oats_son
1yr ago
This post is good! Yes, that all makes sense. It doesn't really convince me to believe, but it's not totally at odds with reality, like how fundamentalists see it. I may have just talked to too many fundamentalists, but to be fair, that was my only perspective on the bible for pretty much all of my youth.
Catholics don't believe that scripture is infallible? Infallibility is a strong statement to make, and admitting that men wrote it is kind of conceding a lot of ground. I guess I don't know what you're supposed to base your belief on here, if men wrote it and it may not be accurate to what God actually wanted us to know. How would inspired word look any different from some random jackwagon writing whatever he wants?
To that end, is there anything solidifying your belief in day-to-day life? I asked a couple Christians if there is justice in this life, or if it's only reserved for the afterlife, and both of them seemed pretty stumped by what I thought was a simple question. To me, it seems pretty obvious that life is randomly cruel to everyone, Christian or not, a world of chaos, untamed and wild except for where men have tamed it. If someone created it, they're either not paying attention to it, as if they wound up a wind up doll and walked away from the table, or they never cared much about it in the first place, an apathetic god that lets the chips fall as they may. You probably disagree with that, and if you do, I'd like to hear it.
I have so many random theological questions (does the suffering of animals mean anything?), but maybe some other day. Or some other thread.
Under any definition of the time when the Bible was being written, "day" did not mean "actually hundreds of millions of years". Anyone saying otherwise is coping. Genesis is literally supposed to be how the world came about, and people interpreted it this way and believed it for hundreds of years until the theory of evolution and uniformitarianism came about.
Is God supposed to be a loving God, as almost every Christian I see says it, or is he supposed to be literally the most wicked thing in existence, with Satan and every other false god paling in comparison both to the magnitude of cruelty he is capable of inflicting and the willingness to see it carried out? When you pick apples, you keep the good ones and toss the bad ones. You don't take the bad apples, smash them into bits, reconstitute them, and smash them again and keep repeating this same pattern. That doesn't make any sense. You know what would make it make sense? If humans came up with it to scare you into believing it.
Edit to add: The idea that you can handwave away the unfairness of that is kind of infuriating to me. You're telling me that a kid can be born in a nowhere town with no opportunity, grow up getting abused by his parents, reach ripe adulthood somewhere after 12, lose faith in God because nothing good is happening to him, and end up shooting himself, and he goes to Hell to be tormented forever. Not only was life unfair to him, but also the afterlife was even more unfair to him, somehow. There's no way to reconcile that fate with any of the rest of the New Testament claiming God to be extremely loving. That's pretty unequivocally horrible. God created every part of this situation -- a cruel world, the rules behind entry to Heaven and Hell, the ability to sin and feel pain. What majesty would do that?
oats_son
1yr ago
I don't at all disagree with the benefits of genuine belief. I feel I have been robbed of these for myself because I just thought about the issues too much. Are your children doomed to the same bitter realization decades down the line? You're just supposed to hope they're less good at critical thinking than yourself?
I was raised with a fundamentalist view of the Bible. One relative of mine went on to grow even more fundamentalist, veering into hatred of the Jews (a severe misreading, if you ask me, and I thought downright heretical until I looked at the lines he was fixated on), but here's some of my grievances. I don't know my Bible very well, and I frankly hold little regard for it, so I will not read more.
- As I said, young earth creationism is pretty wild, but to my eyes, you pretty much have to believe it, according to my fundamentalist relative, due to Jesus quoting something in the Septuagint regarding it; it is also the basis of the faith (why would we need saving from original sin if there was no Adam and we are no more than slightly more intelligent monkeys). If not, then there's all kinds of questions we can get into: why is the perception of God something that changes with the more we know about the world, instead of something eternal? Why did God write the scripture like that, so that a great portion of believers feel forced to stamp their feet about the world being 6000 years old? Why does my mother insist that the Tower of Babel story is literally true?
- Much of the Old Testament deals with God proving himself to be better than other gods; a good example of this is probably the Book of Job, where God goes along with "The Adversary" to test Job. Christians seem to rethink these verses of being false idols and Satan in all cases, but it seems pretty obvious to me that it's about directly combating competing gods in the old world. There are so many points in the Old Testament where it basically says "sweet, my god is better than yours, that's why he lets me kill you and all your male heirs, and then breed your young girls after you're gone".
