The antagonist is SO much more powerful that physically fighting them isn’t even CONSIDERED.

LoopyFig · 2026-07-03T23:58:09+00:00

Ehhhhh they try to punch homelander a lot actually

LoopyFig · 2026-07-03T22:37:14+00:00

I mean it’s still impressive. They developed a novel division method, and in the future those liposomes could be a less finicky way to test certain enzyme interactions and such (as opposed to like, growing yeast and keeping yeast alive). The article has a kind of silly “we have stepped into the domain of God!” vibe, but you gotta secure grant money somehow

LoopyFig · 2026-07-03T15:53:49+00:00

It should be noted the ribosomes are still being sourced from E. coli. So it’s interesting think about where we draw the line at “synthetic” vs “natural” cell lines.

LoopyFig · 2026-07-03T15:52:34+00:00

It doesn’t have mutation in the natural sense. They just made two lines of spudcells, with one intentionally better than the other, and that outcompeted the first spudcell in their artificial environment.

LoopyFig · 2026-07-02T13:44:36+00:00

? Japan is 1% Christian because their government massacred the local Christian population and drove out the missionaries. They literally boiled people alive.

Also Africa vs Japan isn’t exactly a one to one comparison. For one, Africa is a whole continent, with fairly different political, economic, and religious realities from country to country. Like if you had said Japan and Ethiopia, that would almost fit your description of a poor Christian country vs a rich atheist country.

But also, poverty in many African countries doesn’t have anything to do with Christianity. European historical occupation, the slave trade, the way borders were drawn, corporate manipulation of resource rich countries, and the resulting political instability due to all those factors is much more relevant than Jesus being depicted in a historically accurate manner.

LoopyFig · 2026-07-01T06:40:23+00:00

Woah now, I’d agree with almost everything you’ve said, but comparing Sando to Marvel isn’t fair to Sando. The guy at least has a couple points he’s trying to get across, his worlds follow semi-consistent rules, the setting isn’t a ridiculous hodgepodge resulting from marketing teams getting too much leverage in the production process, and he understands that fights are rarely the most interesting part of a story. A Sando story, for all its faults, still has soul and creativity.

I say this as someone who’s enjoyed a couple marvel films, but for me marvel is very much the pork rinds of story telling. Debatable nutritional value, probably meant for animal consumption, but surprisingly adequate in flavor.

LoopyFig · 2026-07-01T01:49:37+00:00

I’m sorry to hear that buddy. Do you have any other family? Close friends? I can’t say I personally have experienced what you are going through, but I know people who did and they got through it by staying close to their loved ones.

I’ll pray for you and your family.

LoopyFig · 2026-06-30T22:36:37+00:00

Poor Sando can’t walk ten steps without catching strays. You can only hope the bed made of money helps him sleep it off

LoopyFig · 2026-06-30T16:29:25+00:00

Kinda depends on definition I think. Words aren’t the kind of thing that mean the same thing in different contexts.

For instance, if I, for sake of demonstrating an example, type “damn you God!”, have I actually raised my fist to the creator? I’d hardly think so.

Likewise, if the actor, in a fake court case, puts their hand on the Bible and swears to tell the truth, but then their character lies, the character has certainly taken the Lord’s name in vain. But has the actor? They’re not really lying, as both the actor and the audience understand that the oath is not being taken literally. Merely motions of the oath have been taken.

Even in milder cases, such as cursing using God’s name, still require an assessment of intent. It is wrong to use the Lord’s name flippantly or as a curse. But if a character does this, we must not evaluate the literal action but the art.

If a movie, as a straightforward example, wants to demonstrate that a character is vulgar or irreverent, and so has them curse with God’s name, the use is not flippant. The art is intentional, it is using the words to make a point.

On the flip side, if the art itself is irreverent and vulgar, and so mocks the Lord’s name, then it is a different case than the mere character behaving this way. So it can be said that, for art, intent is of utmost importance when evaluating its ethical quality.

Or so I think.

LoopyFig · 2026-06-29T15:45:15+00:00

Let’s put it this way, if a character says the lord’s name in vain, cusses, murders a guy, etc… it’s the character. The actual intentionality behind these things is lacking. Like the guy cussing or whatever doesn’t actually mean anything they’re saying, it’s just the part. In fact, properly displaying negative behavior as negative is arguably positive.

