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This is not only the most insane, weird, controversial, risky, potentially deeply offensive, spiritually serious, scientifically upending, philosophically inspired, personal, politically charged and mind-melting story that I have ever written, it is also the most insane, weird, controversial, risky, potentially deeply offensive, spiritually serious, scientifically upending, philosophically inspired, personal and mind-melting story that I have ever read published by a living author.

I have either worked out some incredibly serious things about reality, the human condition, religion and science that can be used to predict future events...or I've just made the most humiliating mistake of my entire life that could potentially get me kicked off of the site forever, causing literally everyone here to hate me forever. It utterly upends pretty much every consensus on these topics, and the most worrying this is, it seems to work. 

I would not even consider publishing it if I did not think "Option 1" was considerably more likely than "Option 2". Because the story I am writing literally shifted me from "Extreme Hardcore Atheist" to "Devout Christian" in a few months, and I believe I have explained it in a way that everyone can read (I have tried to tone it down as much as possible so that it is as harmless as I can make it). 

Interestingly, when I started incorporating these themes which I've worked out into some of my stories subtly, they became my most popular ones, which gave me pause for thought. 

When I finally publish it, know that I really, truly did not mean to harm anyone or hurt their feelings. What I've said, and from what you can read on the "sneak preview", know that I take this very, very seriously.

This is outrageous hubris, I'm intrigued 

I am extremely confident that you have set the bar too high and I will be let down. I will, however, most certainly read it since you have set yourself up as a CYOA mystic of sorts. I have a healthy load of skepticism, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating

I'm much more than okay, which is what shocks me. I'm utterly delighted, and I feel like I shouldn't be. It's like, I understand why everything is the way it is now. All of these things, ghosts, gods, aliens, evolution, fossil fuels, Neoplatanism, occultism, dragons, my username, Horton hears a who...all of these concepts exist for the same very simple reasons. Seriously, with that one story, Dr Seuss got closer to what is really going on with everything than pretty much every philosopher managed. 

 

Either that or I've been driven completely insane, which is not completely out of the question though I doubt it, consdiering all the people I've told have found this at the very least to be extremely interesting, even people who've been studying these things for decades. 

Okay, I have to ask, did you have any kind of majorly depressive period in the months prior to this?

And how are you sleeping right now?

Because if I seem less than enthused here, it's because these kinds of "understanding everything" epiphanies coupled with the need to tell everyone how you've discovered the most profound thing ever, and also even the "feeling great, high energy, nothing is wrong" stuff I associate pretty hard with a former member who did all that in Discord and then progressed to full blown mania.

I really, really do appreciate your concern but I haven't had anything like that wrong with me for many years now, in fact these ideas have been going around in my head for a very long time. And even then, I've checked these ideas with multiple people and they all seem to be coherent enough for them to understand. Also, I thought I ought to be very, very careful with them and not rush into anything.

The story's nearly done now anyway, so it should be out soon for people to read. I hope people at least find it interesting even if it's not convincing.

Yeah, there's this guy i know who will dissapear for a few months and then message me out of nowhere with his new 'theory of everything'. From having known him for a few years now, he switches from being depressive and suicidal, to borderline maniac and believing he will become a politician, god emperor and fix all the world's problems. He constantly comes up with philosophical ideas which are mish mashed together from other things, generally just loosely strung together and much less profound than they sounded in his head. He also is obsessed with genetics and communism? Literally refuses to get a job Because he hates capitalism so much, or thats his excuse anyways. 

If your symptoms of being on a high persist for a long time flutter, or you've had a history of thinking this stuff and being disillusioned later on, it might be mania, we might be wrong and maybe you have discovered something. But to people who don't know, it does read a lot like you're going into mania or losing emotional control. 

Thank you for your concern. I have no plans to become a politician, because I know exactly what's going on with these things.  I'm certainly not going to become a god emperor, or fix the world's problems, nor do I care to spend my time about such things. Honestly I am genuinely somewhat worried about the effect this will have on people reading on it, because if I'm right, this is pretty much the most serious thing I've ever written. 

It's not impossible that I am manic at the moment. But just because I'm manic doesn't mean I'm wrong, or that it will last.

1. This belongs in Writing Workshop (Moved)

2. You're already a Brony, it would be hard to be hated even more. Which brings us to...

3. Unless you're going to be glorifying being a pedo or degenerate fetishes like eating diaper shit, your story is unlikely to get you kicked off of here.

So assuming you avoid that especially low bar, at worst we're going to think your story sucks and that you're a retarded faggot.

At best, your story might get a facinated chuckle out of us and we'll still think you're a retarded faggot.

3.  That's a relief because it's the complete polar opposite of that

I'm likewise curious as to know how Dr seuss figured out the secrets of the universe and subliminally taught them to children through a codex of childrens books. 

I know it sounds whimsical, but if I'm right, the answer is extremely dark. Worse than that, it's literally the darkest thing that has ever been concieved by humanity, and at least one very famous and respected modern author and philosopher agrees with me. It's gnawing away at everyone's minds and spirits, and the issue is everybody knows, and have always known through the last several hundred thousand years, exactly what it is, they just don't know that they know it.

I see, well i look forward to reading it. ^_^ 

Just something to keep in mind though, even if your philosophy or ideas are completly internally consistent, to promote it to be an absolute truth everyone could agree on, youd also have to show inconsistencies in competing theories which appear to be totally internally consistent too. For instance; if someone believes all emotions, positive and negative exist for the sole purpose of repoduction and survival utility (such as anger, sadness, despair, etc) then you having an internally consistent theology relating to the christian God wouldnt be enough to convince a person like this that this 'underlying dark psychic torment' is anythin more than a byproduct of efficent natrual selection. I’m just saying this as something to consider while you work on your ideas, but I’m genuinely excited to see how you’ve woven everything together.

Okay, so, everything that you've just said is absolutely fundemental to my story, especially the (optional) ending, and I'm really, really glad you made those points because I think these are exactly the problems I've managed to solve. Believe me, I've thought this through, and if you want a tiny hint as to where I'm going with this:

 

 https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosGambit

Yggdrasil's ash | great evil suffers,

Far more than men do know;

The hart bites its top, | its trunk is rotting,

And Nithhogg gnaws beneath.

What you just said is orders of magnitude more true than you realise.

Well see now we obviously can't ban Flutter because if we do he'll become more powerful than we could ever imagine.

I can fix you.

You are not a veterinarian. Leave that to the professionals

I have done a light sneak preview of the work, as I have to assume was your intention. Following are my thoughts:

The only maxim that I found in there is "gods treat people how they treat animals." That doesn't seem accurate because no god ever threw rocks at me or kicked me in the ribs or brained me with a weedwacker or kicked me off a roof. Obviously anecdotal, but you really didn't provide any kind of support for this. It seems like you may have just based this off of your own disdain for the consumption of flesh.

I'm not sure how orthodox your version of Christianity is, but Jesus Christ himself consumed flesh at minimum one time. Almost certainly add an additional consumption during each Passover celebration he was alive to enjoy.

Your treatment of Pan, Dionysus, and drinking/revelry in general seem to bely a general anti-fun sentiment. Certainly, excess was a staple in their cults, but it seems like you may just be preaching teetotalism

I also have to say, claiming enlightenment and a clearer view into life's mysteries than any of us mere mortals is hilarious when done behind the cutesy pony avatar. I suppose that's neither here nor there though

These are all addressed later on in the story. And I mean all of them.

I wish I had a tenth of the confidence you have. 

Okay Mr. Freeman

This proclamation does have big Terrance Howard energy.  Maybe an appearance on Joe Rogan is in Flutter's future?

Who's that? I mean the Russian one.

https://youtu.be/lWAyfr3gxMA?si=JRLDziNbN9OwbgmT

To anyone still watching, my pretentious, crazed ramblings have finally been published.

Imma check this one out.

2 hours later. It was fucking amazing!

Where were they published?
Nevermind, I found it. It wasn't popping up on your profile for some odd reason.

You consummate retard

Ew, I'm not consummating you.

You illiterate, slant-eyed pissant

You illiterate, yellow-eyed tar baboon.

you guys should do a Thunderdome fight, release all this gay pent up aggression at each other in a spectacle for all of us to see

If I win this Atlanta native might switch me on get-back mode.

You wouldn't win. I don't lose against Asians

FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

Fine, I'll accept if you do. But you know what they say, if they're black, don't hold back

I formally accept your challenge

@Mizal

Let's fucking go!

The battle between the 2 ageless: who will win, black don't crack or asian don't raisin. Let's see who'll be left standing when the dust settles

Okay but only if it gets you guys to stop flirting, he's like 14 sheesh.

I have so much to catch up on today, I see flutter released his manifesto too.

Nice, excited for the thunder dome

Someone's gotta kick him down the stairs

You better not miss, otherwise you'll be falling down the stairs

Not for the SECOND time, I will have my getback. Then I'll go for Suranna, then my nemesis, stargirl.

Shit, man's got a hit list.

Also, if star girl's your nemesis, you might be in the legion of doom or something. Or whatever evil team is in DC comics

I'm just EBK, idgaf.

Stargirl's not coming back to the site according to one of the last things Abridge said, but who knows.

Damn, I'm really just going about pissing on tombstones lately. Which, me not liking stargirl has never been a surprise to anyone.

Just pick someone new to have beef with, it's super easy go to the "who is online" list at the bottom, then pick a name at random.

Honestly this is the first I'm hearing of the great animosity between Bezro and Stargirl.

Didn't even realize they interacted at all, guessing it was a Thunderdome thing though. (I rarely pay attention to those)

Not a Thunderdome thing, pretty much been since I joined in the forums.

Yeah, but Stargirl was more active before you showed up and by the time you did, she wasn't around as much as she used to be hence why I just don't remember you two interacting much.

He was being a retard and I pointed it out. I think. Honestly, I don't really remember him, but if he wants to duel then I won't refuse. 

How dare you point out my own faults and tell me that I'm wrong and not the greatest thing on Earth, no decency whatsoever.

I'd like to do a Thunderdome match against you sometime— but moreso I want you and Crimson to have a match.

However, as there are so many set up right now I will wait. Speaking of that, there's one right now... I'd tell you to vote, but that would make me a hypocrite.

(but you should vote)

I did add you to my list, check my profile. And I'm about to go vote right now.

Not a Real Fan until you've completed the blood sacrifice

Please enlighten me on where I can finish it, I've already started.

I'm actually a little concerned you may not be joking

I've rituallistically put several baby sheep in a massive oven (In Minecraft), wdym joking? Oh hahaha, funny joke, was defienatly joking.

How does one even get from definitely to defienatly

Obviously, the 15 pounds of Salvia Divinorum required for the ritual may have effects on my mind.

Alright, so, someone made a list of their own criticisms of my story (and gave it a low review too). I will NOT be answering any more of these questions again, here or anywhere else under any circumstances. Because I would just be here forever. But I thought I would place it here regardless 

 

My notes in review, as scattered as the purported theory this story was supposed to espouse and explain:

How is Qamulek/Qamalek supposed to be spelled?

The first one.

Lots of weird wording or obvious incorrect word choice.
 

Sure.

There are many reports of ghosts that simply move down a hallway or through a room.  How is that ghost driven by guilt, particularly when the ghost is unidentified or obviously significantly out of time.  This also presupposes that ghosts are real if we are to take the prelude and forum announcement seriously that this story has import to real world philosophy.

 

Ghosts are heavily associated with guilt or vengence in these stories. Call it "guilt over murder" instead of ghosts and imagine the ghosts are just a symbolic representation of that if you must.

It is clear that on some of the decision branches whole paragraphs are just copied and pasted as they do not always mesh with the context of the story on one branch or there is an assumption that actions have been taken that may not have been actually been selected. Using the Badge or the not using the watch are fair examples.

 

Yes, I did try to gameify but I was more interested in the ideas than the mechanics. If you want a game woth good mechanics, try my "My Little Pomy" story instead.

Could do with a detailed proofreading or two.

Sure.

If the definition of a perfect human is being free of sin and evil, how did the child sacrifices not also count as such?

They do, that's why it worked, but only temporarily, because their ideas are not powerul enough to break the loops, nor are they "Good Shepards". 

Synthesisa is not something that can be played on.

It sounds LIKE a Synthesisa.

The repeated Author's Notes felt unneccesary and jarring.

Yeah. Good. Ok. 

Biological sources are not the only sources of energy, perhaps you have heard of geothermal or solar power?

I have. The point is that pure, solid rocks cannot generate energy unless they have a biological component. Geothermal is heat-energy. You cannot get heat energy from burning a pebble. Further, the machines and minerals needed to generate this power (eg for making the solar panels) need to be mined...and the mining machines need to be powered by fossil fuels. And these processes destroy vast amounts of rock and the environment And these sources don't generate vast enough levels of energy for modern civilisation anyway. 

 

If this story gets deleted or wiped due to having this level of thought put into the critcisms, then I'm just gonna give up.

I will be the first to acknowledge that my review was perhaps overly critical. I do not see how your thesis is as revolutionary as you alluded to in this thread, but I should not have posted a wholly negative review.  I had intended to include some of the positives that I noticed as well, but then got rushed and forgot, so let me add those here.

The story is fairly cohesive overall.  Some of the scenes are quite interesting.  The implementation of the items seemed fairly smooth, although particularly with the Badge it was not clear to me on how to use it to specifically target a given person.  Having the Score displayed throughout was a nice, unobtrusive positive reinforcement to pull people to your summary at the end.  That bit of guided narrative was well handled.

 

I did put a lot of effort into the thought of this story so you can understand my mild frustration, but I appreciate your positive feedback. 
 

I envy you somewhat if you don't understand how utterly counter this all is to most of our global, modern society's basic values, morals and metaphysical beliefs and assumptions. Obviously you've had a lot less exposure to its stupidity than I have in that case, which is why I envy you.

I feel like a big part of the solution to that last part is just in not doomscrolling through social media all the time. The people who do that are not all of every society by far.

Wait...I should have said: "I put a lot of THOUGHT INTO the story!" That would have been funnier, more "on theme" with the message, wouldn't it? Ah well.

Question for flutter: how familiar actually are you with Homer's poems?

I think the hardest thing about taking this seriously for some people (especially those who may have education in that area) is going to be what feel like overly simplistic and sometimes just inaccurate claims about the Greeks and other ancient cultures being used to prop up various points. This might have been a story that needed more background research no matter how fired up you were to write it.

This was the criticism I was most concerned about, I've deliberately exaggerated and simplified some of these stories and characters, especially as you said for the Greeks (For instance, Hestia plays no role despite her actually being a positive character). Further, the Ancient Greek myths went through a lot of different interpretations throughout their history, especially with the influence of Ovid. 

 

Nevertheless, as I said in the description, I still stand behind the theme and gist of the story, and the take on the Greek Pantheon. Especially considering the views of Greek Philosopher Porphyry. 

I've been trying to read through the story to see if there's any merit to the claims made in this thread, but it's just been a slog through many typos and disjointed, unpolished prose, and I don't have the time to finish reading the entire thing just to see if it will get any better.

Can you just summarize the story's main points and list them here?

I would say that "RKrallonor" has understood my story well enough in his review that he's essentially already done that, although the more scientific aspects are skimmed over. 

I'm just going to respond to a few claims made in RKrallonor's review or this thread item by item:

 

>it's literally the darkest thing that has ever been concieved by humanity

Umm, what exactly is this darkest thing that you're referring to in the story?

>the idea that writing a story down gives it structure, and therefore gives the creatures within, structure and rules. That makes them more internally consistent with their thoughts and behaviors. But an auditory story, that is passed down from generation to generation, is a lot more vulnerable to alteration. It isn’t as fixed because the idea of this creature is shared among many people’s minds, but there’s no encoded tangible record holding all these details, so these creatures tend to act stranger sometimes, depending on which person’s imagination it’s following. Even if there’s just one person that’s literate, they can write ideas down and provide more order and structure to shared beliefs, since at least one person has it down in a tangible form.

This is just an observation on the effect that storytelling medium has on thought. It doesn't seem to be particularly groundbreaking or anything justifying the level of hyperbole in this thread.

>Ultimately, the story shows that embracing Christ is the only way to overcome the inherent undercurrent of pessimism present in all the other pantheons, that no matter how much we evolve, things stay the same. Unless you embrace Christ.

Is the story just saying that belief in gods was created by humans to assuage their guilt and fears? If so, that's already a commonly held belief.

Did you ever prove the existence of Christ in your story? Or are you arguing for some sort of religious placebo effect in which, even if gods don't really exist, belief brings enough benefits to delude yourself for?

Also, did you ever demonstrate why overcoming the inherent undercurrent of pessimism present in all the other pantheons is even desirable in the first place?

I'm just going to chalk your claims of how this story would be highly offensive (has a single person even been offended by this story yet?) to being around overly defensive people a lot or something.

I think the game states that God's truth is revealed through the Lord of the Rings movies, Star Wars Ep 1-6, and My Little Pony. So maybe you could just watch those if you find them more palatable.