- From what I've read, there are so many different words used for hell in the books of the Bible that there isn't any consistent view of them, but the mainstream Christian view is that nonbelievers are thrown into an eternal lake of fire to be tormented forever. But believers in Christ get into heaven. I don't know how far right people can get into the weeds on Septuagint vs Masoretic words for "Hebrew", but never even examine this idea at all. Or maybe they have and I don't know it. But what I have heard is that you have to believe all of the Bible, young earth creationism, not permitting women to teach men or get divorced or other things, laying with men gets you stoned, and crucially, Christ's resurrection, or you go to hell. Knowing my relative's issues with the Catholic Church, it amazes me that God would let the Catholics twist the Bible so hard for so long with no resistance whatsoever. They literally could not read the Bible for centuries and discover what it really said. Wouldn't most of them be damned for their degeneration of the Word?
- It is staggering to me how unfair the requirement that you must believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ to not be damned. People on the ground witnessing the miracles would have had such a huge leg up in their redemption. Atheists killing themselves by jumping from a plane can save themselves mid-flight, whereas someone pulling the trigger of a gun gets no such chance. Because Jesus incarnated in a little spot in the Middle East, huge swathes of the populace have never even heard the name of the creator of the universe. Entire continents of people would be damned due to not even having a chance at receiving the message. Or, alternatively, they are saved due to their ignorance, but then once missionaries come and give them a chance to hear the message, then they're damned. Or maybe you're more like C.S. Lewis and think that being saved or damned comes from after death, whether you can accept Christ then or not. Okay. That doesn't seem very true to the message of the Bible to me, but that would be a little more fair. But even the concept of hell is crazy to me. What kind of justice is this? Infinite pain for a life with finite sin? Even the biggest assholes I know of in real life wouldn't go for that. And if you take the classical view of what gets you damned (disbelief in the redemption), how can you really hold it against someone? They were provided with no direct evidence of such a resurrection, in a world where pain and suffering are quite arbitrary, and any relief comes from men, usually atheist men.
If you take issue with these grievances, let me know, but like I said, the Word of God should probably be more eternal than to vary completely based on cultural attitudes and scientific research. I don't really see much room to wiggle away from these while still staying true to scripture. And God has let humanity's Christians splinter further and further over 2000 years without any further clarification. @FCfromSSC
oats_son
1yr ago
These days, you have to decide what to break: the Word, or the laws of reality. The blue tribers break the former and the conservatives break the latter, as you see with young earth creationists and various other sects of the right wing. I've seen some people on here go to religion lately, specifically Christianity; I'd like to poll them sometime and ask them how they did it. There is just too much of the Bible that is objectively false at this point that I don't know how a Mottizen would go about gaining faith. Unless they went a deist route or threw in with Blue Tribe. But at that point, you might as well not be basing your religion off the Bible at all.
oats_son
1yr ago
So your idea is that Amish life is better than the median American life, but not the best lifestyle possible? Why not do government initiatives for something that doesn't self cripple by forbidding modern technology use (like tractors)? Maybe a government initiative for Motteposting.
I think the fact that they don't use anything invented in the last 200 years is also a significant problem with the Amish. America is America because of its tremendous industry. Amish people have their niche in this, but it would not bode well for the country if everyone was Amish.
No doubt another reason the Amish doesn't recruit outsiders is because no outsiders are interested. You have to be born into it to even want it in the first place. If that's not rational, then I'm sorry, because humans aren't rational (excepting us rationalists, who are very rational).
oats_son
1yr ago
My uneducated question to all this is - dude, why does Russia want Ukraine so bad if it was poor before and it's even poorer now? That's like China absorbing North Korea, isn't it? How is this not a net loss for Russia? They spend a bunch of money, catch a bunch of sanctions, kill a lot of people, and get a crappy broken country when they inevitably win.
oats_son
1yr ago
For that matter, have you considered that The Motte is a poor man's substitute for whatever the Amish are doing? Have you considered joining them yourself? I hope you don't look at this as a sneer; I am asking in the hopes that you can potentially see the barriers or incentives to not join the Amish. Maybe one of them is that they would probably be pretty reluctant to let an outsider like you in.
