HereAndGone
7hr ago
The elven rings were not corrupted by Sauron, but their own risk was the tendency of the Elves to want to hold back time so they could recreate the immortal conditions of Valinor in Middle-earth (to have their cake and eat it, as it were). They did comparatively little damage because they were mostly around under war conditions, so first hidden and not used openly until Sauron's first defeat, and then used defensively against him. But if they had been used from the start as Celebrimbor hoped, the Elves would have fallen into that trap of trying to be little gods in their own realm.
Gandalf didn't think much of Bilbo's ring, although he was somewhat suspicious of it, because it didn't seem to affect Bilbo badly and he never imagined that this was or could be the One Ring that everyone had been searching for since Isildur's death. There were a lot of lesser 'magic rings', apparently, because everyone including mortals tried their hand at creating magical items, but how much power any of them could have would have been limited.
HereAndGone
7hr ago
That's what Sauron set up on Númenor with the worship of Melkor. And what a lot of people try to do in the world with "but surely this time I can claim the ring and it'll go okay" (be that the rings Sauron gave the Ringwraiths, who probably never anticipated that outcome, or the One Ring itself) even after seeing the disasters that happened before.
HereAndGone
7hr ago
Yeah, in the world as described, if he does obtain immortality, then there must still be something higher (whatever forces empower the Gu insects, the gods or spirits or just magical energies of heaven and earth) and how can he ascend to that level? The traditional tropes are about the calamities that come to test (destroy) you if you try to cultivate to immortality, and that only if you survive them all will you obtain the goal. So if our guy becomes the single most powerful being on the earth, what next? try to become the most powerful being in the universe? keep dodging the mounting and increasing set of calamities trying to reduce him to dust?
I do think if he achieved a station akin to that of Sauron, he'd be bored: yeah he's got all these mindless slaves under his thumb, but he's spent so long plotting and scheming that what does he do now? He doesn't strike me as the type to decide he'll take up tea ceremony and calligraphy and pondering the secrets of the universe (unless said secrets give him more power). The sweetness of victory is in overcoming this set of impossible conditions; once there are no more obstacles to overcome, what happens next?
HereAndGone
7hr ago
Oh man, you missed the best things from 2006!
"Scientists explained" the miracle, you see, that it wasn't a miracle at all. No, just freak weather conditions that happened to line up absolutely correctly for the events in the Gospels to happen like they did (the ice did not prematurely melt so Jesus fell into the water and it didn't last long enough for Peter to continue walking to shore).
Jesus may have appeared to be walking on water when he was actually floating on a thin layer of ice, formed by a rare combination of weather and water conditions on the Sea of Galilee, according to a team of US and Israeli scientists.
Their study, published by the Journal of Paleolimnology (the study of prehistoric lakes), argues that salty springs along the Galilee's western shore can stop surface water circulating at cold temperatures and there were unusually cold spells lasting up to 200 years in biblical times.
Such "unique freezing processes" would occasionally have allowed a crust of ice to form, a phenomenon the study calls "springs ice", in patches on Lake Kinneret, as the Sea of Galilee is known in Israel. One set of such springs is found near Tabgha, an ancient settlement that is traditionally the site for the New Testament's multiplication of loaves and fishes.
"The chance that there was ice on the lake is very, very high," said Doron Nof, professor of physical oceanography at Florida State University and the study's lead author. "It's almost guaranteed during those cold periods, 100 or 200 years long, that there was one such event at least, maybe four."
I do so enjoy a good "scientists explain miracles" story, they're so comforting in their naive optimism about 'we totally understand everything becasue we're so much smarter than the stupid people back then who believed their lying eyes'.
The "Mary the virgin who was raped" story came out of something way back when in the days of the Anglican wars, when discussing the liberals versus the conservatives in theology. I can't point to a particular source because it was swirling around, but the progressive Christian set do love them some "Mary was raped" tales (ironically, adopting the sceptical views of the Talmud that Jesus was really a bastard borne out of wedlock to a Roman soldier by Mary) because uh something something patriarchy colonialism feminism something something.
The re-interpretation of the scriptures that really raised my eyebrows, though, came during the reign of the first female Primate of the Episcopalian Church, the Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, who gave a sermon that, em, changed the focus of the story of St. Paul and the slave girl possessed by a spirit.
Now, the fuddy-duddy dumb old traditional interpretation of this story is that the girl was a slave whose owners made money from her being possessed, since she was able to tell fortunes, and that St. Paul set her free from being, you know, possessed by a demon and exploited as a money-making machine. Not so! says Katie, nope being possessed by a demon and exploited by your owners as a money-making machine was a beautiful instance of spiritual empowerment and Paulie was just jealous.
