Aditya

social dynamics in the age of mechanical reproduction. chairman of the hamilton society.

[Aditya @pratheology]

Son: I’m truth-telling son of Möbius-shaped dad joke, and you are lying

Möbius-shaped dad joke: Hi truth-telling son of Möbius-shaped dad joke, I’m lying

[will o’brien @Willob]

The Hamilton Society would be honored to host this debate.

If anyone can put us in touch with Scott or Stephen that would be great.

[Aditya @pratheology]

@telocene @DavidZagaynov @poseidonaero @theojaffee we might be related

[David Zagaynov @DavidZagaynov]

Announcing Poseidon Aerospace's $60M Series A, led by TQ Ventures with participation from JAWS, Hanwha, G Squared, Starship Ventures, Drover Ventures, and others.

At @poseidonaero, we are building the future of air logistics with autonomous cargo planes designed and built from the ground up.

[Aditya @pratheology]

@fedpoasts @Kalshi from big backs 2 big bucks 😈💯💸

[Aditya @pratheology]

@Willob this is so sick, congrats will and the whole team!

[Aditya @pratheology]

@juliasteinberg

[aeschines @PseudoAeschines]

Abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is, and saw
Virtue in her shape how lovely.
—saw, and pined his loss.

- Paradise Lost

[Aditya @pratheology]

@PseudoAeschines if knowledge is virtue, then it follows that the vicious man is blind either by choice or by circumstance. which is more tragic i don’t know

[Aditya @pratheology]

@loubohan feels like not many others are writing about this kind of thing. thanks for the writeup bohan!

[Aditya @pratheology]

imo Gödel was referring to the Suspension Clause in Article I + Executive Power Vesting Clause/Take Care Clause in Article II + Supremacy Clause in Article VI.

The Constitution doesn’t explicitly state who defines the state of rebellion during which writ of habeus corpus can be suspended, so the President could define it self-referentially (eg “there exists a state of rebellion against my power to enforce the Law”) s.t. any judge or member of Congress who constrains him can be legally designated a rebel and indefinitely detained without recourse to writ of habeus corpus.

Even if Congress *does* manage to pass a law that constrains the President, this would automatically designate them as rebels AND interpreted as invalid bc it compels the President to violate his Constitutional duty to enforce the Law (which takes precedence via the Supremacy Clause, Article VI)

tl;dr bc the Constitution is the highest Law and the President is Constitutionally required to enforce the Law, any constraint on the President could be interpreted as invalid. He can then define the state of rebellion self-referentially in order to indefinitely detain any dissidents without legal recourse.

[Aditya @pratheology]

@Indian_Bronson No thanks, God has dominion over the same Sun that my name denotes, just like he has dominion over the men who worshipped the creature over the Creator.

[Aditya @pratheology]

Right so was it a sin for St. Peter to accept people carrying their sick in cots on the street so that his shadow falls on them? Acts 5

Or that Christians are called “a chosen race, a royal priesthood” 1 Peter 2

Or was God lying when He said “ye are gods”? Psalm 82

I can go on and on. Your mistake is not taking the Christian claim about “the Holy Spirit living inside us” seriously enough — “those who humble themselves will be exalted” is literally what happens when the Holy Spirit dwells in a man and makes him divine, s.t. the Christian can assert his right to glory as a son of the Most High. Yes this is by writ of God, but a God who is IN him and in whom he is (John 6).

So when the ancient Christian says “I do this for the glory of God”, he says that not merely as a slave but as a FRIEND to the literal God of the universe (John 15). Idt you realize how ontologically drastic of a claim this is.

[Aditya @pratheology]

@Indian_Bronson @Willob @ADoricko You have a surface level understanding of Christianity and don’t seem willing to assimilate counter examples into your model of it. What you’re describing is German Lutheranism, not ancient Christianity.

Read for yourself: https://t.co/DSfPtTgdqi

[Aditya @pratheology]

Yes Christianity requires a view of a human being in need of being saved by Christ. Hence my last point on grace.

What you're not considering is *in what manner* the Christian believes Christ saves man. Does he save man by A) forensically erasing the debt from sin (literally the Reformers' official line) or B) transforming him into a god (Apostolic doctrine of theosis)?

The framework decides whether you have a low vs high view of man:
- Protestants believe A bc man is totally depraved (his will is always tainted by sin, cf Luther's "On the Bondage of the Will) --> salvation = legal imputation
- Catholics/Orthodox believe B bc man is wounded but not totally depraved (he can still know and desire the good, but often inaccurately, cf St. Augustine on "libido of the will") --> salvation = perfection rather than abrogation of man's preexisting desires/knowledge

Re: the pagans -- if A, then pagan "virtue" is a thin facade over sinful desire. if B, then the pagans are virtuous in a real albeit partial sense. I mean why else do you think that Catholicism is fundamentally Aristotelian (Reformers rejected Aristotle) + the Scholastics identify "natural virtue" as both possible and intrinsically good + Dante literally putting the "virtuous pagans" in a state of limbo with no hellfire?

