TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
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User ID: 2854
Yes. It would be terrible to find ourselves in the position of trying to figure out how to live Christian lives by interpreting the Bible from this extremely-removed modern perspective.
I am the kind of person who struggles to believe in the supernatural given the world now makes sense without it.
You might be interested to know, then, that the distinction between 'natural' and 'supernatural' is fairly recent, artificial, and peculiarly Western. In Orthodox Christian theology we see the whole concept as a tragic, and frankly idiotic, mistake.
But also I've gotta disagree. The world makes no sense no matter how I look at it. The concept of The God is great for filling in gaps, such as how the material universe exists at all or how we're conscious, but opens up a lot more questions. Take that away though and I'm fairly puzzled by those things, plus why there are physical laws, etc. in the first place.
I think an important question is whether there is such a thing as objective 'good' and, if so, what that is and how we might know. 'Natural' explanations obviously can't touch this, and I don't see how life can be lived without it.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
1d ago
Well, what does 'follow Jesus Christ' mean, then? Ignore everything he said but think fondly of the nicer parts?
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
3d ago
The political hit from having been caught lying about this would be high (well for Republicans, anyway)
I'm not a Republican but from where I'm sitting it looks like their opponents already uniformly assume the worst about them. I don't think there's much difference between being accused of this and getting caught doing it. The disgust is already priced in.
Decided to take a break from Twitter for a while and for some reason thought I'd do better on reddit. Opened up a thread full of thousands of people raging about and mocking Elon over something he allegedly said. Looked it up and found out he never said it at all. Pointed this out to a few people. Universally downvoted of course, but one of them bothered to respond and tell me that "It doesn't matter. This is exactly the kind of thing he would say."
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
4d ago
I remember spending a lot of time in the orbit of Eric S. Raymond (ESR).
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
4d ago
Can you not run it through an AI for cleanup?
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
4d ago
I'm gonna go ahead and maintain my stance against a hundred million dollars spent on black girl magic.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
4d ago
Has nobody ever called you on that?
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
5d ago
I always interpret it as a refusal to participate in the absurdity of the euphemism treadmill.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
5d ago
The waiter at the starred restaurant which I most recently patronized was a dead ringer for Jason Momoa.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
9d ago
Yeah, my last attempt to play DS1 in the absence of a controller led to me trying to play it with a joystick.
Don't think this would have occurred to me. Don't think it should have occurred to you. ;)
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
10d ago
What different worlds we live in.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
10d ago
Surely philosophical records count as history, and are therefore as 'useful' as any of the rest would be? Nor do I think our knowledge of linguistics will be substantially upset by insight into Etruscan.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
10d ago
Definitely could, but I'd like the experience of starting from scratch again, this time knowing how things work.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
10d ago
I finally got Valheim and enjoyed it for a while but lately have been drowning in so many bears that it's not fun any more. Literally about half my time is spent fighting bears, and as soon as one's gone another seems to take its place almost immediately. Can't go anywhere or do anything. Also, the bears don't drop anything I want, so it's pretty much purely a pain in the ass.
Let's be clear that it's not a skill issue; I can fight them just fine. It just takes too long and their spawn rate is insane.
My more experienced friends tell me I should probably just build a new house somewhere else. Apparently the problem I'm having may be a quirk of two small black forest biomes near my house. The game seems to want a bear in each of them at all times, whereas when I go and explore larger black forest biomes bears don't seem very common at all.
For several reasons I'm thinking I may just want to start fresh with a new character and world.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
11d ago
My goodness, what long labor. How's his mom doing?
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
12d ago
Free Englishmen.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
12d ago
Just out of curiosity, why 'Italian' brainrot?
Someone once told me I had to try Italian soda, so I did, and it was just soda. Then someone said I had to try '''gelato''' so I did and it was just mid ice cream. Neither point is probably relevant. Sometimes I think I just come here to get my rambling out before hitting real old age.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
12d ago
When, in reality, it’s just the overlords of the media ecosystem sprinkling our tent with water.
What a polite way to put that.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
13d ago
That's an interpretation. I'm not even remotely convinced that it's correct. And I hope it isn't.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
15d ago
Perhaps we might crowdfund some kind of retreat for them, or at least encourage the occasional rotating sabbatical.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
17d ago
Rejecting anyone that fails a "basic human decency and tolerance" test that specifically includes tolerating other religions
This would mean excluding all practicing muslims.
I don't know how the West came to assume that 'tolerating other religions' is to be expected, nor even that it should be considered a good thing.
It's something Christians (and Jews) developed to be able to live alongside one another, but it was never meant to be applied to Islam. Let alone something like the Nahua religion. Every time I see one of those 'all religions welcome here' signs I wonder how they'd feel about someone cutting out their heart on the top of a ziggurat.
And re: Islam specifically, despite seeing many debates about it, no one ever seems to ask the peace-professing muslim apologist what the penalty is for apostasy.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
17d ago
I like to imagine that in that future they're culturally German (or whatever) but for contingent reasons all actually speak Japanese.
TitaniumButterfly
Blank and pitiless as the sun
17d ago
Yeah I went through that. It's many years later now and to this day I still can't decide whether I regret going down with the ship as it were.
Repeatedly doubling down on what's clearly a losing bet; wagering more and more of my soul each time and seeing it swept off the table, did much more lasting damage than I could appreciate at the time, and it's taken years to heal. On some level it was correct to do. On another level I wonder if I was just stubbornly trying to prove some sort of point -- if it was vanity instead of love. In which case whom can I blame but myself?
I was surprised when my (Orthodox) priest told me to get divorced. They're not prone to that, you know? I objected, "But, as a Christian husband, isn't it my job to die on the cross for my wife?" He said "Yes, and you've done that, and now it's time to do something else."
Still didn't believe him until I went to a monastery and the hieromonk there (even more hardcore than a priest) said the same thing, and also that it wasn't about me, it was about my child, and that my new mission in life was to find a better mom for said child. That got through to me. I was only once I was doing it for someone else that the path became clear.
Well, I'd say neither. The NT at least was written by the Church for the Church and meant to be interpreted within the Church and its living tradition. C.f. 2 Thessalonians 2:15.
Re: the rest, I don't think it's fundamentally possible to write any text such that e.g. someone from a culture which intentionally raises people to be hostile towards and incapable of understanding that text, can be expected to receive it well and understand it. I think it would make sense to say that, even if the Bible were 'inspired, incorrupt, and infallible' (it's clearly not; indeed there is no one 'Bible' in the first place), it would be reasonable to expect some degree of contextual literacy and adoption of the mindset of its authors to be intelligible. Otherwise the claim is that someone raised to believe 'down' means 'up' should instantly be able to understand that the text means what it means.
And at that point you're essentially arguing that the text on the page should flow or shift around to become intelligible to people who don't even speak the language; who perhaps can't even read; who perhaps are blind and deaf and can't even hear it spoken.
That this seems like a tall order isn't pertinent in the context of (alleged) divine action. We even see something like that described at Pentecost! But I think it more appropriate, and instructive, to notice that Christians throughout history have never held such expectations for the Bible, up until the Reformation at least, which is indeed a point against that movement.
See also Acts 8:26-35. And in that light, the only thing crazier than a non-Christian who insists the Bible fails on its merits because it's not immediately-intelligible to the uninitiated, is a Protestant who insists that it is, actually.
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