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Explanatory power is closely related to indigo tide, I believes.
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Mar 31, 2017 13:09
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Explanatory power is actually super important according to many leading philosopher kings of our time.
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Mar 31, 2017 13:43
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Jastiger posted:Explanatory power is actually super important according to many leading philosopher kings of our time. there's no such thing as a modern philosopher king and even if there was they could eat my rear end tho nice appeal to authority cause the last time you tried to explain yourself you came off as a babbling child incapable of anything other than parroting the same phrase over and over again in the hopes that maybe this time you could actually define your terms. there are people who can teach themselves how to do philosophy or critical theory without going to college but you're not one of them and i'm glad it seems you've recognized this fact. now the adults are talking so why don't you go play somewhere else, okay sweetie?
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Mar 31, 2017 13:55
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NikkolasKing posted:So, more random questions from me. If a self-identified Gnostic believed that Jesus Christ was a) a historical entity b) both God and Man (dual natures, blended nature, half-and-half, I'm not picky) c) worthy of worship, and d) that Gnostic wanted to be considered a Christian, I would count them as a Christian, the same way that I consider Mormons Christians because they claim to be and I'm not invested in being a gatekeeper. In general, though, I think the "Gnostic gospels" are silly. They weren't written at the same time as the canonical ones, they were not part of any area's liturgy, and the premise that the material world is evil (or even merely irrelevant) is completely contrary to the way I experience Christianity. The deity I worship, Who does not have existence like I do but rather is His existence, Who does not have knowledge like I do but rather is His knowledge, took on human flesh like mine, got sweaty, stepped on thorns, was thirsty, died painfully, and becomes present on thousands of altars, under the appearance of bread and wine, every day of the year but one. If God is so intimately involved with physicality, it can't be irrelevant, and even were it evil before, His intimacy with it would sanctify it.
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Mar 31, 2017 14:08
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Senju Kannon posted:there's no such thing as a modern philosopher king and even if there was they could eat my rear end Why are you so mad about people rejecting superstition?
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Mar 31, 2017 14:09
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Jastiger posted:Why are you so mad about people rejecting superstition? can you read? legit curious, it seems like you can't and i don't want to bully you if you're illiterate that's punching down a bit much
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Mar 31, 2017 14:11
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Senju Kannon posted:can you read? legit curious, it seems like you can't and i don't want to bully you if you're illiterate that's punching down a bit much It was obvious i was being facetious regarding philosopher kings but i do find it ironic that you're happy to call out appeal to authority itt.
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Mar 31, 2017 14:20
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dude what part of "buddhist" have you failed to grasp
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Mar 31, 2017 14:32
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Jesus loving christ( sorry, thread), don't reply to Jastiger! He's babbys first atheism coupled with an incredibly consistent ability to not understand anything.The Phlegmatist posted:You joke but if we somehow develop a sentient AI (which I doubt is even possible) then that will displace evolution as something that makes gigantic waves in Christian theology. Namely if an AI is capable of genuine religious expression then it upends a lot of sacramental theology and also pretty much ruins Calvin's idea of total depravity. Being willing to actually speculate on how to handle converted robots and aliens is a(nother) reason catholicism is so cool  NikkolasKing posted:So, more random questions from me. I reject gnosticism as a shamanic practicioner. The material world is not good or bad, it just is - or rather, it is a largely good manifestation of a good divine order. When it is bad, it is because we rail at its harmony and want to follow our brains, which CAN be bad. That said, I'm really into mysteries and enjoy a good gnostic thought as much as the next dude.
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Mar 31, 2017 14:44
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If this thread has taught me anything is that we would spend less time on the question of whether a robit can be Catholic than on the question on how can they take communion if they can't eat bread or drink wine. Well, in the sense that they can't bodily digest them - will a Catholic robit have to instal a tiny bioreactor to accept communion?
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Mar 31, 2017 14:53
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well gluten intolerant and people with grape allergies/alcoholism exist, so it'd likely be the same for them tho if a robot can disobey would, i think, be a clear indication of something called consciousness
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Mar 31, 2017 15:01
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Keromaru5 posted:What I want to know is what happens when a robot decides to join a monastery. I'm the head boss at Hollywood, and I want you to come to a high-powered meeting at the international headquarters of the film industry. We will pay you big time bucks for this idea. You'll be rolling in the dollars.
