This is why scientists don’t interact with the faithful. It’s not possible to have an adult conversation. That said, just some random thoughts:
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I try to respond to these if they are not totally off the wall. This is pretty off the wall but not totally. And I want to avoid working on something else at the moment.
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Anyone who thinks I pissed myself rather than was sweating my balls off, or that I was afraid rather than having fun with the BLM kids is too stupid to use the world’s oxygen. There are apparently a lot of people on the right who are too stupid to use the world’s oxygen. I think what I’ve observed is that the right lower classes are so traumatized and so conspired against, that they live in fear and paranoia. I don’t live in fear at all. Successful people love competition, conflict, and threat. My only concern on the 4th was that we didn’t get BLMm the 2nd amendment guys and the cops to bait us into another cville – or another fail like the recent capitol riot. I’m not an incompetent ass clown. Drama queens are.
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The reason for my body language and demeanor is that it’s not possible to debate intelligently with the faithful except within the context of their faith. I can do that. But it’s not my job. So I’m stressed whenever the subject comes up, because I don’t have confidence that the conversation isn’t pointless, and I want to minimize opportunities for it to turn into pointless nonsense. My opinion on faith is that you have it or you don’t. Faith doesn’t require justification. If it does then you don’t have it. Because that’s what faith means. Either you live your life in imitation of Jesus or you don’t. Few Christians do. Christians who debate faith with reason almost never do. you don’t see Jesus defending his faith. He simply leaves it up to those who don’t to believe whatever they want.
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Of course I’m on FBI radar. I’ve had multiple visits this year, and I spent three hours with them just the other day regarding the capitol riots. I’ve had worldwide business and political experience. I’ve worked for justice, investigated, turned in, testified against, and prosecuted financial criminals. I’ve done work for intel. That said, what I do is expressly legal in the USA – it’s in the declaration, constitution, code, and case law. I’m one of the hundreds if not thousands of political radicals in the world, and they aren’t imprisoned either – because there is a difference between public intellectuals discussing radial politics and actually planning and committing violence. All the FBI cares about is that I don’t actually direct people to commit violence. Or in their words “People don’t understand 90% of what you write, but we’re worried about someone who misinterprets it and commits a crime.” Conversely, you are not worldly, accomplished, knowledgeable, or have insight and understanding of world security, intelligence, court, and law enforcement interests. And yes, I (and many others) have been approached overseas and asked to ‘be cautious’ – primarily because USG didn’t want me (us) accused of being state agents when everyone was imagining that the Ukrainian revolution was US Intel Conspiracy rather than a deterministic outcome of the frustration of the Ukrainian people. We are from different social and economic classes and we have different life experiences – I have agency. I love competition.
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I was raised catholic, with Saturday church school, Catechism, Sunday church, confirmation, etc, and graduated from a private catholic high school, where we studied comparative religion. However, religiosity is dependent on two properties: Trait empathy over systematizing, and familial indoctrination. People like me are always secular Christians because we have extreme trait systematizing not empathy, and are immune to indoctrination. I studied warfare, history, physics, artificial intelligence, law, economics, and cognitive science in that order. And I spent multiple years producing a scientific explanation of religions and their necessity across the empathic to analytic spectrum. What I understand better than most is the intellectual progression of the ancient world through catholicism into Germanized catholicism into increasingly rational catholicism, and the failure of the church to reform in response to darwin, and the subsequent capture of the church’s role by the academy and state, and the postwar capture of the academy media and state by the Jewish counter-revolution against the west. So the difference between us is that I see religion as a political system because I have no personal need – even though I recognize the personal need of the polity. And while it may horrify you, I see what the Jews have done to Russia, Germany, and now America as a repetition of the Christian destruction of the ancient world – there is no difference between woke/pc, tearing down statues, and anti-white hate today, and the Christians doing the same to Rome. That is the Christian bitter pill. Communism, socialism, postmodernism, woke-pc, anti-Christianity, anti-republican, anti-rule of law, white hate, is a revolt against darwin’s explanation for the success of the west in the ancient and modern world, but it is also a repetition of the Christian (Jewish) destruction of the ancient world for the same reasons, by the same motivations. We practice a Germanized Christianity.
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There are 2,510M Christians and 230M Orthodox (less than 10%), and 1% or less in every state but Alaska. So yeah. Tiny. Orthodox is the third-largest division: Catholics 1,200M, Protestants 900M, Orthodox 230M the rest is noise. The byzantine ’empire’ collapsed rapidly over 500 years, and as I said, only held onto a small territory because it was, like today’s NY, a major port, trade, and financial center, connecting the occident with the orient with all the wealth that entailed.
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As far as I know I understand the psychological, social, and political function of western Christianity. And as far as I know, Jesus was a reformer of Judaism like Confucius, buddha, or Aristotle, and he solved the greatest problem of human cooperation in history, and the only possible improvement to the natural law of cooperation (reciprocity) at a time when it was necessary to find a method of integrating superstitious dirt poor peasants into a far more advanced civilization that regarded them as semi-domesticated animals. Paul reversed that innovation just as buddha’s later followers reversed his innovation, just like Zoroaster’s later followers reversed his innovation, just as Augustine reversed Aristotle’s innovation. So there is a difference between living a life in imitation of Jesus – which is the scientifically optimum solution to the problem of human cooperation – and Churchianity which has been a catastrophe for civilization for almost two thousand years. The orthodox maintained that original model and is the ‘best’ church precisely because it was compatible not a competitor to the state, and as such remained compatible with the nation-state, and is a national church. The catholic church tried to rule but was captured by the aristocracy so made itself a natural enemy of the nation-state. The catholic church dogma evolved somewhat deterministically toward natural law by the time of the scholastics, and approached the quality of legal analysis by the early modern period. The protestants escaped the corruption of the catholic church, and divested itself of corruption, at the cost of abandoning the sophistication of catholic dogma, the long tradition of intellectual thought within the church, and doubling down on superstition, and losing the value of catholic education. American evangelicalism is the end of the natural cycle, as Christianity returns to its origins as a personal self-organizing ‘folk religion’ (meaning not institutional), but it remains somewhat hostile to the state. (My ancestor is the author of twenty books during the puritan revolution in England). Traveling around the world it’s rather obvious that the Orthodox nation-state AND nation-church combination is the optimum.
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My primary research objective at the moment is to discover a method – at least an outline – for producing a Christian reformation that satisfies the political needs of the civilization in defense against worse religions, sophistries, and pseudosciences, and that serves the needs of the scientific(secular), traditional(spiritual), and faithful(supernatural). Because contrary to your opinions the data from Pew, from church attendance, church financial reports, from church tax-exempt filings, is very very clear: in two generations only the fundamentalists (evangelicals) will exist in meaningful numbers, and the economy of the Christian faith outside of it will collapse. (Even now, how many catholic priests are responsible for three or more churches?).
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My primary criticism of Christianity is the Abrahamic method of deceit. That is the method the author of the video used in this ‘critique’. So, I mean, he proved my point. He proved my point over and over and over again. Because he fantasized instead of asking me, and he fantasizes about an understanding of organizations, that he doesn’t have. You can’t claim to have the knowledge or understanding you pretend to have. What you CAN say is that you want to associate with the faithful and the faithful alone and that you’re inexperienced and afraid, and lacking leaders who are competent enough to defend you your way of life and your faith.
My suspicion is that this response will be met with equal sophistry and Abrahamic deceit, that will only confirm my arguments. That said, I responded even though the video was undeserving of one.