I don't think that matters to the observation being commented on, which is of the nature of "if one believes in X, it's surprising to me they won't also believe in Y."
There is! There are extra-biblical mentions and deductions. But note that the value of the Bible is that it is already a great collection of varying sources on the matter conveniently pre-packaged into a single volume for all who wish to determine those details. Someone did the heavy lift of identifying the highest quality sources and putting them together in one compendium for all to eat and drink from its rich retellings.
The only way to have trust in such a message is to experience truth in it. The Gospel gives an open invitation for all to read its claims and promises…and to put them to the test. However, be warned that an adventure awaits. Should you read the words and believe them with the smallest faith you can muster, the real-world consequences are stunning and vast and earth-shaking and beautiful. The journey with God is an adventure indeed.
>The only way to have trust in such a message is to experience truth in it.
You've basically just abandoned any kind of logical or grounded epistemology and replaced it with believing in whatever "feels right". Which, you know, you do you, but it just sort of abandons any pursuit of some underlying reality that we share. There's nothing really to discuss there and you could be talking about a belief that the moon is made of cheese, that the earth is flat, or that we should all follow Satan or anything else that "feels right" to whoever.
It's funny that all the early church fathers and theologians made efforts to persuade people that the bible was true through logic and reason and evidence, but that was abandoned by the Church over time, as first people were forced to join the church on pain of death and damnation, and then later as any kind of logical or evidential argument for religion became untenable, people fell back on "well, you just have to choose to believe it if it feels good." Faith in the early church was not an argument for the existence of god, but was _predicated_ on the existence of God, a Christian was supposed to have faith that God, who you already believed in, had the world's best interests in mind. It was never meant to substitute for understanding the world through reason.
Nothing I said excludes logic or evidence, or advocates believing in whatever “feels” right. I clearly said it’s about truth, and truth has to be determined with logic and evidence and first-order experience.
I'll certainly admit lots of Christians have bad epistemology, because frankly lots of people do in general. But there are also lots of people who have thought about this very seriously, contrary to your claim.
I hope the reason nobody has responded to this yet is that they're giving this wonderful article the attention it deserves. I have a lot of thoughts about it, and this is one of the cases where I wish comment sections here weren't so ephemeral and stayed up long enough to be worth spending more time on it.
All of us are facing a personal apocalypse. We all build an entire universe in our minds based on what our senses take in and that world is going to evaporate when you die, and the rest of the world will continue on just fine without us. For a lot of people, it feels better, for some reason, to think that we are so important that the rest of the universe will also cease to exist when we die.
Aside from dreams of the world ending, another way to sort of assuage that dread that we all carry around with the knowledge of our own mortality is to lean into the intuitive belief that we are somehow non-physical entities that are merely contained in these physical bodies temporarily, and that some day we'll be released and go back into our true form. These two ideas often go together, but don't always. The neo-platonists, for example, believed in eternal non-physical bodies ascending to some kind of divinity after death, but didn't really have an 'end-of-the-world' prophecy.
A lot of people reading an essay about this will think about this as an object lesson in gullibility and people failing to use reason, but there are a lot of so-called "rationalists" on this very website who themselves believe in a version of this -- that the world is soon going to face a technological apocalypse of some kind -- maybe it's a super-powerful AI escaping, or climate doom, or nuclear war, or whatever, and at the same time believing that they themselves will find a way to escape death, from mind-uploading, or life extension or something similar. Transumanism, extropianism, "effective altruism", a lot of those modern techno-utopian philosophies are just millenarian doomsday cults with a "scientific" technological gloss.
I don't think there's anything especially "wrong" about the religion this essay is about. It's no crazier than Christianity was, which was also a religion built around a prophet whose apocalypse didn't arrive and who died unexpectedly. They had to build an (at times beautiful, at times ridiculous) tower of philosophical abstractions to retroactively make any of it make sense to them.
On a completely unrelated tangent: If you read https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/ the subreddit for die hard Gamestop "investors", there's a lot of similarity between the way they talk about the "mother of all short squeezes" and the way the doomsday cults talk about the end of the world. There's a religious fervor to it that's sort of based around the idea that the modern economy is a house of cards and will completely collapse because of people shorting a retail video game store.
Grasshopper doesnt care about some higher meaning or immortality. Its role is to enjoy what life gives and procreate if possible. Just because we became self-aware doesnt make us any more special.
No point trying to see more to it, maybe that could be one goal for folks desperately looking for this.
> Just because we became self-aware doesnt make us any more special.
Disagree - I'd say we are special in that we have enough self-awareness to develop technology to destroy the ecosystem our existence depends on, but not enough to stop ourselves from doing it.
