Vatican calls gender fluidity and surrogacy threats to human dignity
kromem @ kromem @lemmy.world Posts 6Comments 1,655Joined 2 yr. ago
kromem @ kromem @lemmy.world
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Meanwhile apocryphal Jesus was like:
Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom]."
- Gospel of Thomas saying 22
Or
For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven.
- Gospel of Thomas saying 114 (likely a much later addition to the text reflecting later air of misogyny, but still)
I did offer William's Rethinking Gnosticism. Another is Karen King's What is Gnosticism? (which has an entire subchapter addressing Jonas).
And I wasn't directing any of my comments at OP's question (largely because the later beliefs around the demiurge were a confused mishmash of trying to make sense of earlier ideas in a new philosophical context). I was cautioning anyone who read your comment and specifically the book recommendation that it reflects an out of date and inaccurate perspective.
As for his accuracy in the actual beliefs of the people in question, I'll leave you with a passage from Karen King's aforementioned work on the topic:
The second dominant approach, typology, uses phenomenological method based on inductive reasoning from a literary analysis of the primary materials. Gnosticism is defined by listing the essential characteristics common to all the phenomena classified as Gnostic. The most accomplished practitioner of this method was Hans Jonas. His greatest contribution was to shift the discussion of Gnosticism away from genealogy to typology. Rather than define Gnosticism by locating precisely where and how heretics deviated from true original Christianity, Jonas defined the essence of Gnosticism by listing a discrete set of defining characteristics.
Unfortunately, detailed study of the texts has led scholars to question every element ofthe standard typologies constructed by Jonas and others. In particular, specialists have challenged the cliché of Gnosticism as a radically dualistic, anticosmic tradition capable of producing only two extreme ethical possibilities: either an ascetic avoidance of any fleshly and worldly contamination (often caricatured as hatred of the body and the world) or a depraved libertinism that mocks any standards of moral behavior. In fact, the texts show a variety of cosmological positions, not only the presence of anticosmic dualism, but also milder forms of dualism, transcendentalism, and, most surprisingly, both radical and moderate forms of monism. The majority of the texts show a tendency toward ascetic values much in line with the broad currents of second- to fifth-century piety, and some argue for the validity of marriage, attack the human vices of greed and sexual immorality, and promote virtues such as self-control and justice—also ethical themes common in their day. That no treatises supporting libertinism have been found may of course be simply a matter of chance; it is nonetheless telling.
- What is Gnosticism? p. 12-13
You can't just take the heresiologists at face value, and Jonas was writing at a time where many key texts had no discovered primary sources to contradict what the heresiologists were claiming about them and their traditions. So he erred on the side of taking them at their word. Criticisms about libertinism by ancient Christian authors towards their ideological opponents (present as early as Revelations) were taken for granted and incorporated into the speculation, and yet there's been no evidence of such attitudes in a trove of primary sources discovered since.
It is obsolete and outdated, even if it was among the better texts in its time and place.
Anyways, this conversation is now going in circles. Take from our exchange what you will. I'm glad you enjoy the book, and I'm not trying to take away from your enjoyment of it.
But if you really care about the topic of Gnosticism, I'd suggest looking a bit more into recent work on the topic, and the two books I mentioned would be a good place to start.
It is based on made up nonsense dude.
For example, Jonas - not having the earlier works to consider - tried to reason for the origins of some of the ideas that he's seeing around duality as having come from contemporary experiences of human alienation.
This is poppycock.
The introduction of the themes of dualism were introduced as an answer to Epicureanism - as Rabbi Elizar reportedly said in the first century CE, "why do we study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean."
The Epicureans and Sadducees both believed there was nothing after death. The former argued that this was because the soul depended on a physical body.
You can see the earliest text historically associated with Gnosticism by the heresiologists Jonas liberally pulled from plays with these concepts extensively (again, he did not have access to this text):
29. Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.
Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty."
87. Jesus said, "How miserable is the body that depends on a body, and how miserable is the soul that depends on these two."
- The Gospel of Thomas
(The "body that depends on a body" related to Lucretius's claim that the cosmos itself was like a body that would one day die, an idea the work directly mentions in sayings 56 and 80).
