domain:mattlakeman.org
FeepingCreature
6m ago
I read it as more like, sophistry may be employed against inconsequential or subjective matters like religion freely, as there's no harm to it; but if you try to argue with reality, reality is gonna win.
madeofmeat
12m ago
Christianity isn't so much about 'things being true' but getting into a mindset where 'it doesn't matter if it's true or not, I believe it'. Christian theology is a complete mess because they go in with the answer in mind and then come up with justifications.
This is definitely what it looks like in TheMotte and adjacent places. People lean hard on the coordination power and social stability aspects and steer well clear of trying to explain nature in religious terms and just shrug at the historical narratives in religious doctrine being very odd. Meanwhile religions keep losing smart and sincere people who start out taking this stuff at face value, realize it doesn't come together, and end up feeling betrayed and lied to. There doesn't seem to be much of a way back either, unless you end up fully convinced in the "it doesn't matter if it's true" mindset after a lifetime of figuring out what is true being important to you. This hasn't always been the case, the 19th century introduced the double whammy of the theory of evolution showing up and a consensus forming that the bible's historical narrative is mostly mythical. I keep wondering what this will do to the religions in the long term, since the process has really only been going for a century or two at this point. You keep losing people who are both smart and sincere, and who you're left with either isn't very smart or isn't very sincere.
benny
13m ago
Can anyone recommend me a book on Internal Family System or related modalities that explore multiplicities in your mind and how to address the ones that you may associate with negative behavior? I'm very woo-conscious (for better or worse) and I would like that not to interfere when starting out, as it appears there is something there.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
38m ago
Let's say I have a difficult task that needs a lot of comms with Gemini to get it on the same page. Then forks allow for easily throwing that into the context for a variant of that task. Or simply A/B testing.
The first time I made use of forks, it was when I was generating images with Flash, and got it dialed in. I then forked it so as to try alternative prompts and the effects of different details, with the easy ability to jump back and forth.
Tenaz
40m ago
I think there are many different meanings of the word "purpose," all of which are valid at times. Then there's "sense of purpose", which is being conscious of one's own purpose. If I say I have a sense of purpose, I'm not particularly saying I have purpose more than I did previously, I'm saying I'm more conscious of my own purpose, or that I feel more purposeful.
The thing about Christianity being true is that while most would agree that it would give people purpose, it doesn't necessarily give them a sense of purpose. That comes, not from Christianity actually being true, but from belief in Christianity.
If Christianity is true then God created us and gave us purpose. We can choose not to pursue that purpose, I guess, and reject our creator, but rejecting a purpose doesn't make it cease to exist. That purpose exists even if we're not conscious of it. It doesn't matter whether it's subjective or not (though I reject that--in the hypothetical, God's purpose for us is as objective as anything can possibly be); it's still a purpose either way, one which the Creator is aware of even if we are not.
This is frequently to the detriment of their drastically reduced number of children
Most of the Western fertility decline was justified and needed. Infant mortality rates approaching 50% were near-universal before the 19th century; the average woman doesn't need to and shouldn't have 4+ children anymore, lest we tempt the spectre of Malthus. (The demographic argument for pro-natalism still applies, but in the long run fertility still needs to converge on replacement.)
Mothers can't be "more precious than rubies" when the job prerequisite is the bare biological minimum expected of a mammalian female. I've seen such pro-natalist exhortations to value motherhood more before, but since status (especially female status) is a zero-sum game, the end result of such efforts is going to look much more like shaming barren women rather than celebrating mothers. It only makes sense for women to branch out into the male realm when the need for their singular area of expertise has been significantly obviated.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
44m ago
No big surprises there :) There's a reason more books have been written about the Bible than any other topic!
urquan
I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness.
45m ago
· Edited 34m ago
A fair warning that, though he analyzes the patristic evidence powerfully and fairly, he also has a unique model of catholicity that he sees as the bridge between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. He at times presents this as the "Orthodox view of ecclesiology," but I'm given to understand that it's more of a minority view. But still, I found his views on ecclesiology irresistible.
