HereAndGone2
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User ID: 4074
HereAndGone2
1d ago
I did not say anything like"I'm going to trigger your over-sensitive fragile little ego.'
You addressed me in terms of "Now I'm not trying to offend you" even when I was explaining it wasn't about being offended, it was weariness with the whole hopeless old debate. If you're presuming that I'm going to be offended by every little thing, then yes it comes across as "your fragile little ego".
To be fair, I do have an itchy trigger finger when commenting on things that are important to me, but consider that reactions are not always going to be coming from a place of being offended?
HereAndGone2
1d ago
If hell was real in the same way that the earth's molten core is real
Newsflash: it ain't. Same way running consecrated wine through a mass spectrometer won't show you that this has turned into blood.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that materialists think everything has to be a stone they can kick or it doesn't exist.
HereAndGone2
1d ago
Even the Pope himself suddenly turns into an agnostic on the topic of hell in spite of Catholic doctrine.
Here we go again. We are required to believe that Hell exists. We are not required to believe that any one person is there, because only God knows for sure. Yep, that includes the worst monster in history you've ever heard of. Likelihood they're in Hell? Very damn high. Pronouncement of absolute certainty they're there? Nope, can't do it.
Let's go back to the 14th century, Hollander translation of Canto XIII, 'Paradiso', "The Divine Comedy" where Dante puts these words into the mouth of St. Thomas Aquinas:
130 'Let the people, then, not be too certain
131 in their judgments, like those that harvest in their minds
132 corn still in the field before it ripens.
133 'For I have seen the briar first look dry and thorny
134 right through all the winter's cold,
135 then later wear the bloom of roses at its tip,
136 'and once I saw a ship, which had sailed straight
137 and swift upon the sea through all its voyage,
138 sinking at the end as it made its way to port.
139 'Let not Dame Bertha and Master Martin,
140 when they see one steal and another offer alms,
141 think that they behold them with God's wisdom,
142 for the first may still rise up, the other fall.'
HereAndGone2
1d ago
Kids these days, eh?
HereAndGone2
1d ago
HereAndGone2
1d ago
HereAndGone2
1d ago
there's a line of argument that the reduction of oestrogen after menopause increases the ratio of testosterone and can result in a subjectively higher libido
Anecdotes are not data, but yes. When I was going through menopause, at the start suddenly it was like a second mini-puberty about arousal. Very damn inconvenient when you don't want to be horny, have no reason to be horny (pete's sake, this is the official end of childbearing years) and nobody to be horny for/with. It did wear off (thankfully) but I can imagine some women getting the burst of desire then and their libido spiking.
HereAndGone2
2d ago
they're going to portray how the character would seem to be talking in modern dialects transposed onto the time period
Yes, but what they're doing is also transposing modern attitudes onto the time period, and that's the problem. Okay, it's a silly, fun game that makes no pretensions to historical accuracy, so having a bunch of thieves and swindlers who would never do a bad, awful thing like use a slur is fine. Shoot a guy dead for the fifty cents in his pocket? Sure! Call him a [bad no-no name]? Heavens to Betsy, no nay never!
If you only think a discussion could be worthwhile if you start from a position of genuinely having no priors, then it will be very difficult to discuss anything.
Remember that position the next time you are modding somebody for "we don't say the Democrats are demons round these parts".
EDIT: By which I mean, if someone has the priors "Democrats are all demons", they are still expected to abide by the "boo outgroup" rule and express their argument about any particular act, speech, or other story in the media on the merits of the act etc. itself, and not "Given that all Democrats are demons, look at this awful thing they just did which demonstrates that they are demons".
But that suddenly does not come into play here? We can all go in with "Given angels do/don't exist, here is evidence for them existing/not existing" and that's fine?
I'm not asking for anyone to convert to any religion. What I'm saying is that the OP can ask religious people on here "why do you believe?" and get answers, but that's as much as we can do. If we go deeper into a discussion, inevitably it will end up "yeah but that's stupid/okay you think you believe that but the real explanation is a natural one" on one side, and "I know this is true by the burning in my bosom" on the other, and nobody is going to convince anybody out of their settled positions.
And we don't need another round of pointless fighting and name-calling.
HereAndGone2
2d ago
Eh, on some metrics it did last until the 14/15 hundreds.
Oh, baby. Baby, baby, baby
Well, okay. If you get your history off the pop culture shelf, who am I to stop you? 🤣 What, are the Carolingians nothing to you?
Well, there you go. Original much like sonichu.
And who did the Jews copy Pesach from, tell me? Enquiring minds want to know!
HereAndGone2
2d ago
Doot, you're proving my point for me. You want a big row where you can go away feeling smug about "I crushed that dumb sky-fairy follower"? Go ahead. I'm not interested in that kind of fight, I've had it already, I don't need more of it. You're annoyed I won't play and won't give you that rush of victory? Well, I can't help you there. There may be others willing to get into it with you, go talk to them.
