shamgar
4mo ago
Your mention of Solzhenitsyn peaked my interest a little, but after having looked at it for a bit as far as I'm concerned it's not difficult to acces at all all. It has a pretty big wikipedia article. It's been translated to German and French. In German it looks like you have to get it second hand (although you can find offerings easily) and in French you can just buy it on amazon. And apparently they're working on an English translation due next year.
There are also other works by Solzhenitsyn which haven't been translated to English yet by the way, not just the one that's about Jews.
shamgar
1mo ago
To be clear, this is very much not going to be a steelman of their beliefs because I'm trying to describe a failure mode in a couple of sentences. The problem is mostly that they can be overly passive in certain ways. There is a common doubt about whether one is part of the elect in these communities and a fatalistic attitude towards this, because it's all God's grace and they can't do anything about it. This is caused by a combination of an extreme emphasis on personal conversion and an extreme emphasis on predestination which leads to people doubting whether they are saved because they did not have the right type of personal conversion experience and their response is waiting and hoping that they will someday be converted by God.
The overly strong emphasis on personal religious experience can be problematic in itself, but it is especially toxic in combination with a type of Calvinism that pretty much only allows them to use verbs in the passive mode when discussing spiritual matters and anything other than God is the subject. There are churches in the Dutch bible belt where you will find a thousand people twice a Sunday, but only a third or less of confessing members will feel like they are true Christians and for instance won't participate in the Lord's Supper, because they feel like they haven't really been converted yet. People will in some sense live like faithful Christians all their life, believe God exists, believe they are sinful and need salvation from God, believe Jesus died to bring about that salvation, etc. but at the same time they will tell you they haven't been converted yet and maybe they are just not part of the elect and will go to hell and then continue just wait and hope that their salvation may someday come to pass. In my view, they can just convert if they want to, God's grace is already at work in them in fact that they even want to be converted. Or maybe they already are converted and they don't have to doubt their salvation because they didn't have the right type of religious experience.
Again I'm not doing justice to these communities because I am zooming in on a particular problem that affects them. The problem is not solely caused by Calvinism but it is definitely exacerbated by a particular application of Calvinism.
EDIT: I just realized the "they" in your post might refer to either the Dutch hypercalvinists that I mentioned at the end of my post, or Luther and Calvin. I wrote my post interpreting it is the former. If purely looking at Luther and Calvin, I think it is more of a theoretical problem and not super important. I don't feel the fatalism I described in my post affects them. The reason I do have a clear preference for using the free will language, contrary to Luther and Calvin, is because of the fatalism I see in some Dutch reformed churches around me, which I think would be undermined by a clearer view of free will and also because I feel it undermines some caricatures of Reformed theology.
shamgar
2mo ago
This view is correct as far as I can gather from the book I linked to. Albeit with the caveat that John Calvin himself and Luther did reject the idea of free will. That being said, the book presents authors who for instance contributed to Reformed confessions and are all influential figures in the Reformed tradition, so I think it is reasonable to say that the Reformed tradition had a view similar to what you describe, even though Calvin himself did not.
shamgar
9mo ago
I have also noticed I enjoy less some of the places for online discussion I used to frequent. I have asked myself whether it was the discussions that have changed or my perception of them. A general trend of declining quality does match my experiences I think, but again I cannot tell whether I might be a bit burned out with online discussions or whether the discussions are burning out.
shamgar
9mo ago
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'esoteric points of high theology', but personally I really enjoy https://mereorthodoxy.com/.
shamgar
6mo ago
I don't know what film you're referencing, so I can't attest to that, but personally I had more fun visiting Bruges than visiting Brussels. I think Bruges still has a reputation in Belgium itself of being a bit touristy, but it does have a large beautiful historic centre. I might be a little harsh on Brussels, it does have some nice historic areas, but given that it's the most famous and biggest city in Belgium it just felt a little underwhelming and at least anecdotally when I visited there myself it also felt overcrowded. Bruges also gets plenty of tourists, but it has a large historic city centre and at least when I visited there, the tourist crowds weren't quite as bad as Brussels.
shamgar
9mo ago
While I can understand why people think red is the obvious choice, but I really struggle to understand why some people seem to have such a hard time imagining non-cognitively impaired people choosing blue.
You presuppositions which together I reckon are sufficient for choosing blue:
- A strong preference for the outcome where no one dies. For instance because you believe human life has an intrinsic value.
- You assume that some people will pick blue. Even if they might think red is the obvious choice when properly considered, maybe they had a brainfart, maybe they misread the poll, maybe their mouse slipped, etc. That's not even considering the fact that for whatever reason people might consciously choose blue.
