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Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
demiurge / architect joke

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Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Lutha Mahtin posted:

it's me, posting in my favorite subforum, Your Creed Sucks

i'm a bigger fan of Pretentious Hierarch Icon Zone

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
start at the beginning and skip ahead whenever it starts talking about genealogies

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
Deidre did some dark poo poo to get there but the Transcendence ending is the only happy ending to AC

also Miriam's final quote heavily implies that she commits suicide and urges her followers to do the same once she no longer believes her war against scientific progress is winnable

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
to back up my claim about Transcendence a bit

  • any other ending either means that in the long run humanity genocided the native Planet intelligence, or vice-versa

  • any ending other than transcendence or diplomatic means one faction crushed all the others

  • in the transcendence ending, everyone gets to be immortal thought-forms for the rest of history. this explicitly includes whoever the game calculates to be your worst mortal enemy (based on hidden factors I'm not 100% clear on, but it's generally pretty accurate) and they're called out in the ending fiction as a kind of "trickster" entity that keeps the rest of you honest.

  • there's no way to cut them out of the process, IIRC even if you turn on the ability to permanently eliminate factions (which is off by default) and destroy them first, they still show up

Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Aug 29, 2018

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Senju Kannon posted:

being able to be saved without any effort, or be damned regardless? it’s a theology that demands little and expects less

not to be rude, but isn't the possibility of being saved just for asking one of the major selling points of your sect?

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

StashAugustine posted:

i love smacs writing but drat that game did not age well from a ui or design perspective

ehhh it's still easily the second-best Civ game after IV and the UI isn't nearly as bad as basically any game contemporary with it

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

The Phlegmatist posted:

I'm out. I've deleted all my social media accounts, and this will be the last one.

You were always one of the most patient and considerate posters with respect to my often-ignorant and sometimes-provocative questions; I mention this not to speak ill of anyone else by comparison but rather to say that you went above and beyond. I'll miss your presence here.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

HopperUK posted:

I suppose if we wait long enough Crusader Kings might include a priest simulator. It does everything else.

Maybe for CK3, but for some obstinate reason Paradox absolutely refuses to make playable theocracies, and this upcoming DLC (which is heavily religion-themed, but still no dice) is supposed to be the last one.

Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Sep 1, 2018

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Griffith is a character from Berserk. He's basically a murderous, demon-consorting narcissist who passes himself off as the messiah of the totally-not-the-Catholic-Church organized religion of the comic. The protagonist knew him personally when he was a nobody, and yells his name angrily a lot.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
like i say every time this comes up, if you don't long for the resurrection and the moral perfection of the world, regardless of your framework, then what are you even doing

i don't believe in the transhumanist version any more than i do the Christian version but i do appreciate the vision of building it with our own hands

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Paladinus posted:

Don't know if it will help with finding the book, but there is a Jewish midrash on returning to God with a similar message. Google says it's in Pesikta Rabbati.


The midrash appears to be referenced in a book by Chaim Potok called The Chosen, but I don't think it's the one you're looking for.

Man every time I learn something new about Jewish theology it sounds rad as hell.

Mind there's probably a bit of a filter at work given I mostly hear about it here, but still.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
I got Docetism, which in retrospect should come as no surprise. :v:

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
so i really upset someone the other day by asking about the necessity of the crucifixion in frankly insensitive terms, and i'd like to educate myself

can anyone recommend a good explanation of Catholic soteriology for a layman

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
e: nevermind, pretty much all I had to do to answer this question was open the summa theologica

Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 11:26 on Oct 1, 2018

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Thank you both.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Caufman posted:

I can think of at least one apple that's been highly problematic for humanity thus far, though.

I like how nearly every plausible answer for "what kind of fruit was the forbidden fruit" is based on a pun in the corresponding linguistic / cultural context.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

:eyepop:

e: also who made that, is it just one person's clever modification of the original statue or is there a company mass producing marian octopi out there

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Night10194 posted:

Why would they be afraid of worshiping a Goddess of the Underworld in a pagan context? They usually aren't anything bad. I know very little about Norse mythology and Hel, so unless she's unusually hostile or something, is it mostly a Hades situation where later material conflates her with Satan?

I know far less than Tias does, I'm sure, but Hel is one of three illegitimate children of Loki; the other two are Fenrir and Jormungand, who are destined to play starring roles in the end of the world. So at the very least she's not in great company.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.


mood

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Spacewolf posted:

Does every US school district do that play in English class at some point during middle school or HS, or just where I grew up?

