Hawaii98
1yr ago
Sure, I'm laundry by hand all the way. For example, I've genuinely come around to thinking that penicillin was a mistake (because its' widespread adoption inadvertently launched a never-ending biological arms race).
But that won't stop a good chunk of people from saying they hate doing laundry already and 'fulfillment' is lame and for tryhards
Hawaii98
1yr ago
Yeah that's the great irony - it's Schrodinger's right wing. We're in furious agreement that like you're suggesting 'normal' ideas are tautologically popular. But, only 'weirdos' rock the boat. Given a choice between being unfulfilled and having to do laundry by hand...
Hawaii98
1yr ago
Everything has been getting so much better, for so long now, that asking ‘wait guys why are we all just getting more completely miserable?’ has the magnetic force of a skunk’s ass
Hawaii98
1yr ago
Well, that doesn't solve the problem - the emergence of a semi permanent rentier/leisure aristocracy.
How about offering solutions in addition to criticisms?
Hawaii98
1yr ago
Yeah, that's another gnarly problem. I know someone similar who owned a dozen or so quadplexes and died quite young from the stress. How about a combo law, either 6 properties or $10 million value combined, whichever is last?
Hawaii98
1yr ago
"I know the rules don't allow me to call you a lying liar, but I really want you to understand that if I were allowed to call you a lying liar I'd be calling you a lying liar right now."
And if I had said that I would understand your point. But what I said was 'please consider this...the shortest acceptable...way to speak my truth...I won't...accuse you of lying but you are clearly pursuing a different agenda...'
That wasn't insulting or 'testing boundaries' - that was speaking plainly while respecting boundaries. Sometimes people say things that aren't true for all kinds of reasons. Having a rule against saying 'I don't believe you' is good for encouraging productive exchanges. But you're enforcing a rule you just made up against pointing out even the possibility of disingenuity, which would only be good for encouraging people to be disingenuous.
As for the other comment (for reference: "Double posting but your response seemed to be, frankly, in bad faith. By all means put up a quote from a prominent early 20th century socialist that purports it's a magnetic force for every lugnut, troglodyte, hardheaded, menial laboring, 9 to 5, factory man in England or at least some data on party registration by demography. "But ackshually it was working class" has negative probative value. Better not to have responded at all.")
Please, and I'm asking sincerely, explain what about this comment was antagonistic, much less unnecessarily so. "But ackshually" wasn't loving but is a widely known enough meme to reasonably be considered playful. And whether I was responding to a comment that was completely true or completely false - it was completely unsupported by evidence. "Everyone knows you're wrong because most communists were working class" was a contribution with negative probative value and it would have been better not to respond at all. I'm still eager to hear how my response was antagonistic (especially 'unnecessarily'?) - and the fact the other guy 'broke the rules' doesn't mean I didn't - but there are quite explicitly rules about low-effort participation, providing evidence, assuming consensus, and writing like everyone is reading. The undermining of the legitimate authority of those rules by my interlocutor was the premise of my response.
NB The guy did go on to provide some interesting sources that I'm still enjoying and others now can as well. So frankly your intervention wasn't just untimely it's trying to fix something that wasn't broke.
Hawaii98
1yr ago
That's your idle speculation, did the NSDAP ban religious worship or not?
(The answer is no, they banned Judaism, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Masonry, but unlike communism, did not dismantle religion)
Hawaii98
1yr ago
Ah! I'm with you now. How do we get more people/everyone into the leisure aristocracy? It seems like (until 50 years ago or so) this had been solving itself, you're never going to get everyone in (because of self-sabotage), but that class had been expanding wildly.
How do you curb the excesses of the (pick a word really) illegitimate leisure aristocracy? Tax the shit out of it. We know taxes discourage behavior so, off the top of my head example, you get 6 houses property tax free but house #7 is taxed at something unfathomable like 10% a year. This will create other problems of course (people buying all of their relatives exactly 6 houses, what is a house, etc) but 99.9% of us are on the same team on this one and that or something similar would theoretically drive investment away from property.
