melling 16 hours ago

“when the realignment caused ten days to be subtracted from the year, mobs across Europe attacked Jesuit houses to protest the time stolen from them.”

Do we see these people among us today?

This resonated too:

“ He said, “Even scientists who don’t believe in God have to believe in ‘Oh, my God.”

  • antognini 15 hours ago

    > when the realignment caused ten days to be subtracted from the year, mobs across Europe attacked Jesuit houses to protest the time stolen from them

    The outrage over the implementation of the Gregorian calendar had more to do with landlords in some areas charging a full month of rent for a month that lacked 11 days.

    • vasco 13 hours ago

      Almost invariably when large groups of people did something really dumb in the past, we just don't have the full story. Not wanting to pay 11 extra days for nothing is completely reasonable, as opposed to the portrayal of dummies going around with pitchforks because someone stole 11 days from their lives.

    • southernplaces7 7 hours ago

      Amusing how some tendencies never really change no matter how much the superficial world changes.

    • exe34 13 hours ago

      Classic landlords!

  • jajko 8 hours ago

    That has nothing to do with religion, beliefs or any validity of those. Just a phrase burned too deep into cranium over decades to dispose of it easily even if wanted. 'What the fuck' or other fuck variants are in same category.

    • headcanon 4 hours ago

      I took it to mean that religious and non-religious scientists are drawn by the same sense of wonder at the cosmos.

resource_waste 12 hours ago

Maybe this is a good place to post it because its about religion.

I didn't think you could have 2 existential crisis, but I did. First one was Religion -> Agnosticism... Second was:

Platonic Realism to Pragmatism.

I used to think there was something special about circles/Pi, I thought there was some force of nature that caused Capitalism, Darwinism, and IR Realism to win... No, these platonic forms/universals don't actually exist. I hear people talk about Love, Happiness, and Justice like there is a perfection available to us humans. They are under the platonic religion.

Today I realize these are constructs of human language, from Pi to Justice, there is no universal. Monism is a religion.

I highly recommend William James's Pragmatism. Its only a 2.5 hour audiobook and it basically created the idea of metaphilosophy.

  • dr_dshiv 5 hours ago

    But within any civilization that develops within the more than hundred billion plus galaxies (or even within the uncountable number of simulated universes), they’d discover circles, spheres, triangles, the Platonic solids, normal distributions, etc.

    The notation and ascribed meaning will vary — but civilizations will likely discover natural numbers and specifically binary numbers and even use them (at least for some time in their development) for computation. Basic operations would also likely be discovered - just as they were on different sides of our own planet.

    There would also be cybernetic feedback loops, where goals are measured and optimized for—- that’s a sort of platonic form.

    These intelligible forms seem more basic to life and intelligence than even carbon or water.

    Super happy to hear arguments otherwise!

    • resource_waste 2 hours ago

      What makes circles more special than a bunch of crumbs? Humans decided circles are interesting.

      I am not denying analytical philosophy doesnt make true statements, but rather that there isnt anything mystical about these true statements. They are constructs of human language. There was no God that typed pi=3.14, but rather humans made 2pir = c true by developing a linguistical logic system where we have radius = 1 and c= 6.28.

      • dr_dshiv 44 minutes ago

        My argument is that ALL civilizations will discover circles. They aren’t human arbitrary. They are discoverable mathematical forms.

        • resource_waste 31 minutes ago

          Discover? You mean name circles and claim that 2pir = c?

          Do you think there is something special about 2*111 = 222?

          Humans had to define every step from length of a line to the significance of roundness. Its all language.

  • 1718627440 10 hours ago

    But Pi seams to be a property of the universe, because it's occurring in a lot of statements about behaviours of the universe?

    There is a longing in people for love, happiness and justice which seams to be universal through the earth population? And people think they would like it if the world was more like that, so they try to influence others so that it is more like that, what's wrong with that? Some people conclude that there must be an origin for that desire outside of humans and that gets the name god.

    So I don't know what you mean? Where do you conclude from that this is not real?

    • resource_waste 2 hours ago

      >Pi seams to be a property of the universe

      If you also agree 1 = 1 is a property of the universe, sure... But these are really just linguistic notations stacked upon each other until statements like 2pir = c are true.

      I can write plenty of other true statements, I can make some strange irregular shape and prove the area of it.

      >There is a longing in people for love, happiness and justice which seams to be universal through the earth population?

      At a minimum moral relativism, between cultures, people, eras, organizations vs individuals seems absolutely true. At one point, being a pirate was honorable because it helped your community.

      • 1718627440 23 minutes ago

        Sure mathematical expressions are expressions of a language, but the name of constants and how we describe them, isn't what matters.

        It's the fact that a shape that has perfect symmetry in infinite directions, the effects of same weather phenomena we called lightning and the limit on information propagation (and million other things I just forgot about) all have a thing in common.

        And all this is totally unrelated from our perception or even the existence of humans.

        > just linguistic notations stacked upon each other until statements like 2*pi*r = c are true.

        You can totally make sound linguistic notations, that just have no grounding in reality. It seams like you think it's only about the linguistic statement, but the language is invented to describe something that exists outside of it.

  • brid 8 hours ago

    Perfection is available to us. Jesus Christ is the way; the Incarnation is the bridge. God became man (taking on like nature) so that we could become like Him and participate in His divine nature.

pseudolus 20 hours ago

Surprisingly, not a single mention of Georges Lemaître - the Catholic priest who made significant contributions to cosmology and is credited with originating what became the Big Bang theory.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre

  • Jtsummers 20 hours ago

    > Surprisingly, not a single mention of Georges Lemaître

    The article:

    >> Pius XII stopped suggesting that the big bang required the orchestration of God after he had a conference with Georges Lemaître, the Belgian scientist and Catholic priest who had laid the groundwork for the theory with his hypothesis that the universe had expanded from a “primeval atom.”

    There's a single mention of him in the article.

  • antithesizer 16 hours ago

    This is what I call self-sacrifice.

  • chiba12 20 hours ago

    It’s literally mentioned in the article

    • pseudolus 20 hours ago

      Alas, I missed that part: 'Pius XII stopped suggesting that the big bang required the orchestration of God after he had a conference with Georges Lemaître, the Belgian scientist and Catholic priest who had laid the groundwork for the theory with his hypothesis that the universe had expanded from a “primeval atom.”'

      • myvoiceismypass 19 hours ago

        So you didn’t read the article you are commenting on? I’m having a hard time understanding how this was missed.

        • tpoacher 11 hours ago

          > I missed that part

          So he did read the article. How did you miss that? :p