Gimme some of that ol' time curriculum?

No, but the Scopes trial itself is often covered in social studies -- in cursory detail, so stuff like the succession of who was prosecuting absolutely gets left out. (I think I may have heard that somewhere else at some point, but couldn't have told you so if you asked and definitely wasn't taught it in school.)

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
I don't know that I will ever be a Christian. However, for a long time I've been thinking about the obstacles and objections that make it difficult for me to entertain the idea of God; you could say it's an effort to take the catechism's claim that you can reason your way to God's existence seriously.

One of the biggest obstacles for me has been the existence of suffering, and especially the notion that God would inflict suffering on humanity as punishment. So much of Catholic theology seems completely steeped in this idea that wrongdoing requires the infliction of pain as payment, and that just revolts every moral instinct I have.

Similarly, many of you in this thread have made valiant attempts to explain suffering to me (as I've hardly been quiet about this objection.) And I may not have properly expressed my appreciation for your efforts; I am grateful to all of you for trying, and particularly to Deteriorata, whose analogy of piano lessons (the suffering isn't as bad as we think it is, it's something we in a sense volunteered for even if we can't see it now, the payoff will be more than worth it) is one that I still absolutely cannot accept, but suggested the solution that occurred to me recently.

As an atheist (and setting aside my deeply ironic urge to anthropomorphize the universe), I understand pain as something that exists because living creatures need a way of understanding when something is wrong or dangerous. It occurs to me that there's no reason this couldn't be extended to spiritual pain as well.

My close Catholic friend tends to describe the world as wounded, and while I really despise suffering, I am able to admit that it would be worse for the world to be wounded and for us to feel no pain -- to have nothing to prompt us to realize that something is wrong -- than for the world to be wounded and for us to suffer because of it. It need have nothing to do with deserts -- it's simply that we cannot have a painless paradise in which we are separated from God because that would be abandoning us to ignorance. At the same time, God can't make this pain into a specific, enforced awareness that "separation from God" is the problem -- that would basically be coercing us into worship, and His goodness would prevent him from doing that.

I have to admit that I've always kind of approached my understanding of God through the metaphor of parenthood, and my relationship with my parents is kind of strange: my parents were kind, loving, supportive, and terrible people. As a consequence I grew up never doubting that people could care for me, and the idea that even the worst people have some good in them isn't that difficult. But it also means that I have a tremendous resistance to moral authority that cannot or will not explain itself, and that for me, any kind of progress towards moral betterment has been synonymous with rebellion. As a result, the notion of God as a corrective parent has been both counter-productive, but also one I can't entirely seem to get away from.

But this also gives me an idea of the Incarnation and the Crucifixion as a solution to the problem of how to reach humanity without coercing us. Christ's embodiment and subsequent sacrifice could be understood as God showing us that this is safe -- rather than telling us "eat your vegetables!" (so to speak), He took on human life and human frailty as an example. The distinction between being able to reason your way to God's existence but having to arrive at Christ-as-God through faith perfectly threads the needle between coercion and leaving us in ignorance; because he was human, Christ communicates to us without compelling us to believe, and because He is God, His message is exactly what we need to hear. And his human experience is also completely and utterly authentic; He is able to cry out "father, why have you forsaken me" and experience the same despair we do -- and overcome it. The example would not be complete without this.

This is probably completely heretical from a Catholic standpoint, since as I understand it the Catholic understanding strongly emphasizes that sin requires payment or even retribution -- pain is deserved as a consequence of wrongdoing, in order to satisfy God's anger towards it, rather than simply being the reification of the awareness that something is broken and wrong. But just the same, I see this line of thinking as the removal of one of the obstacles between me and the possibility of ever being a religious person, and I'm curious what you all think, and whether this lines up with any existing theology.

Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Nov 2, 2018

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Cyrano4747 posted:

The problem is that if you accept that viewpoint we’re at an impasse where half of the people in this country are irredeemable and there is no way to negotiate with them. What’s the end game for that? Civil War 2: this time with tanks and nukes?

Generational change. There's no more important political battleground in the country than schools and colleges.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Josef bugman posted:

Society advances funeral by funeral.