Sure it does, but it still doesn't make us anyhow magical beings suddenly transcending cycle of life and death, when all out ancestors and other even quite smart beings don't / didn't for whatever illogical reasons. We just desperately wish for it to be so, because the concept of permanent death is fucking terrifying, for everybody.
We may still be mentally on a level of bacteria compared to maximum intelligence obtainable in this universe, so self-awareness may not be such a huge milestone some here think it is. A bit of humility about ourselves would serve us well.
> Sure it does, but it still doesn't make us anyhow magical beings suddenly transcending cycle of life and death...
Agreed, hence I made no such claim. But a lack of it may render one unable to wonder what is true, and that may play some role in whether we can do anything about climate change. Like, I don't expect too much of it from the stereotypical Trump supporter, but I now no longer expect it of anyone.
> ...when all out ancestors and other even quite smart beings don't / didn't for whatever illogical reasons.
It would seem the power of science is required to destroy the Earth's ecosystem (religion is only adequate to kill people within the ecosystem, and then only sometimes), and as it turns out it took a while for it to overcome religion. But boy once it did, it didn't take long to fuck things up...with zero responsibility to boot (credit where credit is due: good artists copy, great artists steal).
> We just desperately wish for it to be so, because the concept of permanent death is fucking terrifying, for everybody.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride! And wishing (story telling, etc) seems to be our main skill when it comes to certain topics.
> We may still be mentally on a level of bacteria compared to maximum intelligence obtainable in this universe, so self-awareness may not be such a huge milestone some here think it is. A bit of humility about ourselves would serve us well.
100% agree with the second sentence, but do the two sentences not directly contradict each other?? I think we must have our wires crossed somehow.
How is fearing the risks associated with technology similar to believing in a cult?
Are people who believe that technology can save their life considered lunatics? Because it can already do so now, to a point, but it's not hard to believe that even old age could potentially be cured in the future, although perhaps not our generation. As far as I know there is no law of physics that would prevent us from being immortals (except perhaps the heat death of the universe or something).
Believing in medicine and its incredibly fast paced progress is believing in something irrational with a "scientific" technological gloss?
Well I'd say most transhumanists think that technology can save us from ourselves, not that it would necessarily always do.
I don't see how that is similar to believing in the cult in TFA, and how both are unscientific.
It starts to veer into cult-like behavior when people start building their lives around _near-term_ apocalyptic scenarios. Being involved in anti-nuclear war protests, fighting for climate regulation to slow down climate change, worrying about AI safety, etc similar actions are all completely justifiable responses to reasonable concerns. Once you start building a bunker on a remote pacific island, you're starting to get into "doomsday cult"-like mentality. https://www.cbc.ca/news/billionaire-bunkers-doomsday-1.71301...
It seems perfectly reasonable to me to spend a tiny fraction of your fortune on building a bunker to gain an advantage against highly unlikely events.
Think a civilisation collapse has a 1 in 1000 chance to happen? Spend 0.1% of your fortune building that bunker.
Building your life around _near-term_ apocalyptic scenarios doesn't seem super healthy to me, but it is vastly different from being part of a cult or believing in Santa Claus, as there is indeed some science behind it, although people living that way may imagine those catastrophic events more probable or severe than they really would be.
> For a lot of people, it feels better ... to think that we are so important that the rest of the universe will also cease to exist when we die.
> ...there are a lot of so-called "rationalists" on this very website who themselves believe in a version of this -- that the world is soon going to face a technological apocalypse of some kind ... believing that they themselves will find a way to escape death....
Neither of these points resonate with me. I think the people you describe are a tiny fraction of people — I'm not sure I know anyone like that in any event.
I think the current trajectory of our civilization is unsustainable for a number of reasons and we will no doubt see some bad outcomes. I have absolutlely no expectation of being able to dodge the consequences though.
Maybe it's people like Peter Thiel though that you have in mind.
"Elizabeth Prophet regarded American society as existing in a state of decay, comparing it to the last days of the Roman Empire." [0]
She's definitely right about that one ^. A very slow decay, most visibly seen by its gradual fall of GDP and world influence. This is also paralleled by increasing social welfare over the years, which the church also rejected:
"Elizabeth preached against socialism in all forms, seeing it as part of the global elite conspiracy's plot to control all facets of society. She instead emphasised a philosophy of individualism. Palmer and Abravanel characterised the Church's viewpoint as a 'conservative Republican stance'."
Trump only normalized beliefs already gaining ground within alt-right, neoconservative and fringe Evangelical ideology. His politics were just boilerplate Fox News/AM radio fare.
