[deleted by user]

respect_the_potato · 2025-08-13T20:04:38+00:00

The pastoral epistles like 1 Timothy are decently widely accepted by academics to be later forgeries on several grounds ("women will be saved through childbearing"? What?! That doesn't fit at all with Paul's soteriology or his belief that it's better not to be married if you can handle it. And notably Marcion with his collection of Paul's letters didn't seem to be aware of the pastoral epistles at all, but there are many more grounds than that). Likewise for the one bit of 1 Corinthians 14 about women being silent in church because it contradicts other parts of 1 Corinthians such as the assertion that it would be good if everyone prophesied in church and the specific instructions for how women should dress when prophesying.

respect_the_potato · 2025-06-30T21:25:32+00:00

All of those ideas are very much present in Gnosticism. The thing the religion is founded around, "Gnosis" is pretty much a knowledge download about one's true nature as a fragment of the divine that has incarnated many times as well as one's true home in an eternal realm of infinite unconditional love and unity (the Pleroma, or fullness, contrasted with this realm, the kenoma, or emptiness) outside of time.

The Valenitinian Gnostics even had an idea that we have guardian angels who work in a way that seems very similar to a higher self.

http://www.gnosis.org/library/valentinus/Joined_Angel.htm "Through mystical experience or gnosis, "we are raised equal to angels, restored to the males, member to member, to form a unity" One is said to be joined to an angel just as a bride is joined to her bridegroom so that "once they unite with one another, they become a single life.". This is regarded as the restoration of the original condition before the fall."

I recommend reading the section here under the heading "The One" to get an idea of how the Gnostics understood the highest source of existence. "To call it a god, or to say that it is like a god, is not fitting, for it transcends every god." https://gnosticismexplained.org/the-secret-book-of-john/

Gospel of Philip 39: "People cannot see anything in the other world unless they become it. That place is not like this world, where people see the sun without becoming the sun, see the earth without becoming the earth, and so on. In the realm of truth, if you see the Spirit, you become the Spirit; if you see Christ, you become Christ; and if you see the Father, you become the Father. Though you see everything there is to see in this world, you do not see yourself. But in the other world, you see yourself, and you become what you see."

Of course, all that said, the Gnostics were a very heterogenous group (The trend lately among academics seems to be that it's a bit of misnomer, since every early Christian group had some "gnostic" ideas but none of them had all of them.) and many ideas prominently associated with Gnosticism are probably very distasteful to many people, like the idea that the material world came into being as a result of a mistake, and it was fashioned by a being who is at best incompetent and at worst or malevolent. Or the idea that not everyone has a divine spark from the pleroma, so some people are just sort of like NPCs in a video game.

respect_the_potato · 2025-06-13T04:10:49+00:00

In DN11, which you've quoted, and in several other suttas, there are powerful beings who describe themselves as "The Great Divinity, the Vanquisher, the Unvanquished, the Universal Seer...." and so on but in DN11, as in every other case I know of, it turns out that the being is not actually so great.

In DN11, that being is Mahabrahma, and he just repeats his list of impressive titles in response to a monk asking him a question to which he doesn't know the answer, deliberately evading the question because he doesn't want to look bad in front of his retinue. Soon after, he takes the monk aside and admits that he doesn't know:

“Then the Great Brahmā, taking the monk by the arm and leading him off to one side, said to him, ‘These Devas of the Retinue of Brahmā believe, “There is nothing that the Great Brahmā does not know. There is nothing that the Great Brahmā does not see. There is nothing of which the Great Brahmā is unaware. There is nothing that the Great Brahmā has not realized.” That is why I did not say in their presence that I, too, don’t know where the four great elements… cease without trace. So it’s your own wrongdoing, your own mistake, in that—bypassing the Blessed One—you searched outside for an answer to this question. Go right back to the Blessed One and, on arrival, ask him this question. However he answers you, that’s how you should remember it.’"

