#and it is singular

[togglessymposium]

I feel like theodicy is the place that (post-Plato? post-Zoroaster?) Abrahamic religions tend to really fail as systems of thought.

Like, spiritualism in general tends to be unpersuasive as a question of fact- there's simply no real empirical support for it, even though the construction itself is often powerfully evocative and beautiful. But the matter of evil in Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, etc. is something else, a place where this subset of religious doctrines just has visible and painful problems on its own merits. It's not just that I don't accept the factual claims- it's that the arguments don't add up at all. Theodicy is the crux where you have to fundamentally choose between doctrinal fidelity and the pursuit of truth, because it's where the doctrine is facially, deductively inconsistent and wrong.

At the end of the day, you just can't propose a flawless and omnipotent designer of the cosmos while simultaneously making evil a centerpiece of your analysis. You can be Manichean, and have evil arise from not-God or from some limit God has. You can assert that evil doesn't exist, though that can be tricky: Plato's evil-as-absence thing was largely unsuccessful as an attempt, both because positive evils like pain are regular features of human experience, and because pure deprivation as an ontology of evil still doesn't solve the theodicy problem. But what you cannot do is assert that the foundation of the cosmos is a perfect and all powerful entity incapable of error, and also that evil exists. The toddler's hand is well and truly caught in the cookie jar.

Most forms of modern Christianity and Mormonism try to use free will to thread the needle; mainstream Islam I think is a bit more Leibnizean, though it still leans hard on human culpability. But you can't actually do this! The claim, of course, is to say that the setting of the cosmos is perfectly good, that human volition itself is also perfectly good, but that volition has the special quality of sometimes (though not intrinsically) producing evil, which we all then have to deal with. But there's nothing in free will that actually makes it a suitable solution to this problem. The deity is necessarily extratemporal, and in that frame, volition lacks the special properties it would need to hold this weight; when you can flip to the end of the book any time you like, there's no such thing as indeterminism. Every human choice has one and exactly one result, just as with any other domain of reality; free will, like gravity and electromagnetism, is a process with wholly knowable outcomes. Hence, 'free will' is (in the context of monotheism) a purely linguistic construction that means only 'the consequences of this process are not God's fault.' It has no properties other than the shift in culpability itself, no proposed mechanism or relationship to other phenomena, no inherent virtues that can be explained in terms of any moral system. It's an entirely circular argument, a way to credit God for very tall apple trees but blame somebody else for the invention of applesauce.

[phyi]

important rabbit news

[cyborgized]

Self-Awareness by Katsuhiro Õtomo

[redpapercraness]

to lose you

[vardapilled]

Interviewer: "What was like the toughest day on set, would you say?" Ryan (to MBJ): "Twin day. Your last twin day. The cigarette pass. [It was] 120 [degrees], I think." Michael: "Yeah, that was intense. Multiple takes, not a lot of movement so you're standing still in the heat."

MICHAEL B. JORDAN as THE SMOKESTACK TWINS -> Behind the Scenes Composite Shot Featurette Sinners (2025) dir. Ryan Coogler

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

soundwave is here

[brokenclockgears]

brothers on my mind forever and ever like a curse

[aj-lenoire]

i’m really enjoying the olympics this year, there is some quality nonsense going on

for the first time in the modern olympics (possibly ever?) there’s an equal number of women competing to men, and included in that group we have icons like simone biles, kim yeji, imane khelif

and then over with the dudes we’ve got yusuf dikec who took up shooting after he got divorced, turns up in a t-shirt with no ear protection only to shoot near perfect rounds. we’ve got henrik christiansen who is taking tiktok by storm not for his swimming prowess but the fact he is obsessed with the olympic village chocolate muffins. we’ve got stephen nedoroscik, who is trained literally only in pommel horse so he kinda just sits around doing rubik’s cubes while everyone else does their thing (pommel goes last) and then they activate him like a fucking sleeper agent to crush the pommel routine, secure the usa a medal, and also he cannot fucking see the entire time bc he needs glasses

quality, quality nonsense

EDIT: okay so apparently the smoking thing wasn’t true, my bad guys! dikec has been competing in the olympics since 2008 and is ex-military (but his showing up in a t-shirt without any visual aids is still iconic!!)

[horseimagebarn]

horse whose hooves are stuck individually in different colored buckets the horse seems a bit surprised but unbothered the sign of a well mannered yet perhaps empty minded horse or perhaps this is all a goof of the horses own design

[gunstellations]

rival battle ⚔️

[userarmand]

Louis. Mon cher. You wanted to say something to me? Why are you ill? What's happened to you?

[saturday-byte]

So the pokemon leaks huh

[cyborgized]

"The Robot Who Dreams" by Phillipe Caza

[clouvu]

It's always you

[featherfangart]

The Sun and The Moon

more of the self-indulgent experimentation with the cosmic knights, heheh <3