TitaniumButterfly
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User ID: 2854
TitaniumButterfly
20hr ago
Wanted to finally comment, mostly to say that I enjoy your posts and general project and even remember to pray for you sometimes. <3
In terms of intellectual certitude, reality is simply not structured to allow for it. You will never know until it's too late as it were.
But the argument for classical theism is entirely persuasive to me, and the guy who makes it best, David Bentley Hart, is an Orthodox Christian. He's one of the smartest, best-read, and most integrous people I can practically imagine and in his (half-remembered) words he can't at this point seriously conceive of the Logos except as Christ.
My point is that the historical avenue is effectively a dead end. Christ reveals Himself in the process of Being. Whoever told you that you need to be able to prove your beliefs was a liar.
If you want to dig deeper in this vein I'll recommend The Experience of God by DBH. It's not about Christianity per se but once you understand the reality of classical theism it's a natural additional step to take.
Also I assume you're already listening to Lord of Spirits but will dutifully badger you into doing so if not.
Christ is risen!
TitaniumButterfly
22hr ago
Thanks and nice job! You just saved me from erroneously reifying my priors here. Appreciate it.
I'm inclined to think that anyone so susceptible to the media environment as to be taken in by demoralization tactics would not improve the gene pool by breeding.
Some predators which have evolved to eat humans, e.g. bacterial infections, must be fought off using genetic technology like the body's immune system. Other predators evolved to eat humans, e.g. Satan, must be fought off using memetic technology like Christianity.
Society decided that having a memetic immune system was low-status and threw the whole thing away. Now, pregnant men, sterile women, hopeless children.
Anyway, holding genes faulty for failing to respond to novel memetic predators seems unwarranted to me, especially when those genes evolved in an environment where such memetic immunity was a given.
TitaniumButterfly
22hr ago
I'm referring to institutions continuing to try to indoctrinate the population with failed leftist ideology even as the waters close over their heads.
TitaniumButterfly
22hr ago
Why think in terms of single alleles instead of traits? Complex traits get lost immediately upon mixing with populations that don't have them fixed. The odds of recombination get lower and lower the more complex they are.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
The genetic legacy which will be squandered by these women not reproducing is a tragedy of historical proportions, but I think we're less than a generation away from the corrective counterswing.
Main problem being institutional capture and the unbelievable amount of human damage which will be committed in the name of pride, i.e. futile resistance.
TitaniumButterfly
3d ago
This is fairly common in the US in parishes with a background of immigrants who just wanted to fit in to mainstream culture several decades ago.
Agreed that it's dumb though. How can you even do prostrations?
Sometimes you'll see organs, even, in churches that were bought from other denominations.
And every service, and every event, and every informal gathering...
My parish has a custom of celebrating the Ascension every year by going up to the top of our local ersatz Mount Tabor. The first time I participated, I paid attention when the priest went to great lengths to make sure we all knew exactly where to park and what to do, and how long various routes would take, such that we could all be there on time and not miss the service. I was a single father at the time and did my best, but was sweating because I could tell I was gonna be about 20 minutes late.
When I got there, no one else was around. Had I missed it entirely?
The first other parishioner arrived about an hour after that. They trickled in over time, and we did the service about two hours after we'd all agreed we would. No one seemed the slightest bit surprised by this.
Punctuality is about the only thing I miss about Protestantism.
...
My priest told me not long ago that he has such different experiences counseling (ethnic) Americans and Greeks. The Americans, he says, are perpetually-terrified about their own salvation, but generally seem to rock it in life. The Greeks have no concerns about salvation, but he has to work extra hard to get them to do things like hold down gainful employment or make smart decisions about the future. Since I don't know what to say about that I guess I'm presenting it without comment.
TitaniumButterfly
4d ago
I have seen too many of my own family members, and friends, die surrounded essentially by foreign medical workers who only notionally speak their language, can't imagine their values, and don't seem to care about them as human beings at all.
And I suppose this is only going to get worse by the time it's my turn. Not clear whether robo-nurses might be an improvement.
I'd like my end of life care-givers to be young, earnest, hopeful members of my own ethnicity.
...But then I see the kind of things white nurses post on TikTok and...
Hmm. Seems like I have some kind of block when it comes to thinking past that point.
For this explanation to work would require the following:
- Said headgear would have to be constrictive enough to cause major permanent deformation
- All these cultures independently happened to put such headgear on their newborns
- For no apparent reason they'd all have to independently decide that it also increases intelligence
Basically I'm not buying that.
A practice being widespread doesn't by itself mean anything. Bloodletting was practiced on every inhabited continent thanks to its alleged curative properties. However, I think we can all agree that unless you have one of a fairly small set of diseases it's unlikely to make you feel better and the ancients just didn't know what the fuck they were doing. Circumcision is another bizarrely universal practice, though the reasons for it appear to be lost to history.
That's true, but
- Bloodletting is indeed helpful at times, which is why we still practice it
- I actually don't think bloodletting or circumcision were anywhere near as prevalent across as many isolated cultures, though I'm less sure about this
- My point was that no other comparable practice was consistently supposed to specifically increase the recipient's intelligence. No one's claiming that about circumcision, tattoos, or tooth-filing; or if that did happen it was an isolated fluke instead of consistent.