There's also a weird meta element where I think both of those presuppositions are pretty normal and hence would expect a lot of people to vote blue and if I expect a lot of people to pick blue, that only makes point 2 more salient.
Again I understand why people might not agree with this reasoning, I don't understand why it seems to be so unimaginable that somebody might genuinely hold this position to some Mottizens.
shamgar
11d ago
I have recently passed 30 so it might be ageing is a part of it, but I guess I hoped significant deterioration of my immune system to start later than my early thirties. I did also get covid for sure once but probably twice. If it does have a longterm impact on the immune system that could very well be it.
shamgar
2mo ago
To be clear, I agree that Luther and Calvin were more concerned with a moral sense of free will as you put it in another post. Actually in the conclusion of "Reformed Though on Freedom" the authors of the book touch on this topic as well:
We can distinguish between the religious intentions behind playing down free choice and working this out in an explicit ontology. Given the context of the Reformation, it is quite understandable that Luther and Calvin combated the idea that man is free to work out his own salvation, although with divine help. The moral and spiritual consequences of sin are at stake, and in this respect the Reformers rightly teach the total corruption of man.
So yeah, the view of the book which I think I agree with, isn't that Luther and Calvin were completely wrong and later generations of theologians fortunately completely rejected their view. Rather, Luther and Calvin correctly emphasized the corruption of fallen man over and against a more optimistic view of human nature that was common in the late Medieval/ early Modern period, but in doing so they made some statements that have unfortunate philosophical consequences. Later generations of theologians had more or less the same idea about the spiritual and moral consequences of sin, but were a little more careful and nuanced in working it out philosophically. While, to be clear, I don't think this should lead us to a negative view of Luther and Calvin at all, I don't think it is a completely theoretical point either. I know at least in the Netherlands, where I am from, there are some very conservative Reformed groups that fall into some sort of hyper Calvinism who would benefit greatly if they were told that contrary to popular belief, people like Gomarus and Voetius believed in free will.
shamgar
9mo ago
I also think this is rather tricky and don't know how to deal with it. To complicate matters further I also don't want to err to much in the other direction where you completely disregard everything a certain source has to say because it made a dumb mistake once while it might still have plenty of worthwhile things to say.
shamgar
5mo ago
I'm not super knowledgeable about the issue, but I'm inclined to him in a negative light. As I understand it, he played an important role in moving Europe from cabinet wars to total war.
Given the historical distance, we maybe can appreciate a romanticised Napoleon as a military genius in the way that people think Vikings or Caesar are cool. But if we take a more serious look, I don't see how Napoleon can be seen as a good or even morally neutral person outside of French nationalistic hero worship or Raskolnikovesque nihilism.
shamgar
6mo ago
Care 83%
Loyalty 69%
Fairness 92%
Authority 64%
Purity 64%
Liberty 75%
Strongest moral foundation is fairness and I got matched to conservative.
However, I do score much higher on care and fairness than a typical conservative apparently. Actually, except for the libertarian on liberty I score higher or (almost) equal on every moral foundation compared to any of the profiles. I don't know how good my morality is, but I sure do seem to have a lot of it.
shamgar
6mo ago
Does anybody have tips on interesting stuff to read in French? Fiction, non-fiction, articles, books, blogs, anything goes.
I've always been interested in languages and enjoyed studying them, but I've never had quite the discipline to commit to one and learn it to a high level. Now I want to just commit to one language for a while and learn it properly. Because I already have some basic knowledge of French and I have a trip to France planned coming spring, I figured French would be the best candidate to start with. Just looking to get some more sources of input.
shamgar
11d ago
As for vitamin D, sleep, alcohol consumption and stress, I don't think there is a significant change in between the earlier period where I barely got ill and the past year where I caught colds/flu multiple times.
shamgar
1mo ago
Yes, because of Easter. Also, I saw an argument about the moral impact of Christianity somewhere and that got me thinking about things like slavery and infanticide in the Roman Empire. Being a Christian and that playing an important role in my daily life pretty much makes sure I think about it in passing pretty much every day.
shamgar
2mo ago
I think what you describe is the current situation in France. While I do not see a realistic path to get this implemented in the USA anytime soon, France at least sets a precedent for a modern Western country to make it illegal to gather racial data.
shamgar
2mo ago
I cannot access the review unfortunately.
To put it briefly, the view described by @urquan is pretty much the view that the theologians described in the book have. There are a lot more details about things like different types of necessity, how free choice functions before the Fall, after the Fall, after regeneration and after glorification, etc. but the overall view is pretty much what urquan described. Also, the book deals mostly with free will specifically, not with all the doctrines of elections. So the text provided for e.g. Gomarus deals with all sorts of philosophical ideas about how free will works, but he does not go into supralapsarianism or anything like that.
