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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   32467 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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I'm currently dating a women who's family is the typical Fishtown resident Murray describes (She herself is a lovely girl). Her family behaves poorly. Her sisters constantly engage in borderline prostitution. They have no work.

Just some life advice, this is a very bad idea.

Interesting, Can you elaborate on your perspective? Others have commented on this, but id like your POV as well

Can I just tell you something about marriage that I heard, and has had a massive positive effect on it?

Something the Catholics get right is that young men are told, basically: you have two options for a job as a man. 1) You can be a priest (a spiritual father), or 2) you can be a husband and a father. Both of these are really difficult, at times you're going to hate them and at times you're going to feel like you fucked up.

But your job is to do them well. You chose the "be a husband and a father" route, and you have to look at this as your life's calling. Your wife, due to her background, will present you with some things that are going to be extremely difficult to endure, but you have to. Your marriage is your "burn the ships" moment, you do not have a choice.

There's an idea that life is suffering, and the only way to endure that suffering is to find a meaning to makes it worthwhile. Your marriage is that meaning.

Your wife, and by extension your family, is your life's work. Be good at it.

Something the Catholics get right is that young men are told, basically: you have two options for a job as a man. 1) You can be a priest (a spiritual father), or 2) you can be a husband and a father.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here, unsuited for one and unable to become the other.

There's an idea that life is suffering, and the only way to endure that suffering is to find a meaning to makes it worthwhile.

Agreed. Now try finding that meaning when you're a 43-year-old unemployed man who's never managed to go on a date and lacks the capacity for religious belief.

lacks the capacity for religious belief.

If you simply edit your /etc/hosts file you can add the following lines:

127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com

127.0.0.1 old.reddit.com

127.0.0.1 reddit.com

And the problem will likely go away after a short time.

Okay but joking aside, what do you mean by this? You don't have the capacity for religious belief? Do you believe that you are the most powerful creature in the universe? Surely not.

Now try finding that meaning when you're a 43-year-old unemployed man who's never managed to go on a date

Your purpose is to fix this. Are you sure there's nothing else you could be doing to improve your standing with regards to these problems? Truly nothing?

You don't have the capacity for religious belief?

I am an atheist materialist. There is no God, no "soul," no afterlife; just spacetime, quantum fields, etc. And none of the apologetics I've read, nor religious people I've talked to, have ever convinced me otherwise. I'm saying I'm not capable of perceiving the universe in any other way.

Kind of rules out any religion I've ever heard of, no?

Your purpose is to fix this. Are you sure there's nothing else you could be doing to improve your standing with regards to these problems?

This is something I've gone over in this forum plenty of times, and I'm sure the regulars are all pretty tired of it.

If you want you can try Bostromian Simulation Argument big-tent syncretism: 'your God is a shadow of the Supreme Being, the true creator of our universe'. It's not really a religion, since it has no significant moral teachings. But it does bring a lot of intellectual firepower to the Deist side of things.

If you want you can try Bostromian Simulation Argument big-tent syncretism

Even more ridiculous than classical theism, and more useless than classical Deism, which, IIRC, a number of 18-19th century thinkers pointed out was a sort of "gateway religion" to outright atheism (because a god who doesn't answer prayers might as well not exist).

But the logic does hold. If you're an atheist materialist, why don't you believe that we are in a simulation? That's a perfectly materialist conclusion based on principles we can observe. Bostrom's a pretty smart guy.

Deep down Christians know that their prayers aren't being answered, they can tell that prayer alone won't get them what they want and produce all this cope about how you should be praying to be a better person rather than any concrete outcome. Nor are they using telescopes to look for heaven, somehow they know they won't find it. Still they find some reassurance in the rehashed schizo-prophecies surrounding a 2000-year dead Jew and hope that some day, their prophecies might be resolved and good things will happen. After they die good things they hope good things will happen. And singing hymns is fun.

Well, simulationists can also hope that good things might happen. We might die and wake up from this dream as transcendent, posthuman beings. It's not a hard kind of knowledge, we could be NPCs and be deleted. But there is more weight behind this abstract hope than in theirs, for a certain kind of rational person.

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