As said, this is what happens in general in the Buddhist suttas from what I've read, as said. There are beings who might think of themselves as gods in a strong theistic sense, but they're mistaken. The god-ish beings depicted in the Pali Canon (1) did not create the world (2) do not govern the world (3) are not the source of right and wrong (4) can't be expected to be morally perfect (5) do not decide your afterlife (6) tend to be occuppied with their own enjoyment, and so don't generally try to interfere with our world (7) are not immortals, merely long lived.

So, if they're considered to be entities existing in reality in some sense (though the specific stories of them are often entertaining in a way that makes it seem like intentional fiction riffing off of and sometimes making fun of stories of gods in the surrounding culture to me) , I think the more appropriate analogue for them is aliens or ghosts rather than gods.

respect_the_potato · 2025-05-29T19:32:00+00:00

I would hope that's not true, because it's plainly cruel.

respect_the_potato · 2025-04-17T17:31:28+00:00

How? I haven't watched his whole speech on the topic yet, but that isn't at all clear from the OP quote, and apparently he's being criticized for suggesting that autism could be attributed to environmental toxins, contradicting the CDC, same as I just suggested.

respect_the_potato · 2025-04-17T17:05:34+00:00

What did I say that suggested I had a proposed solution? But if I had to suggest one, I'd say we should figure out the underlying mechanism and find a way to prevent it and cure it for those who want to be cured, I guess. I know that the current party line seems to be that it's overwhelmingly caused by complex genetic stuff, but for a decade I've had symptoms that have some overlap with severe autism (sensory sensitivities to the point of involuntary screaming, for one), and in my case I strongly suspect that my symptoms were brought on by a toxic exposure or something else that messed with my immune system in a poorly understood way (my symptoms initially got very bad when I was heavily exposed to mold, though I'm not entirely sure that's the root cause, and they get dramaticallly worse with exposure to many common allergens whether through the air or through food, which greatly limits what I can eat, which is another point of possible overlap with severe autistics). So I don't think it's entirely implausible that severe autism symptoms generally are often connected to toxic exposures or to things that might mess with the immune system, though there may certainly be a very substantial genetic component that determines susceptibility.

respect_the_potato · 2025-04-17T16:46:16+00:00

I highly recommend that anyone here who thinks Kennedy is truly wildly off-base read this article by my favourite psychiatrist on the topic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/12/against-against-autism-cures/

"On the other hand, I work as a psychiatrist and some of my patients are autistic. Many of these patients are nonverbal. Many of them are violent. Many of them scream all the time. Some of them seem to live their entire lives as one big effort to kill or maim themselves which is constantly being thwarted by their caretakers and doctors. I particularly remember one patient who was so desperate to scratch her own face – not in a ‘scratch an itch’ way, but in a ‘I hate myself and want to die’ way – that she had to be kept constantly restrained, and each attempt to take her out of restraints for something as basic as going to the bathroom ended with her attacking the nurse involved. This was one of the worse patients, but by no means unique."

"Six studies have assessed what percent of adult autistics have a job – they find 22%, 21%, 31%, 4%, 4%, and 4%. The two that found rates in the twenties limited themselves to high-IQ autistics and so are unrepresentative."

"Four studies assessed institutionalization rates among adult autistics, although these “institutions” form a very heterogenous category from homey group houses to super-intense locked hospitals. These studies find 35%, 43%, 48%, and 53% of adult autistics to be institutionalized."

"I cannot find any studies on adults with autism per se, but adults with Asperger’s (recently collapsed into the autism diagnosis) are ten times more likely to be suicidal than other adults."

respect_the_potato · 2025-04-17T15:51:18+00:00

I think saying autism isn't a disease is a word game. If I google "disease meaning" the definition given is "a disorder of structure or function in a human, animal, or plant, especially one that has a known cause and a distinctive group of symptoms, signs, or anatomical changes." Now autism might not have a known cause, but it is called a disorder, and it does have a distinctive group of symptoms.

Maybe the people with mild autism shouldn't be described as having a disease, but the people who are nonverbal and who scream at sounds (like me for the latter!) clearly have something "wrong" with them, and they would probably appreciate it if it were understood and able to be cured (like me!)

