- Joined
- May 9, 2017
Calvinists are not NPCs.
Calvinism is the result of long, rigorous theological reflection that still somehow manages to come to the exact opposite of the truth.
Are American Evangelicals NPC's?
- Thread starter Delaware 14
- Start date
-
Want to keep track of this thread?
Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
Create account
Calvinism is the result of long, rigorous theological reflection that still somehow manages to come to the exact opposite of the truth.
Ughubughughughughughghlug
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 14, 2019
38 Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said:
2 “Who is this that obscures my plans
with words without knowledge?
3 Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
7 while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels[a] shouted for joy?
8 “Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,
9 when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,
10 when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,
11 when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?
12 “Have you ever given orders to the morning,
or shown the dawn its place,
13 that it might take the earth by the edges
and shake the wicked out of it?
14 The earth takes shape like clay under a seal;
its features stand out like those of a garment.
15 The wicked are denied their light,
and their upraised arm is broken.
16 “Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
17 Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
18 Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this.
19 “What is the way to the abode of light?
And where does darkness reside?
20 Can you take them to their places?
Do you know the paths to their dwellings?
21 Surely you know, for you were already born!
You have lived so many years!
22 “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow
or seen the storehouses of the hail,
23 which I reserve for times of trouble,
for days of war and battle?
24 What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed,
or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth?
25 Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain,
and a path for the thunderstorm,
26 to water a land where no one lives,
an uninhabited desert,
27 to satisfy a desolate wasteland
and make it sprout with grass?
28 Does the rain have a father?
Who fathers the drops of dew?
29 From whose womb comes the ice?
Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens
30 when the waters become hard as stone,
when the surface of the deep is frozen?
31 “Can you bind the chains[b] of the Pleiades?
Can you loosen Orion’s belt?
32 Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons[c]
or lead out the Bear[d] with its cubs?
33 Do you know the laws of the heavens?
Can you set up God’s[e] dominion over the earth?
34 “Can you raise your voice to the clouds
and cover yourself with a flood of water?
35 Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?
Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?
36 Who gives the ibis wisdom[f]
or gives the rooster understanding?[g]
37 Who has the wisdom to count the clouds?
Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens
38 when the dust becomes hard
and the clods of earth stick together?
39 “Do you hunt the prey for the lioness
and satisfy the hunger of the lions
40 when they crouch in their dens
or lie in wait in a thicket?
41 Who provides food for the raven
when its young cry out to God
and wander about for lack of food?
39 “Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?
Do you watch when the doe bears her fawn?
2 Do you count the months till they bear?
Do you know the time they give birth?
3 They crouch down and bring forth their young;
their labor pains are ended.
4 Their young thrive and grow strong in the wilds;
they leave and do not return.
5 “Who let the wild donkey go free?
Who untied its ropes?
6 I gave it the wasteland as its home,
the salt flats as its habitat.
7 It laughs at the commotion in the town;
it does not hear a driver’s shout.
8 It ranges the hills for its pasture
and searches for any green thing.
9 “Will the wild ox consent to serve you?
Will it stay by your manger at night?
10 Can you hold it to the furrow with a harness?
Will it till the valleys behind you?
11 Will you rely on it for its great strength?
Will you leave your heavy work to it?
12 Can you trust it to haul in your grain
and bring it to your threshing floor?
13 “The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully,
though they cannot compare
with the wings and feathers of the stork.
14 She lays her eggs on the ground
and lets them warm in the sand,
15 unmindful that a foot may crush them,
that some wild animal may trample them.
16 She treats her young harshly, as if they were not hers;
she cares not that her labor was in vain,
17 for God did not endow her with wisdom
or give her a share of good sense.
18 Yet when she spreads her feathers to run,
she laughs at horse and rider.
19 “Do you give the horse its strength
or clothe its neck with a flowing mane?
20 Do you make it leap like a locust,
striking terror with its proud snorting?
21 It paws fiercely, rejoicing in its strength,
and charges into the fray.
22 It laughs at fear, afraid of nothing;
it does not shy away from the sword.
23 The quiver rattles against its side,
along with the flashing spear and lance.
24 In frenzied excitement it eats up the ground;
it cannot stand still when the trumpet sounds.
25 At the blast of the trumpet it snorts, ‘Aha!’
It catches the scent of battle from afar,
the shout of commanders and the battle cry.
26 “Does the hawk take flight by your wisdom
and spread its wings toward the south?
27 Does the eagle soar at your command
and build its nest on high?
28 It dwells on a cliff and stays there at night;
a rocky crag is its stronghold.
29 From there it looks for food;
its eyes detect it from afar.
30 Its young ones feast on blood,
and where the slain are, there it is.”
40 The Lord said to Job:
2 “Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him?
Let him who accuses God answer him!”
3 Then Job answered the Lord:
4 “I am unworthy—how can I reply to you?
I put my hand over my mouth.
5 I spoke once, but I have no answer—
twice, but I will say no more.”
6 Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm:
7 “Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.
8 “Would you discredit my justice?
Would you condemn me to justify yourself?
