DreadNaught52 @DN52000

The purpose of a system is what it does. Throughout the history of communist revolutions, there has been a wide diversity of ideology. You can see this through the ideology of Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Pol Pot, and so on. The one uniting factor is the death of producers, of the competent, of the innocent, of the religious. Therefore, the purpose of communism is the death of the functional members of society. There is no greater calling or purpose. This is what it is. This is what it is for.

This is hilarious. I am just glancing across my bookshelves of Christian classics. Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost are gothic and read like horror to a modern audiences even if theological. Beowulf (Christian-Pagan syncretism) is essentially a ghost story about a guy fighting a demon. Decameron is series grim gothic tales mostly featuring killing Crime and Punishment centers on a grisly murder The works of Flannery O’Connor are as gruesome as Pulp Fiction But heck, what do those great Christian authors know about art? Real Christian art is Pure Flicks and the Hallmark channel with more references to Jesus. “I just don’t get it guys. Why can’t Christian’s create art???”

@GreeneMan6 Well, I mean, I learned that I would never get married. That's something.

"A pervasive belief that if everything reduces to mechanism in your thinking you must necessarily deny that the interior experience of being human has meaning or value. According to them, I'm expected to deny love and beauty and morality." Only if you are rationally consistent. The pervasive problem with this whole position is that you affirm a metaphysics that explicitly denies these "interior" things of the soul, and yet are unwilling to give them up either. So you are in the unhappy position of refusing to deny the phenomena in favor of the naturalistic theory, which would indeed result in a dead soul, but also unwilling to give up the theory, despite the fact it tells you that these things you value are unreal illusions or epiphenomena. Deactivating a meat robot has no particular moral status, whether or not other meat robots are "programmed" to feel "as if" deactivating a meat robot is a meaningful moral evil of murdering a person. The position "I know this is false, but it still feels as if it is true" is ultimately untenable. In the end, you have to side either with what is true or with the "as if." You have therefore placed truth and what is right and good in direct opposition. Let's look at some more paragraphs: "The person who wondered what I'm doing talking about souls when I'm in atheist is probably religious. And this brings me to one of my major gripes about conventional religions. They hijack our natural wonder at what it's like to be human from the inside for their gain; they erect untestable pseudo-explanations for that wonder in order to suck us into believing absurd and crazy things. Which matters a lot, because as Voltaire famously pointed out, if you believe absurdities you will commit atrocities. Ultimately, the reason I wrote this essay is because I'm anti-atrocity. Which means I want to stop parasitic belief systems from making people crazy. Which means I want them to be able to reconcile the outside mechanistic truth of how the universe actually is with their inside experience of being human." The problem here of course is the pathological hatred of religion, which ESR has asserted many times, as he does here. What he fails to notice is that his project, as stated, "to reconcile the outside mechanistic truth with the inside experience of being human" is an impossible project. The two things cannot be reconciled. A mechanistic worldview has no place for such things as agency, freedom, dignity, responsibility, morality, meaning, beauty, or transcendence. A naturalistic atheist can of course still experience these things, but to him, they must always appear as illusions, false appearances, epiphenomena supervening on top of the "real" deterministic, mechanistic, materialistic phenomena. And of course the deeper problem is that exactly this mechanistic materialism IS A CASE OF THE VERY KIND OF ABSURDITY THAT LEADS TO ATROCITY that ERS claims causes him to reject religion. If you want atrocities AT SCALE, the way to get them is to promote atheism, and convince people there is no God, no moral law, no right or wrong, nothing but intrinsically meaningless matter in motion. If you want to understand dead souls, read Dostoyevsky on the point. I recommend Demons.

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Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet

a week ago

In a recent post I alleged that there is a cla,ss of people whose souls are dead. Somebody replied wondering what I was doing talking about souls when I'm an atheist. There's a deep confusion of ideas here, and I intend to address it. In part because I think it hinders

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@kunley_drukpa I'm sorry, but as an American, I don't want a single Canadian joining my country. Aside from Albertans, they seem ok.

