While it doesn’t mesh well with modern science and inductive reasoning, it is possible that the twist in SFP is that all biodynamics are, in fact and in a very real way, re-incarnations of gods. It’s possible that all biodynamics are in the process of becoming divine beings (at least, compared to slines) and the process is relatively slow.

Think something like Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and you’ll see where I’m going with the idea.

I don’t believe that’s the case – I agree with many other commentators that there doesn’t seem to be any evidence for it – but I can see it as an option.

If literally anything Alison has said thus far means anything, it’ll take a hell of a lot more than a superhero to keep Pakistan and India from going to war– especially a fellow like our knockoff Manhattan here.

Eh… bear in mind that the Wild Card books were a mean spirited dystopian fantasy thing, where heroes only existed to be mocked and ridiculed to remind everyone that life sucks and everything is bad and if you believe otherwise that’s stupid and funny, and this is “realistic.” One scene had a man in a cowboy hat show up when a woman was accosted by muggers – and the muggers immediately shot him in the face and then went on to do whatever they wanted, because casual murders that the cops don’t even bother to investigate are totally a thing according to that sort of twisted “90 X-treme” belief.

A more accurate portrayal of “superheroes in a realistic setting” would be the timeline for the late lamented “City of Heroes” MMORPG. Where superheroes fought on both sides in World War 2, and during the Cold War heroes from both sides of the Iron Curtain stopped nuclear war even as it began before ramming a peaceful solution down the throats of the leaders of both sides. That led to the games’ actual backstory and mechanics, where the player characters were treated as licensed and registered members of “Hero Corps,” a private corporation that subcontracted out to municipalities, providing superheroic services with responsible oversight (i.e. no massive collateral damage, no treating the police as annoying meddlers) as well as compensation to heroes (medical coverage, legal counsel, etc).

It gets that way toward the end – from somewhere around the introduction of Ti Malice…

“casual murders that the cops don’t even bother to investigate are
totally a thing”

Depends on what country you live in. In the USA that’s pretty unusual, unless they were underprivileged visible minorities in somewhere like Detroit.

Yeah, normally Axon seems cynical, but they’re actually being naive in thinking that cops sometimes don’t care about murder victims.

Pickton the pig farm got some of his victims from my area, and believe me, nobody reported them missing for a long, long time. If you kill a prostitute in Vancouver, BC and people don’t notice, I suspect that means that street worker murders aren’t paid much attention in most place.

Well, that just means reality is even worse than my perception. How disheartening.

It does to me – it helps me realize that I might, maybe, not know everything and should seek to more humble.
It may not to you, and that’s cool too. Everyone has to find the meaning to make their lives full.

Who said anything about sacrosanct? I didn’t – I merely suggested that alternate interpretations can offer useful insight into the human condition and provide a meaningful way to live.

The problem with proof is that we’ve come to accept that only material proof is worthwhile. But the material world contains no values. Reduce an object to its component string packets and you still won’t find meaning you can measure. And meaning is as much a part of Truth as is the material world. The judgements we make about right and wrong rest not only on material truth but also on the Meaning we assign to that material truth.

We make the meaning of the world, and we test that meaning against the world and our lives. Meaning exists in our heads, and so does the world each of us lives in. Yes, there is a real world out there, but cognitive psychology is firm on this point – our perceptions and what we experience with our senses shape our viewpoints, and our viewpoints limit how we filter our perceptions. We see the world as we expect to see it and it is VERY hard to radically shift that point of view.

Since this is true, we ought to test everything at some level (which is why I’m mostly in favor of examination of all truths, even the ones that represent the foundation on which my life rests), but we also ought to accept that we are limited and accept the possibility that we could be wrong (which, of course, is not our natural state of being – me included).

Interesting distinction – are you asserting that this sort of behavior is unknown outside of religion?

I fully agree that religious behavior that is oppressive or destructive needs to be placed on the ash-heap of history. And I agree that, for all the reasons you’ve stated, religious thought should be combed through and searched for as much internal consistency as possible.