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Mar 31, 2017 15:19
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NikkolasKing posted:So, more random questions from me. Gnosticism, on my account, is a little worse than a semi-useless umbrella term. It's useful to follow the line of thought that the proto-orthodox communities thought about those outside their bounds; if there was such a thing as a 'Gnosticism' it was invented by the heresiologists, not by those they were writing about. A great deal of modern scholarship on the 'Gnostics' really sucks - they are more as a screen upon which modern authors project their phantasies about what early Christianity could have or should have been. One takes the prominence of feminine figures in the Nag Hammadi texts to pretend that the gnostics were ancient feminists, as if the texts would necessarily reflect real conditions. No more than the respect paid to the Virgin in the medieval period made her devotees feminists when it came to actual women do any of the ancient texts indicate that there were feminist communities back then. I should include a caveat that of course I have nothing against feminism today, but I don't think that a discovery of direct forebears in the ancient world is anything but a flight of fancy, an attempt to go back to an imaginary 'origin' in order to 'correct' an institution that did definitely end up as patriarchal in reality. And I use feminism as the example merely because there has been a host of literature making that specific connection - there are others lines we could follow. We have their writings, but there is basically no evidence on what the ancient Gnostics might have done in practice. So I really don't know what to say about them. But hey, Dan Brown sold a lot of books, and early Christian phantasies led to big bucks for a while, maybe still do, and academics were not shy about cashing in. And what they delivered was often as not intended to cater to their own phantasies, if not those of their audiences. It'll take some time for the fad to blow over and for more serious work to be done. That being said, some of the Nag Hammadi texts are beautiful pieces of writing. And the Gospel of Thomas has a line that is a particular favorite of mine.
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Apr 1, 2017 03:42
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Jastiger posted:Explanatory power is actually super important according to many leading philosopher kings of our time. Do you regularly search your username, just in case anyone on the forums is talking about you, that you made such a timely reentry?
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Apr 1, 2017 03:43
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Numerical Anxiety posted:
Oh come on, don't be a tease.
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Apr 1, 2017 03:44
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is the gospel of thomas the gay one
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Apr 1, 2017 03:45
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CountFosco posted:Oh come on, don't be a tease. Jesus said, “When this day you see your likeness, you rejoice. But when you see your images which were before your beginning, and which neither die nor show forth, how much will you have to endure!” Senju Kannon posted:is the gospel of thomas the gay one Nah, you're probably thinking of the Secret Gospel of Mark. Which is quite possibly a hoax perpetrated by Morton Smith, but no one can say quite for sure, because say what you will about the man, but he was really good at his job. Is it a coincidence that the tracks he followed have disappeared? You decide!
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Apr 1, 2017 03:50
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Numerical Anxiety posted:Do you regularly search your username, just in case anyone on the forums is talking about you, that you made such a timely reentry? Say Cao Cao's name and Cao Cao shall appear.
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Apr 1, 2017 03:54
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Thirteen Orphans posted:Say Cao Cao's name and Cao Cao shall appear. I can't read Cao Cao as anything but "gently caress gently caress" since I learned basic Rude Mandarin.
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Apr 1, 2017 04:08
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just read about morton smith and boy does that sound like a twisted web
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Apr 1, 2017 04:10
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Numerical Anxiety posted:Do you regularly search your username, just in case anyone on the forums is talking about you, that you made such a timely reentry? Of course.
