domain:greyenlightenment.com
I honestly, earnestly, really believe in God and Jesus Christ and the Sacraments. It's not much deeper than that. To me, your question is almost, "Why should we enter into a relationship with the Creator who has a plan for us all to live in happiness and perfect fulfillment, instead of trying to find a connection with Him through less certain methods or worshiping demons instead?"
I don't know why anyone would convert to Christianity except for the reason that they think it's true. Yes, society will suffer the further we get away from God. Pretty much every successful society had some sort of ritualistic belief in God, a higher order, and some kind of cosmic punishment for wrongs committed. This is a relevant statement:
Pro-religion people (like me) will suggest that decreasing religious commitment is reducing trust. That’s obviously true. At the heart of our society (and especially our legal system) is the expectation that virtually everyone will tell the truth under oath, that they will keep their promises, and that they will do what they “ought” to do even when doing so is to their own personal disadvantage, and even if they are confident no one will ever find out. This norm simply works better if everyone believes that God will send them to Hell for breaking it.
I’m not saying the norm completely fails if you don’t believe in God; there are plenty of moral atheists and doesn’t-matterists who would never compromise their own integrity. There are articulate cases for things like “secular humanism” and “the categorical imperative” and just “don’t be a dick.” Moreover, there are lots of psychological reasons why humans enjoy acting with integrity, even without God looking over their shoulder.
I am only saying that our society was built on the assumption that something like 99% of people will act with integrity 99% of the time it is tested. If just a little less fear-of-God means that number drops to something like 90% of people acting with integrity 90% of the time it is tested, that sets off a cascade, the incentives to do the right thing shift, and our society collapses into Escape From New York.
But committing to a religious belief that you don't actually respect is not going to magically create that integrity either. Much the opposite, if I had to guess.
So-so? I tend to use it as halfway between the two (plus fiction writing). I find the benefit of LLMs over an encyclopedia is that I can drill down and use them as a sounding board, and conversely unlike a sounding board I can pester them about details.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
16hr ago
I also want Catholicism without the baked-in commitments to universal human equality and open-ended duty of care to the least productive, least valuable members of the human race. (Commitments which appear to be a large factor underlying why the Catholic Church is one of the largest and most committed facilitators of mass immigration to Europe and the United States.) I’m also uncomfortable with how many of its most important saints are venerated precisely because they were persecuted by the society around them; this seems yet again to center the outcasts, the dissidents, the weirdos. Catholicism built a very impressive edifice atop a Third-Worldist-adjacent ideological chassis, but the underlying logic was inevitably going to take over and become dominant at some point, which is (in my opinion) how you get modern Catholicism.
DelendaEst
16hr ago
Or allow editing but have a button so users can see the audit trail? I understand the intent of the request, but I'd never want to lose the ability to fix spelling mistakes, and I often see people add [edit: reason] tags due to a response causing them to update on something or clarify a fact in the original post.
Mushguffler
16hr ago
Doesn't seem like a real objection anyway -- data can always be adjusted by birth year or held-back status. The school obviously has the data, even if it's not currently being collected in a way that would enable it being used.
iprayiam3
16hr ago
How do you all interact with LLMs?
I’ve seen a few articles recently noting the rise of AI as a buddy / therapist or whatever. It’s usually beside the point of the article but an implicit notion is that lot of folks regularly ‘chat’ with AI as if it were a person.
Which I find baffling. Outside of the very early novelty, I find this way of interacting extremely boring and tedious, and generally find the fact that AI wants to get conversational with me a general frustrater.
If I’m not using AI as a utility ‘write X, troubleshoot Y, give me steps for Z’, and I’m using it recreationally / casually, it’s more akin to web surfing or browsing Wikipedia than chatting on a forum or whatever. I will use it as an open format encyclopedia and explicitly not as a conversationalist sounding board. And i genuinely find negative value in the fact that the former is constantly interrupted with the attempt to be the latter.
So my question is again, how far outside of the grain am I?
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
Liberal comedians made fun of Hunter Biden and Joe's age in their bits about how conservatives have more fun('Causing climate change is more fun than worrying about it, amiright?').
FistfullOfCrows
16hr ago
Maybe this isn't the best place to ask but, can you please disable the ability to delete one's own posts or edit them after they've been replied to?
GoofyGoose
16hr ago
I don’t think the Hansonian argument is about there being no subjective experience. Hanson’s arguments emphasize that there are some emotions and thoughts that we are not fully aware of because it is better not to know.
For example, you may brag to increase your status, but your brain avoids noticing that you are trying to do that because bragging is socially discouraged.
The same ideas can apply to your perception of your own personality or any part of your subjective experience.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
To be clear, my claim is that the education system exists to employ college educated women to make home-makers more of an odd one out than they already are, thus suppressing their numbers further, and that this is an ideological opposition to female domesticity rather than a program to pass out economic benefits.
I don't think this claim is insane on the face of it; education workers are probably a double digit percent of working women who would prefer to be- and could reasonably expect to be if their job was eliminated tomorrow- housewives, and not a particularly low double digit percent.