No wonder they were such cultural hits. They were truly divinely inspired! . 

I can definitely see how anakins fall was definitely psychological torment and manipulation done by demonic forces though, that one I can get behind. 

I'll try and give it a read later this week. See what I think. 

Or, y'know, just read the Bible.

This story is the equivalent of Charles Manson getting messages from the Beatles albums.

Alright, so first thing, thanks for the review and the read through. So while you do say things that I like, as well as a lot that I take issue with in your review (the "sparrows" parable has already been addressed in this thread), there's one that I really did want to focus on, which is

"There is however, several gross misrepresentations of the Bible. The Good Shepherd was a parable to explain to them how he was to be crucified."

The parable can be both, and quite a bit more beside that. Your implication here seems to be that this analogy, or parable, serves only that function which you just specified, while with these religious figures, they'll say one thing which can actually serve loads and loads of different functions as well. If what you're saying is true, and that Jesus in the New Testament had that and only that as the intention of the parable/analogy, then the useage of the specific title "Good Shepard" is entirely arbitrary. All of those references to sheep and goats, all of those Saints going around with Shepard's Rods and staffs, a complete random accident. And the fact that Pan is also of Shepards, and the incident towards Palodes connects them both, well, just another complete coincidental accident, what a random thing to happen. This is how you get things like Postmodernism. 

Even though I saw it coming, the idea that, when  influential religious prophets says or does something it can only have "exactly one preapproved meaning/function", and not serve multiple different psychologcally and societal functions seems utterly absurd to me. 

And the money-changers in the temple, when you claimed it was because of the bird cages, when it was because they were breaking sabbath law? Your claims that you don't insist that humans and animals are equal in the story despite several instances where you criticized and implied punishment for hunters?

And yeah. sheep and goats were common livestock in those days. Jesus was known for using cultural references to imply moral points, known as parables These references, and the sacrifices, were meant to help people understand and atone, not to imply equality to the animal. Also, while they are drawn as such, none of the Saints, disciples, etc. are ever actually seen with a shepherds rod.

Jesus was also described as, and referred to his disciples as, fishers of men. Does this mean the pagan god of fishers is another enemy of humanity? You also describe his sacrifice as "guilt possession" despite it being intended to relieve humanity of guilt.

 

As I've said, it's an interesting concept, but too rambling and contradictory. It reads as more of a conspiracy theory than any actual doctrine. I'm not saying that there's only one meaning to things. The Bible is full of double meanings. I'm saying that these double or multiple meanings usually make sense and fit within scripture and common sense.

The whole money changer's tables thing is pretty clearly about treating the temple and sacrifice as an opportunity for profit

This, he called it a den of robbers, not a den of workaholics. And it's notably the one time Jesus got REALLY mad.

"it's notably the one time Jesus got REALLY mad."

 

This suspicion that I had about Jesus' attitude to animals was getting stronger and stronger, as I read the Bible, then I noticed the absolute fury he had in the Temple and how it was aimed at the bird-cagers, and that's when it really started to sink in. I am not the only one who has noticed this. See "THE MAN FROM THE DESERT  On the Money-Changers" by Kahlil Gibran. 

 

I am assuming that stories like this pass down so well because very little is just random, or arbitrary, or coincidence. I think we are so used to arbitrariness in stories today that we forget just how little room there would have been for this sort of thing thousands of years ago. Literally one line from Jesus can carry more importance than an entire novel that you can pick up from a bookshop today. If it's possible to write a similar narrative that offers an equally or even more cohesive explanation of all the things I've attempted to answer here with no reference to animal suffering, then people can go right ahead. But I think it would be very hard to do so.

 

"We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish, silly tale." -The Great god Pan

And the fact that they were selling things in a temple on Passover. But yeah, selling sacrifices to people on Passover so they can atone, a religious rite, for the sake of profit in the middle of a synagogue is extremely disrespectful.

Man, you're really hung up on those holy days, huh?

The Second Temple wasn't a synagogue, it was its own special thing. 

I actually have nothing against hunters. It's far better than factory farming. This is not me critcising hunters or claiming that they deserve punishment. What I'm saying is that, especially in these ancient, tribal places, people felt this sort of intense guilt whether they wanted to or not. This is not me making an "ought" statement, this is me making an "is" statement. 

After reading through your story I'd be very curious to hear your definition of Christianity— more specifically your thoughts on how a person gets to heaven and the purpose of Jesus's life on Earth.

Because while your story is most definitely spiritual, I don't see a lot of Christian viewpoints reflected in it. Since you said the concepts in it turned you into a devout Christian, these questions seem fair.

The story they're talking about in this thread is "The secret of gods and satan", not "Death and what lies beyond".

Fuck. Danke

Yeah. I get it, that's the first one on their profile. sort by new story games, you'll find the one that everyone is talking about

So I'm not done reading through all the parts of the story you're actually referring to, but my question still stands. There's an overarching message of embracing Christ, but I'd still argue that the message in it still isn't necessarily Christian. Maybe I'm looking at it wrong? I'd love a further explanation.

I mean a story can have Christian messages without being overtly about Jesus at all. But since Flutter's intent seem to be a little more direct than that then yeah it's probably reasonable to expect to find a core statement spelled out.

I can't say much about it myself yet, I'm not really going to have a chance to do more than randomly click around until after the weekend though. I still haven't finished reading the big pony story or some of the last contest entries for that matter.

The pony story is better than this one, I actually like it much more. 

Well, the idea that what happens to you in this life or the next one is based off of how good of a person you are or how many right choices you make is entirely not Christian. A core belief of Christianity is that humankind can never earn any right to anything, and instead it's a gracious and free gift provided by Jesus's perfect life and subsequent sacrifice.

A force of "karma" isn't a biblical concept. Yes, your actions have positive and negative consequences; that's something any person with common sense can agree to. But Christianity isn't a religion that believes in earning your way anywhere by treating animals right or having a guilt-free conscious or any other method. The religion as a whole puts a pretty high emphasis on the way to God being through Jesus and Jesus alone (John 14:6 in particular comes to mind). I'm aware that there are also verses that say the righteous will be rewarded and wicked punished, but again it also states that no one is righteous of their own merit.

So that particular message is what caught my attention and prompted the question. Of course, it's completely possible that I read the story entirely wrong or haven't read enough to fully grasp what's trying to be stated, but it's frustrating that the only person who will ever have a complete grasp and understanding of the story, the author, doesn't want to explain. Beyond even just the story, I like having discussions about religion/philosophy/basic morality and seeing as flutter obviously spends a lot fo time thinking about the topic, I think a conversation with him about it has the potential to be really fun. 

CS Lewis' "Mere Christianity" lectures pretty much sum up my entire view on that religion, and I also really liked his "Christmas Message for Pagans". In the first, he has this idea of "putting on" Jesus' personality, and the more time you wear the "clothes" of Jesus the more the clothes "begin to fit". 

His Christmas Message to Pagans is perfect because he points out that it's almost impossible to go from atheist-> Christian, and that most people will need to go through a brief "Paganism" phase first. 

My version of Christianity is based 100% on my own experiences, and in my experience karma does exist and, while it may not be neccessary, "karma" does exist and will lead you on the road out of athiesm->paganism->Christianity, exactly as CS Lewis predicted. 

I've actually tried to expose myself as little to Christian doctrine as I possibly can, and get everything directly from the words of Jesus. Because I don't believe the things he says imply that you can't "karmiaclly earn" belief in Jesus. The thing that creeped me out was the realisation that Norse and Greek paganism actually works much, much better as an explanation than athiesm does. 

As I said before, those two works by CS Lewis encapsulate my view on things very well. 

Karma as a concept appears to be based on whatever seems just at any given time. There's many things we see as abboherent today which were even rewarded in the past. Like witch burning. I don't think much bad ever came to the persecutors. Even If you look around, the most materially successful people who have the most rewards for their labour's are also much more likely to be low on empathy or just be ruthless dicks in general. But in general if seems to be relatively true, but again I'm not sure. Karma seems to be more societslly subjectively determined as opposed to something absolute. 

Half these views on "wearing jesus skin and morals" Just sound like pantheism to me without actually fully admitting it lol

No. I'm meant to be here to read stories not discuss religious perspectives or argue with people.

The ideas in my post come directly from the words in red. I think you've definitely found some kind of religious belief but I wouldn't necessarily call it Christianity. I haven't read the works you mentioned, but you can't say you "get everything directly from the words of Jesus" and then proceed to say your views are based off reading things outside of the Bible unless you believe CS Lewis was inspired by God (much like the 40 or so authors of the Bible). I could potentially see that argument. But it still doesn't disregard what the Bible does say— unless you mean that you don't think the Bible is 100% God-breathed words, which isn't a popular sentiment but it would make what you're saying make a lot more sense.

Anyway, John 14:6 is written as a quote directly from Jesus: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." 

Another verse I'd like to point out is Romans 3:23. "For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." That comes from Paul, not Jesus, but considering Paul/Saul's entire life was spent devoted to studying the scriptures and the Bible says he had an encounter with God/Jesus personally, I'd say he's pretty reliable if you trust that the Bible is historically accurate. 

Also, the idea that you have to turn to paganism in between atheism and Christianity is, quite frankly, bullshit. There are plenty of testimonies that are the exact situation you're claiming is impossible. Lee Strobel from The Case for Christ in particular comes to mind.

"Also, the idea that you have to turn to paganism in between atheism and Christianity is, quite frankly, bullshit."

 

I didn't say it was impossible. I said that CS Lewis said it was almost impossible, and I probably should have specified further that he was probably talking about his own society. And nothing that I said contradicts John 14:6 anyway and I have no idea how you could have come to the conclusion that it did, if anything what I'm saying reinforces that. 

All these internet discussions around these topics always seem to end in these situations where words and sentences get stripped from their original contexts, and then people just strongly insist on one thing that ultimately turns out not to be true, and then people just have arguments over the meanings of the sentences they're saying. It was only by turning off from all this sort of stuff that I was able to put my own thoughts in (arguably) coherent enough order to even write the story in the first places. 

I mean I could try to do the same thing and argue for a wide variety of beliefs with the standard "in my father's house there are many rooms" defence, but I don't want to go around telling people what to believe either (that's the sort of thing that originally repulsed me from Christianity.) 

Ok.

So, I was in the exact same boat as you, except somewhat more extreme. A 100% literal take on "creationism/Noah's Ark" is utterly disastrous and self-refuting. The fossil strata would have been turned into a homogenous mulch by the great flood, not this sort of ordered, "era by era" structure that we see. And the weight-sorting concept put forward by creationists, that the lighter animals floated to the top, is just nonsense considering dinosaurs had hollow bones and mammals don't, yet mammals seem to be buried on top of the dinosaurs for the overwhelming majority of the case. But if you look at the evolutionary, palentological story throigh a Christian, "Book of Nature" perspective (an idea which I an sad to say only I seem to have come up with) as I do in my story right at the end, then I think it works really well.

 

I started out as incredibly pro-LGBT/Trans/Gay. I supported gay marriage back when none of these big corporations that force these Pride Flags in my face every year gave a damn. Things have moved on since then, especially considering the events of the 2024 Paris Olympics, and the "drag queen dionysos last supper". (I had barely even been Christian for a week before that happened. It's like, you find something sacred that's incredibly important to you, then BAM! Society just has to go and give a huge middle finger to you). 

Now, I just try to avoid all talk of the subject and to think about it as little as I possibly can, and in fact (for reasons that are utterly central to the story I wrote) I see the whole conversation between the "pro" and "anti" LGBT people as the problem itself.

As I said, I wrote these topics into my story, but as I explain near the end, the vast, vast majority of my religious, moral and spiritual beliefs do genuinely come from My Little Pony:FiM/Lord of the Rings/Star Wars I-VI, so you can decide for yourself just how seriously you want to take everything that I'm saying.

The smart Christians who do believe in an absolutely literal interpretation of Genesis are, by neccessity, some of the most fascinatingly imaginative people. They come up with these absolutely insane concepts like "C-Decay", "Bariminology", "Noah's Pangea", it's glorious. 

"This is a photograph of France in 2024."



Okay France, if you say so....

Honestly, it was such a bizarre thing that looped around so fast into unintentional self parody, I couldn't really even get mad. They should've just given those guys a Lady Gaga song and maybe five minutes in front of a camera at most, for their own good.

Dionysus is the god for people who want to worship Pan but are too cowardly to embrace the obvious demonic imagery, so they hide behind Pan's best buddy because they think it makes them more appeaing to normies. It's a cheap parlour trick. 

Do you think goat symbolism is innately demonic? 

See, my idea is it is most definitely not my job to tell people who already don't believe in God what is or isn't a sin. It's not like anyone's going to Hell because of a specific sin, people go to Hell because they don't consciously accept Jesus's sacrifice as their own salvation and consequently cannot be allowed in Heaven.

I never understood why some Christians feel the need to criticize and judge everyone. The Bible quite literally says not to do that. And if the person doesn't believe in God, telling them that what they're doing is looked down upon by someone they literally don't believe in is going to do absolutely nothing. Our job is to LOVE people, no matter what we agree or disagree with that they do. We're to be reflections of God's love in their lives. That doesn't mean accepting their sin but it also means not condemning them for it. The goal isn't to lead them away from their sin but rather lead them to Jesus and allow him to convict, forgive, and instruct them as he will.

In the meantime, everyone's got enough of their own sin to worry about (Matt 7:5). And yes, every sin is equal. James 2:10 says anyone who breaks a law is guilty of breaking them al; the problem isn't the sin itself so much as the heart condition. That's also why the Bible says hatred is as bad as murder. I will say it's most definitely a sin and the arguments against that are excuses. And it's somethng I've wrestled with, so I'm not just saying that out of a lack of empathy. For those people who are like "thenwhy did God make me like this," we were also all born liars and cheaters and with a very evident sin nature. The goal is to get away from how we were born and become like Christ.

ALSO also, God doesn't hate the gays. God doesn't hate anyone. That's kinda his whole thing.

Lol, except For Esau. God hated that guy

Lol

To be fair, Esau could have let it go. God still set him up to be the father of the Edomites, who eventually got payback on the Israelites by sacking Solomon's temple. He also took over all of the physical wealth, and Jacob later got screwed over by his uncle, which wouldn't have happened if he hadn't screwed Esau in the first place. All in all, I'd say God made sure he was well compensated for getting screwed on his birthright.

My comment was a joke based on the reference to Malachi 1 in Romans 9. Thanks for all that, though, Ben hole man

It's true, it states "I loved your ancestor Jacob, but I rejected his brother, Esau" as a direct quote from the Lord. Interesting stuff

Contextually, it's most likely referring to their descendant nations, but that's less funny

“Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”

What gross translation are you using?

Jacob Have I Loved btw is a pretty fun YA novel by Katherine Paterson, the protagonist is the tomboyish "unloved" twin from a pair living in Chesapeake Bay in the late 1930s.

I read it like, 4 times I think. I really liked Katherine Paterson.

Mine says something closer to that in the Romans passage, I took mine from what it referenced in Malachi. NLT though. It's what the school I'm going to next year recommends

NLT is not the best.

The NLT would only be recommended by a school because of crashing literacy standards, not because it's the best. 

What would you recommend? The one I typically use is the ESV

NRSV is the best one. It was translated by an ecumenical team of scholars so it doesn't have the kind of sectarian bias you get with some translations, and it is a more accurate take on some of the "juicier" verses that translators are occasionally tempted to put a spin on. 

Compare and contrast Isaiah 7:14 

NLT: "All right then, the Lord himself will give you the sign. Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel." 

ESV: "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel."

 NRSV: "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel."

The treatment of this phrase is important. NRSV is the most accurate to the Biblical Hebrew, and is engaged in what I think is a more honest scholarly attempt at grappling with the text. The next line is taken from the same passage, but in the Westminster-Leningrad Codex: הָעַלְמָה הָרָה וְיֹלֶדֶת. This is the section translated variously as "the virgin shall conceive" or "the young woman is pregnant". 

The first word, ha'almah, has the lexical sense of meaning "the unmarried woman", almah, with the Hebrew definite article, ha. An almah would be incidentally a virgin, probably, in the context of the Hebrew Bible, but that's not what the word means.  The next word, hareh, is a feminine adjective that agrees with the noun almah. In most of its use in the Hebrew Bible, it means "pregnant".  According to BlueLetterBible, the are four instances (including this one) where it has the lexical sense of a verb mean "conceive": crucially, however, never in the verbal form it appears here. 

However, this is a theologically important line for Christianity: the virgin birth, and all. So the translators of some texts are comfortable bending the text to make it fit. This is why the NRSV, which included Jews and secular scholars in its publication, is a more faithful attempt at translation in a lot of cases. 

The Message is clearly superior to all other translations.

Very neat.

Hey, I have the BlueLetterBible app! That's cool.