Blame the Republican party for preferring to embrace and try to weaponize their lunatic fringe, and blame the other side rather than clean their own house.
IIRC some strains of alt-rightism consider the Roman Empire to be peak manliness and therefore peak civilization and we should inject modern Western society with more of its values. Naturally everyone who believes this thinks they'll be one of the few privileged patricians.
Rightly or wrongly, lots of people feel that the USA is in decline. The Roman empire is a dramatic historical example of a world power declining, so people draw parallels. It's pretty straightforward, imo.
It was a fixation of literature, history, and political science, for… oh, centuries. Not unjustifiably, either. Any entity that becomes that immensely powerful and influential is gonna tend to cast a long shadow. It’s hard to take even a shallow look at a solid millennium of European history after the fall of the Western Empire without running into at least allusions to Rome all over the place. Longer than that, probably. Like you poke at 20th century European history a little (“why was Alsace-Lorraine a point of contention for Germany and France?”) and before you know long you’re talking about Rome.
“But why Rome, of all ancient empires? Why so Eurocentric?”
Well, the short answer is the Industrial Revolution started in Great Britain.
If you mean why right-leaning groups are interested in it: I’d guess it’s the narrative of barbarians threatening from beyond the borders, the cautionary tale of how that and internal corruption brought them down (“well that’s a bit reductive…”—look, I know that), the honor-culture stuff (real or imagined), et c. The more intellectual side of the right in the US (though I think they’ve been rather left behind at this point) may be interested because of connections to the founders, like Washington’s Cincinnatus-like rejection of power after two presidential terms (we named a fairly major city after the dude, even)
This cult and its predecessor, the I AM, are cornerstones of American fascism. It’s a deep dive worth doing. I AM toward its end even perpetuated stories remarkably similar to Qanon, in the 1930s.
A fun fact too: General Nathan Flynn recited a very strange prayer at one of his gatherings. Turns out it’s a prayer from the Church Universal and Triumphant, this woman’s fascist cult. So there may be surviving ideological links today, or Flynn may be in a cult himself, or maybe whoever wrote it for him is.
A lot of this stuff goes even further back to William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Shirts, an American fascist movement. Pelley and Edna Ballard, one of the founders of I AM, were associated.
Wouldn’t be the first time cults tried to use rich or powerful followers to gain money or power for themselves. Look into Scientology.
> General Nathan Flynn recited a very strange prayer at one of his gatherings. Turns out it’s a prayer from the Church Universal and Triumphant
This is in the article.
As an aside, your repeated use of the word "cult" and the word "fascist" detracts from your comment. Both words have been diluted past all meaning, and using them together so frequently in just a few paragraphs induces a lot of cringing from anyone who is moderately familiar with either religious studies or political science. They're essentially just expletives at this point and don't add much meaning beyond intense disapproval.
The Silver Shirts were straight-up fascists. The other movements you refer to were right-wing nationalist movements but I see no evidence of most of the characteristics of fascism except that you try to paint them with the same brush by referring to a vague association between founders.
I assume the objection above was to avoid them being diluted, here. I'm also trying to figure out if you're trying to say that if we just react to the words as if they were being properly applied no matter what, that will prevent them from being diluted. Because that's not good.
> the word "cult" ... have been diluted past all meaning
Another interpretation is that Cult has been somewhat disarmed from it's modern, weaponized usage.
Historically, Cult was as a neutralish term.
In discussing religious groups, Cult helped clarify that the group in focus was a subset of a larger group. It was also used as a catchall reference to small religions.
In the latter 20th century, Evangelical authors/lecturers (eg:Walter Martin) strongly associated Cult with evil and used it to help introduce+nurture animosity toward smaller, unliked Christian faiths.
If Cult hadn't been so loaded with sinister vibes, it might not have become the term we use to reference cloistering, manipulative groups.
Eh, when paired with "fascist" it's pretty clear that OP is using "cult" in much the same way that Evangelical Christians use it. Both words are essentially a label that identifies a movement as something that you should be opposed to if you're not either evil or naive.
> [cult is] essentially a label that identifies a movement as something that you should be opposed to if you're not either evil or naive.
I don't disagree with your assessment here.
I am okay, however, with Cult becoming defanged.
Cult's negative connotations sprung from the worst of intentions - to divide Christians by demonizing other, smaller Christian faiths. Turning a vulnerable group into an (punishable) enemy is a classic fascist tactic.
I argue that the negative associations with 'Cult' were originally a product of fascist methods.
The further we are from all of that, the better I'll feel.