9 Do you have an arm like God’s,
and can your voice thunder like his?
10 Then adorn yourself with glory and splendor,
and clothe yourself in honor and majesty.
11 Unleash the fury of your wrath,
look at all who are proud and bring them low,
12 look at all who are proud and humble them,
crush the wicked where they stand.
13 Bury them all in the dust together;
shroud their faces in the grave.
14 Then I myself will admit to you
that your own right hand can save you.
15 “Look at Behemoth,
which I made along with you
and which feeds on grass like an ox.
16 What strength it has in its loins,
what power in the muscles of its belly!
17 Its tail sways like a cedar;
the sinews of its thighs are close-knit.
18 Its bones are tubes of bronze,
its limbs like rods of iron.
19 It ranks first among the works of God,
yet its Maker can approach it with his sword.
20 The hills bring it their produce,
and all the wild animals play nearby.
21 Under the lotus plants it lies,
hidden among the reeds in the marsh.
22 The lotuses conceal it in their shadow;
the poplars by the stream surround it.
23 A raging river does not alarm it;
it is secure, though the Jordan should surge against its mouth.
24 Can anyone capture it by the eyes,
or trap it and pierce its nose?
41 [a]“Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook
or tie down its tongue with a rope?
2 Can you put a cord through its nose
or pierce its jaw with a hook?
3 Will it keep begging you for mercy?
Will it speak to you with gentle words?
4 Will it make an agreement with you
for you to take it as your slave for life?
5 Can you make a pet of it like a bird
or put it on a leash for the young women in your house?
6 Will traders barter for it?
Will they divide it up among the merchants?
7 Can you fill its hide with harpoons
or its head with fishing spears?
8 If you lay a hand on it,
you will remember the struggle and never do it again!
9 Any hope of subduing it is false;
the mere sight of it is overpowering.
10 No one is fierce enough to rouse it.
Who then is able to stand against me?
11 Who has a claim against me that I must pay?
Everything under heaven belongs to me.
12 “I will not fail to speak of Leviathan’s limbs,
its strength and its graceful form.
13 Who can strip off its outer coat?
Who can penetrate its double coat of armor[b]?
14 Who dares open the doors of its mouth,
ringed about with fearsome teeth?
15 Its back has[c] rows of shields
tightly sealed together;
16 each is so close to the next
that no air can pass between.
17 They are joined fast to one another;
they cling together and cannot be parted.
18 Its snorting throws out flashes of light;
its eyes are like the rays of dawn.
19 Flames stream from its mouth;
sparks of fire shoot out.
20 Smoke pours from its nostrils
as from a boiling pot over burning reeds.
21 Its breath sets coals ablaze,
and flames dart from its mouth.
22 Strength resides in its neck;
dismay goes before it.
23 The folds of its flesh are tightly joined;
they are firm and immovable.
24 Its chest is hard as rock,
hard as a lower millstone.
25 When it rises up, the mighty are terrified;
they retreat before its thrashing.
26 The sword that reaches it has no effect,
nor does the spear or the dart or the javelin.
27 Iron it treats like straw
and bronze like rotten wood.
28 Arrows do not make it flee;
slingstones are like chaff to it.
29 A club seems to it but a piece of straw;
it laughs at the rattling of the lance.
30 Its undersides are jagged potsherds,
leaving a trail in the mud like a threshing sledge.
31 It makes the depths churn like a boiling caldron
and stirs up the sea like a pot of ointment.
32 It leaves a glistening wake behind it;
one would think the deep had white hair.
33 Nothing on earth is its equal—
a creature without fear.
34 It looks down on all that are haughty;
it is king over all that are proud.”
42 Then Job replied to the Lord:
2 “I know that you can do all things;
no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
3 You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know.
4 “You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.’
5 My ears had heard of you
but now my eyes have seen you.
6 Therefore I despise myself
and repent in dust and ashes.”
I started to understand Job due to my own connection to economics, something I've studied many years. (Don't ask me about the real economy, I don't pay attention to it, it's theory.) We have this famous quote from Hayek, guy that took the idea of "spontaneous order" from the social sciences - the notion that under a system of rules/natural laws a chaotic environment will sort itself into some kind of purposeful order - and applied it to human society. "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." There's two sort of cruxes to what he was saying. One is just that we tend to be retarded and bad at thinking of second order, much less than third, fourth, etc. effects, and so the world often surprises us with these unintended consequences that frustrate our goals. The other is that we lack the volume of information necessary. Everybody has a little bit of knowledge, personal in nature, that guides them through their world, and collectively, through our interactions, all of this knowledge gets aggregated up. But no one person, or even subset of the population, knows the full truth and so their attempts to steer human society are going to fail.
It was in the aftermath of the North Carolina hurricane that I finally grasped - in that light - what Job is really about. I regularly confront this theme of mankind lacking wisdom/knowledge to manage its own affairs. So imagine then that people are so bad at knowing for themselves what the price of an orange should be or how much steel to make, yet they think they understand how the entire natural world should operate. Where the rain falls, when the grass grows, who falls ill. We are barely capable of managing our own lives, are utterly incapable of managing ecologies except for in the most blunt and disruptive ways, and cannot even begin to imagine how we would go about building a world from scratch.
