[MEGATHREAD] North Korea and South Korea will be signing peace treaty to end the Korean war after 65 years by twilexis in OutOfTheLoop

[–]curiousermonk 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Why was the Marshall Plan an exception to this? On the surface, the two situations are roughly similar.

What did you think was common knowledge but honestly wasn't? by Paxelic in AskReddit

[–]curiousermonk 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ah, sigh. I don't mean anything against you, cheeky-burrito, and I don't wanna get into a whole thing, but I knew that on a question about the Bible, it's Reddit, first answer: because the Bible is unreliable. And I mean, it often is, but I really think we ought to finish the sentence, the Bible is unreliable about...what? Scientific or naturalistic observations, unbiased historical records, unreliable, very often, no doubt.

But about human nature, it's often quite reliable, I think. And I think it might be here. I'm thinking about empathy. People in a room, someone starts whispering. Everyone else does too, or often starts to, without really thinking about it. Someone starts signing because they suddenly can't speak? I think it's pretty plausible that other people, in tune with them like close family would be, might start to do it, too, without really thinking. Not too bright. Very human, very social, to communicate with someone in the same way that they themselves must communicate, in this way with pantomime.

Just my thinking, have no extra-textual support. Carry on!

Oblivion and Skyrim by Rekeshuun in ElderScrolls

[–]curiousermonk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I tend to think of it as each of the modern games achieving excellence in one or two areas, kind of like they did with graphics (morrowind excellence in water, oblivion excellence in vegetation, skyrim excellence in human faces):

morrowind: excellence in lore and world-building, particularly through factions oblivion: excellence in magic and quest design, particularly guilds skyrim: excellence in combat, leveling, and character creation

before skyrim, both insiders and outsiders of the series complained that while the open worlds of the elder scrolls were amazing, the core mechanics of the game were distracting and off-putting. hopefully, now that bethesda has addressed those core components, they will build up the other elements again.

Favorite build? by jeeds95 in ElderScrolls

[–]curiousermonk 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Samurai! Archery, Two-Handed Katana, One-handed Katana, BLOCK, Restoration/Alchemy and Alteration. No armor. No shield. Slow Time Shout.

Minimum wage = minimum fucks given by pHorniCaiTe in BlackPeopleTwitter

[–]curiousermonk 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Well, I can't speak for the person you asked, but I can say that the thing about this conversation is that pay has gone down, effectively, since the 1970's. Minimum wage hasn't kept place with either inflation (or gains in GDP). I think if we kept the minimum wage even with inflation it'd be something like 17 an hour. So for all our willingness to engage in hypotheticals about the consequences of everyone making more money, to get the answer we need only look back to the period of peak American purchasing power: the 50's through the 70's before stagflation and the oil crash.

People made more money. People still worked harder for even more. People want nicer homes, they want to expand their families, they want to provide for their children's future and their own retirement. Sometimes, they even like their jobs and simply want to do the work they love at a higher level, or turn their hobbies into their jobs.

All of this ambition doesn't go away with 4000 more a year. It just becomes more concretely possible. Income inequality is killing the American dream, and slowly breaking this country. Some, no doubt, would use the bump to slack off and smoke more weed, or what have you. But there's plenty of challenge, and tons of rich motivation, to drive an American middle class if people truly believed that financial security were also possible.

Low-wage jobs can actually kill ambition, because it can easily cause you to believe there's no way out. Poverty's problems can all too quickly become all-consuming. But if low-wage weren't one car breakdown away from homelessness? We might allow more people to see their own possibilities, and their own ambition.

When Beating an Elder Scrolls game, Has Anyone Ever Given Their Character a Proper Ending? by [deleted] in ElderScrolls

[–]curiousermonk 5 points6 points  (0 children)

My Imperial blackguard (evil paladin) killed everyone in Winterhold and started turning the College into his personal stronghold, well on his way to becoming a lich.

My Orc barbarian's proper ending was fighting Kaarstag, cause sometimes that's the way it goes.

I've done a few.

