TitaniumButterfly
No bio...
User ID: 2854
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Oh yeah, edited to be clear I meant Obama.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Has more to do with ancestry, not parentage. High-quality parents put out low-quality children from time to time. Degradation actually happens pretty quickly. Much less often, but still sometimes, two low-quality parents whose own parents were higher-quality put out a higher-quality child. Better to evaluate someone's grandparents than his parents if predictive power is what's desired.
When Obama was elected I met an older white woman who wept tears of joy and said he'd come to do the work of Christ.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
That doesn't follow whatsoever. It presupposes that we're always capable of evaluating deep consequences, which is plainly not the case. It also presupposes a ton of wisdom on the part of the person being persuaded.
Suppose the damage only becomes clear generations later? I'm thinking here of the sexual revolution e.g.
Inability to convince someone that an act is damaging has no bearing on whether it is.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
It doesn't 'just' mean harmful, but it's always harmful.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Yeah, sorry, on my phone so I can't really give this the nuance it deserves.
We should distinguish between three different items here:
- Taking God's name in vain
- Swearing oaths
- Using impolite language ('swear words')
The first and second require way more foundation than I can lay right now. The third I just answered elsewhere in this thread, probably pretty close to this post.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
People have been asking about my political ideology and this pretty much sums it up: the first-world is better than the third-world. It's a good thing that we're not burning witches anymore. But you all are so concerned with "third-world immigrants" you can't see the third-worlding occurring right in front of your faces.
I never understood how you could be so good at caricaturing this obnoxious persona until I saw the page where you explicitly catalogue your history of trolling people on reddit.
This is tiresome and it'll be a nice day when the mods finally get around to banning you.
Since when is ('merely') signaling bad character harmless?
Propriety is a useful concept, as is reverence. Every minor decision we make, and word we use, directionally warps our character. It changes our own conception of ourselves. Offhand I can point to TracingWoodgrains as an atheist who recognizes the pattern and so refrains from foul language. (Though of course use-mention distinction applies to all of this.)
It is not good to regard ourselves as oppositional to order, propriety, or reverence. Instances where disruptiveness, impropriety, or irreverence are correct are exceptional and should always be engaged with deliberately. Never mind the value of cultivating verbal continence; of regarding oneself as holding to a standard other than the vulgar.
These arguments touch on Christian understanding but don't rely upon it. And they are only inward-facing. There's a whole additional side when it comes to the impressions we make upon others and how that can harm them and us.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
I'm a bit confused as to your thesis. My intent here was to demonstrate that the argument was made over 60 years ago and hasn't required updating. And even Lewis was only riffing on much older material that also still stands to this day.
To be sure in that time period people have massively fallen away from God and lost fluency with the language in which the arguments are made. I think the disconnect you're talking about has more to do with ignorant moderns needing lots of extra hand holding to be able to understand what we're even talking about, after generations of educational bankruptcy and training by hostile media.
But re: the rest, your words do not match my experience. The Western tradition has been very active in that time (though mostly in the wrong direction imo) and the Eastern tradition has been exploding in both vigor and popularity. Surely Solzhenitsyn made a mark? And a lot else has been going on. Only, few are listening.
This sort of thing would seem to be cyclical for mankind. People honor God, prosper, become prideful, turn away, suffer terribly, and only once the same old lessons have been relearned the hard way do the survivors pick up the pieces and start the process again.
Usually, the word "sinful" is taken to mean an appeal to abstract, unfalsifiable moral commandments dependent on faith in some religious nonsense for even the slightest form of coherency
I think you have been well trained by enemies of Christianity.
not "here is the solid statistical evidence that consumption of this media will make your life objectively worse by your own values."
Solid statistical evidence is a pretty recent invention, and its accessibility to the public even more recent. The ability of the public to competently evaluate such evidence we can, heh, call a work in progress. In the meantime humans live human lives and require human guidance.
It seems to me that the population is moving from seeing porn consumption less like saying "fuck" and more like smoking cigarettes, and that this is because porn consumption is in fact more like smoking cigarettes than it is like swearing. There are significant observable costs to consumption and the industry that supports it, even from within the Materialist frame.
I was raised evangelical and converted to Orthodoxy and have never heard it suggested that swearing is somehow implicitly sinful. An argument sure can be made that it is in most particular instances, but that would be according to logic that would, as you'd have it, be coherent to materialists.
Apart from failing to cultivate a relationship with Christ I'm unable to think of any behavior typically described as sinful that doesn't have observable material costs. And even that one is arguable given mental health and life outcomes. The question is how aware one is of those costs, and how seriously one takes them, not whether they exist.
Yes, and trivially. The problem with 'sinful' is the same problem 'misogynistic' or 'hateful' has in that it's thought-terminating and usually invoked as "fuck you, stop doing what I don't like".