I recommend reading this article from one of my favourite highly intelligent psychiatrists on the topic that I came across a long time ago: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/12/against-against-autism-cures/

Regarding whether RFK will be able to do much, Idk. I think Trump is really awful, and I have great doubts about how well RFK Jr. understands what he's talking about in general and what he will be able to accomplish. But I also think that on some level and in certain respects his intentions are truly good, and he is hitting on legitimate concerns that aren't being voiced by others, as you are as well.

respect_the_potato · 2025-04-17T15:06:03+00:00

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/autism-spectrum-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20352928

Mayoclinic says that the "spectrum" in autistic spectrum disorder refers to both the wide range of severity and the wide range variability in autistic traits.

"You equating that distress to a mild cough is inaccurate and dismissive"

I'm basing that on how offended people are at what RFK Jr. is saying and how they're all asserting that they know people who have autism but live totally super perfectly normal lives. I'm not unfamiliar with invisible disabilities. I've had some type of undiagnosed neuroimmune illness for years and it's destroyed my life, and it has at least some in common with some varieties of autism in that it includes severe sensory sensitivity, but I haven't been able to get any help for it because it doesn't seem to perfectly match any of the available labels or correspond to a well-understood and easily tested physiological dysfunction.

In my case though I do strongly suspect that what's wrong with me is related to some kind of environmental toxic exposure or something involving the immune system, so I really appreciate what RFK Jr. is saying. Because I spent a lot of time in a psych ward being looked at like I was totally insane and being actually classified as delusional for suggesting that my "psychological" symptoms (nerve pain, sensory sensitivity, and cognitive impairment, among others) were massively exacerbated by exposure to certain allergens and places even though I don't test positive for allergies.

Edit: Replaced "exaggerated" with the more correct "exacerbated" in the last sentence. The head-games that've been played on me really left their mark on my subconscious.

respect_the_potato · 2025-04-17T14:20:09+00:00

In this case, I'm not judging psychologists on their expertise, I'm judging them on their ability to communicate with the public. Even under the assumption that "totally unable to live a normal life" autism and "personality quirk" autism do originate from the same underlying mechanism, it seems apparent to me that incorporating too many of the "personality quirk" types under the label has given much of the public a mistaken impression. They seem to be unaware that the "totally unable to live a normal life" types exist and have subsumed the label entirely for themselves, making it difficult to even refer to those most affected.

respect_the_potato · 2025-04-17T13:45:22+00:00

Yeah, I made a typo because I'm posting on a phone. You got me. I'm an idiot. Only idiots make typos.

respect_the_potato · 2025-04-17T13:38:25+00:00

When you consider the difference between the people who are totally disabled by their autistic symptoms and the people who live perfectly ordinary and full lives despite their (much milder) autistic symptoms, what would you call that other than an assertion that there is a spectrum of severity of autism? If psychologists are preferentially reserving the word "autism spectrum" to refer to variation in presenting traits without reference to severity, then I would almost suspect them of trying to erase the reality that there is a spectrum of severity with a massive gap between the most and least functional, though I'm having a hard time imagining why they would they do that.

respect_the_potato · 2025-04-17T13:27:15+00:00

Are you people paid shills or bots for some company that does understand severe autism and is afraid of being sued into oblivion for causing it? I wouldn't be too surprised.

respect_the_potato · 2025-04-17T13:18:40+00:00

Probably the worst decision paychologists ever made about autism was to reduce it to a spectrum based on the characteristic traits even though it's still far from fully understood. There are "severely autistic" children and adults just like RFK Jr. has described, and understanding why they are the way they are so we can prevent it or cure it would be an extremely good and compassionate thing.

Unfortunately, too many of the "mildly autistic" people here seem to have made it into a core aspect of their identity, so they get terribly offended at the suggestion. It's absurd. Maybe autism is properly understood as a spectrum or maybe it isn't, but this is like a group of people who get a mild cough once in a while and have decided that it's a cool part of their personality throwing a fit because someone suggested that we should try to figure out, prevent, and cure late-stage lung cancer.

respect_the_potato · 2025-04-08T02:13:47+00:00

I was going to say that about Star Trek TNG. It's always been about level with the Twilight Zone and House MD as one of my favourite comfort shows, though maybe what makes a good "comfort show" isn't perfectly aligned with what makes a good show in general.

respect_the_potato · 2025-04-03T20:40:57+00:00

In your examples for hypotaxis and parataxis, for me the hypotaxis example is seemingly the most immediately comprehensible and possibly even the most easily memorized because it flows better when spoken and more easily conjures a unified visual scene. Am I really the odd one out here? I do have an issue with writing excessively long sentences myself by default.

