domain:houseofstrauss.com
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1m ago
Mostly a set of techniques to help settle the mind from the vast distractions in the modern world. A more direct praxis for us to enter states where we can perceive the spiritual world of angels, demons, etc, and get in touch with God.
The ancient Christians recommended meditation or watchfulness before entering into any prayer whatsoever. In the modern world I believe that almost none of us truly are in that mental state due to our myriad distractions. I think Buddhist meditation and understandings could be quite useful for revitalizing direct, contemplative experience of the divine amongst Christians.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2m ago
Not being against the Gays is one of the more salient points
No, this is not true at all from my perspective. Not only is it not one of the things Buddhism offers, Buddhism itself is strongly against gays, and also women. If you look into the roots of the Buddhist tradition there is far stronger sentiment and prohibitions against sexual perversion than in mainstream Christianity.
That being said, I do think the modern Church has a perhaps too myopic focus on sexual sin sometimes.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
8m ago
Thanks for the blunt takes! Interesting views here, very realpolitik. I do agree with most of your take on the Protestant denominations in the U.S., seems as if their cultural moment is fading. Sometimes I wonder if a new religion will come in to pick up the slack, like the "western folk religion" @Stefferi mentioned above, but more formalized.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
14m ago
Great comment. Yeah I do think that the Western folk religion is quite dominant sadly, especially given how uhhh.... poor it seems to be at actually improving people's lives or leading to useful social organization.
I had to laugh at the (often imagined.) All too true.
Listening
17m ago
This isn't really something I'm commenting on, but it is culture-war related and I do genuinely want to know, so...
Can anyone who considers themselves left of center comment on the accuracy or lack thereof of this post? Is this a thing, or more something particular to this specific guy.
quiet_NaN
35m ago
Yes, seems like a storm in the teapot. Anyone doing statistical analysis and worried about the effect of trans people will want more information on what the column actually tracks. Simply saying "the column name is gender, therefore it refers exactly to ..." is always precarious.
but it's hilarious to me that the conservative administration was basically ceding the point here by differentiating at the schema level that "sex" is different than "gender".
I think the steelman of the Republicans would be "there is only biological sex, and 'gender' is a word popularized by our enemies to imply that social roles associated with a sex are worth tracking separately".
But yes, that level of language policing is a bit funny. Not that the woke left has never purged Problematic terms when they were in power, but at least they had the fig leaf of 'it is not about ideology, but the bad term is hurting really people!'
As soon as these countries reach some development/income threshold, the floodgates will open. Syrian Civil war caused huge exodus despite it being only country of 23 million in 2011. In hypothetical continuation of Africa's World War in 2050 let's say involving Nigeria with 400 million people living there, or complete collapse of Egypt if they will have huge war with Ethiopia with combined population of also 400 million, this will completely change the calculation.
And again, I do not think this necessarily needs to be some single source of issues. It is just one of possible outside pressures that will destabilize already fragile situation inside the West.
georgioz
47m ago
It most certainly does not. The average human alive has twice as many female ancestors as men.
This is an often cited fact, but it hides more than it shows. Historically women had lower life expectancy compared to men thanks to horrible death rate during child birth. Yes, they may have managed to reproduce - but so what. It was their family, mostly males who took care of now motherless children. Without men these children would not survive.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
58m ago
I'm going to see a performance of Hamlet next week. What are the best essays or YouTube lectures to help me understand the play or take an alternate view of it?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
I think it is almost inevitable to have mass immigration from Africa when the continent will inevitably be drawn into one or more huge conflicts of countries with hundreds of million of people.
DRC (official population estimate: 100 million) has been in a state of chaos and civil war for decades, yet the amount of Congolese who have immigrated to the Western countries has remained comparatively small (120 000 formally in Western countries according to this link, even if you triple or quadruple this number to account for the illegal migration it would be less than a 1 % of that official estimate.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
Query: do you think current atheists were born of atheist ancestors?
Let’s just say that I used to work as a developer for a large German company. Note past tense.
For the first year I could only install new software or drivers by making an official request and having the Indian IT support do it via remote access. You can imagine how well this worked for embedded systems development where you regularly need to use some new piece of external hardware or random IC manufacturer’s legacy software tool.
The best part? All of the daily work could have been done on a rando, burner laptop as email, team chat, source repositories and build system were all in external cloud services. Literally the only things I actually needed intranet access was to put my hours into the SAP system once per month.
georgioz
1hr ago
I think that female pattern is a little bit different. They are as prone to parasocial relationships as men on onlyfans, but they fall for status and fame - think about boyband members, movie stars etc. As soon as some company will invent some good version of male full AI celebrity and provide it en masse to teenage girls, it will have capacity to oneshot them all.
How do you think religion in the West will interact with the Culture War in the next few elections, and in the future?
I think what will happen in the West is some mix of lebanonization, balkanization and brazilianization. The situation is similar to that of Yugoslavia or Lebanon or many other countries, where you have intersection of various ethnic, religious, tribal or even national interest in constant conflict resulting in confusing mess. There will be foreign shocks, I think it is almost inevitable to have mass immigration from Africa when the continent will inevitably be drawn into one or more huge conflicts of countries with hundreds of million of people. For religion, you can insert progressivism, christianity, islam and classical liberalism as actors in this religious conflict.