ABigGuy4U
16hr ago
Old pagan religions had different virtue ethics systems so it can often be easy to miss how devout these civilizations were despite all the drinking killing and whoring. Also people forget that the cynical libertine city slicker/salt of the earth rural farmer divide has existed forever, and a small strata of the urban upper class isn’t going to accurately represent the beliefs of society as a whole.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
16hr ago
If your understanding of "permaban" is "The mods are never allowed to consider rescinding the ban" then sure, mentally substitute "permanent except in exceptional and so far purely hypothetical cases" if that satisfies your need for literalism.
wayfarer
16hr ago
Twitter and Substack
this impotent whining for violence is hilarious
I wonder whether it is his actual belief, trolling or just grifting in niche they found. I would put my guess on trolling supported by financial extraction they managed.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
Probably confusion between the two categories? And it's legitimately difficult to draw the line- various different kinds of nondenoms and baptists are basically a ring species.
My experience (of hearing women complain IRL), the emphasis is fearing men will assault them, not lie to or manipulate them.
I once had the misfortune of watching a woman at a bar loudly shitting on male hinge profiles, while surrounded by men who kept trying to engage with her socially. This was in the context of after a 5e RPG night at said bar. One guy asked her if she's ever been on a Hinge date and she said "chuh, no, I don't want to get Assaulted" while not looking at him. Then another of the guys around her mentioned being gay and she suddenly put down her phone and started staring at him lovingly.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
Early Christian writers talked about treating their women and slaves better than the pagans- and in ancient Rome this was not an all-important value you could expect them to lie about. Anthropologists today note the effects of Christianization in the third world.
Islamic societies were the most advanced in the world for centuries. Look into the Islamic Golden Age. The civilization that built the Alhambra and founded the first universities in the world, institutions which directly inspired the Europeans who founded the oldest centers of higher learning in Europe.
These Islamic societies were not majority Islamic- Islam degrades HBD capital over the long term by encouraging cousin marriage. As a scientific racist I'd expect you to pay attention to that.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
So you want Catholicism without sexual morality? You want grand cathedrals and theological dissertations and angelic hierarchies and patron saints and guardian angels. You want angry superintelligences running amok(yes, God is much more powerful than demons but is far less interventionist). You want mysteries and establishment hierarchy. You want private devotions, sodalities, archconfraternities.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
16hr ago
Indeed, as Bret Devereaux (from the ACOUP blog) often points out: it's important to remember that people in the past actually believed in their religion.
HereAndGone
16hr ago
that still requires you to know that 4 x 7 = 28 and to me it's just as fast to learn all the times tables in that case.
HereAndGone
17hr ago
They're just going to remember you as a whiny, blubbering coward.
That was the ending of the James Cagney movie Angels with Dirty Faces: the childhood friend, now a priest, of the gangster Rocky asks him to beg for mercy on the way to the electric chair so the gang of juvenile delinquents who idolise him will turn away from the criminal path:
In Rocky's last few hours before execution, Jerry visits. He sees the negative impact Rocky could have on the Dead End Kids and asks him to beg for mercy on his way to the death house, citing the impact it would have on the gang, ruining their romantic image of the gangster lifestyle. Rocky refuses, telling Jerry that his reputation is all that he has left.
As they enter the execution room, Rocky shakes Jerry's hand and wishes him well before walking to the electric chair. Then out of nowhere Rocky breaks down, begging and screaming for mercy, and seemingly dies a coward's death. Later, Soapy and the gang read in the newspapers of how Rocky "turned yellow" in the face of his execution. The gang no longer knows what to think about Rocky or the criminal lifestyle, and Jerry asks them to accompany him to say a prayer for "a boy who couldn't run as fast as I could".
GoofyGoose
17hr ago
“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”
Your ability to think matters because it enables you to get the right answer. The only problem with students who don’t understand is that they won’t be able to get the right answer in more general situations. An athlete doesn’t need to understand the physics of his sport or the biology behind his movements.
hydroacetylene
17hr ago
Yes, the usual iron law reasons are enshrined ideologically.
HereAndGone
17hr ago
Had a look at the Substack link, tried reading what he believes as a pagan, and my impression is "cut-rate Gibbon". Too occupied with "and here is why it's the fault of Christianity that our empire is declining!" and not enough "as a pagan this is why I do things the way I do". I doubt he makes any offering to his picture of Athena, or to Wotan, or any of the rituals pagans would engage in. When he was going "and a real pagan of the past would never do this thing", I was going "Dude, that was exactly the thing they were doing".
wayfarer
17hr ago
You understand what words mean.
maybe it is autistic but names used here are in fact misleading
if someone comes back hat-in-hand begging for forgiveness and promises to be a good boy, it's not necessarily a permaban
this part is true and got confirmed
(whether it is a dominance game, whether it can be called begging and so on is matter of taste and definition game and therefore quite useless discussion)
This would be highly surprising if true; I’ve seen persuasive evidence that the elites of these societies were not majority Arab, but my understanding is that Islamization was extremely thorough and brutal — hence the flight of the Zoroastrian dissident population all the way to India, where they persist as Parsees to this day.
As for the cousin marriage thing, clearly many forms of Christianity also failed to effectively stamp out the practice (hence the discussion around the so-called Hajnal Line) so this seems far from dispositive regarding the superiority of one over the other.
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