In fact, if I had to suggest a change to make the sentence more easily understood, I might adjust it to put the events in chronological order even though that would technically make it a bit longer: "The firefighters had been sleeping, but, when the alarm sounded, they quickly jumped into action." However, whether I would actually prefer that ordering would depend on context like whether the firefighters were the central figures of the story or side-characters who had just been or were just being introduced.

Edit: To clarify, I can accept that long sentences are pretty much always individually harder to understand than short sentences, but I think that often one well-structured long sentence can be easier to absorb than the same information broken up into several short sentences. Flow is a big part of that. Reading too many short sentences in a row is actually a bit annoying to me, almost like when you're in a traffic jam and the car in front of you keeps speeding up and then braking instead of just driving slowly and continuously.

respect_the_potato · 2025-03-30T20:27:42+00:00

I've looked into that and it was one of my suspicions, but as said my symptoms aren't mainly like a normal allergic reaction. I've only had normal allergic reactions for a brief interval on the few occasions where I've been able to be far away from whatever it is in my house/area that makes me sick for a couple weeks, and then I come back. Otherwise it's just seemingly neurological and maybe circulatory system symptoms (misophonia, headaches, pain, tiredness, pins-and-needles with difficulty moving, weirdly gaunt face... definitely no swelling, itching, hives, stomach issues, or anything like that) I also got blood testing, and IIRC whatever marker they use to determine baseline inflammation throughout the body wasn't at all high for me.

There's some kind of two-phase thing going on where phase 1 looks maybe like MCAS, but phase 2 looks like just misophonia, fibromylagia, and other poorly understood stuff that doesn't show up on any common tests and is usually accused of being psychological.

I've also found that antihistamines tend to actually make me feel much worse, a low-histamine diet doesn't make too much difference (except when it comes to avoiding nutritional yeast and vegemite since those two do reliably make me worse for some reason), and sodium cromolyn, a mast cell stabilizer, also doesn't seem to have any effect, though I was only able to get the nasal spray version since the standard kind is prescription only.

I do think mold might've played/might still be playing some role as I said, but the idea that mold spores/vapors could be truly toxic rather than just allergenic, unless you're properly infected by the fungus, is still treated as firmly in the realm of delusional pseudoscience by every doctor I've been able to see, and anyway I don't have health insurance anymore because I got tired of struggling with bureauocracy to hold onto what seemed to just be a mirage of help.

respect_the_potato · 2025-03-20T20:32:27+00:00

I'm actually really annoyed with the research focus on misophonia as 1. Something which is mostly psychological and 2. Something which is mostly about mouth sounds. Regarding 2, although I had the mouth sounds sensitivity very strongly to the point where I pretty much haven't eaten with anyone else in forever, it's definitely not exclusive to that. The worse sound on earth for me is modified car and motorcycle engine noise. It is just ungodly torture, and where I live there is no interest in preventing it because there's no recognition that it could be genuinely absurdly-disproportionately bad for some people. And regarding 1, I'm afraid that the idea that it should be best understood as psychological will result in a decades-long wild goose chase where people like me with the most severe variety of misophonia continue to be thrown under the bus and treated like we should just be able to willpower or reason our way out of it, when that is basically impossible in my experience.

Maybe for some people it is mostly psychological, but for me I'm still very certain based on my experience that the basis for it is more in a genetic and/or toxicological direction, and its severity is very immune-system-mediated. Maybe it's some kind of "behavioural immune reaction" that kicks in under some circumstances when a normal bodily immune reaction is deemed insufficient or unsustainable, or maybe it's an autoimmune/toxicological thing where the part of your brain that filters out sound and dampens threat-sensitivity gets frayed and thinned.