This reminds me of the guy I met who couldn't believe that I described something as heretical. "'Heresy' is, like, something fundamentalists scream while losing their minds!" His only experience with the concept was from media hostile to Christianity. Had no idea that within the tradition we use the word matter of factly; dispassionately.
Sin has only ever meant one thing and at least in my experience it's been used consistently. Via (hostile) media portrayals I have a vague caricature in my head of an ignorant Southern woman throwing the word around to suit her biases, but all such types I've met in real life have instead been progressives.
I am happy that the traditionalists have figured out they actually have to make the argument without the short-circuit. Which should be easy, because they're unimpeachably correct, which is why they were right to pick up the thought-terminating argument from aesthetics in the first place and it didn't take them 60 years to come up with a workable counterargument.
Where's that CS Lewis poaster when you need him?
There has never been a shortage of Christian intellectual tradition for those willing to engage with it. Except, I guess, in Protestant backwaters isolated from that tradition. But even they generally had access to Lewis.
the argument is less "this content is sinful", and more "this content is demonstrably poisoning the relations and sexual health of our children".
What did you think 'sinful' meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
Sin is definitionally injurious to individuals and societies.
All that's changed is that instead of warning people (and getting called crazy), we now get to say "I told you so" (and still mostly be ignored).
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
My other thought was some kind of foreign language keyboard that makes such slipups easy but IIRC this guy is in Texas.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
I mean I'm pretty transphobic but the whole reason this place exists is to be an open forum where people of widely-divergent viewpoints can have conversations and consider each other's perspectives. I upvote effort and sincerity. Downvotes are reserved for bad form, not for disagreement. This is basic stuff and it bugs me that even among our much-smarter-than-average userbase people can't seem to figure it out. Downvoting you for your perspective is the equivalent of rating an item on amazon one star because USPS delivered the package late. Real trog hours.
Also @TheDemonRazgriz since I'm coming back late.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Why is that e accented? I mean I'm a fan of fancy vowels and am constantly fighting the urge to use them, so believe me when I say I'm not bothered so much as titillated.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
I think 'personhood' in this context is mostly nonsense and everything gets circular fast.
Comes down to something like "It's okay to kill him because he's not a person, and he's not a person because it's okay to kill him."
Christian understanding does not end at the Bible. Indeed the Bible says not to use itself that way (2 Thessalonians 2:15). This would seem to be quite a problem for Protestantism but that's beside the point.
The point here is that for a couple thousand years Christians have understood God's relationship with Israel to have been transferred, in a sense, to the Church. Early Christians understood themselves to be part of the fulfilment of the Jewish religion; that Judaism has become Christianity and gentiles have a place in it. They didn't understand 'Judaism' to be a separate thing from Christianity.
However, especially with the destruction of the second temple, the Jews who rejected Christ underwent a radical shift in their beliefs and practices, leading to what we today call "Rabbinical Judaism" -- not the same religion that (partly) transformed into Christianity and, indeed, a younger religion than Christianity, which fairly heavily and consciously defined itself against Christianity.
Within this rubric, what we today call 'Judaism' is rather a Christian heresy and no, there's no expectation that its adherents have any special role that Christians need to worry about. The Church is the 'True Israel'.
For non-Protestant Christians, having so many Protestants in political power is bemusing, frustrating, and sometimes terrifying. This case is all three.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
What does 'person' mean here?
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Jeez I have no idea why you got downvoted so hard.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
I was coming from more of a subconscious, evo-psych angle rather than anything rational, but yes what you say is true.
I'm told that some extremely-conservative states don't even have exceptions for killing two-year olds conceived by rape. In 2025! Even during Pride Month!
The homeless with a profusion of free money, food, shelter, education, healthcare, goods, and services available to them, paid for by my taxes? The ones that I have, on multiple occasions, witnessed throwing away food given to them because despite what their cardboard sign claimed it's not what they actually wanted? Those homeless?
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
From a game-theoretic standpoint it probably increases her reproductive potential. She's much more likely to find a new mate (and get more kids in better conditions) than if she were a single mother.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Yes I used to memorize a lot of poems. That ended circa 2011 when I finally got a smartphone.
The longest one I still remember entirely is Tolkien's Mythopoeia. (PDF!)
Probably my favorite to recite randomly (while driving e.g.) is the Song of Eärendil, also by Tolkien. No link since I couldn't quickly find a good online version.
Lots of shorter material, mostly by Yeats. The Song of the Wandering Aengus, He Hears The Cry Of The Sedge*, and An Irish Airman foresees his Death are favorites.
Also a soft spot in my heart for An Appointment.
Could go on for a while. Having an internal library of poetry is nice for those moments when I'd otherwise be bored or simply don't want to fondle some device.
*For some reason lots of online poetry is riddled with typos which suggest bad scanning/transcription software. In this case 'unhound' should be 'unbound'. This sort of thing is extremely common.
Don't disagree but I'm curious as to how you'd make that case.
More options
Context Copy link