Hawaii98
1yr ago
But it's not the 'other way around' if it's a false equivalence? Communists clearly and explicitly advocate for murdering far more than one in ten thousand people? I'm confused what our miscommunication is here
Hawaii98
1yr ago
I’m merely asking why you believe that Christianity specifically has the highest truth value of any available religion.
I think I've sprinkled several answers to this already but my apologies if they weren't clear. Here is a condensed list:
- Jews doing their thing -Seems clearly spiritual rather than political -Old testament makes sense, everyone repeatedly devolving into sex maniac child murderers -But old testament just...ends. Doesn't make sense. Jesus does. -All my ancestors and their achievements were for Jesus -My culture is (was, sigh) superior
Do you believe that, for example, the Koran is a less plausible account of Muhammad’s life than the New Testament is an account of Jesus’? What about the Doctrine and Covenant’s account of Joseph Smith’s life and sayings?
Your point is very well taken, I just brought this up myself in a similar thread. Mohammed was definitely a guy who in all likelihood said the things he did, same as Joseph Smith. But neither has any verisimilitude. How can Jesus just be an important prophet in Islam when his whole shtick was 'i am not just an important prophet'? And why would God send angels and gold tablets to one guy's backyard with the message 'ladies, if you sleep with this man, straight to heaven'
the spread of Christianity throughout Western Europe in many ways strongly resembles the spread of what we call “wokeness” or “globalist liberal progressivism” today.
Yeah I'll entertain that premise! Hell I'll even go a step further and say Christianity has inadvertently enabled "wokeness" every step of the way for both millennia. But at least at first most (all?) of Christianity's changes on our ancestor's practices were genuinely positive. We did do human sacrifice. We did have sex cults. We did worship rocks and trees. Not swift.
The philosophy expressed by Jesus does not seem to countenance the construction of lavish and glorious cathedrals, or any of the other elements of medieval European civilization which coexisted with a surface-level profession of Christianity.
Jesus doesn't hate beautiful things. We could have an entire conversation about this though if you're interested, would be fascinating
It’s no coincidence that only by openly reconciling Christianity with earlier Greco-Roman paganism did Europeans truly transcend the limitations of the source material.
We were a bunch of mudpeople who barely bothered to invent an alphabet before Christianity. Yes, we had advanced metallurgy, agriculture, civil order, etc. But where were our poems, our philosophical treatises? Our monuments and great works? We were going nowhere fast. We were practically pre-historic before the Romans stumbled on us. If it's no coincidence that Europe rose to such heights as to conquer the globe only because of the syncretism you're describing, perhaps that was precisely what God intended for us.
Hawaii98
1yr ago
You can compare Christianity's history of claimed miracles to Islam's or asian religions, and notice they're about as well attested.
Sometimes things happen that people can't explain and call them miracles. Although I'll re-concede as before I have absolutely no evidence or reason to believe in physically impossible things like limbs regrowing, I'm humble enough to kind of throw up my hands and admit I don't know how it all works.
You can compare the modern physical explanation for the history of evolution, nature, and the cosmos to the history of Christianity (and Islam)'s supposedly divinely inspired claims.
2000 years later we're still not any closer to knowing why there's something rather than nothing
You can observe the structural, geographical, and political influences on the evolution of metaphysical claims and 'divinely inspired' doctrine.
Great point! I used to as an atheist, and still do, find it a compelling argument that for example it would be extremely odd if everyone in indonesia believed dinosaurs died by meteor while everyone in pakistan believe they died from climate change and everyone in thailand believed it was something else. But this is one that faithful people are probably even quicker to acknowledge than atheists: "yeah, human beings fuck things up, what else is new," essentially. Or another example, there are 100 different translations and different scriptures left in and out etc - very convincing to me as an atheist that it had to all be bullshit. Faithful people just study all the different things and say "ah there people go screwing things up again"
You can compare those to the natural history of things like physics, chemistry, biology.
I'm not gonna throw the whole baby out with the bathwater, but I don't really trust a lot of that stuff right now. Again not meaning molecules or gravity or anything like that.
What would a prayer-effect-on-survival RCT find?
