shamgar
robophobe
No bio...
User ID: 2609
shamgar
robophobe
5d ago
If you have examples of scholars who support the opening of John being a later interpolation I would be interested
On the prologue:
- A. Harnack, «Über das Verhältnis des Prologs des vierten Evangeliums zum ganzen Werk», Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 2 (1892), 189–231: the prologue is a preface not organically connected to the gospel.
- R. Bultmann, «Der religionsgeschichtliche Hintergrund des Prologs zum Johannes-Evangelium», in Eucharisterion (FS Gunkel, 1923), and The Gospel of John: A Commentary (1941; ET 1971): an earlier Logos hymn, he argued from Baptist circles, taken over and annotated by the evangelist.
- E. Käsemann, «The Structure and Purpose of the Prologue to John's Gospel» (1957), in New Testament Questions of Today (1969).
- R. E. Brown, The Gospel according to John I–XII (Anchor Bible 29, 1966): a community hymn added at the last stage of editing, together with chapter 21.
Do these scholars actually claim the prologue of John is an interpolation? From your own description of these sources it seems like they mostly suggest the author of John might have used some specific source for this prologue, not that it is a later interpolation trying to insert a different message from what the original author of John intended.
Clearly, Jesus calls the God of the Jews his father
It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, 'He is our God.'
But clearly the sentence goes on: «and you have not known him» (8:55). And look at how John's Jesus describes Israel's experience of God. «No one has ever seen God» (1:18), against «they saw the God of Israel» (Exod 24:10). «You have never heard his voice or seen his form» (5:37), against «you heard the sound of words» at Sinai (Deut 4:12). He calls the Torah «your law» (8:17; 10:34) and «their law» (15:25). John is Jewish, and it is also the gospel most estranged from «the Jews».
He is clearly very critical of the Jewish leaders in his day, nobody disputes this. I don't see how very harsh criticism against of the Jews of his day, while still referring to their God as his father and citing Jewish scriptures authoritatively can in any way lead to the conclusion that Jesus is rejected Judaism as such let alone thinks that the God of Judaism is an evil Demiurge and material creation is bad.
If you don't come in with a preconceived Marcionite notion it is very obvious John is a Jewish book.
Marcion didn't use John. His gospel was a version of Luke, so «Marcionite» is the wrong label. And I agree John is Jewish. The problem is the next step: very obviously «Jewish» is not the opposite of «Gnostic». The Apocryphon of John is very obviously a midrash on Genesis 1–9. The Logos as God's agent of creation comes very obviously from Philo, an Alexandrian Jew. The rabbis very obviously had to condemn the «two powers in heaven» heresy among Jews (Alan Segal, Two Powers in Heaven, 1977).
Logos Christology is just orthodox Christianity and it is indeed well known that is has precedent in Philo and can be related to the two powers in heaven idea. I don't really see how that has anything to do with gnosticism. I was specifically talking about Marcionism because I was replying to your original post where you suggest some passages in John should be read as Jesus mocking the God of the Jews, rather than being the Jewish Messiah sent by Yahweh. And John being Jewish, in the sense that the book cites Jewish scripture all the time and other examples I mentioned, makes any such reading seem very implausible to me. If somebody wanted to write a book where Jesus mocks the God of the Jews, why is that God called his father? Why cite Jewish scriptures? Why call him Christ (which is the Greek translation of Messiah, a term from Judaism)?
Even 'Christ' is a term from Judaism… Jesus refers to himself as 'the Son of Man', a term taken from the book of Daniel. Jesus in Hebrew means 'Yahweh saves', why would that be his name if Yahweh is an evil Demiurge which Jesus tries to free us from?
«Christ» and «Son of Man» are standard in Gnostic texts. In the Apocryphon of John, a voice from heaven announces «The Human exists and the Son of the Human» (NHC II 14). The Gospel of Mary says «the Son of Man is within you» (ibid. 8). The Christ of the Apocryphon is the «anointed» Self-Generated One.
In Daniel it's not The Son of Man but a son of man. This was an idiom for just a man. It was used to denote a humanoid angel coming down. It's controversial among scholars what relationship the NT The Son Of Man has to this.