And, to be clear, I am not a current Catholic, nor have I ever been received into the Catholic Church. I believed firmly in Catholicism for a long time, and the priest who worked with me was happy to receive me, but I backed away because of issues of conscience with some Catholic doctrines, and personal struggles with sin -- as well as, to be blunt, utter confusion as to what Catholicism precisely was in a post-conciliar world.
I had a similar experience with Orthodoxy -- the "intellectual evangelical convert" in my narrative wasn't a caricature, but actually myself, and my mother and my girlfriend indeed accompanied me to liturgy a few times and didn't like it. My struggles with Orthodoxy were not so much about doctrines I could not assent to, but about doctrines that were load-bearing in my Christian faith, like the principle of "faith seeking understanding", the concept of inherited fallenness and separation from God (original sin), the importance of divine justice, and the reality of Hell as a place of separation from God (and tragically suffering), being hard to reconcile with the Eastern Orthodox approach especially post-Romanides.
I would argue that both Catholicism and Orthodoxy underwent a severe and belief-altering ressourcement in the 60s, and that has brought them closer in some ways -- every time I read Catholic theologians talking about paschal mystery theology, they sound very Orthodox to me -- but also separated them, injecting polemic where there might have been agreement. While I agree with Orthodox reservations about De Trinitate and believe his works must be understood extremely carefully, I hold St. Augustine to be a great saint, and a personal patron, and the view among some Orthodox that outright denies his sanctity or experience of divine grace is unnecessary and offensive.
I do not believe the West is the author of heresies, as many of Orthodoxy's greatest writers do, and I believe reason in religion to be, not the enemy of divine illumination, but a means of illumination that opens the mind to be receptive to divine grace by teaching how truly deep "the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God" are, in the words of the apostle. I worry sincerely that Eastern Orthodoxy often collapses into a kind of quietism that does not reflect the serious philosophical and theological capacity for thought I see in the fathers of the Church.
I've tried not to present myself as a Catholic, but a "mere Christian," defending views that I believe represent Christianity at its fullness, but this often means I defend Catholic doctrine because, to be blunt, I agree with it as a matter of theology. At the very least, my goal is that Catholicism is described fairly, as I believe Catholics deserve a fair hearing and don't always get it.
But, to make a long story short, this hopefully answers @TheDag's question as well: I am a committed Chalcedonian Christian, but too rationalist and "western" for Eastern Orthodoxy, too sacramental and synergistic for Protestantism, and too, well, insufficiently totalizingly Marian for Catholicism. I am a wanderer in the wilderness, or taking refuge in "the hallway," in the words of C.S. Lewis, as from a storm prepared to blow away the house built upon sand.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
47m ago
Do you usually fork because you're unsatisfied with the response, didn't want to clutter the context, felt you had a natural off-topic you wanted to explore somewhat sandboxed, or something else? I'm trying to imaging the typical use case where it would feel so essential.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
49m ago
No problem, still appreciate the reply. Hope it's been interesting for you as it has in return. Or maybe I have too much time on my hands.