HereAndGone2
2d ago
We've trapped ourselves. We've made ourselves into societies where women spend years being artificially sterile, from at least the legal age of consent for sexual activity though increasingly below that, until they're 'ready' to have children. That can be in late thirties to early forties.
And after fifteen to twenty years of training the body not to get pregnant, now we expect it to change back on command? Very much more difficult.
You want more babies? Seriously? Then vote to repeal abortion. No exceptions (because pro-choice set will try and drive a coach-and-four through any exceptions and any limits). Good luck with that, liberal men raised to believe it's a human right.
HereAndGone2
2d ago
Whatever solution to bring up young women's fertility will involve older women policing the behavior of younger women
What about young men? Because in the tradwife discussion on here in another thread, it's taken for granted that young men want to play the field and don't want to settle down to a life of boring monogamy age twenty-three or twenty-five.
So unless the young women are having babies outside wedlock - and you guys will criticise them for that - it relies on making young men get married and having kids as early as the young women.
Oh, but marry off the twenty-two year old girls to thirty-five/forty-five year old men, like the old days? Okay. Those guys are going to be virgins until marriage too, because the kind of responsible, faithful, and self-controlled girls you all want to be future wives (no risk of her cucking you with Chad and putting a cuckoo in the nest for beta loser to raise!) will not have sex with them before marriage. So the teen boys are going to have to wait until they're thirty to have sex with that boring life of monogamy.
How do we think this works out? Hang on, here we go again with prostitution, and the good old double standard roars back into life.
Men don't want a wife and kids until they've had their fun, but nobody considers that nature and the evolutionary drive to reproduce is as strong in young women and that's why we get the unhappy effects of "but he swore he'd marry me, now I'm pregnant and single".
HereAndGone2
2d ago
It's not paying for having a baby, it's the necessity to pay for childcare after the birth. Even when the child gets to be five years old, now they're going to school. Someone has to arrange to pick them up and bring them to the childminder after school, when both parents are working full-time jobs, until Mommy and Daddy get home.
There's a lot of expenses, and even more juggling around of schedules, to taking care of children unless you're full-time home-maker, and being a full-time home-maker is both low-status and only feasible if the main breadwinner is making huge money.
HereAndGone2
2d ago
The easiest answer is to bribe pay them. I expect plenty of takers if it's a $10k one-off, with heavy government encouragement.
Guys, have you ever spoken to any women about how many kids they want to have, if they want to have kids, and why don't they want ten kids like their grandmothers' generation?
Any of you men who are not circumcised, would you get circumcised for $10k? Remembering, before you go "yeah sure why not?" that there is an anti-circumcision movement and plenty of men who are even going through expensive surgery to restore the foreskin (or at least an ersatz one) because of the perceived disadvantages?
Would you undergo circumcision for any money if it was a repeated operation?
It's not just "pay 24 year old Mandii to have a baby", it's that women even today still will be responsible for the majority of the childcare on top of looking after the house and holding down a job (even a part-time job). Men will be dissatisfied if their wife isn't feeling ready for as much sex after having a baby. Men will leave because "you pay more attention to the kids than me". This isn't simply "blame men for being selfish", it's complicated problems of intimacy, biology, societal structures, and the rest of it.
Put yourself into those shoes: you are now the person who goes back to work after maternity leave (only now we're saying paternity leave). You have a young baby to take care of, and to arrange that they are being taken care of while you work. If there's any problems, you are the one gets the phone call at work to sort it out. You are the one doing the lion's share of the child-minding and housework, even if your spouse is sympathetic and helpful. If you have a couple of kids, you are the one managing schedules around parent-teacher meetings, birthdays, extracurricular activities, taking time off to bring them to the dentist/doctor, whose salary is going towards paying childcare. Oh, and your partner still expects intimacy on a regular basis and will leave if they feel neglected. Do you think your current life and job as the man of the house can change around to accommodate all that? Would you change around to accommodate all that?
Try imagining being a mother and see how much of that life you want to devote to having four kids, when you could be "one and done" or even none, or put it off till you're forty and established in life.
HereAndGone2
3d ago
What I'm getting at is that discussions of this type, even on here, are not going anywhere except in circles. None of us are starting from the ideal scientific position of agnosticism until we have evaluated the empirical evidence.
So while OP can legitimately ask "believers, why do you believe?", we are not going to get any further than "so you are basing it on subjective experience", because either the philosophical and metaphysical explanations as to 'this is my chain of reasoning here' will be dismissed as irrelevant or even nonsense, or the whole 'okay yeah but Science' gets invoked as with you and "no way to verify it objectively".
