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Ugh. Romans continue to be the worst. e: nailed it
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Sep 4, 2023 02:23
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Omnomnomnivore posted:I uh coincidentally recently listened to a podcast with an Actual Biblical Scholar about that story, so I'll drop it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35Jz3A7tBgU. This was really good, thank you! To dig a little deeper: why didn't it get edited out as time went on? Like, early Judaism as henotheism makes sense to me and its a less confusing way to look at the bible than the one I was taught growing up, but why was the one I taught growing up never one that just...decided to lose a few passages here and there? Like I don't see how the Council of Nicaea would be comfortable with even implicit henotheism, did this come up there?
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Sep 4, 2023 02:53
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it isn't edited out because the books were ancient when the council of nicaea was convened. everybody (who matters) can find out what the original text was by consulting one of the thousands of extant copies of the tanakh and then what happens is that the bishop of alexandria gets very pissed off and leads half of christianity into revolt when your religion puts a really high value on a holy book that has already been around forever it's basically impossible to edit it and retain any legitimacy. it is what it is. similarly the climate around the writing of many of the books in question was not one where the ancient stories could simply be molded however you pleased. slanted toward a monotheistic view, yes, but the stories are the stories. king shithead of moab sacrificed his son and then we ran away, that's the story - why did the sacrifice work? no need to even say it because it's fairly theologically obvious under a polytheistic point of view, and inconvenient from a monotheistic view, so just let people interpret it how they're predisposed to interpret it.
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Sep 4, 2023 03:09
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:Ugh. Romans continue to be the worst. Eh it was the people expecting their tax paid bureaucrat to do his loving job. It’s sort of the public service platonic ideal that the servant does what is expected, regardless of their personal feelings.
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Sep 4, 2023 03:14
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Tulip posted:This was really good, thank you! I think the view was that excising inconvenient passages from books with a long tradition of being treated as scripture would be, in effect, substituting one's own judgment for God's. Though of course there is a loophole: only the autographs are infallible, not some particular surviving version of the text (that was Augustine's view, at least), so you can always speculate that there was a textual corruption at some point and maybe the seeming henotheism wasn't the original wording. But this doesn't justify removing the passage so much as it makes removing the passage unnecessary. In any case, educated Christians in late antiquity weren't modern fundamentalists; in addition to the possibility of textual corruption, they recognized that not every word of the Bible should be taken completely literally.
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Sep 4, 2023 03:15
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You don't need to be a disbeliever or a charlatan to get the results you want from a reading. In messy datasets (literally messy, for entrails), if you go in predisposed to be looking for a specific answer, you will probably find it. All it requires is that the process be complicated enough, and require enough judgment calls, that the same omens might plausibly be read differently by two non-charlatan diviners.
cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Sep 4, 2023 |
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Sep 4, 2023 03:22
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:e: btw, Omnomnomnivore, thank you for that video! Good stuff. Tulip posted:This was really good, thank you! These guys are putting good stuff out online if you're interested in Bible, and they're able to get people like Bart Ehrman on their show which I'll take as a sign they're legit. In some other episode I can't find they propose that capital-M monotheism in the "one transcendent God, all the others are fake" sense could be as late as a medieval development, with even a lot of early Christianity more like "Christ is the superior god" or "all the other ones are actually demons" (and probably few dozen other versions because Christianity has never been one thing).
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Sep 4, 2023 04:10
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cheetah7071 posted:You don't need to be a disbeliever or a charlatan to get the results you want from a reading. In messy datasets (literlly messy, for entrails), if you go in predisposed to be looking for a specific answer, you will probably find it. All it requires is that the process be complicated enough, and require enough judgment calls, that the same omens might plausibly be read differently by two on-charlatan diviners. I have kind of fallen backwards into a data analyst career and this speaks to me.
