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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6123 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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The real issue is the failure of religious education across the board.

People flock to New Age and Eastern practices because nobody told them The Cloud of Unknowing or the Philokalia existed.

They got either rational rules (conservatives) or emotional worship services (evangelicals/progressives), but not the deep contemplative center their souls actually want. Education is poor because apophatic prayer is really hard to scale.

Well yes exactly!!! I very much agree with this? So why did this happen? What do you mean it's 'hard to scale'?

But yes I very much agree that these traditions need to look back to history and realize what they're looking for is already within them.

hard to scale

Teaching what can't be taught, speaking what can't be said.

Direct experience over propositional doctrine.

Most of the texts that relate to these practices acknowledge this. They're not doctrinal manuals; they're initiatory devices that exist to destabilize you until you find the reality they're failing to describe.

I think this has to be done in a small group setting.

So why did this happen?

My guess would be four hundred years of subconsciously incorporating more and more enlightenment materialist thinking. Then enlightenment materialist thinking itself starts to become more and more discredited post 1918, culminating with the looming secular apocalypse of nuclear conflict in the early 1960s. So you see people start scrambling around trying to find things to fill the void materialism left. By that time most of the mystical aspects of western religions had gotten filed down to a toothpick, meaning the only thing left on offer is eastern religions. And the burgeoning psychedelic drug culture of the 1960s, which people often forget had an intensely spiritual, almost religious dynamic back then. If you want more info on that last part, look at The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Educated, enlightened white people were incredibly into straight woo in the 19th century, though. They may have been secular but they sûre weren’t materialists; they were way too into ghosts and psychics for that.

sûre

I could tolerate your accents on thé as a weird quirk, but now I have to ask: are all of these extra glyphs typos? do they have meaning to you? is it an experiment to see how long mottizens will go without mentioning it?

My phone's keyboard autocorrects to french for some reason and I don't find these glyphs worth fixing.

If it was an experiment, then, well, you're not the first person who noticed. It bizarrely got me accused of being kulakrevolt a few months back.

There was a person back on reddit-Motte who'd go back on their comments days later and edit some letters to be weird unicode variants and would then delete all their comments when asked about it, so people may be reading this as a crazy person tell now.

Thanks for replying, and sorry if I sounded hostile. I enjoy your posts :)

At least you didn't claim I was a kulak sockpuppet.

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