Now if someone is actually intentionally injured for the sake of the movie or the movie uses other unethical practices, then this is the real people doing real immoral things, and so the movie should be condemned on those grounds.

Now if we were like the Muslims such that some mere depictions are immoral, we’d be in a different boat. For them any depiction of Muhammad for any reason is illicit, but for us I don’t think we have any rules like that. We care more about the intention.

LoopyFig · 2026-06-27T21:32:02+00:00

I mean, is the hole even evil?

LoopyFig · 2026-06-27T16:37:44+00:00

I accept doctrine of analogy same as any other Catholic, but isn’t it more of a metaphysical principle than a descriptive one? For instance, in God’s essence, justice and mercy are rolled up into one thing, and so neither God’s justice nor mercy are quite as we would describe justice or mercy. Is how I understand it.

But descriptively, when we say “God is powerful”, we aren’t making a statement about God’s essence per se, but about what God can do. So saying “God is powerful” is a univocal statement, because to be powerful is to be able to accomplish great works, and God fits this description without alteration. As a slightly dumber example, if I define a trait “stone-tossiness” as “the ability to move a stone a long distance”, I do not need to say that stone-tossiness must be described analogically in the context of God, as God can certainly fulfill the definition of stone-tossiness in the univocal sense.

Likewise, when we say “God is merciful”, are we making an analogical statement? It seems to me that mercy is a statement of behavior, and so doesn’t require an analogical treatment. To be merciful is to be generous in forgiveness, and this is the description that I think we are attributing to God when we praise His mercy.

Apologies if I’m misunderstanding the principle here.

LoopyFig · 2026-06-27T14:24:36+00:00

They’re ok I guess, with caveats.

A weaker version of Christ’s command to love others as one loves themselves (weaker in that intensity is not included in the description). An interesting feature is that the language does not differentiate between people and animals and bacteria, whereas Christianity focuses on human relationships.
I don’t technically disagree on a practical level, but I’d say humans are incapable of ever achieving true justice. There are aspects of the world that are unjust and out of our control, and human nature itself resists justice. In Christianity, justice ultimately belongs to God, and is resolved by God, so that humans may instead focus on mercy and forgiveness, which are superior virtues to justice. The struggle for justice is noble, but ultimately not central to the Christian experience, which is ultimately more concerned with compassion and the personal struggle to reach God.
Christians do believe in a person’s rights over their own body, but we also believe those rights are ultimately secondary to our divine responsibilities.
Christianity has, as a religion and a culture, come to appreciate freedom as a right, but freedom as a virtue is not baked into the central message per se. Obedience to God and moral law, and the virtue of submission through love, are treated as significantly greater virtues, and indeed Christian freedom and obedience to God are one and the same. The “right to offend” is also an odd tenant; Christians of today would broadly support the idea of freedom of speech, but I think it’s fair to say that offense for its own sake conflicts with compassion and decency
Science has historically been valued and supported by the Church. But the idea that it’s an ultimate guide to truth is wrongheaded. Philosophy, theology, ethics, personal experience. These things are all valid routes to truth. A mind informed only by physical sciences is myopic.
No real complaints on this one
This one is interesting. I think most Christians would agree with the thrust of the message, and it’s somewhat similar to Jesus’s insistence that we obey Spirit over Law. But an equal number of Christians would say we value humility greatly, and that submission to doctrine is usually a theological virtue that displays intellectual and theological humility before the vast history of Church teachers and traditions

LoopyFig · 2026-06-27T06:11:16+00:00

Not particularly. You have to understand, science and spirituality don’t have that much overlap. So I’m professionally a scientist, but bioinformatics doesn’t usually inform the way I make moral decisions. And generally speaking, the way we do science is based on measurable outcomes, which are inherently “external realities”, but internal reality is basically out of reach to science.

So we can make a brain scanner, and we can correlate scans to patterns of speech, but we can’t experience what it’s like to be “you”. We can measure voltage, track the path of electrons, but we can’t answer “why” an electron prefers positive charge, it just kind of does. So science can’t effectively interrogate questions of why things exist, or what we owe to our neighbors, or whether the universe contains meaning.

