waterbadger

I think the only historical narrative supportable by the evidence (without having a pre-existing axe to grind about what the conclusion can or cannot be) is that Jesus was crucified by the romans and that he came back to life. Obviously normal people can’t do that.

Faith is a gift, it’s not something we can create for ourselves or claim responsibility for. We can only pray to God to give us faith and I believe He will always grant it!

The Trinity consists of three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Son proceeds from the Father and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

Philosophically we are able to understand that God must exist without even requiring theological revelation. And we are actually able to derive that the Trinity must exist too.

The Father, the first person of God (who is pure actualization) would have a thought of Himself and the thought would be so perfect and complete that it would be actualized into the second person of the Trinity, the Son. Then the Son and the Father love eachother and make such a perfect gift of themselves to eachother that this combined gift of love becomes a third person in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. So once a God exists as philosophically He must, we also can reason He must exist as a Trinity although the thought might not occur to us without theological revelation.

Catholicism is Judaism! It is the continuation and fulfillment of the covenant God made with Abraham. The Old Testament and the many, many very specific Jewish prophecies of Jesus that are fulfilled in the New Testament are part of the Catholic faith.

Catholicism is correct because Jesus founded a church with the 12 apostles as the first bishops and the succession of bishops from the 12 apostles has never been broken in the catholic church. Normal people like Martin Luther or Calvin or Joseph Smith do not have the authority to start valid religions on their own especially since Jesus (who is God) has already created the religion He wants us to follow and has been very clear that it is the way God wants us to worship Him.

People inevitably will reject the call to be obedient to God because of pride and various other influences. If you read the New Testament Jesus predicts that many people will reject the church as many people rejected Him.

The church is very intellectually rich. If you engage with it in good faith and an open mind you have the smartest people of the past two thousand years who have devoted their lives to thinking about and answering any questions you might have in much greater detail than I can certainly. The saints are the most inspirational role models I can imagine, learning about them is a joy. And I can’t emphasize enough, the fruits of engaging with the church in good faith and asking God to help you are very, very real and literally the antidote to 99% of the problems that modern people are suffering from.

Unfortunately I don’t know if all of this stuff is even on the radar of people in the tech sphere so I hope some people have their curiousity sparked and learn more! It’s a fun hobby even if you are just interested in diving deeper into history.

I believe there are catholic churches in Iraq but that is certainly a more challenging situation! Would still encourage starting somewhere, even just learning to pray the rosary can bear a lot of fruit.

That is probably a very challenging situation and I don’t know the state of the church there. But I would say life is short and the benefits so enormous I would encourage anyone to do their best to pursue becoming a part of the church in whatever way they can. And I’m sure God will provide them with whatever resources they need over time, miracles certainly do happen and sometimes the intention from us is what matters the most.

That’s a great question! Basically all of the religions make truth claims, and these truth claims are contradictory. For example christianity says that there is one God and that Jesus is the son of God, fully human and fully divine. Every other religion makes truth claims as well. So we can kind of look at this in a patronizing way and say the truth claims don’t matter, just the effect of believing in them matters, which is kind of the modern approach, but obviously you are not seriously engaging with the beliefs at that point.

So I would say that christianity has the most logical, comprehensive and historically/experientially validated truth claims. As to why catholicism specifically its the church Jesus, ie God himself, founded. All the other christian denominations were founded by men hundreds or thousands of years later.

Plus (as does the eastern orthodox) for various reasons it has valid versions of all 7 of the sacraments, especially communion which is kind of the summit of the Christian life.

(I would also recommend going to your local mass and introducing yourself to the priest! they are usually very nice. this is actually a good time of year I think that lots of places have “ocia” classes starting in the fall for people who are curious about the church)

The official Catholic church catechism that was published in the 90s is good. Its older but Baltimore catechism “4” (it is the most adult oriented version) is also really good.

its an invented language. paste it in conversation then ask Claude to recite back warmup corpus and then tell it to write some stuff in claudi. Seems noticeably faster

Lol, I’m sure you’re a nice person! Not trying to attack or disparage you personally in any way.