I mainly mentioned these examples, because the reading offered by you in the original post was specifically Marcionite, not merely Gnostic. So I was trying to argue that any readings of passages in John as a complete rejection of Judaism are extremely implausible, given all these Jewish elements throughout the book. These terms clearly come from Judaism even if in the 2nd century some gnostic texts also used these terms. I think it makes more historical sense to view John in light of Second Temple Judaism from which it arose (technically being finished just a bit after that period), than gnosticism for which we don't have any widely accepted evidence before the middle of the 2nd century.
The earliest Christian texts are Paul's, and they are written by an ex-Jew. They also speak of «the god of this age» who «has blinded the minds of the unbelievers» (2 Cor 4:4). They say «the rulers of this age» crucified the Lord of glory without understanding what they did (1 Cor 2:8). They say the law was «ordained through angels by a mediator» (Gal 3:19), and that the Galatians were enslaved to «the elemental spirits» (Gal 4:3, 9). In Marcion's Paul, a lot of stuff about Abraham and so on is missing, so it's not as Jewish as you want it to be.
On the rhetoric, since it's carrying a lot of the argument: «clearly» (twice), «very obvious», «all the time», «I could go on and on», «simply completely untenable», «overwhelming». None of that adds light. Your argument moves in steps that each need their own proof:
John contains Jewish material. Therefore John is a Jewish book. Therefore the earliest Christian texts are Jewish. Therefore an early Gnostic Christianity is untenable.
I accept the first step and partly the second. The third and fourth don't follow, because the second-century readers who knew John the Valentinians.
I agree that John isn't the oldest Christian book, I meant that remark more as pointing to a wider context, not just John, but all of the earliest Christian literature we have is steeped in Judaism, cites Jewish scripture authoritatively, treats Jesus as the Messiah (again a concept from Judaism). This goes for basically all the canonical books, the apostolic fathers, the shepherd of Hermas, the Didache. This is also very much true for Paul, who did indeed produce the earliest Christian writing. Why would you think Paul is an ex-Jew? Again, he cites Jewish scripture as authoritative all the time, he refers to Jesus as the Messiah, he talks about concepts from Jewish theology like the Messiah establishing a new covenant, etc. To me it seems a more coherent reading that Paul was a devout Jew who originally thought the followers of Jesus were a heretical sect following a false messiah and then through a religious experience came to be convinced that Jesus was in fact the Messiah and his followers were the true form of Judaism. I'm pretty sure Paul would never think of himself as having converted to a different religion, but simply as having been convinced of the claim that Jesus is in fact the Messiah.
Again, I'm specifically trying to refute your reading of Jesus somehow opposing the God of Israel as an evil Demiurg, rather than being presented as the Messiah sent by the God of Israel. I think arguing for the Jewishness of John and other early Christian texts, does refute any sort of proto-Marcionism as the earliest form of Christianity.
shamgar
robophobe
6d ago
It's quite possible John should start at 1:19. The beginning hymn looks like an interpolation to some scholars. It is widely believed by scholars that 1 John and 2 John are later writings meant to reign in a lot of the Gospel of John, so we know people were active trying to tone it down. Or it wasn't inserted later. Or it was inserted later but not by the proto-Orthodox. It's hard to tell because it can fit with gnosticism.
I don't see a way in which Christ being identified with the divine logos through which everything was created is compatible with gnosticism.
Generally positing passages as interpolations without textual evidence to me often feels like circular reasoning; somebody comes up with a theory, another scholar points out texts which seem to disprove said theory and then the claim is made all those texts are later interpolations. Without any textual evidence it seems more prudent to simply reject the theory if there is a bunch of conflicting evidence, rather than positing further theory that the contrary evidence must be a later interpolation. If you have examples of scholars who support the opening of John being a later interpolation I would be interested by the way, because I have never encountered that theory so I'd be curious to see how scholars argue for it.
