HereAndGone2
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User ID: 4074
Sure, but two out of your three options are based on "angels not real" and that's the position you're starting from, so we have nothing to discuss. This is not like "which recipe for roast chicken is best, let's test these three out", it's "there is no such thing as a chicken but I'll be nice and pretend I believe you can cook an imaginary bird".
Again, it's not about offence. It's about this is not an impartial, let's start from positions of neutrality so neither of us hold a strong opinion pro or con the premise "is the supernatural real?" exchange. You don't believe it is, I do believe it is, we're not having a good faith discussion of "we don't know for sure so let's lay out the arguments and see what gives us that delicious flavour of crispy skin and moist meatiness".
EDIT: Imagine that I respond to you with "uh-huh, now I'm not trying to trigger your over-sensitive, fragile little ego here, but come on now, how can you expect me to believe there are no angels? I can give you three options when you say you never saw an angel:
- Believe you.
- Assume you're lying or delusional.
- More charitably, assume you experienced a vision of an angel which you can't accept or deny but which you believe was a natural phenomenon.
Do you think that is me being neutral on the topic of "do angels exist (the answer is self-evidently yes)"?
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Surely you should join the church you believe is right about God, no matter what their stance on music or sitting or whether the local pastor is a dick or not!
I agree there. But I'm not an American Protestant who grew up with church hopping if your conscience can't agree with the local church being a normal thing.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Would you accept someone's internal subjective experience of emotional suffering or just shrug it off as "not someone I need to care about so I don't accept their experience as real"?
Again, I'm not saying you have to believe that a spiritual experience is real, anymore than you have to accept that your fifteen year old child's first experience of heartbreak is the big deal they think it is, but it would be a cold parent who would just ignore them or tell them nobody cares.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
I'm not saying you should believe. I'm saying people treat it not as "science says it's not verifiable" but "science says it's not real". And you're logical chopping there with "I believe you believe you experienced that".
Why should 'observable and testable criteria' be limited to what we currently have in our toolbox? This is the same "love is only oxytocin" reasoning that gets us tangled up in the same kinds of arguments about what is real/actual and why then it degenerates into "all that romance crap is stupid, Valentine's Day is only commercial opportunity, you don't love that woman, it's evolution acting on you to fuck her to spread your genes nothing more and certainly nothing special" kind of fighting.
I'm not offended, I'm just tired of the fight.
HereAndGone2
4d ago
This is flippant, but remembering the discussion around the reboot, a lot of it was more "mmm, smexy Cylon ladies!" and not so much "Big Moral Ethical Philosophical Issues" 😁
The 'heritable castes in a year' sounds a leeetle quick off the mark, I imagine they were trying to retcon the original "all the Twelve Colonies of Kobol that these people come from were the origins of the zodiac signs on Earth, and all the Taurans do X and all the Librans do Y and all the Cancerians do Z" typing.
Speaking of theology, Glen Larson (the show creator) was a Mormon and put in Mormon themes into the show, it seems!
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Supposedly, they get to make an informed decision about whether to serve God or not.
Well, it's a sticky point. On one reading of it, angels don't have free will because they are not able not to believe in God and make a choice. Humans are free in that sense, and most pop culture when it depicts humans faced with the undeniable existence of God have them choosing to go the non serviam route because we're big enough and old enough to make our own decisions and our own destiny, dang it! We don't need no gods!
like the dark ages ages weren't dark
Oh, you wanna get into "When were the Dark Ages, what were the Dark Ages, and why did the Independent Free-Thinking Ain't Nobody Gonna Tell Me What To Believe set wholeheartedly and uncritically accept Protestant polemic propaganda?" Because let's fight about history while we're at it!
See, OP, why I think this was a bad idea? 😂😂😂
EDIT:
the date of christmas
Throw in Easter and Hallowe'en while you're at it, this is more Protestant anti-Catholic stuff repurposed first for the Enlightenment Enlightened ("haw haw the Christians just took over existing pagan festivals in order to win over the masses and hold power over them") and then later for the Neopagan Wiccan lot ("excuse me, those are our celebrations which the persecutors stole and rebranded!")
