domain:noahpinion.blog
ABigGuy4U
18m ago
Frankly, I don’t even think college students at liberal universities in most of the country would know what the hell you were talking about if you started going on about your polycule.
hydroacetylene
21m ago
Yeah, she works M-F 8-5.
Agape and philia do not indicate different forms of love in this context. I know CS Lewis says this, but it ain’t so. It’s not something that Origen talks about when he distinguishes between agape and eros, and he definitely would have mentioned it. It isn’t mentioned in the earlier church fathers. Rather, in the context Zizek mentions, the words are used interchangeably. Imagine your girlfriend wants assurance that she is beautiful. “Am I beautiful? … I mean, you think I’m very pretty right? … Tell me I’m gorgeous again.” These are interchangeable within the context, even though there may be slight variations in the usage in colloquial speech.
Just going to quote from some papers on this. In speaking of love, Origen doesn’t even bring up philia, but compares Agape and Eros and concludes that even these two loves are interchangeable in scripture:
Mindful of the indwelling divine love being taken in a carnal sense, clearly with the [ignorant people] in view, Origen returns to the central question in the second half of his discussion on agape in section two of the Prologue. How does the recognition of agapè as a divine name clarify that eros and agapè are interchangeable in meaning? According to Origen, even in the case of God—where it is obvious that we should understand love in the spiritual sense—agape and eros are interchangeable. This is because divine agapé resembles the dynamics of a spiritual sense of eros. This equivalence of agapé and (a spiritual sense of) erõs in the case of divine love becomes evident when we consider the nature of the love we receive from God in Trinitarian terms 33 In unfolding this argument, Origen presents, to my knowledge for the first time in Christian thought, a vision of human deification expressed explicitly in terms of a Trinitarian grammar of love.
Origen's answer rests upon the key conceptual distinction between a carnal sense and a spiritual sense of love. Whereas carnal love (amor carnalis) is directed towards corporeal and changeable realities, spiritual love (amor spiritualis) is directed towards incorporeal and unchangeable realities." Origen's whole argument builds upon the claim that we use the term erõs improperly to indicate carnal love and properly only when indicating spiritual love."' This point escapes the simpliciores, the spiritually immature, who are subsequently endangered by the scriptural language of love as it can be read as an encouragement to pursue carnal pleasure rather than a life of vir-tue.18 This, however, raises the question: what then is spiritual love? According to Origen, scriptural terminologies by themselves will not help because there is no direct correspondence between the conceptual distinction between carnal and spiritual love, on the one hand, and the terminological distinction between agapé and erõs, on the other. As he painstakingly highlights, Scripture can use agapé (noun)/agapan (verb) to substitute for erõs (noun) / eran (verb) in contexts where there is a danger for the weak amongst the readers to fall into carnal sin. But Scripture is equally capable of using erõs / eran terminology to speak of a more elevated sense of love, one that is directed towards higher things.l The conclusion we should draw from this is that the conceptual distinction between carnal and spiritual love is grounded on content and not on terminological difference. It is not that carnal love is erõs and spiritual love agape; rather, both can be used to refer to spiritual love in Scripture. Thus, to discern the nature of spiritual love we need to go beyond terminologies to reach the content of love.
And from elsewhere:
Is there a significant difference in meaning between the two words for love used in the passage, [agapaw and philew]?[…] Most of the Greek Fathers like Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria, saw no real difference of meaning. Neither did Augustine nor the translators of the Itala (Old Latin). This was also the view of the Reformation Greek scholars Erasmus and Grotius. The suggestion that a distinction in meaning should be seen comes primarily from a number of British scholars of the 19th century, especially Trench, Westcott, and Plummer. It has been picked up by others such as Spicq, Lenski, and Hendriksen. But most modern scholars decline to see a real difference in the meaning of the two words in this context, among them Bernard, Moffatt, Bonsirven, Bultmann, Barrett, Brown, Morris, Haenchen, and Beasley-Murray.
