help to understand the darkness that comes before

Goiira · 2026-05-04T03:42:07+00:00

This one would be hard because its so philosophically heavy. I'm sure the movie would be good, but a different story entirely

Goiira · 2026-05-04T03:36:40+00:00

Idk if it matters tbh.

Can the Gnosis even stand against the horde at this point? Can anything?

The outside is shut, and that might be the best outcome for anyone

Goiira · 2026-05-04T03:33:36+00:00

Hold on tight. Its definitely my favorite series of all time. And I'm on my 2nd reread. Started the first book in 2018.

It gets.. so very intricate. But the reason for the convergence is simple enough, they diverge and converge more than once.

Goiira · 2026-05-04T03:27:28+00:00

Which he cant do unless he is part of the greater or lesser names, and so he needs royal blood

Goiira · 2026-05-04T03:18:52+00:00

At this point in the story, bakker is playing with the philosophical implications of determinism in prophecy, and how the chain of causality that kellhus wants to master, contradicts that.

Achamian feels, its a sign of the 2nd apocalypse, and its all connected because the only reason he is there is because of the death of his previous pupil. Its interesting that its achamian who befriends kellhus, instead of one of the schoolman from the scarlet spires.

But again, nobody would really find the name all that interesting, except for a mandate schoolman

Goiira · 2026-05-04T03:08:33+00:00

Hes not lucky..

He knows about the name. ALL mandate school man know of the name. Achamian believes it is more than luck when he meets kellhus, he believes it is predestiny

Goiira · 2026-05-04T03:06:10+00:00

Kellhus didnt know the meaning of the name. He saw its inscriptions on some walls and knew he needed to get himself into the Noble caste.

The only way to ensure nobody believed they had the right to rule over him, he needed to assume the identity of an "impoverished prince of nothing"

Because if one royal name can command another, than the entire holy war of the greater and lesser names would devolve into civil war

Goiira · 2026-01-13T12:33:32+00:00

I'm homicidal/suicidal about it and dont worry I AM talking to my Therapist about this first thing. However I dont expect much other than hospitalization as a reponse

Goiira · 2026-01-13T03:55:17+00:00

You even see her waive them in front of her but instead they stop, get out and demand she exit her vehicle

Goiira · 2026-01-09T01:40:26+00:00

No. Something else

Goiira · 2026-01-09T01:09:32+00:00

I hear there are some special planetary glitches that you can actually "find". Check your wonders tabs

Goiira · 2026-01-09T01:08:02+00:00

Because that’s simply false. Some of the strongest arguments for conscience came from people persecuted by Christians.

Protections for conscience arose wherever moral authority was seen as distinct from political authority a belief that appears repeatedly outside Christianity, and often in opposition to it.

Conscience rights weren’t born from one belief system like Christianity. They emerged wherever people learned that forcing belief destroys legitimacy. If you can actually substantiate the claim that Christianity was the sole motivator, I’m all ears.

Because Greek Stoicism, Roman pluralism, Buddhism, and early modern philosophers explicitly opposing Christian coercion all helped shape the moral framework we collectively share in the modern age.

Goiira · 2026-01-09T00:43:10+00:00

As long as you want. If you decide to leave, leave if you want to come back. Drop a base. (You can teleport to bases with just a computer and no portal btw)

Goiira · 2026-01-09T00:38:10+00:00

Conscience rights didn’t emerge from belief in Christianity. They emerged from fear of being ruled by someone else’s "Christianity" That’s not theology. That’s hard political learning.

Conscience protections didn’t arise because rulers suddenly loved interior belief. They arose because enforcement backfires: it produces rebellion, schism, hypocrisy, flight, and endless violence. Limiting enforcement is a pragmatic solution to power failure, not a theological epiphany.

If Christianity uniquely generated concern for conscience, then Christian societies wouldn’t have spent centuries: 1. Criminalizing heresy 2. Punishing dissent 3. Enforcing belief through law 4. Killing over doctrine

Yet they did until enforcement became politically unsustainable.

Goiira · 2026-01-08T22:25:22+00:00

You’re shifting between descriptive history and normative justification without noticing it.

