Great so people are supposed to use ai to do job boards while HR uses ai to bin applications. What an amazing system. Fuck I love the future

I’ve been trying to sneak in other fonts to any oc I make. I’m definitely tired of the binary ALL CAPS or twitter screenshot

Thanks 😁

Fuck yeah I am. I’ve got a living playlist of lectures I can add this into, thank you!

Actually I see a yt video at the top of the page here, can I watch all the episodes there as an option?

Oh no. It turned him into anime

Lol what even is this?

Ooh you know I actually didn’t, I was just assuming he was being serious considering the non-secular time he existed in. But I didn’t exactly think he was talking about the results being literal eternal suffering or paradise either. In my misconception I had thought he was proposing to live as a functional faith practitioner and just reap the tangible benefits of that when you’re alive. So thanks for prompting me to actually look at it.

You already know I love youtube. I’ll get to that first before the books but probably not before the further Wikipedia articles I got recommended in this thread. Is it cool if I message you any thoughts she stirs up? I definitely appreciate people who can identify pro-social and useful facets of problematic ideologies.

Really? Maybe that’s how I got my misconception of it. My favorite thing about this thread is I’m getting a lot of stuff to reexamine, so this ones moving to the top of the list.

Dude, that would be so sick! I really love Monster Manuals! One of the Gnostic thought people I talked to recently actually showed me a video that was showcasing the different deities in a similar way, but as Tumblr art characters. Very entertaining.

I hadn’t considered that angle for our discussion here but that’s true. The biggest damage any Faith-based theology is doing to incentivising people to decouple from tangible reality. I won’t ever defend that, I just don’t know of a way it’s possible for anyone to widely convince people to stop doing it.

I’ll consider that last part. That seems like an idea I’ll have to examine for a bit. Thank you for engaging and for all the recommendations, Schipelblorp 🙂 Always a pleasure

Oh damn, this made me have to look up Pascal’s Wager in order to follow and that is NOT what I thought it was. And it’s not nearly as actionable as I was giving it credit for.

For sure, though. It’s not like Gnostic thought is terribly useful in a modern context. It’s just the joy of discovering old models of belief. Also they’re colorful. I mostly wanted to know if you have any favorite characters from it because most people who engage with that or pre-Christian cults tend to find a funny little guy that they latch onto.

There’s a couple people who I interacted with who have derived some personal viable uses from the Gnosticism, but it’s kind of way too specific to recommend widely. One was definitely engaging with that “world as a torture device” lense and admitted that these kind of ways of thinking lend themselves pretty greatly to paranoid disorders.

Alright this is going to be a bit of an indulgent bpersonal diatribe, but hear me out. Generally when I’m assessing the worth of religion I try to look at the cost/benefit of it existing, not really whether it’s factually true or politically just. Catholicism definitely full of lies and its atrocities are really the same as any monarchist structure and equally indefensible. Also as you say, craven.

But here’s what people within it at the very bottom are getting from the deal:

• an accountability system that puts physical personal cost on their choices
• a working historical account getting built onto and preserved as time goes on
• a system of quasi-electoral government that was a country at one time but now gets to act as a diplomatic power in the world

Just saying, those are the exact opposite of what Christianity takes from you as a person living within it

Agreed, though. That’s kind of one of the things I appreciate about Judaism, the pluralism and the de-emphasis on Faith. I’ve been dipping my toes tentatively into some Gnostic histories, and proto Christian stuff. I’ll look at the Gnostic Gospels next, then. Do you have a personal favorite little blorbo from cults of that period?

Sweeeet, I’ve been curious about this since my first assumption has always been that “Bros” just were doing Stoicism in its best possible interpretation. Maybe I’m too critical of it and not of them.

That’s valid and a pretty widely agreed on belief. I tend to make a few more concessions for Hebrew and Catholicism because they have controls and political structures for negating barbarism built in to their scriptures, even if those controls have failed in both past and recent history.

The difference with Christianity from those is you’re given leave by the text to engage selectively and do post-modern interpretations of what Jesus wants or the personal cost of not living up to his expectations. Like it’s not that he’s being ignored, it’s that his sacrifice canceled any price I have to pay for my actions in this life. You’re right, though. The person Christ was pretty different from the faith that inherited his name, they probably wouldn’t have had much to do with eachother if he had a choice in the matter. Mainly because he was a Jew and that’s not compatible with how Christians want to believe he was.

In the text it means any choice you make that sacrifices long term benefits for instant gratification. Nietzsche was way into promoting things that give you pleasure, just not at the cost of your health and prosperity

Obviously Hedonic Philosophy isn’t about that either but he wasn’t thinking of hedonism as a philosophy, he was describing a problem humans have with how we make choices

Ooh, I have some opinions about Christianity’s potential to be used by bad actors. Honestly I feel pretty similar about it as I do Nietzsche but more like the architecture for doing evil has always been latent in the ideology for as long as it has existed sperate from Judaic and Gnostic faith.

I definitely would like to hear more about how exactly Broicism diverges from Stoicism though, if you have the time. You’re the first person I’ve heard say that it’s different.

Yeah not so much that. It was kind of refreshing to read something where the author gives up on trying to preempt arguments against him early in the process of creating his work (exhausting, boring, and as time goes on inevitably futile).

I meant more that the prose is full of self-certain trueisms and has that superficiality to it. It doesn’t discount his points to me either, I’m often a vibes person myself. But it offloads a lot of the cognitive work of basically finishing his philosophy onto you as you’re reading it. I think that’s probably the deeper cause of most other problems people have with his philosophy, like how bad actors took and used it for nefarious shit. But, he was a lonely guy in a lot of pain who took to writing to manage it so that’s par for the course.

(my body is devoid of worldly power but I low-key agree because physically building personal meaning and protecting the wilderness trumps all)

Sweet. Reading Wikipedia has got me a little unsure on how to interpret him. I’ll check that out next. Stoicism is kind of a personal bugbear of mine but now regardless I really want to know the truth of this guy

Oh, okay. Well with that summary I’m at least interested in reading more and trying to see if I can parse the satire. Thanks for pointing me in that direction

Edit: Jesus this is like way obvious after you read how his career in state politics ended. But we named a dark triad psychological trait after him. That’s so dirty

Ooh. Very stigmatized ethos surrounding that one. Guess I need to find out what the heck happened there

Just quick short thoughts before I continue reading because I really thought these are immediately striking without further dissection:

Philosophy aside, the comment on LessWrong that said “Nietzsche is a great source of aphorisms, and may be able to trigger some Deep Thoughts in readers, but a lot of his writing seems more like a sort of performance art to me. At least on a superficial level, he’s much easier to read than Kant or Hegel, but that also means he does not even try to argue his point in a rigorous way”. Spot on, this is like the main barrier to his books. I see this as the first problem you’ll encounter before getting to how fascists twisted his words into justifications for doing fuck-all

Then, I REALLY like this Monthly Review article. This passage pointed out a perspective of the problem initially sounding like a misread about how “this is just doing barbarism but with extra steps” but actually pretty accurately describes how greater powers in the world will take almost anything we try to do and turn it into barbarism: The liberalization and deregulation of the most intimate sphere of the person will completely achieve the fetishism of the commodity. And the sole revolt which will from here on be permitted to the Nietzschean by power, when an irreducible part of his disarmed consciousness has, through misunderstanding, fomented some insurrection, will be total annihilation, bestiality towards the other animal which his masters will have brought into the neighbouring cage.

I still need to finish it and get to the Marxist critique but thank you for this

Ty! All the criticisms I’ve heard I’ve only really absorbed through cultural osmosis so I want to read some hard stuff