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Josef bugman posted:I doubt we have more than one chance, owing to depletion of resources, to get off of earth, if we end up ruining ourselves now we are all going to die here. Humanity has come much closer to extinction than we are now.
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Jan 26, 2017 21:03
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my dad posted:I think the forums temporarily ate a post again, so I'm unclogging the thread with a meaningless post.
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Jan 26, 2017 21:04
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Josef bugman posted:I doubt we have more than one chance, owing to depletion of resources, to get off of earth, if we end up ruining ourselves now we are all going to die here. If Trump alone is enough to change that, we were all hosed, anyway. e: hello
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Jan 26, 2017 21:04
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my dad posted:If Trump alone is enough to change that, we were all hosed, anyway. Pretty much. Trump will be dead and buried by the time mass migration from climate change starts causing worldwide civil unrest in earnest, and maybe by that time politics will have swung back over to the left again in the US and Europe. I'm sure that a lot of people will blame God, but He did give us a nice little hint with that whole "be good stewards of the earth" thing.
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Jan 26, 2017 21:40
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Arsenic Lupin posted:How are you guys doing? What's sustaining you?
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Jan 26, 2017 21:55
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Arsenic Lupin posted:How are you guys doing? What's sustaining you? doing my academic work helps, especially because i've found a really interesting problem to work on lately. my choral singing really helps too: it's where i have most of my friends at my university, and our conductor has been a great mentor. we sing some great stuff too: last term we had a couple of excerpts from the Rachmaninov All-Night Vigil, which might be the best sacred music ever composed
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Jan 26, 2017 22:06
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The Phlegmatist posted:Pretty much. Trump will be dead and buried by the time mass migration from climate change starts causing worldwide civil unrest in earnest, and maybe by that time politics will have swung back over to the left again in the US and Europe. I don't think this is a "swing" thing. People seem so tied to this idea of work that I am seriously worried about the longer term future. The fact that it feels like there has been no real recovery at all since the recession doesn't help.
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Jan 26, 2017 22:07
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Bel_Canto posted:doing my academic work helps, especially because i've found a really interesting problem to work on lately. my choral singing really helps too: it's where i have most of my friends at my university, and our conductor has been a great mentor. we sing some great stuff too: last term we had a couple of excerpts from the Rachmaninov All-Night Vigil, which might be the best sacred music ever composed
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Jan 26, 2017 22:08
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HEY GAIL posted:Richard Spencer getting punched on repeat oh yeah forgot to mention that Lupin
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Jan 26, 2017 22:17
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StashAugustine posted:oh yeah forgot to mention that Lupin
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Jan 26, 2017 22:47
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Josef bugman posted:What if his actions lead to, ultimately, an end to the human race. Would that be enough to tell you that the world is ending and that God has done nothing to prevent it? Truthfully, it would not. I know there are Christians who are expecting some kind of supernatural rescue before any kind of Earthly extinction event, but I am not one of them. My belief in God and love of creation is not incumbent on a belief that the ultimate deity must intervene to protect the human race from internal or external existential threats. To quote Frankl's Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning: ...either belief in God is unconditional or it is not belief at all. If it is unconditional it will stand and face the fact that six million died in the Nazi holocaust; if it is not unconditional it will fall away if only a single innocent child has to die - to resort to an argument once advanced by Dostoevsky. There is no point in bargaining with God, say, by arguing: "Up to six thousand or even one million victims of the holocaust I maintain my belief in Thee; but from one million upward nothing can be done any longer, and I am sorry but I must renounce my belief in Thee." But here is what I do believe: God is love, and the salvation of man is in love and through love. That salvation can be experienced here on Earth, in the face of all cruelty and suffering and death. To love remains a daily choice, a moment-by-moment decision not to harden one's heart to creation. As a choice, the human collective free will can opt to commit suicide or ignore mortal threats, and humanity may be making these choices without the presence of any divine safety net save for love, which gratefully is the strongest power in the universe.