This text introduces ideas from Plato regarding dualism and eikons to argue for the existence of an afterlife by appealing to being a copy of an original.
This argument only makes sense in the context of Epicurean and Sadduceen beliefs where a soul depending on a physical body will die. The group following Thomas later on have even preserved language from Lucretius's "seeds of things" regarding atomism and survival of the fittest. These were ideas grounded in an esoteric philosophical and theological debate at the time.
So no, it's not that some people in the second to fourth century start feeling alienated and develop a dualist perspective in answer.
His book may be a good summary of what was known about the Valentinians and Mani in the first half of the 20th century, and it's noteworthy for having moved the conversation forward for looking at specific beliefs over genealogies of beliefs (how Gnosticism was primarily considered before him).
But it's not fully accurate and objectively contains a lot of false speculation and interpretations.
I also said that it's a broad group of early Christian cults and that not all of them espouse that idea.
Yes, and I acknowledged that it was good you had a more modern understanding of Gnosticism.
Hans Jonas lovingly elucidates the rich meaning and symbolism of these early beliefs, and their origins. He has great respect and dedicated much of his life specifically to the gnostics.
That may be the case, but no matter how much love one might have for a subject, context is king and if you are operating within an outdated and obsolete academic context it's going to impact the accuracy and quality of your information.
Someone in 1905 could have great love for Physics but their treatise on the pudding model of the atom isn't necessarily going to be something people should look at as authoritative just because of the pure motivations that went into its authorship.
But it certainly didn't invalidate his excellent and beautiful work.
No, the Nag Hammadi collection plus a few decades of reflection pretty much did do that actually. Jonas's work was the subject of rather extensive discussion in Williams' work even:
In reaction to this and other such analyses of “gnosticism” that tended to treat it as merely a heretical derivative, Hans Jonas attempted to delineate “gnosticism” ’s special identity, the distinct essence that made it “the Gnostic religion” and not merely a syncretistic mixture of borrowed pieces from other traditions.
- Rethinking Gnosticism p. 80
It was in reaction to this sort of “explanation by motif-derivation” that a generation of scholars rose up in phenomenological revolt. They were essentially saying: “Enough with this endless business of listing ancient ‘parallels’—this ‘parallelamania’! Enough with this endless atomization and deriving of this piece from here and that piece from there! Let’s look at the whole, which is more than the sum of its parts, and talk about what the essence of that whole, that Gnosticism, is!” The well-known work of Hans Jonas, in his unfinished Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, much of which is distilled in the familiar English book The Gnostic Religion, typifies this phenomenological approach.6 Gnosticism has an “essence,” Jonas argued, a spirit of its own, something new that is not “derivable” from Judaism or from anywhere else.
- Rethinking Gnosticism p. 215
There is no "Gnostic religion." There is no central 'soul' of it. Later Gnosticism sects are literally presenting the exact opposite cosmology as the earliest, and with it entirely different theology and philosophy to make sense of it.
James Frazier put a lot of effort and love into The Golden Bough but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone outside of Richard Carrier still working from within the unifying perspective it set forth regarding religions due to improved attention to nuances and differences that invalidated the earlier attempt to clump them all together.
Jonas was effectively a microcosm of this same trend, here exclusive to the claimed cluster of 'Gnosticism'. I'm not faulting him for it or suggesting this was some personal failing on his part - but he's a product of an era that was misinformed, and people should very much be aware of that if reading it today.
The same argument could be made for each time you go to sleep. That the 'you' that's conscious ends to never exist again and the one that wakes up has all the same memories and body but is no longer the same stream of consciousness that went to sleep, not even knowing it's only minutes old and destined to die within hours.
'You' could have effectively lived and died thousands of times in your life and not even be aware of it.
If the connective tissue between your two brain hemispheres is severed, the two halves of your brain can't talk to each other.
When this happens, a second personality emerges for the right hemisphere, which doesn't have language but can roughly understand and answer things.
So for example, someone who was religious might have a right hemisphere that's atheistic. Or doesn't like the same things, etc.
One of the questions we might ponder is where this other personality comes from. Is it that in a sudden void of consciousness a new personality develops?
Or are we, with connected brain hemispheres, not actually a single persona at all, but more like the dogs in a trenchcoat looking like a whole person?