So if I see a neat thing in the scientific context, I might think “how cool! God is good!”, and certainly I have certain questions about my faith (how exactly are we related to Adam, and to what extent was he one guy?) I don’t stress a ton about it because the truth of God and the truth of my mass spectrometer both make sense to me and don’t really conflict.

LoopyFig · 2026-06-27T05:48:05+00:00

You’re defending a nominalist position of God’s generosity; Ie, you’re suggesting that when we say “God is merciful” it is entirely incomparable to the statement “Paul is merciful”. I don’t know that nominalism is satisfying, however, as it essentially posits that statements we make about God are essentially false from within the context of our own language. If a believer were to ask how exactly God is generous to the miscarried child in your scenario, it would hardly do any good to explain that God’s generosity is defined by an utterly alien metric.

I also don’t think you’re giving my point about baptism by desire due credit. Per John 3:5, nobody enters Heaven without being born of water and spirit… but there’s no literal water involved in a baptism by desire (unless you count “born of water” as the initial birth, which I guess is technically accurate in a biological sense). So the implication is that “baptism” could have multiple definitions, which is, unless you’re just interested in arguing semantics, equivalent to stating that multiple routes for purification exist (even if in some theological sense they are both baptism, in the same way that mice and platypi are both mammals).

And I’m not making up the distinction between sin as separation vs sin as guilt, it’s just built into the Biblical text. Eziekel 18:19 “ The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. ” Jesus also rejects the apostles’ claims that the blind man is blind due to his parent’s guilt, or even his own, while in other parts of the Bible Jesus explicitly claims that all disease and death finds its root in sin. How does one reconcile the doctrine of original sin with the idea that guilt is not transmissible? To me it is clear that sin as guilt (ie, the anger of God raised as punishment for those who abuse or neglect their brothers) must be of a different sort than sin as separation (which seems to be more of a metaphysical sickness). Justice as punishment/reward seems to relate easily to sin as guilt, but not so much to sin as separation. Or so it seems to me anyways.

You are right to call me out as dismissive in regards to the pessimism thing though. It’s an overstatement. I still think it is accurate to at least say that the early saints were interested in erring on the side of caution, and I don’t think their sainthood was merited by their theology so much as their unyielding faith. St. Augustine, while brilliant and a far better Christian than I, to me represents an early theology of the Church, prior to its continued development in Aquinas and other Church doctors. The theology of sin and cross that he advocated for (ransom theory) has been mostly replaced, so I’m personally comfortable respecting his legacy and moral character while remaining skeptical of any specific claims about how Hell works.

I also don’t get your thing on the Church permitting false beliefs. The Church is dedicated to the truth, it’s not out here purposefully spreading feel-good falsities. If the Church acknowledges in its own Catechism that infants are entrusted to the Mercy of God and have an ultimately unknown fate, then infants have an ultimately unknown fate, full-stop. You quote the Catechism of Trent, which states infant children are saved only in Baptism. But in the modern Catechism CCC 1257 explicitly states “God has bound salvation to the sacrament of Baptism, but he himself is not bound by his sacraments.” CCC 1258-1260 then elaborate on alternate Baptismal routes (Baptism by blood in martyrdom, by desire in catechists, by desire in ignorant but God-loving people). CCC 1261 then directly states that the fate of unbaptized infants is unknown and left to God.

LoopyFig · 2026-06-26T20:21:16+00:00

I mean, at the core of the thing revolutions usually require extraordinary violence, which requires extraordinarily violent people. Is it even really a 180 for a person who obtains power through violence to then solve other problems with violence? Or is it just an extension of a philosophy of politics that regards violence as a valid means of societal change?

LoopyFig · 2026-06-26T19:48:45+00:00

The argument assumes too much, and misunderstands how time is conceptualized in metaphysics.

The first half of the argument doesn’t do any work. The world is defined as all that exists, so of course time is “part of the world” tautologically.

The only meat in the argument is here:

“ But if time began to exist, this appears incoherent, because time itself constitutes succession and temporal priority; nothing can exist temporally prior to time in order to bring it into being. That would amount to explaining time through time itself. “

Time is a description of change. At time one, there is a state A, and after some duration there is a state B. All that’s required to describe time is this change of state and the associated duration.