Trying to language police the use of the word fascism to describe right-wing authoritarians is a waste of time and for me raises a bright red flag for the person doing the language policing. Instead of trying to get people to stop using a term of common parlance to describe the emerging and growing spread of right-wing authoritarianism, perhaps you might want to consider doing some constructive instead, or just coping with the fact that with the current rise of right-wing authoritarian extremism that mirrors prior rises of the same, some people are going to use a word you don't like to describe it.
> a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and/or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Our vocabulary in the US around politics (left and right) gives the false impression that politics is a 2D spectrum. It's not, and very few right-wing groups today have many shared beliefs with fascists at all. This includes the nutjobs who think they're Nazi sympathizers.
According to Orwell the word was already a mostly meaningless insult by 1944 [1], and it's still a mostly meaningless insult:
> Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.
> ... All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.
Elizabeth Prophet didn't dictate her organisation? It wasn't obsessed with nuclear weapons? Their view of initiation doesn't signal a belief in a natural social hierarchy? They didn't sign over their personal assets in service of this ultra-nationalist organisation?
I don't think you've tried to determine their politics at all, you just want to say that the dominant ideology of the US is not allowed to be named.
I’m surprised people are low key defending these groups, even people on the right. This isn’t conservatism. It’s totalitarianism backed by new age woo.
I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised. Totalitarianism is back in fashion lately. Feels like we want to LARP the early 20th century.
Since I'm assuming that I'm one target of this as the only person to contradict you in this subthread, I just want to be clear: I'm not on the right. As far as the conservatives in my (very red) state are concerned I'm a flaming liberal.
As for how I'd describe myself, I'm basically in the "we desperately need to reverse the trend of everyone assuming that anyone who disagrees with them is evil" camp, which is why I strongly object to casual comparisons to fascism. Using that word or the word "cult" to label someone immediately frees you from any obligation to engage with them as a person, and I'm not okay with that tendency from either wing of modern politics.
Historically, I find that what's politically in fashion tends to be aligned with Russia's interests. One giveaway are those "polarizing figures" whose polarity suspiciously changed over time in alignment with Russia's magnetic field: Gingrich, Berlusconi, Dick Morris, just to pick on some whose mention won't start a flamewar. Coincidence is a thing but this ain't it.
Some are contrarians with the opposite polarity, such as Arianna Huffington. Kudos, maybe.
It's a great record, and the chanting is impressive. The same people also put out a single for Aum Shinrikyo which was terrible (although the "A"[*] documentary and it's sequel are fascinating if you want to know what happened after their prophecy failed.)
You can also hear the Church Universal and Triumphant on Negativland's Escape From Noise as "Michael Jackson," giving a lecture about the evils of pop music (also on Sounds of American Doomsday Cults.)
Are Harpers and The New Yorker in a battle to see who can write the longest article. It was easy to start a bullshit religion in the mid 20th century. No google/yelp, a huge population of credulous people before the post-90s cynicism set in, post-war prosperity and discretionary income, Cold War paranoia and the public's receptiveness to doomsday messaging, a willingness of public to trust authority figures or anyone who claimed to be one.
Enjoyable article. Reminded me of the experience of keeping the faith in a startup after it's become clear that it's going nowhere - there's the pragmatic need to keep earning, of course, but also an unwillingness to overturn the social framework of your life, and perhaps a stubborn refusal to upset your strong conviction that you were on the bus to destination success.
I met an ex-JW the other day who has become convinced that he is an extra-terrestrial volunteer, sent to earth in order to help stabilize human society, and that he's able to remotely converse with anybody through the aid of his physical paraphenalia. He was interesting to talk with; 100% convinced that his belief system was real; IANAP, but I wouldn't immediately lump him into any major DSM-5 category. I guess certain minds seek non-mainstream belief systems as a way of distinguishing themselves from the norm, or accounting for a deep feeling of being different, or not fitting in. Perhaps this too is somewhat endemic in the startup crowd; why work for a big firm when you have special capabilities, and can blaze your own trail?
I've known more than a few ex-religious of varying types who in young adulthood have to find an explanation for why:
- they are not at all who the faiths they were raised by said they should be
- they know there's not actually anything wrong with themselves (or others like them), despite what their faith taught them
Squaring these two deeply personal realizations is challenging. People take many paths. Your interaction is an outlier, but by no means the most extreme I've encountered.
This brings back memories of the 1980s. The Church Universal and Triumphant had posters plastered all over college campuses about their retreats. As I recall, according to the posters at said retreats one could "quaff potions created by Merlin" - yes, THAT Merlin from Arthurian legend.
The posters also, incongruously, had this androgynous-looking image prominently displayed:
I thought up until very recently that this was supposed to be an image of Elizabeth Clare Prophet (whose name I thought also was surely made-up), and always wondered why this woman had a mustache :)
> As long has there been human writing, people have been saying the end is nigh. Nobody has ever been right!
