TitaniumButterfly
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User ID: 2854
TitaniumButterfly
2d 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
3d 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.
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.
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