ResurgetExFavilla

Definitely its greatest shortcoming.

Your manly silhouette, cut against a sanguine twilight, must have sent him scampering back to his burrow.

Did he have cute widdle eyes?

It's the source of bsh's power, a digital turbine powered by RM's tears. If he doesn't ban RM every few days, it will stop moving and he will become an ordinary mortal.

That it's only half as cool as the plant kingdom.

Yeah. I obviously disagree with some of his ideas, but the man is a genius. I'm not being hyperbolic, as far as intellect goes he's one of the most intelligent people in the world, and was a renowned mathematics prodigy before he went off to live in the wild. A lot of the societal problems that he pointed out were spot on. His ideas on 'the power-process', as he calls it, I found especially thought-provoking, as well as his thoughts on oversocialization.

AOC is actually the best democrat around, despite making a few dumb gaffes. If she would take a more sane stance on immigration, I would prefer her to just about every candidate out there.

You mean aside from my peritoneal, pleural, and pericardial cavities?

I don't like the 'God-shaped hole' imagery. It's a low, self-flattering vulgarism. Marlowe captured it much more beautifully:

Faust.  Where are you damn’d?

Faust.  What, is great Mephistophilis so passionate for being depriv’d of the joys of Heaven? Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude, and scorn those joys thou never shalt possess.

The truth is that atheists don't always feel some pang for God, some innate yearning specifically for a deity. If they did, revelation wouldn't even be necessary. The fallen state is what we are accustomed to, it is what our world is built around, and it's often very, very easy to take glimpses of the divine and chalk them up to some material origin, or to apply yearnings for something outside the physical realm to secular aims. Faustus cannot grasp the concept of the hell that Mephistopheles experiences because he has no concept of the divine with which to compare his day to day experience. It is the knowledge of what was lost, and of its irrecoverability, which creates Mephistopheles's hell by shifting the perspective of the damned to encompass that loss on a cosmic scale. Faustus mistakes his own ignorance, his lack of perspective, for strength and mocks Mephistopheles for his clearsightedness. It is in this exact same vein that many irreligious mock the religious, and in the end it is due more than anything to perspective. People who reject God are tangled knots, like all people, and their reasons for resistance can't be pared down to some trite aphorism. They aren't necessarily especially stupid or evil or bad, and they aren't bumbling about subconsciously looking for a God-shaped fix, which is part of why I detest religious debates. They can breed this kind of perception of the irreligious by the religious, and that's where an especially insidious type of pride can take root. It's especially bad online, where charity is often rendered muted or downright impotent due to the means of communication which we have access to.

Considering that you were a bizarre banned member who made paranoid, shirtless videos on a computer that sounded like a struggling industrial fan for most of the site's existence, I think that in this analogy we can safely conclude that you were a weed which Airmax pulled up and tossed on the pile before the first layer of mulch was laid down.

The difference between weeds and regular plants is that weeds are adapted to quickly colonize disturbed ground, typically have maybe a year in the sun, and then are outcompeted by more staid, steady species that form more resilient successive plant communities. They never dominate an environment permanently, and if humans ceased to disturb the natural ecosystems they would become much more rare, only showing up when a tree fell, or some sort of fire or natural disaster struck. This website, I feel, will likely enter its next sere soon. Who knows: maybe one day, long after they are gone, we'll all remember the weeds of yesteryear with a sort of muted fondness.

On the other hand, it's pretty heartwarming to see everyone come together to combat a universal nuisance.

I love that Tej's apology thread has transformed into a three page RM spergout. Sorry Tejjie, I should have kept my strong, community service-oriented spirit to myself.

RM exists in an ontological state of being bullied. Anyone who also exists by necessity bullies him.

Geopolitically, Myanmar will probably be pretty central to China's plans over the next few decades, as two of their Belt and Road projects pass through large parts of the country. The BCIM part is also considered especially crucial to their development plans. It would be beyond retarded to piss them off just because they punted a few muzzies back into Bangladesh.

