Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[thathopeyetlives]

Actually, what does Satan derive from the foolish alignment of Westboro Baptist Satanists?

(i.e. very un-Satanic satanists)?

[mitigatedchaos]

I’m not entirely sure what’s being asked here, but it sounds like it might be a good question.

[thathopeyetlives]

Does Satan get anything out of people who profess to like him and worship him but who actually act in a consistently un-Satanic way and display some of the virtues, which confound and attack him?

[mitigatedchaos]

That does actually sound like a good question.

(However, I cannot intuitively model existing in a world where Satan is real and focused on spreading anti-virtue.  It doesn’t really make sense to my brain on a deep emotional level, much like I can only understand other sexual orientations academically.)

Presumably, they are still Damned (which meets Satanic goals?) by Christian standards.  Indirectly, they would also weaken the association of the Great Adversary with evil and thus open up paths for conversion by those who would otherwise see flat evil and resist.

I will admit though that I’m enamored with the idea of evil creatures doing good (through either will or contract), and of using evil means to achieve good, and with fake things becoming (effectively) real.  Something inside me just finds such things cool or satisfying.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

If I might make a charitable interpretation of @sinesalvatorem Community posts, here…

Let’s suppose our goal is to get religious communities to tolerate LGBT people, maybe by becoming less religious or maybe by just being less fundamentalist about it.  (And this sort of thing isn’t just religious in origin.)

It makes sense to know just what it is we’re asking them to give up.

Religion actually is a social technology.  Coal is an energy technology.  That doesn’t mean soot is good for you.

If a non-religious or religious-but-tolerant community can be designed and instantiated, then exiting from previous non-tolerant religious communities has a much lower cost.  (Plus there is the issue of everything else society needs.)

[mailadreapta]

Progressive Christianity is a thing. It’s a thing that has existed for several centuries now, which is abundantly available in every city and most small towns in America. If a “religious-but-tolerant” Christianity were a viable option, you should be able to copy and spread the existing progressive churches to good effect. People can and do move from conservative churches to progressive churches if they find that their beliefs grow out of sync with the conservatives.

Of course, by now you’ve probably noticed that progressive Christianity is dramatically less successful than conservative Christianity. There’s probably a reason for that. You should find out what that reason is.

(And it’s not just Christianity. Reformed and Orthodox Judaism have approximately the same relationship. Progressive Islam is much younger than either of those, but I’d be shocked if it didn’t turn out the same way as the others.)

[mitigatedchaos]

Honestly, from what I can see, the supernatural stuff is part of the glue that holds it all together, and one of the memeplex’s components about it being true to the exclusion of all other worldviews.  You can weaken it a little, but if you weaken it too much, it risks falling apart.

Of course, I don’t believe in the supernatural elements, and many of them I find absurd.  (More deeply, I find the entire concept of eternal damnation deeply unethical.  …though, there are those who believe it’s only salvation or nothing, which has far fewer issues.)

And in many ways, religious tolerance is based on the implicit possibility that one’s religion could be wrong.

For me though, in my interactions with religion, it seems like it’s trying to hack my brain in ways not so different from Social Justice or Communism, so I intuitively resist.  Anything that involves an internal shutdown of mental defenses looks like that to me.  (This actually pisses off SJ and Communists more than religionists, at least in this country.)  On the other hand, there are men out there, criminals, who found their way back into society through religious conversion, and others who staved off suicide, so you won’t see me posting negatively about Christianity in the West that much.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

If I might make a charitable interpretation of @sinesalvatorem Community posts, here…

Let’s suppose our goal is to get religious communities to tolerate LGBT people, maybe by becoming less religious or maybe by just being less fundamentalist about it.  (And this sort of thing isn’t just religious in origin.)

It makes sense to know just what it is we’re asking them to give up.

Religion actually is a social technology.  Coal is an energy technology.  That doesn’t mean soot is good for you.

If a non-religious or religious-but-tolerant community can be designed and instantiated, then exiting from previous non-tolerant religious communities has a much lower cost.  (Plus there is the issue of everything else society needs.)

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[ranma-official]

@mitigatedchaos

There’s no logical proof that they can declaw all religions equally, or that the distribution of violence is the same at the tails of all otherwise-declawed religions, though.