For you to stand and argue with God would require you to know at least as much as God, that is, to BE God. The kind of all-encompassing, all-knowing all-powerful entity that can generate reality from its own thoughts is not something you can ever understand except in tiny glimpses, and its thought processes will always be inscrutable to you because its scope is beyond human imagination.
Why did that child have to die, or that hurricane destroy a large chunk of backcountry? I have no fucking clue, but my inability to explain it doesn't mean there isn't an explanation. Every single thing that happens in this world was put in motion by prior events and will touch on - through causality, through the butterfly effect - every other thing that happens, from the beginning to the end. Without that child's death there could be a train derailment across the sea. Without that hurricane there could be an asteroid strike. I don't know. You don't know.
That family is probably dying inside right now. What makes them different is an intuitive understanding of what took me a very long time to figure out. That's wisdom and that's maturity.
I wonder if this isn't an urban-rural thing where poasters from cities see more ugly-ass modern churches or strip mall churches and poasters from the countryside see the million random countryside churches with steeples and names like "1st 2nd Church of God Almighty of Jerusalems Signs Following Holiness" bla bla bla that are right down the street from "2nd 1st Church of Jesus" and both have a population of 10 people each because they split over a disagreement about how many belly buttons Adam had.
2 “Who is this that obscures my plans
with words without knowledge?
3 Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
7 while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels[a] shouted for joy?
8 “Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,
9 when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,
10 when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,
11 when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?
12 “Have you ever given orders to the morning,
or shown the dawn its place,
13 that it might take the earth by the edges
and shake the wicked out of it?
14 The earth takes shape like clay under a seal;
its features stand out like those of a garment.
15 The wicked are denied their light,
and their upraised arm is broken.
16 “Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
17 Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
18 Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this.
19 “What is the way to the abode of light?
And where does darkness reside?
20 Can you take them to their places?
Do you know the paths to their dwellings?
21 Surely you know, for you were already born!
You have lived so many years!
22 “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow
or seen the storehouses of the hail,
23 which I reserve for times of trouble,
for days of war and battle?
24 What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed,
or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth?
25 Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain,
and a path for the thunderstorm,
26 to water a land where no one lives,
an uninhabited desert,
27 to satisfy a desolate wasteland
and make it sprout with grass?
28 Does the rain have a father?
Who fathers the drops of dew?
29 From whose womb comes the ice?
Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens
30 when the waters become hard as stone,
when the surface of the deep is frozen?
31 “Can you bind the chains[b] of the Pleiades?
Can you loosen Orion’s belt?
32 Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons[c]
or lead out the Bear[d] with its cubs?
33 Do you know the laws of the heavens?
Can you set up God’s[e] dominion over the earth?
34 “Can you raise your voice to the clouds
and cover yourself with a flood of water?
35 Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?
Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?
36 Who gives the ibis wisdom[f]
or gives the rooster understanding?[g]
37 Who has the wisdom to count the clouds?
Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens
38 when the dust becomes hard
and the clods of earth stick together?
39 “Do you hunt the prey for the lioness
and satisfy the hunger of the lions
40 when they crouch in their dens
or lie in wait in a thicket?
41 Who provides food for the raven
when its young cry out to God
and wander about for lack of food?
39 “Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?
Do you watch when the doe bears her fawn?
2 Do you count the months till they bear?
Do you know the time they give birth?
3 They crouch down and bring forth their young;
their labor pains are ended.
4 Their young thrive and grow strong in the wilds;
they leave and do not return.
5 “Who let the wild donkey go free?
Who untied its ropes?
6 I gave it the wasteland as its home,
the salt flats as its habitat.
7 It laughs at the commotion in the town;
it does not hear a driver’s shout.
8 It ranges the hills for its pasture
and searches for any green thing.
9 “Will the wild ox consent to serve you?
Will it stay by your manger at night?
10 Can you hold it to the furrow with a harness?
Will it till the valleys behind you?
11 Will you rely on it for its great strength?
Will you leave your heavy work to it?
12 Can you trust it to haul in your grain
and bring it to your threshing floor?
13 “The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully,
though they cannot compare
with the wings and feathers of the stork.
14 She lays her eggs on the ground
and lets them warm in the sand,
15 unmindful that a foot may crush them,
that some wild animal may trample them.
16 She treats her young harshly, as if they were not hers;
she cares not that her labor was in vain,
17 for God did not endow her with wisdom
or give her a share of good sense.
18 Yet when she spreads her feathers to run,
she laughs at horse and rider.
19 “Do you give the horse its strength
or clothe its neck with a flowing mane?
20 Do you make it leap like a locust,
striking terror with its proud snorting?
21 It paws fiercely, rejoicing in its strength,
and charges into the fray.
22 It laughs at fear, afraid of nothing;
it does not shy away from the sword.
23 The quiver rattles against its side,
along with the flashing spear and lance.