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Sep 4, 2023 04:49
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Silver2195 posted:There are examples of Roman officials who sometimes performed augury as part of their official duties while privately considering it nonsense. See Cicero's On Divination. (Which isn't to accuse Cicero of faking omens, just pointing out that he didn't actually believe in that stuff, and while his view may have been a minority one, it probably wasn't unique.) Ok but the one time the chickens didn't eat the corn th Romans got dumpstered so who can really say?
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Sep 4, 2023 05:19
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Silver2195 posted:There are examples of Roman officials who sometimes performed augury as part of their official duties while privately considering it nonsense. See Cicero's On Divination. (Which isn't to accuse Cicero of faking omens, just pointing out that he didn't actually believe in that stuff, and while his view may have been a minority one, it probably wasn't unique.) sullat posted:Ok but the one time the chickens didn't eat the corn th Romans got dumpstered so who can really say? Yeah, I've always thought that the anecdote about Pulcher's unfortunate incident with sacred chickens gives us a fascinating view into Roman mindset. Like the way it is told is obviously a moral tale about how you shouldn't gently caress with gods. But at the same the whole existence of the anecdote and the actions of Pulcher show that there were people, in very high places even, who were using rituals as theatrics and if that failed, honouring gods is less important than what a man actually wants to do. So the anecdote tells us that Roman society at large really believed in these things during that period but at the same time the society was far from homogenous in their belief system. So there were people who were 'culturally pagan' for the lack of better word.
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Sep 4, 2023 06:04
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There's lots of levels of belief and performatism especially in societies with large class divides, where the ruling classes can and often do have their own entirely different cultures than the classes they rule over. (Ptolemaic Egypt coming to mind) Maybe they believe perfectly well in the gods but are pretty sure the gods don't actually care about what a goose's guts look like spilling out.
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Sep 4, 2023 07:08
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EricBauman posted:And I think it's actually an open question to what extent haruspicy was 'fair' for lack of a better word. I’m not the least bit religious personally but I wonder if 80 years from now or whatever if there isn’t going to be some looking back at the former place of belief and ritual in human culture and more broadly just… sense of being, as a thing that’s actually important. The works of art of the devoted are pretty consistently the most impressive in so many periods of history. There’s a part of me that feels like we’re not wholly better off for not caring about entrails anymore.
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Sep 4, 2023 09:22
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I think people using or abusing religion for other purposes is of all ages, including eras of true devotion. The Renaissance has both absolute highlights of catholic art that made clear that client, artist and audience were deeply religious, and extreme examples of political fuckery related to the church. There even needs to be some measure of true belief in order for the politically instrumental part to work, or it will just be nakedly political. For example, and this is an example that draws things into the extreme, if Caesar as Pontifex Maximus just said "Oh wow, another win for Caesar, what tremendous luck!" with every sacrifice, people would just recognize that he's using the office for his own purposes. So even if Caesar didn't believe himself (which I'm not even claiming), he'd have to keep up appearances by at least following the rituals the correct way and get a random or negative result, so people could see him doing the right thing. It's like with any type of abuse of power or corruption: If you do it routinely, it becomes super obvious. If you only do it part of the time, you can claim it's a coincidence or an honest mistake Of course an office like that can evolve into an absolute sinecure, and people know "oh they're just making him priest/bishop/whatever because his uncle is the king" and then the rituals can lose their meaning and become rituals for rituals' sake, rather than having a religious function. And even then, it's impossible for outsiders to say when that has happened. It may not be the same for everyone. Some people are more cynical than others. Both in the audience and the office holders themselves. You can be the medieval bishop who's only interested in acquiring more territory, and still have some measure of ideas about theology. And the next guy may be a nobody who's given the office because his dad is the duke, but he just happens to embrace the office and catch the zeal of the times. I recently talked to a lady who did catholic outreach and she told me that people with a Buddhist background are now getting more attracted to catholicism because they feel like too much of their own religion (let's not debate whether buddhism is a religion) is just about going through the motions in pointless rituals, and they were looking for something with a more fixed theology, and rituals that were enmeshed in that. Of course she may have been talking up her own shop a bit, but it made sense to me. But I guess part of it is also about just general resistance and saying "gently caress you dad" to your old religion, and just exploring. It doesn't sound like the people she talked about were making an analysis of the nature of participatory religion and ritual magic in the anthropological sense. They just wanted something new, and this catholic woman was there to offer it to them
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Sep 4, 2023 10:48
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cheetah7071 posted:You don't need to be a disbeliever or a charlatan to get the results you want from a reading. In messy datasets (literally messy, for entrails), if you go in predisposed to be looking for a specific answer, you will probably find it. All it requires is that the process be complicated enough, and require enough judgment calls, that the same omens might plausibly be read differently by two non-charlatan diviners. I've seen this treated very believably in some historical fiction. "The lobes of the liver look like those hills right there, can't you see it?" "Yes, of course, a clear sign that this is where the gods want us to stand!" The characters believe in the gods, but they also have a result they want to see, and therefore they find reason to see it.