[Aditya @pratheology]

"to submit to God's will and accept the Savior" is only different from "to live profoundly and walk one's path" if you suppose that the Christian relates to God via a purely cognitive act. This is not the ancient Christian view.

You're operating on a modern, post-Reformation framework that, in an attempt to disempower the institution of the Church, reinterpreted the natural state of man as fundamentally tarnished (e.g., man is "totally depraved", all good works are tainted by sin, sacraments are mere symbols rather than infused vehicles of grace, etc.) s.t. "faith alone" saves.

The Apostolic faith, otoh, saw Being as fundamentally good insofar as God is Being, meaning righteousness is not "imputed to" man but is rather "infused in" him (cf imputed vs infused righteousness). After the Incarnation, man is now capable of not only following God but being conformed to his very nature as revealed in the Son. St. Athanasius: "the Son of God became man so that we might become God" (the doctrine of theosis).

IOW, just as God is Love by virtue of His nature as the foundation of Being itself, He is also Glory, Courage, Honor, etc. The difference with the pagans isn't fundamentally ethical, it's 1) ontological (that these goods aren't separate but unified in the One who is the Good - hence the moral differences downstream of tightly coupling glory, honor, etc. to charity) and 2) practical (that man is trapped in a habitual fluctuation between sin/weakness and virtue/greatness aka concupiscence, the resolution of which requires external perturbation aka grace).

[will o’brien @Willob]

Strong disagree.

Problem 1: Your understanding of "meek" is a translation problem !!!

I hate when I see this line misquoted like this. I am going to go deep on the etymology here so I apologise in advance for the length but it's worth going into detail here.

This passage is first written using the Hebrew word "anav" which means "those bowed down" and refers to devotion to the Lord rather than capability. You can be strong and still bow down to God. This word is also used to describe Moses in Numbers. It calls Moses the meekest man on earth. Bear in mind that Moses is the man who killed an Egyptian slave driver, confronted Pharaoh to his face, and led a nation out of an empire. Whatever the Bible means by meek, it does not mean weak.

We also see how wrong the modern interpretation of "meek" is when we look at the Greek translation, "praus". This was the word Aristotle used for the virtue of controlled anger: the man who can feel anger and act on it, but keeps it under command. The Greeks used the same word for a trained animal. All the strength is still there. It just answers to a master now.

Meekness in Scripture is strength that submits to God instead of to appetite. It is the man who has power and does not use it for himself. That is why turning the other cheek is a virtue: it only counts if you could have hit back. A weak man declining a fight is not meek. He is just weak. Jesus himself is the model. He calls HIMSELF praus, and the same man made a whip and drove the money changers out of the temple, then walked into a death he could have avoided at any point. None of that is passivity. It is power held under perfect command.

Problem 2: The idea that Christianity celebrates weakness is a modern misconception.

Look at who Christians actually celebrated for 2000 yrs.

The martyrs were not killed for being harmless, in fact the opposite really.

The missionaries were not timid either. One walked into pagan Germany and cut down Thor's sacred oak in front of the tribe that worshipped it. Patrick went back to the island that had enslaved him and converted it. These men took a continent without an army.

The Church canonizes soldiers, like Joan of Arc, a teenage girl who led armies. Its most famous image of an angel is Michael with a sword at Satan's throat. Its own name for believers on earth is the Church Militant. Paul tells Christians to put on armor and fight the good fight. None of this is the vocabulary of a religion that celebrates weakness.

The modern conception of a "meek" Jesus is a modern invention. "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild" is a children's hymn from 1742. The harmless Jesus came out of the modern nursery, not the ancient Church, and Nietzsche took the nursery version at face value and built "slave morality" on top of it.

So, to Augustus' question, how do we reconcile these two things? Who has done it before?

The Medieval concept of Chivalry!

The medieval knight was the deliberate fusion of Homer and the Gospel. C.S. Lewis wrote a great essay on this (https://t.co/yWMNVCocwH). His point was that the knight is not a compromise between fierceness and gentleness, some watered down average of the two. He is maximally fierce in battle and maximally gentle at home, at the same time, in one man. That is Christian meekness in practice: the full Homeric capacity for violence, brought under command.

So the claim that no one has reconciled them because they are not reconcilable is just wrong as history. The Middle Ages did it at civilizational scale and held it for centuries.

[Aditya @pratheology]

sometimes i have intimations of a life dedicated to the pursuit of beauty. flashes of nostalgia for something that never existed

i try to store it in writing but cannot. all i grasp is a crude carcass made of ink, the memory slipping with each stroke

maybe language is a curse

[Aditya @pratheology]

@thomasbsauer Angelus Chrome extension, opens up a tab and plays bells at Angelus times: https://t.co/S75Tg9inVZ