Why are socialism, marijuana, and original blockbusters ascendant? Where do "Western values" come from? Why do modern people torture ourselves with comparison and guilt?
Regarding: "The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that Ancient Greek culture used to value brute strength for its own sake, while it was Judeo-Christianity that inverted the relationship between strength and goodness and encouraged the strong to feel guilt and pity for the weak."
I have often thought that narcissism and psychopathy exist in the human population because natural selection favored them at low rates in the population. If your tribe is competing with a neighboring tribe, having one psychopathic person on your team, happy to do terrible violence to the other tribe, is better than if you are all squeamish normies.
By extension, just as many of our leaders today are disordered narcissists (or worse), I think that many leaders of the past and deep past likely were as well.
So no surprise, when the idea of God came along, he/she looked like the leaders of yore. The God of the Torah and the Greek gods certainly read as capricious at best and disordered at worst.
Christianity flipped this, and imagined a God that was NOT disordered! And promised the normies (i.e. the 'meek') that they too could get ahead, and even inherit the earth.
On Question # 6. I'm a 58M who is bald, and have been taking Finasteride for 2 years and counting for prostate cancer prophylaxis. After reading a compelling peer reviewed study. It helps with hair loss too, but the hair was mostly gone before I started.
I explained it to my partner as 'if there was a pill that cut breast cancer 25%, most women would be on it.'
Add the hair factor, and it is a no brainer.
The rub is that some men report a severe and permanent loss of libido from taking the drug. My own deep dive suggests that that is a nocebo effect. ANY treatment of men that involves hormones or the reproductive system... has a small subset reporting that. Including vasectomy. I think there are just a lot of suggestible 'fragile' men out there...
On the question of guilt and Western values, there's a case to be made about the impact, for better or worse, the Enlightenment has has had on a grand scale long term, shifting our focus more towards the individual rather than the collective. A can of worms but something I think about myself often.
What if the unicontext ALSO helps explain the Dem factional war in terms of why both moderates and leftists have valid arguments for their positions AND valid examples to point to?
A weekend’s worth of questions to think about now 👍
Regarding: "The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that Ancient Greek culture used to value brute strength for its own sake, while it was Judeo-Christianity that inverted the relationship between strength and goodness and encouraged the strong to feel guilt and pity for the weak."
I have often thought that narcissism and psychopathy exist in the human population because natural selection favored them at low rates in the population. If your tribe is competing with a neighboring tribe, having one psychopathic person on your team, happy to do terrible violence to the other tribe, is better than if you are all squeamish normies.
By extension, just as many of our leaders today are disordered narcissists (or worse), I think that many leaders of the past and deep past likely were as well.
So no surprise, when the idea of God came along, he/she looked like the leaders of yore. The God of the Torah and the Greek gods certainly read as capricious at best and disordered at worst.
Christianity flipped this, and imagined a God that was NOT disordered! And promised the normies (i.e. the 'meek') that they too could get ahead, and even inherit the earth.
On Question # 6. I'm a 58M who is bald, and have been taking Finasteride for 2 years and counting for prostate cancer prophylaxis. After reading a compelling peer reviewed study. It helps with hair loss too, but the hair was mostly gone before I started.
I explained it to my partner as 'if there was a pill that cut breast cancer 25%, most women would be on it.'
Add the hair factor, and it is a no brainer.
The rub is that some men report a severe and permanent loss of libido from taking the drug. My own deep dive suggests that that is a nocebo effect. ANY treatment of men that involves hormones or the reproductive system... has a small subset reporting that. Including vasectomy. I think there are just a lot of suggestible 'fragile' men out there...
On the question of guilt and Western values, there's a case to be made about the impact, for better or worse, the Enlightenment has has had on a grand scale long term, shifting our focus more towards the individual rather than the collective. A can of worms but something I think about myself often.
@Derek here’s some food for thought:
What if the unicontext ALSO helps explain the Dem factional war in terms of why both moderates and leftists have valid arguments for their positions AND valid examples to point to?