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Sep 4, 2023 14:50
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Kylaer posted:I've seen this treated very believably in some historical fiction. "The lobes of the liver look like those hills right there, can't you see it?" "Yes, of course, a clear sign that this is where the gods want us to stand!" The characters believe in the gods, but they also have a result they want to see, and therefore they find reason to see it. Yeah, that's a super fair take. My full transparency here is that I practice some divination semi-regularly (best not to ask) so I was definitely reading Eric's comment with some personal bias; and indeed, you are correct, even while always wanting to read things "accurately" I have to remain hyper-cognizant that, being human, I behave like a human, and am always inclined to recognize and understand things I want to recognize and understand, most readily.
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Sep 4, 2023 15:40
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Is it necessarily a bad thing? We see with folks that plunge into conspiracy and such, you can view yourself as fully detached from religious baggage while imo basically embracing the same attitudes. I'm fully talking out of my rear end here because I've not so much as read a word of actual research on this, but it feels like a human inclination. EricBauman posted:I recently talked to a lady who did catholic outreach and she told me that people with a Buddhist background are now getting more attracted to catholicism because they feel like too much of their own religion (let's not debate whether buddhism is a religion) is just about going through the motions in pointless rituals, and they were looking for something with a more fixed theology, and rituals that were enmeshed in that. Of course she may have been talking up her own shop a bit, but it made sense to me. Huh, that's unexpected and interesting. I wonder if there has been any formal study on this; on the flip side it seems like you get a notable number of people from Christian cultural backgrounds attracted to what basically seems to be 'the motions of pointless rituals' in Buddhism. I've only ever been to Buddhist temples in Korea so maybe it varies by denomination, but I will say while most of the practices are obviously vastly different, there's a general evocative-spiritualness about them with their hymns and incense and such that felt pretty familiar to Catholic/Anglican services. At least bridged the gap enough I could see hoppings faiths while not having it feel as completely alien as the geographic separation would imply.
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Sep 4, 2023 15:42
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from the outside catholics do have the most interesting type of christianity since it has all the costumes and pagentry, and many hats.