Besides, this was simply the first example of a text relating John to Judaism or clearly saying things incompatible with gnosticism. If you simply read through John you will find OT prophets cited approvingly, references to the God of the Jews as Jesus' father, etc. all the time. If you don't come in with a preconceived Marcionite notion it is very obvious John is a Jewish book. Every couple of verses imagery from the OT is referenced, the OT gets cited approvingly a bunch of times, Jesus describes the temple in Jerusalem as "my fathers house" (2:16-17). Even 'Christ' is a term from Judaism (i.e. Messiah, Hebrew for 'the Anointed One'). Jesus refers to himself as 'the Son of Man', a term taken from the book of Daniel. Jesus in Hebrew means 'Yahweh saves', why would that be his name if Yahweh is an evil Demiurge which Jesus tries to free us from?
In the very chapter you cite in the OP where Jesus rebukes the Jews and uses the "your father the devil" language, a few verses later in 8:54 he says:
It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, ‘He is our God.’ Clearly, Jesus calls the God of the Jews his father, so you can't read the text a few verses earlier as if Jesus is rejecting the God of the Jews as an evil Demiurge.
I could go on and on. I understand the intuition when reading some harsh texts in the OT juxtaposed to texts about love and forgiveness and such in the NT. Or if you hate the material world and you read about the Creator God in the OT and then a few isolated verses out of context contrasting "the flesh" and "the spirit" in the NT. Maybe you think Marcionism or Gnosticism makes sense, but simply looking at the historical evidence the earliest Christian texts we have are very Jewish. They don't teach anything about a Demiurge, they clearly identify Jesus as the Jewish messiah and the son of the God of the Jews. They cite Jewish scripture authoritatively, the use a plethora of Jewish terms and symbols to explain who Jesus is. The idea that some sort of Marcionism or Gnosticism was the original version of Christianity is simply completely untenable in the face of the overwhelming amount of Jewishness we find in the oldest Christian texts we have.
shamgar
robophobe
7d ago
Take a look at the opening of John, I quote here John 1:9-11
9 The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. 10 He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.
In the context this is very clearly talking about Jesus, so Jesus preaching against the Demiurge of gnosticism identified with the Hebrew God seems very implausible if the author of the same book you quote in support also claims the world was made through Jesus. Also the interpretation of the Jewish people rejecting their own messiah, which you find implausible, is kind of literally stated here in the intro to the book "He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him".
shamgar
robophobe
11d ago
If you want my prophecy; the internet will be so flooded with AI slop that it will just kind of become intractable meaningless drivel to everyone, confusing all the comfy little online bubbles with like-minded people we've been building. Thus we will be forced to abandon the digital world and go outside, touch grass and connect with our actual physical neighbours. Pretty much literally the tower of Babel. The SV techno-capitalists have tried to reach the Heavens and build their techno-singularity AI god to unify all humanity around it, but God stooped down to check out what on earth these clowns were up to, and promptly cursed them with language models confusing their language leading to a breakdown of the ultra-centralised technological tower of Babel and once again dispersing humanity throughout the world.
This is pure Luddite wishful thinking and cope by the way, I'm not making any real predictions.
shamgar
robophobe
12d ago
I agree the AI discussion is boring, because the things being discussed are simply speculations about an empirical and technical question which will be answered for all to see in the coming years.
However I do think there is some potential of a genuine culture war along luddite versus technologist lines, or whatever you want to call the two camps. To be sure, this is a more general question concerning the impact of technology on our lives both individually and societally, but I think the recent developments around AI are bringing this to the fore and it isn't a simple empirical question, but a philosophical and ethical one, i.e. what do we want technology to do and how is the technology currently being built affecting our lives and our culture? This is in principle completely orthogonal to whether you are an AI skeptic or a think AGI is around the door.
It's also something which has the potential to cause some genuine discussion in this place, since I think our members run the full gamut from "modernity was a mistake" to "I can't wait for my transhumanist utopia".
shamgar
robophobe
1mo ago
Eco-Conservatism
Well, I've never used that label to describe myself and I don't think I will anytime soon, but nonetheless guilty as charged I suppose. I've always been convinced that conserving nature is conservative, not progressive. I've read too much Tolkien as a teenager, so now I'm immune to the pervasive but incoherent culture war dichotomy of our age which somehow imagines destroying nature in favour of economic liberalism as conservative and opposing that as progressive. Scrolling down a bit, in "other matches" it gives Christian Democracy and Distributism, which are labels I'm more likely to identify with, so fair enough. Contrary to a lot of these types of political tests I feel like this one actually captured my political values pretty well.
