FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
No bio...
User ID: 1739
I mean I can give you links, but they're all going to add up to "Israeli official says they're not stopping the UN" so I don't think that will do much for you, since you are unwilling to believe anything an Israeli official says.
Israel says it doesn’t limit the truckloads of aid coming into Gaza and that assessments of roads in Gaza are conducted weekly where it looks for the best ways to provide access for the international community.
Col. Abdullah Halaby, a top official in COGAT, the Israeli military agency in charge of transferring aid to the territory, said there are several crossings open.
“We encourage our friends and our colleagues from the international community to do the collection, and to distribute the humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza,” he said.
An Israeli security official who was not allowed to be named in line with military procedures told reporters this week that the U.N. wanted to use roads that were not approved.
He said the army offered to escort the aid groups but they refused.
The U.N. says being escorted by Israel’s army could bring harm to civilians, citing shootings and killings by Israeli troops surrounding aid operations.
MSN:
Former Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy ultimately accused the UN of “unforgivable negligence” in its actions preventing food from reaching Gaza.
“The failure of the UN aid mechanism in Gaza is truly catastrophic. 600 trucks’ worth of food the IDF is urging the UN to pick up. I saw mountains of pasta, lentils, hummus, cooking oil, sugar, and flour,” he wrote on X, accompanying a video of him walking among aid supplies.
For its part, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said trucks traversing Gaza have to contend with traveling through an active war zone, along with hoards of desperate people rushing to get the supplies, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Criminal gangs have also previously attempted to ransack the vehicles as they enter the Strip.
“Taken together, these factors have put people and humanitarian staff at grave risk and forced aid agencies on many occasions to pause the collection of cargo from crossings controlled by the Israeli authorities,” OCHA said in a statement last week.
Interesting that the AP claims the UN doesn't want military escorts because it could bring harm to civilians, while MSN gives us the UN claiming they can't send their aid in because their trucks might be ransacked by gangs. So which is it: do they not want an escort because of potential civilian harms, or are they saying they can't do it without an escort because they'll get robbed? It seems to me that they just want the new Israeli aid organization to fail so that they will let UNRWA back in, and any excuse to keep aid out of Gaza is good enough to blame on the Israelis.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
6d ago
Israel has been asking the UN to send the trucks in, it is the UN who has been refusing to do so as long as the Israelis are the ones distributing it.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
6d ago
I bet you write in books too.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
8d ago
Why would you expect Israel, a liberal democracy, to become an impoverished totalitarian dictatorship solely because we stopped providing them military aid? How would that make them safer from invasion?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10d ago
I've only ever been in one accident, and it was because I stopped at the yellow when I shouldn't have.
It was the middle of winter, and the roads were very icy. I was late noticing the yellow, and I slammed on the brakes. I was able to just barely stop before entering the intersection: but the person behind me was not so lucky, and rear ended me. Technically she was at fault, but I know it was my bad. You can't expect someone to stop that fast on slippery roads, I should have just gone through.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10d ago
If you're the kind of person who writes things like "the color of their soul" then yes, I would agree you are a Four. :-)
Enneagram "tests" are pretty hit and miss, I find the best way to type someone is to teach the types to them and let them type themselves. But based on your comments 4w5 sounds pretty likely for you.
It's true that most of the stuff online is either fluff or paywalled, and there are a lot of expensive workshops out there. You can skip those. If you want to get into it, you really just need to read one book: Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self Discovery, by Don Riso. It has 90% of everything you would ever need to know about the Enneagram, packaged up in a very readable format. You can probably get it at a used bookstore for $10, and it will likely be at your local library.
(Or you can read it online here, if you don't mind being a pirate)
Here's an excerpt from the book on Type Five:
Like the other two members of the Doing Triad, average Fives tend to have problems with security because they fear that the environment is unpredictable and potentially threatening. Fives protect themselves by being extraordinarily observant so that they can anticipate problems in the environment, particularly problems with other people. Their curiosity, their insight, their need to make sense of their perceptions — and eventually, their paranoid tendencies — are all attempts to defend themselves from real or imagined dangers.