The Mongols did exactly that though. They were famous for their toleration of other religions and creeds, and for their complicated, neutral form of law. Hell, the Mongol empire mostly dissolved because the Mongol ruling class assimilated to the societies which they conquered. Just look at the Ilkhanate or Yuan China.

My first endorsement =')

I'm pretty bored right now, so I'm down for some light modding

Well, I say things but I don't hear a voice. That's really, really, rare, and usually involves some sort of apparition or command to carry out a great holy work.

RM is Robespierre. Tries to start a revolution based on dopey enlightenment ideals, wants to ban everyone who slights him, ends up turning every ally against him, and when all is lost he misses and shatters his jaw while trying to end things on his own terms.

I find the most effective ways for me are contemplative prayers like the rosary, or lectio divina. The Holy Rosary is a meditative prayer, wherein you repeat the Hail Mary, the Lord's Prayer, the Apostle's Creed, the doxology, etc. That's usually all that non-Catholics see of the Rosary, and all that they think it is: repetition. But the heart of the Rosary, what gives it is power as a prayer, are the Mysteries, and they are invisible to most observers. Each day you pray five decades, and through each decade you meditate on one of five mysteries, using the prayer as a way to focus. Examples of subjects for mediation are the visitation in the garden, the proclamation of the Kingdom, the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, the scourging at the pillar, the crowning with thorns, the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, etc. All of these have a 'lesson' or 'virtue' meant to be gleaned: the scouring reminds us not to commit sins of the flesh, the crowning with thorns warns us against pride, the visitation speaks of love for neighbor, the resurrection of hope.

Lectio Divina is a form of sacred reading perfected by the Carthusian Monks. They are an ancient group of communal hermits, who give up all worldly possessions and almost all contact with the outside world. They practice an extreme form of humility, being buried almost anonymously, and spending most of their life in their 'cell', a small, very simple home with an attached walled garden. Here they work enough to support themselves and study, joining with their brothers only for mass and walks through the woods or mountains. Lectio divina is their process of reading which regards the Bible as the Living Word, and is less focused on a theological parsing as it is on a confrontation of God within the Word. It has four steps. The first is to simply prepare yourself through a small meditation, and to read the passage. The second is to meditate on what was read, which is less about thinking about the passage than it is letting the true meaning of it seep into your marrow. After that comes prayer, which is the conversation part, and then the part where God 'speaks back' is the final stage, Contemplation. This is where the profound encounter with God occurs, and it really is a profound experience that can't be communicated well in words. Just imagine that anything good or beautiful in life is a reflection of God, and that to be in a state of contemplation is to see all of those pieces with perfect, utter clarity for a few moments.

1. Princess Mononoke

2. Akira

3. Treasure Planet

4. Children Who Chase Lost Voices

5. The Lion King (nostalgia, lol)

I almost have enough to save up for a dragon cbow, I have a good amount of enchanted bolts fletched up once I get it.

57 combat, 948 total.

So anyone wanna talk some random trash while I mine in Runescape?

Thett, in the name of Caliph Donald ibn Fred al-Manhattan, will crush you into the dust.

Both

It would fry all the electrical circuits.

This is a problem with ELO in general. I don't mean to insult Mikal's debating skills or temperament by the comparison, but Mikal was at the top on DDO despite the vast majority of people not seeing him as the best debater, a mantle that many would give to Whiteflame or Bluesteel. Because of the way that ELO works, you can make it to the top relatively easily by just having a lot of time to waste and strategically picking debates that you know you will win. In a site with a small and largely inexperienced debating pool like this one, it's very easy to shoot enough fish in the barrel and rise to the top, provided you don't have much use for your free time in real life. Mikal was at least a skilled debater, if not the best, so he rose through the ranks of the leader boards of DDO while it was filled with competent debaters. I think that in these early stages of this site's development it would be even easier to do what he did, with a far more impoverished skillset.

