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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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    1. mostly looking based on podcasts I already enjoy.
    2. The Magnus Archives. It’s an examination of the Architecture of Fear. It is one of the finest examples of worldbuilding I’ve ever seen, It just makes sense that the world works in the way it does, and every piece you learn makes more sense. Tight storytelling, and everything is connected, even though it’s a monster-of-the-week episodic show. The entire 200-episode storyline was planned by the time they finished the first 10 episodes. You’ll know whether it’s for you by the end of the fourth episode.


  • The person asked the question, specifically, why Christians conflate the two, and whether it is true that they are always the same person. Notice that the question asks not just for a dogmatic response, but a comparative religious analysis. While it is true that “modern Christians treat them like the same person”, saying “they are the same person” doesn’t answer the question at all. It asked why do Christians treat them like the same person, and the actual answer is that medieval Christians conflated a lot of things, made up a bunch of demons, and also took secular sources like Milton and Dante as authoritative gospel, rather than religious fiction. If you’re going based on the actual bible, Lucifer is a star in the sky, and precisely nothing more. Even the Serpent from the garden is only conflated with Satan.


  • Literally ignore the other people. They clearly don’t know what they’re talking about, though anise is at least close. The name Lucifer originally referred to Venus, the morning star. It comes from Roman Latin, long before Christianity was a thing, and literally just means light-bringer. The Hebrew name for Venus is mentioned a single time in the bible, referencing a Babylonian king who was given the title. You can probably thank St. Jerome for replacing the Hebrew name for the planet with “Lucifer”, but I’m not certain on that one. I’m not a scholar of mediaeval church Latin. Never, not once in the bible, is Lucifer conflated with the devil. In fact, even the original Satan was called the Adversary not because he was YHWH’s adversary, but because he was effectively God’s District Attorney, prosecuting the wrongs of mortals. The entire conflation with Satan as evil happened between the recording of the Hebrew bible and the development of Christianity. Hence why Satan is pretty much only mentioned in the New Testament.

    Pretty much every single thing modern Christians believe about the devil, or especially hell, was made up in the middle ages, and a hefty amount of that by Dante alone.

    I recommend reading the wiki pages for both, since they’re interesting reads, but you should definitely check me on this. Don’t take my word for it.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer

    Check their earliest histories.

    E: forgot to mention that Milton was another one of the people who made up large portion of the modern idea of “hell”, which was originally a term from old Norse, and so he and Dante basically combined the Norse He’ll and the Greek Hades to make “Hell” as we know it today, complete with the Lord of Hell. It’s all syncretism.












  • I, too, find that perspective compelling, but I think it’s worth pointing out that societal intelligence, as defined there, isn’t unique to humans. Mycelial networks allow communication, learning and reactivity among entirely different species within a forest. Eusocial insects like the hymenopterans have their own unique languages. Whales communicate among their pods and across oceans to pass on information and teachings. I’m not saying that a tree knows what a beetle is, but there’s something deeper than mere genetics at play when unrelated species communicate the presence of parasites through a mycelial network, and each tree begins to produce insecticide toxins, even those which have never been infested by a beetle. We too-often discount the many languages which are already spoken on this planet, simply because they are less intelligible to us, or seem more simplistic than Infinite Jest.


  • You may not like it, but this is what peak evolution looks like.

    Meme aside, crabs are slightly different, since they are a case of convergent evolution. The reason mosquitoes, crocodiles and sharks basically look entirely unchanged is because there has been little to no selective pressure for those species, since their survival and propagation strategy remains incredibly effective. If there’s nothing random mutations could do to make individuals of a species (or a subgroup thereof) more likely to survive long enough to breed, then natural selection won’t have anything to sink its teeth into. If no other competitor comes along to outcompete those species, nor some devastating plague or other disaster which makes their strategy unviable, they will remain unchanged, and we get the coelacanth, horseshoe crab or, yes, the mosquito.


  • I commented this when the last poster made this claim a month back: Sharks are older than most of the current, eaily-visible rings of Saturn. The E-ring is primary composed of material ejected from Enceladus, and there is no indication I have found which would suggest that the hydrothermal processes which cause the jets are anything new. Additionally, just because most of Saturn’s current rings were formed more-recently doesn’t mean there weren’t rings back then. The gas giants have hundreds of moons, and they certainly used to have more. I think it is an undeniable, generally - accepted fact that the gas giants have all had significant rings at some point in the past (and they all, in fact, do have rings, just not all as spectacular as Saturn’s current ones.