Hence, "you say you saw an angel, well I believe you believe it was an angel" (but it was not so). Eyewitness evidence isn't, personal experience isn't enough, yet if I said I saw Joe Malone smashing the window of O'Malley's chemist shop and grabbing stuff out of it, I would not be interrogated on "well I believe you believe you saw that, but since you're basing this on nothing other than subjective feeling of signals your eyes sent to your brain, how can we ever know it was indeed Joe or that Joe was there?" grounds.
Some things are taken as a priori existing and possible, others dismissed as a priori impossible, and here we are back where we started.
HereAndGone2
3d ago
My friend, let me introduce you to the myriad wonders of gender and sexual orientation. Your hypothetical gay guy could be described as homosexual (that is, he only wants to bonk people of the same gender) but hetero- or biromantic, that is, he can feel romantic - not sexual! - attraction for his own and other genders.
Also pls note not use "man" and "woman" as icky terms reinforcing binary sexuality, ignoring and insulting entire wonders of Genderbread Person, thanks!
HereAndGone2
3d ago
Sorry, I'm surprisingly enthusiastic about it for something I haven't watched in 15 years.
No need to apologise, we all are enthusiastic about what we love!
HereAndGone2
3d ago
Haven't had it in a long, long time and this is memory of how it used to be. It was a very odd experience, and puzzling; if I wasn't real, then who or what was this "I" experiencing this?
Yes, the Dark Ages were real. They were not "and this lasted up to the 14th/16th century until 18th century Enlightenment/19th century Rationalism/20th century mass Atheism came along to liberate us!"
It does matter who invents the name and the concept, or do you indeed agree with this stunning example of fact-based representation?
The original, invented by christians, do not steal, holiday of easter?
Yes, original invented by Christians Easter. It is based around the Jewish festival of Passover, or are you going to argue the Jews stole this from the Anglo-Saxons, too? In nearly every European language, the term for Easter is derived from ecclesiastical Latin or church Greek "Pascha", derived ultimately from Pesach, for Passover. See the Irish word Cáisc or, indeed, the English term Paschal (and the name derived from that, Pascal, as Noel and Noelle from Christmas).
We even had rows in the early Church about the date of Easter being too near to Passover!
Now, where the pop culture "Easter is a pagan feast them dirty Christians stole!" depends on two legs:
(1) Many cultures have spring festivals. Easter is a spring festival, therefore The Dirty Christians stole it from pre-existing European spring festivals.
To which I reply, the only people with a legitimate right to complain about us appropriating pre-existing religious feast of the time are the Jews with Passover, and if we're gonna blame The Dirty Christians then we also have to blame Da Joos for ripping-off Passover from some Canaanite or Mesopotamian spring festival. It's turtles all the way down!
(2) There totes was a goddess Eostre and she was the same as Istara/Inanna. Here we get the divergence and, ironically, the recombination of anti-Catholic Protestant polemic (the good old Two Babylons type) and the neopagan movement. The anti-Catholics were (and still are?) very big on "There used to be Pure Gospel Christianity, but at an early date corruption crept in, thanks to the emperor Constantine, and the Roman Catholic Church was born, and this was chock-full of pagans only pretending to be Christian, and they carried over or cynically adopted popular festivals so the masses could keep on worshipping the old gods under the pretence of celebrating new Christian saints and what-not". Then the neopagans hopped on this with "ours is a Genuine Ancient Tradition not invented out of whole cloth in the late 19th up to mid-20th century, we have rights to the big popular cultural events like Christmas and Easter because they belong to us" (often, as I say ironically, quoting the anti-Catholic stuff for evidence).
To which I reply, the big foundation stone for this is one (1) reference, by a Christian saint St Bede (formerly known as the Venerable Bede before his long-delayed canonisation) in a book on working out the dates of major Church feast days like Easter, The Reckoning of Time. (See above where I mentioned about controversies over dating Easter). He mentions that the Anglo-Saxon name for the period where Easter is celebrated is (what now corresponds to our month of April in modern dating) named after a goddess Eostre:
THE ENGLISH MONTHS
In olden time the English people - for it did not seem fitting to me that I should speak of other nations’ observance of the year and yet be silent about my own nations’ - calculated their months according to the course of the Moon. Hence, after the manner of the Greeks and the Romans, [the months] take their name from the Moon, for the Moon is called mona and the month monath.
The first month, which the Latins call January, is Giuli; February is called Solmonath; March Hrethmonath; April, Eosturmonath; May, Thrimilchi; June, Litha; July, also Litha; August, Weodmonath; September, Halegmonath; October, Winterfilleth; November, Blodmonath; December, Giuli, the same name by which January is called. They began the year on the 8th kalends of January [25 December], when we celebrate the birth of the Lord. That very night, which we hold so sacred, they used to call by the heathen word Modranecht, that is, ‘‘mother’s night’’, because (we suspect) of the ceremonies they enacted all that night.
