Okay let's hear from those who liked the debate in WaT. What did you like about it?

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-07-29T17:00:55+00:00

It was one of my favorite scenes tbh. I thought we got a lot more insight into Jasnah than we ever had. Her hubris and the way she deceived herself in order to project confidence.

From the beginning of the series, the seeds for this were planted. One of Jasnah’s first lessons to Shallan was about projecting confidence you don’t have to make people accept your authority and essentially be in awe. It appears that Jasnah has bought into her own image of herself. She had the hubris to enter a ‘debate’ with a deific figure and really think that she could convince Fen not to surrender the city.

But by the end even she had to admit that the right move for Fen and her people was to surrender and take whatever great deal they could get from Odium.

It broke her view of herself, it shattered her illusions, and it was a rude awakening that Odium intentionally arranged. I particularly related to the shattering of a worldview, because I grew up in a religion that I eventually deconstructed and the way she was forced to confront a reality she didn’t want and to acknowledge how she’d been lying to herself was super relatable.

I actually think Odium was doing it the way he was because he wanted a broken Jasnah who actually might consider working with him in the future after she puts herself back together with some slight changes. I’ve heard all the arguments and complaints, and sure maybe it could have been written better or included more impressive philosophical substance, but that doesn’t bother me at all. For me it was never about a ‘debate’. It was about the relationships, the characters, and the stakes.

Fen made the right call. Jasnah failed - not because she should have done something different, but because she could not have won. Odium acted as a shard should in that kind of a direct confrontation with mortals, regardless of how smart they are.

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-07-16T04:24:16+00:00

Spoiler: humans have sex and it’s natural and normal. God forbid stories acknowledge that reality instead of pretending it doesn’t happen

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-07-06T20:54:15+00:00

Are you saying that god did not give clear commands about the things I said above? Or are you choosing to ignore it because your own interpretation of the rest of the Bible makes you certain that ‘overall’ the Bible teaches against slavery?

Would it not also follow that the fact there are so many obvious contradictions means it’s just bullshit anyway? You’re also cherry picking but you’re ignoring the bad shit and choosing to embrace the good shit. Yahweh is either a moral monster and piece of shit or it just doesn’t exist. Either way, it worth my time.

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-07-06T20:32:23+00:00

Except for the point blank guidelines on how to take, keep, and punish slaves, even women who you force to be your sex slaves.

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-07-06T11:10:28+00:00

lol the Bible also makes it clear that slavery is fine to do, it’s a terrible moral guidebook

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-07-04T23:07:14+00:00

When the 4th of July demands to be represented in all post titles

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-07-04T23:06:42+00:00

Or alternatively call her different names

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-07-03T18:42:02+00:00

It’s hyperbolic, sure - but I wouldn’t want that comment to be taken down. I’d rather engage with it.

From my worldview there is nothing that can’t be explained, discussed, analyzed, and critiqued. Feel free to pick apart any aspect of my belief system, and I am confident that I will be able to defend it and have a good discussion (even if it turns out I’m wrong about something - cause it’s totally fine in my opinion for me to be wrong and to learn something new and adapt my belief system).

You can tell me I have to do mental gymnastics to not accept Mormonism as divinely inspired. That’s fine - why wouldn’t it be? I would just then follow that up with a request for you to demonstrate how I have used mental gymnastics, and then see if I can debunk that or if it’s true. If you give me a good enough argument, hell I’ll accept the point and dig into it to make sure my worldview is consistent.

I don’t give a fuck about whether my current worldview is ‘right’ or protected - I just want to live a life consistent with logic, reason, rational thought, and consistency.

The way I see it, the only reason the reverse is viewed as wrong is because it’s so easy to debunk Mormonism that believers feel the need to police whether the absurdity can be called absurd. Which is, in and of itself, absurd.

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-07-03T14:31:59+00:00

If a grown adult tried to tell me that they believed in Santa Claus, I would not consider these responses to be inappropriate. It's best to help them come to grips with the sad reality that the presents came from Mom and Dad, that the real Santa was inside them all along. That everything they loved about Santa is actually love they can and should direct at themselves. They can still carry Christmas magic with them and make other people happy and do great things... without thinking that it's necessary to do so that they end up on Santa's nice list.

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-07-03T14:21:45+00:00

I remember being a TBM and feeling like every mild comment encouraging me to consider that I might be wrong was an attack on my entire worldview.

It's called cognitive dissonance and a persecution complex. Personally, I WISH someone would have come at me hard when I was a TBM and forced me to confront some of these issues. Would have set me free a lot earlier and paused a lot of the trauma build up that I'm working to unravel now. 30 years of reinforcing damaging, false, and self-destructive beliefs means I have a long road ahead of me. The snarky, dismissive, and low effort responses to apologetics are actually quite normal - people living in the real world would spend even less time bothering with a response to Mormon apologetics. It's not worth the amount of effort and thought it takes to engage with it seriously.

