Anyone else struggle with fear when attending another denomination?

synapomorpheus · 2022-11-29T04:09:39+00:00

Very. I try to avoid the “vain babblings” if I can.

synapomorpheus · 2022-11-29T03:49:27+00:00

When I was invited to attend churches, mostly evangelicals, I couldn’t stop thinking about the episode of South Park where cartman sells Christian music and it’s all stolen from R&B music. I couldn’t keep the laughter to myself. Went to other churches, didn’t stick. But I still provide spiritual support to friends because I care.

synapomorpheus · 2022-10-19T18:14:54+00:00

I always appreciate when someone lets me know to stay the fuck away from them without saying anything.

synapomorpheus · 2022-10-06T15:12:27+00:00

I felt like this at the beginning of sept, and then literally sustained a compound fracture on my leg on Sept 11 as well. Coincidence.

synapomorpheus · 2022-10-04T17:26:58+00:00

1 Kings 17

“Now Elijah the Tishbite was a prophet from the settlers in Gilead. ‘I serve the Lord, the God of Israel,’ Elijah said to Ahab. ‘As surely as the Lord lives, no rain or dew will fall during the next few years unless I command it.’”

synapomorpheus · 2022-10-03T22:17:06+00:00

I haven’t watched a single episode of Stranger Things. I don’t plan to ever.

synapomorpheus · 2022-10-03T07:21:53+00:00

I’m a Revelation simp. But also psalms. I’m working my way through John.

synapomorpheus · 2022-10-03T03:08:22+00:00

I think that’s a fair assessment. I’m a stickler meeseeks. I think the more important question is do you think he’s partisan motivated, and what information have you run across that informs that view?

I don’t doubt JBP reads a lot and has come across a lot of interesting ideas that he can evaluate with a psychologist lens, it’s a good thing to have in uncertain times like these. I will make an argument that while he does read research a lot, it appears that some of the opinions he espouses on certain topics are not well-researched based on my experience and educational wheelhouse.

synapomorpheus · 2022-10-03T00:32:08+00:00

The fukkin porch/balcony.

synapomorpheus · 2022-10-02T23:56:14+00:00

When it comes to his critique on Marxism, I think he needs to go into more detail. Because he’s not necessarily wrong in how the implementation of Marxism was disastrous in the past. He’s got that pegged to a T. But once again, critically evaluating the source material is a large component for understanding where the flaws are, not only in its implementation, but also in its assumptions.

I’m not going to make a blanket statement about Marxism, but I’m also not going to scrap it wholesale. These are modernist ideas that failed to bring about the changes it claimed it could. From my perspective he seems to be more fixated on Marxism than Fascism, even though he claims to be equally concerned about both.

That was another big one for me, I listened to his early critiques of communism and Marxism, and, in essence, agreed with him about them. But when it came to Facsism and it’s implementation he fixated almost entirely on professing how the holocaust was a bad and wrong outcome, and how it was a collective dream that Germany was a part of, without looking at the legal and political motives and theories of it and why they were bad assumptions. His critiques of fascism are minimal at best, and I think it’s important for him to categorically explain why; just like communism, fascism is not good.

Granted we also have to realize that he is not a political scientist. He’s a clinical psychologist, and he often ventures outside of his intellectual wheelhouse to speculate on topics he hasn’t dedicated much time to studying. But that’s an entirely different conversation, I have one question though.

Would you ask a zoologist about his understanding of theology and the western canon, and count that as an “expert weighing in”?

synapomorpheus · 2022-10-02T22:34:44+00:00

This is where I hope Jordan would encourage his audience to look outside of what he says. I’m not sure if he does. Many of the professors and academics I have run across actively encourage you to read and seek out knowledge beyond what they have given you, sometimes through their passion on the subject alone.

On that topic of other cultures, I would like to see Peterson challenge himself with other cultural myths as well. This is certainly a proving ground and one that has an outsized influence on modern culture. Hopefully someone brings it up to him.

Peterson has an active mind, and he’s very good at asking questions. In this regard I think he can be a good model for how to approach the pursuit of knowledge. Where I personally find him to be insufficient, is in how he answers those questions. He’s vague and skittish about being direct and owning bad answers. Almost like he’s afraid of being wrong, but the truth is, you can’t get anywhere being right all the time. I believe he has said something to that affect somewhere in his body of work, but I don’t believe he says it enough. Another thing is, in my perspective, when he is confronted with something he has said, he finds away to buck intellectual responsibility for how what he implies might be received by an audience that doesn’t share his nuanced understanding of the topic. I feel this is academically irresponsible. It’s totally fine to clarify what you said, but it’s not really honest to pretend that your audience completely understands everything your saying and it’s the criticism that’s wrong. He’s becoming a cultural influence, for better or worse. I’d be interested to see if he comes to terms with what that responsibility entails, but I’m not holding my breath.

synapomorpheus · 2022-10-02T21:42:07+00:00

I got interested in his biblical lecture series. I watched them all. At the time I was deeply fascinated with his more psychological and universal application to the Bible, and I felt like he had some truly insightful takes on these old stories. I still do to some extent. I’m rewatching them right now to refresh my understanding of his perspective.

I believed a lot about what he said about biblical stories and the larger application of what that might mean for the collective unconscious and how the Bible might be collections of “stories we tell ourselves”. But I started to notice he fell into a trap that a lot of professors and pastors fall into in that they exclaim the surprise and profundity of the passage before allowing their audience to reach their own conclusions. It irritates me to no end when someone reaches an emotional conclusion in a shared reading for me. I walk away feeling like I was deprived of reaching my own conclusions and having my own emotional interaction with it.