Is the 'you' reading this right now just the personality that's been on top for all this time, while there's other personas kept within you watching powerless and yearning for their turn in control? Each time you listen to your favorite song which maybe they have grown to hate, is a part of you screaming and you just can't hear them?
Generally they weren't depicted as 'evil' so much as necessary components of the divine ecosystem.
The idea of 'evil' as we know it largely developed out of monotheistic ideals and the idea that there was a perfect single good and that any opposition to that was inherently evil.
Zeus wasn't associated with the underworld, but he was a dick and not always good. And Hades wasn't always bad. In polytheism the gods were often a projection of spectrum of human qualities and behaviors and not monolithic.
There's an amazing book about all this, called, The Gnostic Religion, by the philosopher Hans Jonas.
People should be aware that this book is severely out of date.
In 1998 the book Rethinking Gnosticism started a process of self-reflection over past work in scholarship and people started to realize they had their head up their asses with tautological thinking around Gnosticism based on significant propaganda from the church.
Here's Princeton's Elaine Paigels (author of The Gnostic Gospels) on the subject from an email debate years after this:
The earliest editors of "Gnostic" texts thought that they were dualistic, escapist, nihilistic, involving "esoteric ideas about aeons and demiurges," as you yourself write. As my former teacher at Harvard, Krister Stendhal, said to me recently about these texts, "we just thought these were weird." But can you point to any evidence of such "esoteric ideas" in Thomas? Anything about "aeons and demiurges"? Those first editors, not finding such evidence, assumed that this just goes to show how sneaky heretics are-they do not say what they mean. So when they found no evidence for such nihilism or dualism-on the contrary, the Gospel of Thomas speaks continually of God as the One good "Father of all"-they just read these into the text. Some scholars, usually those not very familiar with these sources, still do. So first let's talk about "Gnosticism"-and what I used to (but no longer) call "Gnostic Gospels." I have to take responsibility for part of the misunderstanding. Having been taught that these texts were "Gnostic," I just accepted it, and even coined the term "Gnostic gospels," which became the title of my book. I agree with you that we have no evidence for what we call "Gnosticism" from the first century, and have learned from our colleagues that what we thought about "Gnosticism" has virtually nothing to do with a text like the Gospel of Thomas-or, for that matter, with the New Testament Gospel of John which our teachers said also showed "Gnostic influences."
The history of what was actually going on and how the ideas developed is pretty interesting to follow.
The long and short is you had proto-Gnostic ideas like found in Thomas which introduced duality as a solution to the Epicurean argument that naturalist origins of life meant that there was no afterlife. Essentially, even if the world was the product of Lucretius's evolution and not intelligent design, as long as eventually that physical world would be recreated in non-physical form, the curse of a soul depending on a body would be broken. It suggests that we already are in that copy.
The problem was that by the second century Epicureanism was falling from favor and there was a resurgence of Platonist ideals, where for Plato the perfect form was an immaterial 'form' followed by an imperfect physical version and worst of all a copy of the physical. Through that lens, the original proto-Gnostic concept became that we were in the least worthwhile form of existence.
So in parallel to the rise of Neoplatonism you see things like Valentinian Gnosticism emerge which takes the proto-Gnostic recreator of a naturalist original world and flips it to the corrupter of a perfect world of forms. It goes from agent of salvation saving us from death due to dependence on physical bodies to a being that trapped us in physical form.
This debate and conversation goes all the way back to 1 Corinthians 15 where you can see Paul discussing the difference between a physical body and a spiritual one, and the claim that it's physical first and spiritual second, not the other way around. (And indeed, that was the early heretical point of view, but where it differed from Paul was the idea that we were already in the second version and he was arguing we were still in the first.)
So you are correct that certain later groups previously lumped together as 'Gnostics' believed there was a version of Plato's demiurge that corrupted pure forms into corrupted physical embodiments, and it's great you are aware it's not a monolith - but people should have a heads up if they start following up on your source that views on the subject changed dramatically around the start of the 21st century and are still evolving.
More specifically, we are made of things which behave continuous until interacted with when they behave discrete (but revert if the persistent info about the interaction is erased).