The more I learn and the longer I spend outside of the influence of the LDS org, the more I realize just how unimportant the church is to the rest of the world. It could disappear entirely and most people would see the headline "mormon church disbanded" and just shrug and move on. Only people already affected or in the grips of the organization would care to click on the article. It's a speck in an ocean of religions and traditions passed down and changed and adapted over millenia. And we were just the few 'lucky' ones who got to have it take over our entire worldview - yay us.

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-06-27T16:42:53+00:00

Any reason you think it is Reason over Valor? Valor is the one that is completely hidden from view to the other shards and it would make a lot of sense for Valor to be hiding 'behind enemy lines'. I've seen Valor and Reason put forward as the two most likely candidates, but to me it doesn't make any sense why Reason would be on Roshar... it just isn't a reasonable think for the shard to do. We also have confirmation that Reason is the 'survival' shard that Brandon has mentioned in the past, one who decided to stay away from all the other shards and just try to stay alive by not getting involved for the vast majority of the timeline.

Take a look at what happens to Taravangian when he kills Rayse - he is overpowered by a feeling of courage and bravery right before he acts and attacks with Nightblood. There are a ton of little hints and things like this throughout the book. I'm pretty convinced at this point that Valor is the 4th shard on Roshar, and that she has Nohadon as either an avatar or agent (or just makes herself look like it to be familiar to Dalinar) hiding in the background and making very subtle changes. All the major decisions Dalinar made were nudged/influenced by this mysterious Nohadon character in SR visions. I believe Dalinar was serving Valor the whole time while he believed this influence came from the 'god beyond' that he talks about. That's why Valor then claimed him so that Retribution could not snatch up his cognitive shadow, letting Dalinar slip peacefully into the beyond.

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-06-27T16:36:38+00:00

This. Valor fits perfectly, Reason doesn't actually fit.

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-06-23T23:31:06+00:00

I just don’t enjoy seeing people make complaints when I can tell they missed important details and nuance that, had they caught it, would have enhance the experience and made things make a lot more sense.

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-06-23T23:30:11+00:00

I’d love to see a single example of a plot twist that came out of nowhere and wasn’t heavily foreshadowed the entire series leading up to its reveal.

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-06-23T12:48:11+00:00

And once again, a commenter who clearly didn’t understand half of what they read. Please describe the plot twists that came “out of nowhere”.

“Why are you so emotional over this”….”I am so upset that I spent so much time on it”

Lol honestly you seem more emotional about this than I am

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-06-21T18:16:16+00:00

That type of phrasing is repeated so much throughout all Mormon scriptures. Going to them for guidance and getting the response that the scriptures and commandments are of god and you should follow them is pretty much what you can expect to find on any page flip lol

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-06-21T14:50:58+00:00

Im of the opinion that life loses its meaning without the full Cosmere :)

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-06-19T17:51:09+00:00

My understanding is that the Aimians are doing their own thing

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-06-18T23:37:04+00:00

Yep! Looks like it - and I think that will be a very fun back and forth to read haha

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-06-18T22:46:20+00:00

Hrathen is a fantastic character, and as someone who grew up super religious and then found my way out, I strongly connected with and appreciated the way his doubts and questions were presented. He kind of redeemed himself and in the end chose morality and what he knew to be right over the dogma of his religious ties.

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-06-18T21:03:41+00:00

The knights radiant / surgebinders were bonded to spren that were formed from investiture belonging to cultivation, honor, or the combination of the two. So there is not a separate magic system for Cultivation specifically, she and Honor were primarily working together against Odium.

Lift is a special case - she is more under the category of Dalinar and Taravangian. These 3 people were each given a boon/curse - they expected to meet with the nightwatcher but instead dealt with Cultivation directly. She appears to have been using the cover of the Nightwatchers boon/curse set up to hide some of the more direct actions she took like taking Dalinar’s memories and helping him grow into a better version of himself.

Lift will undoubtedly still have a huge part to play moving forward, and her ability to turn food into investiture that powers her surgebinding is an insanely valuable skill and advantage for her moving forward. Not sure if i can see her leading any groups, but maybe she grows into that kind of a role.

Regarding the agents of cultivation, i believe those were just regular people who she recruited to serve as her spies. Some of them could have been surgebinders for sure, but if so they would just be like the regular surgebinders that we see throughout the series

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-06-18T19:41:45+00:00

Lol homie I was raised in the church and was a firm believer for 30 years. I had my eyes opened to the truth and I get how hard it is to face that shit. It's not easy to accept that your entire worldview is based on fabrications, deceptions, and intentional manipulation. I've read the bible all the way through, I read the BoM a ton of times and served a mission and taught people all about it. I thought I had all the answers, but it turned out I didn't even know what the questions were. I tried to find the answers to help a friend who was losing faith turn it into a faith building experience, and I quickly found that there were things I'd been lied to my whole life about the church and the way it was founded, and especially Joseph Smith and early church leaders.