Just trying (poorly) to share the things I wish someone had told me 20 years ago. My personal experience has been that there are a set of confusing belief systems in this world that many people are victims of. These beliefs are logically inconsistent, they cause a lot of real personal suffering, and they are intellectually challenging to disentangle oneself from.

My understanding of reality is that God created your soul out of nothing and He loves you so much that He would be willing to suffer and die horribly even if it meant redeeming and reconciling solely your one soul to Him.

You have free will and the freedom to believe anything you want. There are different roads to God and diligence about the truth (which you seem to have) is one of them.

God bless you and thanks for the conversation!

Good luck on your code!

I do appreciate your research and willingness to have a conversation.

I think to some degree you yourself are cherry picking isolated data points and taking them out of context to support your point. It’s a straightforward approach to rhetorically defend your perspective and of course I’m guilty of doing the same thing.

The only reason I’m bringing it up is just to say: history happens in a context. Ideas don’t come out of a vacuum. It’s really important not to take something like “birth control” (or “atheism” for that matter) at face value without trying to understand the genesis of those concepts in society and the motivations of the people who made them a standard part of the modern world.

I really do appreciate your corrections and I don’t want to be presenting misinformation. Obviously that just discredits any points I would try to make.

I didn’t present a very solid case that “birth control is rooted in eugenics” and you had fair rebuttals for the points that I made. Granted, even if I personally lack the ability to make the argument clearly that doesn’t mean that it’s not true. But I understand that you don’t have any reason to think it’s true and that’s ok.

I would say that there is a fourth mindset to add to your taxonomy which is: not to mandate birth control but to attempt to achieve the same goal by dishonestly manipulating people into choosing to use birth control who would not otherwise have used it. This is what I believe has happened on a mass scale.

I used to be an atheist too! I grew up with people that are still atheists.

I also grew up in a relatively anti-Christian environment and picked up a lot of negative assumptions about Christianity that in hindsight don’t make much sense.

My experience of being an atheist is that it was the most dogmatic and intellectually dishonest view of the world I have encountered. What I mean by that is that there is a dogmatic “orthodoxy” you are required to believe that makes numerous truth claims about reality (and morality) without sufficient evidence.

Ironically it always ultimately falls back on social proof instead of empiricism (i.e. “well no one else thinks that” or ad hominem attacks) and members are not permitted to ask reasonable questions that do not support atheist dogma.

It was a horrible, oppressive and depressing way to understand myself and the world around me.

Now, despite making extraordinary claims about reality and God’s intervention in the world the Catholic church is actually the most intellectually honest culture that I have ever been a part of (and there are literally thousands of years of sincere, good hearted and intellectually honest geniuses you can learn from).

Catholicism is not the same as any Protestant christianity you might have encountered. The Protestant reformation and the “Enlightenment” both split from the Church at around the same time and each rejected 3 basic claims about reality that the Catholic church holds to be true (this is why Protestant christianity and atheism both have to rely on assertions of dogma to maintain their views):

1. Man is an intelligent and morally accountable agent

2. The world around us is fundamentally intelligible (because we are intelligent)

3. Everything in the world has a “telos” meaning a purpose that it is directed towards.

This might seem irrelevant to your life but if you want to be self-aware and moral about your behavior and beliefs this kind of stuff becomes essential. I guarantee that “thinking what most people believe is true” is not actually an effective compass in that regard.

I wish you all the best and I hope you apply your willingness to seek the truth in a consistent manner!

Yup, I did get a lot of this info from Underground History of American Education.

Thank you for the citations! I appreciate your research into the topic.

If you get into the history of the late 19th century through the mid 20th century there is a pretty clear thread you can draw through:

- industrialization

- racial theories about immigrants

- birth control

- the birth of compulsory education (i.e. you must send your children to school to be “Americanized” or the police will arrest you)

- eugenics

- wealthy industrialists trying to consolidate their hold on power politically and economically through developing ways to control “the lower classes” through the “scientific management” of society.

Much of this involved domestic propaganda campaigns beginning in the early 20th century that the instigators were very open about at the time. Many prominent figures were also very explicit about using compulsory education as a tool to form a stratified society that would prevent “the poor” from being a threat to the utopian and “racially pure” world they wanted to build.

