aaa
5mo ago
As a non-Catholic (but familiar with some of the traditions), what are the bounds of "blessing"?
Almost nothing, race horses get routinely blessed.
aaa
6mo ago
Sex education works at reducing teenage sex and pregnancies, as advertised, by emphasizing the consequences of having sex. If you wanted to encourage teenage sex you wouldn't tell them anything and let nature take its course.
While repugnance around thirty year old man has sex with six year old child will persist, I'm not so sure that "thirty year old man has sex with sixteen year old" will
This is ironic because your second scenario is legal in most of the world, including most of the US and has always been so and in the places where it isn't it's because of feminist campaigning.
The progressive movement that exists today is overwhelmingly sex negative: they are in favor of raising the age of consent (to 25), against age gaps, against workplace relationships, against flirting in public, or in bars, or everywhere except designated dating apps, against prostitution, against pornography (except onlyfans), against sex comedies, against sexy women in video games, against revealing clothing in movies.
Play some of the wokesploitation games (Dream Daddy, Goodbye Volcano High), for example: everyone is some kind of queer but no sex, not even hinted at, maybe a (one) kiss, maybe the farthest they get is holding hands.
The trans kids stuff is the second most successful mass sterilization project in the world. Puberty blockers likely cause permanent inability to orgasm, what has your church done that's as effective as that at preventing teenage sex?
aaa
8mo ago
Like the theory that the ADL is funding neo-nazis. Why would they do anything like that?
I don't think they actually are, but there is a rational reason to do it: neo nazis are a safe enemy, no one likes them and they don't stand a chance to ever accomplish anything meaningful.
On the other hand progressive antisemitism is dangerous because it doesn't have all the negative associations that nazis have, it has an academic foundation and is part of an hegemonic ideology.
If you consider it, progressive antisemitism makes a lot of sense, jews are white passing, they are (greatly) overrepresented in positions of power and in the israel/palestine they are on the wrong side of the oppressor/oppressed and colonizer/colonized dichotomies (a pro-palestine position is common in the academic left).
So why isn't antisemitism on the left more common? Because nazis exist, so it would make sense for the ADL to want the nazis to continue existing.
aaa
10mo ago
This is a theological issue on which the Church has softened over the centuries. Even relatively conservative Catholics today get squeamish when the issue of Hell is raised. They will say that we "cannot know" who is in Hell and who is not; that this is a matter for God and God alone. It is not our place to pass judgement. But Dante had no such qualms.
I think I should remind you that Dante was not, in fact, a theologian. He never claimed that his work was theological in nature and was not received as such. It was meant as entertainment: it's original title was "Comedy" and large chunks of the book are spent on trivial political diatribes where Dante "wins" the argument by portraying himself as the Yes Chad and his political opponents as crying soyjaks tortured by devils.
Just to underline how much his views did not reflect the official views of contemporary Christianity it's worth remembering that one of his other books, De Monarchia, was declared heretical shortly after his death, burned on the stake and 200 years later it was entered in the very first edition of the Index where it stayed until the late 1800s.
He wasn't held in especially high regards in literary circles either, he did have his own small fan club but generally intellectuals considered Boccaccio and Petrarca to be the better (vulgar) italian authors. His contemporary fame is mostly due to being rediscovered, at the end of the 1800s, as part of the founding myth for the italian language.
On the topic of the Church having softened on the topic of hell... probably. However consider that the idea of Purgatory was very prevalent throughout the middle ages and I suspect most people expected to get that, rather than hell, for their minor infractions. If that wasn't the case it would be hard to explain all the money they made off of indulgences.
Furthermore the concept of universal reconciliation (in some form) isn't alien to old christian theology, Origen (~200AD) being the early example. You can find more examples by reading the history of Apokatastasis. I like Eriugena's version, the theological big crunch: you can use it to make a transhumanist version where we all get eternal life through being part of a LLM.
This image of the universe as a cosmic lottery with infinite stakes, this idea that one could be consigned to eternal damnation simply for having the bad luck to be born in the wrong century is, of course, psychotic. There is no sense in which it could be considered fair or rational.
I'd say that the idea of infinite punishments (or rewards) being dished out for finite transgressions is psychotic and possibly betrays the fact that nobody ever truly believed it. As Borges puts it:
There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. I have noticed that in spite of religion, the conviction as to one’s own immortality is extraordinarily rare. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe only in those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive
I need not persuade you that we suffer from a lack of responsibility today; it is a common enough opinion. We are told that young men are refusing to "grow up": they aren't getting jobs, they aren't getting wives, they aren't becoming stable and productive members of society. Birth rates are cratering because couples feel no obligation to produce children.