The odd thing about it, to me, was that Unforgivable Curses are Unforgivable when used on humans. Barty suffered no consequences for using them on a spider. Now, you can consider that a result of "wizard racism", or whatever, but, nonetheless, goblins are not human.

@user_name_them9 @KaiserLoengramm God literally told the Israelites that having a king govern them was a very poor decision. If you like monarchy then fine, but don't pretend that it's defined by God as the only permissible system of governance.

@YVrillain @KaiserLoengramm What happened to Lafayette was tragic. What happened to Paine was, well, probably deserved.

My brother and his wife would never ask for help themselves, so... me and the rest of my family will ask for them. givesendgo.com/emergency-medi… My sister-in-law, mother of ten, has been struggling with prolonged, severe health issues. She spent about a month in the hospital...

In 450 AD, a pope wrote a letter commanding priests to stop making Christians confess secret sins publicly. His reason: private confession is the apostolic rule. The common claim is that private confession to a priest was invented in the Middle Ages, maybe at the Fourth Lateran Council, and that the "pure" early Church knew nothing of it. Pope Leo the Great's letter Magna indignatione says the opposite. Around 450 AD, he learned that some bishops in Campania and Samnium were reading out a list of sins before the congregation and requiring public satisfaction even for secret faults. Leo was furious. He forbade the practice outright. His reasoning is remarkable. He called it "against the apostolic rule" to make public what God wanted hidden. Public sins, he said, could be remedied publicly. But secret sins required only private confession to a priest, followed by the priest's judgment on the appropriate satisfaction. Notice what this assumes rather than argues. Leo assumes confession to a priest is already the normal channel of forgiveness. He is not introducing it. He is regulating an existing practice, and he appeals to apostolic tradition as its basis. That is 1,000 years before the supposed medieval invention. One letter, and the timeline collapses. If private confession was normative in 450 AD, the question is not whether Catholics invented it later. The question is who removed it. Why do you think this document is so rarely mentioned in these debates?

I actually do want to have a dialogue with right wing critics of Christianity. I share many of their complaints with the church. However, my instinct is that there is something fundamentally wrong with this frame. It arrives once more from the “view from nowhere”, as if man is sitting at the end of history with a stop watch and a caliper measuring the fitness of various deities. But any Deity worth the name would immediately ask: “Where for comes this caliper and who sets the time for your watch?” There is something to the tradition where people have an understanding of God, a priori, as the origin of order and goodness then ask a specific revelation to demonstrate credentials. AKA: “I am the lord your God who brought you out of Egypt!” But this is a different conversation to the one going on here. If we were addressing in the question classically, we would be comparing revelations and spiritual experiences, not grading one religion against another standard based on metrics.

Dave Greene @GreeneMan6

2 months ago

Yeah but understand this - once you frame religion in instrumental terms like this it ceases to be “religion” functionally and stops working to the purpose you describe. After you fully understand this paradox, you will see that appeals to utility cannot defeat the question of

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@HerniatedDiscus @EBryceLee @Devon_Eriksen_ @AuronMacintyre I think calling it Christian when it has become explicitly atheistic and secular in nature is a bit of a stretch. Our ruling philosophy owes far more to enlightenment thinkers than anything to do with the ethics of the church.

No. Traditional Christian ethics are highly critical of such things as false weights and measures as well as wider ideologies such as marxism. It's true that you can try to take a passage of the Bible out of context to support almost anything but that's also true of every text ever.

@Devon_Eriksen_ @AuronMacintyre I'm sure there are dumber takes out there, but this one is up there.

@reggggiecyde @Devon_Eriksen_ @AuronMacintyre I didn't. But it let him keep his pride, and it compensated me for what I might have done with the money otherwise. Still, were I to do it again, I would try to insist on no interest, or at least try to lower it. He insisted on paying it, but I still feel like I was greedy.