You aren't wrong. I've been a Christian of some stripe, my whole life. Even general Armageddon predictions (soon!) are really dumb and I wish we would stop them.
Besides being wrong, they're either a pointless distraction or they're counterproductive. Counterproductive because fear sucks as a long term motivator.
Faiths have examples and our job as adherents is to strive to embody the example. That's it.
The rest of the guff might be supportive if applied correctly. Mostly, we don't do that.
I'm not so sure it's fear. I suspect it's more often resentment, and the hope that 'our' enemies will soon be consumed by monsters and then 'we' get to watch them be punished for an eternity, so that 'we' may rejoice.
> they fail to even register the bigger cults now called religions
“They” don’t need to because there’s always some atheist in the comment section to make bigoted generalizations and make wild claims that are demonstrably nonsense, such as…
> I truely believe that humanity has a greater chance of being destroyed by one of these death cults than anything else out there.
Yes, because the explicitly atheist regimes that are right now and for the last 70+ years been arming themselves to the teeth with world destroying nuclear arsenals and adopting belligerent stances against the other nuclear powers are way down the list of probable harbingers of doomsday.
Well not demonstrably as that would require you to prove a negative.
The term cult has now a negative connotation but the way I meant it was as little religion, like a carrot an a baby carrot?.
I agree on the atheist rebuttal although I honestly do not think the world is ruled by atheism regimes oppressing the poor religious minority. I have no idea what spawned the whole MAD ideology regarding nuclear weapons, it never made sense to me. It must have stemmed from an unshakeable belief that it was ther right thing to do. This blind faith in something is the problem.
All I know is when the button that dooms us all is pressed, that person will have no doubts that he is making the right choice. Whether he calls himself a christian or an atheist makes no difference.
> I have no idea what spawned the whole MAD ideology regarding nuclear weapons, it never made sense to me.
Because the alternative is, "Hey, using just a few nuclear weapons would be okay." Which would (a) cause enormous destruction and (b) likely escalate to all-out nuclear war anyway. You're better off saying, "Don't ever ever _ever_ start this, because you will not live to regret it."
Even people who at first blush should be immune, since they, you know, worship reason and rationality, have created something which has all the outward appearances of a doomsday cult (a prophetic leader, who lives on donations from wealthy followers, elaborate prophesies about impending doom, an extensive corpus of religious texts w/ commentaries, polyamory, group living, an elaborate rationale to dissuade followers from being concerned about their finances, etc.).
Like, if you created a dataset with the notable features of various doomsday cults and then compared them with the notable features of Rationalism, then used that dataset to inform your priors in an attempt to answer the question, “Are my concerns about impending doom reasonable or have I succumbed to a doomsday cult?” surely the only reasonable answer is, “I have succumbed to a doomsday cult.”
Sort of trashy and shallow, but a good writer makes themselves a part of the work, rather than posturing as purely objective. Ok style wise I guess.
Interesingly, avoiding chocolate when pregnant is really good advice given, as has been posted here numerous times iinm, most commercially profuced chocolate contains lead and cadmium at toxic levels. Sometimes false prophets hit upon truth.
Anyway, I suppose all of this is very reassuring to catholics. Not sure the author could see the bigger picture though. Seemed a bit petty and small minded with scattered humble brags like growing out of her little kierkegaard phase. Lol
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] thread"For many will come in My name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many. " Mt 24-5
"Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. 16 You will know them by their fruits." Mt 7-15
A vague reference in Josephus?
A vague reference in the Talmud?
If I don't believe in the Gospels there's not much Jesus left to believe in, is there?
You've basically just abandoned any kind of logical or grounded epistemology and replaced it with believing in whatever "feels right". Which, you know, you do you, but it just sort of abandons any pursuit of some underlying reality that we share. There's nothing really to discuss there and you could be talking about a belief that the moon is made of cheese, that the earth is flat, or that we should all follow Satan or anything else that "feels right" to whoever.
It's funny that all the early church fathers and theologians made efforts to persuade people that the bible was true through logic and reason and evidence, but that was abandoned by the Church over time, as first people were forced to join the church on pain of death and damnation, and then later as any kind of logical or evidential argument for religion became untenable, people fell back on "well, you just have to choose to believe it if it feels good." Faith in the early church was not an argument for the existence of god, but was _predicated_ on the existence of God, a Christian was supposed to have faith that God, who you already believed in, had the world's best interests in mind. It was never meant to substitute for understanding the world through reason.