I think you should seriously consider the possibility that people used to do those things because of the immediate material rewards that they entailed and they don't do them anymore (as much) because the calculus has changed. It's likely that "be responsible" is just an easy cudgel to reach and beat people over the head with when they are not doing what you want them to do.
aaa
10mo ago
It's so depressing to me when I see this happen: "I used to enjoy X but now that I espouse ideology A I see how misguided my enjoyment was and can no longer experience it". Their brain has literally been attacked by a parasite that is eating away their personality, how sad. Like a psychological version of Alzheimer. I hope it never happens to me.
aaa
10mo ago
We used to have to commit things to memory to remember them, then we invented writing to do the remembering for us. Just like we don't need to use our minds to remember, by using AI we can also offload the process of hallucination to a computer.
aaa
4mo ago
The alt right was always a vague term ambiguously used to describe either anyone who voted for trump but also interchangeably with neo nazis. However the Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right is relevant here.
aaa
5mo ago
Even from an atheist perspective, I feel like the Trinity is a weak example of that?
Maybe you don't really understand the doctine of the trinity? It's something that you can't logically explain or understand but you have to believe. I'm not even sure what it could mean to believe something you don't understand.
Any attempts at making it make logical sense have been declared heretical, for example:
- Jesus was a human but operated like a remote controlled meat robot for God: adoptionism
- Jesus didn't exist before he was born in human form: socinianism
- Jesus never actually had a human body, he was something different throughout: docinianism
- Jesus is actually a separate thing from God: arianism
- Father, Son and Spirit are three different forms taken by God (kinda like water can be liquid, ice or vapor): modalism
aaa
10mo ago
Several people in response to this have mentioned New Atheism and this is something I've been curious about for a while. Can someone explain the whole New Atheism / internet atheism wars thing to me?
America was going through its mini great awakening with a christian evangelical president when 9/11 happened, to which the Bush responded by starting his own holy war in the middle east. It seemed like religious fanatics would just keep ruining everyone's day forever and atheism looked very good by comparison. A few books were published about the topic, somewhat coincidentally and it sort of picked up steam on the internet, especially the nascent youtube.
The label "New Atheism" is mostly just a press label, like IDW, it doesn't really denote anything in particular. If you read arguments about atheism from the late 1600s almost everything is already there (minus evolution and geology).
And then the evangelical awakening died out, McCain lost to Obama (who acknowledged atheism in his inauguration speech) and there was no reason for the movement anymore. What remained ended up being the first victim of SJWs in 2012. Then gamergate happened and people from new atheism either became sjws or anti-sjw (the "skeptics"). The anti-sjw side of atheism doesn't really have a home in american politics (it can't be with the democrats but it also can't be republican because it would alienate the reliable evangelical voter base); when tech platforms (twitter and youtube in particular) moved to do politically biased content moderation (mid 2017 and 2018) the atheistic side of anit-sjw was essentially wiped out.
I think atheism is due for a comeback, this decade, because of all the dissident right people who are adopting orthodoxy/sedevacantism to own the libs.
While I am not a fan of stereotypical Redditors, I also fail to see why being convinced that a man 2000 years ago rose from the dead despite a near-total lack of evidence that this happened other than the writings of a few people who probably never knew him in real life is supposed to make one better than a stereotypical Redditor.
Boy, you're opening a huge can of worms here...
aaa
10mo ago
I think you can reconcile any religion with modern science, but I also think you are going to have some serious work to do.
For example, for christianity, the pain points would be:
- original sin/early genesis and evolution
- soul and thermodynamics/neurology
- lack of evidence for angels and demons compared to the medieval way of conceiving them, demonic possessions especially
- angelology being largely based on a forgery (de coelesti hierarchia)
- transubstantiation/consubstantiation and atomism
- lack of evidence for some of jesus miracles
- the lack of contemporary miracles (or poor evidence for them) compared to biblical times some you can discard as medieval superstitions that don't really matter (even ardently religious people don't believe them anymore), others not so much. You have to have an explanation for original sin, I think.
Other religions would have different pain points.
Somewhere along the way, yes, a religion implies some unmoved mover (or a pantheon of them?).
Ironically I think the unmoved mover argument is very hard to reconcile with modern science, however it's more of a christian thing and even there it doesn't really matter.
aaa
6mo ago
This is pretty much correct. The entire political online discourse is now "what can I do/say/believe that will make my outgroup mad?"
aaa
2mo ago
A piece about the alt right that doesn't mention Yannapoulos, Bokhari and the wider anti-sjw sphere looks completely delusional to me. It's true that there is a real distinction between the Alt Right™, led by Richard Spencer, and the wider anti-sjw movement of the late 2010s that got lumped in as "alt right", sometimes without even being on the right. However the former was basically along for the ride, Richard Spencer was a marginal figure in his own heyday.
aaa
10mo ago
Also I wanted to point out how bizarre the entry about the wager in the pensées is: it ends with a note that, if this argument (the wager) isn't enough to convince you to believe you should then go to mass every day and the monotonous repetition of the liturgy will make you as stupid as a beast and then you will be able to believe. It seems unexplicably blasphemous to me.
aaa
10mo ago
It's amazing to me how much sway the aristotelian unmoved mover god has on a religion that clearly describes a moving, changing god. In genesis god has human emotions, moves around and even shows up at the door of Abraham, on earth. In other words he behaves more like Odin (or rather Baal) than like god-the-philosophical-entity. And even if you discount genesis (and much of the old testament) as analogical writing and superstitions of simple people, how can it be that Jesus is god and also that god is unmoved, unchanging, simple, etc?