As for wealth equality: Christ clearly abhors the “very rich”. Being “very rich” and ungiving damns a person, from my reading. God cares more about this than blasphemy. But we also have very clear and specific anti-equality statements. Someone tells Christ that his brother isn’t sharing the inheritance, and that he should make him share; Christ says that life is not about possessions and that he isn’t the Lord of that. Christ is the Lord of the Moral, not the lord of the specific cultural and legal rules that appear prudent to specific leaders to secure political wellbeing. He is the Lord of “help the poor”, not “no one should ever be poorer”. Or consider:
He entered Jericho and was passing through. And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
Zacchaeus was rich; he definitely had more than twice the average wage; yet he is only required to give half of his wages to the poor and to give reparation to anyone defrauded. Then he has full approval of God and is saved.
More importantly: the very context of the love statements makes a universal love impossible. Christ is telling his disciple to direct all of his love to the sheep. “Do you love me? Tend my sheep!” The sheep are the brothers, or in this case the younger novice Christian brothers, not random strangers. The strangers are those who do not matter at all. For instance, “If [a brother sins against you and] refuses to listen even to the church [telling him to repent in front of you], let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” You see Christ’s treatment of strangers with the Canaanite woman. It shouldn’t surprise us that these rules make sense in light of utility and game theory and psychology, if you believe in both God and science. Casting your love, a precious pearl, to random strangers, is the quickest way to waste your life and your love and to make the world worse. Consider —
If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it, but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.
This is when he tells his followers that they are being sent out “as lambs among wolves”. Now, if the Lord is the shepherd who lays down his life protecting his sheep from the wolves, then who are the wolves? The wolves aren’t sheep; the wolves are in the world; loving the world would be loving “wolves in sheep clothing”, and we have fairytales about that involving grandmas and the hood.
This is Christian love: judge whether someone is worthy if they receive you kindly or hear your wisdom; publicly shake dust off your feet as a statement against them if not; and then remember what your Lord says: their fate is worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. I do not know what happened in Christianity that the clear words and obvious meaning of the gospels are ignored. Does this sound like a hippy or something? Does this sound like spiritual William’s Syndrome? Does God want you to pollute your heart by throwing it at the feet of every evil person? Christianity is not a “text-first” religion but tradition first, true, but the tradition itself attests to the primacy and accuracy of the words. There are some ridiculous zero-day bugs that have infiltrated Christianity and made it “fake and gay”. But if you’re Christian you really do have to believe these words. God is love and He defines love in the teachings of His Son, so forget what you know about love and study the Son who knows more.
Further: as Origen and tradition attests, Christ is the bridegroom of our soul. In antiquity, if the bride is found to be spending her love on random men, she would be beaten, if not by her father then by her bridegroom; she may even be divorced on the grounds of adultery. When Origen wrote on Eros and Agape, it was when studying the Song of Songs, which is a sublimated erotic love poem about our soul longing for God. What does the Bride warn in the song? “O daughters of Jerusalem, I adjure you by the gazelles and does of the field: Do not arouse or awaken love until the time is right.” Otherwise: “The watchmen find me as they went about in the city; they beat me, they bruised me, they take away my veil, those watchmen of the walls.” To be more clear: if the Christian wastes the love reserved for “Christ and whom Christ wills” (your Christian community ie sheep), wouldn’t he discipline you? Just like He whipped those who abused and profaned the temple. Because now, your body is His temple; it belongs to Him; and in your body is your heart where the heavenly treasure resides. Okay, this was an allegorical aside, but whatever.
Now I agree that for a Christian, the “love for the cause” must be triumphant over everything. This is seen in Christ: he calls Peter satan when Peter warns Him against going to Jerusalem; he speaks up against elders; he disregards His relatives, and His own family becomes “those who hear the word and obey it”. But Zizek is wrong that the cause is universal love. It’s just not. “Universal love” is taking an idyllic stream and polluting it with Chernobyllic radioactive waste. We don’t love universally, but in accordance with the Love of the Universal Man.
