Fate or destiny? I don’t think I accused you of being either a fatalist or a predestinationist. I’m referring to the philosophical notion where, through the underlying laws of physics, a complex system of cause and effect has predetermined all past and future events. Our experience of free will under this model is illusory.
What I do believe is that a mind is a product of its circumstances (construed as broadly as possible), to the point where there’s no meaningful distinction between one and the other. “Self” is an illusion, though an important one.
Mind and self are emergent properties of the brain and how it makes sense of the world? Am I understanding that correctly? So far I agree if that’s the case.
Reality’s complicated. It’s pretty hard to make it simple.
To put it another way, I don’t believe in free will; I believe in complexity.
So, determinism essentially, or some personally defined variation of it. That’s not necessarily a bad place to be starting from if I’m understanding you correctly.
So, I guess, what it really comes down to is that I see the horrors of this world as more like disease-- something that can be approached pragmatically and maybe effectively treated or even cured-- than as moral wrongs to be judged.
Not disagreeing with you Ms. Jenneth. Retribution is great for making some people feel like “justice” has happened, but doesn’t really fix the issue. As you say, people may not be able help themselves from doing what they do. Interventions, preventative and corrective measures may work better in the long run.
Sometimes it’s not so easy, though. Human beings are kind of vengeful, vindictive creatures; knowing I shouldn’t be doesn’t keep me from sometimes wanting to hurt someone.
I think that’s pretty common for all of us, despite our best intentions.
Then I guess it fits. … I mostly just duck the label because people trying to apply one usually want to make something simple out of it.
So, I guess I avoid the word so I can define it (I see the definition is pretty nearly exactly what I said), instead of sort of having it-- or whatever people are thinking of when they hear or use it-- define me?
You can’t. You can persuade or coerce. the only way to truly change a person’s outlook is to break them utterly. Any doctrine that requires a person to be utterly broken to find its truth is fundamentally flawed. If God is so powerful that we should all be following him, he shouldn’t have made it so absurdly hard to be persuaded to do so. If we’re so flawed we need to be broken to live correctly, he should have done a better job. Any God that indulges in that level of fuckery is not worth the paper his scriptures are penned upon.
Fair enough, Ms. Jenneth. It’s not fair to have others define you based on their understanding of words you might use. As you say, some people often use it to to sort one into their, often binary, worldview and simplify one’s actual position so it’s easier to attack. I myself have been both victim and perpetrator of such fallacies, but I try really hard to not do that to others these days.
It’s hard to explain one’s incredulity to believers though. If you point out this problem most will either run away angry, shout at you angrily, or calmly tell you what a dough head you are and then proceed to tell you what you just told them, but believing it, without a trace of irony. Sometimes I wonder if attacking a believer’s God is a productive way of communicating lack of belief and its reasons with believers.
Completely on board with what you said about forcing someone to change their mind as well, by the way.
God has ordained, established, and determined all that comes to pass unto his greater glory. He has made the Minmatar people — Achurans included — Wicked and Vile that he might glorify himself in their destruction.
How mysterious are the ways of our God. How just are the ways of our God.
Belief, as a rule, comes as a sort of remarkably complete whole-- a mental framework for the world that adjusts perceptions and tints everything at least a little. But then, we pretty much all have something like this going on: the world of “objects” is a world of illusion to begin with. We all live in our own heads before we live in the world.
An Amarrian might see an apparent wrong perpetrated by God as actually perpetrated by sinful humanity, evidence of a fallen world, or perhaps divine mystery-- what more terrible thing might this exist to remedy?-- depending on worldview. Unless and until something happens to undercut the framework on a fundamental, and usually intuitive, level, everything fits.
I’m not so different this way: to me, it’s all a ferment of interaction merrily bubbling away as a part of the Totality we’re all inextricably woven into. Nothing whatsoever goes against it, because my “god” isn’t good; it just “is.” We’re just little whorls of its own substance. It’s not even paying attention to us, except insofar as we (as part of it) pay attention to each other. A lot of awfulness comes out of this, but what do we expect? It’s not here for us; we just live here as part of it. The universe isn’t morally culpable for being what it is.