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Sep 4, 2023 15:47
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orthodox has some pretty badass hats
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Sep 4, 2023 15:50
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yeah im counting them together for headwear purposes
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Sep 4, 2023 15:54
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Koramei posted:Huh, that's unexpected and interesting. I wonder if there has been any formal study on this; on the flip side it seems like you get a notable number of people from Christian cultural backgrounds attracted to what basically seems to be 'the motions of pointless rituals' in Buddhism. It might just be the lure of the exotic. You want something that's different from what you've been exposed to for your entire life. For example, if you grew up a protestant, without even the rituals of the weekly catholic mass and with less than half of the sacraments, you may be drawn to rituals in general exactly because it's what you've been missing. And then it's easier to cross over into something strange and exotic like Tibetan buddhism than it is to cross a deep theological divide into catholicism. And maybe you want to feel a bit special, and not like one of those catholics that so many people already know
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Sep 4, 2023 16:06
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Koramei posted:Is it necessarily a bad thing? We see with folks that plunge into conspiracy and such, you can view yourself as fully detached from religious baggage while imo basically embracing the same attitudes. I'm fully talking out of my rear end here because I've not so much as read a word of actual research on this, but it feels like a human inclination. Speaking personally, I don't think it's bad per se, but something for me to remain aware of. I like it when my readings confirm my human thoughts and suspicions, and so I need to be careful I am not getting a reading I "like" to the detriment of the actual message/information I am (theoretically) receiving. But the flip side of that is, anyone communicating with anyone else is going to be trying to use words, symbols, a language that the recipient understands properly. So if an entity, a God or whatever, is trying to answer a question or give information it makes sense for them to communicate in a way that will make sense for the person that is asking -- this applies to that example Kylaer gave about the hills. If the characters are inclined to try standing in the hills, they could definitely be making a selective interpretation. But if the gods actually do want them to be standing in the hills... it still makes sense for the liver, the communication device, to have lobes that are viewed and interpreted as hills. What all this means for me in my own practice is that I tend to overcompensate and veer in the other direction sometimes. I think skepticism is very healthy for things like this, but being so aware of my own bias means I am, if anything, more inclined to take at face value auspices that disagree with any initial expectation I had, than ones with interpretations that support me. 
LITERALLY A BIRD fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Sep 4, 2023 |
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Sep 4, 2023 16:22
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WoodrowSkillson posted:yeah im counting them together for headwear purposes It’s basically most denominations except non-anglican protestants. Martin Luther was a mistake.
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Sep 4, 2023 16:25
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Tulip posted:This was really good, thank you! In addition to what Jazerus said about why this would have been impossible to do in practical terms, that also did not come up at the Council of Nicaea because the question of the biblical canon was not debated or even discussed at Nicaea. There is a persistent myth that the biblical canon was fixed at Nicaea by Constantine, which gets signal boosted in historical fiction and bad pop history a fair amount, but this is totally untrue. No one at Nicaea was selecting which texts to include in the bible, let alone thinking about editing them. This misconception may come from the fact that Constantine agreed at Nicaea to provide imperial support for producing copies of the bible, but that was support for making copies of a bible that no one disputed the contents of. Late 2nd, 3rd, and early 4th century mainstream Christian authors (ie, excluding Gnostics, who were not that big of a group), show a very consistent view of what texts the Christian biblical canon contains, and their quotations from biblical texts are generally very consistent, reflecting the fact that by the late 2nd century at the latest, there was a stable and largely agreed upon Christian biblical canon. It's also very likely that this developed before the late 2nd century BC, since the biblical quotations used by Christian authors predating the late 2nd century, also generally show a close adherence to what would later become the standard form of the biblical canon. There aren't a huge number of non-biblical Christian texts from before the late 2nd century though, and the ones we do have don't comment directly on the biblical canon (unlike 3rd century texts, which do), so it's hard to say with certainty exactly when the Christian biblical canon was settled -- but it was certainly long before the Council of Nicaea. And that's just talking about the New Testament, there was never any dispute among early Christians over the Book of Kings (where our troublesome passage comes from), except for a small sect that rejected the entire Hebrew Bible altogether. The canonicity and text of Kings, and the other core books of the Hebrew Bible were always taken for granted by early Christians. Early Christians generally used Greek language translations of the Hebrew Bible (although not always), and the most popular Greek language translation was the Septuagint, which dates to the 3rd century BC. The Old Testament quotations found in New Testament texts generally follow the wording of the Septuagint. So when, in the 1st century AD, the authors of the New Testament were quoting from Kings and other Old Testament texts, they already had a set version of the Old Testament to use that they were relying on. It was way, way too late to edit anything in Kings by the time the New Testament was being written -- let alone 250 years later at Nicaea
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Sep 4, 2023 16:50
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Silver2195 posted:In any case, educated Christians in late antiquity weren't modern fundamentalists; in addition to the possibility of textual corruption, they recognized that not every word of the Bible should be taken completely literally. The discussion about the two forms of Christian communication (literal vs understanding the Bible as a document written by people to be rationally evaluated and that uses metaphor) goes all the way back to Clement and Origen.