Thank you for sharing from your vast knowledge on these topics. I've been reading through the posts on this thread and honestly it's all pretty intriguing stuff

Nice to see another advocate for NRSV here. I'll use that and Young's Literal Translation from time to time.

The GK Chesterton/CS Lewis argument of evolution and geology/creationism being umimportant to Christianity will cause the religion to, in the long run, completely wither away if left unchecked. It's just too vast and has too many ramifications to be swept under the rug. The idea of Christianising Paleontology (something which I've tried to begin the first steps towards right at the end of the story) could, if it even can be done, perhaps be one of the most important steps of religious thought right now. This NOMA stuff, it just doesn't seem plausible any more. 

"Saying Christianity will "wither away' if it doesn't do X or Y is also assuming a lot of fragility there which seems odd coming from someone who believes that this is an omnipotent, all powerful God's plan for the salvation of humanity."

Not neccessarily. Perhaps Christianity withers away, society collapses, then out of the rubble people rediscover it and then do the whole "Palentological-Christianisation" thing. That doesn't seem at all counter to anything religious.  But I'd rather that happened before the collapse, rather than after it.

As I said in my story at the end, modern science has been hi-jacked by stealth Gnosticism, both on the "professional" and "cultural" levels. Yuval Noah Hariri in "Homo Deus" literally has a paragrah where he talks about the scientific consensus of consciousness being nothing more than "jet emissions", or an accident of biology. This is utterly absurd. It is a very good idea, for people who aren't at all into science and all of this stuff, to only focus on the message. But to and to allow this heresy to take over science and the public perception of science (which is vastly societally important today), which seems to have had terrible repercussions on the human psyche, seems like an exceptionally terrible idea to me.

It is telling that the main thing I was exposed to that actually interfered with this for me was My Little Pony. The fact that MLP literally seems to have a healthier, truer and more complete metaphysical understanding of reality than the current global scientific consensus does...this is what I meant in my OP when I used the term "mind-bending." I'm not completely insane, I know exactly how absurd that sounds. 

My dad thinks the Earth is around 8000 years old. I had a friend who was against the idea of church completely but agreed that the Bible (at least the Old Testament) is historically accurate, and he had a much better way of interpreting it. Do I remember that? Of course not.

All I know about him is he was one of the 20 rulers of Judah (and evidently an ok guy), and that's bc there's a song.

He's the one I mentioned that had some generations skipped. In Matthew, Joram begat Uzziah, while in Chronicles 2 it's Amaziah.
Joram/Jehoram was Uzziah's great great grandfather I think.

Like I said before the author would've been aware of the information in Chronicles just like his audience, making it unlikely to be a mistake. So it seems like the thing done in these lists of begattings was to only put in the more significant figures and not mind or bother to mention it if several generations were skipped. Which is relevant when the timeline of those geneological sections are entirely what the idea of a "young" Earth is based on

Now that you mention these other names and who begat who, I think the song may possibly be in order

Of twenty rulers Judah knew, just eight were good, When Israel was divided, only Judah stood. Assyria captured the North it’s true, It happened in seven-twenty-two, Then Judah was alone…with its kings…let’s all sing Doom, doom, doom

The first was Rehoboam, he was Sol’mon’s son, Abijah bad and Asa good, we’re two to one Jehosophat he was so good, removed the idols made of wood, Jehoram bad, Ahazaiah sad, cause his mom…killed his kids (Queen Athaliah)

Joash, Ahazaiah’s kid did hide and thrived Amaziah was an ok guy, but evil survived, Uzziah then and Jotham too, they both were good as good can do, And Ahaz was the worst of them all…he was bound to fall Doom, doom, doom

Hezekiah was the best, oh yes, he walked in the light His kid, Manasseh was a fright, but then he did right, Then Amon reigned for terrible two, the book of law did Josiah true, And Je-ho-a-haz and Je-ho-ia-kim we’re nearing the end, Doom, doom, doom

Jehoiachin, the next to last, was bad you see, Zedekiah rebelled and hurried Judah’s captivity, From Nebuchadnezzar who’s hard to spell, in 586 then Jerusalem fell He carried them to Babylon, till the light it would dawn Doom doom doom

He kept them there till seven-ty years had come and gone, They got to go home by Persia not by Babylon, By Cyrus’ hand it was allowed, before the Lord they fully bowed And never served those idols again, they were through witth that sin Done DONE!

Don't judge my church camp bops.

dork

There's nothing there that I really disagree with, the resurrection especially seems important as a way of avoiding Gnosticism. I would add the caveat that the "will come again in glory" part is something that I'm not sure about how it will look like, and how the "thief in the night" quote applies. 

 

So with Buddhism,  I actually don't have too many problems woth it. But I am very suspicious of how it treats the materia world as inherently evil, which again seems to align it a little too close with Gnosticism, which is something that's very easy to fall into if you're not careful. I don't buy into that idea, I don't think the ultimate goal for everyone's life should just be "reject the world". Certainly I don't believe the vast majority of animals believe that either. And after reading Jesus' words, I was very interested with how many times he brings up animals in the (relatively few) things that he actually says. "Birds of the air", "Sheep and the goats", "foxes of the earth", "and he went out with the wild beasts"...nothing said by these sorts of figures is ever an accident. And then the realisation that Pan/The Devil and Jesus seem both to be Shepards...it started getting suspicious.

 

I only read Lewis right at the end of the whole thing, when I had pretty much formulated my beliefs. And the thing that really shocked me about reading Lewis was how his experience, his conversion and his beliefs were practically a 1:1 copy of my own. Of course his ideas were a lot more focused and thought out, but the general form of the things he was saying aligned almost exactly to the things I was thinking. In particular his chapter "On animal suffering" and his speech "on vivisection" are some of the most brilliant, common-sense things I've ever heard.

I don't know where people get this idea from that Buddhism teaches the world is inherently evil. I feel like it more so teaches "not to be attached either way". Isn't Christianity all about rejecting the material world, its pleasures and illusions to attain union with the holy Spirit and be in the kingdom of God? Seems like the exact same. Not that I believe that, but someone could easily interpret it that way as you have with Buddhism if they wanted to be reductionist. 

 

I think that's most people's main issue with most written religious scriptures, very little is written in black and white, where interpretation doesn't change the weight or meaning of a lot of things. 

Again, the version of Christianity you're describing is Gnosticism. And even under the interpretation of Buddhism you describe, it still denies that the material world is a good place, which I don't think. In fact, non-Gnostic Christianity (especially Catholthism) seems to be very rare in inisisting that the material world is a good place, especially Catholthism. Even incredibly materialistic things like sex can be seen as good under Christianity, even though obviously it includes what many would consider very stirct limits on that. 

Buddhism doesn't talk about "good or "bad" Though. It doesn't state anywhere the world as being good, bad, etc. It teaches the rejection of duality. Part of duality is a distinction of Good and bad.

 

It doesn't teach or believe in morality in a rigid sense. But more so what it thinks leads to the most practical results. 

It makes it a little difficult to justify doing anything at all with such a view. Why should I find out about the world, as opposed to sitting doing nothing, if you can't make the claim that:  "finding things out about the world" is good but "doing nothing instead" is bad?

I don't really like attacking or critcising Buddhism though, I have nothing against it and it's far less harmful than most other viewpoints. Especially when it comes to the animal issue, of course. But I can't really say it's something I agree with enitrely either. 

You're a retard speaking with absolute confidence. There is 1000% a Buddhist ethic. Nonviolence, non-attachment and universal compassion are ethical precepts. 

Mahayana Buddhism, in particular, emphasizes the path of the bodhisattva: becoming a being who can intercede on the path of other beings, who has voluntarily set aside their own enlightenment to help people. If Buddhism was just a manual of samsara escape instructions, there would be no need for that. 

There's a difference between having ethical principles and believing in good and bad. There's an important distinction between good and bad and right and wrong, which i why I made that distinction in the previous comment. 

Bodhisattva, and someone pursuing it does not mean Buddhism promotes lifes suffering being an evil. 

 

Here's what chatgpt would say on the subject if you run the prompt through it: 

Buddhism does not rely on absolute, universal labels of "good" or "bad" in a moralistic sense. Instead, it evaluates actions based on their consequences and alignment with the path to liberation.

• Good and Bad: Buddhism uses terms like kusala (wholesome) and akusala (unwholesome) to describe actions, thoughts, or intentions. These terms are linked to whether something leads to skillful mental states, reduces suffering, and fosters enlightenment.
• Right and Wrong: Buddhism emphasizes "right" action, speech, and livelihood, as outlined in the Noble Eightfold Path. "Right" refers to what is ethically and spiritually beneficial rather than being a rigid judgment of morality.

Are you speaking with absolute certainty to me? But really being retsrded yourself? 

Bringing ChatGPT into an argument with Malk sure was a choice, retsrd.

Arguing with Malk at all honestly

First of all, ChatGPT is a language model, not a search engine. All it does is produce an output that retarded westoids who haven't studied religion beyond a wikipedia skim (i.e. you) would find acceptable. It doesn't think, it doesn't research, its output is not authoritative. 

Also skillful acts and unskillful acts in Buddhist thought are absolutely cognate to good and evil. Just because there isn't an absolute embodiment of Good and Evil in the sense of like, a Zoroastrian cosmology, does not mean that good and evil do not exist in Buddhist thought. The three poisons are aligned with the three lower realms of reincarnation, which are associated with further and more increased suffering. And guess what, retsrd? Skillful acts are associated with incarnation in the three higher realms. That is 100% a system of good and evil. 

End your life irl you miserable little stain. 

You talk shit about the source while offering none yourself. Any more than you choose to trust gpt why should I trust you just because you said it? Lol

Why are they cognate to good and evil? For instance I train, training hurts, I could label that as a "bad" If I wantsd, or all the bad mean words said to me as "bad" But I dont. These are subjective human made terms, where labeling real things with imaginary made up standards leads to living in illusion, the very thing Buddhism argues against. 

I don't know why you speak like that. I'd be mad too if I was Sarcopenic, and too lazy to fix it. 

ChatGPT isn't a source you cumstain. 

They're cognate to good and evil because that is what Buddhists think. The language of good and evil is literally embedded in the earliest Buddhist thought. And again, I can tell you have a base unfamiliarity with Buddhist thought because you're talking about karma and right action as subjective and human made, when in fact they are not. In the Buddhist system, karma is not arbitrary or human-defined, it is a cosmic law.  Read this famous discourse from the Pali Canon and pay attention to the way Buddha discusses moral action. Note how the Exalted One does not say: "you should do good and not evil because of my subjective and relativized moral framework", because that's not how the dharma works. 

"I don't know why you speak like that. I'd be mad too if I was Sarcopenic, and too lazy to fix it."

This is sheer projection on your part, because I have it on good authority that you are a "soft low-willpower babyman who lives on chicken nuggies and anime by his own admission, and has his dad still do everything for him" 

 

At least you gave a source this time, thank you. It does talk about evils, so you've definitely changed my mind there. 

I've seen your body through looking at old threads, no projection there.  Nothing wrong with living with my dad at 21, in fact it's wise for the financial value. 

I think the only picture of me on CYS is from when I was a teenager (the camo jacket one?). There are more current pictures on the Discord that no one likes you enough to invite you to. 

You probably still look like a hermaphroditic lesbian.  Kill yourself wrist cutter. 

You are a pedophile who blasts rope to oriental cartoons, so I'm not really worried about what you find attractive. 

Lmfao

That ones pretty funny. Got a chuckle, still a bitch though. You were showing off a tattoo in the picture I saw, and I'm exagerating to annoy you. Don't take it too seriously. 

How dare you back down. Now everyone in the yard knows you're spineless

Ikr??? He is a swift dromedary traversing his ways.

Our definition of ripped is probably quite different, but good for him if so. Pretty sure the tattoo picture i saw wasn't so long ago he was a teen. It would be good if he did make that transformation though, at least then his appearance would be a bit more congruent with how he tries to present himself online.

I've seen lots of pictures of Malk, but where are yours?

That's Lux_Inferni's new account, she has been here long enough to absorb many excellent memes and lore.

So you can be antagonising? lol my body looks fine but i wouldn't willingly involve myself in someone trying to ritually humiliate me. Keep brown nosing and defending him though.

Lol, "I've seen lots of pictures of Malk"

"QUIT BROWN NOSING!"

You aggressively go after a dude's appearance as your main point in an argument, then back off going j/k j/k only to start it up again the next day. I think some questions about yours are fair at that point just so you guys are on even ground.

This whole thing has been even funnier than you and Petros, you guys are only pretending to hate each other.

Wait hold the phone. Malk and Crimson were actually beefing? I thought it was in the same vein of Petros and Bezro, like jokingly beefing, not actually meaning the stuff they said seriously.

Malk's contempt for someone who makes broad sweeping claims about a thousands of years old religion while being too lazy to even skim a wiki article without help from a robot was definitely real.

I don't really know what emotion Crim is trying to convey when he starts in on someone, backpedals and calls it a joke, then waits a day to start again and insults bystanders too before running off. That line about the nuggies seems to have struck a chord.

But I'm fairly certain Iris hates him for real too at this point lol.

Thanks for clarifying this, Mizal. I wasn't really sure what happened there but this dispute definitely seemed a lot more heated than Petros and Bezro.

Never forget, Buddhism did this.

The irony that a religion promoting practicing peace and tolerance eventually leads to people calling each other "wrist cutters" and "pedos" over the interwebs is really crazy. I mean you could not make this shit up.

Every time I think I find the most divisive and heated discussion/debate on here, the next day, y'all find a way to top it somehow. I really admire everyone's wordcraft and skill with writing arguments to the point where I'm a little scared to step in the ring, because it'll be like me bringing a semi-automatic(I'm not the worst writer after all, but not the best) to a fucking nuke fight. It's really clear that even outside the realm of fiction, y'all are really good writers, you wield your weapons both offensively and defensively very effectively. It's really fun to read through these threads, I chuckle a lot at some of the crazier comments.

Lol I went back to the tattoo thread. It was not a teenage image, it was from a chest piece I got in my twenties where you can see basically only my nipple and two inches of my left arm. Apparently it's been haunting Crimson for some time. 

The one I thought I posted was a picture of me as a sixteen year old with a mullet drinking a Starbucks, but I think that one might have been an IRC chat OnlyMalk exclusive. 

In any case, he can insult my nipple all he likes idgaf lol 

I wasn't insulted by what he said about chicken nuggets. Nor did I take it as an attack on my body. Im fine with discussing topics and sometimes I'll form lofty opinions on things without fully going going In deeper than I should, to a scholarly level which malk, as I said to him, changed my mind. Yes I was frustrated at the same time, not by any chicken nugget comments, lots of people joke about that and it's usually glazed in irony or a light jab but malks insults didn't come across as a joke, they're just straight insults not layered in any humour or irony. It more so felt like he was trying to humiliate and dominate me instead of teaching me. Lots of people rib and insult me and I'm fine with it, it's almost always layered playfully.



A bit of body shaming is fine if he's fine with me roping over a bad take.

I really don't have any issue with the body shaming, giving it out is nothing if you can't take it 

Judging purely from every post I've read, I have a clear picture of what Crimson looks like without even having seen him.

Crimson is an uncategorizable creature visually between the ages of 6 and 65. He is as white as a sheet, mottled with a network of blue veins that lack the vigor to bulge with any pressure, though you can see them twitch and writhe when he's angry. He has wispy, barely-there eyebrows and his sparse strings of hair only begin to grow an inch behind his ears. It is carefully cut in such a way that you can almost tell he WOULD have an obnoxious bowl cut if he had remotely enough hair to create the shape. His forehead is a low, forward-pointing slope ending in squarish corners, giving the impression of a door wedge. It is legitimately concerning for his health that a human hippocampus is alleged to fit underneath it. Clearly his isoceles brow ridge evolved to keep his eyes shaded from the sun, but that is a celestial object he has never seen in his life due to a combination of British weather and subterranean living. The light of the sun is scattered on rainy and overcast days, so that his brow ridge casts no shadow over his beady mole eyes, but they are still so sunken and surrounded by such darkened circles that they appear so even in the frigid, soggy light of the godless British sun.

 

He has a crooked nose that gives a hatchet-like profile in the way it sticks out from his face, but it's vertically short, so that it emphasizes the huge, tortoise-like upper lip that hangs in a permanent frown over his long green-yellow British teeth. Crooked, twisting, and knotted like epidermodysplasia verruciformis warts are they. His lower jaw is unformed- still half-cartilage, and hangs inarticulately from a mechanical hinge that has been surgically installed under his temple to keep the thing from withering completely and leaving the underside of his mouth as just a dry, foul-smelling tongue. A diet entirely of chicken pulp wrapped in breading obfuscates the need for such a bone, (women in his family would understandably rather feed their children chicken nuggets from birth than allow them anywhere near their body) and it has withered from lack of use. The hinge is slightly rusted, and it squeaks erratically like a shopping cart wheel when he talks. His lower lip hangs limp as it is held up mostly by vacuum force when his mouth is closed. If his upper lip doesn't stick to it, it hangs down from his bright red, bloodshot gums, and slow strings of slime just leak from his mouth at all hours of the day, never once touching his dry unbrushed tree teeth and leathery tongue.