24 In frenzied excitement it eats up the ground;
it cannot stand still when the trumpet sounds.
25 At the blast of the trumpet it snorts, ‘Aha!’
It catches the scent of battle from afar,
the shout of commanders and the battle cry.
26 “Does the hawk take flight by your wisdom
and spread its wings toward the south?
27 Does the eagle soar at your command
and build its nest on high?
28 It dwells on a cliff and stays there at night;
a rocky crag is its stronghold.
29 From there it looks for food;
its eyes detect it from afar.
30 Its young ones feast on blood,
and where the slain are, there it is.”
40 The Lord said to Job:
2 “Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him?
Let him who accuses God answer him!”
3 Then Job answered the Lord:
4 “I am unworthy—how can I reply to you?
I put my hand over my mouth.
5 I spoke once, but I have no answer—
twice, but I will say no more.”
6 Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm:
7 “Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.
8 “Would you discredit my justice?
Would you condemn me to justify yourself?
9 Do you have an arm like God’s,
and can your voice thunder like his?
10 Then adorn yourself with glory and splendor,
and clothe yourself in honor and majesty.
11 Unleash the fury of your wrath,
look at all who are proud and bring them low,
12 look at all who are proud and humble them,
crush the wicked where they stand.
13 Bury them all in the dust together;
shroud their faces in the grave.
14 Then I myself will admit to you
that your own right hand can save you.
15 “Look at Behemoth,
which I made along with you
and which feeds on grass like an ox.
16 What strength it has in its loins,
what power in the muscles of its belly!
17 Its tail sways like a cedar;
the sinews of its thighs are close-knit.
18 Its bones are tubes of bronze,
its limbs like rods of iron.
19 It ranks first among the works of God,
yet its Maker can approach it with his sword.
20 The hills bring it their produce,
and all the wild animals play nearby.
21 Under the lotus plants it lies,
hidden among the reeds in the marsh.
22 The lotuses conceal it in their shadow;
the poplars by the stream surround it.
23 A raging river does not alarm it;
it is secure, though the Jordan should surge against its mouth.
24 Can anyone capture it by the eyes,
or trap it and pierce its nose?
41 [a]“Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook
or tie down its tongue with a rope?
2 Can you put a cord through its nose
or pierce its jaw with a hook?
3 Will it keep begging you for mercy?
Will it speak to you with gentle words?
4 Will it make an agreement with you
for you to take it as your slave for life?
5 Can you make a pet of it like a bird
or put it on a leash for the young women in your house?
6 Will traders barter for it?
Will they divide it up among the merchants?
7 Can you fill its hide with harpoons
or its head with fishing spears?
8 If you lay a hand on it,
you will remember the struggle and never do it again!
9 Any hope of subduing it is false;
the mere sight of it is overpowering.
10 No one is fierce enough to rouse it.
Who then is able to stand against me?
11 Who has a claim against me that I must pay?
Everything under heaven belongs to me.
12 “I will not fail to speak of Leviathan’s limbs,
its strength and its graceful form.
13 Who can strip off its outer coat?
Who can penetrate its double coat of armor[b]?
14 Who dares open the doors of its mouth,
ringed about with fearsome teeth?
15 Its back has[c] rows of shields
tightly sealed together;
16 each is so close to the next
that no air can pass between.
17 They are joined fast to one another;
they cling together and cannot be parted.
18 Its snorting throws out flashes of light;
its eyes are like the rays of dawn.
19 Flames stream from its mouth;
sparks of fire shoot out.
20 Smoke pours from its nostrils
as from a boiling pot over burning reeds.
21 Its breath sets coals ablaze,
and flames dart from its mouth.
22 Strength resides in its neck;
dismay goes before it.
23 The folds of its flesh are tightly joined;
they are firm and immovable.
24 Its chest is hard as rock,
hard as a lower millstone.
25 When it rises up, the mighty are terrified;
they retreat before its thrashing.
26 The sword that reaches it has no effect,
nor does the spear or the dart or the javelin.
27 Iron it treats like straw
and bronze like rotten wood.
28 Arrows do not make it flee;
slingstones are like chaff to it.
29 A club seems to it but a piece of straw;
it laughs at the rattling of the lance.
30 Its undersides are jagged potsherds,
leaving a trail in the mud like a threshing sledge.
31 It makes the depths churn like a boiling caldron
and stirs up the sea like a pot of ointment.
32 It leaves a glistening wake behind it;
one would think the deep had white hair.
33 Nothing on earth is its equal—
a creature without fear.
34 It looks down on all that are haughty;
it is king over all that are proud.”
42 Then Job replied to the Lord:
2 “I know that you can do all things;
no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
3 You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know.
4 “You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.’
5 My ears had heard of you
but now my eyes have seen you.
6 Therefore I despise myself
and repent in dust and ashes.”