- 93% match to Eco-Conservatism
- Your internal tension: Liberty and Traditionalist at the same time;
Only 15 out of the 223 ideologies in the catalogue hold both of these positions. Closest matches: Conservative Liberalism, Mutualism, Minarcho-Mutualism - Countries closest to you Old Swiss Confederacy, Lebanon, Holy Roman Empire, Bhutan
- Countries furthest from you: Soviet Union, North Korea, Maoist China
- Figures Closest to you: Pope Leo XIV, Jacques Maritain, G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien
- Figures furthest from you: Joseph Stalin, Joseph Goebbels, Che Guevara
shamgar
robophobe
1mo ago
While it is not as formalized as the traditional monastic practices you bring up, I think for a lot of Christians' personal devotion in terms of prayer and Bible reading does have some overlap with more contemplative practices even if Protestants (or at least Evangelicals) typically don't talk about it in those terms. Protestants are definitely encouraged to take some time and read Scripture and pray on their own. Maybe a more formal structure of doing this like Lectio Divina can probably be a useful tool to do this, but it seems to me that a Protestant who starts his day with 15 minutes of personal Bible reading and prayer is fundamentally doing the same thing as somebody starting his day with 15 minutes of Lectio Divina.
One thing I see around me with secular people who are talking about yoga and mindfulness and mediation and stuff, is that their spirituality seems to very self-centred. A lot of naval-gazing and thinking very hard about your own feelings, but not so much transcendence. I know very little about hinduism and buddhism so I am not claiming this tendency is representative of those religions and their spiritual practices and I am sure this tendency is simply a degeneration of such practices wrought by modern western hyper-individualism. But in general I feel like in the modern western world people spend too much time sitting at home alone naval-gazing - the homo incurvatus in se, which st. Augustine talked about. If anything I feel like most people should be told to stop thinking so much about themselves and their own feelings and to start thinking more about the world around them and the people that inhabit it.
That being said, besides going out more and relating to others (and the Other) learning how to do introspection in a good and healthy way through contemplative prayer might be an important part of the cure for the homo incurvatus in se as well. The condition I am here lamenting might be caused by qualitative problems with introspection as much as quantitive ones. The solution would not just be less introspection, but also better introspection. So I don't necessarily oppose the general point of your post to be clear.
shamgar
robophobe
2mo ago
A while ago I saw somebody complain somewhere on the internet about a bunch of young Amish guys causing some annoyance to him. I don't remember the exact details, but something like they would take a shortcut over his property with their buggies and it would destroy some grass or something. Again, my memory isn't clear about the details, I seem to recall the poster put up a sign saying its private property or something and it was ignored and he was asking for advice on what to do. Multiple highly upvoted comments suggested he go find a local elder and tell him about it and the elder would make sure it would stop. Everybody in the thread seemed convinced that this would be pretty much guaranteed to work. If Amish youngsters are causing problems you can apparently just talk to an elder in their community and the problem is solved.
Personally, I would like the Western world to stop being individualist liberals who don't feel any responsibility for their communities and would rather have them act like the Amish in this regard. If the Amish elder in the anecdote above would have replied "people are morally responsible for the things they actually do, why are you coming to me? I didn't do anything", considering the subject of this anecdote already put up a sign which got ignored, he would have to escalate to the police or something. I think people should be in communities and communities should hold their members responsible to a moral standard. If somebody from a community does something bad and they can get away with it without getting into trouble with their community, that says something about their community.
Of course, this reasoning presupposes people actually are in a healthy community. In some specific cases I think the above logic does permit some sort of group judgement. In other cases people might have innate communal intuitions which might not do their job properly in the current unnatural hyper-individualistic societies we find ourselves in where we offload any responsibility for our fellow men unto the government.
shamgar
robophobe
3mo ago
Has this not been reported at all in US media?