Religions are declawed in a secular society naturally as long as no deliberate action (that ensues resistance) is taken. Christianity is very heavily fragmented and society in general has done a really good job declawing it. We are at a “you can’t even prove if God exists or not” level right now. That’s an absurd step down from the absolute majority of humanity’s history

[slartibartfastibast]

What if your religion expressly forbids secular government/society?

[ranma-official]

Gets declawed and settles down. Most religions are against any government ever overriding religious laws.

[slartibartfastibast]

How do you prevent reversion to non-secular society when you constantly import (and don’t police) extremely conservative people that have been cousin-marrying since classical antiquity? Do you know about clannishness vs. W.E.I.R.D.ness?

[isaacsapphire]

The allure of sexy secular people, particularly young women, is an extremely well established method of getting the second generation immigrants to defect from their culture.

[thathopeyetlives]

Well, the Gods of the Copybook Headings with monkhood and marriage return, I guess. 

I doubt that’s a long term solution. Eventually the sex and apostasy gets boring and then memory and hopes of marriage call one back, maybe to a better place than one was in at first. It happened to me. 

[mitigatedchaos]

#plz no declaw

You’re Christian.  Your religion’s central idea of martyrdom, as popularly understood, and brutally oversimplified, involves the government nailing some guy to a stick.

And in this sense, “declawed” refers primarily to religiously-motivated violence, though I suppose it also refers to virality, which is also a (longer-term) risk factor.

So as you might gather, it isn’t Christianity with its “render unto Caesar” and liberal democratic governments that I’m worried about.  Nor Buddhism, nor Hinduism…

Anyhow, I think some of the rampant sex culture will decline on its own even without religion, just from people noticing what they previously weren’t socially allowed to notice - most people do seem to emotionally bond from sex, so for most people it really isn’t just some fun casual activity to do with randoms, and also long-term accomplishment tends to build a higher baseline level of happiness than momentary hedonism.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Something To Live For

[sinesalvatorem]

Human psychology continues to be basically what I’d predict - while still being startling at the same time. Specifically, getting people to settle down in families is a shockingly good way to make them stop being dangerously antisocial:

It was the most elite unit we [ie: The Palestinian Liberation Organisation] had. The members were suicidal – not in the sense of religious terrorists who surrender their lives to ascend to heaven but in the sense that we could send them anywhere to do anything and they were prepared to lay down their lives to do it. No question. No hesitation. They were absolutely dedicated and absolutely ruthless.

“My host, who was one of Abu Iyad’s most trusted deputies, was charged with devising a solution. For months both men thought of various ways to solve the Black September problem, discussing and debating what they could possibly do, short of killing all these young men, to stop them from committing further acts of terror.

Finally they hit upon an idea. Why not simply marry them off? In other words, why not find a way to give these men – the most dedicated, competent, and implacable fighters in the entire PLO - a reason to live rather than to die? Having failed to come up with any viable alternatives, the two men put their plan in motion.“

“So approximately a hundred of these beautiful young women were brought to Beirut. There, in a sort of PLO version of a college mixer, boy met girl, boy fell in love with girl, boy would, it was hoped, marry girl. There was an additional incentive, designed to facilitate not just amorous connections but long-lasting relationships. The hundred or so Black Septemberists were told that if they married these women, they would be paid $3,000; given an apartment in Beirut with a gas stove, a refrigerator, and a television; and employed by the PLO in some nonviolent capacity. Any of these couples that had a baby within a year would be rewarded with an additional $5,000.

Both Abu Iyad and the future general worried that their scheme would never work. But, as the general recounted, without exception the Black Septemberists fell in love, got married, settled down, and in most cases started a family…the general explained, not one of them would agree to travel abroad, for fear of being arrested and losing all that they had – that is, being deprived of their wives and children. And so, my host told me, that is how we shut down Black September and eliminated terrorism. It is the only successful case that I know of.”

I’m a crazy romantic and even I didn’t expect that tying guys like these down with wives and kids would have such a radical civilising effect. I wonder if this has any implications for gangs or other violent pests?

[mitigatedchaos]

If that’s the case though, then polygyny is a bad thing unless you want large numbers of risk-tolerant men.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

“banning Muslim immigration will only increase terrorism!”

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such an outburst.

it’s literally “the terrorism will continue until immigration improves”

[mitigatedchaos]

Consider what it says about Muslims. It isn’t good. It only reinforces the Conservative viewpoint, much like some of the reaction to Charlie Hebdo did.