When Fives are healthy, they observe reality as it is and are able to comprehend complex phenomena at a glance. In their search for security, however, the perceptions of even average Fives tend to become skewed. They come to premature conclusions about the environment by projecting their faulty interpretations on it. They begin to reduce the complexity of reality to a single, all-embracing idea so that they can defend themselves by having everything figured out. And if they become unhealthy, Fives are the type of persons who take their eccentric ideas to such absurd extremes that they become obsessed with completely distorted notions about reality. Ultimately, unhealthy Fives become paranoid, utterly terrified by the threatening visions which they have created in their minds.
Their problem with anxiety, one of the issues common to the personality types of the Doing Triad, is related to their difficulty with perceiving reality objectively. They are afraid of allowing anyone or anything to influence them or their thoughts. They fear being controlled or possessed by someone else. Ironically, however, even average Fives are not unwilling to be possessed by an idea, as long as the idea has originated with them. Nothing must be allowed to influence their thinking lest their sense of self be diminished, although by relying solely on their own ideas, without testing them in the real world, Fives eventually become out of touch with reality.
The upshot of this is that average to unhealthy Fives are uncertain whether or not their perceptions of the environment are valid. They do not know what is real and what is the product of their minds. They project their anxiety-ridden thoughts and their aggressive impulses into the environment, becoming fearful of the antagonistic forces which seem to be arrayed against them. They gradually become convinced that their peculiar, and increasingly paranoid, interpretation of reality is the way things really are. In the end, they become so terrorized that they cannot act even though they are consumed by anxiety.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10d ago
I will randomly watch anime that my wife is into, and recently started watching "Twin Star Exorcists" My review: if I saw this in middle school I would have been soooooo into this. As a grown man it's pretty cringe, but in a funny way. It is a catalogue of Shonen tropes.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10d ago
Academic and high-class psychologists use Big Five, your average crunchy psychotherapist on the street is more likely to use the Enneagram.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10d ago
If you want personality pseudoscience I recommend the Enneagram over Myers-Briggs. It has a lot more depth. Myers-Briggs is focused on being descriptive, while Enneagram is more focused on being prescriptive. As in, "If I have this kind of personality type, what should I do to be a healthier and happier person?" And the advice is very good in my experience! At least for type Fives, I have not tried the advice for other types and can't testify to their accuracy and effectiveness. But if you're the kind of nut who finds categorizing by personality really fun, then you're probably a type Five anyway.
My wife on a couple different occasions expressed the desire to get a tattoo. Each time I'm like "No. No tattoos. I don't want you to get a tattoo." Naturally she asks me why, and I'm at a loss for words. You just...you don't do that! That's your skin! It's not a piece of paper! Do you want to look like the kind of person who gets tattoos?!
I guess you either grew up in a family with standards* or you didn't.
*My younger brother got a small tattoo, of a line of scripture. Getting a Bible verse tattooed on a discreet part of your body seems like the most innocuous kind of tattoo you could get, but he still hid it from us for years and only admitted it with a lot of sheepishness when he came across a situation where we were bound to see it. This is right and correct.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10d ago
7:1 starts with "judge not" but then immediately explains why you would want to do that: "lest ye be judged". It's saying "If you judge people then God will judge you." It's the exact same idea as 7:2 (which makes sense! 7:2 is literally the next sentence of the sermon!).
It's also worth noting that in John 8 at the end even Jesus (i.e., God) declines to judge her, and then says "Go and sin no more." Which means that acknowledging adultery is a sin is not the kind of judgement he is talking about. He's talking about the punishment part of judgment.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10d ago
I legitimately did not know that converting to another religion means you don't qualify for the Law of Return. What I can't figure out (with five minutes of Googling) is whether that applies to atheist or agnostic Jews. Like, atheism isn't a religion you convert to, right? But it would be weird if Christian Jews were disqualified but atheist Jews weren't.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10d ago
They are a good ally in the region, and we like our allies to be strong. If we decided to stop being an ally Israel would still be able to defend themselves. They have nukes!