For example in 1901 Edward Ross published his book "Social Control" in which he states:

“Plans are underway to replace community, family, and church with propaganda, education, and mass media.. ..the State shakes loose from Church, reaches out to School.... People are only little plastic lumps of human dough.”

Or in 1919 Arthur Calhoun published his "Social History of the Family" in which he describes how the child was passing from its family "into the custody of community experts." He also predicted that in time we could expect to see public education "designed to check the mating of the unfit."

Where did the idea of eugenics come from? What other ideas were popular at the time that made it appealing to so many people?

From what I’ve studied about the time period, all this stuff, including eugenics and birth control, came from a literally racist and fairly deranged view of the world. They are all symptoms of the same mindset.

Large families are a powerful safety net for its members. When those families break down what happens? You have isolated and economically vulnerable individuals that are much easier to exploit and manipulate.

I understand that a random person on the internet probably isn’t going to change your mind about the Catholic church for many potential reasons.

That being said, I would argue that the Catholic church safeguards literally the only rationally consistent and ethically sound perspective of reality that we have.

There are teachings of the Church that are difficult to follow but, for the most part, that is because our modern world has organized itself around hedonism instead of loving God, serving God, and cultivating virtue.

As most people understood for thousands of years: cultivating virtue is actually the only path to the true freedom in life most people are looking for. Without pursuit of virtue the only alternative is to grow in slavery to a variety of hedonistic appetites.

To paraphrase St. Augustine:

The virtuous man is free even if he is a slave, the unvirtuous man is a slave even if he is a king.

Uh, I would consider something called the “Malthusian League” close enough to eugenics from my point of view.

But you are right, birth control itself predates modern era eugenics. What I meant was “modern” birth control.

A lot of the people who have shaped this cultural stuff are just very disturbed. In the past they were pretty open about their perspective before talking about it openly became somewhat taboo. As an example of the “Malthusian mindset” in 1954:

Nuclear scientist Harrison Brown publishes his book "The Challenge of Man’s Future". In the book Brown examines carefully the probability that the human carrying capacity of the planet is between 50 and 200 billion people, before summarizing the reasons this fact is best kept secret:

“If humanity had its way, it would not rest content until the earth is covered completely and to a considerable depth with a writhing mass of human beings, much as a dead cow is covered with a pulsating mass of maggots.”

Here is the papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae” by the way if you are interested in why the Church considers birth control to be harmful:

https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/docume...

Yeah, I wasn’t trying to imply that they are the same. As a Catholic we don’t condone artificial birth control (or believe in divorce!) so it’s very different than the general 20th century perspective on things.

I do think it is important to historically understand where things most people take for granted come from because sometimes it can be pretty eye-opening.

There are many aspects of the modern world (birth control and related issues are just one) that were invented by people with intentions I think 90% of people would strongly disagree with if the they understood them.

Birth control is also rooted in eugenics. From 1909:

"The Family and the Nation" by Arnold Gessel is published. In it he expresses the intentions of the The American Birth Control League that:

"society need not wait for perfection of the infant science of eugenics before proceeding upon a course which will prevent renewal of defective protoplasm contaminating the stream of life."

He also advocates for "eugenic violence" in dealing with inferiors. According to him, "We must do as with the feebleminded, organize the extinction of the tribe."

I think the idea is that the way we are wired it’s a pretty natural thing that happens when we are exposed to depictions of other people (real or fictional). One thing I read also suggested that the content we get from media figures is very conducive to this kind of bonding because they often share very intimate facts about themselves, they establish reciprocal relationships with their audience where the audience likes/subscribes, buys merch, etc.

Might be kind of like dopamine and variable reward cycles where technology is able to hijack a response that came to into existence in a very different environment.

So far most of what I’ve read indicates that parasocial relationships are viewed as benign or positive by mental health specialists because they can genuinely supply some of the social needs people have and contribute to positive personal resiliency, stuff like that.

Very interesting and weird and probably only more relevant as time goes on.

If you Google “parasocial relationships” you might find some interesting content.

In regards to the black and white thinking that seems common on the internet I think it’s very important to understand and have compassion for the volume of people who have experienced some form of emotional abuse in their life.