No, I promise, this is what she said. The original text of the sermon seems to have been scrubbed, so the only quotes are from traditionalists not too happy with this novel exegesis, but a sample of the sermon is this:
Paul is annoyed at the slave girl who keeps pursuing him, telling the world that he and his companions are slaves of God. She is quite right. She’s telling the same truth Paul and others claim for themselves. But Paul is annoyed, perhaps for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness. Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it. It gets him thrown in prison. That’s pretty much where he’s put himself by his own refusal to recognize that she, too, shares in God’s nature, just as much as he does -maybe more so!
Yes, kids, remember: if a demonic spirit wants to set up shop in your head, go right and ahead and let it do so, because that's a beautiful holy gift of spiritual awareness! Honestly, every time I look at the fruitcakes and nutjobs in my own church, something like this comes along to make me go "well at least the current pope isn't this out to lunch, thank you Holy Spirit!"
HereAndGone
7hr ago
most of them would spontaneously reinvent Arianism, and have no idea they were committing a heresy by doing so
You would not believe the effort I'm putting in to bite my tongue here and not be mean about the Heinz 57 varieties of American Protestantism.
But I can't just laugh about the Protestants, the state of modern catechesis nearly everywhere for the past forty or more years has been abysmal. An awful lot of "Jesus wants us to be nice because being nice is nice", much much less "here are the Ten Commandments and this is what they mean".
HereAndGone
7hr ago
Edit: I just read your post below about Arianism - are you actually directly talking about me?
No? It was our pal the Imaginal Christian as quoted? 'Here's a bit of Adoptionism, here's a bit of Theosophy, here's a bit of....' in regards to understanding of the nature of Christ, the sense of the Bible, is God personal or a force (immanent or transcendent) etc.
HereAndGone
7hr ago
I don't have a strong opinion on whether anointing people with oil from a shrine does something in particular or not, but still think that kind of thing is a good tradition.
Here I have to quote one of my favourite poems by Yeats, it's very short but full of rich imagery:
Oil And Blood
In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli
Bodies of holy men and women exude
Miraculous oil, odour of violet.
But under heavy loads of trampled clay
Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.
HereAndGone
13hr ago
Oh, not just Arianism, it's a nice mish-mash of the Greatest Hits of Christological heresies plus the late 19th/early 20th century craze for spiritualism and mysticism investigating magical, occult and Eastern traditions, topped off with the liberal Christianity of the post-Biblical Criticism era (well of course we can't believe in literal miracles anymore, now we have science and Darwin and all that!)
I think my favourite anecdote of the liberal Christian "explain it away" is the "Jesus was ice skating not walking on the water", followed by the "so the Virgin Birth wasn't but here's why those silly billies thought she was a virgin" attempt.
I honestly love the ice skating one. A very convenient, very temporary, very localised mini-ice floe on the Lake of Galilee so Jesus could appear to be walking on the water, but when Peter jumped overboard poof! gone! melted! which is why he sank in the water, plus the fishermen with him in the boat - who had all been fishing this lake their whole career - had no idea about the very convenient weather conditions to bring about mini-ice floes that (must have) regularly happened so Jesus knew there would be one so He could fake 'walking on the water'.
Dude, an actual miracle is easier to believe than this pile of wishful thinking.
Explaining away the virgin birth is fun, too. See, obviously we are all modern adults who know how sex works, so we know virgins can't get pregnant (unless they've had sex and are now ex-virgins). So why did people talk about the Virgin Mary? Well clearly she was pregnant by rape. And to avoid the stigma of her being pregnant outside marriage (because that's the one bit of the Scriptural story we can take on trust as correct), people in her village would refer to her as "Mary, the virgin who was raped". And over time, that became shortened to "Mary the virgin" and hence - ta-da! - the Virgin Mary.
Yeah, sure. Totally believable, if you turn off your brain to everything but the current Zeitgeist.
HereAndGone
14hr ago
I like symbolism, but when I see the likes of this I groan "oh God, not this crap again". Yeah, give us mystic Christianity divorced from any roots in a living faith tradition, where we can pull it around like Sam Harris Buddhism (get the benefits, dump the woo, be compatible with our true god Science!) to fit what we want without making demands.
If you want Christ the Cosmic Mystic Gnosis Theosis jack-in-the-box, you can go for Theosophy or any range of Western Esoteric traditions that will fit you right up but make no demands of you along the lines of But you, who do you say I am?.
