domain:infonomena.substack.com
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
4hr ago
I like symbolism, but when I see the likes of this I groan "oh God, not this crap again". Yeah, give us mystic Christianity divorced from any roots in a living faith tradition, where we can pull it around like Sam Harris Buddhism (get the benefits, dump the woo, be compatible with our true god Science!) to fit what we want without making demands.
Yeah agreed. And the same people that ate up the Sam Harris Buddhism stuff are wanting to move to Christianity now that Buddhism doesn't work for them anymore.
WhiningCoil
4hr ago
That being said, and I mean this genuinely, but your posting style seems very uhhh cynical for someone who believes in Christ? If you genuinely believe in the Christian tradition, shouldn't you be more joyous? Christ won!
Yes. I am a lifeline cynic/edgy internet atheist trying to change my ways. It's not moving in a straight line.
HereAndGone
4hr ago
I like symbolism, but when I see the likes of this I groan "oh God, not this crap again". Yeah, give us mystic Christianity divorced from any roots in a living faith tradition, where we can pull it around like Sam Harris Buddhism (get the benefits, dump the woo, be compatible with our true god Science!) to fit what we want without making demands.
If you want Christ the Cosmic Mystic Gnosis Theosis jack-in-the-box, you can go for Theosophy or any range of Western Esoteric traditions that will fit you right up but make no demands of you along the lines of But you, who do you say I am?.
If you want mysticism rooted in tradition, explore the Orthodox and Catholic traditions, but be aware that this is work, not just 'sit there and contemplate my own inner awesomeness'.
Jazzhands
4hr ago
It's also pretty similar to Jefferson's Deism. It's an old heresy that recurs regularly throughout history. In the past few centuries it pretty consistently tries to sell itself with language like "compatible with a scientific mindset." Check out Bishop Spong (of the famously growing Episcopal church) for a relatively recent iteration of this.
HereAndGone
4hr ago
I don't know what their views are (I don't track closely "aha, X said Y so that must mean Z" on here). Whether they're Red, Blue, Green or Orange, professing to have insight into the mind of the shooter because the magic crystal ball is showing the shape of a black dog is proposing an explanation too soon.
HereAndGone
4hr ago
What I wanted to point out was that the immediate and reflexive jump to "he must be one a' them bigot pro-lifer zealot Christian MAGAs!" has not been borne out so far by what we know, and that guy appears to be a Democrat or at least involved with the Democratic party on some level.
So there are no immediate convenient just-so stories as to "who did this why" in the aftermath of any event like this, and 'least said soonest mended' is the best advice.
Lizzardspawn
4hr ago
Israel is well on its way to achieve that
Without snark - is it? As in - is it easier for Iran to rebuild, than Israel to replenish it's offensive capabilities? So far in the face of Iran Israel has been faced with the greatest gift of them all - stupid adversary. But you can't expect this gift to keep on giving forever.
My humble armchair prediction is that we will be unpleasantly surprised at how fast Iran will get it's footing back if the regime survives.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
4hr ago
Why bother calling it Christianity if you're going to hollow out the most fundamental claims of Christianity? It's just secular humanism wearing Christianity as a skinsuit. It doesn't provide a way to be forgiven of your sins, it doesn't even think sin is real! It doesn't provide for resurrection or life after death, it doesn't believe in life after death!
I tend to agree with this as a final belief system. However I'll admit that this line of thinking moved me from atheist --> sympathetic to Christianity, and ultimately a believer in Christ's resurrection. So there is some utility in it as a perhaps transitory phase, no?
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
4hr ago
Sometimes I like to think about the Trojan War, and how for the longest time, I think basically since the Enlightenment, "educated" people believed it was just a myth and never happened at all. Then some random German thought "I donno man, this poem is pretty specific about where Troy was. I think I can just, like, go there?" And then he did, and it was. The truth was sitting there just barely below the surface for anyone with the motivation (and lack of sneering cynicism) to just check and see.