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Apr 1, 2017 04:20
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i can't really hate i do the same thing on offsites lmao
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Apr 1, 2017 04:32
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Numerical Anxiety posted:Gnosticism, on my account, is a little worse than a semi-useless umbrella term. It's useful to follow the line of thought that the proto-orthodox communities thought about those outside their bounds; if there was such a thing as a 'Gnosticism' it was invented by the heresiologists, not by those they were writing about. A great deal of modern scholarship on the 'Gnostics' really sucks - they are more as a screen upon which modern authors project their phantasies about what early Christianity could have or should have been. One takes the prominence of feminine figures in the Nag Hammadi texts to pretend that the gnostics were ancient feminists, as if the texts would necessarily reflect real conditions. No more than the respect paid to the Virgin in the medieval period made her devotees feminists when it came to actual women do any of the ancient texts indicate that there were feminist communities back then. Well Elaine Pagels was writing stuff decades before Brown. She's the one I've mainly read when it comes to Gnosticism. Not that I disagree with you - the Goddess Movement of Second-wave feminism was all about this. "Real" or imaginary, women tried to go back to a time before men ruled the world and perverted everything. Time itself has some irresistible allure. A religion holds more sway and power if it goes back thousands of years, not decades. Why? I have no idea. A lot of New Religions, by virtue of being new, have more progressive ideas built into them. And yet, they are shunned as frauds and cults while people instead think all the answers to life were given to illiterate Bronze Age jerks obsessed with hating gays and women. (Hope you understand I'm being purposefully crass there and also deprecating because I'm no less obsessed with finding answers in "old" things.) NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Apr 1, 2017 |
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Apr 1, 2017 05:17
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Cythereal posted:Eh. I'd say AIs are free to believe in God or not as they choose. Always got a kick out of doing the Ascent to Transcendance in Alpha Centauri as the Lord's Believers. Hi, godlike alien planet-mind. Do you have a few minutes to hear the good word of Jesus? I feel like it would lead to a revival of medieval "delayed hominization". On the surface it seems fairly easy for "rational ensoulment" to include human level AIs. It runs into some prickly issues since other human-like intelligences (elves, fairies, etc) explicitly don't have souls. It also runs counter to modern anti-abortion trends in thought. Any Thomists care to weigh in? How would the distinction between plant/animal/human life play into an AI? Since souls aren't physical, it seems wrong to assume that mere human physicality is a requirement. Reducing God's image to mere physicality seems a poor approach to Christianity.
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Apr 1, 2017 10:38
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We have rules to baptize multiheaded fusions of flesh, so human shape isn't important. Baptising an AI would be worth it if only for the r/atheist screeching that it would cause
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Apr 1, 2017 10:57
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NikkolasKing posted:Not that I disagree with you - the Goddess Movement of Second-wave feminism was all about this. "Real" or imaginary, women tried to go back to a time before men ruled the world and perverted everything. Time itself has some irresistible allure. A religion holds more sway and power if it goes back thousands of years, not decades. Why? I have no idea. A lot of New Religions, by virtue of being new, have more progressive ideas built into them. And yet, they are shunned as frauds and cults while people instead think all the answers to life were given to illiterate Bronze Age jerks obsessed with hating gays and women. (Hope you understand I'm being purposefully crass there and also deprecating because I'm no less obsessed with finding answers in "old" things.) As a student of native american spirituality, I gotta say that the goddess people kind of have it right. There is no inherent sexism in ancient american theology, though of course there is a lot of dumb men and traditions anyway. Example: When we prepare the sweat lodge, menstruating women cannot participate - but this is because their natural power has been spiking, and we can't let them in without risking harm to themselves. In general, women are considered much holier than men can ever be, because of their direct ability to create new life. Hell, the entire sweat lodge is a symbol of the female womb, where men may hope to gain some measure of the enormous female magic for themselves. Tias fucked around with this message at 11:55 on Apr 1, 2017 |
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Apr 1, 2017 11:51
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Tias posted:As a student of native american spirituality, I gotta say that the goddess people kind of have it right. There is no inherent sexism in ancient american theology, though of course there is a lot of dumb men and traditions anyway. don't forget seidr and ergi seidr is the ritual magic aspect of historical Norse mythology and religion, and it was explicitly "ergi" "ergi" refers to emasculating, effeminate, or dishonorable behavior. performing seidr was inherently a feminine act and modern historians speculate this probably involved sex magic. e: and seidr was learned by Odin who was simultaneously hung on a tree and stabbed with a spear (Odinic sacrifice) so not to Christiansplain about Norse paganism to Tias, but Odin learning seidr is pretty similar to Jesus' crucifixion and historical evidence suggests they are totally independent stories also, Tias, hope all is well and praying for you. do you talk in sweat lodge about White Buffalo Calf Woman at all? Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 12:33 on Apr 1, 2017 |
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Apr 1, 2017 12:26
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Tias posted:There is no inherent sexism in ancient american theology, though of course there is a lot of dumb men and traditions anyway. This is an extraordinarily bold claim given how little we know about the ancient Americas. Also, the Aztecs seem pretty run-of-the-mill sexist what with their focus on an all-male warrior caste and a male war and sun god. All of this ancient presentism, eg finding feminists in ancient times, is the sickly child of 18th century mythologizing on the "state of nature".