...Nor is it irrelevant if we take the trouble to translate the names of the other months. The months of Giuli derive their name from the day when the Sun turns back [and begins] to increase, because one of [these months] precedes [this day] and the other follows. Solmonath can be called ‘‘month of cakes’’, which they offered to their gods in that month. Hrethmonath is named for their goddess Hretha, to whom they sacrificed at this time. Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated ‘‘Paschal month’’, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance. Thrimilchi was so called because in that month the cattle were milked three times a day; such, at one time, was the fertility of Britain or Germany, from whence the English nation came to Britain. Litha means ‘‘gentle’’ or ‘‘navigable’’, because in both these months the calm breezes are gentle, and they were wont to sail upon the smooth sea. Weodmonath means ‘‘month of tares’’, for they are very plentiful then. Halegmonath means ‘‘month of sacred rites’’. Winterfilleth can be called by the invented composite name ‘‘winter-full’’. Blodmonath is ‘‘month of immolations’’, for then the cattle which were to be slaughtered were consecrated to their gods. Good Jesu, thanks be to thee, who hast turned us away from these vanities and given us [grace] to offer to thee the sacrifice of praise.
(If these calendar names are stirring vague sensations of "haven't I heard something like these before?", yes, Tolkien used these as basis for month names in The Shire, e.g. 'Winterfilth in the muddy Shire').
Now, this was catnip in the late 18th to early 19th century folklorists and antiquarians, particularly when we started getting European nationalist movements (think of the revivals of 'this is our native language and literature, these are our historic traditions, we are indeed a separate culture of our own and not mere helots of the dominant empire'). It had an entire name of its own, Romantic Nationalism. We get composers like Smetana and Sibelius writing works based on local folklore and myths, the Celtic Revival in Ireland, the search for and creation of national epics.
And discovering Big Important Pre-Christian Influences was a huge part of this. Eostre is probably linked to dawn goddesses and there were deities like that in Europe, heck we might as well invoke Ushas and Eos here as well. But those had fallen into obscurity, until the new scholarship seized upon Bede's mention to reconstruct an almost entirely imaginary goddess. We don't have any details of her worship, nature, etc. because Bede is the only surviving reference we have. But that didn't stop the Romantic Nationalists from giving her a slew of attributes and bigging her up in importance.
And so here we get to today, where it is taken as Gospel that hares, eggs, chocolate, and the rest of it are all derived from Eostre, the goddess cruelly displaced by the wicked Christians from her own feast.
But no, children, Easter is Christian. The name in the English-speaking world may be derived from Anglo-Saxon but the feast itself has been there from the foundation of Christianity.
HereAndGone2
3d ago
deeply female-coded shit in the worst possible way
And now we're gone back to 19th century "religion is for women" (which came via "Roman Catholicism is for women, it's a soft, feminine religion unlike strong masculine square-jawed Protestantism").
Truly, nothing new under the sun.
HereAndGone2
3d ago
Love can be explained as an evolutionary adaption in our neurology, but that doesn't make it not real.
But the reduction to "it's all just neurochemicals" does anger or hurt people who lay a very great emphasis on the importance of love (all kinds of love). "Yeah we could just shoot you with a syringe full of hormones to make you feel that way and it would be just the same as if you met the right person for you" is not what people want to hear, or would accept. And is that all that love is, in fact? I don't think it is, and I think a lot of humanity believes and has believed that it is not all that it is.
HereAndGone2
3d ago
The heritable castes thing comes because one of the main characters is a deckhand and he's training his younger son (who was supposed to be going to go off to the big city) to help because they're desperately overworked and there's nobody else, and everyone around him is doing the same.
That's not really establishing a caste system, though, that's "we're desperately undermanned and since I'm a deckhand that is what I know and what I can teach you to do".
Sure, give it four or five generations and it becomes a caste system, but it's a bit too on the nose for "right now I am drowning, please throw me that life belt" situation they got going on. God knows, Original Trek engaged in some anvil-to-the-head moral lessons as well, but that is a little too much nudging in the ribs about inequality and the state of society today.
HereAndGone2
3d ago
If you were the parent of any future children, God help them with an attitude like that.
It was an analogy, not a request that you be my ersatz parent holding my hand while I sobbed into my pillow.
Oh sweet divine, now we're really gone off the rails. I was trying to use the example of "boo outgroup" rule as being about telling us to leave our priors at the door, and now suddenly I'm calling for atheists to be banned? Where did I say that? Why would I say that?
I'm saying we're all coming to this with our minds already made up, so there's not going to be persuasive arguments going on. And I think the direction this exchange between us has veered off demonstrates that: I genuinely don't know where or how you got "You want atheism to be a bannable offence" but that's how these discussions end; Religion versus Science and we've already awarded the laurels to Science.
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