Paul's definitely an interesting case. Of course we all must acknowledge to some extent that the NT after the gospels is not really a comprehensive look at everything going on in the church, there's some "selection bias" so to speak. A lot of the leadership seems to have viewed him as the go-to guy for Gentile stuff, despite not even being a Gentile himself (though his Roman citizenship and language proficiency certainly made him better suited for the job than many of the 12), but the exact extent of his authority and his position isn't spelled out very clearly, though we do have hints. And on top of that, although the LDS position is that the 12 apostles are special, the word "apostle" is used a bit more freely in the NT, and Christian vocabulary is just getting defined anyways, somewhat haphazardly. With that said, I'll freely admit that at some point, I and others choose to make plausible inferences about Paul. This "backwards" reasoning is not load-bearing despite that, I still think it's decently supported. For example, although the laying on of hands isn't strictly mandatory for some stuff, I choose to believe that at some point he was given some sort of special dispensation to fill the role he filled in the early church, and definitely people perceived him as such beyond just respect for the man that brought them the gospel of eternal life. Regardless, I do not think he was operating as a rogue preacher or anything, rather he
You're definitely correct that Hebrews has a very particular audience and goal. Aside from the wide belief that it's not actual by Paul, it's directed toward Jews and their questions about, among other things, how Jesus was from Judah, in hopes of keeping them in the church -- a big issue for the Jews who have believed for centuries that Levites are the only ones who can do priesthood rites! The letter talks about how Christianity is superior to Judaism in various ways, for example Jesus is better than angels, and also discusses how Levite priesthood isn't actually the only game in town. There's this Melchezidek guy who Abraham paid tithes to, kind of implies he's higher up, the author say, right? And Jesus is a Melchezidek-like figure. See, it's Biblical for non-Levites to do priesthood things! (And in fact the LDS theology takes this even farther and to this day has two separate priesthood lines reflecting this, a lesser Aaronic one that does baptism and communion and the Melchezidek one that does eternal marriage and is a prerequisite to be a bishop and such, which is an interesting detail but more of a modern application)
Note however that at no point here is there the implication that it's open season, anyone perform ordinances and covenants and rituals, the somewhat spontaneous and sporadic callings of OT prophets notwithstanding. And 5:4 emphasizes this same point, that because many rituals (e.g. the day of atonement ritual on Yom Kippur) have the priest literally as a stand-in for God or Christ, not just anyone can decide to step up and play the role (v4). Jesus also didn't do this of his own accord, but in fact (v5-6) "Christ did not exalt himself to be made a high priest, but was appointed by him who said to him... You are a priest forever, after the order of Melcheizedek" (emphasis mine) . You are correct that in some places in Hebrews and elsewhere in the NT we are taught very specifically that the whole point of the Levite rituals (especially the scapegoat of the above ritual) was to symbolize Christ and prepare them for him, and as far as we know the Levites didn't have a particularly special role in the early Christian church, but when talking about authority more generally, Christians including Jewish converts still would have implicitly understood that authority in general is a more fundamental principle. Moreover, in v11-14 we learn that the audience has, broadly speaking, been doing a pretty bad job with the "basic principles". Foreshadowing, in my book. Far from the only time, too.
As an aside, despite my church's love for the KJV, I'm a bit of an NRSV man myself. The 2 Timothy passage starts by talking about Paul's good example worthy of emulation, but also the inevitability of persecution. Then, however...
[A]s for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness... (emphasis mine)
To me it seems quite clear that the whole passage emphasizes that the source of teaching (i.e. the person(s) doing so) is very important, and is paramount in assessing its reliability. And that Scripture assists in maintaining those teachings. Thus I draw the conclusion, supported elsewhere, that the person of the teacher matters a lot when assessing doctrinal purity. Obviously, there are many passages of the scriptures encouraging teaching each other more generally, but as a few of the other passages (among others that exist too) suggest, the congregations themselves seem to have perennially done a poor job at policing their own doctrine. That's what I take away from many of the (especially Pauline) epistles, at least.
In fact there are vanishingly few people teaching fellow members who don't have some line of authority. Apollos (Acts 18) was among these odd-man-out examples, a convert to the baptism of John who is doing missionary work and who knows the scriptures really well, he gets corrected by another missionary couple ("coworkers" of Paul, elsewhere) in private, and then goes back to missionary work in the synagogue. Interestingly, no mention of internal teaching, and in fact he is later the cause of a schism in 1 Cor 1:12 (though plausibly this is not his fault)! I'm not aware of any other cases. And actually his case is illustrative - he had a pretty good, scripturally grounded understanding, he was even immediately receptive to the truth, but was still unable to independently come to the proper conclusion with scripture alone. Thus my earlier point about how despite having some major sympathy and Sola Scriptura roots the end result was clear that at some point extra revelation is needed.