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Apr 1, 2017 12:39
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Lakota culture and political structure is absolutely patriarchal, men hold all the power. A fair bit of deference is given to women, especially elders, but it's not an egalitarian society.
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Apr 1, 2017 12:45
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Pellisworth posted:Lakota culture and political structure is absolutely patriarchal, men hold all the power. A fair bit of deference is given to women, especially elders, but it's not an egalitarian society. Rodrigo Diaz posted:This is an extraordinarily bold claim given how little we know about the ancient Americas. Also, the Aztecs seem pretty run-of-the-mill sexist what with their focus on an all-male warrior caste and a male war and sun god. Which is why I said theology, not society or culture, but keep provoking yourself I guess. E: I'm not even claiming they were feminist, so chill the hell out - I'm just saying that parts of ancient society were a lot more woke about sex and gender than we are now. I'm not including aztecs, because it's really hard to actually prove anything about their beliefs. Pellisworth posted:don't forget seidr and ergi I know all that, I was talking about american beliefs  Norse paganism is hella sexist in some ways, though there is also some powers that only women have.I'm doing better, thanks. Mind not actively cracking, but I'm feeling pretty lonely after my fiancee up and left without any sort of warning. Yes, we do. One of my friends have her as a helper entity, calling her abuelita or something like that. Tias fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Apr 1, 2017 |
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Apr 1, 2017 13:49
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Why does magic have to be egalitarian?
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Apr 1, 2017 15:12
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Shbobdb posted:I feel like it would lead to a revival of medieval "delayed hominization". On the surface it seems fairly easy for "rational ensoulment" to include human level AIs. It runs into some prickly issues since other human-like intelligences (elves, fairies, etc) explicitly don't have souls. It also runs counter to modern anti-abortion trends in thought. Actually, I don't know that elves, fairies, &c. don't have souls. I mean, animals do have souls - that's what distinguishes a living dog from a dog corpse, or a living snail from a snail corpse. Those souls just aren't (as far as the Church knows) immortal, because the animals having them don't have the capacity to know things in the abstract. (e.g. they might recognize specific triangles, but not triangularity.) If an elf exists, and an elf is capable of knowing about triangles and triangularity instead of just about this or that specific triangle, that elf necessarily has an immaterial soul (knowing is not a function of matter) and that soul might be immortal; but since as far as I know elves don't exist the question is moot. Extrapolating to an AI, obviously its form is the specific way that its circuits are put together, but the problem is deciding whether or not it's ever alive; as it stands, a machine is never either alive or dead. If it were alive, its form would also be its soul, and so the "ensoulment issue" would be very easy: the moment that it became alive, its form would be the form of a living robot as opposed to a form organizing unliving matter, and that would be the moment it "became" ensouled. (Similarly, the moment a distinct human organism exists - when there is a cell that doesn't belong to either parent - it has its own form, and thus its own soul. What this means for any rights it might or might not have is left as an exercise for the reader somewhere other than this thread.)
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Apr 1, 2017 15:24
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I don't know of any official doctrine or teaching on that matter, but the science and ethics of present-day AI is very much on the Church's mind; just five months ago, there actually was a large conference at the Pontifical Academy for Science with (amongst others) Stephen Hawking and representatives of companies like Google and Facebook as speakers. Re: AI with souls, there is also an interesting if a bit alarmist article in The Atlantic that considers also some voices addressing the issue outside of the RCC. Finally I've found a very interesting blog of a Catholic physicist who explores the Theology of Science Fiction and describes some SF stories dealing with this problem. I think that's the closest we'll come to an exploration of this issue for now.