- It's natural for moderns to suppose that the ancients would obviously have associated bigger brains with higher intelligence, but in fact many (most?) of them hadn't made that connection at all outside of ACD specifically. C.f. some cultures supposing that consciousness and wisdom are located in the liver, which can be eaten to absorb it.
If ACD is correlated with bigger skulls solely because elites naturally have big skulls, that's not great for the "ACD increases skull size" theory unless you're going to smuggle in Lamarckian inheritance. It should decrease, not increase, your belief that ACD increases skull size.
Yes, I'm aware. It's almost my point! Which is that it's weird for the mainstream consensus to be that there is no correlation. If anything I'd expect them to lean harder into it as evidence against ACD's effectiveness. I really do think the motivation here is just to keep distance from icky associations with things like phrenology, etc. Certain ideas are simply radioactive to academics and this has all the hallmarks of being one.
Part of the reason I think so, as I said before, is that they're apt to lead with "ACD doesn't even increase cranial capacity" which is a very strong statement. When it's pointed out that it clearly does at least some of the time their backpedaling becomes less convincing the more one presses into it.
TitaniumButterfly
10d ago
Depends upon how high they're falling from, and in what concentration.
TitaniumButterfly
10d ago
I'm a big fan of Arthuriana and may check this out. However, a quick glance at the wiki page suggests that it subverts a lot of things I'd rather not see subverted. While the stance on Christianity isn't clear, I've run into... too many examples to enumerate of ~Arthurian fiction from that era which indulge heavily in eye-rolling disparagement. At least this one doesn't sound obnoxiously feminist?
Curious as to your take.
Personally I adore Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle, especially the first two books, which do something really cool by weaving in the Atlantis myth. Also, I think because of Lawhead's progressive brain tumor, his writing seems to have gotten steadily worse over his career after those books, but last I checked (a while ago admittedly) they still stand up well.
TitaniumButterfly
13d ago
Agreed. It's gratifying when someone riffs like this.
I imagine most women would prefer a decent but powerful man over a harsh but powerful man
I'm certain most would express that preference, and about as certain that most would reveal otherwise.
They are truly alien creatures to us men and in such cases we're prone to typical-minding. Women are smaller and weaker etc., but it's a mistake to suppose that they experience the world the way men who are as small and weak would. We tend to evaluate propositions regarding female psychology by asking ourselves whether those same propositions would be true of us if we were in their shoes. But many behaviors which would be vices for males are virtuous for females, however subtly so.
Anyway, the problem here is that different thirsts for a person might be mutually-exclusively satisfied by different strategies. She wants several mutually-exclusive things, because the pareto-optimal reproduction strategy has to sort of multithread and jump to whichever option is advantageous at the moment. She desires to be cherished, adored, and protected; she desires to be taken without consent by the man against whom no other man can stand. It's difficult to imagine what actual human male can fully scratch both itches. But, then, nowhere is it written that complete happiness was ever on the table. It wouldn't seem to be adaptive.
I also happen to know that women are substantially more likely to orgasm with partners who beat them than with those who don't, though I hesitate to mention it because the data is not publicly-available and I have no real way to substantiate the claim. But once you start paying attention, the pattern is pretty clear.
Whether that's good or bad would seem to be mostly up to you.
TitaniumButterfly
16d ago
Just bothered me that she was a man in a woman suit.
TitaniumButterfly
19d ago
I'm not the one to ask either, but while we're at it you might also consider gifting them a new ladder. I like the foldable, extensible aluminum ones. Lightweight, portable, and last forever with occasional treatment of graphite lubricant in the moving parts.
TitaniumButterfly
19d ago
I think Ukraine really broke him. Was painful watching him write fan fiction about it for weeks, months... years? And then something just snapped, I guess.
(100% of this is speculation.)
TitaniumButterfly
24d ago
Haters gonna hate.
I find the "I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy!" stickers so obnoxious that every time I see one I'm overcome by the urge to make a custom one along the lines of "WE'RE GOING TO MARS!" with a full-color Elon giving a big thumbs up. I'm not even that big a Tesla fanboy; it's just that they make me want to be so I can signal as hard as possible that I'm not as neurotic, credulous, and vain as they are.
However my lifelong personal prohibition on bumper stickers has served me well to this point and I can't see myself deviating after all these years.
TitaniumButterfly
24d ago
Oh yeah I wanted to recommend Bog Standard Isekai. I've only read the first two books but it's the best pure litrpg I've found yet.
TitaniumButterfly
26d ago
Obviously it's not true
I disagree and insist that you justify your statement.
TitaniumButterfly
29d ago
I think the covid situation had less to do with the disease and more to do with the unpredictable, flailing government reactions thereto.
TitaniumButterfly
29d ago
People are people. They grieve and rejoice the same as we do.
I think this is pretty self-evidently incorrect. Different people seem to have different native capacities for all sorts of things, and that's before we get into cultural programming, head trauma, or psychiatric disorders.
TitaniumButterfly
29d ago
But nobody is going to contradict Fathers of the Church
Except other Fathers of the Church, amirite?
After thinking about this a while I have two conclusions:
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