If you want mysticism rooted in tradition, explore the Orthodox and Catholic traditions, but be aware that this is work, not just 'sit there and contemplate my own inner awesomeness'.
HereAndGone
14hr ago
I don't know what their views are (I don't track closely "aha, X said Y so that must mean Z" on here). Whether they're Red, Blue, Green or Orange, professing to have insight into the mind of the shooter because the magic crystal ball is showing the shape of a black dog is proposing an explanation too soon.
HereAndGone
14hr ago
What I wanted to point out was that the immediate and reflexive jump to "he must be one a' them bigot pro-lifer zealot Christian MAGAs!" has not been borne out so far by what we know, and that guy appears to be a Democrat or at least involved with the Democratic party on some level.
So there are no immediate convenient just-so stories as to "who did this why" in the aftermath of any event like this, and 'least said soonest mended' is the best advice.
HereAndGone
14hr ago
The ratfic then answer the question "what would happen if an actually smart character got dropped into this setting"?
The answer to that, if I'm being snarky, is that they are not in fact the "actually smart character" they think they are and there are reasons why 'this obvious way to take over the world' doesn't work out.
Then again, I am not a fan of the type of fiction where it's "just let me get my stats in a row and manipulate this convenient loophole et voila, deus ex machina!" because that's sports betting, not an organic magic system. Magic should be a little bit fuzzy and imprecise and "no it has to be the exact phase of the moon, no I don't know why, and oh yeah if it rains all bets are off" because that's how things work in reality once you leave behind in vitro or in silico experiments.
HereAndGone
14hr ago
This is what happens with serialised novels, though; before the web, there were newspaper and magazine serials. Writers getting paid by the word so they spun it out as long as they could and padded like they were quiltmakers. Or a popular serial was what made people purchase your paper or magazine, so you pressured the author not to end it too soon.
HereAndGone
14hr ago
It's as if a Western fantasy book had its main magic system be referred to as "Satanism" by everyone in-universe.
That's what the One Ring is (and to a lesser extent the other rings are) in "The Lord of the Rings". It's not the One Weird Trick you think will bring you power and victory, it will hollow you out because in the end it only has one true master. This guy is trying to be Sauron, and even if he gets what he wants, it may not be how he thinks it will be - the greatest deception is self-deception, 'I got everything I wanted without having to pay the price' (ignore the mountain of skulls, ignore that I have lost my fair form and can never go back). Ring-making is a dangerous art and will exact the highest price.
HereAndGone
14hr ago
By the sound of your review, what happened was perfectly in line with the world of the story. You get this close to achieving your ends, but too bad, sucker! Here's that kick in the teeth for you!
Fang Yuan ran into the final Calamity that shuts down everyone hoping to become Immortal. That is the perfect ending.
I disagree with your view about what would happen if he did achieve his goal. So now you're Immortal, what next? I don't think he'd take up other pleasures (what, come this far just to be a fat, drunken lecher like the rest of the fools?) because he's pared away, dug out, exploded, burned off, everything apart from relentless will to power. He can't chillax and make friends and find love, he's trained himself to think of all that as stupid crap for the losers and as only methods of exploiting others. After ten minutes of peace and stability he'd be bored stiff.
He would either need the challenge, like the classic Western gunslingers, of "so you're the number one, now every wannabe is coming gunning to take your place", in order to keep the purpose of life going or he'd have to create his own rivals (manipulate behind the scenes to get a bunch of near-Immortals chasing after him) in order to defeat them because otherwise, what was it all for? He's beaten the game, reached the highest possible level - now what? Replay it on a different mode?
HereAndGone
1d ago
Yeah, shooting politicians probably is politically motivated. But he could have been shooting politicians because he thinks they're lizard people controlling us all with mind rays from their lunar base. We don't know precisely what or why the guy was trying to achieve as yet, so saying nothing except some anodyne platitudes until we find the hell out what was going on is the best way to go.
HereAndGone
1d ago
I don't want to fight over this. But if someone can come along and presume that the shooting happened because of some Christian extremist, I'm going to answer that in the same spirit as it was posted. "Gosh, he must have been a radical anti-abortionist, he had a list and everything!"
Says who? When we get proper information, go right ahead. Right now we have bits and scraps and no clear pictures, and what little information we do have points towards the guy being a Democrat, but already some comments here are trying to spin it that "yeah well it was really all the fault of the Republicans".