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Apr 1, 2017 16:30
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NikkolasKing posted:Well Elaine Pagels was writing stuff decades before Brown. She's the one I've mainly read when it comes to Gnosticism. For sure, Pagels is before apocryphal gospels became big business - her commitments are more political. But still, it's telling that The Gnostic Gospels is a popular work rather than a proper scholarly work. She inadvertently opened the door for what is to come - if you want to see "scholarship on gnosticism as about book sales," just look at what happened with the publication of the Gospel of Judas.
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Apr 1, 2017 16:36
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Tias posted:Which is why I said theology, not society or culture, but keep provoking yourself I guess. E: I'm not even claiming they were feminist, so chill the hell out - I'm just saying that parts of ancient society were a lot more woke about sex and gender than we are now. Saying there is "nothing inherently sexist" about their theology is still a hot garbage take. Not only are you lumping together a bunch of Amerindian civilizations but it is entirely unprovable about, say, the Crab Orchard Culture, and there are many others (like the Powhatan) whose religion we only know in fragments. There's also the issue of separating the theology and cultural practice, which I don't think is applicable past a certain limit. In the same way I'd say that the Orthodox Church is theologically sexist for keeping menstruating women from receiving Communion, despite this not being part of the central religious text. quote:I'm not including aztecs, because it's really hard to actually prove anything about their beliefs. maybe then dont make sweeping generalisations
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Apr 1, 2017 18:46
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That's interesting, where are you getting that info from?
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Apr 1, 2017 18:58
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NikkolasKing posted:Well Elaine Pagels was writing stuff decades before Brown. She's the one I've mainly read when it comes to Gnosticism. You might enjoy Kurt Rudolph's Gnosis. He has some slight anti-Catholic bias but it's a pretty good survey of what we know about the early Gnostic Christians. Pagels falls into the trap of assuming all the different Gnostic sects shared similar beliefs. They didn't. To use the feminism example, Pagles glosses over the fact that some Gnostics didn't believe women could even enter into Heaven. She frames the whole thing as "bad mean orthodox Christians silenced the Gnostics and called them heretics because Gnostics were just too pro-women," which is just really biased and an unfair account of the tensions between orthodoxy and Gnosticism in the early church. You have, for example, some Gnostic sects being antinomian and having wild orgies and others banning sex entirely. It's really poor form for a historian to just label all these different groups as just being "Gnostics" simply because they were all in opposition to the orthodox church.
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Apr 1, 2017 21:12
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Prayer request: Hi all. This coming week is a stressful and exciting one for me. I've got my undergraduate capstone due ("The Rhetoric of Female Christian Mysticism") and I should be hearing back to see if I get a research assistant position that'll make going to LIS grad school viable. Looking for motivation and confidence and attention to detail. I've been listening to Hildegard's hymns to settle myself while I work, and it's absolutely lovely and I'd love to share it with y'all. 
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Apr 1, 2017 21:21
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:maybe then dont make sweeping generalisations Says you! You've had it in for me every time I've posted something in this thread you could denigrate in any way at all - if I annoy you so much, then maybe deal with it in a constructive way and don't reply. JcDent posted:Why does magic have to be egalitarian? I don't think it necessarily does, we just get a flak for not respecting women in the sweat lodge, which is odd given that this particular tradition actually considers women to be more spiritually powerful. In principle, the earth mother and the great spirit are two equally powerful forces, though I doubt the medicine men and road people attempt to make this sort of judgment.
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Apr 1, 2017 23:06
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The Phlegmatist posted:You might enjoy Kurt Rudolph's Gnosis. He has some slight anti-Catholic bias but it's a pretty good survey of what we know about the early Gnostic Christians. Yeah, that is a good one. Karen King's What is Gnosticism? is pretty good for pointing out the very many historiographical traps that one risks writing about the "Gnostics." And despite being revisionist in a very different way, as well as I think written before the publication of Nag Hammadi, Hans Jonas' The Gnostic Religion is still kind of an interesting read. Just take it as phenomenological rather than historical, strictly speaking.
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Apr 1, 2017 23:07
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