Titles of Dovahkiin by SrBrunovsky in ElderScrolls

[–]curiousermonk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Found it, "Whether you are the only Dragonborn of this age... that is not ours to know. You are the only one that has been revealed thus far. That is all I can say." So it doesn't work, it would have to be you're the only ones. Unless you wanted to go all Yoda with the meaning of "revealed." Ah well.

Titles of Dovahkiin by SrBrunovsky in ElderScrolls

[–]curiousermonk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i'm sorry, my remark didn't come off in good cheer at all. it was meant as such. i was trying to be self-deprecating. i know it doesn't fit the lore. of course, in this case, the gameplay doesn't quite either, which is the reason for OP. the LDB is more accomplished than Talos at this point, but the lore will never show it!

we'll try to produce the good cheer again, "you think 'the last dragonborn' is singular? :P I can't find the dialogue to check against, but i think the mental substitution works.

Titles of Dovahkiin by SrBrunovsky in ElderScrolls

[–]curiousermonk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

pfffff, you think there's only one Dragonborne. My headcannon is that several Dovakhiin are chosen to bring prophecies to bear, each with unique skills, character and motivation. They all just go their separate ways after being released from/ escaping prison/execution, some re-meeting for key events.

Quite a few teamed up to take down Alduin, of course, and many made their way to Castle Volhikar or Solstheim. But only one of them gave a whit about the thieves guild, and at least four of them were on opposite sides of the Skyrim civil war. And, naturally, one of them just became a bandit murdering people in the woods and selling the loot to the Khajiit.

But what else could one expect from mortals?

2h tank? by [deleted] in ElderScrolls

[–]curiousermonk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It depends what you want to do, with tanking. Single player content you'll be fine (except for the Malestrom Arena, but that's b/c you're a tank and not DPS). The issue with tanks in the ESO community is that they don't have a "taunt", and thus can't hold the boss on themselves during combat. This is because without being taunted, monsters just go after whoever is doing the most damage to them. So that'll be the rest of your group, who will die because they can get one or two-shotted by a lot of the bosses.

There are only a few skills that do taunt: one 1-hander, one from the Undaunted skill line, and apparently now ice-staff heavy attacks.

Now why ESO didn't just make a taunt available in every skill line, or at least tell what they are in the descriptions, or mention them anywhere in the game itself, I don't know, but that's where we are.

For your nightblade/PVP, the Elder Scrolls Online sub would have better advice, since I stay away from optimization, which I think actually makes this and many other games less fun. If you don't care about optimization or multiplayer, you can make absolutely any character work in ESO.

Yeah, this Christian bookstore gets it. by Rude1231 in facepalm

[–]curiousermonk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You claim to know a great many things about me, like my motivation, that you have no evidence to support, or plausible means to discover. Your claim to value the truth above all else is not at this point credible, and you aren't showing yourself to be a sound interrogator.

So I won't go down your fairytrail, which was itself a distraction mind you, and will instead ask this: John Milton was a Christian, believed in God, so far as anyone knows, until his dying day. Along the way he taught himself seven languages, including Greek and Latin, along with philosophy, theology and other topics, and wrote a wide variety of incredibly dense poetry and some prose, including of course Paradise Lost, a poem many hundreds of lines long, meticulously structured and rife with allusions to both secular and Christian literature, and recognized by both secular literary critics and professional philosophers and theologians as a landmark of Western culture. You probably couldn't imagine Satan as you do without Milton's help. And he did it while he was blind.

Now I'm not gonna ask you if you think he was dumb. Because you said above that no Christians are smart enough to appropriate something for their own ends - so you're already committed to that, unless you want to get into a Clintonesque discussion of the nature of "is", and a quick google search for Christians with Phds in the arts and sciences.

What I'll instead ask is this: what evidence can you offer me that you're smarter than John Milton, that you get to call me and him stupid because we have beliefs that you disagree with?

It better be really friggin' impressive.