HereAndGone
1d ago
There were pro-life Democrats in the party, until they got deliberately frozen out. There's still a sub-group of them inside the party, but they weren't the ones being invited to, for instance, Hotties for Harris bashes.
Right now, they can't make enough of Governor Walz being pro-reproductive rights and so forth.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Okay, maybe the T.S. Eliot parody was over the line.
But show me where I'm wrong that it is more likely than not that Democratic politicians are pro-choice. The bodies are barely cold by this stage so I don't want to go digging out "what did Representative A and Senator B get as scores from Planned Parenthood?" but assuming that "oh this guy must be pro-lifer because he had a list of pro-choice politicians" doesn't track when it comes to Democrats. If he had a list of Democrats, he had a list of pro-choicers, more likely than not. Correlation is not causation, isn't that the saying?
HereAndGone
1d ago
I think it's the default left-wing half of Catholicism in America, consistently votes democrat, and is pretty solidly blue tribe, just not woke.
In the days when the Democrats really were the party of the working man, you could vote Democrat and be red-coded. That faded away as they chased after the college-educated vote, pivoted to "what do college kids like? oh yeah sex'n'drugs'n'rock&roll", went increasingly all-in on progressivism, or at least allowed the progressive wing to push the social liberalisation programme, and dumped the rare part of "safe, legal, and rare" in the dumpster.
So now you're either mostly a cultural Catholic who votes blue no matter who because that's how you were raised, you are more serious about your faith but think the Democrats are better on other issues, or this is the deal-breaker issue for you and you have to hold your nose and vote for the Republicans.
But I think FCfromSSC doesn't mean Catholics when they talk about Christians there, they mean Protestants and most especially the Evangelicals.
HereAndGone
1d ago
I've seen reports that he had a target list of pro-choice politicians and abortion providers
If the politicians were all Democrats, then yeah they'll all be pro-choice. As your comment indicates, Christians and pro-life not wanted in the Democratic Party.
Depravity, depravity, the Democrats like depravity,
For they are fiends in human shape, monsters of depravity.
You may meet them in a by-street, you may see them in the square —
But when a crime’s discovered, then a Democrat's not there!
(Because it was really a pro-life, homophobe, transphobe, racist, conservative theocrat, bigot, Republican in disguise only pretending to be a Democrat)
HereAndGone
1d ago
He has ties to Tim Walz and the greater Democratic Party. Still no released motive.
Which makes me think that politicians should say as little as possible in the immediate aftermath of an event like this or any other tragedy or natural disaster, because it only leads to egg on face (as well as shooting off your mouth based on inadequate information).
Walz was quick off the mark with "this is a politically motivated assassination", presumably on the basis that if Democrat politicians were attacked, it must be those dastardly Republicans to blame. Well, turns out that (it's looking like) the guy is one of your own, Tim. So now what is the political motivation, and how is your party to be held accountable?
Particularly if (let's do some wild speculating here) the guy was motivated by the David Hogg approach of "let's go after the moderate Democrats, after all they're to blame for co-operating with Republicans and enabling Trump to be elected"?
HereAndGone
1d ago
Investigating, or trying to change? One of the rules of this joint is "no building consensus" and I think that's fair enough. If A wants to know why B thinks/doesn't think X is right or wrong, fine. If A is trying to persuade B that of course X is right (or wrong) and that B should change their mind, now we're getting into a grey area.
Because I've seen my share recently of "well of course all right-thinking people believe X is normal, moral, and good" with no room for "some people think X is wrong in good faith and with solid reasons".
There are some things I am not going to change someone's mind on and they're not going to change mine. I've had those arguments and those rows, more or less civil depending on how heated both parties got. So when "just askin' why" query number 999 comes along, I'm not interested in fighting over that old fight again.
HereAndGone
2d ago
Nothing in her life will change until she comes around to "this is not working" and then "this is not working because it's wrong". If she just blames it on "this is not working because society is too prudish for my bold brave liberated open lifestyle", she will continue to get hurt and not understand why.
Yeah, but so far the reports seem sketchy - not the actual list but one typed up and given to the police? I don't know how much credence to put in anything, though his sudden turn (if I believe the alleged LinkedIn page on social media claimed to be his) from a history of generally working in the food industry/retail industry to saying he was CEO of Red Lion and working in the Congo sounds very odd - maybe he had some kind of mental breakdown?
So maybe he was shooting or planning to shoot pro-choice people, or maybe he had some other reason, or who knows what exactly was going on. I'm waiting to hear more. He seems to have had a mixed background, to say the least.
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