She did not "withhold medical aid". This is a falsehood spread because she didn't offer the dying serious medical services and strong painkillers. But nuns aren't doctors - they don't have the training for serious medical work. And, at the time, India had banned narcotics, so painkillers were unavailable. No one was helping the people St. Theresa and her sisters helped. The alternative was leaving them to die on the street.

les gens détestent Elon pour des raisons complètement débiles pollution, climat, net worth, individualité, etc. alors que c’est un des types qui fait le plus pour tout le cybercab : - moteur sans métaux rares - voiture plus légère, moins chère à produire - 100% électrique, zéro CO2 à l’usage - un seul véhicule qui sert des dizaines de personnes → moins de voitures au total - dispo jour et nuit, pas d’indisponibilité - facile d’accès, ultra sécurisé - ça va faire chuter les morts sur la route de manière massive starlink : - internet accessible partout, pour tous spacex : - a cassé le prix d’accès à l’espace - fusées réutilisables, cadences de lancement absurdes - veut rendre l'espèce multi-planétaire neuralink : - déjà utile pour des gens qui ne pouvaient plus bouger / communiquer X : - info en temps réel, moins de filtre politique - a open-source l’algo énergie : - défend le solaire au-dessus du reste, devant le nucléaire et le fossile - pousse une énergie abondante et clean optimus : - un robot humanoïde qui peut faire les tâches répétitives / dangereuses c’est objectivement l'un des plus grand entrepreneur de ce monde et certainement l'une des personnes qui a le plus d'impact positif pour l'espèce

A serious answer: Usury is that which is to take advantage of another. I once had a coworker who had a payday loan on his car. I paid it, and asked him to pay the sum plus 10%, IIRC (far less than the loan company was charging). In the end, he insisted on paying it, to his credit, even though I was willing to accept the principle. Was that usury? Probable not. Was the payday loan usury? Absolutely. It was designed to escalate into a spiral of debt resulting in the repossession of his only vehicle. And you may say, well, why shouldn't they have done, if they could do it, for a greater profit? And I say, I worked with him for years, and even though he doesn't like me, I was his neighbor. I owed him help, because I am a Christian, and he is my neighbor. As best I understand, as a Catholic, usury is the the use of money to destroy your community for your own benefit.

Did you even read what I wrote? I'm not defending Clancy, my opinion of her is that she is absolutely sane. She premeditated the attack, she acted methodically - insane people don't do that. I was defending the philosophical basis of the insanity claim. Nothing I've learned about Clancy makes me think that she was in any way incapable of choice or discerning reality. Even if she was hearing voices (which I really doubt), auditory hallucinations do not force you to do something. Depression does not make you kill your kids. Plenty of people every day try to kill themselves without going on a killing spree. Dahmer knew what he was doing was wrong, and he tried to hide it. He still did it because he wanted to do it. He enjoyed it, and he decided his enjoyment was more important than people's lives. That's a choice. That's why he was evil. If he'd killed someone and eaten them in public because he was genuinely hallucinating that he was in Hawaii, slaughtering a pig, and holding a BBQ for the neighborhood, that would be insanity. We'd still have to lock him up, but that would be insanity. Yes, a literal cannibal can be sane. The fact that evil can be stupid and bizarre doesn't mean the perp isn't capable of rational thought. Sanity is about being able to apprehend reality. Wanting to do something disgusting is about desire and will, not sanity. The problem with the insanity claim is that we've so medicalized every explanation of evil that having the temptation to do something wrong becomes evidence of insanity because "no sane person would do that". That's bullshit - knowing how reality works doesn't change anything about perverse human nature. People will rationalize anything. As for drunk driving, you are responsible for that if you do it because you chose to drink. Also, many people drink and don't drive. Alcohol doesn't make you drive, you choose to. And if you drink so much that you forget why you shouldn't drive, that was your choice as well.