domain:anarchonomicon.com
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
25m ago
In reality though, they should "just go be Orthodox." ;P
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
26m ago
but I'll bet even the average Catholic priest doesn't really, truly believe in angels and demons and would freak out as much as any secular person if he experienced something actually supernatural.
You're probably not wrong, sadly! I don't have a ton of experience with the Catholic church so I can't say one way or another, but I wouldn't be surprised if you were correct here. 100% with Protestants, I don't think most of them genuinely believe at all.
I will say though, it is different with Orthodox clergy! Again, insofar as my own experience is a guide. The Orthodox clergy I have talked to genuinely believe, discuss supernatural phenomena happening to them and other congregants, and are incredibly committed to the preternatural as a part of their worldview. Now, this doesn't mean all the laity deeply believe and that's a separate problem, but I have noticed a big difference.
I remain a materialist atheist and it's very unlikely anything will convince me to change. @FCfromSSC writes some very cogent criticisms of materialism and I get his point that materialists often base their "knowledge" on constructs no more inherently trustworthy than faith, but that just tells me no one can really "know" anything. Maybe for some people that leaves belief wide open as a choose-your-own-adventure, but I find myself unable to just make myself believe things. "You don't have an answer for how the universe started, therefore Jesus" is such a huge leap that I don't understand how people get there, though clearly many do.
Hmmm, I'm not sure you are fully grasping the point @FCfromSSC is making. I may be butchering it, but the basic idea is an invitation to interrogate your own axioms. You may say nobody can really "know" anything, but regardless, to live and function in the world you do have to "know" things and have some axioms. Perhaps this idea that nobody can "know" anything is an axiom itself. Once you start to dig deeper into the structures of your beliefs, you find that a lot of them are built on houses of cards.
As for the leap - it's not as ridiculous as it may seem. It does take some reading and some genuine motivation and learning, but I'd recommend some books on Biblical symbolism like The Language of Creation, or Peterson's Holy are We Who Wrestle. If you want a deeper, historiographical lens, check out Violence Unveiled - Humanity at the Crossroads.
No argument will convince me to just "reason" my way into accepting Jesus or Mohammad PBUH or the Tao. (Don't try; you do not have an argument I have not heard before.) The only thing that would trigger a conversion in me is witnessing something with my own eyes. Show me an angel, so to speak.
These beings don't necessarily appear to us everyday, especially if we don't try to reach out to them. Our minds can be quite closed. Have you tried fasting, or camping alone in the wilderness for 3+ days? Or, alternatively and frankly much riskier, you could try psychedelics and pray to an angel and ask for a sign. He who seeks shall find, and to he who knocks, it shall be opened.
Does being "religious" actually change anyone's beliefs or behavior? Not really. I've long been of the opinion that being religious has almost no impact on an individual's character and says little about him
My conversion dramatically changed my own actions and character, in concrete ways. I have seen and heard many other stories of this being true. I do agree in general though that too often Christianity is worn as a sort of facade of piety while doing whatever you want. Christ had that in his own day, and I'm sure we will always have religious hypocrites amongst us. I am hypocritical in my own ways. That doesn't mean that He isn't alive, and active in the world.
AmericanSaxeCoburgGothic
Happy to be here! Goal is to post the most exclamation points.
26m ago
I think of the survivor who jumped from the Golden Gate bridge- all their problems suddenly seemed very solvable. What I see in friends and colleagues is a lack of faith (organized religion) that is coupled or leads to a lack of optimism in the world; and I think poor planning for their future (you're saving how much for retirement!). But I guess a Marxist interpretation would be the false lies distort a workers' view to accept their station in life. I guess my point is a strict reasoning and rationalist approach to life can be more harmful given certain personal characteristics and the human capacity of self delusion.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
30m ago
Thank you for the response. Just to press the point, is the worst that would happen to an hypothetical child that he or she would end up like you? Is that so bad?
RenOS
something is wrong
1hr ago
It's not about having no experience, it's about them having a tendency to tell you that behaving like a good christian or [insert religion] will surely lead to you finding and holding a partner, when it's at best unrelated or at worst actively counterproductive.