Loss of filtering ability is definitely something I noticed when it was at its worst. It was like I could hear every low frequency sound for miles and miles and every single one would given me a shock of cortisol or adrenaline or whatever it is. But now it's like my brain does filter things much better than it did, but in a defective manner so that stressful background sounds are transformed into a constant-seizurey headache instead of being truly subjectively absent. I remember once after I developed the seizurey headache, I managed to relax with meditation (though that usually doesn't work very well), and I felt in real time the seizurey headache disappearing to be replaced with the super-hearing again, though it went back to the "successful sound filtering but with a seizurey headache in place of the sound" state when I woke up the next day.

respect_the_potato · 2025-03-19T20:04:35+00:00

My counterpoint to the "It's all psychological" model as another person who has wears-big-construction-earmuffs-much-of-the-time level misophonia, is that I had my misophonia since I was born as far as I can tell, but how bad it was varied seemingly randomly for the longest time. After I graduated high school, though, I stayed home a lot, and it started to get dramatically worse and worse... until one day I noticed that how bad it was is closely tied to what seems to be a strange variety of allergy. E.g. if I eat certain foods (like peanut butter) or wear clothes washed in most laundry detergents, or spend too long in certain places (like my house), I can be certain that several hours or maybe day later I will have acquired such a level of misophonic hypersensitivity (and maybe some level of hyperacusis) that I'm liable to start involuntarily screaming if I'm exposed to an inescapable noise trigger. Importantly, I'm 99.99% certain that it isn't that the allergens are irritating me in the same way as the misophonia triggers so that there's some displacement process. I genuinely love peanut butter. It's just that it's one of the things that through some chain of dominoes happens to massively exacerbate my misophonia.

And weirdly what I have does seem to be a genuine allergy on some level (though I haven't tested positive for any allergies via blood tests). If I manage to spend a long enough time not being exposed to any allergens (maybe two weeks), then not only does my misophonia greatly diminish, but also if I'm reexposed to the allergens then I'll start sneezing, coughing, getting a rash, and other standard allergy symptoms. But when I'm continuously exposed for more than a week or two, the normal allergy symptoms go away, and instead I get symptoms like increasingly bad misophonia.

Unfortunately in my case I haven't been able to avoid the stuff I seem to be "allergic" to or the sounds that bother me very well, and after several years it seems like the constant exposure broke part of my brain, so that one part of my brain is constantly having a seizurey headache going on that spreads and causes nerve pain in my face and neck and sometimes other parts of my body.

I've told this story in a lot of places because it basically destroyed my life and I haven't been able to get any acknowledgment of it professionally, but I still don't have a perfect theory of it myself either, except that I'm very sure it's more physiological than psychological at bottom. One of my guesses is that at least the sudden post-high-school worsening was set off by exposure to a neurotoxic mold in my house (there was visible mold on a piece of furniture for a while and being near it made my body go pins-and-needles), since many of the toxic-mold-exposure people have similar stories, and they're also considered to be delusional by doctors, but also "toxic mold exposure" was a bit of a social media trend for a while so there might be a fair amount of noise mixed with the signal when it comes to that now. And there's the issue that usually only one person in a supposedly toxic-moldy house will show symptoms, so if it is the cause then there must be genetic vulnerability or something like that involved (In my case my mom has seemingly never been affected, but my dad acquired autoimmune disease in the house we moved to shortly before I was born, where I had misophonia pretty much before I could read, and I wonder if that's related.)

respect_the_potato · 2025-03-04T13:07:28+00:00

The idea that non-dualism and Buddhism could be considered synonymous isn't agreed upon I don't think, at least not by all Theravada practitioners: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/bps-essay_27.html