It was James 1:5 after all, encouraging those who have gotten stuck to seek revelation, that was according to his account, the prompt for Joseph Smith to pray for guidance in the first place. He later found good company with many people who read things like Eph 2:20 or Eph 4:11-13 and felt that a Christian church needed apostles and prophets as a key attribute, or were dissatisfied with the Protestant status quo in other ways. It was largely these people, as far as I know, who initially converted, and honestly the church has never attracted large numbers of Catholic converts specifically. Part of the early LDS appeal was precisely to this audience of people who had gotten deep into the scriptures, and didn't see its reflection in contemporary Protestant groups.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
56m ago
The actual alternative for Brits is to kick out their unproductive, non-British population, tighten their belts, and spend a decade or two training up new doctors and nurses from the natives. That would drive down costs and reduce wait times in the long run,
What is the mechanism by which replacing foreign-trained doctors with native British doctors is supposed to make healthcare more affordable for patients?
My naïve assumption is that doctors from, say, the Indian subcontinent are willing to accept lower pay and less favorable conditions than comparable Brits, simply because the opportunity to live and work in Britain is worth so much more to them than it is to a native Brit who takes that opportunity for granted. This is, as far as I can tell, pretty uniformly the story of nearly all immigrant labor, skilled or unskilled, throughout the developed world. And presumably the ability to furnish such doctors lower wages and less benefits would in turn redound to the patient in terms of lower costs.
I’m extremely sympathetic to many of the arguments for deporting foreign laborers — even doctors — and thereby clearing the field for natives to move into their remunerative positions; however, the argument that it will make things cheaper for the end users of those services seems to be quite dubious. Perhaps I’m missing something. Am I wrong that Indian doctors accept lower pay and that this causes healthcare costs, ceteris paribus, to decrease relative to the counterfactual in which all doctors are white Brits?
Supah_Schmendrick
1hr ago
I refuse to debate you further about the exact technical definition of "purpose" and whether it exists objectively or just subjectively, no matter how much you want to have that debate.
Okay, I don't particularly care about technical definitions; I was asking because I didn't understand what you were trying to get at with "not just a sense of purpose but an actual purpose," which seem to me to round to the same thing.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1hr ago
I've occasionally edited my own responses, but never the LLMs. I wonder if that would be helpful for jailbreaks. At some points, when the context window wasn't enough, I'd delete unnecessary responses to clear up space, but with a 1M window now? Never necessary.
The ability to fork chats is clutch, I can tell you. I miss it on every other platform.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
1hr ago
One could argue that the expected role of the woman has changed, and now they are all out of the house doing labor (and “labor”) elsewhere. This is frequently to the detriment of their drastically reduced number of children, because young children really do need a mother around most of the time.
I’ve never met a daycare provider or a maid who is even half as good as a half-decent stay-at-home mom. And there are many decent stay-at-home moms out there, women who love their homes and their kids. They just don’t get noticed because of mal-oriented societal norms, and because they aren’t and never can be influencers, and because they understand that they don’t have to become like men or compete with men to be more precious than rubies.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1hr ago
Except we strongly disagree on what Biblical actually means.
TheBailey
soapy mop
1hr ago
Surely that's more to do with the cultural coercion affecting his “brides”? cf. Elon Musk's quasi-harem, the sheer exploitativeness and power asymmetry seems to disqualify it from really counting as a mutually constructed "romantic" relationship...
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1hr ago
The Orthodox still believe in the bodily ressurection. I think the standard claim would be that Christ's body and the physicality of it is a Holy Mystery, and that we don't necessarily need to know.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1hr ago
I mean Rome as the patriarchal seat, compared to the rest of the pentarchy. (i.e. the Orthodox church.)
Sure, childcare and housework is necessary, but I'd contend that it actually isn't all that valuable in an economic sense, nor is it really that hard. A back of the envelope calculation suggests that a near-majority of housewives aren't earning their keep:
From a quick google search, the median cost of daycare in the US is $12.5k/yr and the median salary of a maid is $27.5k/yr. Housewives only need to maintain one house/a few children and don't need to adhere to professional standards for cleaning/childcare, so let's halve the sum and add maybe $10k/yr for other miscellaneous responsibilities, coming out to a $30k/yr equivalent salary for the responsibilities of a housewife. The average male salary in the US is ~70k, so if the median man is spending >40% of his income on supporting his wife, it could be said that she's got a bit of a grift going for her, with the scale of the grift increasing with greater male earnings and investment.