Government initiatives seem to be pretty poor at getting people to make lifestyle changes. You can throw all the government initiatives you like at the obesity problem, with nothing to show for it.
oats_son
1yr ago
Certainly it would be difficult to adjust, but it appears to be the rationally preferred lifestyle.
The doctor tells you that in order to live an extra 5 years, you need to give up beer, take up broccoli, and start jogging every once in a while.
What's many people's response? Hell no. They say they'd rather live fast and die hard than to give up all these things. I've seen people on this site echo similar sentiments last time I posted about coffee. And this is much more than just eating a piece of broccoli every so often, for once in your life. This is a fundamental upheaval of most people's styles of living. Even if there are benefits to your health, it's not rational to do it, because it would mean basically giving up your current personality and identity. A spiritual death.
Patriarchy, gender norms, media restrictions, simplicity, social competition predicated on virtue, increased exposure to nature and an emphasis on tradition can all be emulated.
But they aren't, and can't be, unless you happen to run a cult and get a bunch of broken dysfunctional people that are easily manipulated into whatever shape you desire. This is kind of like Esperanto -- all the aspects of human language can be emulated, so why not craft your own conlang and then it can be everyone's second language, or even first language, and far easier to learn? Despite all this, nobody learns Esperanto. No momentum. No natural evolution. No reason to take it up.
oats_son
1yr ago
I live near Amish and the amount of genetic deformities in them is quite higher than normal. I've seen a guy with a messed up hand, and a guy who walked really funny with one nearly useless arm along with a contorted face. This is more of a minor point, but they're always buying ice cream and paying for rides from non-Amish and borrowing people's generators and phones and other various modernities that they apparently need, despite their religion forbidding them for their own personal ownership.
That's not to diminish their successes, which are numerous. But genetic deformities, hard work, genuine faith, and voluntary (sometimes hypocritical) giving up of modern pleasures is a high price to pay.
It would be staggeringly difficult to try to engineer that sort of thing among normies. The genie is out of the bottle for genuine faith for most people, and once people have been raised up in the usual environment, they're not going to want to give everything up unless they're crazy. The Amish are an oddball group that arose organically. I don't think it's possible to emulate them in any meaningful way, and so it's useless to even pose The Amish Question in the first place. On a nation scale, why would you want to encourage it? Imagine if everyone went and became Amish.
There were so many of you that told that The Hock guy to import some South American wife. I'm now going to ask all of you to go into scary detail on this. What are the best methods for Passport Bro-ing?
Let's take a few considerations here before beginning:
- You only speak English
- Your game probably sucks if you're considering this
- You have at least a decent amount of money
- You are trying to find a respectable woman, in addition to being attractive
- You have to find someone quickly because your funds are not unlimited
And I predict there will be variations if you consider the following points:
- What region? I predict some of the poorer LatAm countries will be popular choices, also central and eastern Europe, and of course, the classic Southeast Asia (though in my opinion Southeast Asia is probably not so preferable because the culture is very different and you're liable to get hit with a frying pan later in life, and if you're white, your kids won't look very much like you). Please state your choice for this Guide For Passport Bros, and why you picked it.
- Does it matter if you're an atheist or of a particular religion?
In addition, I encourage you to name possible upsides and downsides of doing this. Seems like avoiding the slut culture that America has gained could be a positive, but it also seems like that culture has been successfully exported worldwide. Maybe I'm wrong! At least someone here knows more than me, I'm sure.