 

He has no chin to speak of, rather his foul fishjaw is angled inward like a funnel, forming a smooth slope of flesh that slides straight into his fold-laden worm neck with no indication that the bottom of his mouth and the top of his throat are separate components. It is a long thing, hunched forward at the shoulder and held always parallel to the ground, giving the oily strands attempting to form a neckbeard the impression of millipede legs.

His malformed body is simultaneously underweight and obese. His skin sags from its wiry, corpselike frame and pools at a grotesque alembic stomach. His triceps are so atrophied as to make the back of his arms appear actually concave-- sunken in the middle with just the bony prongs of his elbow bones and the bulge of connective tissue at his shoulder keeping the skin from drawing fully in. So stiff and ill-used is the mechanism that he actually can't fully unbend his arms and it hurts him for his elbows to be at angles wider than 90 degrees.

 

His dry and anemic flesh can scarcely muster a drop of sweat a day, especially given how little he moves, but he hasn't showered in so long that he still smells like a gym duffle bag, and this scent combined with molded cum socks form the humid miasma that kills whatever intruder who opens the basement door unprepared on the very spot.

I'm not a quarter of the way through this yet and already broken with laughter, you might have actually killed me. You need to write more often.

But don't you think it's unfair that everyone is ganging up on Crimson like that?

It feels a little mean when everyone from CosmoluscentPenguin to Sentinel are all ganging up on Crimson like this, especially since Malk already got his shots in. I mean I have no dog in the fight, and I do think Crimson was mean to Malk and made some unwarranted comments about his body, but Crimson's had my back once so it just feels a little unfair how everyone's going at Crimson without anyone on his team. I disagreed with his comments, especially since he made insults specifically referring to a real-life picture, like that shit's pretty fucked up, so I'm not going to defend crimson and I thought they were inappropriate for the discourse, but this might be going too far, especially since Sent came in after Malk already fought back.

Malk was already doing an excellent job of fighting on his side, as was his right, but everybody just ganging up on Crimson like this feels a bit overkill. It's fair when Malk insults Crimson because Crimson was the one who went after Malk so Malk should rightfully destroy him, but now everybody is just piling in and that's a little messed up. Like bro's already cooked, and Crimson's normally a good dude so it just feels a little mean-spirited how everybody's piling on like this.

I would tend to agree with you RK, if that was not one of the most evocative and clearly visualized pieces of character description I have ever seen on this site or elsewhere.  This is a writing site, after all, and such stellar writing should be lauded, regardless of causation.

That's true, I didn't see it that way.

During forbidden arcane inquiries, the vision was revealed to me by the divine many moons ago, and long before this thread. It is as neutral a recollection of what I saw of Crimson as I could muster, I just thought it was on-topic to share in this moment because people were just now wondering what he looked like.

Well then, your writing style was immaculate and I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of your roast. That was a well-crafted precision strike, I mean good god.

Sent was just having some fun with writing body horror, I'm not sure he's ever even interacted with him. .

Crim just said some dumb things and then didn't quite manage the smooth recovery and exit he had in mind. Then came right back in here with a stick the next day, so I'm not feeling like seeing him get slapped around a little makes him much of a victim.

But people argue here all the time, it's not a big deal. Someone else will say something dumb eventually and they'll get messed with awhile instead, and Crimson will probably join in.

The most irritating thing Crim said imo wasn't even any of this stuff, but brushing Iris off saying "he wasn't here to argue or talk about religion" when he'd been in here with everyone else doing exactly that right up until she asked him to explain a statement he'd made.

But this reply chain is where the party is, not over there.

Thanks for explaining Mizal, I'm still a little new to the site culture so I think my response was an overcorrection. You're right, that makes sense.

I didn't want to talk with iris about it because she was clearly frustrated. Feels like itd just be another ego battle. Although to clarify to her here if she does want to respond to it. There is some Christians who are Pantheists, namely Quakers. I'm not an expert on how they reconcile pantheism with Christianity but I know they takes God's omnipresent aspect literally in all forms.

To Quakers, heaven is finding union with God, or realising your oneness with him. To be in heaven is to just be with God. That's about the extent of my knowledge. I don't know specific passages they use to justify their beliefs. I more so made the comment because it reminded me of them, and how if God and jesus are one and the same. Meaning both God and man, I can see why some readers of the bible might have seen jesus as the example to follow in an even more literal sense and not one to just see as a unique chosen one with this unique bond with God. Although some don't even consider it Christianity anymore, more so an offshoot inspired branch. I did once meet a guy who was a Quaker, he considered himself a Christian but he was very vague about it.

I know karma is considered a cosmic law in Buddhism. I agree with what you're saying about what we say is good or just isn't really relevant too it. I was just giving my perspective on it that it doesn't actually seem to exist as a real cosmic law to me. In that section I wasn't claiming the view i was giving was the view of Buddhism, it was just me giving my perspective. I think you probably just misunderstood me there.

"in my current understanding of pantheism "to be in Heaven is to be with God"

In my understanding of Christianity God is all good. If Heaven is a place where good people go God must therefore reside there. To quote from BBC bitesize which is an educational tool (mostly for kids)

"Heaven is described as eternity in the presence of God, as Heaven is a state of being rather than a physical place. Heaven is the ultimate aim for all Christians, for their soul to be reunited with God and united with Christ."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zwvymsg/revision/4


Some extra sources to support.

Revelation 21:3-4
"And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.'”

Heaven is described as a place where God dwells with humanity in a perfect relationship, free from suffering and death.

Heaven is synonymous with where God resides.

"How can you be a fragment of God existing within God and go to Heaven to be with God at the same time?"

This is a good one, its a bit paradoxical. In the Quakers eyes you're never truly separate from God, our egos just make us feel and think we are, as such we live in a false sense of identity and reality. So you don't actually change location, nor is God fragmented, you just apparently overcome the illusion of separation allowing you to realise what was always there.

"Heaven returning to God and losing all of your individuality?"

Your false human made identity yes.

"what is Hell?"

Hell would be described as separation from God, or believing you're separate from God, so technically we're already in Hell.

One of my favourite quotes: "i used to think i was a man experiencing the universe, now I realise I'm the universe experiencing what its like to be a man"

my favourite pro pantheist argument though is a really simple one by Spinoza "All that exists either exists within something else, or within itself". Even within the universe, everything exists within something else, eventually, at least intuition would say we'd necessarily have to get to something existing within itself. Its simple but pretty compelling.

"Concepts like karma should be looked at through the religions they belong to. Buddhism is one of those religions. It's okay to not believe in karma; you don't have to apply human morality to cause and effect and try to disguise it as karma."

Yeah, true. I made most of my comments in this thread while on 30 second piss breaks at work, So that's probably why they lacked the logical rigor you would have liked. Evidently during those 30 seconds I've shown an heuristic bias in choosing to attack most peoples false conception of how karma works instead of the actual religious one. On the actual religious view of Karma; its obviously seemingly impossible to prove, at least right now. Its intentionally vague and just has a "well if he got away with it in this lifetime I'm sure he will be punished in another". So to me that view isn't even worth trying to refute due to 1. its impossible too 2. Its currently impossible to prove or disprove right now and feels like an eternal cop out card for any bad behaviour. But there's still some things i said in my previous comment on it which still apply to the actual religious view. For instance; It doesn't really feel intuitively correct to me that there's somehow an intrinsic cosmic law at play which is physical in nature (it has to be otherwise it couldn't interact with physical things if its non physical). It seems much more likely (as i previously stated). That what is good, or bad is subjectively determined by humans and fluctuates at different times and places and not some physical cosmic law which doesn't give a shit about what humans think.
-
"I was referring to Christianity through a pantheistic point of view which happens to be my understanding of pantheism as a concept of the divine,"

In that segment i was trying to explain how some pantheistic Christians use heaven and union with the holy spirit terminology as tort enough reason to take the scriptures as more pantheistic than what some other denominations, so i was still speaking about pantheism, or trying too.

"Either you've completely missed the context of my questions or you had AI write your post for you,"

I've probably definitely missed context or misunderstood you somewhere. I'll take it as a compliment that you thought I might have used AI there though lol, at least it means I probably seemed non biased.

"How do you reconcile an all-good God with the creation of Satan? Why was there a tree of knowledge of good and evil? I personally believe God is neither good nor evil. He just is. In that respect, Satan is neither good nor evil. Looking at it from a Christian viewpoint, I would say God knew Satan and knowledge of good and evil was necessary for our growth throughout life."

I like this question, because you clearly have a nuanced and well thought out view on ethics and morality. In my own personal opinion id actually agree with you, im not a Christian, and neither am I a self proclaimed pantheist, i just find both belief sets endearing in many ways and can appreciate their depth. I don't know, what exactly makes God 'Good' or why Satan is 'bad'.

I know Satan doesn't actually have a physical form, and some Christians don't even believe he's anything more than another state of separation from God. This concept of Satan as a spiritual figure occupying a fiery hell is largely ficticous, and ideas of Satan as a created being by God are generally just loosely strung together from theologians who know more than me based on passages implying so, as opposed to any actual proper descriptions or conformations in an absolute sense that he's a fallen angel from heaven or whatever.

If im misunderstanding though and you're talking about how pantheistic Christians do it; I honestly don't know. I'll just appeal to human ignorance and say that most humans cant definitively define how they even know what good and evil is, at least in an objective sense, and nor can they explain how they know, so someone claiming God is evil for making Satan is unsubstantiated in my eyes. I just don't know either way, and i doubt any human is smart enough to convince me otherwise in either direction, at least that ive met or read about up till now.

"Heaven as a state of being doesn't equate to an eternity in the presence of God or returning to oneness with God."

It seems to be heavily implied so scripture wise, and is the predominant view not just in a pantheistic/Quaker view but also in most Christian denominations in general. Other denominations just take those same passages less literally.

"Unfortunately, up to this point, Heaven is treated as a place and that place is wherever God is despite your claim that Heaven is a state of being and not a physical place."

True it does appear to be so, certain times it seems pretty flippant, where its stated Heaven is a state of being but then God speaks from his throne in heaven. I like to just imagine this is an artistic effect as opposed to God being a bearded man with a human face sitting on a throne somewhere, but that's just how i interpret those bits. Many Christians do treat heaven as a place, but this view is likely wrong.

"Heaven is treated as a place and that place is wherever God is despite your claim that Heaven is a state of being and not a physical place."

God is whole and holistic, so yes Heaven seems to be either stated or implied to be wherever God is, but many believe he is everywhere, so Heaven in a literal sense is all around us, so its both a state of being and a place at the same time due to its qualities being infinity itself.

"When I say we're a fragment of God, think of it as a shard of glass within a block of glass. "

This is fair, most people have this issue. But reframe it a little bit "everything which exists, exists within something else or within itself" the shard of glass within the glass is within it, but still distinct from the broader glass. In this same way you and I exist within the world but are still in this same sense separate too it. Then the world is contained within space, and lets just say space is contained within itself. For physical things to interact they must share properties, otherwise they would go through one another. This then means there's Something underlying all reality which seems to possess all properties within it, allowing things to interact. this underlying thing is all properties itself. Paradoxically, all things are in it, and if all things are in it, but that's within itself, then all things in it are itself. It is the originator, the first mover. So yes the glass shard analogy works on the human eyes or surface level, but on the cosmic or larger picture it doesn't translate seem to translate as well, so we're both a shard in the human experimental level, but on the macro level it may well be a false illusion.

"Okay, fine. The problem with identity being false is that it's based on an individual's experience and their interpretation of it. As per my beliefs, it's impossible for anyone to experience an objective reality. I'd argue we're not meant to experience an objective reality to build a "true" identity. Who are you to say what is and isn't a false identity anyway? "

I dont think im capable of convincing you to think otherwise. I only joked when i said i could fix you. I'm just not smart enough to figure out the worlds hardest questions like these. I just don't have the memory nor the bandwidth to both figure these things out, apply them critically to my life, while engraining them into a permanent aspect of how i see the world in every waking day. I think the only way would be the law of non contradiction, and again, you'd might even contend whether humans can know their reason is reasonable, and at that point conversation just spirals into circular reasoning and becomes unproductive.

"The problem with identity being false is that it's based on an individual's experience and their interpretation of it."

"Yes, this is the basic idea behind Hell. I see we're back to seemingly non-pantheistic views. From my understanding of a pantheistic viewpoint we--well, you at least--aren't in Hell because we aren't separate from God."

A Christian who takes the more literal interpretation would probably still describe me as living life in Hell, regardless of if i am or not, since i experience a sense of separation from God, I'm not no Jesus.

"it has to be otherwise it couldn't interact with physical things if its non physical"

Electromagnetic radiation interacts with physical objects all the time and is not physical.  Things do not have to be physical to interact with physical things, they just usually are.

"This concept of Satan as a spiritual figure occupying a fiery hell is largely ficticous, and ideas of Satan as a created being by God are generally just loosely strung together from theologians who know more than me based on passages implying so, as opposed to any actual proper descriptions or conformations in an absolute sense"

You make this statement as if someone has some means of proving any of these religious concepts, from pantheism to Buddhism to objective morality.  None of them have irrefutable evidence, or there would not still be this debate out them.  Without proof beyond feelings and opinions, all of this should be considered ficticious, or at least none of it should be denigrated as "less real".

Electromagnetic fields are physical phenomenon. They're still made of the same building blocks everything else is. EM radiation consists of photons, which means its basically massless, but photons are just quantum particles. Doesn't electro magnetic radiation come about from accelerated charged particles?

"You make this statement as if someone has some means of proving any of these religious concepts, from pantheism to Buddhism to objective morality."

Yeah, i can see why it can read that way. I like to be optimistic about the future. I don't think its fully hopeless on these things, it will be a hard feat to objectively rule them out, but i like to think the codes may be broke if humanity can survive long enough.

EM radiation is generated by charged particles but is not the particles themselves.  It is the waveform of energy that propogates through physical media, but is not physical media itself.

From wikipedia: Electromagnetic radiation is associated with those EM waves that are free to propagate themselves ("radiate") without the continuing influence of the moving charges that produced them, because they have achieved sufficient distance from those charges.

In quantum mechanics, quanta are considered zero mass photons that propogate those field effects.  I do not think that most physicists would consider such virtual particles as actually physical.  That is probably an arguable position by people that know physics better than I.

To be non physical is to be non tangible, without form. But waves oscillating from being interacted with and moved occurs from energy and momentum being given too it from the electrons movements, meaning it has form or well, something there, since it can be disturbed/moved by something with form. Electromagnetic radiation obeys the laws of physics. Electro magnetic radiation is even born from the movements of matter, even if it isn't defined as matter itself due to its weightlessness and wavelike function. I can see why you can think its non physical, and it certainly isn't physical in the traditional sense that matter is, hence why we decided to make the distinction between these forms of energy, but its still something that can be tangibly messed about with, measured, detected, and change momentum/frequency. This idea that something truly non physical can mess with physical things just seems to be a giant non sequitur to begin with, it doesn't seem rationally possible. To be non physical in the absolute sense, at least to means to not exist.

And thus why quantum mechanics defines quanta as weird pseudo particles.

But if you genuinely believe your last couple statements, doesn't that mean that God(s) do not exist as they have no direct physical impact on reality?

Virtual particles are pretty mind melting to read about, but very cool.

I think it's possible for a God to exist. There's nothing inherently contradictory about the idea. It would just mean these gods would have to be physical in an unusual way such as virtual particles or dark matter, or gravity. Humans are very flawed beings in our perception. There's many things I can't see with my eye sight, and it probably only evolved well enough to be "passable" As opposed to ideal lol. Same with my other qualities. I'm very limited in what I can perceive or know, like an ant would be compared to me or you. I do believe you have to be physical to interact with the physical. But this might manifest in creative and unusual ways i wouldn't expect, such as how weird things like gravity, dark matter or electromagnetic radiation work. I still think they're physical phenomenon though, they just occupy that space in weird and unusual ways.

So what particles is God made out of? By your logic, he otherwise couldn't exist.

I wouldn't really know that's the point. But I am a materialist. In a scientific perspective there's absolutely no reason to believe immaterial beings exist, and David humes problem of induction suggests the same. If I'm talking with speculation on what God would be made of in its highest form, I'd pressume it would be pure consciousness, so whatever consciousness is made of, which yes, I also think must be physical, even if it's just some kind of high vibrational energy we cant detect or see yet like traditional matter. I don't think even that would be some spooky spirit with no form or actual reality. So he probably wouldn't be made out of "particles" In its highest form, at least not like matter.

Although if God exists, he either created from itself or from nothing, since he was the only thing to exist. I think it's more likely he created from itself for many reasons. Meaning if a conscious God does exist he experiences himself through us, more than likely.