Except that often it doesn't and you end up in the same situation you were always in the rich get richer, the poor stay poor. The best way to alter that in terms of historical times has been to arm a loving tonne of people, get most of them killed and then have them come back and demand better and the government be afraid that they would use that training and guns to kill them.

In truth? If we are all damned then maybe it would be best to spit defiance at the systems that make it this way and the people who defend it, either through going "well it's supposed to be like this" orrrrrr

To be clear, I'm not proposing this as a general theory of how to change society. I'm saying that for this particular decade or two, it's one of the clearest sources of hope for things to improve, I think -- not a substitute for political action or moral persuasion, but a fallback when it comes to people who will not be persuaded.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

HEY GUNS posted:

because there are many friendly atheists in it and one pagan

if it really bothers you i'll change it back

For whatever it's worth, please don't worry about it either way on my account. I like that this is a Christian space where I am welcome as a guest, I don't need it to belong to me.

Plus I'm probably going to start taking RCIA classes before the end of the month anyways. :v:

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Caufman posted:

You are more than a guest; you are a contributor.

Also, the RCIA thing is new news, isn't it?

It is.

It's something I considered three and a half years ago when I decided I needed to understand Catholicism better, but at the time the actual practice of faith was so alien to me (and I had such distinctly ulterior motives) that I would have felt insincere committing to it then.

I was lonely and depressed and in love with someone who was also at a trying point in her life, and we were sort of clinging to our friendship and the possibility of making it more than that as a lifeline. We even talked about getting married, but in the end she didn't think she could ever explain to our theoretical children why their father didn't believe in God.

I threw myself very abruptly into study of the Bible, read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and spent months that summer going on long walks outside sort of arguing with myself, trying to identify each of the things that stood between me and believing. I went to the nearest Church and asked to see a priest, made an appointment, and talked to him about my situation and some of my objections; he gave me kind and well-intentioned advice (prayer, letting grace guide you over time, and acknowledging that there was a lot of disagreement even within the Church about things like acceptance of homosexuality) but it wasn't really the kind of abstract, intellectual answer that I needed at that time.

I was also applying and preparing for law school at that time, and as it happened the school that gave me the best financial aid (at the last minute -- I'd already said yes to a scholarship offer in Chicago before the University of Pittsburgh came through with a last-minute better offer) was in the same city where my friend was going to school. I was still holding onto some hope that we could work things out (and I checked with her that I wasn't overstepping myself by coming there) so I jumped at the chance.

I went to a couple of Masses with her but felt completely out of place -- through no fault of the parishes themselves, mind you, just that sense that you get as an introvert standing among a community that you don't belong to for the first time. I also visited a local congregation of Friends, thinking maybe I could wrap my head around the total opposite -- a much more flexible and loosely defined idea of God -- and while again the people were very friendly I had an incredibly bizarre internal experience while I was there (that I could talk about more if people are interested, but this post is already turning into my entire life story) that left me more sure than ever that belief in God was incompatible with who I was.

I started posting here regularly around that time as well; you guys gave me the chance for me to see which of my beliefs and impressions were compatible with Christianity or not, and it really was mostly "not."

I couldn't overcome the simple, involuntary inability to believe in God as I vaguely conceived of Him.

I couldn't condone the existence of suffering and natural cruelty, which in turn meant I couldn't imagine being grateful to the architect of the the world as it is.

I couldn't imagine seeing the Catholic church as a moral authority given its teachings on sex and sexuality, combined with the scandals of the priesthood and the cover-up of those scandals.

I was deeply bothered by what I saw (and to be honest, still see) as the invitation to passivity and turning inward that seems -- bound to, but not necessarily synonymous with Christian belief.

Intellectually, the idea that a perfect world would look like a hierarchy where one infinite being ruled over many limited ones bothered me, and on an emotional, experiential level, my deprogramming from white supremacy and the rest of my father's beliefs, and just my general experiences with illegitimate authority meant that every step I'd ever taken in my life towards being a better person was an act of rebellion -- "anyone who wants to be called Lord is your enemy."

I've struggled with each of these things for years. But I'm not a completely static creature, and I've made progress on each of them.

I've come to regard my relationship to existence and its foundation as important whether or not I call that foundation God.