I started to understand Job due to my own connection to economics, something I've studied many years. (Don't ask me about the real economy, I don't pay attention to it, it's theory.) We have this famous quote from Hayek, guy that took the idea of "spontaneous order" from the social sciences - the notion that under a system of rules/natural laws a chaotic environment will sort itself into some kind of purposeful order - and applied it to human society. "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." There's two sort of cruxes to what he was saying. One is just that we tend to be retarded and bad at thinking of second order, much less than third, fourth, etc. effects, and so the world often surprises us with these unintended consequences that frustrate our goals. The other is that we lack the volume of information necessary. Everybody has a little bit of knowledge, personal in nature, that guides them through their world, and collectively, through our interactions, all of this knowledge gets aggregated up. But no one person, or even subset of the population, knows the full truth and so their attempts to steer human society are going to fail.
It was in the aftermath of the North Carolina hurricane that I finally grasped - in that light - what Job is really about. I regularly confront this theme of mankind lacking wisdom/knowledge to manage its own affairs. So imagine then that people are so bad at knowing for themselves what the price of an orange should be or how much steel to make, yet they think they understand how the entire natural world should operate. Where the rain falls, when the grass grows, who falls ill. We are barely capable of managing our own lives, are utterly incapable of managing ecologies except for in the most blunt and disruptive ways, and cannot even begin to imagine how we would go about building a world from scratch.
For you to stand and argue with God would require you to know at least as much as God, that is, to BE God. The kind of all-encompassing, all-knowing all-powerful entity that can generate reality from its own thoughts is not something you can ever understand except in tiny glimpses, and its thought processes will always be inscrutable to you because its scope is beyond human imagination.
Why did that child have to die, or that hurricane destroy a large chunk of backcountry? I have no fucking clue, but my inability to explain it doesn't mean there isn't an explanation. Every single thing that happens in this world was put in motion by prior events and will touch on - through causality, through the butterfly effect - every other thing that happens, from the beginning to the end. Without that child's death there could be a train derailment across the sea. Without that hurricane there could be an asteroid strike. I don't know. You don't know.
That family is probably dying inside right now. What makes them different is an intuitive understanding of what took me a very long time to figure out. That's wisdom and that's maturity.
This is retarded. There are tons of Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal etc. churches all over the place that are built in the traditional architectural style. Recognizably churches.
I wonder if this isn't an urban-rural thing where poasters from cities see more ugly-ass modern churches or strip mall churches and poasters from the countryside see the million random countryside churches with steeples and names like "1st 2nd Church of God Almighty of Jerusalems Signs Following Holiness" bla bla bla that are right down the street from "2nd 1st Church of Jesus" and both have a population of 10 people each because they split over a disagreement about how many belly buttons Adam had.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2022
When boomers are doing it, yes. The common denominator is boomers.
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2023
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2017
Jehovah's Witnesses are loony too.
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2023
The "corporate building churches" are indeed associated with evangelical (especially nondenominational) Protestantism, the adherents of which emphasize how "God cares more about the community than the building", but are usually in suburban areas as far as I can tell. (Source: grew up attending one.) The ones in urban and rural areas are generally more recognizably churches.
There are also "basement churches" like they have in countries where Christians are actively persecuted, like in China.
There are also "basement churches" like they have in countries where Christians are actively persecuted, like in China.
Delaware 14
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 18, 2024
I don't even know how I missed Jay Ho's.
There is something extremely anti-social in the US and I can't tell if it comes from religious beliefs, a symptom of suburbanism, or if they came from the same root like American individuality.
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2024
So there is no free will?
- Joined
- May 24, 2023
this is true but also Christianity is still the least retarded of the major world religions
Ughubughughughughughghlug
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 14, 2019
Depends on what you mean by free will, and taking an atheist perspective on it doesn't solve this either.
First point, if nature is entirely mechanistic - everything has physical causes, including our decisions being determined in our minds by our brains which are organic computers - then you go back to that idea that everything is basically predetermined by the set of laws nature operates under and the initial conditions. If you can completely solve the set of laws AND find the initial conditions, boom, you can reconstruct everything that's going to happen exactly as it happens.
What adding on an all-knowing God - and I'm assuming you had that in mind, since we're talking about Christianity - then that God chooses the initial conditions and the laws of nature, and knows all of the outcomes from every possible combination of the two, so yeah, God knows exactly what will happen, chooses BECAUSE of what will happen, and so if that doesn't sit well with your sense of free will then you've got a problem.
On the other hand, if you take an idealist view of the world, then God may know everything that will happen but he doesn't necessarily directly cause it because the creation of his is capable of doing more than just reacting to stimuli.
But does your decisions being reactive to stimuli mean you don't actually have free will? I don't know that it does in any useful or meaningful sense. So the meat machine that is you reacted to the world in X way. Does that mean you don't have any moral responsibility for it just because we can theoretically piece together a step-by-step chain of events? I don't see that that follows.
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2024
I mean if god decided to make me a scoundrel then thats kinda on god, no?
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2018
No, they’re minor questgivers if you’re following the Lawful Evil path. They’re a minor enemy faction otherwise. My loadout for dealing with them usually includes Earplugs in the main accessory slot and some kind of scattergun for my main.