My issue with a non materialistic view of deities or gods is that I don't know exactly what they're referring too when they say they're Immaterial. If it's immaterial what is God made of? Nothing? Spirit stuff? What is spirit stuff made of? I've just never had a proper explanation of what makes something immaterial without just describing something material.

Mari Emmanuel is pretty cool btw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVlJ7UxFFLM

He'll survive.

This one's funny, and at least only half true.

The bit about your dad was the only part of that you were willing to protest?

Lol, I mean I do like chicken nuggies (need salt on then before they go in the air fryer otherwise what's the point, you know?). Im ashamed to say i haven't watched anime in years now though, fake fan at this point smh. 

 

And let's not start on the willpower. You need willpower to sustain yourself on nothing but nuggies, and that's facts. 

I am glad you salt your salted oilbread-meat.

Now I'm looking forward to you reading my story even more (if you decide to), because I want to see how your views compare to the ones in the story, especially the science stuff. 

There is absolutely good and bad within Buddhism, it is certainly addressed. The tenets of the Eightfold Path are all described as "Right ___", implying that there are correct and incorrect ways of doing things. These are basic Buddhist ideas.

Yeah actually, there is a lot about rejecting the world in Christianity. But that doesn't necessarily mean going to live in a monastary and never speaking to a nonbeliever. It also doesn't mean not doing anything fun. It just means not attaching yourself to the world and giving up what you;re called to give up.

That probably wasn't the best way to put that, but "putting away Earthly things" is 100% mentioned and encouraged in the Bible.

Is the material world inherently bad, a wash, or good? No one seems to argue that the spiritual world is inherently bad (unless you're Denett or Fredrich the German author with a funny moustache, and even they don't say it's bad they just deny it exists). It seems to me to be a very easy to answer question with vastly important implications. 

It sounds like you and Fresh have a lot to talk about, why don’t you guys have a thunder dome battle next week in the next slot available, if both of you are down for it?

Wow I’m setting up a lot of the fights, I think I’m on my way to becoming the next Don King of the thunderdome.

Oh yeah, my bad. If both parties agree and are willing, could that duel be scheduled for the slot after bezros and petros?

I'm taking a small break from Thunderdome stuff in general. Need to focus on school. I really shouldn't be on the forums so much but the pull, the magnetic pull...

We'll see where I am in a couple weeks, and flutter as well. I don't actually have any beef with him (I think?).

You know, you could always fight someone........

"I don't actually have any beef with him (I think?)."

No, of course not! But then, I don't have beef with anyone, because I don't eat it...

Glad we're on good terms then. 

"Tell your boyfriend, if he says he's got beef, that I'm a vegetarian and I'm not fucking scared of him"

I also don't eat beef, for the record. (the days of hotdogs in my ramen are also far behind me, for those keeping tabs)

Not as a matter of religion. I just don't like beef.

That makes sense, I respect that. Ultimately it’s both of your decisions, I’m just throwing out potential matches out there.

I think I would be interested in dueling someone in the thunderdome at some point in time, I’m just not really sure when or who I would duel. Perhaps in the future I might

Th material world can be used for good and can be a force of evil. It's not the stuff itself that is bad, but the heart condition behind it. Hording stuff because of greed or fear is bad. Matt 3:24 says you can't serve God and money, but also that you can't serve two masters in general. As long as God is the center of your life, there's nothing wrong with having stuff.

If the relative "goodness" or "badness" of the material world is entirely dependant on mortal intentions (which I'm not sure I support, considering there seems to be a single, wholly good intention behind everything which would seem to override such mortal intentions, or at the very least align with them) then surely that means that the relative "goodness" or "badness" of all collective wills of all mortal intentions, when combined, inform the "goodness" or "badness" of the material world?

 

This question is essentially the crux of my whole story. 

It's about the intention of the individual, not related to the material at all.

There's probably an important distinction to be made between "the world" as in the prevailing culture of the day vs "the world" as in God's material creation

Yeah, for sure. The first is in the sense of "worldly" the adjective.

Really similar, and probably based off of that, bt I'd say my definition of Christianity has been based on the Apostles' Creed.

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
      creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
      who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
      and born of the virgin Mary.
      He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
      was crucified, died, and was buried;
      he descended to hell.
      The third day he rose again from the dead.
      He ascended to heaven
      and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
      From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
      the holy catholic church,
      the communion of saints,
      the forgiveness of sins,
      the resurrection of the body,
      and the life everlasting. Amen.

Worth noting that the word "catholic" there does not refer to the Roman Catholic church. I guess the only thing I would add is that the belief and trust in the resurrection of Christ is our only way and the only requirement to go to Heaven, which the creed doesn't really specify.

I will also say I don't have a whole lot of creeds or anything memorized, my church isn't like that. But I learned that creed in youth group a few years back and it words it pretty well.

Yeah, lower case catholic is always the adjective.

You are just pretty casually dismissing one of the most well known Christian apologists here.

"You found God by reading the works of a man who famously wrote this whole body of work meant to direct people to God? Seems sus, get fucked retard."

That's not what I meant. I meant that he's not God himself, not that he's not highly intelligent or doesn't make good points. I don't have a problem with flutter's beliefs, I just don't think it entirely falls under the branch of Christianity. I'm not arguing about if he's right, just if his beliefs and the beliefs of Christianity align. He seems to put a lot more emphasis on works and actions than I've come to believe Christianity entails. I'm really not trying to come off like "you can't call yourself a Christian", I'm just wondering why a person would specifically say they're a devout Christian, but specifically their version of Christianity (as flutter put it). Why not just say it's a different religion? There's animal sacrifice in the Bible; clearly cruelty to animals isn't the be-all end-all. And the Bible clearly states that this world will present us with trials. The idea of "bad things happen because you did bad and good things come because you did good" just doesn't fit in my mind. According to the Bible (specifically Romans 3:10-12), all people are wicked and none of us do good. It's impossible to earn any kind of good thing by our own actions, and all of them are a gift from God that people don't deserve. We do good things not to get good things, but because it's the right thing to do. Sometimes it ends in literally dying, and that doesn't mean the person who died did something incredibly horrible that made it to where they deserved death more than other people.

And I evidently misread his statement about coming to Christianity straight from atheism, as flutter pointed out. I can get behind what he's saying regarding that particular concept, I just didn't know what it was he was saying.

I also don't mean to come off as hostile. I really am just trying to understand. I apologize for any sentence or concept I take out of context, I'm presenting them as best I can with my limited understanding of what's being said.

I can't really delve into any kind of debate right now anyway, but just to establish it for context, do you believe Catholics are Christians?

I don't know enough about Catholicism to have an opinion on the matter.

My retarded layman view of Catholicism is that it's a bit more traditionalist, conservative, and community orientated compared to some other branches of Christianity. I find myself a bit more drawn to Protestant or other versions though, at least if I were to be Christian. The sense of community seems like it'd be better with Catholics though. 

 

That's because God hates foot lickers.

CS Lewis was an incredibly prolific and widely read Christian thinker. You are a retarded zoomer and somehow coming across as less reasonable than the schizoid clopper 

You always have such a way with words.

As Lewis defines Paganism as simply having religiosity without being Christian, you may be assuming a different definition than he was.  I agree that there are plenty of atheist converts that did not go through a period of paganism, as in the worship of old gods, but if they were honestly atheists to begin with they certainly would have entered a period where they felt the draw of the numinous but had not selected christianity as the model of it that they felt was most correct.

Not saying he is right or wrong, I do not agree with his assertions any more than I agree with Flutters, but merely pointing out he starts the sermon with an unusual definition of paganism.

I agree Fresh.  I've read through a whole run of the story and do not see it as a persuasive argument or effectively explaining how this line of thought led someone from staunch atheist to devout christian.  Wanting to discourage animal cruelty, especially in industrial farming, does not require belief in a god, much less specifically the christian one.

Okay, I'm getting quite a few questions here and I'm sorry, but I'm not going to answer any of them. As I said earlier in the thread I'd be here forever if I did that. I already feel like I said way too much in the actual story.

Based.  I like it. Let your art speak for itself.

Well. He said plenty in the OP too, so I think questions are natural if people are finding any part of the numerous claims made unclear.

See I actually feel like the story itself doesn't really say much. It's like you're hinting at stuff, but you never really say anything. I feel as though if you truly believe this information is as important as you claim in the original post, then you should be more than willing to talk about it. 

Are you... scared? The fact that you were even slightly worried a story would get you banned is absurd. You could directly claim that the world is ruled by a giant spaghetti monster and say that everyone who doesn't believe you is going to hell and you wouldn't be banned. You don't get banned for offending people, and stories don't get taken down for that either. It's obvious you put a lot of work into it, so I'd say it's safe.

But when you're proud of something, you should want to talk about it. Besides the very very cryptic and... flamboyant? original post and one response to a negative review, you haven't done that at all. Was this story not meant to inspire curiosity? Was it not meant to leave the reader wanting to delve into the ideas brought up? Am I supposed to read it and move on? You said the concepts within it are lifechanging, but it doesn't seem as though you want them to impact anyone at all.

The thing is, I'm not really proud of my stories, this one especially, because I don't feel like any of the ideas contained inside actually belong to me. This is why I love fanfiction. And you can see for yourself in the reviews, there's been such a vast range of reactions to what I've written. I have tried to be as clear as I possibly can in the story, but I suspect what's going on is that the story has completely different effects on people depending on what kind of things they think about or the ideas they are exposed to. So someone who spends all their time in Church might have a very different reaction to someone who's spent their life reading Dawkins/Hariri/Daniel Denett. I'm fine with that, because if I can even inspire one person to think about these things, or if I can shake anyone else out of the ideologies that ultimately spring from this "selfish gene" nonsense, then I consider it a success.

 

If it hasn't really changed your worldview, then it's perfectly possible, perhaps even likely, that you already have a healthy outlook on life anyway. 

Trying to gauge the effect this story has had on everyone:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FQD7GkyWUAERJOB?format=jpg&name=medium

 

So, I said that I wouldn't be answering any more responses. Apparently that's not going to be the case because I'm going to answer this next one.

 

1) This is not really a storygame at all. It's a manifesto, but more than that, it's a personal expression of what the other believes in an interactive format.

Sure, it's why I was worried about publishing it here at all. But it certainly has interactive, gameified elements too. The reason I published it here is that it is one of the few places left that I have not got complete and utter contempt for. 

2)  I feel that I cannot honestly review this story without at least a small mention of those issues, so I apologize in advance to the author.

Fair enough, you are entitled to your opinion.

3) I think you actually cheat your argument by cutting off any truly disturbing imagery.

On the contrary, I think that's the biggest mistake everyone makes. An overload of horror causes people to shut their minds off and not even want to think about what's going on. In fact it works as another one of these "narcotics". 

4) One is the extremely bold statement that panic is the primary emotion felt by acoustic societies.

This all comes from Marshall Mcluhun, and I actually think that it works if you really think about it. If you honestly believe (as acoustic societes seemed to) that the world was full of Qamuleks and Skinwalkers and Ghosts and all these bugbears, then I find it very difficult to imagine that you wouldn't have panic as a symptom if that society. And for all our talk of scentific progress, we still have aliens and creepypastas and AI and people going on and on about the "SiNgUlAriTy" ad nauseum, so it doesn't seem to have made a difference. This is just a restatement of what the actual themes of the story are, so really it's answered by the story itself. 

5) but things getting smaller in perspective toward the horizon was an observable fact far before any kind of formal Euclidean geometry.

The point is not that people completely forget the concept of Euclidian geometry, the point is that the concept seems more uncertain in such socieites. 

6) The idea that acoustic societies were ruled by unchanging gods that weren't subject to linear time is also a little bit silly. It is, in fact, later monotheistic religions with written scripture who were the ones insisting that they worship a timeless, unchanging god.

The Greek gods have no Ragnarok but the Norse Aesir (written by people who venerated the written word) do have an ending. Even Christianity has its own "Ragnarok", which is the Second Coming.There's an end point in both of them. But not im the Greek gods (well, except when Christ comes in...)

7) I'm not sure whether the exception in the mind of the author was for "good" media or for people who also read a lot.

At this point, things get hazy enough that I can't make any definitve statements about what's going on. All I can say is, it's possible to tell "good" messages from "bad" ones, the "bad" ones promote looping behaviours and the "good" ones don't. 

9) Much of the storygame presupposes that humans and animals are equal and that the suffering of both is to be given equal importance.

Never did I say or even imply such a thing. I used the "100 billion" animals a year figure later on in the story. Jesus has the quote about a human life being worth more than "many sparrows". Not "infinite sparrows". Not "100 billion sparrows a year". I mean, there have been 100 billion humans throughout history, so if humans and animals were equally important then we'd cancel out our whole species right to exist every year. This is going too far, but you have to ask yourself, seriously, when do we reach that point? And I don't mean in a relative, subjective point of way. If my theory at the end of the "collective demiurge" is true, then there comes a point when the literal building blocks of reality start to cause humanity as a species to crumble. 

10) Belief that it's vengeful animal spirits making humans commit these evils is naïve at best, and I'm doing you the favor of not assuming that is what's being said.

That's a healthier, truer way of looking at the world than this postmodernist, failsafe ideology of "Oh, everything's just relative, man! You can do and say whatever you like with zero consequences man!"Despite the fact that people who try that just end up triggering these mental failsafes.  As I said before the "collective demiurge" concept is the science-y, evolutionary way of looking at it for people who need that sort of thing. But you can look at it anyway you like. 

11) I think what you have wrote has a lot of thought and care put into it, and I truly believe that anybody just trying to write their worldview in a storygame would come off passionate and insane. There's certainly nothing evil in here, and while I don't think this has really changed my worldview anymore than Peter Singer did, I honestly am glad you made it. If nothing else, it could make your other stories interesting to read with this one in mind.

That was an extremely nice thing to say, which is why I broke my rule of "not answering questions" for this one. The line "there's certainly nothing evil here" is a particular relief. I do believe the "collective demiurge", at least from a modern perspective, is an extremely important philosophical concept which I haven't seen anyone else discuss before.

1) The fact that my manic, borderline-mental breakdown was only a "little" delusional sounding is something that I'll take as a win.

2) "a bleeding heart vegetarian with a cartoon pony avatar" That quote's going on my profile. 

Hello. I don't think you and I have ever talked before, and if so I can't imagine it was favorably since I've disliked most of your other games so far. However, despite the hilarious audacity of its premise, this thing was clearly very important to you, and, for the first time, interesting to me. So I'll be going out of my way to give you the benefit of the doubt. I haven't read all the way through this story, but it is in part due to certain glaring misconceptions that have interfered with my ability to understand and digest what you're trying to say in good faith-- A task that people farther along than I apparently also have trouble with, so I'd like to get any clarifications straight from the pony's mouth, as it were, before I continue.

EDIT: I just read you're not doing that anymore, but I've been eaking away at this effortpost for entirely too long to not post it. I'll continue my reading forthwith once my brain has recovered the energy.

The issue that sticks in my head the most given what I know about the subject, is that Ancient Greece, and Rome by extension, were oral societies first and literary societies by pure incident. The fact that we can read the words of authors from that period is less because they intentionally wrote things down to speak to the future, though occasionally they did, it's because the writing was the only thing that lived. What we have from that time period is like fragments of bones preserved in reliquaries. But at that time, writing was not meant to be like a longterm preserved form of thought. Rather, its reputation was as a dull but helpful assistant to its older brother art, rhetoric.

This was a time before uppercase and lowercase letters, spaces, or, in the case of the Greeks, even a completely agreed-upon direction of text, because for the most part writing was purely a memory aid. A guy who wrote something down knew how he intended to say it, memorizing the words was the problem. So things like punctuation and other indicators we use to show how something is supposed to be said by someone who isn't the one that was thinking it, were unnecessary. A lot of speeches we have from classical Greece are written "as the cow goes", as in, like, starting from left to right, then going the other way on the next line, then back again, because preserving the fluidity of speech for the guy who wrote this for himself to read was more important than another person being able to read it, and everyone had their own kind of system.

It was a tradition for most people at the time, even highly influential thought leaders, to have all their journals, speeches, and poetry and shit, burned after they died. This was considered important for the legacy of the person, because writing things down, especially at that time, didn't come with the disambiguating power of voice, and delivery, and body language, and all those other things they were used to using in order to communicate with people. Most of what we have from those civilizations were either highly constructed things intentionally written to be published to a select group, usually students, like the big name Philosophers and Homer/Hesiod works we have from that time, or, like the persona; poetry we have by Cicero, salaciously "stolen" from its author before it could be destroyed, like much of Kafka's work.

You seem to make a big point of Ovid being the one to normalize and reify the subversion and complication of mythology, but that just doesn't seem like the case. For one thing, Lucian, one of my favorite writers of that kind of period, had already been dead something like 50 years before Ovid was born. For another, the evidence we have suggests that subversion was kind of the rule rather than the exception.

You seem to acknowledge a little bit that oral mythologies change depending on the storyteller. People knew about this at the time! This was considered a feature rather than a bug. There were a lot of poems and things meant to stay memorized  to carry across generations, yes, but they also weren't meant to represent a literal physical truth in a lot of cases. Not everyone's cultures kept the same stories, and not everyone within each culture knew all of them. Differences in one's recounting of the events are meant to communicate one's individual perspective and belief, and picking apart the story so that you know how best to tell it is like a social bonding activity within the religion. There isn't some "canon" enforced from the top down about what happened. There were consistent versions of the myths written down in order to be kept a long time, but the details could be esoteric. In places where cultic institutions were more powerful, people might be more protective of the way certain stories are interpreted, but like...

Take Hinduism for example, a highly syncretic polytheist religion that's been continuously alive a lot longer compared to most modern examples except maybe the umbrella of religious practices within China and Japan, but I don't know if that part of the culture is nearly as 'alive' as it is in India still. There are far fewer places there where you could hear what I'm about to describe in those places than you could in India. The principle of the practice is that you can only learn so much from the parts of those stories that have been written down. The way these stories evolve and stay relevant is when you learn them the way that the people who still believe them know them, (Unless you're one of the increasingly fundie/literalist Hindutva types, but they have very particular political reasons behind trying to move Hinduism away from that into something more atomized and authoritarian, like the priestly classes before them) which is by listening to like a whole family or group of people discuss the story. Like, the daughter might know one part in the most detail, the dad might know something else, somebody might say something that seems wrong and someone else might correct them, and the story is relayed through a kind of wisdom of the crowd phenomenon. Sometimes only the older men in the family are allowed to tell it, sometimes everyone has kind of a hand in it, the dynamic changes by culture and that also says something important about what the story means. The plot points of the story are widely agreed upon, but differences in how different groups and settings will tell you that story, and how different people within that group will tell you that story, can communicate a lot about their perspective on life and their values as people, which are important. That's what mythology is for, that's not only how these stories spread, but it's kind of their social purpose.  

Ovid chose to be critical of the gods, but he was far from the first. The oldest literary sources we have suggest that the gods were capricious figures, seen more as embodiments of their elements with all the potential harm that could come, and they were frequently more feared than loved. The "good guys" were not really thought of as universally, morally good, and the "bad guys" were not unanimously reviled. There is a classical temple to Cronus, the guy most famous to modern minds as the one who ate all the Olympian gods but Zeus, but also had a lot of other associations and responsibilities in the ancient Greek mind, whose foundation still stands today. Lucian even casts Cronus as an unambiguously pretty good guy succeeded by rich wasteful scoundrels in his Saturnalia, in order to make a point about the treatment of poor people at his time and place. But that's the thing, Lucian was a satirist, but that art is far older than he is. In fact, in many cases, subversion was the point.

The fact that written works can be openly complicated and subversive now isn't evidence that complicated and subversive things didn't exist before they were written, it's not evidence that there was some kind of paradigm shift right before the start of the Common Era. It is maybe a sign that countercultural thinkers were being taken more seriously at one time or another, or had more access to writing and having their work preserved. But that's not to say unorthodox retellings didn't exist, only that literacy and the proliferation of thought used to be a thing controlled by the privileged at one point.

Cults of the gods, the closest to organized churches at the time, had political and pecuniary power in their spheres of influence, (usually specific citystates,) so they had a lot of vested interest in keeping their stories carefully memorized to portray their gods "correctly" and proliferating new ones to justify their practices. But that doesn't mean that there was a tightly controlled orthodoxy. You could get in trouble for espousing certain views too publicly, like a lack of belief in the gods altogether, but often wildly different takes on the same story would coexist and the difference would be like a matter of personal political and religious opinion.

A good example of this is Hades and Persephone. Is it a tragic romance, Beauty and the Beast type of tale, or the suffering of a kidnapping victim eternally bound to a cosmic rapist? The Homeric version is fairly neutral in its depiction and centers most of its narration on Demeter's reaction. Both interpretations of what was left unsaid have existed for about as long as people have been reading Homer, but different versions become more popular at different times.

The story of Theseus and the minotaur is actually a combination of stories based on folklore on the isle of Crete specifically, and between the lines is a kind of subversion for a pantheon of gods whose name we don't even know because what was happening in real life at the time of this story's proliferation was that the burgeoning Cretan monarchy was moving away from the less organized "bull cult" (a separate kind of religion we don't know a lot about before it became syncretized into the system of Hellenistic cults) in order to draw bloodline legitimization from the Olympian pantheon, like most other monarchs were doing or had already done at the time. At a certain point the Greek gods were very popular on that island and/or the bull cult was considered more cringe, and gradually a story arose of Theseus, son of Poseidon, supplanting the monstrous offspring of an impossibly perfect fecund bull figure and kind of stabilizing the rule of Minos, whose own ancestry was meant to be semi-divine. (And a fun note for those who bothered reading this far anyway: the fact that everybody important at this kind of time needed to have at least a famous agreed-upon demigod or two in their family tree is part of why the Gods are so horrifically incestuous. But not all of it! Sometimes it seems like there just had to be a bit of incest around here.)

Anyway the point I'm getting at is that there just seems to be evidence that the complete tapestry of humanity has kind of always existed-- What's changed is who's allowed to be in charge, who those people in charge allow to live, whose word is allowed to appear in record, and why. The idea that they were any more or less panicked than we are, or ever were, might "make sense" from the perspective of someone looking back 2000 years at an alien existence, but it is not quantifiable nor falsifiable. They had plenty of concerns and anxieties, as human civilizations have always had for justifiable reasons, but the relation between Pan and Panic is rooted in far more than just the medium by which information travels and knowledge is stored.

Pan, in the Greek mind, is the god of nature- Nature as defined as a separate thing from Man. A thing we see as beautiful because we have not been traumatized by it-- And, indeed, many people still saw nature as beautiful back then, when they had the experience and knowledge to safely interact with it. But in the city-states? Where the gods and their stories were being recorded in writing for the first time? You generally come there to get away from that sort of thing. Like all the Greek gods, pan was alternately loved, revered, feared, hated, embraced, and avoided, depending on the person and their situation in life. The forest around my house is a welcoming place even at night, but the coyotes in my neighbors' field change the tone drastically.

The anxieties the Ancient Greeks felt weren't some superstition based purely on confusion and the unknown. The ancient Greeks, as humans are all too prone to do, were perfectly content to just make shit up to fill in the blank space of what they didn't know. The etymological root of panic, describes a cacophony of noises in the woods, which, to the Greeks, in an ancient world where agriculture was young and dangerous animals hadn't been massively culled back as they had been even during the dark ages, was a real and present threat.  Pan reigned during a time when a very small minority of the human race lived in what was called "Civilization". Most people around the world at this time were kind of a hybrid between nomadic and agrarian societies, living in tiny little villages or moving between them depending on the season. Identity and cohesion needed to be maintained between these societies to differentiate themselves from those "barbarians". Which is where, before you start interpreting Pan as some underlying panic in all people of this period that distinguishes the literate from the non, it becomes important to understand where we even learned about Pan in the first place-- Who's the one telling the story of Pan, and what are they telling us they believe?

To the kind of person that was able to write down anything about Pan and have it preserved by his contemporaries, Pan represented bedlam, chaos, madness, all that which was not strictly and carefully controlled by civilization. The fact that Pan was also the god of the good things people generally associate with nature is relatively quite positive representation compared to how chaos figures are treated in our far older record of bronze-age religions of city-state societies-- Frequently, a figure that represented the chaos and unpredictability of untamed wilderness had to be killed by the chief of the gods in order to make the world humans live in, and frequently that society would commemorate that event on a yearly basis to celebrate the fact that they were civilized and hopefully encourage fertile fields and the peaceful continuation of life in sedentary civilization.

And the thing about those bronze age civilizations-- By any modern standards, they are hyperbolically fascist. In the framework set up by the religious and cultural norms of Sumer and Assyria, a person's sole value and purpose is the job they are bound to do for the rest of their lives. Some are bound to rule, some are bound to oversee the worship of the gods, the majority are bound to some kind of industrial or agricultural toil. Women are property-- And frequently, men are also effectively property of their father until such a time comes that they take over whatever purpose the dad was fulfilling through inheritance, or, if somebody literally owns their dad, they're also chattel until death, unless it's one of those voluntary/indentured servitude situations or other loopholes. The dictator isn't just chosen by the gods to rule, he is A God, or an aspect of one reincarnated over and over by himself and his children. There isn't just "a year" on the calendar, you're in Year 8, meaning his majesty Ashurban's been emperor of the known world (and by extension all of the cosmos) for 8 years. When he dies (and he might not! Who knows?) we're giving it all to his son and starting from Year 0 again. Your city is your state, your state is your God, your king its living embodiment, and you live only at his pleasure.

There is much ado in the post-enlightenment age about separating church from state; This was before most institutional schools of thought had separated God from Ruler-- The openly oligarchic states of the Athenians and Spartans suddenly seem wildly progressive despite how awful it would have been for a normal person to live there. The image of Pan as a horror, to frighten the common peasant on the outskirts of the state's direct influence into compliance, could just as well be intentional. Of course all the gods can be wrathful, all of nature's forces from the wind to the sea can present terrible danger and destroy what man builds. But Pan? You don't want to cross into or take advantage of his territory in any way. You don't want to trespass into that wilderness when darkness comes. You don't want to happen upon Pan, the swindler, the destroyer, the defiler, the prolific rapist of men and women.

But he was also a rustic fertility god, the protector of shepherds and other folk who would have lived far away from the cities. A lot of these people would have found that interpretation absurd, but they generally weren't the ones holding the pen. I would caution against drawing such a broad conclusion about Pan as your source appears to have done, because that's just the thing-- Whenever a primary source tells you anything about the Greek Gods, they have an agenda. Of course Pan is dangerous and horrifying-- Of course it's bad to be "out there" in the unknown. It's important that the people beneath you, the urban man of letters, feel that way. It's important that you spread the word, so that no matter how oppressive and stiflingly competitive life in the citystate can be, people don't start considering the alternative.

I'm not saying that we avoided some kind of hippy paradise by not abandoning ancient Greece or whatever, but I am saying that the people who were able to write things down are not representative of the vast, vast majority of classical peoples, and that when myths were written down and intentionally preserved it was done so with ulterior motives. In a world where rhetoric is the superior of the arts, considered the only way to truly convince people of something, you write things down when you literally want to control the narrative. And it's a common theme throughout most ancient religions that strictly juxtapose an agriculturalized man against wild and dangerous nature.

I don't think it's acoustic societies that necessarily gravitate to this interpretation. I think it's just  politically useful for hegemonic societies to frame their perhaps flawed authority as the sole alternative to unknowability and death. Surviving bronze age religions don't seem nearly so cut and dry about the issue. Genesis was Jewish first, and a contemporary subversion of this Kaoskampf civilization-vs-nature stories. In that story, creation is inherently good, and the fact that man must leave the garden to toil is almost lamented. Zoroastrianism I'm not very familiar with but what little I have seen asserts that a certain piece of the divine is intrinsic in all life, whether or not there's a mythic distinction between the part of the world that's nature and the part that man makes for himself.

I guess my overarching point is that I disagree with the thesis that acoustic societies were in some way governed by an underlying ubiquitous panic; I think the idea of panic was instead a lot more like the idea of chaos in that it was widely recorded across cultures because it was considered politically useful for the upper classes who were writing down these things. There's no way to know what they were feeling and numerous interpretations that would suggest they felt and thought all sorts of other things that would contradict that kind of thing. I think the only thing I've learned from this thread and the process of writing this damnable post is that autistic societies are prone to an innate feeling of "Uhm actually". Back to reading this storygame I guess.

I read this entire text wall and found it to be good.

:)

Good job Sent.  You stated several of my issues with this story clearer than I could have been bothered to do.

Thank you Sent, you made me wanna read the Brony story to see how bad it is.

That's entirely the wrong mindset to go into a manifesto with, smh. It is not a work to be engaged with idly!

You should post a separate review on the story game itself, you'll easily get a featured comment, your analysis really detailed and well-written! I know that what you wrote is more of a meta-analysis on Flutter's analysis of auditory societies, but I would love to see what you thought of the game as a whole

I'm not done, and there's more things coming up I take issue with, that's just the first one I could fully consolidate.

Oh ok gotcha.

I read it now, I think I would've had a better time reading Ben's new story.

All things considered, you probably would have.

Yea, I agree

First thing, although I try to write stories that are welcoming to everyone, I am not under the delusion that everyone will find them interesting, they're all aimed at certain types of people. The idea that 100% of people are going to enjoy an open world MLP fanfiction doesn't seem likely to me. 

Secondly, I can't really comment on your points until you get to the end, because there are so many that relate to things that I address later on. In particular your comment "The idea that they were any more or less panicked than we are, or ever were, might "make sense" from the perspective of someone looking back 2000 years at an alien existence," is utterly fundemental to the backbone of the story. So if you decide to leave a review or a comment by the time you've finished, I'll give that a read. But I will say that the acoustic thing is based vastly around the works of "Marshall Mcluhan", who I credit at the end and, the more thought I gave to it, the more sense it makes. So for example, if you're in a dark forest and you hear a howl coming from the left, then suddenly the same one from the right, then one from behind, this instantly creates unease. Such an effect is going to be pretty much impossible to replicate in text form. The differences between acoustic and text based media are so incredibly vast that I currently find it very difficult to imagine that they have little or no effect. 

 

After looking into Mcluhan's stuff and then reading transcriptions of primarily acoustic stories, then comparing them to similar stories told by literate cultures, the differences becomr very easy to spot. In particular, the "euclidian" vs "non-euclidian" aspect is something which I spotted, then after researching it, found that Mcluhan picked up on the exact same thing. To me that indicates (as I said in another, unrelated post) that we were "thinking along the same lines", which you can't do in an acoustic media since there are no lines with which to think across. 

Aren't you getting your spiritual inspiration not from text but from movies and shows though? That's one of the things that didn't make sense to me.

My suspicion as to what's going on there is that the people who wrote these movies and shows got a great deal (or even most) of their inspiration from text-based media. The LOTR movies are obvious in that they're directly based off of that text media, Star Wars is a little less so (though George Lucas is obviously extremely well read on people like Jung and Campbell considering his influences). With MLP, that also seems to have many, many literary references (Wuthering Heights is directly mentioned by Fluttershy, and the more obvious Arthurian/Tolkien references, with a two parter at the starts of S1 that many have compared to Milton's Paradise Lost). 

As I said in one of the optional conversations in the Inuit village, even if the media is being delivered through an acoustic means, if the person delivering this message is already highly literate, then the messages delivered via that acuatic media will be far more ordered and structured than otherwise. 

This seems to be playing out in real time. People like Lucas, Faust and Jackson who seem to get most of their information from print, text media are being replaced by people who seem to have got substantially less of their information from text media. The comparisons between their work and the work of their succesors are night and day. 

I mean I guess I have to disagree fundamentally with the acoustic/ textual thing, because widespread literacy has only been a thing of the last couple hundred years, and the accomplishments of past societies are myriad.

I agree that reading imformation does change the way people think about it and remember it to a degree, just like how the language you speak can determine how you approach and categorize certain concepts, but it comes down to what we're used to. Sent already went into a lot of this is detail, but I've read the Greeks also saw writing as a crutch that dulled the minds of those who relied on it for memorization. (Probably the equivalent of people today not feeling the need to personally retain information that's always one Google search away.)

It's hard for us to conceive of an oral society but it was the reality for humans for most of history. I love the English language but words on a page are not a natural forum of communication, and I could see a real case for them making information stale and stagnant--like a recorded performance versus a live one, but lacking also much of the connection that goes into any face to face conversation. (Unless we go through these elaborate lengths to describe those things in a way that lets the brain of the reader simulate the gaps. Which, I think we've managed admireably in getting around these handicaps with fiction, but again only in a very recent timeframe.)

The written word is a tool like any other, and I think Sent hit the nail on the head when he said one of the original purposes was to control information. It literally set propaganda in stone. (Judges, for all that it's filled with some of the most based stories in the Bible, was pretty obviously commissioned to support the idea of lines of kings over the old judges system.)

I also don't get the particular fixation with left to right. Systems of writing produced by societies of very accomplished and organized thought that we owe much to today did not do this. And all societies featured change. It really feels like you're raising up the European style of preserving information above all others in an unfounded way, either because that's what you're used to or because of a personal connection to it that makes it hard for you to imagine life for someone with fundamentally different experiences in a way that isn't different/scary/bad. I have a hard runs with it too, but it's like, however the mind wrapps around it, it worked for them. Many humans of the past were far happier than we are.

Genuinely though, what is it about humans speaking with other humans that is inherently bad? Fearfully and society destroyingly bad, even. Or at least inferior compared to text. (A medium that famously does not convey tone well and is open to huge misunderstandings.)

Particularly looking at it from the religious angle, the God of Abraham did a lot of things by speaking words.

Guess unless told otherwise I'll just assume left to right writing being claimed as the basis of all civilized thought is Flut's way of saying he's proud of his European heritage.

Just because it's an interesting bit of trivia and might as well go here because why not, I came across an article in the Smithsonian some time ago that talked about how the Canaanites invented the written alphabet that later evolved into Greek. (There were obviously writing systems used by major civilizations well before that, but not based on the all important alphabet that permits the passage of time when written out left to right or whatever.)

The thing the article was actually about was an ivory comb that had been found in 2016, which hard carved on it the oldest known sentence in alphabetical language--and it was an invocation against head lice.


Oh yeah, and I looked up the "as the cow goes" left to right and then right to left alternating writing, and unsurprisingly, it's all Greek to me:

"Boustrophedon is a style of writing in which alternate lines of writing are reversed, with letters also written in reverse, mirror-style. This is in contrast to modern European languages, where lines always begin on the same side, usually the left. The original term comes from Ancient Greek: βουστροφηδόν, boustrophēdón, a composite of βοῦς, bous, "ox"; στροφή, strophḗ, "turn"; and the adverbial suffix -δόν, -dón, "like, in the manner of" – that is, "like the ox turns [while plowing]". It is mostly seen in ancient manuscripts and other inscriptions. It was a common way of writing on stone in ancient Greece, "

Pretty interesting concept though and it makes a weird amount of sense for them to have structured writing on a page after plowing a field. I know ancient Hebrew was written right to left, I'm not sure of the cow thing for them.

I'm a big fan of the writing the aliens from Arrival use though. Which I guess if you remove the time travel is closest to a lot of Asian languages where they just look at it to grok whole concepts at once, or have those poems that show more layered meanings when read from multiple directions.

I can't really respond to all of Sent's points here, mostly he's given me a set of subjects to look up that are probably way more interesting when he talks about them. But it's not a new concept that writing things down can freeze them in amber and force them to stagnate. We've seen the same treatment to many collections of folk tales, from the Brother's Grimm to Robin Hood to Arthurian legend. What the author chooses to put to the page becomes viewed as the original and definitive source, when before that these things were living and ever evolving tales.

Obviously everyone here at a writing site views it as hugely, vitally important, but it still can be just a form of preservation, like pinning a dragonfly to a board or wrapping up a mummy. There's a lot to be learned from what's left but some essential element has been lost.

Also, I've realized all poetry is tied intinsically and inseparably to "acoustic" ways of thinking, if there's anything to this concept at all. It's subjective and ancient, and there's nothing pleasing about an arrangement of words on a page except in how they'd flow if spoken out loud.

Which has made me realize that people who were born deaf possibly get nothing out of poetry at all. That seems really sad, I don't really know anyone personally who could confirm or deny it as a theory though.

I mean there are plenty of rhetorical things that are satisfying in poetry that don't necessarily require you to hear the words in your head, although that does help. Much of the poetry around the time the bible was written, came long before the invention of literal rhyming or before we even had such a frankly luxuriant selection of synonyms with their own distinct sounds and specific and nuanced meanings to choose from. But there are still really cool, almost sensory effects you can pull off with words by using the concepts those words contain alone. The old testament specifically is full of really satisfying metaphors, comparisons, and repetition, for example. But people do this with spoken word literally all the time, which is why they're called rhetorical devices. You can appreciate chiasmus, hyperbole, anaphora, and epizeuxis without having to hear them. However, I did just pick all those ones specifically because of how fun they are to say.

You faggots talked too much.

If it's wrong to kill animals for food, why did God base us on violent omnivorous chimps instead of multicolored ponies?

Harvesting a cow provides a lot of absolutely crucial products beyond just meat, and the milk and eggs you might alternately rely on only come from half the species. If animals are naturally arranging themselves into group of one male to multiple females, what's supposed to be done with all the excess males who aren't passing on their genes and whose existence strains the food supply?

You can't even survive without animal protein unless you are using artifical supplements, why would God create humans this way and then attach spiritual judgement to basic survival?

Man this is one of the most wretchedly unsatisfying posts I have ever read. Whether the dietary claims are even strictly true is one thing that can be debated in circles forever, as it always will be whenever vegetarians and highly defensive normals are in a room together. Trying to turn the male animals thing into some kind of principle when that really isn't how the industry works anyway is another. But the thing that most offends me here is that, even though I don't agree with many of this guy's philosophical positions-- I'm not vegetarian, and I don't think his diagnoses of history and culture seem correct-- you come out here with the same canned arguments about vegetarianism as anyone else on the planet for no reason except what seems to be a half-assed attempt to trigger him on the most blatant things.

You really came here and tried to post this unironically. Tried, as if a person like Flutter probably hasn't had this very argument in different ways five times before you. At the very least he's probably ignored 20 arguments just like this one before. Look at this dude's post history, most of his time spent on the internet is in places that annoy him for nonspecific reasons related to watching people argue. The story he wrote literally opens up with how pointless and unproductive that kind of approach is anyway, and on that we agree. There are so many ingredients here for a genuinely weird, interesting and entertaining debate or just discussion, and you come out here swinging with this shit, like, what the hell. Boldly defending the majority opinion, just in case you'll finally be the one musket in the gunline that actually aims true and changes this guy's mind. What would we do without you?

This post probably doesn't even register as offensive to him. The message itself is not even offensive to me. Rather, it offends my eyes with its repulsively cliche nature. The complete lack of engagement with the schizopost in front of you, aside from trying to tie the same "but omnivorism is biologically essential in humans" shit he likely already doesn't believe in because it's every conversation about vegetarianism at this point, to classic intelligent design talking points, as if somebody who's entrenched themselves in a position this autistic would see a contradiction here for the first time and one side or the other would suddenly completely give way because you said this. The audacity!

You really came in here, saw a vegetarian manifesto calling the LOTR movies the last stand of Christianity, and the best response you could come up with was "My brain has already decided these positions were stupid before the conversation started so I'm about to ownzone this dude so hard with nutritional theories I learned years ago". You redditor! You absolute fucking bot! Go in the corner and think about what you've done. Think of the opportunity you squandered, confronting a truly one-of-a-kind maniac with the same shit you would use to argue with any 6 year old who says they decided not to eat meat, as if that's even the most significant thing here. Where the hell is the mischief in your soul? Where is your sense of intellectual adventurousness? I would give this post -1 commendations if I could.

Actually no, if I'd wanted to make the "canned argument" I'd have pointed out that widespread agriculture is disruptive to habitats and kills billions of animals as well, vegans always hate that as it shows their bias.

I admit I didn't read this entire thread, because I mean look at it. Other people seem to have replying to the rest of it well in hand and I don't feel qualified to try and pick apart someone else's religious beliefs about cartoons and movies or how they're interpreting the Bible.

I DID read the authors last post though and he's complaining about factory farms (wow holy crap, do you mean.... they're bad???) but also saying with absolute certainty that ancient tribal populations, while existing in the most natural way humans ever lived unavoidably felt "intense guilt" just for being created to need protein.

The point about male animals is that it makes sense as a factor for ancient herders and also for how people hunted, I'm not trying to argue about modern practices, they are just another example of the exploitation inherent to capitalism.

But the idea someone would look at their child with their muscles failing and their belly bloated out from lack of protein and feel automatic, unavoidable, INTENSE GUILT for feeding them is insane and out of touch Westernized thinking. Going a step further and presenting that as a Catch 22 designed by God Himself is really something else. Hinging the guilt or non guilt of the whole world and every human in history on their access to artificial supplements that haven't even existed a century. It makes even less sense than the writing thing.

I have no problem with vegetarians or vegans who make a personal ethical choice, but it's a diet with a lot of privilege layered on and trying to push it on everyone else by guilt or any other means is just arrogance. My aunt was a nutritionist for 16 years, she talked to a lot of vegans, it's literally not a viable diet outside of a modern, wealthy, Westernized country and even then it really can't be maintained in a healthy way. They need pills to live and most of them are mentally ill. (Vegetarians aren't so bad in health but vegans hate them since they also need the factory farm boogeyman and just create more demands for affordable eggs and dairy.)

But in other countries it's not intense guilt they're feeling but intense malnutrition.


"People need a diverse diet to ensure adequate micronutrient intake if they don’t consume fortified, processed foods.

Micronutrient-rich foods include fruit and vegetables, meat and dairy, pulses, seafood, nuts and seeds.

In contrast, cereal, root, and tuber commodities tend to be energy-dense but are micronutrient-poor."



"Why is micronutrient deficiency more prominent among people of lower incomes?

Since cereals tend to be less expensive than other food commodities, poorer households tend to have a more monotonous and energy-dense diet that is lacking in the dietary diversity required to meet micronutrient requirements.

In contrast, richer households are more able to afford a diverse range of micronutrient-rich foods to supplement staple food items."

This isn't revolutionary information, it's all basic stuff, you can see that these diets kill. https://ourworldindata.org/micronutrient-deficiency

And there was more in this in the boiling rice thread, the "guilt free" Jesus approved grain based societies are literally watching their stunted children succumb to all kinds of conditions anyone here would feel only horror to see, that would've been the norm for every non-modern society without animal protein, and are avoidable in first world societies only because of fortifications and supplements and unprecedented cheap and easy access to meat (even if it apparently only comes in the shape of chicken nuggets around here.)

If vegetarians really wanted to change the world and improve animal welfare they should focus more on economic equality and less on shaming people and pointing at them going guilt guilt GUILT for the literal survival act of getting nutrients the only way they can. Nobody likes factory farms and there's no need to keep repeating that they are bad, but in the countries that are set up that way they just happen to be the current only way you can feed billions of impoverished people more than just a starvation diet of corn and rice.

No clue who is for and who is against what but I'm just butting in to say if animals weren't supposed to be eaten they shouldn't be tasting so good

Easy solution: save the animals, eat the poor.

Easier solution: eat them all.

No, eat the rich.  As stated above they have been raised on a more diverse and nutrient-rich diet, which will translate to better feeding for whomever eats them.  Also as a bonus they sometimes drop money when prepared for consumption.

That's a good point, I'm not sure I'd want to eat anything raised on ramen and Doritos anyway. And I did hear that today was the start of CEO season.

See, there you go. There's actual layers and detail here! You actually criticize things about the text and add things that are truly relevant to this unique encounter. The old argument was a box unopened, only hinting at what might be inside. Here is the meat of it.

"But the idea someone would look at their child with their muscles failing and their belly bloated out from lack of protein and feel automatic, unavoidable, INTENSE GUILT for feeding them is insane and out of touch Westernized thinking. "

 

The whole point of my story is that you can, temporarily, blot this guilt out by focusing on other extreme emotions (I go into particular detail in the "Ancient Greece" section but the theme is there throughout). Which seems exactly what your comments imply you're trying to do, especially with that one. This is why I don't feel the need to respond to them, because why would I want to deconstruct comments that already prove exactly what I'm saying? 

I want to keep this thread going. Tell us some funny vegan stories from your aunt's work.

I think I read somewhere on reddit that PETA steals people's dogs and kills them, checkmate activists.

(Maybe Petros should join.)

Dream job?

Another thing I'm wonderimg about is how all this relates to the concept of hybrids. Because another thing I've begun to notice is that more tribal, acoustic stories tend to either focus on hybrids or normal creatures with very odd features (multiple eyes or just one, odd colourings such as the feet all being different colours, little respect for euclidian space). Like, most of the Ancient Greek monsters tend to be like this, in fact I can't think of one monster off the top of my head that isn't a hybrid of some kind. And obviously other very old socities have the Sphinx, the lion man, just hybrid after hybrid. 

 

As far as I can tell, these sorts of distortions fall out of favour as socities get less acoustic, and instead rely on more "mundane" monsters (giant wolves, that sort of thing). The dragon is a case where a "hybrid" seems to remakn and not fall out favour in less acoustic socities, though I would argue a "dragon" is less absurd a hybrid than a "manticore". It's funny how many modern stories (Witcher/MLP/Elder Scrolls/Dragon's Dogma), whenever they feature hybrids, have to rely on such ancient works that actually seem to predate advanced literature. It's things like this that make me think none of this is a coincidence, and further, wonder to what extent "panic" socities can be identified with "hybrids", particularly human-animal hybrids. Even Pan himself can be seen as a hybrid.  To make the connection between panic-hybrids/distortions-acoustic socities does not seem at all like a stretch to me (and yes, Discord from My Little Pony is who lead me down this thought route to start with, so anyone reading is perfectly within their rights to dismiss this as unlikely.) 

 

"a truly one-of-a-kind maniac"

That's exactly correct, and what I was aiming for. Mockery is a very efficient thought narcotic, but it's very difficult to make someone who seriously argues "My Little Pony literally contains the ultimate answers to our moral, scientific and spiritual problems"  sound considerably more absurd than they already do.

As far as Ancient Greek monsters that are not hybrids, I'm no expert, but Charybdis comes immediately to mind.

I think many "modern monsters" could also be argued to be hybrids of some kind. Bigfoot seems to be a man-ape, the Jersey devil, a man-bat-horse or whatever.

I think a more likely reason the hybrid style of monsters gave way is the natural selection model of evolution. Maybe some influence from H.G. Wells or H.P. Lovecraft also drives the modern urge to make "monsters" and "aliens" entirely 'other'

Things like Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, Lovecraft, they all seem to spring up when acoustic technology (radios, telephones, gramaphones) starts really getting into gear, which also seems to coincide with the rise of industrial farming. I make this point in my story with UFOs but it applies there too. These things almost seem to be heralds of some kind, which is one of my central topics.

This is what I find eerie about the whole thing, that when people try to find flaws in it they only end up reinforcing the point I was making. Speaking of "Bigfoot", here's another story I found when looking into this that really helped to solidify what I was saying: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1000

As long as we're just vaguely talking about a large time period, that's also *around* the time when US literacy became much more widespread

Yes, that probably did delay the effects of this acoustic media, meaning that without that "quelling" effect, there would have likely been considerably more hybrids and "panic" rather than the few scattered examples you mentioned. How this is supposed to undermine my point I have very little notion. 

All of this conversation is just vaguely talking about large time periods. My story, and the extremely varied conversations it seems to have produced, have already gone on for way too long as it is, and that's with me trying to make all of this as simplified and vague as I possibly can. There are innumerable ways all this can be dissected, cut up and interrogated, but my point is that if what I'm saying is even very vaguely along the right lines as opposed to complete gobbeldygook (shich I do not deny as a possibility), it seems somewhat serious. 

The fact there is no clearcut acoustic/literary line in recent history I guess does mean that you have a lot of room to flip back and forth like this whenever somebody counters your points.

Good thing the literary nature of the words means anyone can see what you just did there lol.

Like I said, this is all of course vague with a great deal of room for uncertainty, because it happens slowly over a long period of time (just like biological evolution, actually, which is why creationists have such fun with the argument "I've never seen a monkey give birth to a man!", as if we should expect these clar-cut things to happen). This is one of the useful things about mythology, that it condenses vast stretches of history into a small ampunt of time. (Another Mcluhan point, where he refers to the myth of sowing dragon's teeth into soliders as being analogous to the effects of the alphabet). 

I'm about as capable (or if anything, more capable) of defining a strict line between acoustic/literate socities as I am in defining the exact point where a fish-ancestor becomes an amphibian, or the exact a "non avian dinosaur" transitions into a "bird". But that doesn't mean these things didn't happen.

Well, I do see you saying that every post in the thread just reinforces your points, but I'm not really sure that's actually, objectively what's happening.

One of the things that I've noticed about the internet is that people tend to use it to pick large narratives and things apart with all these sorts of little arguments about all the small details. This is one of the things I was trying to write my story to answer, to make all my points in such a way that averts that sort of thing, and if that hasn't worked, then I'll happily admit that I've failed in one of my core goals. Nevertheless, I still think that people should be at least a little wary of this attitude. 

"One of the things that I've noticed about the internet is that people tend to use it to pick large narratives and things apart with all these sorts of little arguments about all the small details." 

Attacking the supporting arguments that lead to what you consider a false conclusion is literally one of the most ancient forms of argument. 

You think Lovecraftian monsters are combination? This is absolutely insulting, and Lovecraft would probably call you half his cat's name if he saw what you were claiming here!

Modern hybrid: Deformed ponies that talk and cause men to have powerful delusions.

You told me in the other thread that a society is not acoustic just because most of its members are illiterate, because the mental structures associated with literacy apply even to illiterate members. I specifically named ancient Greece as an example of an oral culture, to which you deployed the following argument. I've tried to reconstruct it as charitably as I can, because you're kind of all over the place. 

P1. There are only literate and acoustic societies. 

P2.  A society is not acoustic if it has members who can read. 

P3. Ancient Greece had members who could read. 

P4: (P2+P3) Therefore, Ancient Greece was not an acoustic society. 

