#i cant do abstract thinking im not good at any philosophy or anything

[rapidhighway]

i think i might just have to give up and leave this school

[goldtips]

okay so ya girl is back at it again. this was originally going to be a reply to someone but well. it got out of hand. i shat all over babylon the anime a while ago and honestly kind of feel bad. there are definitely things that the show does that makes it stand out, esp as a seasonal anime bc you dont expect dir. to spend much time on them!!!! like if we’re comparing this to shows like fanservice anime or any .. mediocre seasonal isekai then ofc this show is better lmfao. the only reason i shit on it is because i expected this anime to be Better ;;;;;;;

mind, i’m not rescinding my statement - as far as i’m concerned, babylon is still a hella frustrating anime because it tries to showcase humans as nihilistic, utilitarian robots that don’t seem to consider the topic of suicide emotionally even though thats supposedly humanity’s defining trait ??? and it deals with the topic of suicide with the care of elephants gallivanting in the fucking savanna :))) the whole show has also been pretty lacklustre in terms of characterization, trying way too hard to be intellectual and feed edgy plot points instead of giving any development - the plot feels reactionary overall and placid rather than exciting. also, the fact that the anime started as a mystery / politico-legal sort of show just makes the transition from that to abstract theory even more forced...........

HOWEVER im promised im going to stop shitting on babylon so lets talk about what the anime does right shall we. more specifically,,, the biblical imagery!!! is great !!!! : D

the show is called babylon. in the old testament (ot), babylon is humanized as a “brutal, callous and proud” woman who “believed that she would reign over the earth forever.” in the new testatment the phrase “she who is at babylon” refers to the new world culture currently at war with the covenant community. in such that rome, as a mistress or whore of the new world, is seeking to seduce and subvert people of god, enticing men to fall “drunk with the wine of her fornication.”

yes,,,, a whore who uses sex to entice innocent men into complying with new culture? who believes herself to be akin to god and also in this context, above the law and morality - im gonna say its not too far a stretch to say that magase was intended to symbolise the whore of babylon.

however, that’s not all - links can be made between the enactment of the suicide laws and the seduction of new culture. who exactly is leading the front? kaika itsuki ( 齋 開化 ), who’s name literally means culture. that aint a coincidence. also, that weirdly-placed reference to roman law / norms during the suicide debate as a way to convince the masses to revert / adopt roman ideology??? also not a coincidence. :))))

in addition, there are two other major biblical events related to babylon:

the book of revelations; and

the tower of babel.

its safe to say that both narratives are being pushed atm.

revelations:

in revelation 17, the spirit of babylon decends upon earth through the whore. she arrives on the back of a beast with 7 heads, “arrayed in purple and scarlet”, “drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.” “seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth.” the revelations also prophesizes that she will be defeated by a beast, but it is unclear as to which. there are two beasts in book of revelations. the first beast comes "out of the sea" given authority and power by the dragon/serpent. the second beast comes "out of the earth" directing people to worship the first beast, a "false prophet".

in a similar vein, nomaru had secretly vouched for itsuki’s, providing itsuki with the necessary resources for him to rise up in ranks and become the new mayor. the kanji for ryuichiro nomaru ( 野丸 龍一郎 ) contains both the kanji 野 and 龙 which respectively mean field (i.e. earth) and dragon. they are key references to the beasts of revelation

plus according to nomaru, it was also purely because of magase that the political struggle turned out the way that it did, meaning that she is ultimately the one controlling the entire operation. this mirrors the way she is sitting on the heads of the beast (i.e. the proverbial brains of the campaign that itsuki is heading) 

we also see that when magase uses her powers her eyes and hair glow in a sort of purple/burgundy color to support the imagery as well! 

the book of revelations is the final chapter of nt. it is merely an allegory of struggle between good and evil and doesnt refer to actual people or events. kinda like the show huh. nyyy way, we see that the protag john the apostle writes down what is revealed to him through visions to send it to the 7 churches :))

kinda like how zen keeps on seeing magase through visions and has to document !! his findings and report back to admin? ik this isnt exact but there’s a bit where he has to write down her confession and it really struck me as weird until this bit popped up, maybe that was included to as a way of tying in :))

tower:

according to the myth, there were plans to build a city and tower high enough to reach heaven - god who observes this confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other. why? because “now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”

while not entirely similar, we see recurring themes in babylon that deal with miscommunication and new ideology. the conflict mirrors the myth in that unity of language (or ideology in this case) and its subsequent discordance once differentiated. 

the interrogation scene in ep 4 deals with reconciling differences. magase asks whether those with different values should be accepted, despite them being contrary to norm. all this time, society has been developing an ideal set of norms - the entire country shares the same values and priorities with no deviation. growth has stagnated. in similar fashion to how god commands for many languages to be created, magase sows the seeds of doubt towards long-standing assumptions and moral values in order to create discordance and push japan into a state of new development

in the new campaign, itsuki proposes to apportion shiniki city from japan and instill new values. this confounds the population and sends them into disarray - the tower that they have created is crumbling, in similar likeness to the parable of babel.