Ughubughughughughughghlug
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 14, 2019
Well, one classic argument (it has a formal name, I don't remember it) is that this may be the best of all possible worlds. That seems absurd, but again, we understand very little about even simple matters. I don't have a clean answer to it myself. I think one thing you find is that no materialist truly believes they're actually a meat machine; our own behavior contradicts that. If free will is an illusion, it's an illusion that's necessary for us to function at all and fools 100%. On some level it seems more plausible to me to go with the common sense, folk answer (of course it's real) than the clean, logical philosophical answer that it isn't.
I'm not a materialist anyhow. I had an idea, don't know if anybody else has ever had the same idea (usually when I have a half-baked theory it turned out some giga-brained Chad figured it out 300 years ago, gave it a name and did it a million times better than me). But I see the nature of reality as being like this: everything is consciousness. All just our minds. So far this is just solipsism. But in order for it to actually mean anything for two or more beings to be conscious together (common sense says I'm not unique), that implies they must be connected in some way. I also cannot buy the idea of nonexistence. Consciousness only makes sense as a flow (something that was revealed to me after general anesthesia) and while one can imagine it flowing from one end, or having a portion of time cut out as a skip, I don't think it makes sense for it to be a flow that ceases at both ends. Consciousness is existence and existence can't not exist? So it could perhaps loop on itself, or infinitely recess into the past as well as move forward into the future, but the "common sense" answer to me is this: our consciousness has always existed back to the beginning, will always exist (not withstanding the skips), and is interconnected with one another through some means.
The way I came to visualize this was to imagine consciousness as like a tree. There is a trunk, a flow of consciousness that is at the root of everything. Then off of that buds the branches - that being other entities that are conscious - and off of those bud smaller branches, leaves and so on. All are constantly growing (flowing forwards), and we may call that whole tree God. It's a panentheistic God: every thing that has an internal life, that feels qualia, is a part of God, but there is also a piece of God (the trunk) that is a part of no thing subordinate to it. We are a part of God, we are not God ourselves. Who were you before you were conceived? You were your mother (Swedenborgianism has a similar idea, but it has it be the father), who was her mother, and so on back to God. I am very fond of the Burning Bush as a visual symbol. Nina Paley was a smartass Leftist Jew, but she had a wonderful cartoon that I found very striking, and the Presbyterian Church in Ireland uses it as their symbol.
What causes consciousness? That's not actually essential for my model, but for me, the answer is life, and I define life loosely but I think elegantly as self-perpetuating order. There are things in nature called spontaneous order, emergent order, self-organization (in the natural sciences). The laws of nature acting upon chaotic matter to assemble into something that is orderly and, oftentimes, almost purposeful, as though it was (I'd argue that is) designed by some kind of higher power. We see this with crystals (a mineral sorts itself into a repeating pattern), we see it with ecologies, we see it in an imperfect form with the way celestial bodies organize themselves into systems (systems that often trace out complex geometric patterns as they move about), we see it in living creatures themselves (homeostasis) and we see it in human society through social behaviors like the way languages form or the way markets coordinate economic planning.
So if one accepts God as the creator of the laws of nature (which is admittedly a more mechanistic way of viewing it), then this sort of self-sorting has a great deal of significance.
But not everything that is ordered - spontaneously or by a human hand - is really alive inside. Crystals, for example, grow, but there is no fire in them that makes them seek out more material to consume to grow themselves or (could be wrong) repair themselves when damaged. Same with the celestial bodies. Living things are different. They don't just order themselves, but they actually maintain an equilibrium, will try to return to that equilibrium, will purposefully engage with their environment to grow themselves and impose that same order on matter around them. They don't just passively come together but proactively shape their world.
So I take anything that has this property as living and anything that is living as conscious. I also don't see any problem with consciousness being nested, which I know some philosophers of mind also embrace. So my individual cells can be conscious just as I am, and human societies (of which I am a part) can be conscious too.
Now, where is there room for truth, or some sort of mechanistic science, within this framework? I find statistics to be a useful metaphor. In statistics we have this thing, linear regression, that basically says, IF we assume that this model is true, THEN you would reasonably assume that we're living in the likeliest of worlds, so the parameters we'll assume would be whatever parameters can predict this world with the greatest accuracy. We try to minimize "error." And of course there's a mathematical formula to do this. Well, I see the laws of nature as being similar. Imagine that there are all of these different possible sets of laws of nature and their parameters (constants). "Reality" is just the set of explanations that best reconcile what everybody's experiencing. Moreover, I believe that reality does likewise constrain what we are able to perceive as other conscious beings (humans, animals, plants, God) kind of mold our experience. So it is a worldview that allows for the possibility of the supernatural, of miracles and potentially even of slightly and gradually changing laws of nature, but in a very constrained of no importance to our day to day lives.