"I take in order the next instance offered: the idea that Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages. Here I did not satisfy myself with reading modern generalisations; I read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations. If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn’t. It arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world was swarming with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again: repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top. This is the amazing thing the religion did: it turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the load of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans, we arose and remembered Rome. If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.
I added in this second trinity of objections an idle instance taken from those who feel such people as the Irish to be weakened or made stagnant by superstition. I only added it because this is a peculiar case of a statement of fact that turns out to be a statement of falsehood. It is constantly said of the Irish that they are impractical. But if we refrain for a moment from looking at what is said about them and look at what is DONE about them, we shall see that the Irish are not only practical, but quite painfully successful. The poverty of their country, the minority of their members are simply the conditions under which they were asked to work; but no other group in the British Empire has done so much with such conditions. The Nationalists were the only minority that ever succeeded in twisting the whole British Parliament sharply out of its path. The Irish peasants are the only poor men in these islands who have forced their masters to disgorge. These people, whom we call priest-ridden, are the only Britons who will not be squire-ridden. And when I came to look at the actual Irish character, the case was the same. Irishmen are best at the specially HARD professions—the trades of iron, the lawyer, and the soldier. In all these cases, therefore, I came back to the same conclusion: the sceptic was quite right to go by the facts, only he had not looked at the facts. The sceptic is too credulous; he believes in newspapers or even in encyclopedias. Again the three questions left me with three very antagonistic questions. The average sceptic wanted to know how I explained the namby-pamby note in the Gospel, the connection of the creed with mediaeval darkness and the political impracticability of the Celtic Christians. But I wanted to ask, and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, “What is this incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth like a living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying civilization and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead; this energy which last of all can inflame a bankrupt peasantry with so fixed a faith in justice that they get what they ask, while others go empty away; so that the most helpless island of the Empire can actually help itself?”
There is an answer: it is an answer to say that the energy is truly from outside the world; that it is psychic, or at least one of the results of a real psychical disturbance. The highest gratitude and respect are due to the great human civilizations such as the old Egyptian or the existing Chinese. Nevertheless it is no injustice for them to say that only modern Europe has exhibited incessantly a power of self-renewal recurring often at the shortest intervals and descending to the smallest facts of building or costume. All other societies die finally and with dignity. We die daily. We are always being born again with almost indecent obstetrics. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is in historic Christendom a sort of unnatural life: it could be explained as a supernatural life. It could be explained as an awful galvanic life working in what would have been a corpse. For our civilization OUGHT to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability, in the Ragnorak of the end of Rome. That is the weird inspiration of our estate: you and I have no business to be here at all. We are all REVENANTS; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about. Just as Europe was about to be gathered in silence to Assyria and Babylon, something entered into its body. And Europe has had a strange life—it is not too much to say that it has had the JUMPS—ever since."

This Chesterton excerpt (who was himself an agnostic converted to Catholicism) sums up what I mean pretty well:

"And if we took the third chance instance, it would be the same; the view that priests darken and embitter the world. I look at the world and simply discover that they don’t. Those countries in Europe which are still influenced by priests, are exactly the countries where there is still singing and dancing and coloured dresses and art in the open-air. Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.

I have given an imaginary triad of such ordinary anti-Christian arguments; if that be too narrow a basis I will give on the spur of the moment another. These are the kind of thoughts which in combination create the impression that Christianity is something weak and diseased. First, for instance, that Jesus was a gentle creature, sheepish and unworldly, a mere ineffectual appeal to the world; second, that Christianity arose and flourished in the dark ages of ignorance, and that to these the Church would drag us back; third, that the people still strongly religious or (if you will) superstitious—such people as the Irish—are weak, unpractical, and behind the times. I only mention these ideas to affirm the same thing: that when I looked into them independently I found, not that the conclusions were unphilosophical, but simply that the facts were not facts. Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god—and always like a god. Christ had even a literary style of his own, not to be found, I think, elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious use of the A FORTIORI. His “how much more” is piled one upon another like castle upon castle in the clouds. The diction used ABOUT Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. That he used other even wilder words on the side of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if anything, rather increases the violence. We cannot even explain it by calling such a being insane; for insanity is usually along one consistent channel. The maniac is generally a monomaniac. Here we must remember the difficult definition of Christianity already given; Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other. The one explanation of the Gospel language that does explain it, is that it is the survey of one who from some supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis."