SO TL;DR this show has a really cool starting concept i cant lie?????  i for one am not shitting on its supernatural elements (even though the flow was a little inorganic) in hindsight there’s no point in expecting a show called babylon not to delve into supernatural/biblical elements lol :)))

as a right hoe for imagery and philosophy/ethics, this gave me high hopes but the execution of everything else was way below average. why bring in a discussion about suicide that’s poorly researched + try to be edgy abt it and have the citizens to have support it so easily???? ruins the immersion so much

if the anime really wanted to focus on philosophy there should be some mention of ethical theory to justify his point. like, being aimlessly philosophical only ends up being flowery and pseudo-bullshit lmao. one of hte reasons why i was so frustrated with magase and zen’s discussion in the interrogation room. like woman what was your fucking point. its only wasting screentime if you don’t get anything from the conversation. the philosophy was so fucking unnecessary - babylon could have been executed as an in-depth political/psychological anime instead. WITHOUT THE SUICIDE.

this and the lack of good characters really bummed me out. i think that the show was expecting me to connect to some of the characters before they were fucking killed off but i didn’t end up giving a single shit about any of them so. :) the whole show feels more about the shock factor and gore than about interesting plot.

concept 10/10, execution 1/10

[unproduciblesmackdown]

sometimes the wild thing with depression is looking back and trying to figure out when it started and never really being able to draw a line for anything like "this was the earliest age it All Began(tm)," probably because there's not generally such an On-Off Switch type process to it. i know usually circa ten yrs old or later in the teens is usually what people point to but sometimes more of a period of exacerbation rather than origin, and who can say it's not also having the emotional and psychological capabilities and capacities that young children don't that bring a greater sense of perspective and awareness, idk anyways so i'm not sure if i was ever not-depressed or anything....i know i was always uncomfortable outside what was familiar and "shy" and i know that as soon as i was around other kids in a way more socially organized than running around together, namely preschool at 4 yrs old, i was aware of not feeling like i fit in and noticing i couldnt make friends like other people could. ive been good at bs-ing school from the start and happen to pick up things very quickly so even though i probably had the same habits as kids with the worst grades and had no particular ambitions re: academia (beyond avoiding parental wrath and later maintaining the identity that kinda protected me a bit in school) since i got really good grades and was quiet and pretty much just read in a corner when left to myself from kindergarten through middle school, i was probably considered a usually ideal student. i remember a couple of people who i felt i was genuinely friends with, a kid named michael who i think went to a different school after a couple of grades, and a kid named jacqueline in 2nd grade who was like me so quiet in retrospect i'm not sure if she knew much english but we played legos together and stuff but then we got in trouble for not paying attention during not even a lesson but i had to move seats b/c arbitrary Making An Example and since we were both so quiet we just didnt interact much anymore to avoid further attention. i made other friends technically but generally it took a long time to be comfortable with them and we were never close and in the meantime i dont think i ever much liked school. i remember one random sunday evening just getting upset about not wanting to go back the next day just because it was boring and meantime at home of course it sucked but i didnt quite realize it til i was older and it helped of course being young enough to be able to go outside for hours and be perfectly entertained playing in the dirt and trees and stuff. i read a lot at home too i remember having pretty skeptical thoughts about Life from earlyish on but, besides spending a crap ton of time just in my own head (reading, playing in dirt) i think i had ideas that life and the world was pretty amazing. like earlier on of course it was like "is magic real??" but then later its just stuff like reading in books about how kids had good friends and families and got to pursue their interests and do things and work out drama and have nice endings with a lot of hope for the future. for all i could tell the only thing keeping that from being my life was that i wasnt old enough, or probably i hoped that it was just a matter of time. it was less like i was extrapolating from my own limited observations of the worse aspects of life that life must be great and more like i was already noticing that my world was lacking and just hoping that it would grow out of it; not to mention being given the hint that stuff like abuse was my own fault and shortcomings i started getting more aware of being fed up with things / that they weren't inherently going to change around like late elementary school / middle school but it would take another year or two to really get the extent of it, and in the meantime by 14 or 15 at the latest i was consciously suicidal so like, moving fast there. i probably by that point had already caught on to the fact that my world had just been kind of shitty and that it wasnt going to change or seem better after a certain amount of time like i'd thought it would. and then add also having a better understanding of the rest of the world just by being older and getting more experience and realizing that its a lot more chaotic than initially taught to you and that being depressed and having developed few interests and zero ambitions and having antagonistic parents and very few friends doesnt do much to give you as much a cushion from that chaos as it could tangent: honestly i like programs