Culture War can lead to civil war, but I think that people in the West have a very skewed view of what it looks like. People like Tim Pool are too much married toward scenario of US Civil War or Spanish Civil War, which while confusing was more or less fought as a standard war. What will more likely happen is more akin to Lebanon or Yugoslavia, where decades old status quo of deliberately constructed balance of internal tensions slowly deteriorated, only to combust quickly, suddenly and violently. Or you can look into other conflicts such as what we now see in Ethiopia or South Sudan or even Syria, where you have incredibly confusing web of loyalties and where belligerents are unclear and alliances constantly shifting.
jake
1hr ago
- Amish: >6.0 (Mennonites also appear high but I couldn't find recent data)
- TradCaths: 3.5/3.6 (3.6 anecdotal, "Kloster 2018" cited for 3.5)
- Mormons: 3.4
- Muslims:3.0/3.1
- Evangelicals: 2.3 (All following numbers use this citation)
- Catholics: 2.2
- Jews: 2.0
- Mainline Protestants: 1.9
- Atheists: 1.5
- Agnostics: 1.4
Religion will interact with the US culture war effectually, as the nonreligious population largely selects itself out of existence. This will swiftly accelerate with the wifebot and the half-right to reproduction, where it's mostly religious families buying the half-rights of mostly nonreligious sellers. Especially Mormons, when it becomes socially viable for them to pick polygamy back up (Smith and Young, laughing). Catholicism and Mormonism, there's your Western future.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1hr ago
Big funds are smart enough to have 2 year noncompetes for quants though.
Completely unenforceable in the UK and (increasingly) large parts of the US too. Any decent solicitor can get them cut down to 6 months, the 2 year non-compete is just one of the many shitty tricks employers play to try and discouraging us from jumping ship. The mechanism of action of a 2 year non-compete is through chilling effects, not legal enforcement.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
True, but having both parents around is different to "and then dad shook us off like we were dirt on the soles of his shoes and set out for a new fun life with a new fun family". That has got to hurt. Even a distant, neglectful father has to be better than one who made the choice to reject you in favour of someone else (someone better).
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Very, very minor kerfuffle (the story seems to have quietly died) about our Arts Council asking questions about religion and sexual orientation on grant applications.
The Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) has written to the Arts Council asking for further details on the “nature and content” of questions asked of artists when they were applying for bursary grants earlier this year.
It follows worries raised by a number of artists who contacted the Irish Independent in recent weeks to raise concerns after they were asked about their sexuality and religious orientation, among other personal questions, when they applied for the bursary round in February.
The headline makes it sound like some kind of vaguely sinister data-gathering on deviants and there's nothing in the body of the story to explain why they asked these questions, but if you think about it, it's obvious why. Of course, this is because it's a government body and so has DEI targets to hit, and how will it fill out the paperwork about the percentage of queer trans disabled neurodivergent multiracial Wiccans who were awarded a bursary unless it gathers data in this way?
The same people complaining they were asked if they were gay will be the first to cry "discrimination!" if they don't get a bursary and will go running to the media about how they were refused because they were gay, when it's much more likely the Arts Council wants to give as many grants to gay etc. artists as they can in the name of representation, except they have to find out who is gay etc. first!
HereAndGone
2hr ago
My (naive?) theory is that Trump owes his victory as much to the Evangelical community more than any other - they very much represent his spirit.
I think it's not his spirit, but rather where else could they go? The Democrats certainly have no signs of welcoming traditional believers aboard, unless they drop all that stuff about abortion/LGBT+ (and male headship for the harder core). What I was mildly surprised by was Kamala Harris failing to reach out on grounds of "I'm Christian too" (yeah, I know: citation needed). She did the usual campaigning in black churches, but no broader appeal to the religious conservatives with stories about "I sang in the church choir as a girl, I attend this church when I'm at home":
Harris, on the other hand, is a rare political figure who may have downplayed her spiritual life in public, given anti-religious sentiments in her native San Francisco Bay Area and a complicated personal religious journey.
Harris is a Baptist who was raised by a Black Anglican father and an Indian Hindu mother, and she is married to a Reform Jewish husband.
She’s a longtime member of San Francisco’s historic Third Baptist Church and has a deep relationship with its pastor, the Rev. Amos Brown. As vice president, she has attended services at Baptist churches in the Washington, D.C., area and in 2022 spoke at the National Baptist Convention.
...In her 2019 memoir, Harris wrote about her mother’s making sure she was exposed to both Hindu and African American Christian religious traditions, adding that she and her sister, Maya, sang in the choir at 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland.
It's probably also complicated by the fact that that is an American Baptist-affiliated church, not a Southern Baptist one, but nevertheless she soft-pedalled on religion, as did Walz (quick, anybody have any idea, without looking it up, what denomination if any he belongs to?)
Whoops, looks like Walz is a souper!
"Tim, who was raised Catholic, became a Lutheran after marrying Gwen. He has called himself a "Minnesota Lutheran" and identified Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, a congregation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as his family's parish."
Corvos
2hr ago
I think there is an underappreciated gap between the 'artisan' worldview and the 'executive' worldview. In the former, skills are things you acquire through great effort and are the main achievements of a well-lived life. In the latter, skills are things you buy; your merit comes from the things you have access to and the use to which you put them.
Corvos
2hr ago
And also to minimise the scale of the breach, right? It's bad if an employee tells me that BigCorp and BiggerCorp are expected to finalise their merger by May, but it's worse if they give me 2000 pages of detail on the subject including all the due diligence on both parties.
KingOfTheBailey
2hr ago
I thought I was the only one who felt this way.
Mushguffler
2hr ago
Agreed, either gender matters or it doesn't. If it matters, then they used it wrong and should be scolded for it.
@Blueberry this is what I meant if you're curious.
More options
Context Copy link