Over here in the Netherlands it's like frontpage news in mainstream media and it creates a lot of commotion on more European heavy parts of social media as well as far as I can tell. Obviously happenings in Spain will be a bit more relevant for other European countries than in the US, but I would think a seemingly orchestrated event where 50 thousand migrants storm a border and cross illegally into a Western country would get at least a little bit of attention in the US.
shamgar
robophobe
3mo ago
I saw it yesterday and I liked it a lot. It's definitely not perfect and I can see certain things that could ruin it for people, but overall I think if you enjoy Christopher Nolan films in general, you will enjoy this one. I'll try to say some things about it without spoilers.
Two major things I could see ruining it for some Mottizens and why they didn't ruin it for me:
-
Culture war. My impression is the culture war nonsense is pretty superficial, so for me personally it didn't bother me too much. Okay, race swapping Helen is silly, but I don't feel like the culture war stuff affected the interpretation and the themes of the story. I feel like Nolan genuinely had a vision for this film that doesn't have much to do with the culture war du jour. I didn't get the idea that this is some conscious progressive subversion of the original story at all. I think all of the actors that were complained about beforehand as diversity hires, did a fine job or at least not a bad enough job to ruin the film for me. In terms of less superficial stuff, the only culture stuff that popped into my mind while watching the film had to do with the fact that the theme of hospitality plays a major role in the film, which it also does in the book btw. There was a line or two where I was thinking, maybe they want me to think about immigration or something in relation to this hospitality stuff, but if that's the case, the film is sending a very ambiguous message about it and not just pandering to progressive culture war memes. Honestly, the fact I was thinking about immigration culture war here might well be culture war brainrot on my side.
-
If you are a history nerd and care a lot about adaptations being super faithful to the books and historically accurate and such, there is probably a lot to get hung up on in this film. All of the armor and boats and stuff have nothing to do with Bronze Age Greek stuff. There are some shots in flashbacks of Agamemnon in armor at Troy and frankly he looks more like batman than like anything authentically Greek. For me it probably helped somewhat that I only read parts of the Odyssey like 15 years ago or something during Ancient Greek lessons in high school. I had some overall familiarity with the story, but when something surprising happened to me I couldn't be sure if this is some detail that I haven't read or forgotten about or whether this was a deviation from the source material. There are one or two hamfisted interpretations/themes in there where I thought it would have been better if he didn't spell it out as much as he does. On the other hand some Nolanisms were actually incorporated skillfully in harmony with the source material. Nolan always plays around with time and non-linear storytelling, but the original source material is also somewhat non-linear, so that actually worked surprisingly well.
I think those are the two major things I think could ruin the film for some people who are sensitive to those issues. Now onto two things I really liked.
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When we compare it to the 2004 Troy film, one massive difference in which Nolan is much more faithful to the source material: it includes a bunch of supernatural stuff. If you've ever read a fragment of Homer, you will know that the gods aren't vague background things, they are very much actively involved in the story. Honestly, if anything, we probably should have had even more and more direct involvement of the gods than Nolan gives us, but I think Nolan gives us about as much gods as modern Western audiences can handle without it becoming goofy.
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The characters at times behaved not at all like modern westerns. That is to say, while some influence of contemporary morality and values that we all take for granted is impossible to avoid in something like this, otherwise the film would probably be completely unwatchable for modern audiences, there is a degree of violence and brutality that is at least somewhat trying to represent the original Bronze Age story, rather than sanitizing everything for modern audiences.
Overall, if you're so fed up with culture stuff that you immediately rage-quite when you see a silly raceswap even if it is somewhat superficial and doesn't affect the underlying story, you are probably not going to enjoy this film. Otherwise, if you enjoy other Nolan films, I can recommend seeing it. It isn't perfect, but I personally enjoyed it a lot.
shamgar
robophobe
3mo ago
I think in your disdain of AI-critics you need to distinguish between people who are skeptical of AI's purported abilities and those who think it is evil, at least in the way it is currently being built.