All of us are facing a personal apocalypse. We all build an entire universe in our minds based on what our senses take in and that world is going to evaporate when you die, and the rest of the world will continue on just fine without us. For a lot of people, it feels better, for some reason, to think that we are so important that the rest of the universe will also cease to exist when we die.
Aside from dreams of the world ending, another way to sort of assuage that dread that we all carry around with the knowledge of our own mortality is to lean into the intuitive belief that we are somehow non-physical entities that are merely contained in these physical bodies temporarily, and that some day we'll be released and go back into our true form. These two ideas often go together, but don't always. The neo-platonists, for example, believed in eternal non-physical bodies ascending to some kind of divinity after death, but didn't really have an 'end-of-the-world' prophecy.
A lot of people reading an essay about this will think about this as an object lesson in gullibility and people failing to use reason, but there are a lot of so-called "rationalists" on this very website who themselves believe in a version of this -- that the world is soon going to face a technological apocalypse of some kind -- maybe it's a super-powerful AI escaping, or climate doom, or nuclear war, or whatever, and at the same time believing that they themselves will find a way to escape death, from mind-uploading, or life extension or something similar. Transumanism, extropianism, "effective altruism", a lot of those modern techno-utopian philosophies are just millenarian doomsday cults with a "scientific" technological gloss.
I don't think there's anything especially "wrong" about the religion this essay is about. It's no crazier than Christianity was, which was also a religion built around a prophet whose apocalypse didn't arrive and who died unexpectedly. They had to build an (at times beautiful, at times ridiculous) tower of philosophical abstractions to retroactively make any of it make sense to them.
On a completely unrelated tangent: If you read https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/ the subreddit for die hard Gamestop "investors", there's a lot of similarity between the way they talk about the "mother of all short squeezes" and the way the doomsday cults talk about the end of the world. There's a religious fervor to it that's sort of based around the idea that the modern economy is a house of cards and will completely collapse because of people shorting a retail video game store.
No point trying to see more to it, maybe that could be one goal for folks desperately looking for this.
Disagree - I'd say we are special in that we have enough self-awareness to develop technology to destroy the ecosystem our existence depends on, but not enough to stop ourselves from doing it.
We may still be mentally on a level of bacteria compared to maximum intelligence obtainable in this universe, so self-awareness may not be such a huge milestone some here think it is. A bit of humility about ourselves would serve us well.
Agreed, hence I made no such claim. But a lack of it may render one unable to wonder what is true, and that may play some role in whether we can do anything about climate change. Like, I don't expect too much of it from the stereotypical Trump supporter, but I now no longer expect it of anyone.
> ...when all out ancestors and other even quite smart beings don't / didn't for whatever illogical reasons.
It would seem the power of science is required to destroy the Earth's ecosystem (religion is only adequate to kill people within the ecosystem, and then only sometimes), and as it turns out it took a while for it to overcome religion. But boy once it did, it didn't take long to fuck things up...with zero responsibility to boot (credit where credit is due: good artists copy, great artists steal).
> We just desperately wish for it to be so, because the concept of permanent death is fucking terrifying, for everybody.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride! And wishing (story telling, etc) seems to be our main skill when it comes to certain topics.
> We may still be mentally on a level of bacteria compared to maximum intelligence obtainable in this universe, so self-awareness may not be such a huge milestone some here think it is. A bit of humility about ourselves would serve us well.
100% agree with the second sentence, but do the two sentences not directly contradict each other?? I think we must have our wires crossed somehow.
Are people who believe that technology can save their life considered lunatics? Because it can already do so now, to a point, but it's not hard to believe that even old age could potentially be cured in the future, although perhaps not our generation. As far as I know there is no law of physics that would prevent us from being immortals (except perhaps the heat death of the universe or something).
Believing in medicine and its incredibly fast paced progress is believing in something irrational with a "scientific" technological gloss?
If it is driven by an assumption that tech will always save us because it always has in the past.
I would draw the line at things like global climate change though.
Building your life around _near-term_ apocalyptic scenarios doesn't seem super healthy to me, but it is vastly different from being part of a cult or believing in Santa Claus, as there is indeed some science behind it, although people living that way may imagine those catastrophic events more probable or severe than they really would be.
> ...there are a lot of so-called "rationalists" on this very website who themselves believe in a version of this -- that the world is soon going to face a technological apocalypse of some kind ... believing that they themselves will find a way to escape death....
Neither of these points resonate with me. I think the people you describe are a tiny fraction of people — I'm not sure I know anyone like that in any event.
I think the current trajectory of our civilization is unsustainable for a number of reasons and we will no doubt see some bad outcomes. I have absolutlely no expectation of being able to dodge the consequences though.
Maybe it's people like Peter Thiel though that you have in mind.