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Sep 4, 2023 17:08
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Koramei posted:Is it necessarily a bad thing? We see with folks that plunge into conspiracy and such, you can view yourself as fully detached from religious baggage while imo basically embracing the same attitudes. I'm fully talking out of my rear end here because I've not so much as read a word of actual research on this, but it feels like a human inclination. There has been a lot of convergent evolution which has been remarked on by Christian observers of Buddhism. I haven't heard a lot from the other direction, but it would probably be written in Chinese and Japanese and might not have gotten a translated release.
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Sep 4, 2023 18:44
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EricBauman posted:And I think it's actually an open question to what extent haruspicy was 'fair' for lack of a better word. It really seems genuinely sincere in all the translations of Xenophon I've read. Just repeated and repeated incidents of situations where they really need to attack but omens say no so they dont.
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Sep 4, 2023 18:51
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cheetah7071 posted:orthodox has some pretty badass hats practical too. 
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Sep 4, 2023 19:24
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Nessus posted:Both Buddhism and Christianity have a range of sects which go through the degrees from 'high rituals and plenty of them' to 'informality to a fault', and I can see that it might be easier to move diagonally from one area to another. People going from Judaism to Buddhism is so common that it's a standing joke. (The Chabad people claim that many of them also return, and that they're bringing the blessings of Jewish thought to Buddhism, but eh, they would say that, wouldn't they?) As an aside, there's also a long-standing involvemen between Jesuits and Zen Buddhism, apparently the zen focus on meditation and a personal experience of no-self through koan practice etc. jives so well with Ignatian spirituality and prayer practice that a lot of priests just started to combine the two and now you have Jesuit priests who are also teaching Zen masters. I love when stuff like that happens in religious circles.
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Sep 4, 2023 20:12
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barbecue at the folks posted:As an aside, there's also a long-standing involvemen between Jesuits and Zen Buddhism, apparently the zen focus on meditation and a personal experience of no-self through koan practice etc. jives so well with Ignatian spirituality and prayer practice that a lot of priests just started to combine the two and now you have Jesuit priests who are also teaching Zen masters. I love when stuff like that happens in religious circles. The Buddha is a non-canonised Christian saint.
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Sep 4, 2023 20:25
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barbecue at the folks posted:As an aside, there's also a long-standing involvemen between Jesuits and Zen Buddhism, apparently the zen focus on meditation and a personal experience of no-self through koan practice etc. jives so well with Ignatian spirituality and prayer practice that a lot of priests just started to combine the two and now you have Jesuit priests who are also teaching Zen masters. I love when stuff like that happens in religious circles.
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Sep 4, 2023 20:29
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Zopotantor posted:The Buddha is a non-canonised Christian saint. Feast day when?? (it's 27 Nov according to the fine article. if you see the Buddha on the road, pass the potatoes)
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Sep 4, 2023 22:11
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I remember reading somewhere that the first Jesuits to visit Japan thought it was basically a perfect society aside from all the Paganism. And that it annoyed them that a lot of the people they were trying to convert were like "Wait how can your god that created Everything be good when 'everything' includes wars and plagues and famine? Doesn't make sense not to have separate bad gods for that." Obviously that was before the persecutions which probably annoyed them a bit more.
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Sep 4, 2023 22:14
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As Pratchett put it, great wisdom always seems to be a long way off in some foreign culture, never down the street.
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Sep 5, 2023 07:36
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:It really seems genuinely sincere in all the translations of Xenophon I've read. Just repeated and repeated incidents of situations where they really need to attack but omens say no so they dont. You also might get situations I guess where the general doesn't particularly believe in omens - but his men do, so trying to attack with men who think they're cursed is going to end really badly anyway.