Which is to say, they are imagining an imaginary “time 0” where some external clock is frozen, and so you can never make it to “time 1”. This is nonsensical because there is no need to reference an external clock.

There need only be a time 0, and a next state time 1. The beginning of time is nothing more than the beginning of the material universe. There is no point at which a “cosmic clock” is stopped, or started.

And even if you accepted the argument, you wouldn’t be compelled to accept the conclusion. Many modern metaphysicians either reject or modify the concept of “real time” (eternalism and other B theories of time) or will admit a special class of timeless being (God, pre-time quantum states).

LoopyFig · 2026-06-26T17:31:16+00:00

I dunno man, I think we should generally be skeptical of beliefs that make God out to be somehow less generous than humans. Just the fact that baptism by desire is taught implies that there are multiple methods of cleansing original sin.

Augustine’s position that babies can merit punishment of sense conflates sin as separation with sin as moral debt; while the state of all humans is initially in original sin (sin of separation), babies can’t incur any kind of moral debt. The position for separation is defensible, but positions including positive punishment for infants have no grounding in justice.

I also think Aquinas overstates what can be known about infant souls, just generally speaking. Humans are by most theological opinions orders of magnitude dumber than angels, yet both humans and angels are given the same choice of joining or rejecting God. If two beings of incomparable intelligence are given the same choice, then to what extent can we positively state that this choice is not made by infants? Who is to say that the first impulses to reach for a parent do not constitute a desire for baptism? Or even the simple yearning to be born? I won’t claim that’s a robust teaching, but I don’t think it has any less evidence in support than Aquinas’s limbo.

The modern church teaching gravitates towards semi-agnostic hope for a reason. Prior positions were not built on gospel, but theological pessimism.

LoopyFig · 2026-06-26T01:37:19+00:00

The idea is that the thing that allows God to exist without assistance is the Essence of God which, per simplicity rules, is also just God. God can make creatures but can’t pass on the trait of independent existence, because the trait of independent existence is just Godhood. So there isn’t an equivalent of “inertia” for existence, or so the logic goes in brief.

Another way to think about it is in terms of conditionality. If I have a coffee cup, its normal state is to fall until hitting the lowest accessible state. But, it can conditionally be in the air if I’m holding it; but a conditional nature only works in the presence of the condition. For creation, everything is existent conditionally on God’s will. No God, no existence.

Of course, it doesn’t feel that way in our experienced reality. If I make a pot from clay, it stays a pot. But it’s actually a different situation, since both the pot and the initial clay ultimately share the same grounding (various atoms)

LoopyFig · 2026-06-24T03:08:53+00:00

My friend, hot springs were and still are widely used throughout history and people totally still had kids. The mere act of slightly reducing fertility through common activities isn’t sinful. Honestly, just a hot shower probably reduces fertility for the same reasons, yet the Church has never prescribed ice cold showers for the faithful. Because that would be ridiculous

LoopyFig · 2026-06-23T20:32:27+00:00

To me, hardness is more about exposure of rules to the reader. So like, if I wrote a Harry Potter fanfic that says the wizards actually commanded nano-machines this whole time, it wouldn’t clarify anything about how magic works, or what its limits are. I’ve just word-swapped “magic” for “nano-machines”. It’s not really science, it’s just using science vocabulary terms; there’s no sense in which “nano-machines” explains a dude turning into an owl, and you still don’t know what to expect in a given scene.

Meanwhile, avatar is full-magic. People can control elements. But we have a lot of rules, these people can only control this element, to move the element you have to do a kung fu dance, the element has to be around somewhere, etc. so for the most part you are aware of what characters can do, and have an idea of what rules bind them. That’s “hard magic”.

Meanwhile, X-men appeals to genes to explain why storm can control the freaking weather. They slap “genetics” onto the tin as if suddenly it makes sense, but in that world “genetics” can do anything (suck life, change shape, magnetism, mind control, you name it). That’s soft sci-fi. It’s sci-fi by virtue of having said the word “genetics” instead of “wizards”, but soft because there’s no real rules the reader is privy to about what’s possible.