HereAndGone2
5d ago
Golly. I had no idea I was being so prolific, no wonder you felt twitchy. Apologies!
HereAndGone2
5d ago
I'm not claiming to have had a personal experience of the Holy Spirit, but your response is precisely why this discussion will go nowhere. "Imma right and you wrong!" on both sides.
HereAndGone2
5d ago
I can just accept that every culture has these stories and lots of people experience things that are, IMO, either misunderstood or not real.
Feck it, and I said I wouldn't get into an argument.
But that's it in a nutshell right there: not real. By what metric? Science, which tells us that gods and spiritual experiences are not things that happen, so it's not real and here's the real explanation.
Also, STEM and religion aren't automatically mutually exclusive.
I do accept that, but I think some people are very uncomfortable with the idea that one can be both, not either/or. A kind of Unitarian Universalist 'religious/spiritual' nice polite makes no demands of belief that will contradict Science Says? That's fine, but keep it in your pants, buster, when it comes to making real-world decisions.
Remember the furore over Francis Collins being an Evangelical and leader of the Human Genome Project, then director of the National Institutes for Health? Sam Harris remembers, as does P.Z. Myers:
Collins read in the Times that many of his colleagues in the scientific community believed that he suffered from “dementia.” Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, questioned the appointment on the ground that Collins was “an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs.” P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota at Morris, complained, “I don’t want American science to be represented by a clown.”
Cool Buddhism-derived meditation for me, but not Bible-bashing literalism for thee:
In 2006, Collins published a bestselling book, The Language of God, in which he claims to demonstrate “a consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony” between 21st-century science and Evangelical Christianity. Let it be known that “consistency” and “harmony” can be in the eye of the beholder.
In fact, to read The Language of God is to witness nothing less than an intellectual suicide. It is, however, a suicide that has gone almost entirely unacknowledged: The body yielded to the rope; the neck snapped; the breath subsided; and the corpse dangles in ghastly discomposure even now—and yet, polite people everywhere continue to celebrate the great man’s health.
HereAndGone2
5d ago
My memory is that the disabled had people there to help them, and that particular guy was disadvantaged by being there on his own, so he had nobody to keep a space for him or tell him when the waters were disturbed or help him get into the pool:
7 The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.”
Rather like the helpers at the baths in Lourdes.
HereAndGone2
5d ago
Those experiments sound somewhat like what C.S. Lewis describes in "An Experiment in Criticism" when trying to establish criteria for what makes good or bad taste, and he describes the different kinds of dealing with art/reading:
The ‘few’ whom we are seeking cannot be identified with the cognoscenti. Neither Gigadibs nor Dryasdust is necessarily among them.
Still less is the status seeker. As there are, or were, families and circles in which it was almost a social necessity to display an interest in hunting, or county cricket, or the Army List, so there are others where it requires great independence not to talk about, and therefore occasionally to read, the approved literature, especially the new and astonishing works, and those which have been banned or have become in some other way subjects of controversy. Readers of this sort, this ‘small vulgar’, act in one respect exactly like those of the ‘great vulgar’. They are entirely dominated by fashion. They drop the Georgians and begin to admire Mr Eliot, acknowledge the ‘dislodgement’ of Milton, and discover Hopkins, at exactly the right moment. They will not like your book if the dedication begins with To instead of For. Yet, while this goes on downstairs, the only real literary experience in such a family may be occurring in a back bedroom where a small boy is reading Treasure Island under the bed-clothes by the light of an electric torch.
The people, Right or Left, who have become aware that it is now in the fashion, and safe, to disparage AI art are like this. They're not recognising good or bad art, human or AI art, they're attuned to the Zeitgeist and demonstrating that attunement.
HereAndGone2
5d ago
I didn't loathe Deep Space Nine, to be clear about that. I found it a interesting change from the setting until then, not on a starship going from planet to planet but a fixed location like a space station. Strangely enough, before ever it came along, I had wondered about if any show would do an episode like 'a day in the life of a station commander' where he deals with a set of minor crises that could become major ones, making for a very exciting episode before at the end we see a starship docking for crew shore leave, resupplies, and the rest of it, and two of the ship crew making some comments about how peaceful it all was but yeah they could never handle the boredom of it all.