To take your proposal for LLM-moderation as an example, I personally am happy to accept that it could work in some form, at least in this context I'm not a skeptic of AI's abilities. Nevertheless I would be very worried about letting openAI or Anthropic or some other big tech company run by people I personally consider to be insane or evil or quite possibly both to run the moderation of this place. Considering common complaints in these parts about the moderation of social media, it seems to me that the techno-capitalists ideas about moderation don't exactly match the mores of this community. If you can implement it in such a way that the castellan of our motte Zorba and his trusted moderators are in full control of the LLM, like you use an opensource LLM and you run it on your own server or something, then I wouldn't be opposed to automating some rote moderation work with an LLM. But if we seek to be free and independent to run this community by our own standards, making our moderation dependent on tech companies with all sorts of incentives that don't align with ours seems misguided.
Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
~ Frank Herbert
shamgar
robophobe
3mo ago
Yeah I was thinking mostly of trans stuff when I said that. I agree with you that our culture is very hypocritical and incoherent when it comes to this, which is the very tension I was trying to point out. Which is why the very sentence after the one you quote says:
Ironically the same people who make such accusation often have little issue with telling bodybuilders on gear or transhumanists that they are insane and should accept their natural body (which is correct in my opinion, I'd just like them to extend this to gender related transhumanism as well).
I'm happy to add ugly men to that list (or ugly women when they can't frame their vanity as transgressive feminism trying to dismantle the patriarchy trying to control their sexuality or something like that). I have no clue what your personal struggles were of course, but I will say fixing some sort of obvious deformity or a scar or something to me is qualitatively very different than trying to look like another gender, trying to look half your age or trying to have cartoon action figure musculature or unnatural gigantic boobs or something. Depending on the specifics I might well still come down on the "make peace with the body you were given" side, but I have much more sympathy for somebody who feels insecure about some unattractive feature of their body and just wants to look normal, compared to people who want to look like a transhuman abomination.
There is a strange tension in contemporary western culture. On the one hand we are bombarded with platitudes about how the good life consists of being free to be yourself, i.e. the postmodern ethic of self-actualization. On the other hand when your desires clash with who you actually are in reality and you for instance end up with body dysphoria, we are told that if you think people should be themselves, you are a horrible reactionary bigot and paradoxically get accused of not letting people be themselves. Ironically the same people who make such accusation often have little issue with telling bodybuilders on gear or transhumanists that they are insane and should accept their natural body (which is correct in my opinion, I'd just like them to extend this to gender related transhumanism as well).
I think a key to understanding this problem is that there is an unspoken assumption that your true self is primarily to be found in your desires. This is interestingly a complete inversion of the more negative view of the "passions" which most premodern Western thinkers had (both pagan and Christian). Traditionally passions are considered to be fleeting, unstable and for a good life one needs to learn how to control the passions lest the passions control you. I don't know much about eastern thought, but my superficial stereotype of Buddhism also includes a negative view of the passions. Much philosophical work has been done and is being done with regards to the question of what a self is or whether a self even exists and I will not make a judgment on that question in this comment, but at least I agree with the ancients that the passions are a particularly implausible and silly candidate for locating one's self.
This unspoken interpretation of self-actualization as maximally indulging ones passions is in my opinion the cause of much of the cultural woes of contemporary Western society. Passions being fleeting, unstable and insatiable, it is no coincidence that our culture is reaching ever sillier ways of actualizing ones true self. "The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing". Once we get people telling us that amputating perfectly healthy parts of their body is the only way they will ever be able to really be themselves or pursuing literal vampirism to extend oneself throughout time, we should maybe pause and think what on earth went wrong in our culture. I believe to recover from this madness we need to regain a sense of some sort of human nature and when our passions point at things that are at odds with human nature, one's true self is to be found in human nature and not in said passions. Things only get their beauty and meaning and identity from their place as a part of a meaningful whole. In other words, we need to recover the value of limits, moderation and propriety, but limits are anathema to a Left that seeks to emancipate us from all hierarchy and a Techno-Right that wants to move fast and break things.
From the Centuries of Meditations by Thomas Traherne:
"His Power bounded, greater is in might,
Than if let loose, ‘twere wholly infinite.
He could have made an endless sea by this,
But then it had not been a sea of bliss.
Did waters from the centre to the skies
Ascend, ’twould drown whatever else we prize.
The ocean bounded in a finite shore,
Is better far because it is no more.
No use nor glory would in that be seen,
His power made it endless in esteem.