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
11d ago
Whats wrong with converting Jews to Christians anyway? Plenty of secular Jews are welcome in Israel, whats wrong with ethnic Jews that are Christian?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
18d ago
And currently the newest Sudanese civil war has displaced around 16 million people and created 4 million refugees, yet I don't see them coming here.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
19d ago
The mature civilizations of this planet are becoming less religious. It would be a mistake to assume the immature civilizations will continue their current trend lines exactly.
It would be a mistake to assume that there is such a thing as a "mature" civilization that all "immature" civilizations will develop into, with the same certainty that children develop into adults. The fact that the USA is far more religious (and has stabilized at a far higher level of religiosity) than Western Europe despite being much richer and more technologically advanced should be enough to demonstrate that civilizations do not all end up in the same place. If sub-Saharan Africa does "mature" and become rich we shouldn't be that confident that they will become much more secular. They may take a different route altogether.
Not to mention a significant percentage of global population is in China, which is extremely secular yet shows signs of growing more religious over time. Now you might (correctly) say that China has its own unique political and cultural circumstances, including the fact that atheism is the state doctrine and religions are legally restricted. That's true! But it is another example of how different countries may take very different paths than from Western Europe.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
19d ago
Why Buddhism? Only 1.1% of Americans are Buddhist. Admittedly that is about the same as the number of Orthodox Christians in the country, but 40% of Americans are Protestants and 19% are Catholics. Do you really think it's likely that two religious groups that are each only 1% of the population are going to outcompete the 60% of Americans who are some other kind of Christian?
Buddhist meditation is certainly popular among the elite class (particularly the West Coast elites) but they take the meditation and leave the religion part, I can't see them pivoting to Orthodoxy.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
19d ago
If current trends continue then the world will be less secular in the future, not more secular.
According to Pew Research (and they're arguably the best at this sort of thing) in 2050 Christianity will stay at a little of 30% of global population, same as it was in 2010, while the religiously unaffiliated will fall from 16.4% of global population to 13.2%. And in the United States the decline of Christianity seems to have leveled off.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
As far as the judgment thing goes, Lewis had some more to say! First, the idea of sin isn't that you avoid sin because God will punish you for it, but because sin is bad in and of itself:
People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, "If you keep a lot of rules I'll reward you, and if you don't I'll do the other thing." I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself.
To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.
As for why you should feel guilty, well, do you think a bad character is something to feel proud about? I'm a coward: I have learned that about myself. I feel shame about it. I'm trying not to be one any longer! I don't think feeling guilty about our flaws is that strange a thing to feel. When we think about God as the ultimate Judge it might be better to focus less on the potential punishment for our crimes, so to speak, then for the fact that who we are will be judged, and judged perfectly. Lewis writes a bit on this as well in his essay "The World's Last Night":
We have all encountered judgments or verdicts on ourselves in this life. Every now and then we discover what our fellow creatures really think of us. I don’t of course mean what they tell us to our faces: that we usually have to discount. I am thinking of what we sometimes overhear by accident or of the opinions about us which our neighbours or employees or subordinates unknowingly reveal in their actions: and of the terrible, or lovely, judgments artlessly betrayed by children or even animals. Such discoveries can be the bitterest or sweetest experiences we have. But of course both the bitter and the sweet are limited by our doubt as to the wisdom of those who judge. We always hope that those who so clearly think us cowards or bullies are ignorant and malicious; we always fear that those who trust us or admire us are misled by partiality. I suppose the experience of the Final Judgment (which may break in upon us at any moment) will be like these little experiences, but magnified to the Nth.
For it will be infallible judgment. If it is favorable we shall have no fear, if unfavorable, no hope, that it is wrong. We shall not only believe, we shall know, know beyond doubt in every fibre of our appalled or delighted being, that as the Judge has said, so we are: neither more nor less nor other. We shall perhaps even realise that in some dim fashion we could have known it all along. We shall know and all creation will know too: our ancestors, our parents, our wives or husbands, our children. The unanswerable and (by then) self-evident truth about each will be known to all.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
Speak my name, and after a week or so I'll probably appear!