This is a good example of my answer to the last question: I don't care because I don't trust it. Googling 'study on does prayer work' pulls up literally a million results and we know we could find plenty both for and against. I also know I've prayed for a loved one to get better and they did for seemingly no reason. And as long as you're not overdoing it, it can't hurt.
Are the divine inspirations claimed by members of other christian sects or Islam fake, even though they're roughly as passionate as those of the members of your sect?
I'm not a member of any sect, in keeping with my general 'don't trust things just because someone says so' goal, but answering your question in the spirit in which it was asked, I feel comfortable saying the more recent stuff like Islam and LDS are not as believable as the older stuff, and that some beliefs in general are more plausible than others (Scientology comes to mind)
Hawaii98
1yr ago
Quite happily yes! Although there's the added convenient coincidence that Christianity is the only truly global religion thanks to the roman empire and colonialism
Hawaii98
1yr ago
Actually existing fascism and communism are fundamentally the same in nature and only differ in rhetoric.
This doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny if for no other reason than actually existing fascism supported religion while communism dismantled it
Hawaii98
1yr ago
How do you solve it without the revolution?
If your family line can get together mid six figures of money in investments and assets and sit on it for 1.5 generations without anyone buying penis compensation trucks or boats or developing a gambling addiction or fentanyl addition; you can just be fucking set. (Said in the tone of a joke, but actually a big ask according to the facts.)
You already answered your own question: don't self-sabotage and you can just be fucking set. Maybe the question you're asking is how to solve people self-sabotaging
Hawaii98
1yr ago
I have no idea how you get from that conclusion to “Yeshua Ben Nazareth, a 1st-century Galilean carpenter and mystic, was the literal incarnation of those spiritual forces, and therefore it is very important that I analyze his teachings and model my own life after those teachings to the best of my ability.”
A lot of people a lot smarter than me have written libraries full of books on this exact topic, but I'll give my best shot at a short answer. The story has verisimilitude. Maybe not every detail, but taken as a whole.
There is a whole world of other possible religions to believe in - including any of the various extant strains of Judaism, if you’re so convinced that the Jewish people specifically have some particular connection with, or part in, this spiritual realm!
I do plenty of this, I just call it the Old Testament. And in terms of 'all religions are equally true - that is to say - equally false' it's just not very compelling to me because it means declaring myself to be more clever than virtually every single one of my ancestors for more than a thousand years. If Christianity is just a stupid hoax, then I have to reject my entire cultural history as stupid and my entire ancestry as a bunch of suckers. This was a source of consternation for me actually as an atheist who liked the West
Hawaii98
1yr ago
(also directed to /u/fcfromscc) perhaps I could've been more clear - yes Jesus was actually seriously telling that guy to give up his worldly possessions and follow Him. He was calling the rich guy's bluff that he was leading a spotless moral life. Obviously rich guy loved his money more than he loved Jesus.
The joke came afterward, after the fella was retreating in shame from being called out, and it was directed at the disciples at the expense of the rich guy. It's a hyperbolic put down, like 'this fucking guy - it'd be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.' Imagining a camel trying to get through the eye of a needle is inherently humorous.
Regardless, it is not a salvation issue, unless you happen to be a rich person who believes He meant all rich people were barred lol Then you might be in trouble
Hawaii98
1yr ago
That seems like the least charitable interpretation possible of me bringing up the reality that Jesus said more than one thing about rich people.
Hawaii98
1yr ago
I’m happy to admit there’s been nothing in my life that defied the observable laws of the universe to suggest the existence of any divinity. That is, if we exclude physically-possible-but-miraculous ‘everyone in that car should have been dead’ type of things, yeah I completely see your point.
But I’ve come around to thinking it is decidedly more likely that some unobservable spiritual forces exist and that Jews somehow play an important role, than it is that they’ve been doing their thing all this time because of literacy and nepotism. It’s not all just one big coincidence.
Hawaii98
1yr ago
Other way around. It's only the one in ten thousand who's currently exploiting the rest who will be worse off under communism; without them everyone else will be either around where they already are or better off.
This does not pass muster; communism does not suggest that only one in ten thousand people are exploitative. One in ten is closer to the truth but a compelling argument could be made for even more.