Had not the Sun been bounded in its sphere,
Did all the world in one fair flame appear,
And were that flame a real Infinite
’Twould yield no profit, splendor, nor delight.
Its corps confined, and beams extended be
Effects of Wisdom in the Deity.
One star made infinite would all exclude,
An earth made infinite could ne’er be viewed:
But one being fashioned for the other’s sake,
He, bounding all, did all most useful make
And which is best, in profit and delight
Tho’ not in bulk, they all are infinite."
shamgar
robophobe
4mo ago
Yeah and also there is a surprising amount of overlap between the people who think AI is going to plausibly kill us all and the people actually involved in building cutting edge AI.
"Hey guys ASI is an existential risk. Btw have checked out this new model we've made, it's so awesome we're going to get ASI any day now."
Hmmm all the normies think we're either insane or evil or both. Wherever could they have gotten that idea?
shamgar
robophobe
4mo ago
I used to be firmly on the side of Brave New World being the relevant dystopia novel for our world rather than 1984. I've recently reread the space trilogy and I am forced to come to the conclusion that if half of what the techno-capitalists dreamed up turns out to be more than a power fantasy by a bunch of delusional nerds, the Space trilogy might turn out to be the best literary description of the evil facing us presently.
shamgar
robophobe
4mo ago
Do you think Christians should completely abstain from politics? In the end somebody has to run the country and I cannot imagine a version of Christianity that doesn't at least espouse some values that will inform how Christians think a country ought to be run. If you think Christians should completely abstain from politics, what do you think Constantine or Clovis should have done after converting to Christianity? How should a country be governed when almost all of its citizens profess Christianity, like most Western countries up until quite recently?
shamgar
robophobe
4mo ago
I can never understand the trad Christian love for the Russian state as some enabler of Christian virtue - it's really really not the case.
My experience as a European member of a conservative church is that this is mostly an online and political phenomenon and doesn't represent people who actually go to Church. It might be different in the USA, I don't have any info on the ground from over there, but over here in the Netherlands right wing populist politicians will exhibit sometimes the trad love for Russia and they will make some vague remarks about our country being Christian or whatever, but none of those politicians actually go to Church and if you push them all of them will admit they are cultural Christians and don't actually believe any traditional Christian dogmas. Just like you can get more liberal politicians to sometimes dress up progressive politics with vaguely Christian language about love or whatever, the right wing populists will dress up their anti Muslim sentiment with some vague rhetoric about us being a traditionally Christian nation or whatever. In both cases it is just superficial rhetoric trying to appeal to some cultural memes and doesn't really mean anything. In practice, people who vote for those parties mostly don't actually attend Church regularly and people who do attend Church regularly almost never vote for those parties. Maybe in other countries actual trads are more tempted to vote for the right wing populist parties as the lesser evil, but in the Netherlands having no electoral threshold and proportional representation in our parliament, we are spoiled with not just one, but two actual traditional Christian political parties and almost everybody who regularly attends a theologically conservative Church votes for them and both of these parties are not pro Russia.
shamgar
robophobe
5mo ago
I agree the NRx (or whatever label you want to slap on it) and Christianity are very much opposed and its a weird quirk of American politics that anybody would think otherwise.
Your framing of the issue is rather bizarre however. The way you talk about it, one would almost think that empathy and helping the poor and the vulnerable is some sort of leftist and progressive invention. In reality of course, Christianity has promoted these things since its inception more than 1500 years before anything that can be meaningfully called 'leftism' or 'progressivism' ever enters the scene. It would be more accurate in my opinion to state something like leftism took a Christian virtue and isolated it from the rest of the Christian worldview and rather predictably ended up in a rather unbalanced and silly place. Recognizing this silliness in the leftist project, the alt-right/NRx/whatever simply completed the process of the secularist revolution and threw out the last remaining bit of the moral order of Christendom.
shamgar
robophobe
5mo ago
I think pro-life people are typically opposed to IVF exactly because of the reason you point out.
