131–140 of 373 posts
Totally tangential, but I was thinking this morning about my experience as a kid when my parents forced me to be an alter boy at our local church. There are these occasional observances where the church is obligated to put on a special service, part of a liturgical calendar. Sometimes these happen at like 11am on a Wednesday. It was nice to get out of school to go and burn some incense and follow the priest around wh…
In the pre-1970 Catholic mass, the priest faced the altar and spoke in Latin. The mass was changed in 1970 so the priest faces the people and speaks in the vernacular. The shift in understanding is clear. Religion used to be about God, and about our obligations to and relationships with Him. This was true across all religions. Now, most people think of it as primarily a community building exercise. This modern mindset is the only context in which your comment makes sense. Premodern catholics would be baffled at it
I document technical things on my blog and hardly anyone reads it. But later on when I need that thing again, I just go there and I have the perfect documentation available for the topic (it's perfect since I wrote it hahaha).
Care to share your blog‘s url?
Recently, I paid for OpenAI for Deep Research. I asked it about a topic I'm actively working on and researching: reactivity and effect systems. Deep Research ended up using my blog as a part of its research. At first, I wasn't sure what to make of it. But reading the source, my blog post reminded me of some ideas I had consciously forgotten. The Deep Research report gathered some of those idea and repurposed it in an…
Totally tangential, but I was thinking this morning about my experience as a kid when my parents forced me to be an alter boy at our local church. There are these occasional observances where the church is obligated to put on a special service, part of a liturgical calendar. Sometimes these happen at like 11am on a Wednesday. It was nice to get out of school to go and burn some incense and follow the priest around wh…
I think your comment highlights a fundamental difference in how most modern people understand religion from how our ancestors did. In the pre-1970 Catholic mass, the priest faced the altar and spoke in Latin. The mass was changed in 1970 so the priest faces the people and speaks in the vernacular. The shift in understanding is clear. Religion used to be about God, and about our obligations to and relationships with H…
I was actually envisioning something closer to the monastery that Alyosha was a part of in The Brothers Karamazov. It reminds me of the cliché admonishment of priests that pray in the streets (something that pops up in the Bhagavad Gita long before it does in the words of Jesus). It is worth pondering the lengths to which monks would go to prove their holiness was genuine and not the result of seeking attention.
It is true that at the time of my writing the comment, the top comment was a popular blogger extolling the benefits of clout that one might gain from writing a blog that gains some following. But in general, that is a feat most will never achieve. For the rest, they are more like the premodern adherents, doing the ritual for some other reason. The blog post we are discussing is literally about that kind of self-justification.
If you know you will not (or perhaps should not) blog to gain an audience, why should you do it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think your comment highlights a fundamental difference in how most modern people understand religion from how our ancestors did. In the pre-1970 Catholic mass, the priest faced the altar and spoke in Latin. The mass was changed in 1970 so the priest faces the people and speaks in the vernacular. The shift in understanding is clear. Religion used to be about God, and about our obligations to and relationships with H…
I think it may be the case that your possession of a tidbit of trivia and your particular interpretation of changes/reforms that came after Vatican II is causing you to interpret my comment in a different light than it was meant. I was actually envisioning something closer to the monastery that Alyosha was a part of in The Brothers Karamazov. It reminds me of the cliché admonishment of priests that pray in the street…