It’d take a lot, to shake me from that. But then, I guess I don’t ask much.
… Maybe that’s kind of the key, actually: the more you ask for, the easier you probably are to disappoint, and the harder it’ll be to keep believing. If you don’t feel like you’re really in a position to ask for much of anything, it’s hard for anyone to find leverage to pry your world open and pour something in.
Even if I accept this as totally true, Mr. Nauplius, do you remember reflecting recently that the Directrix should really order me to kill myself?
You’d want me to “cleanse” myself by murdering people. I’d sooner be dead myself. Assuming I was prevented from ending my life, and unless something happened to persuade you that I wasn’t “given over to destruction” for some reason, you’d feel a continual sense that you were acting against your god’s will by failing to (1) subject me to some vision of Hell and (2) send me there.
My safety would be guaranteed only so long as your affection didn’t get overridden by a fit of piety. You seem to have those when you get upset, and I expect you’d find me an upsetting captive, so …
I don’t think he believes you on this one, Aria. I don’t think he believes you in part because I’m not sure he should believe you. Why should killing a few people who’ve never done you any harm bother you? The food you eat, the facilities you live in, even the air you breathe is all brought to you by the suffering and deaths of trillions. What’s three more? Is it just because you’d have to see them?
I’m not so sure about that. True slave implants replace your inner will with an external one, and as such, there may not be any part of the mind screaming, just silence. And considering our similar thoughts on the existence of free will, I’d say that whether anything of value is lost, that could not be justified by successfully creating a utopia, is debatable.
I could be a True Slave, and you might not even notice. Actually, maybe I’d be a nicer person.
What’s worse, it might even come with a kind of immortality.
Well, if it’s a consolation, it is quite likely that after some time, a True Slave has accepted its place as part of Sansha’s Nation, so even if it is hell for a while…eventually you will live in the Promised Land, for the rest of your days, and you would not want to leave it even if you could want it.
In a way, what we’ve been saying about faith? … I don’t believe in the Amarrian god. The world doesn’t seem so kind to me, as to have such a being, watching and guiding.
The god I see is blind and deaf. It can’t see and right the injustices in this world any more than I can police my own intestinal bacteria. And, it’s forgivable because it’s blind and deaf. It’s not aware of what it puts us through. That makes it okay. That even makes it beautiful.
Nauplius’s god is awake and aware of the suffering of the world-- and enjoys it. He’s a god of malice and hate, to whom cruelty is sacred.
I’m capable of murder, for any reason and maybe for no reason at all. It’s “cleansing” myself in the sight of such a being I’d prefer death to.
‘God’ isn’t doing it. People are. People who are awake and aware of the suffering around them—and enjoy it. People full of malice and hate. And yes, for them, the cruelties they inflict are sacred, part of a divine mandate and obligation.
And you cleanse yourself in their sight every day through your obedience to that malice. Maybe your immediate counter to that is ‘I don’t, I serve the Directrix, and she’s a decent person’… but she serves them. She upholds the Amarr faith, she supports the Empress and the Empire. To argue that serving her is not serving them is to argue that the lowest-ranking footsolder doesn’t serve the Crown because he or she gets their orders from an intermediary.
You serve Napkins’ god. You serve billions of him.
You deal with an extremely small, self-selected subset of them, Aria. But yes, I’ve noticed that you insist on denying the machinery of misery that supports your mistress’ lifestyle.
Edit: There’s also a pretty strong case to be made that apathy, that knowingly and willfully disregarding suffering and turning a blind eye to it all… yeah, that’s pretty monstrous. I don’t need to have a child with an arm torn off screaming and sobbing in front of me to want to do something about it. You, it seems, do.
Eh … it’s been pretty clear for a while that I’m seen as morally corrupt in Arrendis-world.
It’s okay. I knew not everybody would be able to see me as a good person considering who I work for, directly or indirectly. I made my peace with that before I took any oaths.
Is the one you’ve sworn loyalty to, and the others whom you associate, using their positions of privilege to rectify and put an end to slavery? Do you use your position of loyalty towards the same goal? Perhaps not primarily in either case, but are you and they doing what you can towards that?