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Jan 27, 2017 00:13
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There's no such thing as a collective free will. I mean, it's a useful fiction for organizing a democracy but I wouldn't hang a theological or existential argument on it. e: That is to say, independent of rehashing theodicy for the nth time, an argument premised on the idea that every victim of the Holocaust was somehow, even fractionally, a willing participant in their destruction is wrong and obscene. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Jan 27, 2017 |
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Jan 27, 2017 00:16
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:There's no such thing as a collective free will. I mean, it's a useful fiction for organizing a democracy but I wouldn't hang a theological or existential argument on it. Indeed, I see why the term collective free will is a problem, and if I have accidentally suggested that every victim of the Holocaust was somehow a willing participant, then I want to make it clear that I do not believe that and I am sorry if it seems like I do. There must be a better term for what I meant when I said collective free will. I mean to describe the result of all individual choices, aware of the fact that oppression exists and that power is used to take power away from others. Victims of evil are not choosing to be victims. In responding the Josef, what I wanted to say is that we face the results of the sum of our choices (without implying that all of our choices are in agreement, or that those who suffer chose their suffering) playing out without the guarantee of a supernatural safety net that will trigger before consequences get too dire. The prophets are right to warn folks of great woe and wrongness that result if people continue down a morally compromised path. When Martin Luther King Jr. was about to deliver his warning that America may go to hell before he was murdered, his thesis was not at all to suggest that the poor are a willing participant in their oppression. It is rather those that if the wealth of America is not used by its citizens to eliminate poverty, it may be judged harshly by the ultimate judge of the universe for what the nation has done or failed to do for the least among us.
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Jan 27, 2017 01:18
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Well, I mean there's a reason the great theologians who lived during WWII (Henri de Lubac, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, etc.) tended to focus less on why great evils happened and more on what Christians were supposed to do to combat evil and what God was doing at the same time to aid Christians as ministers in this task; that was how they answered the question of the problem of evil. Easy answers like "God works everything for good, don't worry guys, onto the next question" get pretty hollow in the face of the Holocaust. Aaaand most of them are considered borderline heretical by conservatives still thanks to our forever culture war, but there's some great insights to be had in their writings.
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Jan 27, 2017 04:03
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Methanar posted:Serious question: How is it morally justifiable to impress your beliefs, faith, religion, etc onto your children when they see you as an the ultimate authority on everything. Ecclesiastes is the answer.
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Jan 27, 2017 04:11
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Caufman posted:Indeed, I see why the term collective free will is a problem, and if I have accidentally suggested that every victim of the Holocaust was somehow a willing participant, then I want to make it clear that I do not believe that and I am sorry if it seems like I do. Yeah, sorry to jump on you like that. The language about free will threw me into a completely unrelated thought, as it turned out.
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Jan 27, 2017 04:15
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Its ying and yang. Good could not exist without evil. well, it could- but who would make a universe that boring?
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Jan 27, 2017 04:33
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I LIKE COOKIE posted:Its ying and yang. Good could not exist without evil. thread expert on chinese religions whose username i forget please tell everyone here all about yin yang theory theories? i know chinese religion is very okay with contradictions
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Jan 27, 2017 05:10
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I LIKE COOKIE posted:Its ying and yang. Good could not exist without evil. There's nothing boring about a universe without evil unless you assume that good is perfectly uniform, that there is only one kind of goodness. In which case the boring one, is you.
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Jan 27, 2017 05:26
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well if you're gonna split hairs like that, you'll need to define where good ends and evil begins, please. Otherwise your 'different kinds of good' theory doesn't work there's only one kind of good. you may have heard of it before its called "good" or maybe there is no such thing as black and white, only grey.
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Jan 27, 2017 05:35
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I LIKE COOKIE posted:well if you're gonna split hairs like that, you'll need to define where good ends and evil begins, please. Otherwise your 'different kinds of good' theory doesn't work boredom is the ultimate evil, therefore an exclusively good universe would have no boredom
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Jan 27, 2017 05:41
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I dont like boredom, but boredom inspires change, and innovation. A boredomless universe for us would be amazing. But if God provides infinite entertainment.... we would act too predictably, anddddd she'd be bored. so, in conclusion, ying, and yang.
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Jan 27, 2017 05:52
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Senju Kannon posted:thread expert on chinese religions whose username i forget please tell everyone here all about yin yang theory
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Jan 27, 2017 05:54
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Like a lot of people here, I was really deeply wounded by the election. And week 1 of the Trump presidency has dredged up plenty more anxiety and anger and depression. I have found though, that dwelling on those feelings only deepens them. I'm really only hurting myself when I give over to the "we're hosed" mentality. Instead, I sustain myself by focusing on all the good things in my life- my wife, my cats, my adequate job, and trying to be thankful for them. In fact, my wife just got promoted to full time from PT, which means we're going to be honest to god stable, not just "getting by" for the first time ever. Accordingly, I realized it's time that I act from this position of security. Years back I had the privelege to be an interpreter for a group that resettles refugees in my city, sets them up with apartments, transit, job interviews etc. Tonight I downloaded the volunteer application to get involved again. Try and do right by some people even if the federal govt. won't. My grasp of Christian theology is not super strong, but I'm positive that doing right by the meek is a good thing. I still try and pray. I try sincerely, but God is so silent. To me at least. I will try and do more good in my life and see if that changes. Could you pray for me?