I am still absolutely opposed to what I guess you would call the logic of death -- the way everything in the world grows old, decays, the way life feeds on other life, the constant presence of scarcity, and so on -- but the depth of bitterness and resentment I felt because of it wasn't healthy. Existentialism has been a great comfort to me but I wasn't approaching the Absurd with cheerful refusal, I was trying to fight and protest the Absurd in the posture of a suicide -- with angry, despairing defiance. I wished I could believe, like a Christian, that Death had been conquered, but couldn't.

I am appalled by suffering and cruelty, but I can say with confidence that I'd rather exist than not, and, after thinking about it for a long time, even that I wouldn't want to throw away the memory of past suffering. I'd like to be a better version of myself, but I wouldn't want to be someone else, and I wouldn't want to be nothing. So I can't, in good faith, be completely ungrateful for what I see in existence, because if I did then the logical thing to do would be to turn away from it.

I've come to an understanding of natural and human cruelty that lets me suppose: maybe God determined that that the best world is one in which imperfect creatures participated in creation, and participated in meaningful ways, not just as proxies for His will. Maybe suffering is as repulsive to Him as it is to me -- maybe even more so, because of His perfect perspective -- and it's just that an infinitely powerful and infinitely good being has to thread the needle where doing nothing to help us would be abandonment but even the slightest compulsion would be tyranny. It's not that suffering is necessary -- it absolutely isn't -- it's just that if I'm right and God hates tyranny even more than suffering, overcoming suffering has to be a human project, guided (but not determined) by non-coercive grace, at least for now.

To understand the world as a human project means it doesn't make sense to retreat from the Church because I disagree; it means that I need to go towards it, to join the communal discussion -- not with the delusion that my opinion is uniquely important and is going to change everything, of course, but in the sense that a universal human project is incomplete without any of us. I have a few moral lines I won't ever back down from and they would probably make me a really bad Catholic, and that's going to be a delicate thing to negotiate even just as a friend standing nearby let alone if I decide to convert, but I don't think I can let that be an excuse.

I'm not going to stop being a socialist, because my socialism is grounded in the belief that is the urgent duty of every human being on Earth to look out for each other, that every death by starvation, untreated wound or illness, or exposure when the cure for those things is available is a murder. I don't see this as incompatible with Christianity; actual, historical materialism-based Marxism might be but I was already way too in love with the idea of telos to be a good Marxist long before I even knew what the word meant, or started thinking about religious conversion.

Moreover, I've seen people exemplify faith as a call to action in this world; the friend I mentioned earlier is a great example, and several of you have impressed me on this front as well.

Hegel had a good response to my concerns about hierarchy years and years ago -- essentially "does it really make sense to ask about the superior and inferior between a person and the air they breathe?" It didn't immediately satisfy my objection, but it put me on the right track, especially alongside some of the other theological points like God being His qualities rather than possessing them. To ask whether God is hierarchically "above" mankind is like asking, "which do you love more, your mother or your family?" The family is a larger and more inclusive category, but to weigh one separately against the other isn't even possible -- you can measure the part against the whole, but if you tried to measure the part against everything left over without that part, neither of those is the whole.

With respect to both the spirit of rebellion that has guided me and with respect to the question of passivity, I've been reading about the Abolition movement in the antebellum United States, and it's been helpful to have a portrait of radical, activist Christianity in my own cultural context (albeit 160+ years ago) and on the side I like to imagine I would have been.

And... that's where I am now: I've changed my mind about a few things, and resolved others on the terms I set for myself, however arbitrary. I can imagine myself believing in something like God and responding to that something with gratitude instead of resentment and pain. Believing in Christ, specifically, would be an extraordinary step beyond that, and I'm inclined to agree with the Catechism when it says that step can't be achieved through reason.

If I'd tried to do this in the summer of 2015 I would have been doing it out a desperate desire to remake myself to suit someone else's need -- I would have been dishonest to myself (to say nothing of the Church!) and demeaning to her, to act like if I could just contort myself into a different person we would automatically be happy and together afterwards.

Recently, that same friend agreed to sponsor me for the RCIA. We've both changed a lot since then and neither of us are in quite such soul-crushing circumstances. I still love her, but without that edge of desperate, selfish loneliness, and it's no longer the reason I'm doing this -- it's become something I need to see through in and of itself, and that's what needed to happen for me to give myself permission to proceed, so to speak.