Finally, what is it all for? I think that the point of it is that we are created to essentially become godlike ourselves. Christianity calls this theosis. What makes people different from the rest of creation is not that we're conscious, but that we have an intellect that is capable of not just perceiving but of actually thinking about why. A dog or cat is very much alive inside, I think even more intensely than we are, but it lacks the intelligence to think abstractly, to ponder or judge, essentially to make moral judgments about the world it exists in or reflect on its own behavior. That's what the philosophers called reason, that's what the Bible refers to as the "knowledge of good and evil" as well as being "made in God's image." When a creature becomes too intelligent, it starts to think like God, able to design and not just exist... and yet it doesn't have that fullness of information necessary to actually behave with moral perfection, conform to this order of how things are meant to be. And the purpose of life is to train us to get to that point. If we didn't have free will we wouldn't be rational moral agents capable of developing ourselves morally, and if we're to have free will there has to be suffering as a potential consequence, leaving aside the moral development that suffering also helps along.
Why do we need to develop? Many possibilities. One is that God himself was essentially lonely. Imagine being the only entity in the universe that is actually truly alive in some deeper sense. You'd get very blue. Christians don't like this explanation, because they have some theological quibble that the idea of God having emotional needs means he wouldn't be perfect, but I don't know that I buy that. Another one I quite like is that it's essentially just God's "life cycle." The whole purpose of life is to re-produce, make more of itself, whether that means getting bigger or making copies or doing both, and that is what God is doing when his little buds and leaves suddenly become awake on a deeper level, not just awake with the senses but with intellect too. But they don't have - can't have - a full understanding. So they have to mature, through both guidance from him and struggle with the self, until they have achieved a state of perfection, a moral understanding that is perfectly in harmony with their creator. The corporeal life is to godliness what childhood is to adulthood. The point of it isn't to make you jump through a bunch of hoops and give you a buffet of pleasure as a reward, like the physical version of Heaven is often imagined as, which is just a pagan version of it to sell the idea easily. The point is to go out and struggle with yourself until you have been polished to the point that you could - in principle or (in Mormonism) in fact - go and do it yourself, like your parents raising you. In Earthly life, Aristotle called this ideal state of godlike moral perfection and wellbeing "eudaimonia." The Bible and modern psychology call it "flourishing." The Enlightenment called it "the pursuit of happiness."
I do think it is possible, in a way, for the identity of an individual to die even as the individual's conscious does not. I had to ask myself, what happens to the evil. I don't buy into reincarnation. I don't see what function a Hell would have. Then I realized, the consciousness could just loop back. You have a branch, it was a shitty branch, and it loops back into the trunk (God). If you laid it out on a graph, you'd see what i mean. There's this main stream of consciousness, there's a fork off of it, but then the fork rejoins. You could not say that any part of the evildoer (say, Charlie Manson) winds up in any later branch of the tree, because you can't trace it back to that fork; the separateness of it is what makes it Charlie Manson, and that is destroyed when the consciousness folds, seamlessly, back into that of God. It's a mercy, because it means there is no eternal separation (like Hell), but it is still a tragedy because it means that you lose what it means to be you.
The way I came to visualize this was to imagine consciousness as like a tree. There is a trunk, a flow of consciousness that is at the root of everything. Then off of that buds the branches - that being other entities that are conscious - and off of those bud smaller branches, leaves and so on. All are constantly growing (flowing forwards), and we may call that whole tree God. It's a panentheistic God: every thing that has an internal life, that feels qualia, is a part of God, but there is also a piece of God (the trunk) that is a part of no thing subordinate to it. We are a part of God, we are not God ourselves. Who were you before you were conceived? You were your mother (Swedenborgianism has a similar idea, but it has it be the father), who was her mother, and so on back to God. I am very fond of the Burning Bush as a visual symbol. Nina Paley was a smartass Leftist Jew, but she had a wonderful cartoon that I found very striking, and the Presbyterian Church in Ireland uses it as their symbol.
What causes consciousness? That's not actually essential for my model, but for me, the answer is life, and I define life loosely but I think elegantly as self-perpetuating order. There are things in nature called spontaneous order, emergent order, self-organization (in the natural sciences). The laws of nature acting upon chaotic matter to assemble into something that is orderly and, oftentimes, almost purposeful, as though it was (I'd argue that is) designed by some kind of higher power. We see this with crystals (a mineral sorts itself into a repeating pattern), we see it with ecologies, we see it in an imperfect form with the way celestial bodies organize themselves into systems (systems that often trace out complex geometric patterns as they move about), we see it in living creatures themselves (homeostasis) and we see it in human society through social behaviors like the way languages form or the way markets coordinate economic planning.
So if one accepts God as the creator of the laws of nature (which is admittedly a more mechanistic way of viewing it), then this sort of self-sorting has a great deal of significance.
But not everything that is ordered - spontaneously or by a human hand - is really alive inside. Crystals, for example, grow, but there is no fire in them that makes them seek out more material to consume to grow themselves or (could be wrong) repair themselves when damaged. Same with the celestial bodies. Living things are different. They don't just order themselves, but they actually maintain an equilibrium, will try to return to that equilibrium, will purposefully engage with their environment to grow themselves and impose that same order on matter around them. They don't just passively come together but proactively shape their world.
So I take anything that has this property as living and anything that is living as conscious. I also don't see any problem with consciousness being nested, which I know some philosophers of mind also embrace. So my individual cells can be conscious just as I am, and human societies (of which I am a part) can be conscious too.