Ironically, I would actually say that they are better equipped to give good relationship advice once you already are committed to each other, for the same reason.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
But what I'm saying is that my friends really aren't too 5% Giga-chads and those last two example friends are extremely not that.
So if I know lots of non-alphas who are fucking, what's up?
incognitomaorach
1hr ago
Anecdata but my views have changed substantially (civ nat/soc dem to "quite a bit further right") via online discourse, osmosis, and frankly I think my views coming into contact with reality. A large amount of my IRL contacts have also moved further to the right on social issues specifically, mostly driven my immigration, or at least online discourse and media that is shaped by immigration. How much of this is driven my argumentation vs. just looking at reality is difficult to parse, but what I would say is once certain dominoes fall, one becomes much more receptive to argumentation around other points and policies. The nature of tribalism means that it's extremely hard to remain iconoclastic and the step from "I'm on the left except for the extreme culture war stuff" to "I'm on the right" is an order of magnitude smaller than the step from "I'm on the left" to "I'm on the right".
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
This team in one day produced themselves 70 opportunities for video. Again, boasting or all but, "Yeah sometimes we hit people behind our targets. Bummer." Where's the video? We do know this happened, since both sides say it did. 70 opportunities from one team in one day for video of a bad shot.
Nothing.
Surely this should make you investigate your priors? If we accept that this happened but can't find video, then it shows that video isn't needed to prove something happened!
Firstly, I think there is video but we just don't see it since we're not in the Arab media-sphere, not on the right telegram channels. I've read some books and reports, that's enough. Here's one video of a prisoner being raped: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qmjGdzyj5BA
Furthermore, video footage is often misleading. It can be selectively edited or leave out context as we're both aware. Nobody is going to watch enough video to distinguish excecptions from standard, on the scale of armies and states.
Finally, the standard for believing that Israel acts with cruelty should not be high. We know there were violent protests when the Israelis started investigating torture of prisoners - protests against the prosecutions. This indicates that there's a good number of Israelis who are in favour of torturing prisoners, shooting prisoners.
I don't need live video to know that there's a lot of rape in South Africa, even if it's politically relevant in that many don't like blacks or the end of apartheid. Likewise with Venezuela. We don't need extensive evidence to prove it's a shithole. Some things are just straightforward and make sense. They can be derived from first principles.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1hr ago
Oh, there used to be android instructions. It's not too hard though it's pretty much - install on Windows using the Windows instructions, then install onscripter plus on your tablet, then transfer the game's folders across to your tablet, then run it. If you can get umineko project running may as well stick with that though - when I played it UP ran like crap on android.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1hr ago
Lol that's all good man, my perspective on posting is if you never want people talking about it, don't mention it. I meant it in the sense of genetics, it would be unwise for me to have children. Ironically, or perhaps just fucking inevitably, kids were the only thing I was ever one hundred percent certain I wanted growing up.
I know I could adopt, but... Well I haven't found the woman yet who doesn't jump on her backwards bike and backpedal out of the relationship when I say "hey I have a tenuous grasp on reality at the best of times, plus it's heritable, so let's adopt a kid together!" Well there was one, the girl of my dreams, she didn't want kids, but she would have been a great mom and she put up with my bullshit for a very long time, but she was solidly progressive, and so when I started drifting further rightward (I was a lefty centrist when we started dating) we stopped being able to talk as much as we had, so I fucked that.
I don't mind any longer. I'm not saying I wouldn't jump at the chance if a woman asked me to adopt with her, but I'm alright. My brother and sister have kids and they are not shy about asking for help watching them, so I get to be the cool uncle, which is a good consolation prize.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
Israel has a domestic tech base and production capacity
No, they don't. China has a domestic tech base and production capacity. Russia has production capacity. Israel just produces a few high-end pieces in a giant web of European and American IP and supply chains. Intel has a fab in Israel, running on Dutch lithography equipment, itself made from German lenses...