It's crass to lay such things bare, but I think it's an important point to be made, and to note alongside it that it wasn't always this way. Good housekeeping used to include responsibilities such as practical crafts, tending to the hearth, spinning wool, etc. that made women far more economically valuable, if not as primary providers. As the functional value of home economics has been hollowed out by technology, the expected role of women ought to adapt to the circumstances.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
The Avignon papacy was resolved with the declaration of which line was the true one.
Tenaz
2hr ago
This whole discussion is a waste of time. I refuse to debate you further about the exact technical definition of "purpose" and whether it exists objectively or just subjectively, no matter how much you want to have that debate.
It would certainly make my dating life easier. I’d have a sense of purpose in life, defined rules of virtue to follow, but it just doesn’t make any actual sense.
OP mentions three benefits "if Christianity were true":
- Easier dating life
- Sense of purpose in life
- Defined rules of virtue
Are these the first things that come to mind for you if Christianity is actually true? Not, say, the ability to see dead loved ones in the afterlife, or the knowledge that prayer works? Every one of these is strongly compatible with belief in Christianity, and in fact the benefits exist even if Christianity is not in fact true.
I think a charitable (and accurate) reading is something like "I wish Christianity were true, because then I'd believe in it, and I'd get the benefits of belief." But certainly what he's referring to is benefits of belief in Christianity. If you can't see this I don't know what to tell you.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Nicene Christians use the term for themselves.
The existence of organisations like NICE in the UK also tacitly accepts this fact.
It will never cease amusing me that in 1945, C.S. Lewis, one of England’s most successful authors, named an organization of scientific depravity “N.I.C.E.,” and then 54 years later, England just goes ahead and creates something of a very similar nature, with the same name and everything.
Who could have realized Torment Nexus jokes were already stale before the turn of the millennium.
They could support more people if the government hadn't underfunded the NHS!
British people are already taxed up to their eyeballs, and the NHS is better funded and staffed than ever. In 2018 it already made up 30% of all of England’s services spending, so I’m not sure from where you’re going to get more funding. Despite all that the A&E’s are, morning noon and night, hugely overcrowded every time I’ve been in one, full of very un-British looking people, horribly slow and incapable of triage. There’s only so much blood left in the British stone and it can’t fix those problems.
The actual alternative for Brits is to kick out their unproductive, non-British population, tighten their belts, and spend a decade or two training up new doctors and nurses from the natives. That would drive down costs and reduce wait times in the long run, but no one in a democracy is ever willing to suffer short term unpleasantness, so the NHS will just keep being a money pit until Britain cracks up. It might also help to cut the bureaucracy that infests all Western service providers. I am willing to give credit where even minimal credit is due and it looks like Starmer is willing to do that so maybe there will be some gains from that which stave off disaster for a while.
Alternatively, they could privatize it, which would at least let the companies involved ration care more sensibly.
Let me know how that works out for you.
24 When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the wilderness where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it. 25 Twelve thousand men and women fell that day—all the people of Ai. 26 For Joshua did not draw back the hand that held out his javelin until he had destroyed[a] all who lived in Ai. 27 But Israel did carry off for themselves the livestock and plunder of this city, as the Lord had instructed Joshua.
Hard-heartedness works out surprisingly well for God’s people, sometimes, as it turns out.
I'll have to check that out. I recently read Two Paths by Michael Whelton. He presents things in a fairly detached and non-triumphalist way, but his final judgement reflects the fact that he is a Catholic who became Orthodox. A Catholic response to some of his points would be interesting to read, but another Orthodox perspective that a current Catholic recommends might also be a good way to "fact check" him.
I find Jesus writing a book that nobody's heard of not inherently goofier or ahistorical than rising from the dead. Or having communion wafers turn into his flesh. Of all the weird things people say about Jesus, writing a book that isn't in the historical record is nowhere near the top of the list of "things secular historians don't think are true about Jesus".
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