Yeah this is one of my favorite historical anecdotes!! It's an absolutely insane reversal of the historical narrative.
And yes I actually do agree that ultimately you have to pick an axiom to ground Truth into. I have chosen Christ personally.
That being said, and I mean this genuinely, but your posting style seems very uhhh cynical for someone who believes in Christ? If you genuinely believe in the Christian tradition, shouldn't you be more joyous? Christ won!
Not sure if I'm accurately modeling your beliefs here I'm just curious.
HereAndGone
4hr ago
The ratfic then answer the question "what would happen if an actually smart character got dropped into this setting"?
The answer to that, if I'm being snarky, is that they are not in fact the "actually smart character" they think they are and there are reasons why 'this obvious way to take over the world' doesn't work out.
Then again, I am not a fan of the type of fiction where it's "just let me get my stats in a row and manipulate this convenient loophole et voila, deus ex machina!" because that's sports betting, not an organic magic system. Magic should be a little bit fuzzy and imprecise and "no it has to be the exact phase of the moon, no I don't know why, and oh yeah if it rains all bets are off" because that's how things work in reality once you leave behind in vitro or in silico experiments.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4hr ago
· Edited 37m ago
It's hard to pick just one! So many are good for different reasons and offer different things.
Joyce's Ulysses was almost wholly responsible for educating me on what art can and should be; everything else is just filling in the details in comparison. So that has to rank up there.
Ryukishi07's Umineko deserves a mention because it pulls off the rare combination of being interesting on both a formal/experimental level while also just being an amazing page-turner mystery story. Only story I've ever read where I was skipping meals because I wanted to keep reading. I highly recommend it to everyone. (Gwern described it as "mind-screwy; and awesome, and awful. It was long, intricate, baffling, a gorgeously flawed achievement. Everyone should read it; no one should read it. I still don’t know what to think of it. Is it ridiculous self-indulgent tripe which exposes my own mush-headedness, or the deepest mystery I will ever read?" Don't look up Gwern's full review though because it has spoilers for the whole thing.)
HereAndGone
4hr ago
This is what happens with serialised novels, though; before the web, there were newspaper and magazine serials. Writers getting paid by the word so they spun it out as long as they could and padded like they were quiltmakers. Or a popular serial was what made people purchase your paper or magazine, so you pressured the author not to end it too soon.
HereAndGone
4hr ago
It's as if a Western fantasy book had its main magic system be referred to as "Satanism" by everyone in-universe.
That's what the One Ring is (and to a lesser extent the other rings are) in "The Lord of the Rings". It's not the One Weird Trick you think will bring you power and victory, it will hollow you out because in the end it only has one true master. This guy is trying to be Sauron, and even if he gets what he wants, it may not be how he thinks it will be - the greatest deception is self-deception, 'I got everything I wanted without having to pay the price' (ignore the mountain of skulls, ignore that I have lost my fair form and can never go back). Ring-making is a dangerous art and will exact the highest price.
WhiningCoil
4hr ago
At some point I got hit with belief fatigue. I can scarcely tell what's true from last week. Was the Minnesota shooter a D or an R? Will I ever really know? We still don't know shit about the Butler PA Trump Assassin. Or the motives of the Vegas shooter. I've utterly given up concern over whether the truth of the Christian tradition is 100% literally exactly what happened. Probably 75% of what I hold to be true about history, or the active state of my own country, is a lie. Lies I will never have the ability or opportunity to correct. Shit, people get wrong the truth of things they saw with their own damned eyes. Eye witness testimony is famously among the worst forms of evidence. I get all the nitpicking about the game of telephone/oral tradition that eventually got put down in the bible, and then translation after translation etc. I just no longer see how that same argument isn't a fully generalized destructor for any concept of truth.