But, there’s a very large “throw out the baby with the bathwater” streak here. Meaning matters. and matter is without intrinsic meaning. As humans, we build our lives on that meaning. Religion, philosophy, and science are all paths to different truths that provide different meaning to our lives.

If you can find meaning using nothing but the scientific method, that’s awesome. Not everyone can. I’m getting an element of ‘”my method of finding truth is vastly better than your method” superiority in your post of the sort you’re decrying in your post, which is a bit ironic, isn’t it?

Your argument is to agree that scientific method cannot find meaning. You then preclude another method to finding meaning. Okay, what, to you, is a valid method to discover meaning, since you also seemed to disparage philosophy in earlier posts? I’m not saying religion is the only option for meaning – I’m simply saying it isn’t inevitably linked to destructive outcomes in all cases, which seems to be the premise you’re advocating.

If one accepts religious texts whole-cloth, your observations are valid. I don’t subscribe to that view, as should have been obvious in my posts, and I don’t support those that don’t bother to think about their theology, which also should have been obvious in my posts.

What I’m hearing you decry is complacency, thoughtlessness, and laziness of thought. I’m on board with that, 100%.

You’re engaging in the logical fallacy that because some people of faith are guilty of this intellectual indolence (and I tend to think the majority, but that’s my bias showing) that the rest are also guilty of this and cannot be trusted thereby. You are engaging in profiling, prejudice, and any other buzzword that allows us to judge a group of people by their most socially visible members.

It’s a thing we humans do, because it makes life easier.

“According to everyone who isn’t a philosophy major, there is definitely some shared universe that exists outside all of our minds and has a number of consistent characteristics. ”

I call that just a bit disparaging.

I didn’t ask you to accept my vision of religion; I suggested that you may wish to open yourself to a broader image of it in your own life. I also said if you didn’t want to, that’s cool – literally, I might add. If you can find meaning without resorting to a deity and it works, keep doing it – I’m all for it, particularly if it leads you to justice, compassion, and mercy.
And for the record, faith without question, to me, isn’t faith – if a person doesn’t have doubts about the meaning of it all, then they’re probably not thinking enough.

I am truly sorry you were abused with religious dogma and authoritarianism. That is, to me, a valid reason to reject religious dogma and religious authoritarianism. I also have experienced that, but in general I find that people who are asshats to start with use faith as a weapon – truly good people take the good stuff of faith and set aside the abusive stuff. I am sorry you’ve not met anyone like that and I’ll hope someday you do.

Thanks for talking with me – I had a lot of fun finding out about you.

To me, no, this is a dumb idea, but not that much dumber than actual things religions do teach and people believe.

I’ve always thought that the idea that we must have been created in the past makes for a rather unimaginative version of this theory.

Clearly, we will have been created next Thursday, with memories including having this conversation.

No more so than the humanity of Jesus Christ suggesting that all humans are divine, if we accept the interpretation that the biodynamic gene is simply the mechanism by which an external divine entity manifests in Dhruv.

Who’s to say that they’re NOT all divinities?

Not just in a “all biodynamics are modern day pagan deities made manifest” sense, but in a “we all possess the divine within us” sense. One of the reasons why Jesus is respected by the Jewish people is that Jesus never actually claimed to be unique or particularly special – he called himself a son of man, and encouraged people to behave in a godly fashion. Which is what EVERY religion does – they don’t just say “thou shalt not do this or that,” they say “you are a descendant of the divine, here is a guide to behaving in a godly (i.e. godlike) fashion.”

As a Jew, I’m not sure where you’re getting this idea that Jesus is respected by the Jewish people. We actually don’t think about the guy at all, unless we’re studying comparative religion or something. I don’t, in fact, have an opinion about Jesus, nor do most Jews.

I mean, we’re AWARE that he’s important to Christians, and out of politeness, we don’t badmouth the guy in public much, and stuff like that, but it’s not like we particularly care about it.