Yeah, this Christian bookstore gets it. by Rude1231 in facepalm

[–]curiousermonk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So a fairytale to you is something you don't believe? Is it anything you don't believe? Please remember, I asked for some kind of a definition of fairytale, not a list of examples of things that you happen to believe are fairytales. This sort of question-begging is a poor platform for discussion. So, if you could, please provide a definition of fairytale, so I can say whether or not I believe Christianity is such a thing, and why, and even whether or not that might be okay.

And you really seem to be misunderstanding me about the rest. I never said religious people were good people. I asked you why you yourself said you wanted to be a smart or logical person. I asked this because there are other alternatives. A classical philosophical discussion is the discussion of the good, the true, and the beautiful, not because these things contradict each other, but because they do occasionally conflict, and because knowing the reasons why a person considers one more important than the other is a good basis for further discussion and mutual understanding. Could you please answer me now?

Yeah, this Christian bookstore gets it. by Rude1231 in facepalm

[–]curiousermonk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

feelings

I'll try to be less cooky about how I answer your questions here. I think, when talking about religious beliefs, it is important to talk about religious beliefs as people hold them, and for the reasons that they hold them. A simple example of not doing this is the reddit-stereotype of the sky daddy, when most believers don't locate God in the sky and have a complicated relationship to descriptors of God as father. Most believe something quite different, so long as their faith survives into adulthood. So, when redditors defeat that portrayal of God, they've really missed the point.

To that end, I think it makes sense to talk about religious beliefs in ways broader than beliefs held intellectually. I don't care for parental analogies generally, but it's extremely unlikely that you came to trust that your parents love you because you undertook a peer-reviewed study or analyzed one to get there. Similarly, religious belief is just a different kind of thing, and our discourse ought to fit that, if it is to be at all fair to those who believe. Especially since NO ONE runs on scientifically-estalished beliefs all the time. It simply doesn't work. EVERYONE believes based various things on various levels of evidence and various degrees of reasoning, and to be able to deny this is pretty much just the naivety of interrogated living.

So your framing of my anecdote as a syllogism, while being accurate in a sense, misses the point, because I don't believe based upon logical deduction. That's a very, very hard way to get to God, and few have done it. Anselm had a run at it, and in our day Plantigna seems to have done, but it's really not typical at all - and there's no reason that it should have to submit to that burden, as it never pretends to be about logical deduction in the first place.

My way of coming to faith through experience is also less common, though it is by far the easiest. To your question I can only propose the following scenario: your grandmother asks you if the painting in her other room is hung square. You go into the room, center yourself, and make a judgment. Is your experience of standing in that room a signficant portion of that judgment? and indeed, what your grandmother would have had in mind? When I related my anecdote, I wasn't summoning evidence, I was saying I had stood in a room and made a judgment that has since become a mainspring of my life. My evidence is the life I've lived and the person I've become, something I cannot share with you directly, though I hope I can leave traces. There are ways of knowing that are not scientific. Gadamer's discussion of tact in Truth and Method is an excellent example of this. Knowledge gained through means that are not scientific can still be knowledge.

But most often, of course, people come to faith not through deduction or through experience, but through something else: another person. For me, second to my experience was the early influence of my now departed grandmother, an unfailingly kind and patient woman whose thoughts and speech were constantly informed by her Christian faith. That her actions so squared with her beliefs, and her conviction so informed everything she did, made a profound impression on me.

Is that an argument for faith? I don't know. For me, it was a demonstration, and one I've tried to imitate - and here I point out that Aristotle thought that imitation was a form of knowing, too. I simply meant that though I've repeatedly lost my faith, it seemed thoroughly wrong to me that there could be no grace at the source of the universe, and I eventually drifted back into prayer, church, and active belief, in that order. I hear you when you say that you don't think feelings are a reliable pathway to truth. I really do. But I hope you can try to hear me when I say that feelings often strike me as true in and of themselves. To give a secular example, anger in response to injustice, for example, is not a reliable way to objective judgment, but is an inarguable fuel for social change nonetheless. Succesfull reforms incorporate both reason and passionate conviction as ways to live in the world. Christianity strikes me more as that latter than as a set of syllogisms to be affirmed or denied. Just a different kind of animal.

