The Gaming Den

Stahlseele wrote:if the bad people get punished in hell, does that not make satan the good guy?

To the extent that the tetragrammaton is "good" in Shin Megami Tensei (i.e., not at all), ATLUS has a similar conclusion.

Kaelik wrote:You are doing that again. Please stop.

Hi, my name's tussock, you may know me from such memes as "tussock is always wrong about everything". If you'd bother correcting the bits you see as wrong in this case, the next time I wrote it somewhere it'd be less so, to some degree, otherwise it won't be.

This time I looked up as much as I could be bothered (which is not much, eh), and memory being what it is, basically invented the rest out of whole cloth. I thought the changing definitions of Good and Evil over the timeline of the English-language bible was interesting, and pertinent to the question at hand.

tussock wrote:

Kaelik wrote:You are doing that again. Please stop.

Hi, my name's tussock, you may know me from such memes as "tussock is always wrong about everything". If you'd bother correcting the bits you see as wrong in this case, the next time I wrote it somewhere it'd be less so, to some degree, otherwise it won't be.

This time I looked up as much as I could be bothered (which is not much, eh), and memory being what it is, basically invented the rest out of whole cloth. I thought the changing definitions of Good and Evil over the timeline of the English-language bible was interesting, and pertinent to the question at hand.

I cannot emphasize this enough, but if you are aware of the fact that you have no idea what you are talking about, many you should just not make a post where you speak about the thing you know you don't know anything about, and pretend you do know things.

Ancient History wrote:http://www.christiansagainstdinosaurs.com/

You know what hurts the most? I looked at a couple of videos on their Youtube page hoping to find the comedy or entertainment tags. I did not find them.

Kaelik wrote:I cannot emphasize this enough, but if you are aware of the fact that you have no idea what you are talking about, many you should just not make a post where you speak about the thing you know you don't know anything about, and pretend you do know things.

And here you are still not improving the conversation by adding anything to it. It's like you think the world should be a place where everyone who isn't professionally trained should remain silent at all times and those who are trained should also not bother to speak, so that no one is ever wrong about anything.

Because this is an RPG forum where a lot of people who are not professionally trained game designers talk about the failures of various RPG designs. Obviously that works better when the people who are former and currently professional industry writers, you know, write stuff about their industry. But it'd be a pretty bloody quiet place if no one else was allowed to say anything, and if they really want a comment-free blog those exist.


This isn't wikipedia, I'm totally just going to be doing original, uncited, research here if it momentarily interests me to do so. If I get something wrong, and no one bothers correcting it, that's just how that's going to be. I'm trying to get things more right, in part by discussing my ideas in public as they occur to me.

When you turn up and say "you're wrong about this, so just shut up forever", that's just weird, man. It's a standard of perfection which exists nowhere, even inside each little industry people are wrong all the fucking time. History is where people have rarely been anything other than wrong about every single thing they have ever written or said. It's just life.

Rubio dropping out last night made me think of this. He said that it's not in God's plan for him to be president in 2016, or maybe ever. Why do non-Calvinist Christians say things like this?

Free will seems to be a huge part of their apologetics. It's used to explain evil and even certain amounts of suffering on earth, as well as the existence of hell. If they believe this, why would they think that God's will has any bearing on a democratic process?

They can be inconsistent about free will applying to other people. They also do believe in God giving people suggestions of various degrees of directness; if Rubio were a hardline theocrat he'd say something about how not enough people in this country are listening to God.

RobbyPants wrote:Rubio dropping out last night made me think of this. He said that it's not in God's plan for him to be president in 2016, or maybe ever. Why do non-Calvinist Christians say things like this?

Free will seems to be a huge part of their apologetics. It's used to explain evil and even certain amounts of suffering on earth, as well as the existence of hell. If they believe this, why would they think that God's will has any bearing on a democratic process?

A religious person holds mutually contradictory positions? Call the presses, that isn't true of all religious people ever.

Kaelik wrote:

RobbyPants wrote:Rubio dropping out last night made me think of this. He said that it's not in God's plan for him to be president in 2016, or maybe ever. Why do non-Calvinist Christians say things like this?

Free will seems to be a huge part of their apologetics. It's used to explain evil and even certain amounts of suffering on earth, as well as the existence of hell. If they believe this, why would they think that God's will has any bearing on a democratic process?

A religious person holds mutually contradictory positions? Call the presses, that isn't true of all religious people ever.

Human beings are not rational.
Shure some are more irrational than others and usually religious people count among the more irrational ones.

Korwin wrote:Human beings are not rational.
Shure some are more irrational than others and usually religious people count among the more irrational ones.

Being irrational is different from literal doublethink.

Lots of people are subject to confirmation bias, that's totally fucking different from seriously thinking A and ~A at the same time. That second one is pretty rare outside of religious thought, but is basically required by most religions.

Kaelik wrote:Lots of people are subject to confirmation bias, that's totally fucking different from seriously thinking A and ~A at the same time. That second one is pretty rare outside of religious thought, but is basically required by most religions.

Not just required, but actively encouraged. To a religious person, the ability to think A and ~A at the same time is seen as being enlightened. (Judeo-Christian, anyway...I can't speak for other religions).

phlapjackage wrote:Not just required, but actively encouraged. To a religious person, the ability to think A and ~A at the same time is seen as being enlightened. (Judeo-Christian, anyway...I can't speak for other religions).

True. I can't count how many times I've had someone tell me I "just don't get it" because I recognize the concept of the Trinity to be contradictory. Same for the grace vs. works thing. I've found most of the "enlightenment" comes from goal-post-shifting definition changes, while implying different definitions.

Works with economics as well...

Eh, light's a wave, when you measure it like a wave, and a particle, when you measure it like a particle, because it turns out particles are just probability fields whose solutions match various wave equations when in motion across some spaces.

Which is A and ~A until you get far enough into it to see that they're both measuring artefacts of a larger context.

That's what everyone hopes is going on under the hood of their A and ~A dilemmas, there's just no observation and math behind the Trinity or, well, most economic philosophy it seems. Contradiction and things not making sense isn't intractable, like trains really can fit in tunnels that are shorter than the train from some reference frames, because simultaneity is not real. Infinitely fast is actually 3x10^8 m/s. The real world is unbelievable bullshit in many ways.

What shows which ones are OK is not pure logic or reason, but science, eh.

RobbyPants wrote:True. I can't count how many times I've had someone tell me I "just don't get it" because I recognize the concept of the Trinity to be contradictory. Same for the grace vs. works thing. I've found most of the "enlightenment" comes from goal-post-shifting definition changes, while implying different definitions.

True - because they mean 'getting it' to signify abandoning individual reason and submitting to the authority of the system.