the blame on a lack of supplies rather than the Nazi "bestiality".
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
24d ago
Friend, I’m hungry for the only power that really matters to me. The mightiest king is powerless to exile tumors, or outlaw Alzheimer’s. No tyrant can face down death.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
25d ago
|| Good works. I have people in my life with diseases that aren’t really curable, just treatable. So I’d cure them, then I’d break the taboo to lose my powers so that my family can remember my existence again.
All these options seem terrible, but that’s the least so. ||
I didn't get past the second choice. Amila, 100%. There was a time where I debated to myself what kind of superpower would be the best to have. That was before I became a parent. No debate, it's magical healing, by a long shot. Everything else can be fixed, except people.
If I had such a power I'd spend the rest of my life traveling from hospital to hospital, healing everyone there. I'd let people know in advance, so they could bring their sick and crippled. I'd start a nonprofit organization to support my work and auction off the right to be the first three people healed by me at any of my stops to the highest bidder in order to fund it.
I would never retire.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
20d ago
Eye witness accounts will be more reliable than human remains in the case of trying to determine whether Carthaginians really sacrificed children, particularly for something that occurred so long ago in the historical record. That doesn't mean that eye witness accounts are the only kind of evidence, or can never be wrong, it's just a recognition of the fact that testimony gives us more specific and more reliable information than trying to interpret 2,000 year old bones in a hole in the desert. When physical evidence matches eye witness testimony it gives that testimony more credibility, but if you dig up Carthage and you can't find pits full of baby bones that means either the eye witness was not reliable, or that no physical evidence survived the passage of time, or evidence survived the passage of time and you haven't found it yet.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2mo ago
C. S. Lewis wrote about the relation of Christianity to the liberal idea of political equality in a few places. This passage is from his essay "Membership":
I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows.
That I believe to be the true ground of democracy. I do not believe that God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple, to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. I believe that if we had not fallen Filmer would be right, and patriarchal monarchy would be the sole lawful government. But since we have learned sin, we have found, as Lord Acton says, that “all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The only remedy has been to take away the powers and substitute a legal fiction of equality. The authority of Father and Husband has been rightly abolished on the legal plane, not because this authority is in itself bad (on the contrary, it is, I hold, divine in origin) but because Fathers and Husbands are bad. Theocracy has been rightly abolished not because it is bad that learned priests should govern ignorant laymen, but because priests are wicked men like the rest of us. Even the authority of man over beast has had to be interfered with because it is constantly abused.
...
By treating human persons (in judicious defiance of the observed facts) as if they were all the same kind of thing, we avoid innumerable evils. But it is not on this that we were made to live. It is idle to say that men are of equal value. If value is taken in a worldly sense ― if we mean that all men are equally useful or beautiful or good or entertaining ― then it is nonsense. If it means that all are of equal value as immortal souls then I think it conceals a dangerous error. The infinite value of each human soul is not a Christian doctrine. God did not die for man because of some value He perceived in him. The value of each human soul considered simply in itself, out of relation to God, is zero. As St. Paul writes, to have died for valuable men would have been not divine but merely heroic; but God died for sinners. He loved us not because we were lovable, but because He is Love. It may be that He loves all equally ― He certainly loved all to the death ― and I am not certain what the expression means. If there is equality it is in His love, not in us.
In the early days, just die probably. Assuming the sanctuary power doesn’t work when cursed.
If I can get my operation going, we can expand. I could hire disciples of Ur as bodygaurds, hire more healers to expand my operation, and eventually build a secure hospital facility of my own that people can be flown to. If we pair healers up two by two then if one is cursed the other could potentially sanctuary them both to safety.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
I mean, yes and no.
I don't think my choices are determined in that I could not have chosen differently, but I will inevitably make one choice. And the choice I make will pretty much be the result of my character, my history, my circumstances, and divine intervention. If I'm set a problem that I agonize over, where I am not sure which way to go, that I waffle back on forth on, I'm still going to end up choosing something and not choosing every other possible thing. And while I would hold that it was still possible for me to choose something else, once I choose it's chosen and that's that. If you could somehow meaningfully "run the simulation again" with all the factors influencing my decision remain the same, I'm going to make the same decision. If I don't have any new information to work with, I'm going to come to the same conclusion.
I suppose one way to put it is that I"m fine with my actions being determined by my history, character, and circumstances because those are all things that make up who I am and any choice determined by who I am is my free will choice. If the choice is determined by something else (the blind movement of atoms, lets say, or a divine plan that determines my actions regardless of my history, character, or circumstances) then I don't see it as free will.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
How broad is too broad to be considered "elite"? If you told me that 10% of a population were elites, that doesn't sound too weird to me.
Let me run a quick sanity check. Hmm, 30 seconds of Googling is telling me that in Medieval Europe the nobility were around 1-3% of the population (except in Castille where it was around 10% at certain times, but that seems to be an outlier). So perhaps 9% is too broad.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
Thanks for bringing a Calvinist perspective, since I was not confident I portrayed the Calvinist position right. Growing up my Dad always told me, "Son, beware the yeast of the Calvinists."
He also said that Arminians were Calvinists who flunked logic, though I never could figure out why. Every time I try to study Amrinianism they either seem to be agreeing with my perspective, or saying something completely incomprehensible to me.
While the consensus is that God knows the future with 100% accuracy, there is not Christian theological consensus on predestination, election, or free will.
In the Evangelical tradition I grew up in the position I heard the most was that the Bible commands us to choose certain things, which means choice is possible. And that the Bible says God knows all things, including the future. Like most Evangelical theology, how to square that circle is left as an exercise for the reader.
The Calvinists, quite famously, believe God chooses who will be righteous and who will be damned from jump. We have no ability to choose salvation or damnation. Many Calvinists believe that we do have free will, but our choices are based on our desires and characters and God choose to give us particular desires and characters that will constrain the choices we have available.
The Catholic church teaches that we have the free will to either accept or reject the grace of God, and that when God predestined the course of history he left room for us to make decisions. He knows what decision we'll freely make in advance, of course.
C.S. Lewis described the intersection of our choices and God's predestination this way in Mere Christianity:
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