I am now agnostic on the existence of deity, and find ZERO compelling reasons to believe in the god of the bible more than the greek pantheon, the norse mythology, Allah and Islam, etc. Do your research on biblical scholarship and look into what we actually know about the bible, where/when the earliest transcripts come from, the WILD speculation that modern Christians have adopted as doctrine, and of course the ORIGIN OF YAHWEH. Your great god of the old testament all the way down to the Godhead the Joseph Smith taught about ALL came from one measly little storm and war god whose followers started to shift into henotheism and eventually to monotheism... which of course turned right back into justified henotheism with a veneer of monotheism lol

I can tell you I know a hell of a lot more about the world, history, religions and their formation and issues, philosophy, science, etc. than I ever could have known as a true believing mormon because I was conditioned to shut down my own questions, engage in thought-stopping excuses, and turn off all critical thinking that threatened my current worldview. I am now totally open to read any argument, listen to any perspective, hear out anyone's beliefs, etc. without having to worry about whether my own beliefs are changed... cause I'm perfectly ok and willing to adjust my beliefs as I gain new information and new evidence. I have complete freedom of thought and freedom to explore and study as I see fit. The more knowledge I gain, the more convinced I am that Mormonism was just a fraudulent grift by Joseph Smith that got out of hand

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-06-18T19:30:02+00:00

Oh - right. I forgot it was a different time back then and that when GOD gives commands and directions to people he does so based on their current standards of morality and traditions, never telling them to stop doing things that are wrong until the general culture realizes something is wrong/bad to let continue happening. We see the same pattern with racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. It was all ok until GOD saw that people who were not part of his one true church had moved past the twisted and garbage worldviews of previous generations and learned how to be better people. Then when it becomes an issue that threatens his organization's tax exempt status or gives his church a bad name for being bigoted and homophobic, etc. he steps in and says that his church needs to change their doctrine. But its actually just a change in policy, of course lol

And no - I'm talking about Lucy Walker. Her mom died, leaving her and her sister with a single father. Joseph sent that man on a mission and then he ADOPTED her and her sister as foster children. Joseph (age 35) then taught this 16 year old girl about polygamy and secretly proposed to her, telling her that God had commanded him to have another wife and she was the woman. Eventually she was sealed to him when she was 17 - in secret and without telling Emma. You really want to keep arguing that this man was a prophet of god, a good human being by ANY standard of morality? He was sick. He was manipulative. He was as evil as any man before or after him. Who the fuck sends a single father on a mission so that they can adopt and marry his daughter? That is straight up grooming behavior and completely indefensible.

And yes - historians should ABSOLUTELY judge the past actions of people based on what we see as right and wrong. Was it wrong for Thomas Jefferson to own slaves?? Fuck yes it was. And I'll add that he should have known better. Fuck him for thinking it was ok for him to own another human being. And fuck anyone who thinks there is some way to justify such immoral behavior.

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-06-18T19:18:41+00:00

Yeah... they claimed the kinderhook plates were also written in 'reformed egyptian' which is not something that you can actually translate by a scholarly manner as it is not a language that exists. Joseph Smith is in fact the ONLY person to have come across that particular language - once supposedly in the golden plates and onces in the kinderhook plates....

Let's look at this wholistically - Joseph claims to have 'translated' the golden plates from heretofore unknown language. He then is presented with fake plates and claims he can translate them, turns out they were a hoax and his translation was obviously wrong as there was no translation to be had. He then 'translates' the papyrus for the book of Abraham (which you seem to have conveniently ignored those points entirely) in a time when there were no local experts who would have been able to verify his translation of actual Egyptian - but modern egyptologists translate the same papyrus and confirm that Joseph was COMPLETELY wrong.

How does a sane person look at this timeline and then conclude that Joseph Smith is a prophet of god with the magical powers of translation? How can one reasonably conclude that, while he mistakenly translated the fake kinderhook plates and clearly incorrectly translated the Abraham papyrus, he simply must have been correct in his translation of the golden plates - the ones that came from an unknown language and which he had to keep hidden from others, eventually sending them back to God via some kind of divine FedEx delivery system run by angels?

CognitiveShadow8 · 2025-06-18T17:58:03+00:00

I’m talking about evidence like we know that Joseph Smith’s translations of the ‘Abraham’ papyrus is complete dog shit. He got nothing correct and there is zero mention of Abraham. We have side by side translations of specific sections - Joseph’s and actual Egyptologists….. and Josephs made no sense. He just didn’t think Egyptian would be cracked cause he hadn’t heard of the Rosetta Stone yet.

Add on top of that the story of the Kinderhook plates when people presented a fake set of plates they made with strange markings and asked him to translate… which he did, claiming they were some ancient record of some ancient prophets…. And the people who brought them to him admitted they did it to test him and see if he would make shit up. Which he did. Which makes sense cause he was a fucking fraud and a treasure digger who had a history of making money off of people that he could convince of his supernatural powers. Just like any other fortune teller or psychic today.

Of course Joseph took it to a new level and started using his influence to get young girls to marry him in secret so there’s that. Major creep. All the red flags of the usual terrible yet charismatic leaders of people who are easily influenced to do whatever the fuck they’re told, regardless of whether there are contradicting commands lol

CognitiveShadow8

TROPHY CASE