I want to test the solutions I've come up with, see if I'm really just coming up with rough approximations of old ideas, and learn whether my solutions are acceptable not on my terms (I already know they are, after all) but on the terms of the community I'm thinking of joining. And as I understand it, that's what the RCIA is for.

Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Nov 12, 2018

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

HEY GUNS posted:

you remembered what i said? i don't even remember what i said half the time. many years!

I wouldn't feel right unloading my thoughts on this thread like I sometimes do if I didn't also listen!

Thank you all for your support and patience, by the way, recently and in the past.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
In fairness if you lived in a world where vampires, physical, people-eating demons, and necromancers were all demonstrably real you'd probably be a little more paranoid about witchcraft, too.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
I think it's a mistake to dismiss the imagery just because it's trashy and historically inaccurate.

The idea in Castlevania is that the Church is a corrupt repressive institution, but at the same time that the power of faith and God is manifestly real -- and not just real, but accessible even to deeply flawed people. The image of a zombie priest (who was a shithead in life to begin with) blessing a river in order to turn it into holy water to destroy vampires is grotesque and kinda sacrilegious, but it's also kind of interesting; it shows God working good after a fashion through the actions of literal evil monsters, and also suggests a kind of "scientific" approach to the divine: you have a priest, you have water, you can make holy water. It's all based on observable, learnable rules.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Mr Enderby posted:

Have you read The Power and the Glory?

I haven't; does it have a discussion of this idea?

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
Having had some experience with bigotry from the inside, as it were, I think I can answer that.

It really comes down to insecurity. In particular, I think it relates to how people orient themselves towards strength and vulnerability, happiness and suffering.

The idea that the world rewards us for our merits (even before worrying about what is or isn't meritorious) is a fragile one, because it isn't true. To defend the idea of a just world, then, you have to assign flaws to people who are suffering or unhappy in order to explain their suffering. This is incredibly important because if you cannot do this, you have no way of protecting yourself from suffering -- no amount of merit will save you.

If you are a generally happy and fulfilled person, this takes the form of defending what you have as justly earned, allowing you to deflect or ignore claims that you have more resources or power or authority than you deserve and should share. At any rate, to see suffering puts you on the defensive.

If you are a generally unhappy person, this takes the form of internal self-loathing that most people can't tolerate for very long. You need some hope that by self-improvement you can suffer less, which you will probably cling to, and the sight of someone who (from your perspective) is flawed in the same ways you are being happy or successful despite this will be hideous to you, because it suggests that what is wrong with you is even more immediate and personal, and perhaps incurable. Again, to see suffering (your own or others!) puts you on the defensive; you want to distance yourself from it any way you can.

The practical upside of this is that a society which believes in the "just world" fallacy will have to explain oppression in terms of moral or meritocratic failings of the oppressed. On top of that, the more intimately your personal strength, ability, and merit tie into your identity, the more defensive you will be.

If, for example, your idea of manhood is completely bound up in domination (that you won't ever fully realize because other people have wills and agency), in being a material provider (that you often won't be able to be because capitalism is bullshit), and in never showing vulnerability (which is impossible because everyone is vulnerable) then the most terrifying thing you can imagine is being a woman. The next worst thing is being seen the way you see women.

So gay men are a threat to your identity because suddenly just being a man isn't enough by itself to put you in the "safe", happy, powerful category, and transgender people of either persuasion are a threat to your identity because they threaten to erase the category completely. And, crucially, maintaining the separation -- that you deserve to be happy because of who and what you are and others don't -- is easier than admitting the absolutely terrifying possibility that bad things just happen to people for no good reason and there's no surefire way to protect yourself.

The cure for all of this is recognition that the world really is terrifyingly unjust, that all of us are vulnerable, and that the best defense we have is to pull together, prioritizing the needs of the most vulnerable.

This is a theme that is common to leftist politics and to Christianity, and I think a big part of the wedge driven between the two (which wasn't the case only ~150 years ago) is the extent to which American Protestantism in particular married itself to the idea of a just world, and to a very mechanistic idea of how God interacts with and is reflected in that world, operating to reward good behavior with good outcomes.

(And of course, this isn't an exclusively Protestant problem by any means, because the idea leeched into the groundwater of American moral thought in general, and even as a confused atheist/deist hybrid or whatever I count as right now I still have to deal with my unexamined intellectual debt to this idea from time to time.)