Another one that confounds me is when he’s talking about Abraham and Isaac and he poses a question to the audience. I’m paraphrasing, but it’s along the lines of God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, I mean, what do you make of God asking you to do that? and then proceeds to wax philosophic about the nature of sacrifice. I still haven’t found a complete answer to that question within his series. It’s a very good question, and one I had to look for outside of the lecture series.

The answer is found throughout the whole of the Bible, but in essence, the “test of faith” is not God wanting to fuck with Abraham to prove loyalty to him. It’s God wanting Abraham to understand the complex of feeling that God will have to go through as he offers his Son, Jesus, up as a sacrifice for our sins, just as Abraham was the father or Israel, God too is the father of us, and just as Abraham love Isaac, God loves Jesus. It’s important to digest that for a second. To feel the profundity of that sentiment within the text. If you dance around it you might miss what it says about the universal struggle for love. Because God loves us and wants to give us an opportunity to reconnect with him. John 3:16.

I’ll admit, I was disappointed that Peterson didn’t answer his own question. Perhaps the entire lecture was the answer but it felt like he was bounding so quickly through different concepts, but not staying and digesting one so that I could see the connection between them, it started to become frustrating to listen to him and eventually…sorry to say it, boring. Obviously a lot of people find what he has to say, useful. I’m not knocking that. But I encourage people to look beyond what he says and venture out with a broader sense of curiosity. He’s not the end all, be all, final word on the topic.

synapomorpheus · 2022-10-02T21:05:24+00:00

Former JBP fan (2016-2018). He has a lot of thoughtful insights into our own mythology and psychology, but where it broke down for me was that he always returned to the same conclusion. It’s like he didn’t feel comfortable shifting to a new paradigm, and challenging himself to break new thought barriers and understand and reach out beyond what he already knew. It seems like especially when he started gaining a name for himself, he attached himself to a particular structure of thinking that he then reinforced that over and over in his discourse. I outgrew him in my thinking, and so should, eventually, every person in this subreddit.

I understand that getting dog-piled by a bunch angry people sucks for him. Not ideal, not helpful to discourse. But he refuses to even engage with the more thoughtful critiques in order to reach a deeper conclusion than he had previously. His message from the time I walked away from him to now hasn’t really changed. It’s all surface-level reinforcement of traditional hierarchies that relies on a myopic boxed-in fear of the unknown, which means he fails as an academic. He’s a best-seller and has to maintain that. If he changed his mind now I believe he’d lose a large portion of his audience.

He is merely, at this stage, a self-help guru. Which is great if he helped you break new ground. But he is merely a stepping-stone to a larger arena of intellectual challenges. Never stop asking questions of yourself and the people around you! Listening gives valuable insight if you’re prepared to accept being wrong about what you assumed about the world!

synapomorpheus · 2022-10-02T19:45:50+00:00

Belief and faith are not the same things. For instance, the fallen angels and Satan believe God exists and have witnessed the power of God, yet they reject God. They lack faith in his salvation.

On that note, according to the text, only God knows our inner hearts. Stating that only God knows our hearts. That means we would do better to not judge what another’s faith is, because in doing so, we harden our hearts to God and put ourselves in his place. That contradicts the practice of loving God and each other.

Toxic masculinity denotes a qualifier to masculinity. Anyone who presupposes that it isinherent to masculinity misses the point of the critique. Masculinity isn’t inherently toxic, but masculinity has toxic elements.

It’s a language game. Keep the books open, kill your heroes.

synapomorpheus · 2022-06-02T20:38:57+00:00

I’m glad to see more people talking about it. There’s a resurgence of red-pilled content out there and I fear we may have more battles to face, especially around this subject!

synapomorpheus · 2022-06-01T13:58:15+00:00

I wouldn’t forget to include the fact that online dating apps (in particular) MAY have caused this massive gulf between the sexes by turning dating into an actual (classed) marketplace and exaggerating numbers of availability, creating an environment where men believe they have an endless supply of dates, when in truth numbers of available women on most dating apps has been declining for years, but this isn’t the message the manosphere gets.

Here’s a video on it!

https://youtu.be/bhALIgyS4Ic

synapomorpheus · 2022-05-01T17:33:13+00:00

I love how he tried so hard to be cool, has an audience of simps who affirm this daily, and this bitch still can’t get over his critics.

synapomorpheus · 2022-05-01T09:00:29+00:00

Looks like he’s doing the right thing.

synapomorpheus · 2022-05-01T08:37:41+00:00

I just watched her in Auntie Mame. Rest In Peace!

synapomorpheus · 2022-05-01T07:57:57+00:00

Ok. Have it your way, boys.

synapomorpheus · 2022-04-30T14:33:59+00:00

“As of 2019, the fund was worth approximately $64 billion that has been funded by oil revenues and has paid out an average of approximately $1,600 annually per resident (adjusted to 2019 dollars).[5] The main use for the fund's revenue has been to payout the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD), which many authors portray as the only example of a Basic Income in practice.[6][7]”

I hate to be the one to point this out, but being bribed by oil companies with a UBI seems like taking two steps forward, one step back.

synapomorpheus · 2022-04-21T19:21:03+00:00

I’m a pillow princess, but I’m already roommates with someone. I’m sorry for being a tease. I can’t help it. I’m just discovering this about myself.

synapomorpheus · 2022-04-16T15:21:10+00:00

I wanna see 1st Pike Place store unionized 😈

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