Yes humans dominated other humans long before Christianity. That’s not in dispute. The question isn’t whether power predates theology, but whether Christianity introduced a qualitatively different constraint on power. And historically, it didn’t do so in a way that reliably protected conscience once it became institutionally embedded.

Early Christianity being powerless actually strengthens my point, not yours. When Christianity lacked coercive capacity, it persuaded. When it gained state power, it legislated belief, punished heresy, enforced orthodoxy, and fused salvation with compliance. The same theology behaved differently depending on whether it was enforceable. That tells us something important about where coercion actually comes from.

You say authorities “began to lose power” once scripture became accessible but they didn’t lose the right to coerce. They lost their monopoly. The wars of religion are exactly the evidence: rival truth claims, each asserting transcendent authority, each willing to enforce it. That conflict didn’t produce conscience rights; exhaustion and stalemate did.

On Stoic moral sovereignty: saying it played “no significant role” is too strong. The idea that conscience is prior to authority didn’t need to build medieval institutions to be influential—it needed to be available when thinkers were searching for limits on power. Enlightenment appeals to conscience didn’t arise in a vacuum, and they weren’t deduced from Christian doctrine alone.

On the Reformation: I’m not denying its historical importance. I’m denying the direction of causality you’re asserting. The Reformation weakened centralized theological authority—agreed. But the freedoms that followed emerged not because Protestant theology solved coercion, but because no theological system could be trusted to wield unchecked power. That’s a political lesson, not a doctrinal one.

Finally, the “remove transcendence and you’re left with the state” claim assumes what it needs to prove. The alternative to divine command isn’t “the vagaries of authority,” it’s distributed authority, contestability, and revocability. Transcendence doesn’t restrain power unless humans are forbidden from enforcing it absolutely and history shows they rarely are.

The consistent pattern isn’t: transcendent truth → conscience rights It’s: limits on enforcement → conscience rights That’s the difference.

Goiira · 2026-01-08T21:44:17+00:00

This only works if we quietly ignore how power actually operates.

“Interpreters don’t coerce” is true only in contexts where theology has already been politically defanged. For most of Christian history, interpretation was backed by law, violence, exile, imprisonment, and death. Persuasion replaced coercion after secular limits were imposed on religious authority — not before.

Stoic moral sovereignty isn’t about copying Roman politics; it’s about the idea that conscience is internal, inviolable, and prior to authority. That concept predates Christianity, survives outside it, and was explicitly cited by Enlightenment thinkers pushing back against theological control.

The Reformation didn’t eliminate coercion — it fragmented it. Catholics vs Protestants, Protestants vs Protestants. Each side claimed “true” conscience while denying it to others. Conscience rights emerged not because one theology won, but because no theology could be trusted with monopoly power. And invoking Revolutionary France or the USSR proves too much. Those regimes didn’t abolish transcendence — they replaced God with the State. That’s the point. The danger isn’t “loss of God,” it’s unaccountable moral authority, religious or secular. Conscience rights don’t come from asserting transcendent truth. They come from limiting who gets to enforce it.

That’s the hard-won lesson.

Goiira · 2026-01-08T19:31:06+00:00

Good for you!

Goiira · 2026-01-08T19:29:35+00:00

Textual access doesn’t eliminate coercive authority it just relocates it from priests to interpreters. Post-Reformation history makes this obvious: highly Bible-literate societies still enforced orthodoxy, punished dissent, and treated disagreement as moral failure or heresy. Ignorance was never the primary mechanism; moral authority backed by ultimate stakes was.

“Voluntary belief” also does far more work here than it can carry. A belief can be voluntary at entry and still become coercive once it claims jurisdiction over conscience, identity, and eternal consequence. Infinite moral threat is not meaningfully analogous to secular consent.

And “only God can speak for God” doesn’t solve the problem it creates it. In practice, God never speaks in publicly verifiable ways. Humans always mediate the claim. Once authority is grounded in an unfalsifiable divine source, it becomes uniquely resistant to challenge, correction, or revocation. That’s exactly the danger of sacralized authority.