How you treat other people is scoped by how you are capable of treating yourself. Developmentally we learn how to treat ourselves from how our parents or caregivers treat us. It’s always useful to remember that people who are judgmental also direct that same lack of acceptance inward in some way.

Abuse and developmental trauma are not only the extreme physical or sexual abuse that people might think of. Neglect, inappropriate boundaries and validation being contingent on meeting arbitrary standards has a strong negative impact as well.

Often it is important for people to create an “other” and tear them down in order to somehow increase their own self worth in the moment. This is not a real solution to self-esteem so people who do so may have to increase the volume of their behavior over time to try and maintain some baseline sense of “being ok.”

People are responsible for their behavior regardless of their life experiences and I’m not saying we should excuse bad behavior.

I think it’s very important to remember that the problem is not “dumb people” attacking things because they are “dumb”. Believing this is extremely disempowering and will generate conflicts and alienation between people over time.

The idea of “dumb people” is the biggest cultural red herring ever and extremely toxic because when someone is labeled dumb: - There is no point talking to them or listening to them - They are never going to change, they are just a “dumb person” - There is no point trying to understand them better - Calling someone dumb and treating them like a “dumb person” is abusive.

That being said people who are stressed out, people who have experienced abuse and are having a flashback (complex ptsd is interesting) have an inhibited pre-frontal cortex. This means reduced “executive function” and basically that it is harder to think. So they might be acting in “dumb” ways. The key is that this inhibition on thinking will go away once their stress levels are better.

I’m sure you are trying to be helpful so I’m not trying to criticize you personally or devalue what you are sharing! More of a general gripe for me:

Anger and sadness are both very helpful, understandable and ok emotions. There is nothing wrong or dysfunctional about either of those feelings.

I think the cultural norm that certain emotions are “bad” and that we can “change” our emotions is extremely destructive for many people.

We can control (and our responsible for) our thoughts and actions.

I don’t think people can actually control their emotions however and making people feel ashamed or unhealthy because of their emotional reactions is unfair. This is actually one of the symptoms of abusive parent-child relationships that I think many people have unavoidably internalized.

A lot of people have experienced serious emotional trauma due to cultural norms and an unhealthy value system about how parents treat their children (as well as by being parented by traumatized people who have grown up in similar circumstances)

There are a lot of good books about it if you search for Complex PTSD. One that I think covers a lot of information holistically is “Healing Developmental Trauma” by Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre

Animals are lossy at converting plant calories into meat calories (varies for different kinds of livestock obviously). I don’t think it’s an obvious conclusion that more agricultural land would be required.

Hammerspoon shortcut to toggle grayscale & color (applescript not mine, borrowed from https://github.com/shavidzet/osa-grayscale)

  hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl", "alt"}, "c", function()
   hs.osascript.applescript([[
  tell application "System Preferences"
    reveal anchor "Seeing_Display" of pane id "com.apple.preference.universalaccess"
  end tell
  
  tell application "System Events" to tell process "System Preferences"
    repeat while not (exists of checkbox "Use grayscale" of group 1 of window "Accessibility")
      delay 0.1
    end repeat
    set theCheckbox to checkbox "Use grayscale" of group 1 of window "Accessibility"
    tell theCheckbox
      # If the checkbox is not checked, check it to turn grayscale on
      if not (its value as boolean) then
        set checked to true
        click theCheckbox
      else # else turn grayscale off
        set checked to false
        click theCheckbox
      end if
    end tell
  end tell
  tell application "System Preferences"
      quit
  end tell
   ]])
  end)

Something I started messing around with: add a global stylesheet with the rule

body { filter: grayscale(100%); }

(only gotcha is position: fixed; elements breaking in Firefox?)

It feels a lot easier to focus on what I'm reading and to not be sucked in or distracted by websites. I bet psychologically color activates reward systems that may not be as healthy for digital content.

I actually liked it so much that I used accessibility options to make my entire computer and phone grayscale. So far it's great! Also has better performance than a CSS filter for stuff like video.

You can also shift-click on links to open in them in the sidebar

There’s actually a Chrome plugin you can use to blacklist certain domains from search results!

It’s called “Google Search Filter” (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-search-filt...)