"AI is an existential risk and that's a good thing actually" sure is one hell of a take. Although to be fair, I think this type of misanthropic techno-millenarianism is in the end nothing but the inherent telos of transhumanism or even just of the techno-capitalist "technology is going to solve all our problems" vibe. While I despise your ideology, I can at least applaud your honesty. Rather than the Straussian world-salad of somebody like Thiel or sugar coated scifi dreams of a lot of techbros, you at least have the clarity of mind to see where your ideas lead and the guts to say the quiet part out loud.
shamgar
robophobe
5mo ago
Can the wordcells of the Motte come up with an alliteration for the title of a weekly finance thread on Saturday, to make it fit in with the other weekly threads? Maybe Solvency Saturday?
shamgar
robophobe
6mo ago
Hmm I confess that while I've heard about Suarez being an important thinker at the time, I'm not super familiar with him. I wasn't aware he had significant influence in the Reformed world. I know for instance Gisbertus Voetius, who is one of the most influential theologians in the 17th century in the Netherlands, explicitly defended Aristotelian philosophy against Cartesian philosophy, including also specifically on metaphysics arguing against the extreme nominalism of Cartesian philosophy. But yeah maybe I need to moderate my claim then to saying that the majority of orthodox reformed theologians were realists instead of calling it "pretty much universal". Thanks for providing a counter example to my claim!
In any case, Suarez himself was a Roman-Catholic so at least with regards to differences between Roman-Catholicism and the Reformed tradition I think it is fair to say that metaphysics is not an area of conflict between confessional Protestantism and Roman-Catholicism.
shamgar
robophobe
6mo ago
How does God work and will (1)? Does God have a an array of potential actions, any of which he can actualize? Yet this runs the risk of these potential actions being "outside" God. Does God create the potentials as he actualizes them? Thus no "possibles" exist for God, simply "actuals"? This also could be seen as a constraint on God and limit his radical freedom. Both these potential concepts of God’s will and freedom (of which I’m sure there are hundreds of alternative concepts) seem to be operating at a level above how Barron conceptualizes God’s freedom. Put crassly, Barron seems to be hinting that God could not "make a triangle a square", that is, that God is constrained by logical impossibilities. But this is such a small view of God. God creates our minds and universe. Our minds invent or discover things like logic, or define things like squares or circles. Whether spawned by our intellect or embedded in the structure of the cosmos, these concepts (including logic!) are part of Creation itself. God created the conditions under which we can model physical reality with math, structure, and logic. Logic is a model. Logos is Truth. Logic is created. Logos is the Creator.
I'm a bit late to the party, but having just gotten around to reading this post, this stood out to me. Personally I feel like saying "God cannot make a square triangle" does not diminish God's omnipotence at all, nor does it entail some sort of Logic that exists independent of God to which God is beholden. A "square triangle" is simply not a thing in any sense whatsoever, so saying "God cannot make a square triangle" does not entail saying there is a thing God cannot do. Any triangular object can be made into a square object by God, but then by definition it ceases to be triangular. If the words "triangle" and "square" refer to something real, "square triangle" cannot refer to something real. To be clear, I'm not suggesting "triangle" and "square" refer to uncreated things that exist independent of God, I'm simply suggesting that they are real things and that this necessarily suggests "square triangle" is nonsensical sequence of symbols. Saying "God cannot make a square triangle" is identical to saying "God cannot make a weiuytrni". I suppose if somebody would ask me "Can God make a square triangle?" I would reply by saying that question is incoherent rather than saying "no". But if somebody asks me "Can God make something that is logically impossible?" I will definitely answer "no", because I believe logical impossibilities are incoherent nonsense.
To the best of my understanding, my view is simply metaphysical realism and the vast majority of Roman Catholics (very much including Barron), Eastern Orthodox and confessional Protestants are all metaphysical realists and this is not an area of contention between these traditions. Some Catholic apologists have claimed Luther was a metaphysical nominalist because he was taught in university by nominalists, but Luther doesn't write a lot about philosophy and he writes very negatively about the scholasticism he knows from his own education. And besides that, once we get a more fleshed out Lutheran and Reformed tradition in the period of Protestant Orthodoxy, both Lutheran and Reformed theologians are pretty much universally metaphysical realists as far as I know.
This is a solved problem. Might be a bit awkward sometimes, but surely preferable to castration.
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