However, you are also correct about Luther and Calvin not having that view! The authors of ‘Reformed Thought on Freedom’ actually acknowledge that explicitly in the conclusion of their book when discussing possible objections. I know that it sounds implausible that Calvin and Luther had anti free choice views whereas pretty much all their successors the next couple of centuries did try to retain a notion of free choice. However, based on what I’ve read in the book, I am inclined to believe that. The later theologians all using a scholastic philosophical apparatus are very careful to retain free choice, despite affirming a very high view of God’s sovereignty. For what it’s worth, Calvin at least does hint at a little bit of nuance in his views at some point in the Institutes. I’d have to take some time to find the passage again, but I remember that somewhere in the Institutes Calvin says that fallen humans sin ‘necessarily’ but aren’t ‘coerced’ to sin. So they can’t not sin, they sin freely in some sense. This seems to hint at something more like the view that Urquan described and which later Reformed theologians also defended, albeit without the careful technical scholastic language used by later Reformed theologians and there are other places where Calvin does not seem to show this nuance.
Note that I am here specifically claiming the Reformed tradition as Reformed Orthodoxy developed retained a notion of free choice, not that they didn’t believe God foreordained everything. How there can be an omnipotent and omniscient God, who knows and allows and in some sense causes everything that is, while also somehow not being the author of evil and allowing for human freedom, remains a tricky question. There is a long tradition from the Church Fathers, through the Middle Ages and into Modernity of theologians grappling with that problem. I am not even claiming here that the Reformed scholastics were particularly successful in their approach to answer this question, just that mainstream Reformed theology from the sixteenth up to and including the eighteenth century, stands in the same line as the Medieval scholastics trying to reconcile Gods sovereignty with human freedom. In fact, somebody like Bernard of Clairvaux who made some distinctions between different types of necessity gets cited approvingly a bunch of times by different theologians discussed in the book. Some of the theologians seem to not like the standard Latin term for free will ‘liberum arbitrium’, although they all acknowledge that the Church Fathers used that term and so they also seem uncomfortable (unlike Calvin and Luther) with completely rejecting that term. However, when you read the treatises in the book, it becomes clear that they are accusing their Roman Catholic and Remonstrant interlocutors of something like what we would call a libertarian free will view, while they themselves argue for something more like what we would call compatibilism today.
You specifically mention Gomarus, so let me try to summarise the treatise on free will from Gomarus provided in the books. Gomarus first talks about what free choice is:
Free choice is the free power of a mind-gifted nature to choose from those [means] leading to a certain goal, one [means] proposed by reason above another, or to accept or reject one and the same [means].
He goes on to make a distinction between free choice (liberum arbitrium) and will (voluntas). The will is concerned with what we want, i.e. with goals, whereas the free choice is concerned with means, i.e. making a concrete choice between A or B. Let me give an example to try and explain this distinction. If somebody is thirsty and wants to drink a glass of water, the thirst and the goal of satiating that thirst, is the voluntas. Nobody thinks somebody made a conscious free choice to be thirsty and desire a glass of water, that’s not what people talk about when they say ‘free will’. The person in the example then has a choice to drink a glass of water or not. That’s the liberum arbitrium. Unless he has knowledge that the glass of water is poisoned or something he will more or less certainly choose to drink the glass of water, but he was completely able to choose not to drink the glass of water.
After a bunch of specific definitions and distinctions and technical terms and stuff as is common in scholastic theology, Gomarus goes on to describe free choice in four states, the state before the Fall, the state after the Fall, the state after regeneration and the state after glorification. As I understand it, the key here is this distinction between liberum arbitrium and voluntas. The potency to choose either A or B, i.e. liberum arbitrium, is affirmed by Gomarus in all those four states. What changes, is the voluntas. The fallen unregenerate man has a corrupted voluntas that is no longer oriented towards God, but towards sin. Therefore, though he is completely free in the choices that he makes, he will always use that freedom to sin, because that is now his goal:
Although the unregenerate are not able to do anything but sin, they do it freely, for they elicit the exercise (exercitium) of an act in such a way that they are able not to elicit it, and they are in a way masters of their own acts. However, with respect to the kind (species) of act, they are determined, since they are able to do nothing else but sin and have evil as their object, under the pretext of good. Besides, it is not otherwise for the good angels, who, confirmed in grace, are necessarily determined with regard to the kind of act, for they are able to do nothing else but good, even if [the exercise] to elicit an act here and now is totally free for them.