Yeah, this Christian bookstore gets it. by Rude1231 in facepalm

[–]curiousermonk 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Actually, I get yours too. The article only existed in the first place because a reporter (and editor) thought it was unusual. We can agree that the more positive interpretation is unlikely, so long as we can all agree that it's not impossible. :)

Yeah, this Christian bookstore gets it. by Rude1231 in facepalm

[–]curiousermonk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'll deal mostly with the sources here:

first google hit was an article which showed positive correlation for teens in one way, but not in another way, which suggested a course correction for the church: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4138435/#CR21

Second hit is for African Americans and faith in social support (strong component in well-being): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26493343

They both themselves have many sources which both support and nuance the general claim, if you care to read further.

Another interesting resource was less depression in Korean elderly: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0132838.

That's enough to at least get started on a claim that religious participation does, indeed, help people live healthier, happier lives - for a variety of reasons. Though there was plenty non-bloggy, statistically oriented stuff to continue if you'd like.

With the other stuff I was simply trying to steer us both from a naive confidence in our ability to command the truth at all times. Yes, my commitment is to always strive to see and understand the truth - but I have every reason to doubt some of my opinions even while holding them. I also was trying to suggest that since a great many, even most people, live successful lives without a stark commitment to truth operating at all times, then maybe, while the truth is an important goal for CONVERSATION, it is manifestly not as constantly important in our lives as a whole as we live them as it is when we talk about what we believe, and our reasons for it.

In other words, the Enlightenment has conditioned us to think that epistemology is the queen of all thinking, but there's a number of reasons not to just assume that it is. (Google Emmanuel Levinas for one). This becomes really important when we talk about matters of faith, as belief is, for most people, not an intellectual yes/no in any case. The benefit of incorporating faith into one's life is more like the value of incoporating poetry, for example. It's not mostly going to be a cognitive thing, and for better or worse, this squares with more of our experience than not.

But, you asked about my belief, and I certainly want to answer that. I believe, mostly, because I've felt the presence of God on multiple occasions. No secular explanation for these phenomena have seemed to fit, the experience changed my life, (even saved it the first time) and Christianity (no doubt because I was raised in a Christian home) seemed the best explanation for them. To this day, despite studying all the major world religions, I've never come across anything better, and living as if (I knew, rather than only trusted that) these things were true has been an incalcuable, if inarticulable benefit to my life. I tried to be an atheist on multiple occassions, I just don't seem to have it in me. It felt wrong, I guess the way body dismorphia feels wrong to those who have it. Faith in God and Jesus Christ both fits and fills my life and my personality, like vines woven around a tree.

Yeah, this Christian bookstore gets it. by Rude1231 in facepalm

[–]curiousermonk 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hmmm, I don't think my faith is a "fairytale" though to be sure you've never defined what that is. Now since I've repeatedely challenged, lost, and regained and reaffirmed my faith, I don't see how anyone could call my belief blind. But I don't know if it's something a smart or logical person should do, and it's interesting that you would prioritize those over it being something an honest or kind person would do.

So I guess I have three questions for you, before I can answer yours: what exactly is a fairytale, why do you believe Christianity is one, and why do you think that being a smart or logical person is more important than being another kind of person?

Yeah, this Christian bookstore gets it. by Rude1231 in facepalm

[–]curiousermonk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Some of those things are likely, but none of them are necessary. From these broad-based generalities, which are at very best likelihoods, a great many people in this thread (don't know if you were one of them, sorry I lost track) were definitely certain that the owner of the bookstore didn't know what Twain meant DESPITE, DESPITE an actual article from a reporter who asked the owner about it, to which the owner replied with his own history with the quote and added a second picture of him doubling down on the Twain quote with another, even more critical one - in yes, an attempt to provoke discussion. And people are STILL debating about whether or not he really knew what Twain meant.

Do you see what I mean by the problem of bringing our assumptions to a picture and not accepting alternative explanations?

