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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

This is my conversational account. For my work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Feb 17
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      Replying to @donkyourenemies @vgr

      I think VGR is (correctly) thinking of American popular Christianity, which is basically Capitalist packaging for some modern-era philosophical ideas with no roots in the tradition, and which in fact violate it. Together they function like a (sociological) cult.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    2. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Feb 17
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      Replying to @arlynculwick @donkyourenemies @vgr

      I've never met someone of a totalising worldview who enjoys the radical fallibilism of science (its openness to correction). Cultists want certainty, and they'll have it.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    3. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Feb 17
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      Replying to @arlynculwick @donkyourenemies @vgr

      But this sort of thing is pathological, and it's not the common case. For the greater part of history (including today), any historically informed orthodoxy is completely at odds with the current typical form of American evangelical/charismatic Protestantism.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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    5. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Feb 17
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      Replying to @donkyourenemies @vgr

      Indeed, but I think his statement is false for Christianity.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    6. CA‏ @crsndrsn Feb 17
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      Replying to @arlynculwick @donkyourenemies @vgr

      I actually think he's got a good point, Christianity is rejection of the finality of death-Christ was resurrected, everyone will go to heaven/hell, loved ones are looking down on us, etc. Not everyone worships for those reasons, but it's a critical belief of Christianity

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
    7. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Feb 17
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      Replying to @crsndrsn @donkyourenemies @vgr

      You're right that that's a mainstream Christian belief, but the funny thing is that it, like a lot of other things I find uncontroversially wrong about Christianity, stem from neoplatonism, which wormed its way into the tradition through fraud (c.f. the Pseudo-Dionysius).

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    8. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Feb 17
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      Replying to @arlynculwick @crsndrsn and

      One (of many) non-neoplatonic Christian ways to deal with death is to take it as an empirical, real-world embodiment of the (speculative) Trinity, which is characterised as self-sacrificial relations of love. So life and death together function as love.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    9. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Feb 17
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      Replying to @arlynculwick @crsndrsn and

      This isn't escapism ("belief in the benevolence of things you cannot control") it's seeing (empirically) the fact that to live is to depend upon the death of other things, every day. In the real world. It uses this experience to define "love."

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 17
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      Replying to @arlynculwick @crsndrsn @donkyourenemies

      Yeah I wouldn’t characterize death/resurrection as the escapism vector of Christianity. They don’t actually try to escape that despite having weird beliefs about it. They pay their belief taxes on that front.

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 17
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      Replying to @vgr @arlynculwick and

      The escapism is probably something around justice. Most religions seem to land in that neighborhood.

      1:21 PM - 17 Feb 2020
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        2. Arlyn Culwick‏ @arlynculwick Feb 17
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          Replying to @vgr @crsndrsn @donkyourenemies

          As in, theodicy? ("how can God both permit suffering/evil and be just/good?)

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Feb 17
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          Replying to @arlynculwick @crsndrsn @donkyourenemies

          Probably, but a more folk version of that. Remember I’m talking about median practitioner at an individual level, not scholarly institutional doctrine. As in, what is a given believer who occasionally goes to church, prays and thinks of themselves as religious, escaping from?

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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