HereAndGone2
5d ago
There is nothing new under the sun, as the fella said.
HereAndGone2
5d ago
Yes, and thank you.
HereAndGone2
5d ago
I swear I'm not (she said, face pressed against your window, scratching gently at the door, and what is that shadow under the bed?)
HereAndGone2
5d ago
someone who simply wants to vanquish nincompoops who think Hebrew mythology can be successfully validated by science
The name-calling started earlier than I expected.
To keep my end up in contributions, here's something about an Italian saint from the 19th century (but not canonised until 2025) who ended up promoting the rosary:
Bartolo Longo (b. 1841) was a young student training to be a lawyer in Naples when he fell under the influence first of rationalists, then occultists.
A natural progression, one might say? 🤣
HereAndGone2
5d ago
Ah, I remember the OG Galactica and its sequel Galactica 1980, which was cheesy late 70s/early 80s fun! It had Dirk Benedict, who went on to play Face in The A-Team, as Starbuck for one. Finding out that it was based on oddball ancient astronaut type notions (or at least someone involved in producing it had those) was also funny. I was in my mid-teens when it aired so that probably helped.
I never bothered with the reboot because I was not that interested at all and the idea of taking it seriously enough to give it the full Babylon 5 treatment just wasn't in my bailiwick. It would have been like deciding to reboot Disney and do a show about the travails of one Michael Mouse, a late 20s to early 30s office worker (but up-and-coming, junior exec type not just a cubicle drone) in the Big City (east or west coast of your choice) and his friends, romantic interests, pet, etc. And of course Michael was not a mouse, that would have been silly for A Serious Show.
I much preferred the chrome toasters Cylons.
HereAndGone2
5d ago
Why? Not why are you still here but why would you wish to not be?
I couldn't understand it. At the time I just felt tired. Tired of everything. Didn't want to continue existing.
I also had bouts of whatever the opposite of solipsism is; that is, I used to feel I was not, in fact, a real person really existing. My reason could talk me down with "but if you're not here, what is this entity experiencing the sensation of not being real?" but what most convinced me was tricking myself with "well that's my mother, and I believe she has an independent, real, existence, so if she's my mother and she's real, I have to be real, too, because she couldn't be my mother if I wasn't real".
Very odd feeling. Never done drugs so I have no idea if the reports of ego death or whatever are similar.
HereAndGone2
5d ago
are you quite sure you're not the one lazily shirking reciprocity for the gifts you've been given
That is definitely part of it. I really don't like people, so I grumble hard about "God commands I love you (dammit)".
HereAndGone2
5d ago
Oh no problem, I am absolutely terrible at name remembering (I can remember faces, you should hear me go "oh! that's so-and-so, you know, that person from back when we did the thing! is her name Margaret? Jane? something like that?" about people I worked with for eight years but have not seen for a whole six months) so I can't match up usernames to people on here. I just go "hey isn't this that same numbskull who said that dumb thing about peppercorns?" and launch into the fray even if it's not, in fact, the same person.
HereAndGone2
5d ago
Doing laundry, cooking together, watching movies, going out.
And that gives me the hives. Possibly because I've become too used to This Is My Routine And This Is How Things Are Done, but trying to (for example) work in a kitchen with a sibling makes me very uncomfortable. I'm working training in a new co-worker and the amount of times I've had to bite my tongue about "go away! lemme do this myself!" (because I am not doing this myself, that is the point of training someone else to do it) has been very high.
I really am just "hermit crab, this my shell, go find own shell, farther away the better".
HereAndGone2
5d ago
Well, there's that much at least and she is repaying the debt of family.
HereAndGone2
5d ago
You're already presuming that those of us who say "yes we do believe in the superstitions" are lying.
What is your model of someone who does believe the superstitions, and how does it not include somebody on The Motte?
If you were the parent of any future children, God help them with an attitude like that.
It was an analogy, not a request that you be my ersatz parent holding my hand while I sobbed into my pillow.
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