Dan Carlin constantly quotes some historian talking about ancient texts, and it goes something like "We cannot believe ancient history, but we have no choice but to believe ancient history." It goes back to the constant arguments about how much of what we know about, say, Alexander the Great was real, how much was propaganda, and how much was apocryphal nonsense? But at the same time, you can't go full retard and claim Alexander the Great never existed. Sometimes I like to think about the Trojan War, and how for the longest time, I think basically since the Enlightenment, "educated" people believed it was just a myth and never happened at all. Then some random German thought "I donno man, this poem is pretty specific about where Troy was. I think I can just, like, go there?" And then he did, and it was. The truth was sitting there just barely below the surface for anyone with the motivation (and lack of sneering cynicism) to just check and see.
How important is it really if I choose to believe that 2000 years ago God manifested as a human on Earth? More over, as I go down the rabbit hole, and try to intellectualize that belief, I can still make it work, literally. If I really want to.
I guess if I had to try to put a point on this, it's that everything may be lies and nonsense. The fog of war isn't some vague concept in distant operations. It exists inside our brains far closer to the source than we'd like to believe. Not unlike LLMs have done more to degrade my estimation of people than raise my estimation of AI, arguments against the Christian Tradition have ultimately eroded my ability to believe anything more than they "disproved" Christianity in specific. So fuck it, why not return to the belief system my ancestors had for over 1000 years? They had a pretty good run during that time.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
4hr ago
Who knows?
But I still stick by my original claims. I think it's productive to frame it as akin to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. When you're starving, self-actualization is something you don't have the time or inclination to pursue.
In a way, I think Fang Yuan has the drive for immortality just above the basic fundamental needs like food, or even shelter. We know that he has some interest in poetry (he recites and composes it himself without anyone forcing him to), so maybe he becomes some kind of Philosopher-King? It's entirely possible that you're right that he eventually becomes bored, infinity is a very long time, but 500 years of life turned him into what he is, who can really say what longer periods will..
aqouta
4hr ago
Do you not understand that this is just like fourth wall breaking and pointless? The person asking you is just going to come back with some added contrivance to make this "actually I start a rebellion" dodge impossible because whether you're clever or heroic enough to overcome the scenario isn't what anyone cares about in this sort of conversation.
They're trying to see how other people think about certain value trade offs, would you do something horrible and disgusting to save a life? Does it matter if it's an elderly life you're saving? If your answer is no then that's a fine answer and you can justify it. Whether you'd then go and try to overthrow the society that put you in that situation is just not very interesting. Yes, very good, everyone agrees it'd be horrible to be put in that situation. Because we all agree with that you elaborating on just how angry you are at this imaginary entity forcing the least bad option is just kind of boring, especially if you're doing it to dodge that actual question.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
4hr ago
Religion and symbolism are incredibly important in directing the identities and behavior of groups of people. It even directs their biological evolution which can be seen clearly in Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and Christianity. This was of course also true for ancient European religion. You can see a microcosm of this phenomenon if you just go to a comic con and observe the public rituals venerating fictional comic-book characters. In this way, rationalism does underestimate the importance of symbolism; scientific atheism simply rejects the scientific truth of these stories but stops short of understanding why they were created and what they actually mean. These stories are "real" insofar as they meaningfully influence material reality. The thread you linked relating these myths and rituals such as prayer to "prompt engineering for the subconscious" is apt.
But based on your summary, Mythical Christianity seems to ignore 99% of the text of the Bible and the symbolic analysis of those figures you provided does not at all generalize to the canon as a whole. For example, Yahweh is symbolically a Hebrew tribal god and the Old Testament does not at all fit the interpretation of Yahweh as "love by embracing all things that exist & affording the path to salvation through communion with it". So maybe Mythical Christianity then decides to basically dispense with the Old Testament, well then it's not at all serious about symbolically engaging the New Testament.
We are in darkness symbolically because the prevailing religion in the West is predicated on the literal truth of stories that are no longer believable in this day in age. This "Mythical Christianity" tries to reconcile this but it's self-defeating. It has awareness that Religion is essentially fine-tuning the LLM of collective consciousness, but then tries to circle back and maintain a divine inspiration for those stories.