As additional evidence for this, consider the Eucharist. You have to enjoy the Eucharist to have a part in Christ, to be a brother, to be saved perhaps. Only confirmed Christians in good standing could participate, and they had 2-3 years of training and catechesis before being confirmed, involving fasting and repentance and reading. We know this from Justin Martyr, some of the earliest Christian writings we have. This ritual is the only time a Christian sees the living Christ: the intimate shared brotherly meal becomes the real body and blood of Christ; it’s the real living Christ there, and being consumed. This tells you a lot. It’s not radically inclusive love, it’s radically exclusionary and private. At a time when anyone could participate in a Pagan feast, and when the Jews believed in national salvation, this was profoundly exclusionary and private. This was the dominant mode of Christian activity until the 300s which, in my opinion, should never have been altered.
Zizek says
To attain true love, we have to reach beyond humanism: even loving all of humanity directly is not enough—Christ has to be here
This is not quite it. Christ did not love “humanity”: there are many who will see Christ and Christ will tell them He never knew them. Not “I have forgotten you”, not “you never knew me”. No; “I never knew you”. These are the “vessels of wrath tailored for destruction”. For a Christian, true love is this: a man laying down his life for his friends. Not only is this literally what Jesus says, but He literally does it on the Cross. How this happens, is actually never said by Christ; it is compared to Moses lifting up a serpent staff, that those who are bit by those sin-symbolic serpents may not die but live. That it magically absolves your sins upon belief is a satanic thought. But there are at least some things that are sure: Christ loved God that He spent his life learning from His youth. He spent his adulthood healing and teaching others despite guaranteeing His death. He is wrongfully charged for disobedience for misrepresenting scripture, and obediently assents to the sentence. He continues professing truth and love. As He suffered, He sung to Himself some of His favorite songs. He wants His tormentors forgiven by God before He dies. In very mysterious appearances, He returns again. He appears to Thomas in the upper room, like the upper room of the Eucharist, where Thomas touches His side, the same side from whence blood and water flowed. Did Thomas touch the bread turned body? Did Christ’s side flow out in wine turned blood, mixed with water as all wine was had in antiquity? I don’t know. It’s a mystery. I agree with Zizek that the material is immaterial.
This is the Christian stance at its purest: not the promise of salvation, but just such unconditional love, whose message is: “I know you are bent on destroying yourself, I know I cannot prevent it, but without understanding why, I love you unconditionally, without any constraint.”
Christ’s love is, essentially, conditional. It really is. There are some people He never even knew, let alone loved. Christ issues warnings, firm warnings, shocking warnings. He is filled with warnings. Before He sends sinners to an eternal fire, He curses them. If you do not believe this, you are not a Christian, and you’re something worse than an atheist, because you have seen His words and dispute that He said it or meant it. Why does Christ tell us these warnings if not to warn us? A better Christian movie is the Whale. It’s deeply, deeply Christian. The protagonist is saved by warnings to His soul and health, and also primarily due to love for His daughter. (“not giving thanks, nor seeking forgiveness for the sins of my soul, nor for all the souls numb, joyless and desolate on earth. But for her alone, whom I wholly give you.”)
Do you know who else was saved like this? Jonah! You know, with the whale. Is Jonah the sign of unconditional love? Did the Ninevites enjoy God’s unconditional love when they fasted (cattle and man alike) in sackcloth and ashes with only the hopeful possibility that God will have mercy on them? And who “comes in the sign of Jonah”? Who is it that says the sign of Jonah is the only sign He will provide “a wicked and adulterous generation”? It is the One who, “in the days of his flesh, offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears, to God who was able to save him from death, and who was heard because of his fearful reverence — He was a son and learned obedience through what he suffered.”
A decent example: if every drug user could be saved by unconditional love, very few white people with loving mothers would be drug addicts. Do you know what would save them? If every time they did the drug, I beat the shit out of them to the point of death and told them I hated them. Sadly this is illegal. But it’s what God does to those whom He loves the most, like Job and Jonah. I have no doubt that if Christ saw the disciple whom He loved drinking too much poppy tea, that He would beat that wicked servant or at least kidnap Him into the desert for an extended 40 day retreat. And this would be love. True love are the true words “given by one Shepherd”, which are “like goads and like nails firmly fixed”. Thank God the yoke is easy.