[andhishorse]

I’m not convinced that it says something about Muslims that similar circumstances wouldn’t say about other groups. (Having conveniently used the term “similar circumstances” in such a way that I’m not sure that similar circumstances exist for any other group, rendering my claim suspiciously difficult to disprove). It seems to just say that this course of action will have the effect of non-negligibly increasing the very small proportion of Muslims who think that All Americans Deserve to Die, on account of this being a course of action that will likely (and not with maximal inaccuracy) paint us as Bad People who Must Be Destroyed.

[mitigatedchaos]

What I mean is what it says about left-wing opinion of them. “Oh those poor Muslims, they’re so easy to rouse to violence. They can’t help it, so be nice to them!” It’s a form of special treatment that would not have been given to other religions, and it isn’t a form of respect.

But of course, the Left already doesn’t want real cultural diversity on this matter. They don’t want, for example, the Jizya. They want a watered-down version of the religion that is compatible with Western Secularism.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[wirehead-wannabe]

> Although the method’s success rate was about 3.5%, experts in the field are calling the study a “stunning achievement” that could potentially “eradicate infertility” if it can be applied in humans. The ability to make artificial eggs from any cell in the body could allow women who lack viable eggs or male-male couples to have genetic children of their own. “Reproductive age” may become obsolete.

Oh great, let’s just take the breaks off of the Quiverfull problem completely.

[ozymandias271]

I am not sure why you think this is a big issue?

In the short run: the set “has ten kids” selects really hard for smart, highly religious, nonconformist people who take ideas seriously. With the exception of the second thing, I’m not sure why anyone in this community would object. It doesn’t seem like desire-to-be-Quiverfull is genetic: the religions in which people have ten kids don’t seem to have particularly high retention rates, particularly given that they’re willing to e.g. not educate their children to get them to stay.

If you’re like “eventually the world will be full of people who have evolved to want lots of kids because the others don’t reproduce, and then overpopulation”, yes, but an allele reaching fixation takes long enough that I’d be surprised if we were still meat by the time it happened, and if we’re not meat this is irrelevant. And I’m honestly uncertain which way the sign of this particular technology goes: sure, very enthusiastic people could use it to have a twentieth kid, but women who don’t want kids that strongly and thus didn’t have a kid until they were fifty could also use it. 

[jack-rustier]

Worst case scenario: what will probably end up happening, if anything happens, is that you get a world where a million mutually exclusive cults try to outbreed each other. Which is to say, the world isn’t going to look very much different from this current version of it. The only difference is that everyone is able to have more kids without their own age becoming a factor.

Today’s meme magic phenomena will continue apace regardless of this technology being freely available or not.

[wirehead-wannabe]

I was focusing more on the genetic aspect of this + overpopulation in general rather than the memetic part, though I can see why people didn’t interpret it that way. Basically, I don’t want to live in a world crammed full of as many humans as possible. I want everyone to be able to have their own huge tract of land and live densely only when they prefer to.

[sinesalvatorem]

Solution here, it seems to me, is to buy your track of land while it’s plentiful and not let new people move in. Then you only have to fear eminent domain, but I think that getting the government to stop stealing people’s land is probably actually less of a hard problem than getting people to stop undoing infertility.

I find it just as likely that we’ll manage to convince everyone to accept forced-infertility-by-default after forty as that we’ll get everyone to accept forced-death-by-default after 80 once anti-aging is a thing. Besides, in both case, the worlds in which people actually manage to be banned from editing themselves are dystopian hellscapes anyway.

[mitigatedchaos]

That’s not a real solution.  The political will under such conditions would shift, and democracy means you’ll be eminent domain’d for sure, even if it were realistic for most non-millionaires to attempt this in the first place.

Life extension would actually help here, however, since it keeps non-baby-obsessed people around and politically relevant longer.  Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.

[sinesalvatorem]

Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.

Seen here: The single most horrify thing I have ever seen a transhumanist unironically recommend, out of a vast number of horrifying futury things.

[thathopeyetlives]

[Catholic screaming]

[mitigatedchaos]

If $Deity prohibits the use of birth control under Catholicism, then surely altering one’s genome to live past the normal maximum age of 120 years would be an even greater violation of the divine will?

I would expect the Catholic church to come out against human genetic augmentation, and thus life extension, even though I don’t expect them to come out against, for example, curing blindness.