Mythical Christianity is like becoming aware that the shadows on the wall are just symbolic projections from some artists backstage, but still believing those shadows are divinely influenced to show the audience the truth. So you don't leave the cave, you stay there even though you know they are just shadows being consciously scripted by human beings with their own motives and political agendas.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4hr ago
Are people able to suppress the appearance of spren related to an emotion they’re currently feeling but would like to conceal?
To some extent. This does get explored in the series (for example, a character going undercover who has to try to not draw fearspren). It seems to be that the main thing is how strongly you feel the emotion, so not drawing spren is a matter of trying to keep your emotions calm. I would say the books don't get as deep as you might like, but they do give some consideration to how the existence of emotionspren affect the world.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4hr ago
That being said, from my short time here it seems like most of the Christians on this site aren't that into symbolism, and tend to be more "rationalist" and materialist in their worldview.
Not entirely sure I follow your usage of the word "symbolism" here, but I do think I know what you're getting at.
I'm an atheist, but I have a religious disposition. A religious "personality type" if you will. Conversely, I've interacted with Christians here and elsewhere who believe in a literal God, but don't seem to possess the religious mindset at all.
Funny how things work out like that.
I'm pretty sure we can find many historical examples beginning / ending hostilities within the same generation.
I'm also pretty sure you can admit that Iran specifically is already in its second, leaning into third, generation of participants.
If you want to go by senior leaders, they already are in the second senior leader generation and are well staged for a hardliner to lead the third. If you want to go by major institutional leaders, the late Soleimani of the IRGC was around 20 during the revolution and 60 when he died as the head of the IRGC, which is to say that most of the revolutionary paramilitary types are being done by younger men of post-revolution generations. The Iranian Revolution is about 46 years old, which is to say a child born after the 'new' Iran has had time to grow under up, be properly educated, fight, have kids, and for those kids to have been properly educated and in their fighting / parenting years as well. The Iranian theocracy absolutely has a revolutionary veteran ingroup for people who were involved in the revolution from the start, but the age of the average iranian- 34- means that most of the actual feuding-execution has been conducted by considerably younger people for a generation or two already.
When we look at historical examples of participants ending a feud in any generation, the proponents for ending it are generally not both declaring themselves an enemy while continuing to conduct routine hostilities to their end-of-life years. Almost as importantly, their key pillars of support tend not to gained their privileges with joining in on the feud, and don't stand to lose substantial influence and wealth if they let the feud go away.
Iran is the sort of structure you'd expect to see continue on a conflict across leadership generations. Both the autocrat-level senior leader selection processes and the state-within-the-state role and incentives of the IRGC support continuing the conflict. The senior leaders select for, and remove on a basis of a lack of, commitment to the Cause. Even the nominally elected representatives are pre-screened at the candidate selection level, and the non-elected power centers are even more deliberately managed.
This selection structure is in turn enforced by an institution that would lose its perks and privileges if the hostilities were to end. The IRGC is both a revolutionary-enforcer private army, but also a state-within-a-state whose privileges are justified by defending the revolution and executing the feud by, yes, bringing death to Americans. (And others.) This is the 'worst' of three worlds in terms of 'ending hostilities within the same generation'- selection for revolutionary fervor, material incentive for continuing, but also the prospect of punishment if a non-revolutionary successor took over. Then the IRGC would get fewer perks, and possibly more prison sentences for those things like domestic detentions and torture of political dissidents opposed to the revolution.
if we want to characterize Iran's leadership structure, they'd be closer to historical analogs of Imperial Japan- where being insufficiently hardline could get someone assassinated or the government functionally self-couped- rather than, say, Gaddafi in Libya, who happily engaged in European terrorism before trying to reconcile later. Japan notably continued its feuding until its government was forcibly resolved, and Gaddafi's feud was not as over as he might have thought when the European successor-governments saw an opportunity to strike back at him with US support.