I do not believe that God wants us to love God “in Himself”, for no contingent reason. I do not believe that there is such a thing as loving a thing outside of what the thing means to us. Love is biological and God designed biology. We love our fathers if they are fatherly, and you have no obligation to love them if they are not. Yet, we have no father on earth! We have a father in heaven who is perfectly fatherly, who “disciplines us for our good that we may share in sanctity”. And “we love because God first loved us”. Similarly, Jesus tells us to love our enemies not because they are human, but because we will be rewarded by God. Because He wants our love perfect, like our father’s love is perfect. Loving enemies is our spartan practice for perfection, and has nothing to do with any obligation that emanates from our enemy.
Christ must not be "made into a direct object of love who can compete with other objects", for otherwise "things can go terribly wrong".
I’d say this is complicated. If we love Christ, even just as a “character”, and celebrate Him in social environments, and are evaluate by our peers with His law, then we will behave like Him. Which is probably the best way we can love like Christ. We can only understand more than this mysteriously, through statements like —
the King will answer, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
Notice, again, the focus on brothers. Indeed, the first name of the religion was the Brotherhood.
hydroacetylene
22m ago
You don’t get a lot of spam calls at night- those people work 8-5.
WhiningCoil
32m ago
You know, that really strikes at the duality of it for me. I don't want to be fucking around with arduino components like electronic legos, but then the ecosystem of all electronic components is so vast and wide and deep that you really are just adrift.
My dream for a time was to build my own 8-bit computer with some cheap 6502, VGA output and synthesizer audio as a fun learning exercise. But it turns out nobody makes VGA chips anymore? Or audio? Basically everything is SOC, and every project you see along these lines has a legit 8-bit Z80 or 6502, and then uses an SOC as a co-processor for it's VGA and sound, or has you using 20-30 year old salvaged chips.
dr_analog
razorboy
39m ago
It's really the most hellish part. I'm trying to just take it easy and not worry about how soon I get this done to avoid stressing.
Starter kits help a bit, but they're only like $10 whereas I want something like $100-200 that contains the top 1000 things people use for, e.g. Arduino or LEDs.
I fantasize about taking a two week vacation to Shenzhen and hiring some Chinese EEs that speak English to show me around and going home with a suitcase full of stuff I bought off the street.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
43m ago
You keep making these assertions, and I am willing to tentatively grant that Aella specifically maybe isn’t on the radar of “Normal Christians,” but hearing about polyamory is unavoidable, even out here in deep flyover country.
Do “Normal Christians” have more than a surface-level awareness of the concept and a desire to grant debating the concept any more time than “That’s just fornication with extra steps?” Probably not, but I would anecdotally state that they do know it is a thing.
The work the word “practical” is doing in that sentence is: anybody with even a passing understanding of Christianity.
You’re right: to a person who has no understanding of Christianity, Mormons are Christians because what they vaguely look like.
This is the same true for people who think Buddhists are Hindus. Or Jains are Buddhists. Or any of the many tiny middle eastern religions are all Muslims.
But they aren’t. While there are definitely various flavors of Buddhism, and various flavors of Hinduism, these are not the same thing. In fact, even the Mormons own propaganda about “the Latter Day Saints movement” where they talk about the various flavors of Mormonism aligns with the “Hindus aren’t Buddhist, Mormons aren’t Christians” point I’m making here.
They’re trying to have it both ways. Both that it is a separate religion revealed to Joseph smith when an angel showed him some magical golden tablets in 1830, and also that they’re Christians.
Muslims, who also recognize Christ as a prophet, affirm the virgin birth, and acknowledge some of the Miracles, but they aren’t Christians, although some Muslim evangelists may try to claim some alliance with Christianity when recruiting people in the same way that Mormons do.