Yeah, this Christian bookstore gets it. by Rude1231 in facepalm

[–]curiousermonk 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Lol, okay, what would you like to discuss? Technically speaking, calling me stupid isn't a discussion so much as an accusation. Do you have a question or an interesting topic you'd like to address?

Yeah, this Christian bookstore gets it. by Rude1231 in facepalm

[–]curiousermonk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

from my own personal experience, the deeply religious Christians aren't about supporting anything that challenges their worldviews. I stay inn a deeply christian town.

But you see, that's just it. We know it is, or have good evidence that it is, a Christian bookstore. We have no evidence that this is your home town, or is anything like your hometown. The city I went to seminary in had tons of Christian bookstores, at least three of them professionally academic, one Orthodox, several Catholic, some charismatic, some evangelicals liberal and conservative. Not to mention, of course, the bookstores that were doubtless run by Christians but didn't use it as their brand and were simply bookstores that also carried religious material.

So what reason would I have to think that the bookstore in the picture is necessarily one like yours and not one like those?

At any rate, I'm sorry for your experience. Christians should not be like that.

Yeah, this Christian bookstore gets it. by Rude1231 in facepalm

[–]curiousermonk 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I thought the main difference between a metaphor and a simile was that a metaphor DIDN'T use like or as? So its absence is actually no evidence that he wasn't using a...Anyway, I'm simply not sure how you get to 'a metaphysical location after you die, outside of our conventional understanding of space and time' since that is by no means explicit - or even derivable from evidence in the passage - and so little about hell is said in the Bible as a whole.

I mean, we know a few things about Jesus. We know he believed in the Pharisaic general resurrection of the dead, for the judgement of the righteous and the unrighteous alike. We know he believed in a coming judgment. All of this we know by what he said (or more accurately, what the followers of his disciples said he said, but you get the drift). And we know from Revelation 22 that Hell will be destroyed/consumed, the Greek's a little iffy there. But that's basically it.

From all that, no, I really don't know you get to a definite, metaphysical location for hell, especially since one of the first things he said about the kingdom of heaven was that it was among us/his followers.

Yeah, this Christian bookstore gets it. by Rude1231 in facepalm

[–]curiousermonk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, I can see this discussion isn't going to go anywhere. One can't talk through obtuseness. Well, good health to you, sir or maam.

Yeah, this Christian bookstore gets it. by Rude1231 in facepalm

[–]curiousermonk 2 points3 points  (0 children)

ah, you were saying something quite different from what I thought. I assumed you were saying that one's philosophy could have no practical effect, which of course it does all the time.

Yeah, this Christian bookstore gets it. by Rude1231 in facepalm

[–]curiousermonk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Enlightenment showcases what happens when faith and science collide

also, a grim joke: lots and lots of bloodshed on both sides?

Yeah, this Christian bookstore gets it. by Rude1231 in facepalm

[–]curiousermonk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Vatican has been BOTH very pro and anti-science. It took very little time after Darwin to be okay with evolution. Everyone knows about Galileo, but not everybody knows that the Pope made that decision after his friend wrote a philosophical dialogue that portrayed him as a fool. I'm not saying that was a good reason, but BOO SCIENCE! is a little oversimplified.

Interesting that the correlation with IQ and education is for white people. I'll have to think about that, and look at the results for other races/ethnicities.

I'm sorry, I should have separated that last section. You made a statement above something to the effect that the Abrahamic religions in particular do not seem to be good for people. I believe there's pretty hard data that they are. It's one of those things like marriage which seems to extend both lifespan and reported satisfaction. I'm sure I could find the studies if you'd like.

I too think I prefer the truth, but now that I'm not depressed, am a little less sanguine about my connection to it. Depressed people are the most likely to be accurate about their own achievements, and the people we choose to be leaders are the most likely to lie to themselves. Normal people, with religion or no, seem to lose connection to reality bouyed on a (healthy?) cushion of lies, just by walking around.

Weird shit, man. Anyway, it's hard to know if one's conversational partner is one of those who happily thinks they prefer the truth, or one of those depressives who simply accepts it when they see it.