beauty and certainty

 beauty inaugurated the faustian age, such as it is

everything of worth we have we owe to beauty

the choice was never between beauty and truth

it was between beauty and certainty

paris chose

certainty was always temporary and false

first books homer spenglar the bible as legislative text

 is the bible essentially a legal text?

it's a lot like a legislative text in that it's reasoning ultimately doesn't matter, it's authority derives from it's delivery from authority

back when i was trying to locate paganism and how it functions, specifically it's locus of meaning, i identified 4 kinds of religion (leaving the door open to others, but they have still not presented themselves in an obvious way to me, if they exist) those that have their locus of meaning in the text, those that have it in some core concept they are wrestling with, those that locate meaning in the quest for human perfection, and those that derive their meaning from the environment.

even though I was the one who drew the distinction i didn't really see or understand the difference between those that locate their meaning in a text and and those that i'd call 'philosophical' built around constructing a structure around some core concept or insight. separating them was an intuitive decision

anyway, idiot jordan peterson said stupidly that the bible was the first book. the myth of the first book matters. it has flow on effects that shape the society. it's important that mythically homer is the first book of western civilization, rather than hesiod. the western character would be entirely different if we thought hesiod was the first.

anyway, someone in a thread said "platonic philosophy had such a hold on the west", and i was thinking, how would it be if some platonic text was the first book, mythically, or at least in a way that some idiot could state it confidently. manifestly different from how the bible as the "first book", in the christian era, shook out. since the core of platonicism isn't legalistic, it's moralistic, but pursues some understanding of a moral order through logic, rather than authority, things would have been vastly different, and it shows the character of the bible in a stark light.

i'm also reading some christian's apologetics regarding his worldview (the universe next door). as usual it has a big self own in it that he glosses over with supreme confidence. he's trying to take apart liberal theologians (lloyd gerring). 

in his chapter on existentialism he says, the resurrection of jesu cannot be metaphorical it must be historical and that the bible must have a historical basis for the promise of juses to be valid. the bible manifestly in huge significant portions isn't historical, portions that need to be historical to function, not like gensis and stuff that can be hand waved away. 

anyway, you could give this guy huge examples of the bibles failure as history and it wouldn't change anything for him in practice. because it's authority doesn't come from it's historicality, or from it's logic (obviously), but from it's claimed originating authority. like a legislative text.

do you have any familiarity with spengler's 'decline of the west'

he describes, or catagorises, western civilisation as "faustian"

and i think he was latching onto something. a change in the myth of the first book. away from the bible and toward homer. the faust story is the renaissance story par excellence. the turning toward this greater knowledge, the triumph of beauty over the legislative, the allure of classical art and classical culture and that in turn laying the cultural groundwork for the emergence of the printing press. the triumph of the potency of classical artwork over the churches ability and authority to oppose and suppress it.

the gods and archetype

1) the gods exist across several different modes that make up their totality

2) they are not all the same kind of creature

3) they cannot be killed by man

4) deity is relational, they exert themselves upon the human

some of them have an archetypal aspect

it's not the totality of any of them though

and i wonder how much of it is the post-hoc affixation of an archetype after the fact

the archetypal as a taming

the archetypal as management

belief in the singularity as nrm

 the emergence of a novel religion is an interesting topic, especially when it's undirected and organic

driven by the zeitgeist

like the tech-utopian belief in the singularity

there's a few components that go into it, it's mythic underpinning, it's magical proof, which all religions need, is the big bang

the big bang happened, so it can happen again, with technology

and the proof that it's going to happen is moore's law 

this will be the ultimate salvation

not just saving man from self destruction

but you will live forever as a computer copy of yourself

ai will discover a way to raise the dead

physically

if your body is correctly prepared

all of this is not quite religion... it's getting real close, it looks a lot like it, but it's not quite there

the thing that puts it over the line

and that's real illustrative

is roko's basilisk

which fermented in an internet forum/large internet community, before being pushed into public view by elon musk, who obviously already had a following

and that any amount of people heard it and didn't dismiss it as clownish....

that it even got to musks ears

"Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment proposed in 2010 by the user Roko on the Less Wrong community blog. Roko used ideas in decision theory to argue that a sufficiently powerful AI agent would have an incentive to torture anyone who imagined the agent but didn't work to bring the agent into existence."

about how demons aren't very compelling

 demons are ultimately a deeply feeble concept

it's just ;evil so evil it's autonomous and personal.... there's no delineation of their powers, just bottomless evil, that can be used to excuse anything

every other spirit has pretty clearly delineated concerns and associated powers

demons are just scapegoats

not just scapegoats but a means to enforce orthodoxy and guard any kind of spiritual experience as a privilege of the dominant religious hierarchy

if we don't like your spiritual claims, must be a demon

the danger of moralising writing

 i mean i think the moralising aspect is the dangerous one... you can make totalising demands and trust in peoples judgement to apply them judicacely . but that's out the window one you start to make the moral argument

do this because i have a vision is different from do this because i am right

greeks and writing again, straight to the point

 i think the greek pantheon as it's commonly thought of is an accident of writing

something that came about because of how the earliest greek writing was deployed

they didn't understand what they were doing

the rural cults were a lot closer to how you actually do polytheism in a potent manner

they'd worship like, a handful of deities in their local expressions... like 3 or so, not necessarily on any logical scheme to relate them to each other, but whatever emerged would be immediate and meaningful and beyond tired exhortations about morality