ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
Blogger, Christian convert, general strange one. https://shapesinthefog.substack.com/
User ID: 3709
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1hr ago
I agree though that act 2 is great compared to act 1 so far lol.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1hr ago
I am very lost on choral chambers. Explored everywhere I saw and am kinda stuck. ALAS! I want to look stuff up but would hate to spoil more.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
5hr ago
I stopped playing Silksong after I bought a 5070 Ti last Sunday. Thought it would be weird not to play something 3D. Clair Obscur has been bought, downloaded, but I haven't launched it yet.
Clair Obscur is amazing. Cyberpunk was kinda cool I guess, but idk I couldn't get that into it. Played it for a while but never finished it.
Clair Obscur though, that game is a work of art man. Seriously once in a generation. Do it.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
8hr ago
The first upgrade barely changes anything. You still take the same amount of hits to kill most enemies. Kind of a let down compared to hollow knight.
Idk about the second upgrade, you have to finish act 1 to get it and im still working on the last boss.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
9hr ago
Still playing Silksong. Still getting rekt. I'm now stuck at the Last Judge, but at least there's more to explore now than when I was stuck on Moorwing. That was horrible hah.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
10hr ago
dude yes!!! YES YES YES I literally bought some last night. love you for this.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
10hr ago
Though it must be frustrating for you mods, I have to admit I find it kind of fun that there's a sort of game of subterfuge going on with old banned posters re-emerging under aliases. Like a classic spy novel.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
11hr ago
What's your favorite comfort food when you have a cold? I have a cold.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1d ago
For what it’s worth, regardless of current Catholic teachings, the early Christians (pre Constantine) would never have advocated for political violence whatsoever. They were martyred in the hundreds and saw it as a gift to be martyred for Christ.
Personally while I’m not sure I ascribe to that level of extremity, I am confident that we are far, far from morally justifying any political violence in the U.S.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
Thanks for the clarification. I’ll admit I get pretty heated on this topic. I’m still a relatively new convert so I have some of the zeal alive in me, forgive me for using it improperly.
We do agree a lot more than I originally thought! I suppose your optimism clouded my judgment into thinking you were saying the task was easy, but upon a re read I can tell that’s something I simply projected onto your reply.
I also agree that traditional values and just a general focus on integrity and virtue would go a looooong way towards solving modern dysfunction.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
The sad conclusion of all this seems to be: the romantic notion that Science™ can be trusted as a process seems to completely wrong. Science is only as a good as the people doing, and the people doing it at the moment don't seem much good. If a conflict between their scientific principles, and their political principles arises, scientists seem to reliably choose politics.
The central myth and in my view issue of modern discourse is this idea that science, more specifically empiricism, has metaphysical and moral value, and can be used to make claims in such fields. It absolutely can't. Empiricism cannot make value judgements and be used as a cudgel to force metaphysical arguments about what a man or woman is. The second you begin to cross that line, your vaunted neutral, empirical viewpoint falls apart.
Unfortunately if we truly accepted this as a society, we would basically have to rewrite our institutions from the ground up anyway, a truly harrowing task. We'll see if empiricism is defeated anytime soon.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
I strongly disagree. Technology very dramatically alters the ways societies can be shaped. While values perhaps can be neutrally separated from technology in a completely arbitrary sense, at the very least society must be arranged far differently than it was in the past.
For instance, in the past the Church and various monarchies relied on the fact that information flow was far more easily controlled amongst the peoples they governed, and indeed in history itself. With modern technology, that is no longer the case. Or even if you can re institute that picture, it would be far less secure and stable than it was in the past.
It may indeed be easier to learn about a trad society and traditional ways of living with modern technology, but that does not mean that overall social stability or status hierarchies can simply be reimposed with a trivial change in values. I believe @coffee_enjoyer understands this as well as @Tretiak, @MayorofOysterville, and others who commented on this post.
This type of response, blithely asserting that a return to traditional values with modern technology without a serious understanding (or at least discussion around) the history and the ways societal configuration has dramatically changed, is a large part of what makes me frustrated with the RETVRN movement as a whole. After all, we largely share values and want the same thing, I simply think that instrumentally we need far more intellectual prowess brought to bear on the problem.
Again, I think our core disagreement here is that "values" can somehow be instilled and kept in a society completely separated and in a vacuum from technology. There are many great writers like Ellul, Heidegger, McLuhan, and others who have persuasively argued that this is in no way the case.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
The 'traditional' view of Tradition is that of a seed which is slowly growing into a tree.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3d ago
The guy I quoted, Ross Arlen Tiekne, Yoshi Matsumoto, David Armstrong, just to name a few off the top of my head.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3d ago
Not sure what you consider semi-prominent, but frankly yeah a lot of the left at least try to display it and often do convincingly, despite the fact that they're wrong. For instance I think Ezra Klein, while he is disastrously wrong on many fronts, does display charity and love.
Many Christian writers on substack with smaller followings display charity and love, though I'll admit they aren't necessarily prominent or even semi-prominent. I suppose anger and fear do sell.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3d ago
I agree and I think this is my point. The average person wants this, but instead of trying to ask the questions which need to be answered to achieve a truly stable liberal culture with a traditionalist bent, they are focused on fear mongering and such.
In general I think we’re aligned, I suppose this is more of a critique of the popular traditionalist intellectual than it is the movement as a whole. Im extremely sympathetic myself.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3d ago
I think this is true of the average believer as well. Perhaps because of perverse dynamics, it does not seem to be true of the average public intellectual or writer who represents the traditional view.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3d ago
Fair, I can’t necessarily comment on the life satisfaction. I do believe that industrialization and modernization tend to crater general happiness levels so I’m not arguing on that front.