Now, where is there room for truth, or some sort of mechanistic science, within this framework? I find statistics to be a useful metaphor. In statistics we have this thing, linear regression, that basically says, IF we assume that this model is true, THEN you would reasonably assume that we're living in the likeliest of worlds, so the parameters we'll assume would be whatever parameters can predict this world with the greatest accuracy. We try to minimize "error." And of course there's a mathematical formula to do this. Well, I see the laws of nature as being similar. Imagine that there are all of these different possible sets of laws of nature and their parameters (constants). "Reality" is just the set of explanations that best reconcile what everybody's experiencing. Moreover, I believe that reality does likewise constrain what we are able to perceive as other conscious beings (humans, animals, plants, God) kind of mold our experience. So it is a worldview that allows for the possibility of the supernatural, of miracles and potentially even of slightly and gradually changing laws of nature, but in a very constrained of no importance to our day to day lives.
Finally, what is it all for? I think that the point of it is that we are created to essentially become godlike ourselves. Christianity calls this theosis. What makes people different from the rest of creation is not that we're conscious, but that we have an intellect that is capable of not just perceiving but of actually thinking about why. A dog or cat is very much alive inside, I think even more intensely than we are, but it lacks the intelligence to think abstractly, to ponder or judge, essentially to make moral judgments about the world it exists in or reflect on its own behavior. That's what the philosophers called reason, that's what the Bible refers to as the "knowledge of good and evil" as well as being "made in God's image." When a creature becomes too intelligent, it starts to think like God, able to design and not just exist... and yet it doesn't have that fullness of information necessary to actually behave with moral perfection, conform to this order of how things are meant to be. And the purpose of life is to train us to get to that point. If we didn't have free will we wouldn't be rational moral agents capable of developing ourselves morally, and if we're to have free will there has to be suffering as a potential consequence, leaving aside the moral development that suffering also helps along.
Why do we need to develop? Many possibilities. One is that God himself was essentially lonely. Imagine being the only entity in the universe that is actually truly alive in some deeper sense. You'd get very blue. Christians don't like this explanation, because they have some theological quibble that the idea of God having emotional needs means he wouldn't be perfect, but I don't know that I buy that. Another one I quite like is that it's essentially just God's "life cycle." The whole purpose of life is to re-produce, make more of itself, whether that means getting bigger or making copies or doing both, and that is what God is doing when his little buds and leaves suddenly become awake on a deeper level, not just awake with the senses but with intellect too. But they don't have - can't have - a full understanding. So they have to mature, through both guidance from him and struggle with the self, until they have achieved a state of perfection, a moral understanding that is perfectly in harmony with their creator. The corporeal life is to godliness what childhood is to adulthood. The point of it isn't to make you jump through a bunch of hoops and give you a buffet of pleasure as a reward, like the physical version of Heaven is often imagined as, which is just a pagan version of it to sell the idea easily. The point is to go out and struggle with yourself until you have been polished to the point that you could - in principle or (in Mormonism) in fact - go and do it yourself, like your parents raising you. In Earthly life, Aristotle called this ideal state of godlike moral perfection and wellbeing "eudaimonia." The Bible and modern psychology call it "flourishing." The Enlightenment called it "the pursuit of happiness."
I do think it is possible, in a way, for the identity of an individual to die even as the individual's conscious does not. I had to ask myself, what happens to the evil. I don't buy into reincarnation. I don't see what function a Hell would have. Then I realized, the consciousness could just loop back. You have a branch, it was a shitty branch, and it loops back into the trunk (God). If you laid it out on a graph, you'd see what i mean. There's this main stream of consciousness, there's a fork off of it, but then the fork rejoins. You could not say that any part of the evildoer (say, Charlie Manson) winds up in any later branch of the tree, because you can't trace it back to that fork; the separateness of it is what makes it Charlie Manson, and that is destroyed when the consciousness folds, seamlessly, back into that of God. It's a mercy, because it means there is no eternal separation (like Hell), but it is still a tragedy because it means that you lose what it means to be you.
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2022
I knew this would be a magnet for cringe pro-Christianity atheists. I must be psychic.
A "journal"/ "news" site started in 2020 that is laser focused on covid vaccines, "peer-reviewed" by vaccine skeptic cultists, has a URL meant to sound like a real journal that was founded in 1980, everyone involved with it is an antivaxxer or JFK Jr cultist. Classic A&H bullshit!
A "journal"/ "news" site started in 2020 that is laser focused on covid vaccines, "peer-reviewed" by vaccine skeptic cultists, has a URL meant to sound like a real journal that was founded in 1980, everyone involved with it is an antivaxxer or JFK Jr cultist. Classic A&H bullshit!
grump
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 14, 2016
As far as I can tell there is nothing in the factual statements in the article that are contradicted by outside sources. And its not like the bigger sites are staying out of conveniently stating the story in a way to fit their agenda or editorializing either, since they're using this as an antiTrump plank.
Last edited: