• 18 Posts
  • 1.35K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle
  • Simply put, because you often want to change the state of something without breaking all the references to it.

    Wild off the top of my head example: you’re simulating a football game. Everything is represented by objects which hold references to other objects that are relevant. The ball object is held by player object W, player object X is in collision with and holds a reference to player object Y, player Z is forming a plan to pass to player object X (and that plan object holds a reference to player object X) and so on.

    You want to be able to change the state of the ball object (its position say) without creating a new object, because that would invalidate how every other existing object relates to the ball.


  • Evolutionarily speaking, threats from outside are an existential threat and need spreading. Good deeds at home are already known by everyone who matters and the ‘reward’ is survival of your children, not you ‘feeling good’. People do ‘hero worship’ though. I think you are downplaying that. Though the influence that comes from such a position probably means people are inclined to cooperate with ‘power’ because it has, de facto, already shown itself to be powerful. Whereas those ‘asking’ for power are necessarily weak.

    This is all pop-sci evolutionary psychology so discard at will…


  • but look at his appeal to widows and the unmarried in Corinthians

    you are missing that barely a verse earlier he attributes people’s different ability in this regard to the grace of God…

    “I wish that all men were as I am [single and celebate]. But each man has his own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that.” - 1 Cor 7:7

    he recognises people are given different abilities by God. this is not “failure”. Yes, if God has decided that you aren’t for the single celebate life it is better to get married than burn with desire. As Paul makes clear “But if you do marry, you have not sinned” (1 Cor 7:28)

    I understand your hypothesis, but Paul neither says what you want him to say (that sex itself is shameful), not does it stand up as an explaination when it comes to other things Paul says…

    to follow on from your verse above…

    “If a brother has an unbelieving wife and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. 13And if a woman has an unbelieving husband and he is willing to live with her, she must not divorce him. 14For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his believing wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but now they are holy.” - 1 Cor 7:12

    This is a far cry from the “original sin” and polluting effect of sex espoused by the later catholic church. it’s the exact opposite. a christian women might be having sex with a heathen husband. but far from this polluting her in any way, it does the opposite - she sanctifies (makes holy) her unbelieving husband! and similiarly, children of such a marriage are not polluted by this act of sex with a non-christian. rather “they are made holy” (v14).

    these are not the words of a man who thinks sex is a dirty and pernicious problem.

    later on this same passage, Paul makes it clear that his preference for people to not be married is due to the persecution the church is experiencing:

    "26Because of the present crisis, I think it is good for a man to remain as he is. 27Are you committed to a wife? Do not seek to be released. Are you free of commitment? Do not look for a wife. 28But if you do marry, you have not sinned. And if a virgin marries, she has not sinned. But those who marry will face troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this. " - 1 Cor 7:26-28

    Paul is not acting like someone who finds sex itself shameful. He is acting like someone who has seen the additional suffering caused by persecution to married people (and by natural consequence, people with children). He is echoing Jesus’ words on the matter: “How dreadful it will be in those days [the end times] for pregnant women and nursing mothers!” (Matthew 24:19) In this time (the late 50s AD), Nero has taken over from Claudius and had begun his severe persecution of Christians (Tertullian quoted by Eusebius). This was on top of a famine seen during the time of Claudius (Acts 11:27-29), which you can read in Joesphus caused some families to be in such a desperate state that they resorted to canabalism of children.

    This, together with the expectation that Christ would return soon (“Brothers, time is short… this world in its present form is passing away” - 1 Cor 7:29-31), meant that being single and free to spread the gospel was a priority.

    But I’ll say again - Paul never calls sex in a monogamous marriage “shameful”. In fact he goes to the extraordinary lengths of saying a wife has the right(!) to demand sex from her husband (1 Cor 7:4b).

    Any hypothesis of Paul’s internal thoughts has to accomodate this behaviour and being a “sex repulsed asexual” does not cut it. He was a self confessed “zealous Jew” (Gal 1:14) when it came to Torah defined sin (male homosexual acts, orgies, cultic practices, adultery), but as for lawful marriage, he acknowledges it is what some are called to by God and within which women ought to have conjugal rights.






  • Oh both Paul and Jesus were morally conservative, no doubt about that. I was replying to someone I felt was implying Paul was somehow co-opting Jesus’ liberal movement into something more conservative and respectable. Whereas I think the opposite is true. Paul pushed frontiers Jesus never mentioned.

    soapbox to preach his own distain by insisting that pleasure in sex is bad

    I don’t think this is quite the right angle though. He was certainly disgusted by same sex acts and the contexts in which likely had in mind: cultic practises, orgies and temple pederasty.

    But he is never against sexual pleasure within heterosexual monogamy as if there was something distasteful about pleasure itself. He never states that the purpose of sex is reproduction. Never condemns solo masturbation for instance (which one might have expected since he had a non-jewish audience). Also, neither he nor any other NT writer calls into question sexual pleasure once a couple can no longer bear children. (Which you would expect if they were against unproductive pleasure in a puritan way). On the contrary, his assertion that a wife’s body belongs to her husband and a husband’s body belongs to his wife and that couples were to not deprive each other of sex except by mutual agreement has to be seen as being both radically democratic in how relationships are conducted by also acknowledging that pleasure in sex serves a purpose in itself. (One only has to imagine a would-be prayerful monastic husband, perhaps emulating Paul himself, being told, no, you have to have sex with your wife, to realise that Paul was not some acerbic prude)

    Paul’s view he explicitly links to his expectation that the world is ending soon (forgive me I can look up references at the moment). He wishes that everyone was as he was (single and celebrate). But this appears to have been born out of a controversy over whether or not travelling apostles could expect churches to bear the cost of a wife travelling with them. Given his other statements on wishing to never cause stumbling blocks of cost on already very poor communities this seems to be born out of practical mindedness rather than any kind of general anti-sex view. He regards the better practice to be celebrate and await Jesus return. But that if people felt they’d otherwise be too tempted, then they should marry and that was fine. He explicitly notes that married people will suffer a lot in life, which has to be read in the context of the ongoing persecution of Christians. And the use of torture of one’s loved ones as a psychological weapon.

    conservative bullshit that Paul’s hijacked letters contained

    Yes. I believe Paul was visionary and radical. But I also think he felt his innovations were partially justified given “time was short”. If there weren’t enough male ministers and gospel workers then he was ok with talented women breaking the social mould. (And not begrudgingly, he sings their praises many multiple times). But it’s impossible to tell how he would have felt or spoken had he known his system would be used for 2000 years not 20.

    A later generation of disciples apparently decided Jesus’ return was delayed didn’t have the same appetite as Paul for breaking the mould and fell back on traditional gender roles more firmly.


  • Practically speaking since war is unthinkable is would result in as much economic isolation as Europe can bear. It would be the end of NATO. Almost immediately there’s be European voices saying ‘What’s the real harm?’ and other appeasers. I think the political lash back would only last 5-10 years as parties opposed would find the only tool at hand - economic punishment - to be unsustainable. It would legitimise nationalistic sentiments in Europe even further. Britain would, naturally, talk of betrayal but not be able to make any resistance of any substance.


  • I don’t think there’s an easy solution. There are a lot of people who don’t regard tolerating illegal entry in any form to be a workable solution. I should think they disagree with you over whether illegal crossing can be stopped. They just regard the punishment to not be high enough. Callous as you say. But I should think they’d regard the toleration of undocumented crossings that a tiny minority of are criminals evading detection is also callous on the people that suffer as a result.

    I personally think more liberal but documented movement in tiers is a solution. But I don’t think the status quo of what America had been doing - tolerating illegal crossings and toying with the idea of naturalising undocumented people - was a solution because the writing was on the wall for a long time that America was democratically moving against it. The catastrophe that’s currently happening is the result.

    Some people just don’t regard illegally entering a country to be a misdemeanor, rather they regard it as a serious offence. Such stances are usually as emotional as they are reasonable. But so is most politics…





  • I’ve heard various explanations, I don’t know how accurate the following is. I’d be interested to learn more:

    • the very earliest colony settlements had to bargain hard and with precision in order to survive. It began a contractual culture that eventually extended into litigation

    • due to high immigration from many differing backgrounds, disputes had to be settled in litigation rather than relying on social understanding

    • the religious culture was largely inherited from the Puritans who had a legalistic and inflexible reading of the new testament. (This unwillingness to compromise is why they were persecuted in Europe and fled to the new world)

    • the American identity is ‘invented’ (in the sense that’s it’s an abrupt mixing of many old world cultures) and so national identity was initially based on cerebral activities (the Constitution, Bill of Rights) rather than evolved from a very long history of social bonds found in old world ‘nations’. This required a cerebral precision to be at the heart of identity which easily extended to legal rights and relations

    As I say, take with a pinch of salt. But this is the gist of what I’ve heard from people who know more than me.


  • Have you tried talking in only short amounts that require a response? That could narrow down the specific thing that made them not want to respond. If this is happening all the time with all sorts of people that’s unusual. In your example it’s hard to tell if they were overwhelmed with your talking style or if you offended them or if you missed all signs they were uncomfortable and they felt entitled to be rude to you (without saying) or if you just happen to be encountering people who feel that’s an ok thing to do and it doesn’t really have anything specifically to do with you. Lots of possibilities.