Hawaii98
1yr ago
Puyi is a fair counterexample, thanks for bringing him up. He'd be interesting to learn more about sometime
Hawaii98
1yr ago
Perfectly fair point given how I organized the sentence; it should have been:
Namely, being born in any way with unequal (and from communism's perspective, unearned) advantage, such as being more intelligent or more attractive.
In this case the Tsar's 'unearned' advantage obviously being his circumstances of royal birth rather than his dashing good looks
Hawaii98
1yr ago
Okay, but there are tons of examples of Jesus telling those same people that he is God incarnate, that eternal salvation is only possible through following him and taking seriously his commandments and proclamations.
All true
Given this, don’t you think that if he really had been God incarnate and really was intent on leading his followers to salvation, he would have, I dunno, been a bit more responsible about speaking clearly and not making muddled and seemingly-contradictory statements?
This is an excellent question. The short answer is yes, the longer answer is not only is this common for basically everyone to think today, Christian or otherwise, but that it was common when Jesus was walking around doing His thing. Bugged the shit out of people, especially all his friends, that he wouldn't just give a straight answer.
But the even longer answer is that He actually did both, and he explained why he usually spoke in parables. He did sometimes give straight answers (in fact in the example that started this conversation about the rich guy and the camel thing, Jesus answered his questions about what to do). And one of the last things he did (at supper) was to just lay it out plain: "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another" (John 13:34)
As far as why he wasn't usually more clear about everything, it was so "they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven." (Mark 4:12) "They" being "us" in that sentence, as in, he didn't want to make it too easy for us or we'd just go along and our 'belief' wouldn't have much if any value.
Remember that for thousands of years and many generations God tried the whole "talking man in the sky" thing - often explicitly telling people "do not do that or I will smite you" and they'd fuckin do it anyway every single time! Speaking clearly had, historically, limited value in teaching things or getting people to think about them. I'll say again that we are (now) called to use our minds to think through and discern what's actually true (Romans 12:2) and for me, this sequence (God tried just telling people -> didn't work -> Jesus tried asking us to think for ourselves instead) tracks.
Joking around and making statements which seem to be literal imprecations about the correct way to live - with, again, the stakes having previously been established as whether or not you will receive eternal salvation, or suffer eternally - but which are actually jokes, or flippant statements, or intentional obfuscations… this seems much more like the behavior of a normal mortal human man, a charismatic but narcissistic cult leader with both the standard human failings and additionally the failure modes particular to that specific personality type.
Yeah that's a perfectly fair point, but that's Jesus for ya. He could be snippy (called his best friend Satan when he got upset at the thought of him dying lol Matthew 16:23). He had a temper ("I come not to bring peace..." Matthew 10:34). He could be jealous (“Anyone who loves their father/mother/son/daughter more than me is not worthy of me" Matthew 10:37). He got nervous (Luke 22:44). He got sad ("Jesus wept." John 11:35). He loved his friends (John 15:13). He loved his mama (John 19:25). He was both human and divine.
One of the universe's greatest mysteries, maybe the greatest, because Christ already existed at the moment of creation (Let us make man in our image, after our likeness Genesis 1:26)
Hawaii98
1yr ago
You and I know that but others might not, it'd be more cool if people didn't make baseless assertions, but so it goes
Hawaii98
1yr ago
Do you understand how, to somebody who is not a Christian and who is not invested in believing in the most favorable possible interpretation of your faith, this just seems like extra-special pleading?
Sure, I understand completely. I used to be a fairly militant atheist and used to sometimes bring up the camel quip myself.
That said, I'm not interested in 'the most favorable possible interpretation' of the scriptures, I'm interested in using my mind to test and discern what interpretation is most pleasing to God (Romans 12:2).
Surely there are a great many things which Jesus is recorded has having said which you consider deeply profound insights and statements of Jesus’ - and, by extension, God’s - true beliefs.
Funny enough, not really. The first time I sat down and really read the gospels, most of the stuff was kind of nod along, "yeah that makes sense," but there's no earth-shattering revelations on the surface level. You have to study for those insights.