For problems with cosmological arguments see Sobel, Logic and Theism, chapter 5.
aaa
5mo ago
Christmas trees came about in the 1500s in the Baltics and are decidedly Lutheran in origin. The notion that Christmas is merely a rebranded pagan holiday (Yule or Saturnalia) is anti-Christian propaganda.
I think this is bullshit. I've read the arguments, I know what historians think about this and I'm still convinced their arguments are weak.
There is no logical reason you would decorate an evergreen tree to celebrate the birth of the son of god, which happened in a cave and involved no trees at all. The christmas log is an even better example, somehow there's local customs, spread from the uk to turkey relating to a magical chunk of wood. Where does that come from? Turns out, nowhere. It just starts getting mentioned out of nowhere. Same thing with the christmas tree, at some point it just starts existing for no logical reason.
I think there are two explanations, one is that they are pre-christian traditions that survived underground until they re-emerged at some point (it doesn't even have to be that much underground, it just needs to be a topic that wasn't recorded in writing). Or they are new traditions that don't have anything to do with christianity, a sort of repaganization of europe.
It's hard to tell which is the case because the christian middle ages didn't bother keeping a record of pagan european tradition.
aaa
2mo ago
PS. someone referencing himself as a "young buck" is probably the cringiest thing I've seen this year so far.
aaa
5mo ago
Fascinating. I would make the opposite inference. If the mind was separate from the body, like if we were little ghosts remote controlling the body, I would expect drugs and brain damage to have a much smaller effect or no effect at all. You can get some effect in the brain-as-antenna model, but stuff like prefrontal cortex lesions causing personality changes and primary visual cortex lesions causing loss of color vision in memories is hard to swallow.
None of this is conclusive but it makes me lean more towards materialism.
aaa
5mo ago
This explanation is often repeated but it's a lot less certain than people would have you believe. The theory goes "it was a widespread belief among ancient jews that prophets lived perfect lives and died in the same day they were born", also known as the "integral age theory".
There's two problems with this, the first one is that it is almost completely unsourced. The only source that exists is in the Rosh Hashanah and states that only Moses was born and died on the same day (for rather contrived reasons). Now, that text is about right in terms of dates for the establishment of Christmas and Jesus was supposed to be better than Moses, so it makes sense. However there is another problem: Jesus didn't die on the day of his birthday.
So the entire argument is moot, someone placed Jesus birthday on the 25th for some reason, that reason has been deleted from history. It is plausible that the integral age was used as a contrived excuse to place it there, but we don't know for sure. It can not be the real reason (because a straightforward application would just tell you that he was also born on easter). The real reason has likely been deleted from history.
Sources:
aaa
9mo ago
Small golf-cart like cars exists in europe, for example this brand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_(marque)
If we had golf cart cities, it would be pretty easy to add secure storage compartments into them. And, I'll be honest, I don't feel that my car is that secure when I park it in Seattle. In fact, a golf cart might be superior since when I get robbed I won't have to replace my auto glass.
The general problem is that they are so light that thieves just take the whole thing.
aaa
10mo ago
A true believer should allow life to happen to them, because the outcomes are determined by the omni-potent God.
This position was historically held by quietists and you can read the general principles in the papal encyclical condemning them as heretical: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/Innoc11/i11coel.htm
aaa
10mo ago
Let's say that all that argumentation fails. There still seem to be reasons that it might be a sensible thing to adhere to, even if you think it's relatively unlikely. Pascal's wager is formidable, for one.
Pascal's wager is terrible because infinite rewards break game theory.
Suppose I ask you to give me $10 and in exchange I will reward you with $10000. Should you take this wager? To answer this question you could estimate the probability p that I'm telling the truth and calculate the expected value of the wager: 10000p - 10(1-p). If it is positive you should pay, if it isn't you shouldn't. It's unlikely that you will be able to prove that p=0 but it also doesn't matter, as long as you estimate it to be low enough that all you need to know.
But suppose I promise you an infinite reward for your $10. The condition is now ∞p - 10(1-p) > 0 which is always true if p > 0. So, as long as you can't call me a liar certainly you have to enter the wager. What's worse this is independent of the entry price. As long as I ask for a finite price, no matter how large, you have to pay it.
What does this mean? Either we should reject all wagers that involve infinite rewards (because otherwise we would have to take all of them) or, if we choose not to, we are lucky that there are multiple incompatible religion. Because taking one religion's wager means rejecting many other and some of the other will have infinite punishments for rejecting them all of the wagers are undecidable and we are free to choose whichever we want or reject all of them.
aaa
5mo ago
I suggest you try to get it to solve that problem correctly, it isn't easy. The prompt is already giving clear and simple instructions and even reminding it not to use the highest value card for the second part of the ordering doesn't work.
Even so, for problems this simple once you start trying to read and find out bugs in the code it produces you have already lost, it would have been faster to write the implementation yourself.
You say you yearn for the monastic lifestyle yet you do not even attempt practicing the most basic of the ascetic practices: control over your internal feelings. Stop experiencing envy and resentment, just stop. Then maybe you will learn to enjoy watching a thonged ass for what it is rather than tormenting yourself over the philosophies you have constructed around it.
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