UnopenedEnvilope
47m ago
That’s a great reference. ❤️
ABigGuy4U
54m ago
Normal Christians outside of Silicon Valley wouldn’t even know who Aella is, or that polyamory is a thing.
UnopenedEnvilope
54m ago
You get the feeling that, as a public company, if they could have moderated their greed, tempered it a bit, they might have gotten away with everything, albeit at a lesser scale in the second phase. But that tragic flaw brought them to that point and they couldn’t change.
That's because migrants shouldn't get government welfare besides essential services (e.g., police, fire) and programs know to have a positive rate of return (e.g. childhood education) unless their host country admitted them specifically because they have an attractive skillset justifying recruitment and retention efforts. America is better than europe because most of our immigrants are illegal so we don't need to pay for their medicare or social security. Illegal immigration is better than regular immigration.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1hr ago
Is full self driving more dangerous per mile than having a human drive? Otherwise it might be the case that having an AI parse the CFR would work better across the board than having humans do it, but would fail a few times in highly surprising and attention-grabbing ways.
zeke5123a
1hr ago
You still need an actus reus. If you remove “strict liability” you are just adding a new element government must prove; not changing the predicate to something wishy washy.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
I mean it's not exactly the Napoleonic Code Civil just yet. But given how incomprehensible and vague US law has become, it's high time for this kind of jubilee.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
Although SCOTUS has fairly consistently ruled that that type of search (accessing a third party business's records about you without your knowledge or consent) is not a 4th amendment violation, including specifically in the case of bank records with Miller in 1976.
I am neither an American nor a lawyer, but even I can see that 4th amendment doctrine is a hot mess. I don't know what a sensible set of rules looks like from a policy perspective.
desolation
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
It hoovers up people self-selected for being ambitious and hardworking from other countries, thereby strengthening our nation
Largely untrue for recent and particular groups to Denmark and The Netherlands.
desolation
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
Ehh, I kinda get it, Episcopalians don't want to talk about anything icky and theological like "sin," that might imply they actually believe in something numinous, but almost anything would be better than, to paraphrase, saying that in the interest of racial justice they'd rather shut down than help refugees who happen to be white.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
You know, in my casual reading of history, legal reforms of this sort usually go down as "Best thing since sliced bread". They rarely stick, and a few generations later the law has recomplicated itself to a point where it's just a mechanism of abuse and corruption. But for 20-100 years upright industrious people can breath a sigh of relief, content that some petty tyrant can't conjure up some obscure bureaucratic incantation to seize all their wealth and throw them in a rape cage.
PokerPirate
1hr ago
That's fair. I've known plenty of churches like that as well.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
Does my experience here sound right so far? Small electronics success often hinges on shopping skill?
You know, once upon a time I wanted to do more electronics stuff. But this is more or less the brick wall I ran up again. Sourcing parts is bonkers complicated, and simply was not a part of the hobby I was going to enjoy. I repaired a few old motherboards, and developed enough soldering skill to repair the odd toaster, mouse or audio speaker, and more or less decided to leave it there. Although I'm always have my eye out for an inspiring woodworking/electronics project.
urquan
I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness.
1hr ago
This isn’t true for fentanyl, but illegal fentanyl is so dangerous that the only people who use it will be stupid/impulsive, so you can’t draw conclusions about the general population from them.
Fentanyl is often laced into other illegal drugs to make them more addictive — or in other words people are being poisoned with it without their consent. A lot of the moral panic over fentanyl is about that aspect.
FtttG
1hr ago
114k on my NaNoWriMo project. I would like to say that the end is in sight, but who knows. It actually feels like it's getting harder and harder the closer I get to the finish line. If I'd known that, when I'd finished my initial 50k words at the end of November, that would represent less than half of a first draft - I'm not sure I would have started in the first place.
Okay, I can’t speak to liberal university college students, not having gone to college, but that wasn’t the original assertion.
I can tell you anecdotally, n=1, that while “Normal Christians” in flyover country won’t know the jargon, they are definitely aware that people are out there, both on the coasts and in flyover country, trying a new spin on justifying sexual sin.
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