She's definitely right about that one ^. A very slow decay, most visibly seen by its gradual fall of GDP and world influence. This is also paralleled by increasing social welfare over the years, which the church also rejected:
"Elizabeth preached against socialism in all forms, seeing it as part of the global elite conspiracy's plot to control all facets of society. She instead emphasised a philosophy of individualism. Palmer and Abravanel characterised the Church's viewpoint as a 'conservative Republican stance'."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Universal_and_Triumphan...
Blame the Republican party for preferring to embrace and try to weaponize their lunatic fringe, and blame the other side rather than clean their own house.
This the British talk this way in the 18th century ?
“But why Rome, of all ancient empires? Why so Eurocentric?”
Well, the short answer is the Industrial Revolution started in Great Britain.
If you mean why right-leaning groups are interested in it: I’d guess it’s the narrative of barbarians threatening from beyond the borders, the cautionary tale of how that and internal corruption brought them down (“well that’s a bit reductive…”—look, I know that), the honor-culture stuff (real or imagined), et c. The more intellectual side of the right in the US (though I think they’ve been rather left behind at this point) may be interested because of connections to the founders, like Washington’s Cincinnatus-like rejection of power after two presidential terms (we named a fairly major city after the dude, even)
A fun fact too: General Nathan Flynn recited a very strange prayer at one of his gatherings. Turns out it’s a prayer from the Church Universal and Triumphant, this woman’s fascist cult. So there may be surviving ideological links today, or Flynn may be in a cult himself, or maybe whoever wrote it for him is.
https://x.com/PiperK/status/1445663165186904065
A lot of this stuff goes even further back to William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Shirts, an American fascist movement. Pelley and Edna Ballard, one of the founders of I AM, were associated.
Wouldn’t be the first time cults tried to use rich or powerful followers to gain money or power for themselves. Look into Scientology.
This is in the article.
As an aside, your repeated use of the word "cult" and the word "fascist" detracts from your comment. Both words have been diluted past all meaning, and using them together so frequently in just a few paragraphs induces a lot of cringing from anyone who is moderately familiar with either religious studies or political science. They're essentially just expletives at this point and don't add much meaning beyond intense disapproval.
The Silver Shirts were straight-up fascists. The other movements you refer to were right-wing nationalist movements but I see no evidence of most of the characteristics of fascism except that you try to paint them with the same brush by referring to a vague association between founders.
Another interpretation is that Cult has been somewhat disarmed from it's modern, weaponized usage.
Historically, Cult was as a neutralish term.
In discussing religious groups, Cult helped clarify that the group in focus was a subset of a larger group. It was also used as a catchall reference to small religions.
In the latter 20th century, Evangelical authors/lecturers (eg:Walter Martin) strongly associated Cult with evil and used it to help introduce+nurture animosity toward smaller, unliked Christian faiths.
If Cult hadn't been so loaded with sinister vibes, it might not have become the term we use to reference cloistering, manipulative groups.
I don't disagree with your assessment here.
I am okay, however, with Cult becoming defanged.
Cult's negative connotations sprung from the worst of intentions - to divide Christians by demonizing other, smaller Christian faiths. Turning a vulnerable group into an (punishable) enemy is a classic fascist tactic.
I argue that the negative associations with 'Cult' were originally a product of fascist methods.
The further we are from all of that, the better I'll feel.
Sort of adjacent to your point. I think the label 'Fascist' best serves us when we apply it to fascist behaviors.
I'm not saying Fascist isn't a reasonable label for people who embrace fascist behaviors. It is.
But 1) understanding and identifying fascist behaviors - this is how we know when to apply the label and
2) the behaviors are the mechanism for harm; they deserve our greater focus and
3) People are multiple things and things change. Behavior is what it is.
> a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and/or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Our vocabulary in the US around politics (left and right) gives the false impression that politics is a 2D spectrum. It's not, and very few right-wing groups today have many shared beliefs with fascists at all. This includes the nutjobs who think they're Nazi sympathizers.
According to Orwell the word was already a mostly meaningless insult by 1944 [1], and it's still a mostly meaningless insult:
> Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.
> ... All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
[1] https://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune...
I don't think you've tried to determine their politics at all, you just want to say that the dominant ideology of the US is not allowed to be named.
I’m surprised people are low key defending these groups, even people on the right. This isn’t conservatism. It’s totalitarianism backed by new age woo.
I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised. Totalitarianism is back in fashion lately. Feels like we want to LARP the early 20th century.
Since I'm assuming that I'm one target of this as the only person to contradict you in this subthread, I just want to be clear: I'm not on the right. As far as the conservatives in my (very red) state are concerned I'm a flaming liberal.