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Jan 27, 2017 06:27
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Hey, can I interrupt to ask a historical question? I'm curious about the Great Schism and what people thought about it at the time. From the perspective of your ordinary parishioner, did they know or care what was happening? Did they already think "Those Latins/Greeks over there are weird and not like us" or did that come later? I'm interested in the view from the ground as it were, even though I know that's hard to get. Any sort of insight would be appreciated, and I apologize if the questions are dumb.
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Jan 27, 2017 07:16
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VoteTedJameson posted:I still try and pray. I try sincerely, but God is so silent. To me at least. I will try and do more good in my life and see if that changes. https://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2012/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20121114.html
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Jan 27, 2017 07:33
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VoteTedJameson posted:Like a lot of people here, I was really deeply wounded by the election. And week 1 of the Trump presidency has dredged up plenty more anxiety and anger and depression. I have found though, that dwelling on those feelings only deepens them. I'm really only hurting myself when I give over to the "we're hosed" mentality. God bless you and save you, VoteTedJameson. There should be no shame in talking about God's silence. In fact, that your conscience is troubled by the ascent of Trump indicates to me that God is plenty loud in your spirit. You do not lack for a sense of morality, a sense of compassion, a sense that you must act. And as strongly as you have those things, you are also permitted by God to have a sense of ultimate hope. You do not struggle alone. I am exhorted by God to share with you that sense of hope and unity. Congratulations on the stability of your domestic life! That is a blessing you most certainly may enjoy and recover in. The enemy is not stronger than the love of your wife, or even the love of your cats, or the love that is present in this thread among strangers. So pray for me, too, that I might be present tomorrow, that I will have the strength of faith to stand with the least of our brothers and sisters, to tell the truth, and to share the universal good news of life.
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Jan 27, 2017 07:33
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I LIKE COOKIE posted:well if you're gonna split hairs like that, you'll need to define where good ends and evil begins, please. Otherwise your 'different kinds of good' theory doesn't work Have you heard of 'cool'? Some things are not only good in conventional sense, but also cool. Their goodness and coolness, however, are actually just degrees and different representations of the ultimate goodness coming from God. Things are ungood when they lack in that goodness.
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Jan 27, 2017 10:34
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I agree with everything you said and it sounded really good but cool definitely isn't the word your looking for. I think cool is defined by opinion. What is cool to one person isn't cool to another. It's not concrete in any way. I don't think God sees "cool" the way you or I do. Cool is 100% a construct of the human experience. It's imaginary. God dont care how cool you are. But hey, I'm not God, and God is one cool motherfucker so who am I to put words in her mouth
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Jan 27, 2017 10:47
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HEY GAIL posted:i believe that is p-mack Nah, I know a bunch about 19th century religious rebellions, but not a whole lot about the actual beliefs themselves outside of that context. I'm mostly familiar with yin yang theory being used to justify awful misogyny.
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Jan 27, 2017 15:56
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P-Mack posted:Nah, I know a bunch about 19th century religious rebellions, but not a whole lot about the actual beliefs themselves outside of that context. which is weird because in theory it should be egalitarian since balance is required between the two, and yet the male needs to be dominant over the female. so the usccb has on every job posting "must believe and follow church teachings on marriage" and other belief based stuff, even for secretary work, and i'd like to believe it's because they want me to stop applying for jobs that's what i get for outing myself in a publication and also having "queering" in the title (it was my editor's idea$
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Jan 27, 2017 16:08
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HEY GAIL posted:i will. what do you think about the pointers in this speech, for how to find God? (Look at nature, be introspective, be gentle.) I like those pointers, because they seem to cater to classic over-thinkers and second-guessers like myself. And they seem rooted in a tradition of intellectual curiosity.
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Jan 27, 2017 16:17
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MarsDragon posted:Hey, can I interrupt to ask a historical question? Well, your average peasant in France or Russia probably didn't know and didn't care, they were too busy farming and saving their own soul to care about someone hundreds of miles away. If you lived in a border area where both forms were practice, you may have known but didn't care. There's a debate right now over how much people knew and cared. Historians at the the time of the schism thought it was just another church slap fight and that nothing would come of it, but here we are
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Jan 27, 2017 16:32
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I remember reading a letter from a Kyivan post-schism monk to the Pope, where it was obvious the author either didn't know about the whole ordeal or didn't care. I think the letters were dated something like 1090-1100, but I can't remember the name of the monk. Something very Greek starting with F or Th, I'm pretty sure.