Why, then, should we take seriously your contention that this particular statement - one which just happens to present an extremely inconvenient dilemma for your other non-religious philosophical and material commitments if taken literally and seriously - is just obviously a joke and Jesus didn’t really mean it, unlike all the other stuff he said that you agree with?
This is the question I just answered, tho. You're never going to understand the gestalt of a man/God's philosophy from isolating a single sentence. You have to look at all the parts in conjunction to get a sense of the whole. In this case, Jesus spoke more than once about rich people and getting into heaven. Yes, he did say the camel thing. He also told Zacchaeus - another rich guy - that he was going to heaven. Therefore, since it is impossible for a camel to go through the eye of the needle, but demonstrably possible for a rich guy (Zacchaeus) to get into heaven, Jesus was obviously not being literal or completely serious when he said the camel thing.
And again let's remember the context in which he said it: He had just called out some rich poser. The guy was skulking away with his tail between his legs. "Then Jesus said to his disciples" aka he turned away from the crowd to make an aside to his buddies (Matthew 19:23). Sometimes when people say things to their friends that are not completely serious, it is called a joke.
Finally let's look at the disciple's response: "The disciples were astounded. “Then who in the world can be saved?” they asked." Clearly they did not get the joke. But Jesus lets them off the hook, "look[ing] at them intently and say[ing], "Humanly speaking, it is impossible. But with God everything is possible.” Clarifying that 1) He was not being literal about the camel thing 2) rich people can indeed go to heaven 3) He had a playful sense of humor.
RFK Jr announced this morning that he was leaving the democratic party and would continue his campaign as an independent.
I've spent a bit of time reading through articles and hot takes, and the overarching theme seems to be some variation of:
No real democrat would ever vote for him
He's more popular with Trump people anyway
This changes nothing, or maybe even hurts Trump
Taking as a given that Trump will be the GOP nominee as long as he is still alive - and therefore given the inescapable enemy-of-my-enemy dynamic of (Biden vs Kennedy) vs Trump up until this morning's announcement - some might consider this a fairly baffling take. Because it seems self-evident that democrats are less likely to approve of the guy who's mussing up their candidate's hair than the 'other party' would be, especially when that guy doesn't hold and has never held a public position. For me personally, this reaction makes more sense when read as a coping mechanism for what is the latest in a series of fairly not-great developments for the Biden campaign.
But more interestingly, this reaction completely dismisses the possibility that the election may have just changed quite fundamentally. Perhaps Kennedy will quickly fade into obscurity like most other third-party candidates do (anyone remember Lawrence Lessig?), but perhaps he'll be more like one of these guys. Joe Biden and Donald Trump's approval ratings are both hovering around 40% which suggests at least 20% of the electorate open to an alternative. Kennedy is also (relatively) young, spry, healthy, handsome, a household name (kind of), has a beautiful family, and independently wealthy. And the voice thing doesn't take all that long to get used to. This independent campaign could have legs
But even more interestingly, on the heels of Cornel West's announcement that he was ditching the green party to run as an independent, and with the open-secret that No Labels is planning to put up their own independent candidate, there is a chance for this to be an extremely unusual election. With Joe Biden and Donald Trump both unusually unpopular, there is a (admittedly very small) chance for this thing to blow wide open if Kennedy, West, No Labels, Green, and Libertarian all siphon off just a few voters each.
Now, again, this is all extremely unlikely to happen (if for no other reason than ballot access deadlines are all rapidly approaching), but the conditions are there for this to be one of those 'historical realignment' elections. If we stipulate there's a phenomena where voters don't support people they think have no chance, and that I'm about to make up these numbers and they have no probative value, let's imagine just for fun a poll comes out in the Spring that looks something like:
Biden 38
Trump 37
Kennedy 11
No Labels 5
Libertarian 3
West 2
Green 2
That's almost a horse race. It's a few bad bounces for the big guys away from the shape of a European-style election with multiple viable parties. And with some voters as disaffected as they are, maybe 'almost' is enough for some of them to rethink who does and doesn't have a chance. After all, if it's Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or This Guy...why not 'This Guy'? Just a thought.
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