Well, priors of course always suggest against organizational goodness. And the Catholics have historically done much good. But their conception of God can be frightening, and many people learn to worship their God. They also don’t have any mechanism by which they could update—their entire belief system is structured around the idea that God wouldn’t let them go astray. If God is as important as they claim, then it’s easy for them to be evil by their own lights. “Discernment isn’t about telling right from wrong, it’s chiefly about telling right from almost right.”
There are other reasons more speculative, they’re in my comments from the last few months, use Wei Dai’s tool, search for Catholic. If you want.
Thank you for the response. Though checking your comment history you still preferred Catholics as recently as mid April (citing them as a new possible group to join).
If I were to join any phyg, it’d be the Dominicans. SingInst might be my second choice, but you can’t join them, you can only join the Rationalist Conspiracy these days. And I’ve already left SingInst’s Journeyman circle or whatever, there’s no going back after that. But I’m damn glad I was a Visiting Fellow for two years.
What do you think of the Greek Othordox? Nassim Taleb endorses them for aesthetic reasons and for the fact that their understanding of God is Apophatic primarily and thus doesn’t intrude on real world near beliefs.
I have no opinion. If they’re at all like Russian Orthodox folk then I probably like them somewhat. But I’m only really into the Catholics, and that’s mostly because they seem massively undervalued, not because I think they should be the arbiters of truth and justice. But they think God should be the arbiter of truth and justice, and I agree with them about that, and agree with them that that’s an extremely important fact about the world that should shape how we live our lives.
Well, priors of course always suggest against organizational goodness. And the Catholics have historically done much good. But their conception of God can be frightening, and many people learn to worship their God. They also don’t have any mechanism by which they could update—their entire belief system is structured around the idea that God wouldn’t let them go astray. If God is as important as they claim, then it’s easy for them to be evil by their own lights. “Discernment isn’t about telling right from wrong, it’s chiefly about telling right from almost right.”
There are other reasons more speculative, they’re in my comments from the last few months, use Wei Dai’s tool, search for Catholic. If you want.
Thank you for the response. Though checking your comment history you still preferred Catholics as recently as mid April (citing them as a new possible group to join).
If I were to join any phyg, it’d be the Dominicans. SingInst might be my second choice, but you can’t join them, you can only join the Rationalist Conspiracy these days. And I’ve already left SingInst’s Journeyman circle or whatever, there’s no going back after that. But I’m damn glad I was a Visiting Fellow for two years.
What do you think of the Greek Othordox? Nassim Taleb endorses them for aesthetic reasons and for the fact that their understanding of God is Apophatic primarily and thus doesn’t intrude on real world near beliefs.
I have no opinion. If they’re at all like Russian Orthodox folk then I probably like them somewhat. But I’m only really into the Catholics, and that’s mostly because they seem massively undervalued, not because I think they should be the arbiters of truth and justice. But they think God should be the arbiter of truth and justice, and I agree with them about that, and agree with them that that’s an extremely important fact about the world that should shape how we live our lives.
Dang! Not Alfred E Newman, but rather John Henry Newman. Obviously. Duh.