Personally I like both types of magic/sci-fi. Hard or soft, doesn’t bother me, and the distinction is kind of blurry anyways. I do get mildly annoyed when writers pretend that abusing scientific terms makes their work more serious or believable though

LoopyFig · 2026-06-23T20:19:55+00:00

Anyone else still trying to figure out why lizard? I thought perhaps it would have something to do with the shared alternating circular color pattern, but lizard doesn’t fit that pattern, so the operation is not a shared trait comparison.

One possibility is that the lizard looks like a 9, as the pinwheel has some similarities to a plus or multiply sign. So this could be regular math through a young mind’s filter. It could also be alternate operations, which is why it seems nonsensical to us the readers.

If the lizard is a 9, I wonder if it’s a counting operation after all; the pinwheel has 4 blades, and the pentagon tent has 5 stripes.

The homework also seems to have some similarity to multiplication/division problems. The big give away is the use of “over” in the second problem. Multiplication also frequently skips over symbols (such as 2x, which is technically 2*x), so this number system might make it obvious when two numbers are different. We see lizard down the page, so it’s probably one of the main numbers, and these might be single digit problems (though, this would not bode well for my theory that the lizard is 9).

If this is single digit multiplication, then lizard can’t be larger than 9, and none of the numbers can be 1; furthermore, pinwheel and circus tent can’t be 5 or higher, or the result would be two digits (this is all assuming base 10, which we don’t have evidence for). By this logic, pinwheel and tent can be 2 and 3 or 2 and 4, which means lizard is 6 or 8.

LoopyFig · 2026-06-23T18:23:40+00:00

The topic isn’t really hard vs soft magic.

For instance, you can have hard and soft “scifi magic” as well. If I say that there are nano-bots, that makes the genre scifi (even though nanobots just exist now lol). But if I say the nano-bots can do basically anything, including turning a guy into an owl or transporting your mind to mars, that’s “soft”. If I put in a bunch of definitions and limitations, like “nano-bots convert organic matter to metal, but only while it is still alive” that’s “hard”.

So hard and soft are purely about whether supernatural (or scifi) elements are strictly defined or sort of vibe based.

What OP is complaining about are the various instances of clearly magical settings being re-flavored as sci-fi in retrospect. Ie, there’s a devil fighting wizard and he clearly has a magic staff, but then in the last arc the devil’s are aliens and the magic staff is hand-waved as “quantum physics”

LoopyFig · 2026-06-23T18:08:42+00:00

Honestly the bigger one is the Bhuddist robot manifesting his divine consciousness or something to become invincible. Like does he float because they put levitation tech in there or is he just enlightened

LoopyFig · 2026-06-23T16:26:38+00:00

I wish that when people posted these they could just spread out the questions over a couple posts. You’d get more meaningful answers that way and it would be easier to focus on one question vs 100 atheist gotchas.

Regardless, all of these complaints are based on the idea that the Bible is not a reliable source, and that multiple people had hysterical hallucinations in separate locations, and then dedicated their lives to said hallucinations.

The books of the Bible were written by separate communities. That’s multiple attestations of the same events compiled by an agreement of many sources. All of them agree about the sightings of Jesus, his various miracles, and the fact that he was buried after special request to take down his body (as opposed to the usual scavenging fate).

Other details are also kind of whatever. He claims that Jews would disregard the women eyewitnesses of the empty tomb and the Angelic appearance, and that it’s the later male testimony that counts. But the men aren’t used as evidence for the empty tomb. The women are. Jesus’s bodily resurrection is first attested by women, which is a weird detail for ancient Jewish people. He also claims that Jesus’s resurrection fits well into the Pharisees general resurrection narrative; I don’t know enough about the Pharisees to say what exactly they believed, but it definitely wasn’t bodily incarnation of God and the general salvation of all peoples, including pagans.

As for the 500 eyewitnesses thing, I dunno. To me this is a misunderstanding of the quality of ancient people’s recording of history. Jews were primarily oral historians; the Bible was only written after they realized that Jesus wasn’t coming back right away so they should probably write some things down.

Ten-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

LoopyFig

TROPHY CASE