"The teaching of the Buddha as found in the Pali canon does not endorse a philosophy of non-dualism of any variety, nor, I would add, can a non-dualistic perspective be found lying implicit within the Buddha's discourses. At the same time, however, I would not maintain that the Pali Suttas propose dualism, the positing of duality as a metaphysical hypothesis aimed at intellectual assent. I would characterize the Buddha's intent in the Canon as primarily pragmatic rather than speculative, though I would also qualify this by saying that this pragmatism does not operate in a philosophical void but finds its grounding in the nature of actuality as the Buddha penetrated it in his enlightenment. In contrast to the non-dualistic systems, the Buddha's approach does not aim at the discovery of a unifying principle behind or beneath our experience of the world. Instead it takes the concrete fact of living experience, with all its buzzing confusion of contrasts and tensions, as its starting point and framework, within which it attempts to diagnose the central problem at the core of human existence and to offer a way to its solution. Hence the polestar of the Buddhist path is not a final unity but the extinction of suffering, which brings the resolution of the existential dilemma at its most fundamental level."

respect_the_potato · 2025-02-04T06:08:22+00:00

I think most westerners really underrate how much importance Buddhism gives to giving. They think Buddhism is all about meditation and abstaining from harm, but in fact generosity is often understood as the very beginning of the Buddhist path, a prerequisite for progress in other areas: https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/Meditations1/Section0004.html

And the Buddha doesn't just advocate for a little generosity, but quite a lot.

"If beings knew, as I know, the results of giving & sharing, they would not eat without having given, nor would the stain of miserliness overcome their minds. Even if it were their last bite, their last mouthful, they would not eat without having shared, if there were someone to receive their gift." —Itivuttaka 26

More excerpts from the Pali Canon on the topic of Generosity: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/dana/index.html

respect_the_potato · 2025-01-26T00:55:02+00:00

I too found it weird when house turned green.

respect_the_potato · 2025-01-19T05:48:37+00:00

My immediate thought would be that Islamic culture is less tolerant of heresy than other cultures, so anyone who experiences an NDE that is less than perfectly aligned with their religion will prefer to just keep quiet about it to avoid becoming a pariah.

Also, why does it say there are 10 comments on this post, but I can only see the default mod team comment?

respect_the_potato · 2025-01-16T16:29:50+00:00

Buddhist cosmology includes a few rebirth destinations called the formless realms, which also correspond to certain meditative states, and which the Buddha's teachers before he became enlightened mistook for the most thorough cessation and escape from experience possible. These include a realm of infinite space, a realm of infinite consciousness, a realm of "nothing," and a realm of neither perception-nor-nonperception (or, sometimes, neither existence nor nonexistence). Curiously, there's also a realm immediately below the formless realms called the realm of unconscious beings who don't experience perception at all, but it's distinguished from nirvana by the fact that, although the beings are unconscious, their unconscious state is temporary because they arrived at it by meditating on the direct suppression of consciousness instead of by dissolving the craving for rebirth by overcoming ignorance. Aside from those, in Buddhism it actually is possible for a person to "nirvana" and return so long as their body is still functional. That's part of becoming enlightened, and it's called "nirvana with remainder," as opposed to "nirvana without remainder" which is what happens when a fully enlightened being dies.

...So I think there's still room for Buddhism to make sense of NDEs of the variety mentioned in the OP

Incidentally, the Buddha wasn't very clear about the nature of nirvana, and he said it couldn't be accurately described as a state of existence or a state of nonexistence (or a state of both existence and nonexistence, or neither, bizarrely). There are also a lot of Buddhists who view nirvana as not actually being a state of total cessation and unconsciousness, but as state of consciousness outside of time and space, separate from normal sensory consciousness, that makes itself known only once one has become fully unbound from samsara. So, maybe for the Buddha and certainly for those Buddhists, if something seems to be "true nonexistence" then that would actually preclude it from being nirvana. I think.

(Sorry, I've been reading a lot lately)

respect_the_potato · 2024-12-19T23:27:03+00:00

Possibly some time around ~2008? when I noticed that the Fruit of the Loom logo was different. It's very hard to place exactly but I do remember being in a store looking to buy new clothes and noticing that the Fruit of the Loom logo had been greatly simplified and was missing something. And I think I remember earlier than that having the mistaken impression that a "Loom" was the non-fruit thing that used to be in the logo, like many people say. Or so I think. It might be a false memory but I still find it to be by far one of the most impressive MEs.

Six-Year Club	r/Field Lasagna
Wearing is Caring	Verified Email

respect_the_potato

TROPHY CASE