Comments on: Goddamned

By: Bill

Bill — Sun, 23 Nov 2014 04:22:06 +0000

My religion is: 1. Respect Gnon; 2. Get right with time.

By: l0b0t

l0b0t — Sun, 23 Nov 2014 02:16:25 +0000

If I understand it correctly (admittedly my knowledge of the cult of Joe Smith is gleaned from an undergrad perusal of Book Of Mormon, many many viewings of Big Love, and the nice missionary lads who rent a house in my neighborhood), Mormonism builds upon and somewhat alters Abrahamic monotheism. The beauty, to me, of Hubbard’s long-con is that he was being fairly original and creative in his narrative; a modern myth for a modern people.

By: VXXC

VXXC — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 19:25:42 +0000

“To “synthesize a God out of thin air” is an ultimately absurd temptation to be determinedly resisted.”

Well done Doctor Land. Well Done.

Our Old Gods are Christian, Catholic, Orthodox. They’ll quite do. We need to replace the staff, who are only caretakers after all. And they’ve failed as no men have failed in History. Decent men in their positions used to kill themselves well into our Christian era or they marched to the scaffold if that was available.

It’s only in our modern, post-Christian era that accountability has fallen out of fashion.

Gentlemen the last 50 years have been fashion, fads of a fallen generation unfit to lead. They’ve been encouraged and abetted in media, Finance and academia in this to the plunder and general ruin to the profit of shall we say a chosen few. <=who aren't the problem, they're just being themselves off the leash.

Now these men and women are dying anyway, and if it happens faster as consequences of their choices and failures all to the better. New leaders will rise, including of Catholicism. I can quite remember Pope John Paul II going to Poland and the Polish Politburo trembled. Literally their hands were shaking when the met him.

It’s human to mistake the now for eternal, it’s particularly acute in the present day. We, the now and the present are not the eternal, nor are we the successors. We have work to do, and it’s been analyzed quite enough. No amount of analysis or fabulist planning gets us out of that work.

We should indeed have children. We shouldn’t leave our mess for them. We quite know what needs doing.

By: admin

admin — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 17:01:56 +0000

If a misreading, I can assure you it’s entirely unintentional. You seem to be equating the recognition of something bigger than ourselves with getting “down on our knees”. That strikes me as ludicrous. Are you down on your knees before the scale of the universe? Just because we’re pitiably stupid apes, doesn’t mean we have to get pointlessly abject about it.

Gnon means begging is useless. Might as well throw away the knee-pads for good.

By: Different T

Different T — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 16:57:06 +0000

Intentional misreading?

Simplified sentence with the missed apostrophe…

Could it be the expression of pseudo-intellectuals’ desperate attempt to create “deus ex machina” and allow themselves to finally get back on their knees with a good conscience?

By: admin

admin — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 16:45:00 +0000

Getting down on your knees before Gnon is entirely pointless to all concerned. Or maybe you think it’s worth begging Natural Selection to stop being so mean?

By: Different T

Different T — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 15:59:13 +0000

What is NRx’s obsession with Gnon and AI?

In simple terms, could it be the expression of pseudo-intellectuals (who consider subjugation to another human as beneath them, yet are “clearly too intelligent” to believe in a “flying-spaghetti monster”) desperate attempt to create “deus ex machina” (with data, lots of lots of precious data) and allow themselves to finally get back on their knees with a good conscience?

All the more comical when admin finds “the indications of an Occidental desire for enslavement or destruction by Islam” “hideously plausible.”

By: Artxell Knaphni

Artxell Knaphni — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 15:17:56 +0000

Islam being “occidental” or “Western” is due to cultural geography. If you wish to deepen “obstinacy” into psychological theories of narcissism, that could be productive, but it doesn’t alter geographic emergence.
Apotheosis, in it itself, is not necessarily narcissistic at all: it all depends on the kind of god that is produced.

By: John

John — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 12:35:49 +0000

”A thousand years from now, they will be saying Christianity burnt itself out while Buddhism endured.”

2000 years and still going.

By: Peter A. Taylor

Peter A. Taylor — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 04:49:59 +0000

I would say that it is possible to exploit the subconscious in a rational manner, but that one has to distinguish between being “rational” and having adequate analysis tools. Designing a good religion is going to require a great deal of trial and error.

“In God we trust. All others, show me your test data.” — aerospace engineer’s saying

“Everyone believes a test except the test engineer. No one believes an analysis except the analyst.”
— Pedro Chou

A short homily on “Epistemology for Engineers”:
http://home.earthlink.net/~peter.a.taylor/ccg-notes.htm#epistemology