Possibly, depending on how it's framed. I feel as if a blanket debate would be too broad. I would certainly debate the communion of saints or transubstantiation.

Honestly, your conceptions of Catholicism are similar to what I held most of my life, before I actually read anything written by Catholics or met many Catholics in any deep sense of the word. It's what we're taught in school, part of the historiographic 'Black Legend'. My conversion to Catholicism began with reading Catholics. I read the writings of everyone from the Church Fathers and Carthusian Monks to G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Day, and John Moriarty. I visited a very beautiful, quiet, out of the way island that was deeply Catholic. Far from being judgemental or rigid, the people were at once serious about their faith and attuned with the natural world, living simple lives rich in color and care for one another. In my readings, I came to the conclusion that I have been fed lies about this religion on a grand scale. That it offered a way of life and a way of interacting with people which were much more deeply and profoundly satisfying than anything else.

I already listed one of Protestantism's bad ideas: the idea that heaven and hell are a strict black and white dichotomy. Others include denying transubstantiation, holding that the dead are unaware of what happens on earth, and their opposition to monasticism. The idea that the Old Testament is a science textbook is another, and the borderline denigration of Mary is another. The abandonment of sexual morality is also rampant among Protestants. But by far the most offensive, imo, is the commercialization of spirituality which takes place within evangelical megachurches.

I think that Catholicism is like the tree grown by the seed planted by Christ, or the fire kept burning all of these years, originating in the spiritual conflagration of Pentecost. The Church is the body of Christ, and everything, from its spirituality to its art to its theology, reflects the truth existing at the root of the institution. I am certainly more drawn to traditional Catholicism, and think that the current Church is caught in a struggle against very dark forces which have infiltrated it. I align a lot more with the mystic side of the Catholic intellectual tradition, like Saint Gregory the Great, Saint Benedict, Saint Bruno, etc. I am a convert, and am not at all a fan of Protestantism. Their nonsensical theology was all that I knew for a long, long time, and it really pushed me away from God for a lot of my life (I was an atheist previously).

Thanks for that explanation. I don't want to derail your thread, I've just only really read the historical and doctrinal differences without really ever knowing an actual Orthodox person.

The Catholic and Orthodox stance on this are pretty different from the Protestant one, mostly because we share a belief in particular judgment which depends in nature on the godliness with which a person lived, a stance which dates back to Saint Augustine of Hippo and several early Church Fathers. Saints were famous for dispensing with earthly wealth. Elizaveta Feodorovna, a Russian saint, was one of the richest woman of Europe, Grand Duchess of the Russian Empire, and a German princess. She had huge collections of jewels, a palace, beautiful clothing. Her husband was assassinated by revolutionaries, and she went to his murderer's cell, gave him a bible, forgave him, and tried to plead for clemency for him. When she went unheard and he was executed, she sold off all of her great riches and became a nun, using the proceeds to found charitable organizations throughout the city, devoting the rest of her life to caring for the poor without her material comforts. She was martyred when the revolutionaries captured her and shipped her to Siberia as a precaution (as she was technically a Romanov heir), throwing her down a mine shaft along with a live grenade and several of her relatives. Villagers reported hearing hymns echoing from the damaged shaft, and when the White Army arrived later they found from the state of the bodies the Elizaveta had spent her last hours, grievously wounded, bandaging the wounds of others in the shaft and singing hymns. That complete giving of oneself over as a tool of God is the Christian ideal, and is very rare. A Catholic example would be Saint Catherine Drexel, one of the wealthiest heiresses in America who gave over her entire fortune, becoming a nun and devoting her life the the education of the poor, particularly Indian children, and founded the only historically Black Catholic college at the time (in the 1920s).

So Christ is very right in this passage. Most of us deserve additional perdition after death; we can't look on the face of God without painful shame at the ways in which we failed to live up to those expectations. Every comfort that we enjoyed while others suffered, every moment of unjust anger, every failure to forgive, is a weight on our soul after death. Because it's impossible to live a life which is worthy of God, though saved on the last day we are separated by God in the afterlife to the degree which we separated ourselves from him in life. The saints like Katherine and Elizaveta are much closer to him, most of us are further from the beatific vision. In Roman Catholicism this state is called purgatory, and is poetically symbolized by cleansing icy fire.