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
As someone who came from a Protestant backwater (evangelical non-denominational, essentially) I can attest to that! We didn't have Acquinas or Augustine or Calvin (and we didn't want them either!) but we had Lewis. We adored Lewis!
Why here's a potentially appropriate bit of Lewis now, on how non-Christians often view the idea of sin:
Apart from this linguistic difficulty, the greatest barrier I have met is the almost total absence from the minds of my audience of any sense of sin. This has struck me more forcibly when I spoke to the R.A.F. than when I spoke to students: whether (as I believe) the proletariat is more self-righteous than other classes, or whether educated people are cleverer at concealing their pride, this creates for us a new situation. The early Christian preachers could assume in their hearers, whether Jews, Metuentes, or Pagans, a sense of guilt. (That this was common among Pagans is shown by the fact that both Epicureanism and the mystery religions both claimed, though in different ways, to assuage it.) Thus the Christian message was in those days unmistakably the Evangelium, the Good News. It promised healing to those who knew they were sick. We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy.
The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God in the dock.
It is generally useless to try to combat this attitude, as older preachers did, by dwelling on sins like drunkenness and un-chastity. The modern proletariat is not drunken. As for fornication, contraceptives have made a profound difference. As long as this sin might socially ruin a girl by making her the mother of a bastard, most men recognized the sin against charity which it involved, and their consciences were often troubled by it. Now that it need have no such consequences, it is not, I think, generally felt to be a sin at all. My own experience suggests that if we can awake the conscience of our hearers at all, we must do so in quite different directions. We must talk of Conceit, spite, jealousy, cowardice, meanness, etc. But I am very far from believing that I have found the solution of this problem.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
C. S. Lewis wrote a bit in a letter about the appeal of fantasy over real sex which seems appropriate:
For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back: sending the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides.
And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifice or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival.
Among these shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification is ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself.
Pornography asks far less of us than sex with another person does. If it displeases us we can skip to another bit of porn. We never have to think about pleasing another person, or do something that brings us little pleasure because it brings our partner great pleasure, or think of any needs but our own. Very tempting!
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
It's important to put that verse in context. Paul is saying that if Christ was not raised from the dead, then we will not be either. So when he refers to misery he means that if we are toiling in the hope that we have been saved from our signs and reconciled with God and will be resurrected to eternal life, and that's not true, then we would be the most "miserable".
But Paul doesn't mean "miserable" as in "feeling the emotion of sadness or depression". The Greek word that the KJV translates as "miserable" is "eleeinoteroi". It is used one other place in the Bible: Revelation 3:17: "Because you say, ‘I am rich and have prospered; I need nothing,’ but do not realize that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked,". Now isn't it a bit odd to say that someone believes they are prosperous and need nothing but in fact are miserable in the sense of being sad or depressed? In both cases the word would be better translated as "pitiable". Their condition is miserable, not their emotions: they are in a position worthy of the pity of others. Which is how other translations, like the NIV, translate the word. And certainly it is the case that it is a pitiable position to be in if you believe that your sins are wiped clean and you will be resurrected and that's not actually true.
"If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied."
We also have to keep in mind Paul's audience: Christians were a persecuted minority in the Roman Empire at the time. Unlike modern Mormons, Paul and his audience were daily in danger of beatings, execution, and being thrown to the lions. As he writes a few verses later:
"And as for us, why do we endanger ourselves every hour? I face death every day—yes, just as surely as I boast about you in Christ Jesus our Lord. If I fought wild beasts in Ephesus with no more than human hopes, what have I gained? If the dead are not raised,
“'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.'"
Yeah, I can’t blame you: after all, I don’t believe the UN or Hamas. This war is one of those situations where we won’t really know the truth of what’s going on until it’s a decade or so later and people have had time to investigate. Maybe three decades later, wait for enough people to die who would otherwise be embarrassed.
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