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Sep 5, 2023 11:18
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I dunno if this is really the right place to ask this but I've always wondered why Fantasy stuff loves to combine two words together and say "boom, a name." I always think of Skyrim and the Stormcloaks but it's pretty much everywhere in Fantasy fiction. Is this just laziness or is there any historical basis for such naming conventions?
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Sep 5, 2023 15:50
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Compound words are a basic and very productive feature of Germanic languages, and Fantasy Stuff is heavily Germanic via Tolkien.
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Sep 5, 2023 16:05
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I don't think there's any historical precedent, just writers/companies being lazy about coming up with intellectual property. You can't own the word "centurion" but you can own some nonsense concatenated phrase like "Primespear Squadboss." The most famous example is probably Games Workshop who, after a court finally ruled that they can't own the trademark on "Space Marine," among other things, changed everything to pseudo-Latin and idiotic concatenated words so they could trademark them. Of course, the practice goes back a good bit further than 2013. I guess it evolved gradually over the past few decades. It feels to me like it intensified and became standard practice in the 90s-00s, with Magic: The Gathering playing a big role. It was very much the norm in D&D from 3rd edition and onward.
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Sep 5, 2023 16:09
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I mean, I'd say its a fairly common method of creating names well into the present. Think of Springfield. Or Centerville. And this is true in many languages - Letterkenny can be translated from Irish as "Hill + Head." Japanese surnames in particular are basically all made like that, Suzuki is "bell+tree," Tanaka is "rice field + middle," Takahashi is "tall+bridge." Japanese place names are similar, Hiroshima is "wide island," Tokyo is "east capital" and Kyoto is uh "capital capital." Skyrim I think is trying to go for a bit of a Scandinavian/scottish feel, and so we can look at some place names from those languages. The ones that stand out to me are Shetland and the Faroes, both of which have contested etymologies with Faroes either being a mashing up of two different words for land from different languages or "Sheep Island," but the oldest known version of Shetland is literally "Hetland" with "het" meaning "cat." Some large cities in Norway also have these kind of double-noun names, like Sandnes ("sandhead"), Trondheim ("stronghome"), Porsgrunn ("bogground"), and Kongsvinger ("kingsbend") (aside, thank you norwegian wikipedia for including etymologies on the city pages, made this post easy). So yeah, its absolutely an extent naming convention in multiple languages, past and present.
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Sep 5, 2023 16:16
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NikkolasKing posted:I dunno if this is really the right place to ask this but I've always wondered why Fantasy stuff loves to combine two words together and say "boom, a name." I always think of Skyrim and the Stormcloaks but it's pretty much everywhere in Fantasy fiction. It derives (largely by way of Tolkien and William Morris) from historical antique/medieval Germanic personal names, which tend to be dithematic compounds. For example, Alaric, “all-king”, Beowulf, “bee-wolf” (metaphorically, “bear”), Eomer, “horse-great” (presumably, “good at riding horses” but maybe “big as a horse”). But also collective names: the ancient Alamanni, whose name is still used for Germans in a lot of Romance languages, probably originally signified “all men” (in the sense that the name was first applied to a union of smaller groups). Or for another example, Lombard just means “longbeard” originally. And of course other cultures do it too, lot of biblical Hebrew or ancient Greek personal names were formed in a similar way. for example all those guys whose names end in “-cles” are “glory to/of (something)”. To some extent that’s just how names are created, by sticking preexisting words together.
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Sep 5, 2023 16:21
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Obviously there's a parallel to Germanic languages, but I think Halloween Jack is partly right that a lot of it just feels like lazy naming. A lot of the non-core classes from D&D 3e have terrible names like Warblade, Warmage, Soulknife, Hexblade, and Swordsage, for instance, because the obvious names tended to be already used for existing classes.
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Sep 5, 2023 16:35
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