Most Protestant churches in America reject the idea of purgatory, holding instead that anyone who is saved is saved and that's that, they enjoy the full fruits of paradise. Obviously, I find this idea ludicrous.

I don't think this is the right approach. First of all, Mike owns the site, so the only way to protest him is to vote with your feet. Secondly, of all the assistant moderators are essentially cops to bsh's magistrate position, enforcing his moderation policy with their own flair, so there's no point in approving or disapproving of them because we have little idea what their personal moderation policy would be. Personally, I suspect that bsh's moderation philosophy might be far less onerous than Castin's, even though Castin may have a stronger 'social game' so to speak. Thirdly, I don't think that this should be made personal, and that we should stick to differences in moderation policy. While I originally had personal issues with bsh1 due to his stance on free speech, he hasn't really cracked down in the way that I was afraid of so it's not really a personal issue at this point. I do disagree with aspects of current moderation policy, but bsh is a human being capable of addressing those concerns and changing his moderation style. One of the ugliest aspects of current culture in the US is that people are treated like static entities incapable of reform or change, either starkly evil or good based on a laundry list of 'isms'. That's not how human beings work. It would be far more constructive to vote on specific decisions or general principles than on the moderators themselves. Personally, I strongly disagree with Wylted's most recent ban because the thread was a joke (though I could understand people taking it seriously from an outside perspective). I also don't think that people should be punished for doing anything to the mod team aside from threats or doxxing, because moderation should strenuously avoid any appearance of personal grievance. I agree with RM's banning, both in principle (because of his history of prolific threats and doxxings, on and off this site), and generally (because I think that he has a dampening effect on the willingness to debate on the site). Let' talk about policy, not people. Why do you disagree with bsh? Should the CoC be revised and how? How could moderation improve? I think that some of the personal problems with moderation are due to a perceived hesitancy to address their concerns: very well, critique moderation for being unresponsive then. Otherwise we're just slinging shit at each other.

No, more poking fun of the specific way that he was behaving (portraying himself as a tough rebel, but falling over backwards to suck up to moderation, going around threatening people and saying rude shit to them and then crying to moderation that he's being 'bullied' when someone gives him any flak in return).

analgesic, dylan, drafter, and Wylted

I teased RM for being a coward, sycophant (albeit an incompetent one), and crybully, after which he launched a long string of impotent personal attacks at me. I myself was pretty moderate on the moderation action in this particular case, and my little tiff with RM had little to do with his support of them. I teased you as well, but we didn't get into any sort of real fight because you didn't respond like an autistic nine year old.

Lol, apparently now it's anti-Semitic to even mention the historical fact that our 'Greatest Ally' attacked one of our ships, killing 34 and wounding 171 Navy personnel. At this rate, I suppose the King David Hotel bombing will be the next inconvenient fact that's hilariously deemed 'hate speech'.

Oh my God Thett, you can't just tell people that they're faggots.

I think voting standards should be looser by default, with the stricter standards an option which debaters must both opt into beforehand. The ones that you posted seem fine to me. I don't think that S&G or sources should be separate points, I think that conduct should be, as someone can lose a debate while still having better conduct on a fairly regular basis. I don't think that it's very common to see someone win a debate with terribly worse sources or S&G so bad that it impacts the readability of the debate.

How do you see Orthodoxy as 'very different' from Catholicism? The main differences seem, to me, to be filioque, Papal supremacy, the calendar, and separate cultural evolutions. There are especially a lot of parallels with Eastern Catholic rites imo. I'm genuinely curious.

I think that this is because stress is such a huge cause of many health problems, and optimism either in itself reduces stress, or is correllated with conditions which reduce stress.

That's like saying that nobody can call anything blue because #0000FF doesn't really exist as a natural pigment. Things aren't disqualified or made 'subjective' by being inexact; if that were the case we would have to scrap all of taxonomy.