I thought the question they were discussing was whether or not Iran has a blood feud with the US?
They were, but your question was not that question.
You quoted the section about believing someone who declares themselves an enemy, as opposed to Nybbler's characterization of a blood feud. Your response questioned why to believe a self-declaration of enemyship by comparing it to any other political slogan, as opposed to any other kind of conflict. Your basis of argument specifically ignorred the sort of validating actions (that would give slogans credibility) that is the understood background context of the US-Iranian feud.
Maybe I misunderstood something, but how would you describe the concept if not a 'burning, irreconcilable hatred'?
I wouldn't.
Partly because even irreconciliable feuds can be reconciled, because 'irreconciliable' is a judgement of the involved people's character, not an objective fact of nature. People's characters change with time and context, such that things that were impossible for them at one point are imminently possible at another. Reconciliation is usually by the descendants (future generations) rather than the initiators (the current Iranian leadership generation), and the more degrees of separation the better. I do not recognize / subscribe to a fundamental distinction between an irreconcilable geopolitical and a feud that could eventually ends, for the same reason I do not hold the same for any other 'unending' human relationship. There are no unending human relationships, because there are no unending and unchanging humans to have them. There are no permanent geopolitical conflicts, because the people having the conflicts change out.
The other part is I don't think 'blood feud' is a coherent enough concept to be meaningfully definable. I would certainly recognize as a metaphor for multi-generational hostility. I would also recognize it as a metaphor for hostility-on-general principle. But because 'blood feud' is so nebulous, it is also non-falsifiable. If your concept of blood feud is [A] and Nybbler's is [B], and Phailoor's is [C], Nybbler is not wrong for not being aligned with [A], or even in asserting [B] when rejecting [C].
Given that Nybbler's argument uses blood feud in the way Phailoor was using it- namely as Phailoor's short-hand for a conflict that is (as he put it) mostly a response to the US and which would end if the US stopped acting- and that Nybbler's point was far more about 'believe what they say' than 'there is a blood feud specifically because they say there is'- I also wouldn't read into blood feud as any sort of specific concept by either of them.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5hr ago
Why would it move me? If indeed he was correct and the French weren't worthy of liberty, it does not change what liberty is. That some people, allowed liberty, will destroy themselves and others with the latitude thye have, does not make liberty into "not liberty".
self_made_human
C'est la vie
5hr ago
Well, now I must know yours!
ChickenOverlord
5hr ago
Rejecting the Nicene conception of the Trinity seems like a fundamentally different idea to me than what this "Imaginal Christianity" is doing, i.e. denying any and all supernatural aspects of Christianity.
HereAndGone
5hr ago
By the sound of your review, what happened was perfectly in line with the world of the story. You get this close to achieving your ends, but too bad, sucker! Here's that kick in the teeth for you!
Fang Yuan ran into the final Calamity that shuts down everyone hoping to become Immortal. That is the perfect ending.
I disagree with your view about what would happen if he did achieve his goal. So now you're Immortal, what next? I don't think he'd take up other pleasures (what, come this far just to be a fat, drunken lecher like the rest of the fools?) because he's pared away, dug out, exploded, burned off, everything apart from relentless will to power. He can't chillax and make friends and find love, he's trained himself to think of all that as stupid crap for the losers and as only methods of exploiting others. After ten minutes of peace and stability he'd be bored stiff.
He would either need the challenge, like the classic Western gunslingers, of "so you're the number one, now every wannabe is coming gunning to take your place", in order to keep the purpose of life going or he'd have to create his own rivals (manipulate behind the scenes to get a bunch of near-Immortals chasing after him) in order to defeat them because otherwise, what was it all for? He's beaten the game, reached the highest possible level - now what? Replay it on a different mode?
My point is that at least this specific scenario (not all thought experiments) is pointless and setup not to gain any insight but to troll. And maybe to try whitewashing aberrant sexual practices.
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