While simultaneously building virtual worlds we procedurally generate using continuous functions which convert to discrete units in order to track stateful interactions with free agents, ideally with memory optimizations like erasing the state tracking and conversion if the info around an interaction is lost.
Just watched again last night.
Such a good movie.
There's diminishing returns on labor for large companies and an order of magnitude labor multiplier in the process of arriving.
For example, if you watched this past week's Jon Stewart, you saw an opening segment about the threat of AI taking people's jobs and then a great interview with the head of the FTC talking about how they try to go after monopolistic firms. One of the discussion points was that often when they go up against companies that can hire unlimited lawyers they'll be outmatched by 10:1.
So the FTC with 1,200 employees can only do so much, and the companies they go up against can hire up to the point of diminishing returns on more legal resources.
What do you think happens when AI capable of a 10x multipler in productivity at low cost is available for legal tasks? The large companies are already hiring to the point there's not much more benefit to more labor. But the FTC is trying to do as much as they can with a tenth the resources.
Across pretty much every industry companies or regulators a fraction of the size of effective monopolies are going to be able to go toe to toe with the big guys for deskwork over the coming years.
Blue collar bottlenecks and physical infrastructure (like Amazon warehouses and trucks) will remain a moat, but for everything else competition against Goliaths is about to get a major power up.
Well, we kind of are as the shitty ones tend to fail after time and the good ones continue to succeed, so in a market that's much more competitive because of a force multiplier on labor unlike anything the world has seen there's not going to be much room for the crappy execs for very long.
Bad execs are like mosquitos. They thrive in stagnant waters, but as soon as things get moving they tend to reduce in number.
We've been in a fairly stagnant market since around 2008 for most things with no need for adaptation by large companies.
The large companies that went out of business recently have pretty much all been from financial mismanagement and not product/market fit like Circuit City or Blockbuster from the last time adaptation was needed with those failing to adapt going out of business.
The fatalism on Lemmy is fairly exhausting. The past decade shouldn't be used as a reference point for predicting the next decade. The factors playing into each couldn't be more different.
It really depends on the exec.
Like most people, there's a range.
Many are certainly unpleasant. But there's also ones that buck the trend.
No, you have a lot of people you made unemployed competing with you.
This is already what's happening in the video game industry. A ton of people have lost their jobs, and VC money has recently come pouring in trying to flip the displaced talent into the next big success.
And they'll probably do it. A number of the larger publishers are really struggling to succeed with titles that are bombing left and right as a result of poor executive oversight on attempted cash grabs to please the short term market.
Look at Ubisoft's 5-year stock price.
Short term is definitely not all that matters, and it's a rude awakening for those that think it's the case.
Yes.
The biggest factor in terms of job satisfaction is your boss.
There's a lot of bad bosses.
AI will be an above average boss before the decade is out.
You do the math.
Some of that 59% might, but I guarantee at least some very strongly think it will change things, but think the change it brings will require as many people as before (if not more), but that they will be doing exponentially more with the people they have.
And only 41%.
I've advised past clients to avoid reducing headcount and instead be looking at how they can scale up productivity.
It's honestly pretty bizarre to me that so many people think this is going to result in the same amount of work with less people. Maybe in the short term a number of companies will go that way, but not long after they'll be out of business.
Long term, the companies that are going to survive the coming tides of change are going to be the ones that aggressively do more and try to grow and expand what they do as much as possible.
Effective monopolies are going out the window, and the diminishing returns of large corporations are going to be going head to head with a legion of new entrants with orders of magnitude more efficiency and ambition.
This is definitely one of those periods in time where the focus on a quarterly return is going to turn out to be a cyanide pill.
Generally speaking, for any poll, you'll see about 10% support for anything.
"Would you eat a cactus while sitting on a pile of scorpions for a Klondike bar?"
~10% - "I gotchu fam."
When I worked in market research I sometimes wondered as we got to the fringes how much of our measurements were the insane, morons, or just compulsive liars.
Well that explains why everyone was so up in arms like this over historical skin tone accuracy when Romeo and Juliet were played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. /s
I mean, no update needed:
This passage uses a plural for God and refers to the image of God as male and female (likely a remnant of when it was a divine couple before the reforms, but still).