All of which is why Job is one of the most important books in the Old Testament. :v:

Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Nov 18, 2018

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

NikkolasKing posted:

Even if you could wave a wand and make most every human being on Earth happy, could we enjoy the happiness knowing that others are still in misery?

I don't think that opposition to all suffering means that suffering is more powerful than happiness. What it means is that you can conceive, at least dimly, of a perfect future -- an ideal that makes no exceptions. It means you can imagine the end of all suffering. Our distance from that ideal might be painful, but it's also a call to advance towards it.

I also think that this illustrates something about the communal nature of morality. It makes no sense for one person, acting alone, to feel guilty that they can't help everyone; being consumed by that thought isn't healthy. But that's thinking about it in very individualistic terms.

I think that we feel the pangs of a collective conscience. (Just in an abstract sense, I'm not talking about a hive mind or some Jungian nonsense or anything.) And the responsibility that conscience demands is a subtle one -- you have to keep in mind that you don't control the actions of other people, but you do influence them, and you do provide a mirror through which they see themselves.

Which is to say: you can have a moral duty to save everyone, without having a moral duty to save everyone yourself. You have a share of a collective project, which includes collaboration, organization, and picking up slack. It's not enough just to help your share of people and then wash your hands of it, but what's demanded of you then isn't just "more help." It's that you participate in our progress towards a society that helps everyone.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
i''m not from the midwest but my mother's from Michigan and i was familiar with hotdish long before I learned what it was called

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

NikkolasKing posted:

Guess a big problem is that I just don't really think a better, perfect society is possible. I think a lot of people abandoned the idea of utopia after utopias justified hundreds of millions of people dying last century. Objectively things are getting better but, as I was trying to say earlier, objectivity flies out the window in the face of feelings and empathy.

Well, I mean, to put it in Christian terms it's not possible for humans to live a life without sin, either. I'm just suggesting that a lot of the dynamics and moral/theological consequences of that idea can be extended to societies as well.

NikkolasKing posted:

I dunno, this might just be something I gotta work through. It's one reason I like learning about stuff. Reading and gaining knowledge has always been a great way to get my head on straight. That and music. Music really is the best cure. Might sound shallow but a good song really makes it all seem worthwhile.

I don't think this is shallow at all. Suffering is best understood as an obstacle; it only makes sense to talk about obstacles in reference to the thing they're preventing or blocking. If suffering did disappear overnight, we'd have to think about what "good" means in that context, now that "doing no harm" and "alleviating harm" were out of the way, and I think it would mostly involve creation and enjoying the creations of others.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
If you have to get out of the country to live or to have any chance at happiness, please do.

If you don't, please stay and fight, we need all the help we can get.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
Please have that debate if you have the time, I am interested.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

HEY GUNS posted:

my two cents: I'm uncomfortable with the idea of converting for non-doctrinal reasons. If you really believe the Orthodox church is the fullness of Christian faith, then there is no other option or very few other options (the second known Orthodox person in the US, a convert, got a dispensation to attend Episcopalian services while in the US). This isn't like consumer goods, where I can pick one color of shirt or another. Unless I became persuaded the church has become heretical it's not really a choice from my pov any more.

i wish The Phlegmatist hadn't left the internet because of religious reasons, this sounds like something he'd have intelligent opinions on.

I suppose the alternative is to view churches as somewhat akin to alchemy -- we don't really know what we're doing, but there's something about spiritual growth in a communal setting that informs and enriches us, and it works so much better than going it alone that even serious disagreements about doctrine don't totally erase their worth.

Sounds kind of Protestant now that I type it out, though. :v:

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

HEY GUNS posted:

the only dude itt who has read all of origen...

that sounds like a challenge

wikipedia posted:

He was a prolific writer who wrote roughly 2,000 treatises in multiple branches of theology, including textual criticism, biblical exegesis and biblical hermeneutics, homiletics, and spirituality.

gently caress

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
i have a confession, as an atheist

the War on Christmas is real, but we didn't start it. Christmas carols are violence

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Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

joat mon posted:

Pascal's wager is definitely a thing in the West, and much more calculating than your translation. That and inertia may be the main reasons that most nominally Christian Americans are Christian. (But won't admit)

you should be an atheist because God is actually engaged in a cosmic game of hide-and-seek and absolutely resents being believed in by anyone who hasn't physically located Him

it's too late for me because by saying this I have 100% sealed my eternal damnation

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