How exactly, is this "culture war"?
A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary
61–70 of 111 posts
Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world I'd say both are orthogonal to each other. The religious view of the world explain the "why do we exist?" and the scientific view the "how do we exist?".
You can credibly be a theist and believe in science, but it's a lot harder to really believe in one of the big religions and also believe in science.
Why? I'm a believing Catholic and believe in science too.
Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, if you define religion as literal interpretation of the Bible, stuck in the 9th century, while allowing science the full benefit of modern understanding. For example, you probably didn't have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinozism in mind when you said religion. > Even when "natural laws" were discovered, those laws were divine in origin, and thus could conceivably be arbitrarily suspended or changed under div…
> literal interpretation of the Bible, stuck in the 9th century I have to speak up in defence of people who lived in the 9th century. In the Middle Ages, allegorical approaches to Bible interpretation were popular, and they weren't wedded to literal readings of it – e.g. Augustine of Hippo (4th/5th century) argued that the six days in Genesis 1 were not meant to be understood as six literal days – and Augustine's vie…
I'll admit, I picked "9th century" at random, without knowing much about it.
Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
An omniscient god can guide random processes as it wishes. Or it can create a system where the desired outcome will come to pass, without controlling every detail. Like how each molecule of water moves randomly and unpredictably, but the river flows downhill and to the ocean.
But then if Occam's razor tells you the random process[0] will manage just fine, you have to push God's guidance further away still. At some point you might ask yourself, if increasingly sophisticated phenomena keep turning out to be explainable without any reference to God, if anything science touches turns out to be devoid of God, then why should we expect to find Him? -- [0] - an important realization is that evol…
> if anything science touches turns out to be devoid of God, then why should we expect to find Him
I don't think science can be used to find any proof of the existence of God
Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
An omniscient god can guide random processes as it wishes. Or it can create a system where the desired outcome will come to pass, without controlling every detail. Like how each molecule of water moves randomly and unpredictably, but the river flows downhill and to the ocean.
But then if Occam's razor tells you the random process[0] will manage just fine, you have to push God's guidance further away still. At some point you might ask yourself, if increasingly sophisticated phenomena keep turning out to be explainable without any reference to God, if anything science touches turns out to be devoid of God, then why should we expect to find Him? -- [0] - an important realization is that evol…
In this context, I use “random” to mean without the intent of a sentient being.
Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why and how can contradict. Easiest example is “god made people this way” vs “people are the result of random processes that came about due to happenstance”.
An omniscient god can guide random processes as it wishes. Or it can create a system where the desired outcome will come to pass, without controlling every detail. Like how each molecule of water moves randomly and unpredictably, but the river flows downhill and to the ocean.
Anything “can” happen if you want to define that it can. The point is that the why in many religions can lead to people thinking humans have a special status, vs the how indicating there is no reason to assume that.
The problem comes when people make decisions based on god making the desired outcome to pass, such as “don’t worry about climate change, everything happens for the better and god will take care of us”. There are religions that believe their purpose is to breed and multiply, without regard to the parameters of the system, because god will take care of the problems.
Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary
#67Not sure how the author decides what is ordinary and what is transcendent. According to him, there is nothing special about folks creating podcasts, but there is something special about a singer-songwriter. He does not say why. Take https://www.patreon.com/sonicether who earns $50k a month creating shaders for Minecraft. That sounds mundane until you realise that he's probably enabling tens of thousands of people to…
I think you have this the wrong way around. The article is undoubtedly correct to my mind. The most popular content creators are basically doing nothing. Looking at the truly huge Youtubers, people on Patreon, Instagrammers, streamers etc it is clear that mundanity with high production values is what people want. This is non-art served up with the orchestra and vino that you are criticising as bourgeois. Reality TV g…
I agree with some of your points. Podcasts have come a long way and if one takes a bit of time and is open to dialling down the filters there is lot of interesting conversations happening.
Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
An omniscient god can guide random processes as it wishes. Or it can create a system where the desired outcome will come to pass, without controlling every detail. Like how each molecule of water moves randomly and unpredictably, but the river flows downhill and to the ocean.
But then if Occam's razor tells you the random process[0] will manage just fine, you have to push God's guidance further away still. At some point you might ask yourself, if increasingly sophisticated phenomena keep turning out to be explainable without any reference to God, if anything science touches turns out to be devoid of God, then why should we expect to find Him? -- [0] - an important realization is that evol…
Sure - but that's a far cry from 'contradiction'.
And you overstate "explainable" - we are only able to explain things in terms of math and fundamental (well, the most fundamental found so far) physical laws. But we cannot explain the source of either of those - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics#Fou...
Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary
#69The article identifies a culture war between the ordinary and the transcendent, and sees in the Patreon top 50 that the ordinary has won, but it doesn't do a great job of how it determines how it classifies the entries.
Apparently a political podcast is ordinary, things that are NSFW or dealing with history are ordinary, and photos of New Yorkers are ordinary. The only things it considers transcendent are educational videos and Amanda Palmer.
As examples of what he means by transcendent, he mentions ancient Greeks, Christianity, Enlightenment, classical music, the US Constitution and scientific revolutions.
But honestly, hasn't the ordinary always outnumbered the transcendent? There first needs to be an 'ordinary' to transcend. Even during the height of enlightenment, the world was filled with the ordinary. We remember the transcendent because it is what changes things.
Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary
#70A recent survey of American values indicates that patriotism, belief in God and having children all rate much lower than they did 20 years ago. Gosh, one wonders what could have happened? Maybe two decades of pointless soul-rotting stupid wars, all supported by the most patriotic and pious among us? That has certainly sapped this correspondent's patriotism. (His piety, though, something else sapped that...) Next you'…
> Maybe twenty years of pointless soul-rotting stupid wars > Next you'll be telling us that trigger-happy crowd-murders are more common > It's as if chickens... come home to roost! I'm a bit confused, are you of the mind that there is some relation between mass-shooters and the wars in the Middle East? Or just those wars are why people feel less positive about patriotism?
I've been around long enough to have seen karma in action. If I pay enough attention, I often find that "karma" is another name for "obvious consequences".
The things that we're encouraged to blame for these mass murders: guns, crazy people, Republicans, white supremacists, etc. we've always had in USA. What has changed? I submit that over time we've been subjected to ever-increasing levels of war-media conditioning. We're constantly encouraged to fear, to hate, to destroy. Right now we're hating on Iranians and Venezuelans, with plenty of leftover hatred for Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Russians, Chinese, etc. The idea is that we'll funnel that insanity into voting for, or at least tolerating, increased payments to armaments manufacturers, and the contrived wars necessary to "justify" same. Some people just aren't mentally pliable enough to focus on the desired end goal. If you tell them often enough to fear and kill, eventually that's what they'll do. Maybe they'll try to kill mostly "others" on their killing sprees, but maybe they're such loners that anyone human parses as "other" to them.
It's not a coincidence that the "first" one of these things took place in 1966. The military-media-industrial complex was pulling out all the stops on their first big project since Korea.
Yes, also, obviously, the wars have killed patriotism among thinking people. Again, though, it hasn't just been the wars, but also the industrial-strength war-media war conditioning that was necessary to bring them about.