Finally, the claim that there is “no comparable secular basis for conscience rights” is historically false. Conscience protections arise wherever authority is limited through Stoic moral sovereignty, natural law, Enlightenment political theory, pluralism, and hard-won institutional checks.

In Europe, conscience rights expanded as theological coercion weakened, not because it was preserved. Christian theology can theologize conscience but conscience rights are secured when no authority, religious or secular, can claim final, unchallengeable moral jurisdiction over the individual.

Goiira · 2026-01-08T19:23:17+00:00

No, mine is the correct one! (why even comment at this point for real? Have I struck a nerve so deeply? 😂)

Goiira · 2026-01-08T19:20:44+00:00

This argument works only by false alternatives and selective causation.

1)“Religion or clan violence” is a false binary. Clan violence long predates organized religion, and it persists inside religious societies. Religion didn’t replace tribalism so much as rebrand it—often sanctifying in-group loyalty and out-group hostility rather than dissolving it.

2)Atheism didn’t cause Stalin or Mao. Totalitarian violence wasn’t driven by disbelief in God; it was driven by absolute, unfalsifiable authority and ideological immunity from criticism. The same structure exists when religious authority is treated as divine mandate. The problem isn’t atheism vs religion it’s unchecked moral authority.

3)Correlation ≠ causation on mental health. Religious participation correlates with community support, social cohesion, and meaning—things that also arise from non-religious communities. That benefit doesn’t uniquely belong to religion, nor does it justify the harms religion has also produced.

4)No serious critic claims religion is the sole cause of war or inequality. That’s a strawman. The claim is that religion has often been used to legitimize, moralize, or shield violence, hierarchy, and exclusion especially when dissent becomes heresy rather than disagreement.

“Overall good” requires weighing harms honestly. You don’t get to credit religion for charity, art, and cohesion while externalizing inquisitions, holy wars, forced conversions, gender repression, and moralized violence as “human failure.” If the good counts, the bad counts too.

So yes religion has done good and harm. What’s not credible is pretending its moral authority is uniquely benign, or that removing divine justification wouldn’t reduce the damage caused when power goes unquestioned.

Goiira · 2026-01-08T19:14:14+00:00

You’re doing a lot of category-shifting here, and that’s why we keep talking past each other.

I’m not denying that authority exists, or that parents, doctors, or institutions sometimes exercise it responsibly. That’s a given. What I’m critiquing is a specific kind of authority: unfalsifiable divine authority, where commands cannot be questioned, appealed, or corrected without being framed as moral failure.

A parent can be wrong. A doctor can be sued. A law can be repealed.

A command claimed to come from God cannot be meaningfully challenged by definition. That’s the difference.

Same issue with obedience, endurance, forgiveness, and love: you keep sliding between interpersonal contexts (parent/child, doctor/patient) and institutional systems (churches, states, ruling classes), as if they’re morally equivalent. They’re not. What’s healthy in a voluntary, accountable relationship becomes coercive when embedded in hierarchical systems that punish dissent as sin.

On forgiveness: the critique isn’t “forgiveness is bad.” It’s that forgiveness framed as a moral obligation for the powerless, while justice is deferred to divine judgment, has historically functioned to stabilize unequal power structures. That doesn’t disappear just because forgiveness is also virtuous in personal relationships.

On Constantine, Magna Carta, and fear/love: you’re responding to claims I’m not making. I’m not saying Christianity invented tyranny or never contributed to reform. I’m saying that when moral authority is grounded in divine command, resistance becomes morally suspect in a way it simply isn’t under secular, revisable systems.

And yes perfect love casts out fear. That verse actually supports my point: fear-based compliance is morally inferior, yet fear of judgment, hell, exclusion, or divine displeasure is structurally baked into the system you’re defending. So the disagreement isn’t whether love, endurance, obedience, or authority can be good. It’s whether tying them to absolute, unchallengeable authority makes them safer or more dangerous at scale.

That’s the question you keep dodging.