You were making an economic argument above though!
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3d ago
Have you read any of David Bentley Hart's work? He's my favorite modern apologist at the moment, and you might like him. Especially The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. He makes strong arguments for how the Gospel can be instrumentally useful while still supernatural.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3d ago
Hah I agree having studied history! Traditionally women were masters of the house and household economy. Men would make MAJOR decisions, but by and large the household finances were firmly in the realm of women.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3d ago
I think most of this can be explained by the fact that Thailand is a country who's economy is heavily dependent on tourism. When that's the case, they will optimize to make tourists happy over other concerns.
This may feel like a 'healthier' economy to you as a tourist, but I don't think it means the economy is healthier in any other meaningful sense.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3d ago
Weirdly we seem more forgiving in a legal context and less forgiving in a social context.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3d ago
Good points I've actually defended the traditional church hierarchy many times by appealing to this kind of argument.
I suppose I just get fed up sometimes with how uhh well frankly foolish and disconnected much of the church hierarchy seems to me. Not claiming they are, just that I have difficulty understanding their motives. This goes for Catholic and Orthodox and Anglican, btw.
You do make good points though!
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3d ago
A Christ shorn of his supernatural aspects is just a charismatic ascetic who bamboozled some poor and sick people by saying spooky unverifiable nonsense. Judged purely by his personality characteristics and by the very limited record of his non-supernatural deeds, he does not come off as some great hero, nor even a stellar lifestyle role model. (He died unmarried, childless, and with seemingly no wealth, possessions, or notable professional achievements.)
This is very core to the Christian mythos. Let me quote from a recent article I read on Christ and Nothing:
In any event, the purpose behind these indefensibly broad pronouncements—however elliptically pursued—is to aid in recalling how shatteringly subversive Christianity was of so many of the certitudes of the world it entered, and how profoundly its exclusive fidelity to the God of Christ transformed that world. This is, of course, no more than we should expect, if we take the New Testament’s Paschal triumphalism to heart: “Now is the judgment of this world, now will the prince of this world be cast out” (John 12:31); “I have overcome the world” (John 16:33); he is “far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion” and all things are put “under his feet” (Ephesians 1:21-2); “having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15); “he led captivity captive” (Ephesians 4:8); and so on. Still, we can largely absorb Scripture’s talk of the defeat of the devil, the angels of the nations, and the powers of the air, and yet fail to recognize how radically the Gospels reinterpreted (or, as Nietzsche would say, “transvalued”) everything in the light of Easter.
The example of this I find most striking is the account John’s Gospel gives of the dialogue between Christ and Pilate (John 18:28-19:12). Nietzsche, the quixotic champion of the old standards, thought jesting Pilate’s “What is truth?” to be the only moment of actual nobility in the New Testament, the wry taunt of an acerbic ironist unimpressed by the pathetic fantasies of a deranged peasant. But one need not share Nietzsche’s sympathies to take his point; one can certainly see what is at stake when Christ, scourged and mocked, is brought before Pilate a second time: the latter’s “Whence art thou?” has about it something of a demand for a pedigree, which might at least lend some credibility to the claims Christ makes for himself; for want of which, Pilate can do little other than pronounce his truth: “I have power to crucify thee” (which, to be fair, would under most circumstances be an incontrovertible argument).
It is worth asking ourselves what this tableau, viewed from the vantage of pagan antiquity, would have meant. A man of noble birth, representing the power of Rome, endowed with authority over life and death, confronted by a barbarous colonial of no name or estate, a slave of the empire, beaten, robed in purple, crowned with thorns, insanely invoking an otherworldly kingdom and some esoteric truth, unaware of either his absurdity or his judge’s eminence. Who could have doubted where, between these two, the truth of things was to be found? But the Gospel is written in the light of the resurrection, which reverses the meaning of this scene entirely. If God’s truth is in fact to be found where Christ stands, the mockery visited on him redounds instead upon the emperor, all of whose regal finery, when set beside the majesty of the servile shape in which God reveals Himself, shows itself to be just so many rags and briars.
This slave is the Father’s eternal Word, whom God has vindicated, and so ten thousand immemorial certainties are unveiled as lies: the first become last, the mighty are put down from their seats and the lowly exalted, the hungry are filled with good things while the rich are sent empty away. Nietzsche was quite right to be appalled. Almost as striking, for me, is the tale of Peter, at the cock’s crow, going apart to weep. Nowhere in the literature of pagan antiquity, I assure you, had the tears of a rustic been regarded as worthy of anything but ridicule; to treat them with reverence, as meaningful expressions of real human sorrow, would have seemed grotesque from the perspective of all the classical canons of good taste. Those wretchedly subversive tears, and the dangerous philistinism of a narrator so incorrigibly vulgar as to treat them with anything but contempt, were most definitely signs of a slave revolt in morality, if not quite the one against which Nietzsche inveighed—a revolt, moreover, that all the ancient powers proved impotent to resist.
You may also want to read some Girardian thought on the matter of how Christ can be so impactful while being so weak. I have thoroughly enjoyed Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads.
What are the best completed cultivation novels in your mind? I started reverend insanity off the rec of @self_made_human but wasn’t feeling the evil MC vibe.
I’ve read coiling dragon, I shall seal the heavens, cradle, and mother of learning and liked em all. Tried out Warlock of magus world but it’s a little too silly for me so far.
Any thoughts?
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