As for how I'd describe myself, I'm basically in the "we desperately need to reverse the trend of everyone assuming that anyone who disagrees with them is evil" camp, which is why I strongly object to casual comparisons to fascism. Using that word or the word "cult" to label someone immediately frees you from any obligation to engage with them as a person, and I'm not okay with that tendency from either wing of modern politics.
We need to stop handling psychotic totalitarian lunacy the same way we handle people we don’t agree with about the use of pronouns or tax policy.
Some are contrarians with the opposite polarity, such as Arianna Huffington. Kudos, maybe.
You can also hear the Church Universal and Triumphant on Negativland's Escape From Noise as "Michael Jackson," giving a lecture about the evils of pop music (also on Sounds of American Doomsday Cults.)
[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_(1998_Japanese_film)
Show's archives here: https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/MW
I met an ex-JW the other day who has become convinced that he is an extra-terrestrial volunteer, sent to earth in order to help stabilize human society, and that he's able to remotely converse with anybody through the aid of his physical paraphenalia. He was interesting to talk with; 100% convinced that his belief system was real; IANAP, but I wouldn't immediately lump him into any major DSM-5 category. I guess certain minds seek non-mainstream belief systems as a way of distinguishing themselves from the norm, or accounting for a deep feeling of being different, or not fitting in. Perhaps this too is somewhat endemic in the startup crowd; why work for a big firm when you have special capabilities, and can blaze your own trail?
Ouch. So on-point.
There's wrong, and then there's so-wrong-it-should-be-a-musical!
- they are not at all who the faiths they were raised by said they should be - they know there's not actually anything wrong with themselves (or others like them), despite what their faith taught them
Squaring these two deeply personal realizations is challenging. People take many paths. Your interaction is an outlier, but by no means the most extreme I've encountered.
The posters also, incongruously, had this androgynous-looking image prominently displayed:
https://store.summitlighthouse.org/images/thumbs/0000144_pos...
I thought up until very recently that this was supposed to be an image of Elizabeth Clare Prophet (whose name I thought also was surely made-up), and always wondered why this woman had a mustache :)
As long has there been human writing, people have been saying the end is nigh. Nobody has ever been right!
You aren't wrong. I've been a Christian of some stripe, my whole life. Even general Armageddon predictions (soon!) are really dumb and I wish we would stop them.
Besides being wrong, they're either a pointless distraction or they're counterproductive. Counterproductive because fear sucks as a long term motivator.
Faiths have examples and our job as adherents is to strive to embody the example. That's it.
The rest of the guff might be supportive if applied correctly. Mostly, we don't do that.
“They” don’t need to because there’s always some atheist in the comment section to make bigoted generalizations and make wild claims that are demonstrably nonsense, such as…
> I truely believe that humanity has a greater chance of being destroyed by one of these death cults than anything else out there.
Yes, because the explicitly atheist regimes that are right now and for the last 70+ years been arming themselves to the teeth with world destroying nuclear arsenals and adopting belligerent stances against the other nuclear powers are way down the list of probable harbingers of doomsday.
The term cult has now a negative connotation but the way I meant it was as little religion, like a carrot an a baby carrot?.
I agree on the atheist rebuttal although I honestly do not think the world is ruled by atheism regimes oppressing the poor religious minority. I have no idea what spawned the whole MAD ideology regarding nuclear weapons, it never made sense to me. It must have stemmed from an unshakeable belief that it was ther right thing to do. This blind faith in something is the problem.
All I know is when the button that dooms us all is pressed, that person will have no doubts that he is making the right choice. Whether he calls himself a christian or an atheist makes no difference.
Because the alternative is, "Hey, using just a few nuclear weapons would be okay." Which would (a) cause enormous destruction and (b) likely escalate to all-out nuclear war anyway. You're better off saying, "Don't ever ever _ever_ start this, because you will not live to regret it."
Like, if you created a dataset with the notable features of various doomsday cults and then compared them with the notable features of Rationalism, then used that dataset to inform your priors in an attempt to answer the question, “Are my concerns about impending doom reasonable or have I succumbed to a doomsday cult?” surely the only reasonable answer is, “I have succumbed to a doomsday cult.”
And yet here we are.
Interesingly, avoiding chocolate when pregnant is really good advice given, as has been posted here numerous times iinm, most commercially profuced chocolate contains lead and cadmium at toxic levels. Sometimes false prophets hit upon truth.
Anyway, I suppose all of this is very reassuring to catholics. Not sure the author could see the bigger picture though. Seemed a bit petty and small minded with scattered humble brags like growing out of her little kierkegaard phase. Lol