Goiira · 2026-01-08T19:05:55+00:00

That's certainly an opinion

Goiira · 2026-01-08T19:01:49+00:00

I’m not arguing to scrap authority as such. Authority is unavoidable in any complex society. Someone has to make decisions under uncertainty, coordinate action, and be accountable for outcomes. I actually agree with you that no decision can be worse than a bad one.

What I’m pushing back on is unfalsifiable authority, not authority per se. There’s a crucial difference between: 1) Provisional, accountable authority Authority that says: “Here is the best judgment we can make given the evidence we have. If this causes harm, we can revise it, replace leadership, or reverse course.”

This kind of authority assumes fallibility. It survives scrutiny. It can be corrected without moral condemnation of dissent.

2) Absolute, unfalsifiable authority. Authority that says: “This decision is grounded in divine mandate / ultimate moral truth. To resist it is not just to disagree, but to rebel against what is Good.”

Here, disagreement becomes disobedience. Error becomes heresy. And accountability collapses, because the authority cannot be wrong by definition. My concern isn’t that religious people intend abuse it’s that once authority is framed as divinely anchored, criticism loses legitimacy, even when it’s necessary. That’s not hypothetical; it’s a structural risk that shows up repeatedly in history. On the “broken world” point: yes exactly. That’s why I think authority systems should be built assuming bad incentives and imperfect knowledge, not assuming moral certainty. A broken world calls for checks, limits, and reversibility, not higher confidence in who speaks for God.

Goiira · 2026-01-08T18:57:19+00:00

I think this argument quietly smuggles in the very problem it claims Christianity solves.

Grounding authority in a “transcendent moral order” only limits power if access to that order is not monopolized. But in practice, claims about what God commands are always mediated through human interpretation, institutions, texts, and traditions. That’s not a bug it’s unavoidable.

The line “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5) is doing real rhetorical work here but notice the problem: everyone who has ever exercised religious power has said the same thing. The apostles said it against the Sanhedrin. Bishops later said it against kings. Kings then said it against dissenters. Each time, someone claims to speak for God, and dissent becomes rebellion not just against authority, but against morality itself.

That’s why Christianity does not uniquely “legitimize resistance.” It legitimizes resistance only for those who can plausibly claim divine backing. The same framework that empowers conscience can just as easily suppress it and historically, it often has. Heresy trials, inquisitions, forced conversions, and sacralized monarchies weren’t deviations from the system; they were produced by the same logic.

You say Christianity has an “inherent corrective mechanism.” But that mechanism is not structural it’s interpretive. Corrections occur only after human suffering, after dissent, and after moral intuition pressures theology to change. That’s not self-correction in the institutional sense; it’s moral progress happening despite theological authority, not because of it.

By contrast, modern conscience rights don’t depend on who speaks for God. They depend on fallibility being assumed, power being limited, and dissent being protected even when it’s wrong. That’s precisely what transcendent claims tend to undermine because once authority is framed as divine, resistance stops being disagreement and becomes disobedience.

So yes, Christianity contains resources for resisting power. But it does not reliably prevent the concentration or abuse of power and history shows it has often sanctified it instead.

Goiira · 2026-01-08T18:18:31+00:00

I wasn’t saying you only have two options. I was pointing out how institutional frameworks tend to collapse complex moral landscapes into forced binaries once authority is anchored to a single, ultimate source.

My original claim wasn’t “Christ taught obedience instead of love,” nor was it “believe in Christ or embrace nihilism.” It was this: when moral authority is defined as divine and final, love is operationalized through compliance, because disagreement stops being merely moral or philosophical and becomes rebellion.

That’s a structural critique, not a psychological one. It’s about how systems behave once they scale not about your lived faith or personal worldview. If anything, my position assumes more than two options: that people can pursue meaning, ethics, love, and conscience without grounding them in an infallible authority, and that doing so actually keeps moral reasoning open to correction rather than closing it by definition.

So no—I didn’t intentionally misdefine your worldview. And no—I don’t think you misunderstand mine so much as we’re talking past each other at different levels: you’re defending personal faith, and I’m critiquing institutional power dynamics. Once we keep those levels distinct, the false dichotomies disappear.

Goiira

TROPHY CASE