As a fellow Jew… you’re supposed to be studying. That’s what we do, remember? “Rabbi” doesn’t mean “priest,” it means “scholar.” And that’s what Jesus was – a carpenter’s son turned Rabbi. He was a Reform Jew, basically.

And it’s not just courtesy that keeps us from badmouthing the guy in public. He was a fine example of the teachings of Hillel, when he was summarizing up the Torah thusly: “That which is hateful unto you, do not do unto others. That is the whole of the Law, the rest is merely commentary.”

Most Jews do have an opinion about Jesus. And that opinion is generally “I wish more of his followers would emulate his example.”

Heinlein Reference Upvote!
+5 Internets!

Bling.

Fundamentalism is probably the wrong word for hinduism, Hindu nationalism or just extremism would be better, but it has a long and varied history in India. The past few pages of SFP have been basically filled with hindu nationalist symbols, associations and imagery (the BJP (Bharatiya Janata party), the saffron clothing etc. I’m not sure whether the Shiv Sainiks or Sangh parivar are actual organizations but they follow a similar pattern to actual Hindu nationalist organizations like the RSS, ‘Shiv’ refers to both the Hindu god Shiva and the 17th century king Shivaji who founded the Maratha confederacy and is now a symbol of anti-muslim sentiment). Pretty much any history of 20th century India will tell you something about Hindu Nationalism since it’s one of the most important political forces (the man who shot Gandhi was a hindu nationalist for instance) The best book I can remember reading about this was ‘The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s future’ by Martha Craven Nussbaum but I haven’t read many books about India since 2010 when I was last really interested in the country. Things to note include the fact that the current prime minister of India probably actively aided in anti-muslim ethnic cleansing by Hindu nationalists when he was governor (or whatever their provincial leaders are called, first minister? something like that) of Gujarat province in the early 2000s.

Like all human institutions, there’s the good and the bad.
Comes from being made of humans, I suppose.

I wish I had thought of this response yesterday…
We have lots of institutions made of donkeys – they’re in the capital cities all across this great nation!

::flips a microphone into the air and watches it fall to earth::

Actually, that’s almost (but not quite) the exact opposite of what you said. I never claimed that said religions were “rapidly dying,” or even slowly dying. I specifically stated that modern science was BORN from organized religion, and that said religions have had a very, very, very, VERY long history of both accepting science, furthering science, and promoting science. The modern crop of anti-intellectual denominations are doomed to die out almost as quickly as earlier splinter groups that also ended up as mere footnotes in history.

The theory of evolution didn’t solve any great mysteries, except for the question: “How did wolves become dogs?” Science doesn’t answer “divine mysteries,” science provides FACTS. And science is also about acknowledging said facts and not glossing over and ignoring them when they inconveniently contradict your theories. I say that because you’re “pretty sure Islam didn’t adopt evolution that long ago” because you clearly didn’t look at the second link. Here, let me copy/paste a few snippets:

“In Kitab al-Hayawan (Book of the Animals), the 9th century scholar al-Jāḥiẓ references several parts of modern-day evolutionary theory such as animal embryology, adaptation, and animal psychology. One notable observation al-Jāḥiẓ makes is that stronger rats were able to compete better for resources than small birds, a reference to the modern day theory of the “struggle for existence.”[15] In the same century, Persian scholar Ibn Miskawahy wrote about the evolution of man in his books, Tahdhīb and Fawz al-aṣghar.[16]”

“In the 19th century, a scholar of Islamic revival, Jamal-al-Din al-Afghānī agreed with Darwin that life will compete with other life in order to succeed. He also believed that there was competition in the realm of ideas similar to that of nature. However, he believed explicitly that life was created by God;[19] Darwin did not discuss the origin of life, saying only “Probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some primordial form, into which life was first breathed.”

(Darwin originally developed his theories to reaffirm his belief in G-d; he didn’t turn atheist until the death of his daughter, which is when a lot of people do tend to have crisis of faith. But Darwin himself saw no inconsistencies between belief in his theory and a belief in G-d)