that teach instructors how to recognize things that look like Behavior Issues as maybe more being signs of external issues. i wasnt the best at paying attention and i was often quiet in school whether in class or not and it mightve been a problem if i didnt get good grades but since i did i could just be in the background. i don't particularly resent this or anything because i know how teaching is and i myself didnt really understand i had serious problems at home until much later, but in retrospect i think i always had signs. i remember one particular incident when i was about 8 really shouldve been a bit of a warning sign. i know nobody can really do anything even if they know things are bad but considering i had to learn what abuse looked like by myself and i didnt feel supported by any adult and even when i knew what was going on when i was much older i still just didnt tell anyone in any position of authority because i had learned i had to protect myself by keeping personal things totally confidential and that if i exhibited any signs of struggling i would be blamed and chastised for it. wouldve been nice to at least be informed what was going on at an earlier time and maybe given some sense of confidence or at least a sense it wasn't completely my fault. turns out what gave me any ounce of confidence at all was being like 19 and being so blamed and maligned that it backfired and i started feeling like if i was as awful as i was made out to be then surely i didnt need to feel ashamed and responsible for everything that was being done to me. if i already deserved to be dead then what more could i bring on myself by daring to be so terrible as to feel i shouldnt be treated like i was! checkmate atheists anyhow, i feel like my Good Concepts About The World kind of evolved from "later on everyone has adventures" to "later on everyone goes to middle school / high school and makes friends and bonds with their family and follows their dreams" to something just more vaguely escapist with abstracted ideas about simply feeling comfortable and nice, with maybe general imagery, usually like summer sunsets or just some nice stars or something. i thought about it once and it made a lot of sense, thinking about stuff in terms of the concept of feeling ok and good things existing in the world and being able to sense it despite it also being at a distance or otherwise removed like dont get me wrong just because i wanna be dead i dont have some kind of notion that everyone else's experience of life is the same as mine i.e. that life and/or the world is inherently shit, i know its no more objectively bad than it is objectively good. i still like to think about the good side of all of it. i think its a total mistake to have the idea that if someone is suicidal or even just depressed that it necessarily has anything to do with what they think of the philosophy of the concept of Life, its more personal and immediate than that. honestly i hate all the advice about how you need to write a poem for your suicidal friend to teach them the magic of life or do some otherwise melodramatic bad y.a. novel shit that'll give them a New Perspective on the wonders of life literally overnight. not only is it always disgustingly patronizing and often counterproductively Tough Love-esque but also totally like unrelated to the root of the problem of "what if i'm worried about a friend making a suicide attempt." if you're personally wanting to do something i s2g literally just provide a distraction. talk about random shit or play online scrabble or go over and make midnight snacks, not like set a flower on fire while dropping a porcelain teapot on the floor and lecturing them about how this Doesnt Solve Any Problems or is a permanent solution to a temporary problem like no. just be a distraction jfc and dont insult anyone by generalizing their experience and guessing at what's probably an extremely complex and personal matter and turning it into empty clichés anyways: this was the longest way to get to the idea that isnt it wild when, like how you can Hear a sound in your head and despite recreating it decently its different from actually hearing it externally, you can sometimes remember what it was like to feel nice about the concept of life? i cant really summon earlier things but sometimes i can remember flashes of having those later sad-person-in-their-own-head moments of thinking of distant abstract concepts like seeing the sky as a medium for connection to the infinite experiences of humanity, and i can get like the equivalent of a visual image of a recreated feeling from back when i still had a few lingering overly-optimistic notions that things would be good soon. don't get me wrong, again im still aware of the good things in life and i still have good experiences and still feel good feelings. but i dont harbor expectations that the course of life must and will average itself out or lean towards improvement for any reason, like knowing that good things happening to you out of the blue is the same as how terrible things can happen for exactly the same reason—namely no reason at all. so i just dont have the same feelings i used to about my own personal life, and i dont feel the things i used to when i hoped it still could be Only A Matter Of Time. so its wild when for some reason i mentally stumble on the memory of having those feelings and theyre still recent enough that i get a moment of recreating the feeling like i do when i can picture something in my head, and its totally different and dissonant than what's currently true for me. it wasn't a more accurate perspective to think that life being bad meant it had to improve, but its obviously a nicer feeling. and it sounds like overused to the point of meaningless comparison but its like getting your head above water for a second in terms of the momentary contrast of sensation tldr its wild when you depressioning 24/7 and dead inside and have an instant of remembering What It Was Like To Feel Things

[ah17hh]

Explicit Atheism is a religion. via /r/satanism

Explicit Atheism is a religion.

