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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25440 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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There's a difference between fixing a broken car and converting your car into a boat or vis versa. Fixing the car brings it closer to the Platonic ideal of what the car is supposed to be, converting it into a boat is something different.

I think Christians have a level of innate bioconservatism, Adam was directly made by God. You're not supposed to mess with God's vision, maleness or femaleness.

Adam was made directly by God. But his children were not. Obviously, claiming to know the will of God better than the Catholic church is hubris and heresey... But to me it seems obvious that the Nature of Man is to transform, evolve, create, adapt, and so on.

To create something that God needed to create you in order to create, is to act as his pen, His Glory. So why do we call the things that only Humans could have build Unnatural when they are clearly part of His design?

The Catholic argument, I believe, is that, given Free Will it is entirely possible to do things that are not explicitly part of his design. But I don't buy it. At least not in the context of humans engaging in self-creation. Even when I take Natural Law as an axiom, it only serves to make me intuit transformation and metamorphosis as being said nature.

Man's nature isn't to have legs, its to have legs until he grows great enough to Glorify god in greater ways. Why didn't God create man perfect to begin with? Because then Man would be God and God would have created nothing. It is the process of becoming itself that glorifies God. It is the realization of man that he needs to be more like God that proves God's relational greatness.

And... here I assume, is where the preacher throws me out for being some kind of weird Unitarian instead of a Catholic and also for giving long heretical speeches in Church.

The question is, without a solid goal of "perfection" you can't really meaningfully pursue it. One man cuts off his own leg because he believes that will make him more perfect, is that glorifying God through an act of self-creation? If your goal is merely to transform, then cutting off your own legs is as good a goal as growing five more of them. But if your goal is perfection, to get better and better, to "grow great enough to Glorify god in greater ways" then you need a fixed goal to be working towards. Chesterton put it well in Orthodoxy:

This, therefore, is our first requirement about the ideal towards which progress is directed; it must be fixed. Whistler used to make many rapid studies of a sitter; it did not matter if he tore up twenty portraits. But it would matter if he looked up twenty times, and each time saw a new person sitting placidly for his portrait. So it does not matter (comparatively speaking) how often humanity fails to imitate its ideal; for then all its old failures are fruitful. But it does frightfully matter how often humanity changes its ideal; for then all its old failures are fruitless. The question therefore becomes this: How can we keep the artist discontented with his pictures while preventing him from being vitally discontented with his art? How can we make a man always dissatisfied with his work, yet always satisfied with working? How can we make sure that the portrait painter will throw the portrait out of window instead of taking the natural and more human course of throwing the sitter out of window?

Disregarding pimp my ride, it’s hard to say the platonic ideal is male or female, right? Why would going from the one to the other violate that ideal, so long as you arrive at the right spot (theoretically)? We could claim the ideal is that of a man for a man, etc, but then we are back to disagreeing about the initial state.

To my non-catholic understanding, I’d be down with someone transitioning if it is to serve God. That’s a pretty damn high bar, but who knows.

it’s hard to say the platonic ideal is male or female

The distinction between male and female both does and doesn't exist at the same time.

You're not supposed to mess with God's vision, maleness or femaleness.

Sometimes the vision comes pre-messed-with. It's not like anyone actually knows what maleness or femaleness are anyway, and fewer still are able to come up with a complimentary picture. Rather humorously, it's usually the manlier women and womanlier men that have a better understanding of how the sexes are supposed to work together, but they're also the furthest away from the vision-as-written simply due to their nature.

Why would going from the one to the other violate that ideal, so long as you arrive at the right spot (theoretically)?

Because the Bible says gayness is bad, on its face in fact (implications for transsexuality follow from that). Uniquely, it's one of the things that are said to be bad but doesn't have self-evident negative effects (gay marriages [the ones that follow "the vision" except it's 2 dudes instead] are more stable than straight ones, apparently). So then, what's that mean (figurative, literal, or both and if so under which context?), how much should we care, and should our approach be more Proverbs 3:5 or 1 Corinthians 8 when it comes to the gays (and what forms of gayness should we accept)? It'd surely be nice if we figured it out before God decides to go full Sodom and Gomorrah on us.

before God decides to go full Sodom and Gomorrah on us.

If that is your concern, perhaps you ought to focus more on the prohibitions on feeding the homeless.

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