I like the idea that if I don't ever find success in the dating market, I can just chicken out and fuck off to Colombia and pick up some chick and fly back. But that sounds like so much effort. Maybe it will be my own Hock.
oats_son
1yr ago
Totally agreed, this seems like it would be any supportive mom's reaction if their son was into guns. Posting about the range trip to facebook checks out, not getting worked up he was looking at bullets checks out... This might seem weird to people not in the hobby and not around guns at all, I suppose, but obviously you can't really look at this family's dynamics from that kind of framing.
oats_son
1yr ago
I actually know a holocaust revisionist who is very insistent on arguing his point at all times (especially lately due to the Israel-Palestine thing). One time I asked him about whether the Belarussian village burnings and rampant killings in the western side of the USSR (as portrayed in this movie) were true, and he sort of offhandedly said that the Russians probably lied about it, since the Russians lied about a lot of stuff, and also this was a matter of rallying support among Russians for the Motherland.
This of course doesn't represent SecureSignals's views or any other Holocaust denier's views, but I don't think there is nearly as coherent a narrative about other World War II happenings among revisionists. I wonder what the prevailing view of Imperial Japan is among Holocaust revisionists.
oats_son
1yr ago
I'm afraid it's more like he's posting to try to get a steelman of the "don't kill yourself" position, and despite wanting to be, not being convinced by the arguments. If his brain is anything like mine, it does a good enough job arguing for the "keep yourself safe" position on its own two feet (two brain halves? two cortexes?) without going to 4chan.
oats_son
1yr ago
I'll give it a shot next time I buy anything. I have too much alcohol in the house because I drink way too slow.
All those trips to Oktoberfest over the years still haven't really delineated the differences between all the different types of beer for me. I must not drink enough.
oats_son
1yr ago
I have not, and I've never heard of it but because it's a red wine I regard it with suspicion. Does it have a lot of tannins in it like other reds? That's probably what's doing it, I am told.
oats_son
1yr ago
Yep, just at work. I figured I'd be playing a dangerous game if I drank it on weekends too. But it's not too serious either way.
oats_son
1yr ago
I actually hadn't ever even heard of decaf tea. It squares with your acidity problems? I may have to try it. My experience with tea has been "meh", but I don't know if I've tried black tea specifically. The best iced tea I ever drank was some unsweetened iced green tea at the state fair when I was severely dehydrated, it's never tasted good otherwise.
oats_son
1yr ago
I don't think I will have any withdrawal symptoms if I quit; I never drink any on the weekends. But I think you're right. I'll try quitting for a while. It's really easy to get into the habit of making some every day and then desiring the allotted coffee that you clearly deserve. It's true, it's just a drink, but there's nothing like coffee, and I don't want soft drinks, so that pretty much leaves alcoholic beverages and milk for water alternatives, and those have calories.
I would absolutely drink non-alcoholic beer if old age robbed alcohol processing from me.
oats_son
1yr ago
I've tried enough IPAs to say that they're not too bad, but I'd definitely rather have a stout. Too many hops. Seems I haven't found any real satisfying middle ground between the super heavy beers (stouts) and the crisp light beers (ales, pilsners, shandies).
You like red wine? I haven't found a red wine I liked. I hate the taste of them, somehow. I like sake, I like white wines, I liked some homebrewed date (the fruit!) wine, but I highly dislike red wines, sweet or sour.
oats_son
1yr ago
No! Liquor is the wrong comparison! The right comparison is the huge amount of craft beer stouts that get made. I have tried many of these with many different subtleties. Almost all of them are bitter. But some of them are tastier than others. One of them may have some little banana taste in it. Or one tastes like chocolate. Or maybe it's just some uniquely nice bitter taste. Well, okay, I guess liquor is an okay comparison. They're both "acquired tastes". After you drink enough liquor you learn to put aside the taste of the alcohol and actually tasting the rest of it. Maybe something similar happens with coffee. I know someone who is very particular about the coffee he uses, even though he uses cream and sugar he needs his fancy stuff otherwise it doesn't taste good enough. I've tried the same coffee he likes, except black, and I have to admit, it's pretty nice. How dare you say these things about me and my fellow coffee drinkers!! You've ruined this thread!
MathWizard is right, coffee flavored stuff is good too. I'm a big fan of coffee ice cream. I probably wouldn't drink very much alcohol if I didn't like the coffee flavor that stouts have.
Why do you want to get into linguistics? Learning a language is the applied version of it, but the higher level stuff doesn't seem that useful to me.
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