P5: (P4) Therefore, Ancient Greece was a literate society.

Calling hybrid animals a characteristic of acoustic societies doesn't make sense, because, as you've said, literate members of a society influence illiterate members. It's a contradiction of your own terms. 

(I'm only answering this because I happened to see it when posting my "last" message). said in the story that a tribe with 0 literate members and 100 acoustic members is different to a tribe with 1 literate member and 99 illiterate members, which in turn is different from a tribe with 100 literate members and 0 illiterate members. As I have repeatedly acknowledged, there is a vast amount of room for uncertainty here, especially when we start to ask questions like "how does the percentage of literate people in a non literate society change their thoughts patterns"? Nevertheless, the fundamental claims that "the medium has no impact on the message" or "a society with 1% literate persons is no different from a society with 100% literate persons" seem far fetched to the extreme. Again, if you think I'm insane or all over the place you're probably not wrong, but then why waste time trying to convince me in the first place then?

 

Also if trying to tear down every little point while ignoring the overall thrust of the work "is literally one of the most ancient forms of argument" (and I'm not convinced it is), then one of the most ancient forms of argument is wrong and I'm right. I reject your reality and substitute my own. 

Most people call the "every little point" supporting arguments, and the "overall thrust" the conclusion.

This is easily the most insane post out of all of them

I know they're plants and all natural, but that doesn't mean shrooms and salvia are good for you.

No, you can't actually reject the reality where "a conclusion follows premises" and substitute your own. 

This entire thread is proof that literacy allows him to do just that, from the comfort of a dank basement strewn with crusty socks, far from any reality illuminating ray of sun. I've now read every one of his posts, and I know it's overused to tell people to touch grass, but rarely have I seen such a desperate case as this.

I had a longer effortpost in the chamber here now that I've gotten to the end, but it seems I'm running out of time for my words to fall on pegasus ears.

Oversimplification is a major issue with a lot of the points you've made here, but this particular one goes as far as to do an upsetting disservice to the human imagination so I had to stop and make this response separately. I'll grant you that if there's one thing literate societies have that acoustic ones don't, it's the ability to preserve a lot of words for descriptive purposes that have very little use in everyday speech. If your language has relatively few words because not many have been invented yet and there's not a way for common people to look up the basic ones, attempting to describe something truly unique will require you to lean on familiar concepts even though they might not be accurate. You already know this, no doubt, because it's alluded to in your story already.

In organic language, the first way to describe unusual creatures starts with drawing from something with more common experience. "Cameleopard" was the common way for the latin-writing world to refer to the giraffe even into the 1700s. "Shield-toad", literally translated, is the German word for a tortoise. In academic manuscripts from the time of Pliny through the medieval period, bees were referred to as being very small birds. Taxonomically? Probably not, because they didn't really strictly separate animals very much back then, nor by the same completely exclusive categories, but it was used descriptively, because how else would you get the image across to someone who had only rarely seen bees and might not know how to identify one? If you're trying to describe a kind of animal that no one else has seen, or maybe you just don't know the word for that animal in the language of the person you're speaking to, or the spoken language of the person you're writing to, which was extremely common in the ancient world, metaphor and comparison to other animals are often the first tool most people reach for. And, like, that's kind of the real point here. A giraffe is not really a "combination" of anything except its evolutionary ancestors. But if you wanted to describe it to a Roman in one sentence, you would have to use some kind of analogy, even if you don't agree with the assessment that it resembles a camel and a leopard. Medieval dudes who'd never seen badgers before would frequently draw them as bluish dogs. There is a rather famous depiction of a "clam" in medieval artwork as a ridged circle with eyes and a beak.

Which is part of what irks me so much about you calling "Lovecraft" creatures combination animals, and then also lumping them all together with this meaning you've assigned them, because it just feels like it belies a lack of understanding of what he's trying to do and often (Though not always, because sometimes the individual pieces carry important symbolism within certain groups, though it isn't universal and changes as the monster travels) what myth-tellers were trying to do in creating these descriptions in the first place. Lovecraft's monsters are a thing unto themselves, that is the point. He is using comparison to attempt to describe something which has no common reference point. Very often the point of his stories, horror aside because I never really got that sort of thing out of his work anyway, was to attempt to imagine something that was literally outside of livable human experience and see if it could be relayed consistently between people.

Here is a thought experiment for everyone in this thread because it just occurred to me, but how would you describe this creature to a viking? You have about 5 sentences before he stops paying attention and assumes you're insane.



As an afterthought, there are plenty of examples of non-combination monsters in Greek mythology, the Cretan Bull and the Nemean Lion-- In fact Hercules' 12 labors story is full of them. They just aren't called monsters even though they fulfill the same role because they aren't usually the spawn of Chimera and most modern people interpret them as closer to being "real". But there are also plenty of examples of weird combination-monsters that come from... Post-Roman societies? I'm assuming that the fact they first appear in written sources after the fall of western Rome is a safe bet for these being suitably "Literate" seeing as this is the time of the Christian paradigm shift. The Keythong, Wolpertinger, and Water-leaper (I cannot and will never spell the actual welsh name of that creature) are just the first that come off the top of my head. The 1800s is in fact rife with the "fearsome critter" phenomenon, which are explicitly described as combination animals for humorous purposes, and these creatures with origins in different US states would frequently travel from their place of origin across the country by newspaper. It could also be argued that many creatures we consider "normal", if separate, creatures unto themselves in our own folklore because they have so many things supporting their normalization, would need to be described as combination animals if we tried to send them back in time or explain them to a society entirely without them. MLP for one is a great example because they clearly aren't just pegasi and unicorns. Rather they seem to be a combination between horse and marshmallow, with relatively gaunt and flexible shapes and faces not unlike babies. There's a clear differentiation in the way "ponies" are depicted in the MLP style that makes them a creature unto themselves very much unlike what people before animation would have simply pictured as being much more explicitly horselike.

It's a featherless ostrich with dolphin skin, and a dolphin's head. Beetle wings and six dolphin-skinned horse legs. They should already know about six legged horses, they're Vikings.

If they don't know what an ostrich is, maybe some kind of fucked up dolphin-deer? There are worms coming out of its face.

This post just makes me wish Flutter were still alive so he could give his opinion on Ezekiel's four living creatures.

I was gonna say, there are people to this day who insist that Behemoth was a hippopotamus or a dinosaur even though he doesn't strictly need to be either of those things for the point to get across.

My own attempt would be (shrunk to an illegible size to not influence anyone else's attempts before they try it for themselves. Shame on peekers!)

A six-legged deer with the skin of a fish. It has eyes on the end of fingers, similar to a crab or a snail, and raven-blue wings hidden under shields of skin as a beetle hides his wings. Its mouth is a combination of two bird beaks, and its two front legs do not touch the ground, for it uses them the way a man uses his hands.

Okay, that one's a lot better than mine, but you planned this.

I did, I cheated!

This whole aside on trying to describe the alien is reminding me of something I've read a couple of times about how natives spread news of the Spanish. That had fur on their faces and had convinced giant deer to let them sit on their backs. Their penis hung at their side and they'd draw it out to make a loud bang.

And something about assuming the monks (less hairy, and penis-less) were their women.

Kåre ran towards the settlement as quickly as he could, his eyes wide with fear and astonishment. Sweat streamed from his curly haired brow and his breath came hard and ragged.  The call had gone up when he emerged from the tree line, and half of the men met him near Torsten's hut at the edge of the village, with the women and children not far behind.  Everyone was concerned as Kåre had left with Harald, Leif, and Sten that morning to hunt.

Kåre dropped to his knees as the men gathered around, desperately trying to catch his breathe so he could speak.  After a moment, he cried, "There is a monstrosity the stalks these woods." With a look of sad sympathy to Torsten he said, "It killed Sten. I'm sorry.  It killed Sten and we ran." Quiet tears began to stream from his eyes, leaving tracks in the grime on his cheeks before vanishing into his beard again.

Ødger, the Jarl, grabbed his shoulder and shook him.  "What was it, Kåre?"

The young man sniffled and pulled himself together. "It was very strange, yet burned in my mind as clear as you standing before me.  It had bare storm cloud colored skin like an eel, darker on the top than underneath, and a soft, rounded body like an eel or worm with six long legs, each tall as a man and bent like a dog's, but with two large flexible toes on each foot.  The front two legs were held up and out like a man's, but are as quick a viper.  I could barely see the movement when it reached for Sten.  It's head is the most bizarre aspect of all.  There were no eyes or proper mouth, but instead a fleshy maw of four even flaps that spread open like a flower to reveal a lining of eel-like fangs, angled to draw food into it's horrid gullet." 

He paused for a moment and shuddered.  The crowd were awestruck and horrified, and many eyes were turned to the treeline.  Kåre continued, "Where these gross fleshy lips split, so far back to be where you would expect to see eyes four even spaced black horns sprang from it's face.  These horns twitched and quivered, their points narrowing on Sten as the thing threw him into it's mouth.  The sound was awful, yet we took our spears and made to kill the beast. It moved quicker than an arrow and none of our spears struck home.  Broad patches of eelskin on its back shifted and revealed huge wings the color of brightest summer sky.  These wings beat up a tempest as the horror rose into the branches of the great trees overhead. It roared like a woman's birthing scream and I felt my bones turn to jelly with fear." He gulped, and the color left his face at the memory. "All three of us turned and fled.  I don't know where they are, but I heard the thing clambering through the trees like a massive squirrel and heard it's roar two more times before I lost track of it completely.  I hope it has not followed me, but we must prepare!" he exclaimed, leaping to his feet again.

Ødger nodded solemnly and said, "Yes, Kåre.  We must prepare to hunt down this foul monster before it becomes more of a threat."  His eyes met those of other men in the crowd, silent commands given to trusted people.  Everyone could tell that it was only a matter of time.

One common theme I've been noticing about these criticisms is that they all seem to be trying to pick apart or unthread individual points without tackling the larger, broader themes or the continuous evolution of these concepts. So for example, I will make the point that hybrids seem to be common to all cultures that are pre-literate (in stories being told for thousands of years), then someone will say that hybrids show up in the first few decades of the 20th century. This raises up a lot more interesting points, like how electric, acoustic media can travel for thousands of miles in a second whereas physical text media would take far longer to do so. So in a sense, acoustic electric media can condense decades if not centuries of pre-electric media time into less than a second. But the point is, I can't possibly keep track of every single little argument that chews up and dethreads everything I've set up. The attempt to lose the arguments in the vague, transitory phases bring up memories of the old Young Earth Creationist arguments who try to discredit evolution by trying to find the "missing link transitional fossils". It seems with these long timescale things, the favourite tactic to discredit them is to point to the transitional stages, which is interesting in itself.

 

I'll end this with, either people have found this story helpful or convincing or not. Certainly, I'm not overly concerned if people don't take me seriously, otherwise I wouldn't have used Discord and Fluttershy as sources (because everypony knows that Princess Twilight Sparkle, Maud Pie and Starswirl the Bearded have the highest qualifications). But I will say, be wary when someone tries to break up continuity of anything. This applies to stories, arguments, fictional universes, bit also life as well: if you see yourself as a completely, radically, vastly different person than when you were as a child or a teenager/adolescent, then your continuity of identity has probably been disrupted somewhat. So whenever this happens, make sure you at least notice what's happening and don't let it happen unconsciously. Even if this is the only message someone takes away from this and completely disregards everything else I have said, then at least I've achieved something with all this. But I don't really want to have these kinds of conversations any more. 

 

Roll Credits: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0-fRL2Pn4-w&dp_isNewTab=1&dp_referrer=youtube&dp_allowFirstVideo=1

So because you do not want to explore your own ideas, including the individual threads that make up the whole, you are hoping to just walk out of the conversation?  You were the one that claimed to be revealing a deep, foundation shaking truth and understanding, and upon not receiving wide-spread praise and adulation for how brilliant the concept is, you would rather just not talk about it than try to address some of the challenges presented and perhaps lead yourself to further refinement and clarity in not only how to present the concept, but your core concepts themselves.  

It lacks the courage of the Young Earth Creationist who at least fights back about transitional fossils and ways to define klades that make sense.  At least that person is attempting to support and backup the concepts they are putting out, however inane and dumb they may be.

Instead, it seems like every response you add is simply trying to pivot to some other point altogether without addressing the issues raised.

Finally, anyone who, as an adult, does not see themselves as a vastly different person than when they were a child is someone who has been overly isolating and constricting themselves.  Living another ten years should pretty significantly change you as a person if you are allowing yourself to have new experiences and are attempting to grow as a person.  Give yourself another ten years, and I bet you will find this whole thread unbearably cringy and embarrassing.  I know that is how I feel about much of the stuff I have put out there on forums (hell even the dial up BBSes I started on) in the last 30+ years. 

Your story really wasn't as deep or even entertaining. The reason why people are nitpicking is mainly because you failed to convey your broad ideas succinctly and clearly enough. If I hadn't stumbled on this thread, my eyes would have glazed over within five pages instead of halfway.

All I'm hearing here is that you don't have the courage of your insane convictions. 

This is the largest Writing Workshop thread in over 9 years

Time to add a background and break 1000 posts

This is your fault.

Uh, I mean. Ask and ye shall receive.

Lovely choices here

The CYStian Gods smile upon me this day.

Nobody cares Sherbert! (This random act of aggression brought to you by sleep deprivation)

Sleep.

You are a child and cannot tell me when to close my unsleeping, dead eyes

Sleep.

Hey, don't you have sister wives to feed or something?

Wake.

Actually, I'm an adult

Well, not until you learn to cook actual food for yourself.

In my eyes you're not an adult, at least an adult that isn't controlled by other adults like a whipped kid till you've made your first 400k, liquid. If you can't do that you're going to be working till the day you die or get a generous pension.

I would uniorinically rather die than still be forced to work in my 40s. but I'm just weird in that regard.

uniorinically deranged

I was mostly just joking. To lean into the whole gate keeping thing. Human connections are the most important thing for me. My girlfriend makes me happy the most, to be honest.

A real Tony Clifton right here

Wow, literacy rates must be terrible there in the UK. Petros reposted it and you still didn't see it.  

He also clearly doesn't know what unironically means

Based on Sent's description, a lot of people would probably rather die than be you in their 40s, checks out.

Then what color is your Bugatti? Andrew Tate headass. Don't CYS, KYS.

How long have you been waiting for an opportunity to use that CYS, KYS line?

Surprisingly, that one came off the dome. I'm usually a retarded fag but I can think quick, I'm a good freestyler.

That line really cracked me up, nicely done.

Get used to people gate keeping adulthood, kid

So this is what it feels like to be forced to read something with annoying, screen covering pictures.

Don't appreciate the gorgeous artwork?

I love it, but it makes it hard to read the menu. I have no right to bitch though, given my inability to do a story without pictures.

Just asking the empty air here I know, but:

Ancient Greek religion had no founder and was not the creation of an inspired teacher. Rather, the religion arose out of the diverse beliefs of the Greek people.[4] These beliefs coincide to the thoughts about the gods in polytheistic Greek religion. Adkins and Pollard agree with this by saying, "The early Greeks personalized every aspect of their world, natural and cultural, and their experiences in it. The earth, the sea, the mountains, the rivers, custom-law (themis), and one's share in society and its goods were all seen in personal as well as naturalistic terms."[5]

As a result of this thinking, each god or goddess in polytheistic Greek religion is attributed to an aspect of the human world. For example, Poseidon is the god of the sea, Aphrodite is the goddess of beauty, Ares is the god of war, and so on and so forth for many other gods. This is how Greek culture was defined as many Athenians felt the presence of their gods through divine intervention in significant events in their lives. Oftentimes, they found these events to be mysterious and inexplicable.[6]

In the literary Trojan War of the Iliad, the Olympian gods, goddesses, and minor deities fight among themselves and participate in human warfare, often by interfering with humans to counter other gods. Unlike their portrayals in Greek religion, Homer's portrayal of gods suits his narrative purpose. The gods in traditional thought of 4th-century Athenians were not spoken of in terms familiar to the works of Homer.[6] The Classical-era historian Herodotus says that Homer and Hesiod, his contemporary, were the first writers to name and describe the gods' appearance and character.[7]

Mary Lefkowitz discusses the relevance of divine action in the Iliad, attempting to answer the question of whether divine intervention is a discrete occurrence (for its own sake) or if such godly behaviors are mere human character metaphors.[8] The intellectual interest of Classic-era authors, such as Thucydides and Plato, was limited to their utility as "a way of talking about human life rather than a description or a truth", because, if the gods remain religious figures, rather than human metaphors, their "existence"—without the foundation of either dogma or a bible of faiths—then allowed Greek culture the intellectual breadth and freedom to conjure gods fitting any religious function they required as a people.[8][9]

But just some stuff I came across in skimming a wiki article that, even with my very casual knowledge of Greek history really seems to challenge statements like "their gods were not subject to change and people were living in panic and terror at ALL times unable to move forward because they couldn't make sense of the world".