So Gomarus does not deviate from Reformed ideas about total depravity and such. What he argues is that man being fallen and in some sense not able to do anything but sin, is compatible with humans being free. They sin, not because of some sort of necessity, but because, their nature, being corrupted after the Fall, they want to. The argument Gomarus uses here about angels is also used a couple of times by other theologians in the book. Can good angels, glorified saints in heaven or even God sin? Christians typically believe it’s certain God is not going to sin, or that glorified saints in Heaven are not going to fall into sin again, but it would also be rather absurd to claim that God or glorified saints are not free. So this must mean it is possible for your will to be so strongly confirmed in good, that you will certainly always freely choose to do good. Likewise, for the unregenerate man, their will is corrupted to the extent that they will always freely choose to do sin.
I am not saying that this view is perfect or that the Reformed scholastics are able to answer all the questions this raises in a satisfactory way. But it is clear that somebody like Gomarus, who has a reputation of being a hardcore Calvinist, because he is the one who originally started the beef with Arminius himself, surprisingly actually confirms humans have liberum arbitrium, even in their fallen state, despite John Calvin and Luther rejecting that term.
shamgar
6mo ago
That's a good point, the Rijksmuseum is probably worth a visit. I haven't been there in a long time and I am personally not super into art and musea, so take my words with a grain of salt, but obviously they have a lot of famous paintings there and that's something the other towns I mentioned don't have to offer.
The Netherlands is a small country, so a visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam does not exclude a visit to Leiden or Utrecht, to get a taste of a historic city centre with canals, with less crowds and less tourist traps.
shamgar
1mo ago
In Rome there are a bunch of obvious sights to see if you are interested in history. In twelve hours you probably struggle seeing all the main attractions already, but if you have some time left for some reason: the Basilica of San Clemente is itself a monumental church, although there are many more impressive ones in Rome, but you can enter excavations of a 4th century church below that, and then you can enter even lower excavations of a 1st century house that was used for a Mithras cult below the 4th century church. A Medieval church, built on top of a church from antiquity, built on top of effectively a Mithras temple and you can enter all those buildings. I thought that was a pretty cool place to visit. Another interesting church to visit in Rome is the Sant'Ignatio. While building it they ran out of funds to build a dome and then the painter managed to make a painting on the ceiling which very convincingly produces the illusion of a dome from the perspective when you enter the church. It's a fun gimmick to see if you happen to be close to it.
In Napoli, the Vesuvius and Pompei are obvious attractions. I haven't been to the Vesuvius, because somehow both times I was there the weather was terrible and they closed off the mountain due to safety reasons (that's what I get for avoiding tourist crowds in the winter I guess). Pompei I thought was very impressive to see. Another slightly lesser known one that is also very impressive is Herculaneum (or Ercolano in Italian). It is a town buried under lava from a Vesuvius eruption just like Pompei and while it is much smaller and lesser known than Pompei, it is actually for the most part better preserved. Some difference in how it was covered by the eruption means that there is more organic material, like paint and wood, that was preserved and survives until the present.
shamgar
1mo ago
I think Hyperbolica does a much better job at getting you to experience hyperbolic space, because you actually walk around 1st person in a Hyperbolic world, whereas HyperRogue uses a top down perspective and tessellation to represent hyperbolic space.
One big difference is also that HyperRogue is much more challenging. I've never really played other roguelikes, but I think they are supposed to be very challenging and HyperRogue sure was for me, which also meant I did not get very far. Hyperbolica being a pretty straightforward simple adventure game almost feels like the opposite, where it was pretty short and easy and for me it almost felt more like a showcase for the concept of a 3d first person hyperbolic game, than a fully fleshed out game in its own right. That was not a problem for me by the way, because I think the concept is so cool that I am more than happy to pay some money for a good showcase of a hyperbolic world in which I can walk around 1st person, but it's good to have realistic expectations going into it. For reference, looking at my steam library, I have 3,5 hours in Hyperbolica and completed the game, whereas I have 11 hours in HyperRogue and I feel like I achieved almost nothing in it.
In some sense HyperRogue is probably a much better game, at least if you are into roguelikes. As an experience of hyperbolic space however, I much prefer Hyperbolica.
Understandable. For what it's worth, as someone who is mostly a lurker, these threads are one of the things that keep me lurking.
Your sentiment is certainly relatable. However, I don't have any advice for you which you have not already rejected in your post. It does make me think of this little poem:
“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”
What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.
All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.
All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say,
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.
No one remembers the former generations,
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them.
Don't do it bro
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