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Jan 27, 2017 16:43
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Nowadays, we desperately want people from this time period to care very deeply about the schism because we do, but, it turns out, they didn't care
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Jan 27, 2017 16:47
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There were already noticeable differences between the Latin and Byzantine churches in the 7th century. Certainly someone who traveled around a lot in a place where both were in close geographical proximity, like Southern Italy, would've run into situations where one town was celebrating Easter and the next town over was fasting for Lent -- or that one church here used unleavened bread and the other leavened. Unfortunately there's a dearth of any sort of primary sources about what common people thought about this. On the other hand if you want to look at troubadour poetry about the Crusades as a window into what the common people of the West were hearing about the East after the Great Schism, poo poo goes downhill quick. As the Crusades begin to fail horribly, attention turns towards how lazy and un-Christian the Emperor of Constantinople is and he's blamed for letting the Muslims run wild. Of course, there were also a lot of poetry criticizing the Pope as well, but in general the Crusades (especially the Sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade) finalized the schism.
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Jan 27, 2017 19:51
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VoteTedJameson posted:
I'm no expert in theology, but hopefully you may find this idea useful: if God is silent, then that silence must exist for good reason. If there is a God, the God as we generally conceive God being good, it would not act or refrain from action without good reason. Alternatively, God transcends us, and thus God's communication transcends what we ordinarily think of as communication. A moment of happiness that seems to have no objective justification, for example, may be something worth considering on as a moment worth learning from. It's important not to imagine that revelation is not confined merely to the prophets, to voices or messages we hear, but in subtleties as well. For everything there is a season, a time for thunder and trumpets, and a time for the soft whisper of winds through the willows. Please do not interpret this as condoning divination by means of treeomancy, or animism.
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Jan 27, 2017 20:56
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Caufman posted:The enemy is not stronger than the love of your wife, or even the love of your cats, or the love that is present in this thread among strangers. So pray for me, too, that I might be present tomorrow, that I will have the strength of faith to stand with the least of our brothers and sisters, to tell the truth, and to share the universal good news of life. https://thecorrespondent.com/5696/were-heading-into-dark-times-this-is-how-to-be-your-own-light-in-the-age-of-trump/1611114266432-e23ea1a6 quote:[The voice inside that tells you the right thing to do] is your conscience, your morals, your individuality. No one can take that from you unless you let them. They can take everything from you in material terms – your house, your job, your ability to speak and move freely. They cannot take away who you truly are. They can never truly know you, and that is your power. quote:Do not accept brutality and cruelty as normal even if it is sanctioned. Protect the vulnerable and encourage the afraid. If you are brave, stand up for others. If you cannot be brave – and it is often hard to be brave – be kind. Edit: As an Orthodox believer, I have models for what happened the last time someone tried to make France great again, or Germany. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Jan 27, 2017 |
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Jan 27, 2017 23:02
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Stanley Hauerwas: Christians, don’t be fooled: Trump has deep religious convictions I'm not going to compare Trump to Hitler or anything, but I was thinking about what Karl Barth said about idolatry the other day. Barth saw the rise of Nazism and based a lot of his theology around it. When you consider the Trump worship that goes on in certain corners of the internet (like, well, Freep and Facebook), I think a couple things come into play: 1. It involves a central messianic figure (Trump) 2. Who promulgates a redemption narrative (Things are bad for you right now, my tribe, but it's not your fault! It's the fault of the other and only I can fix everything for you.) 3. With an eschatological promise (America will be made great again; my tribe will prosper in the New America I create for you.) 4. And a promise of a wrathful judgment (The other who have wronged you so badly will pay for their crimes.) I think that would've made a more interesting article than Hauerwas' but whatever. Essentially Trump's populism just feeds into Judeo-Christian messianic expectations, which, even for the non-religious, permeate the culture of conservatism in the United States. If some progressives like to talk about being on "the right side of history" all the time, there's a certain class of conservative that just says "well, we're on the right side of the coming eschaton."
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Jan 28, 2017 16:55
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i don't think there's much judeo about it, especially since trumpism has led to a rise in antisemitic violence
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Jan 28, 2017 17:01
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