I wanted to come around and talk about faith and the hypocrisis of the convinced atheists.

In a subjective way I myself deeply believe in science first and, therefore, in the indifference of the universe stripped from any unmaterial aspect. It is the immediate rationnal logic after all, yes.

Objectively, ultimately, I know that I dont know and it is the only thing closer to the truth that we'll be able to say in any of our lifespan on the subject.

"Abstract theories with no basis in reality" means nothing that can be observed nor experienced on a physical level. It goes without saying that science cannot answer that. Itd then means there isnt an absolute answer at all that is even possible. It feels that saying " If I cant see it, its not there" is a bit limiting. Makes me think of object permanence for babies under 8 months old.

It might sound obvious and people that claim to be science-oriented would say that if you cannot recreate results with experience or observable data it has to mean the theories are, without a doubt, false. But is it so simple with concepts that would be theorically impossible to experience even if true? Is science even applicable? It is, but science would say it doesnt know and wouldnt try to bring any theories whatsoever.

Because the other way around is also very true; How is the answer that "obvious"? Absence of proof isnt proof of the absence, so might we qualify doubtless materialism as a form of faith also?

When we fall into metaphysics / the unobservable / the untangible, It's quite easy to fall into "faith". (i.e cheer beliefs stripped from any tangible proof)

If I can indulge with an easy analogy, let's imagine two blindfolded persons in front of a table, and asking them what color is the vase on top of said table.

Im sure one of them will say its obvious the vase is blue, because theres a 3000 years old book saying so.

Most probably one of them will say its obvious there is no table nor vase at all because they cant see.

Thing is, the debate is utterly uninteresting to observe. Theyre neither wrong or right and they wont ever have the feedback to know it, unless they remove the blindfold (death). There isnt, and will never have any possible, tangible, observable data.

For all we know, we could be in front of a wall. For all I think, if theres anything else than a cold, infinite, indifferent void on the other side, our arrogant monkey brains might not even be capable to put it into words if it has seen it. Even less theorise it by itself from nothing.

Explicit atheism, believing in the absolute absence of everything that you cannot see, would then fall into faith and, therefore, would qualify as a religion in itself. Making it, maybe, the most hypocritical of all religions.

It's not that we dont ask the right questions, or that we bring the wrong answers.

It's that we still have the arrogance (and time to waste) to bring answers (not theories) to questions that cannot be asked under the pretention of truth seeking, science, or honest philosophy.

Its the difference between a philosophical and religious approach on the subject. One might bring theories (or would underline the uselessness to do so), the other impose answers.

Being agnostic (evidently) I know there is a large spectrum of atheism and Id have to specify that without doubt, there is faith. So im probably only talking about explicit, hard atheism.

Now I dont want you to think my philosophy revolves around defending any deity. It is actually about not even asking that question and considering it empty, or useless.

Its also not about not carrying any beliefs. I myself like to think about eternal recurrence, fractal cosmology or other spiritual shenanigans, but as comforting theories rather that absolute truths. It brings little less comfort, sure, but is a whole lot more honest.

I know a lot of us are Atheists, mostly agnostic, and honestly never came across a satanist that claimed or preached anything metaphysical with zealous conviction. But who knows, convinced atheists are not all explicit.

It is, in my honest opinion, quite important to talk about doubt. Satanism is also about freedom of thought, and limiting ourselves to an answer (or even trying to bring one) feels a bit counterproductive.

I am not an expert on any of these subjects, nor a native english speaker for all that matters.

I can only wear the mantle of Philosopher and wanted to create discussion with all good intentions.

So what do you think? What is your view on the concepts of faith and doubt? What is their place in satanism? Is there any absolute truth to you?

Thanks for reading, be kind to one another and Hail Satan 🤘

Submitted April 17, 2020 at 07:45AM by TomKreutznaer via reddit https://ift.tt/2RMCLLv