Does Israel produce all of the umpteen million parts needed for aircraft and guided missiles? No. They import. They're heavily reliant on imported steel! There's no guns or shells or machine tools without steel. They have zero oil production, only natural gas. They're heavily reliant on imported energy. They're surely heavily reliant on all kinds of key industrial infrastructure (transformers, large turbines, construction vehicles).
If Western sanctions fall on Israel, the country disintegrates immediately since it's just impossible to sustain an advanced, high-tech economy at their low level of scale. America first is an entirely separate issue. Russia and America can afford to scorn the world to a certain extent, they're actually big countries. Size matters a lot. The US can't bully China or Russia or Europe with assured success but it can wipe the floor with Israel economically.
Iran isn't a specialized high-tech economy, they're sanctions-proofed and have a much sounder, more developed foundation in their industrial base. Iran actually is energy-secure and a net energy exporter. Iran is the 10th biggest steel producer, Israel isn't even on the list.
As I got older, I realized that a version of “the law of attraction” or “the secret” or “practice gratitude journaling to make you happy” was in fact pretty much true.
It's basically the inverse of "misery loves company" - both are self-reinforcing loops where your internal state shapes who you spend time with and what you pay attention to, which then reinforces the original state.
I was just rereading DFW's E Pluribus Unum where he talks about the same mechanism with loneliness: lonely people watch TV (or some other isolating hobby) for connection → less real-world interaction → more isolated → more TV. The medium becomes a kind of attractor state that keeps pulling you back.
Same principle whether it's gratitude journaling pulling you toward noticing good things, or doom-scrolling pulling you toward catastrophe. Once you're in the loop, the feedback mechanism does the rest. Knowing about the loop doesn't necessarily free you from it, you can see the curtain and still get caught in the performance. The hard part, like you say, is trying to forget or pretend not to do the curtain checking practice. I have some friends who swear by psychedelic usage as lifting them out of depressive states etc. but ultimately I think if you're pretty well adjusted or don't have some kind of PTSD or OCD, psychedelic use (even one off!) can make it really hard to break out of the "it's all a farce, look at us it's just monkeys [playing status games/performing characters/etc.]" mindset. Like yeah that's kinda true, just try not to think about it and you'll be much happier.
TowardsPanna
2hr ago
Is there any research on how a nation's (its people) body language, thinking styles, communication styles, attitudes towards self, etc, etc, is affected by a past where the country was subordinate to another country/empire? Slave mentality or the like.
Soteriologian
2hr ago
I have strong feelings that GUI toolkits have never been done well. All existing solutions are bad, and they’re mostly all bad in the exact same ways.
The root of the problem is smart people want to work on things where they can deliver formal results—and in many areas of software engineering, you can! Databases, type systems, even graphics to a large extent are all backed by substantial formal theory (even if the users of these technologies are largely unaware).
UI, on the other hand, has no backing in formal theory whatsoever. It’s like knot theory in mathematics, or the Collatz conjecture—nobody even knows where to start to make progress in a direction anyone would care about.
Soteriologian
2hr ago
It’s hard to do any worse than the results themselves these days, but they pull it off somehow.
RenOS
something is wrong
2hr ago
Hmm weird, I can't find anything on how to play that on android. The umineko project version is a bit tedious to get running, but so far it seems to work, so I'll just use that.
MachineElfPaladin
2hr ago
Nondeterministic free will is not nearly so clearly evident to me as it appears to be to you.
For those three lines of evidence you list, I can think of at least one other phenomenon which I'd say fits all of them pretty well, especially if you give me a couple hundred years' worth of leeway on technological development and scientific inquiry, and yet is unambiguously false.
For another, we have good reasons to think that decisionmaking and behavior are at the very least strongly dependent on the material actions of the brain, in that we can go screwing with neurons on chemical, electromagnetic, or mechanical levels and notice that it results in changes in those things.
This reminds me of a story I've once read (or watched?), which indeed ends on the main character achieving immortality, even godhood, as they desired, but sacrificing the world in the process. Then they sit in the never, for eternity, doing nothing. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the story, or much more details. But I always thought that this is the appropriate ending for "main character has limitless ambition and no moral compass whatsoever".
FistfullOfCrows
2hr ago
just straight up hate the idea of Christianity in its modern formation. Decades of 'oh you believe in an old man in the clouds with a fluffy beard granting wishes' has poisoned them,
Can you really blame them, Christianity as an institution has been speedrunning blasphemies upon blasphemies with a straight face for centuries, from the absorption of the Trinitanism cult nonsense (god being three beings yet one), the constant Idolatry (Icons, Crosses, holy trinkets, holly sites) the base and mundane nonsense (The Pope says trans rights). It's all so tiresome.
I know people NEED a certain flare of the mystical made physically manifest, even if just to have something to do during communal rituals, but this doesn't ameliorate how stupidly worldly and mundane it all is.
The second biggest problem with Unsong is that Scott has disease of MCU writer; he cannot stop making jokes, even during serious moments, which completely ruins the dramatic tension.
Yes, thank you, you put it into words. No accident that the protagonist names his laptop after the Buffy the Vampire Slayer desktop that adorns it, so much of the dialogue has that "quippy" Whedon quality I find so grating. "Wouldn't it be funny if Christian archangels communicated like annoying teenagers on Tumblr?" Not especially, Scott, no.
Schizophrenic narrative structure that constantly jumps between past and present story threads involving completely different characters and locations
I actually don't mind this too much, I think it contributes to the sense of the fictional universe being huge and epic in scope. Although perhaps it might have been a bit less disorienting if there had been two chapters in the present-day A-story, then jumping back in time to provide backstory, then jumping back to the A-story for two more chapters etc.
In about 10 years of shitposting on the internet about politics, I have come to the same conclusion. Pre-2020 clownworld, most of my writing was a mix of snark and observation with some anger, and everything since 2020 clownworld has been almost entirely anger. I have not changed anyone's mind on anything, and nor has anyone changed my mind on anything. Changes of opinion came entirely from reflection in my own time when I was alone, and certainly could not have occurred in the hyper-confrontational thunderdome that is the internet. At best, it was an outlet for my inner need to akshually when I see peace being valued over truth, and at worst a complete and total waste of my time.
Ultimately, the way to impose your will on others in a post industrial society is to form a sufficiently motivated group and use infiltration or intimidation to take over important insitutions and then use those institutions enact your desire. Arguing on the internet is worse even than voting. Voting at least exposes the flaw the system and makes it clear to those aggreived that voting cannot get what they want.
FistfullOfCrows
2hr ago
I haven’t considered myself a Christian for a long time. The idea that you can appeal to some supreme being to intervene in your daily struggles - and that he’d actually do something about it - strikes me as deeply arrogant. It feels like narcissism.
Another reason I stepped away from Christianity is the growing sense that, as an institution, it’s far more invested in preserving its own status and influence than in any genuine truth. Most of the people at its core seem more concerned with hierarchy and control than with the transcendental.
I need my gods to be beyond the petty politics of old men in robes. The closest I’ve come to something I could follow are movements like the Bogomils/Cathars/Manichaeans, yet I don't think if there is a god he'd be particularly interested in my own personal needs.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3hr ago
I think we coddle everyone too much. Schools are literally afraid to flunk kids, parents don’t make them do chores, and so unless they play competitive sports, Theres just no push toward “you need to actually do stuff to be successful. Add in the push toward hedonism and consumer culture, and people have absurdly low work ethics and high expectations.
wayfarer
3hr ago
I would ask Gaashk out, but she would probably stab me
sounds like sort of deniable asking out, AKA flirting
He did not in fact ask me out
I am pretty sure that it was an attempt
is still single and complaining about it on Facebook
well, clearly their strategy is not going well but it mirrors more common complaint about woman sending utterly unclear signal and expecting man to spot it and interpret as interest and act on it this one was quite clear though
Time is a terrible thing to waste. The question to be asked of younger folk not using their time employed or in education is "How are you going to fund your retirement?" Working hard and making money in your 20s / 30s I think definitely beats working as an old person. Banking on the AI miracle seems too low probability to me. The adage I think of is the job you are doing now often leads to what you do in the future. And short unemployment begets long-term unemployment.
More options
Context Copy link