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The idea that marriage is solely about abusing and dominating women -- or for that matter, men -- really is short-sighted.

I suppose this might be my fault for starting to integrate my post-metamodern super-positional framework, but I can't unsee multiple truths.

Especially under a true nuclear family model where women get to pick who they marry, marriage is ideally a partnership and a quid pro quo.

Ideally under a true nuclear family model, a man is supposed to go out into the world and make something of himself, and become worthy of being selected for marriage by a woman. At that point, the man is going to typically be at the beginning of their long productive span of worthiness, and a young beautiful woman is near the beginning of a fairly short period of youth, beauty, and fertility.

The man gives the woman fidelity (so the woman doesn't have 15 baby mommas knocking at the door), a promise of long-term support, long-term companionship.

The woman gives the man fidelity as well (so the man knows his child is his), a promise of working with the man to help maintain his household and raise his kids together, and long term companionship.

In a good marriage, both parties get things they want. The man wants to know his child is his, and also wants to be able to support his children, and he knows he'll have a beautiful woman by his side that he likes. The woman gets singular access to a quality man she knows she likes, and support raising her children both material and otherwise, and importantly once she's old and infertile she's got a guarantee of support, assistance, and companionship.

There are potential problems in both directions, and part of the problem happens when the other party tries to get their part of the bargain without giving their side.

Ironclad marriage laws where a man doesn't need to do anything to fulfill their side of a marriage are obviously unfair to women who give up their youth, beauty, fertility, and end up with children (typically the mother is responsible for children throughout history and in the primate kingdom before history). That's screwed up. Can't really agree that it's acceptable for women to be trapped in crappy marriages with no real recourse.

Ironclad alimony and child support and custody laws where a woman can just cut and run means that the woman doesn't need to do anything to fulfill their side of a marriage, and that's obviously unfair to men who give up their future earnings and some degree of their freedom and might lose access to their kids, and also lose the ability to support their kids. That's also screwed up. Can't really agree that it's acceptable for a woman to leave and run off with the money and the kids and maybe even end up with those kids getting hurt or killed by a step-parent who by the numbers is overwhelmingly more likely to harm the kids than the actual father.

Marriage can really be good for the parties too, though.

Women on dating apps know full well that it sucks being the 10th date of the day for some supposedly great guy. She doesn't want to just bang a great guy, she wants to ultimately date a great guy and eventually be by that great guy's side for good. Marriage lets her find that great guy and get him to agree to settle down with her. Eventually she's going to want kids, and she wants someone who is going to provide for her during pregnancy and traditionally while she's raising their child, and a great guy is going to provide money, protection, emotional stability, companionship, and he's going to be a big part of raising the child himself. That sort of deal is something worth giving something up for.

Men in general know that it's hard to meet a good woman, and once you do meet her, you might eventually want kids too. The thing is, if she's out banging every guy she knows, there's a good chance it isn't your kid. You want to be able to provide all the things the woman is looking for because it means your child is going to have the best chance at life, but if you can't get an assurance of fidelity, there's a chance you spend your life's effort raising another man's child which is catastrophic.

Both sides of this arrangement are part of a new method of survival that became necessary about 250,000 years ago. Prior to that, women had sex with whoever -- perhaps every man in the tribe -- because it meant all the men would like the woman. Individual men didn't have much of a stake in a baby though, carrying the kids and raising the kids was the job of the woman. If a man could pump and dump, great -- the child was likely to survive, and the only lineage that would matter is the matrilinal one. What happened 250,000 years ago is that the heads of children got too big. What happened next is twofold: First, pregnant women became far more vulnerable. Second, babies were born earlier and earlier in development. Human babies are effectively born premature, and so are completely vulnerable for a very long time after birth. Because of this development, men who did a pump and dump effectively saw their kids die off and their mates die off, while men who stuck around to protect and serve their mates and provide for their offspring saw their kids survive and thrive. On the other hand, this large investment from men meant there was danger for men -- if a sneaky fucker (which is, I kid you not, an actual academic term) gets in an inseminates the woman the dedicated man agrees to take care of, then the man has just completely blown it for himself -- he spends years of effort raising a sneaky fucker's kid, potentially taking himself out of the gene pool entirely.

So I think both the MRAs and the feminists are right about marriage, and they're also totally wrong about marriage. It isn't about exploiting men, it isn't about exploiting women, at least when it's done right it should be about making sure both parties get what they need out of the deal and that both parties are incentivized not to renege on their end of the deal, which is certainly not what the system is set up for today because it is trapped in modernist and postmodernist black and white ideology which can't see multiple viewpoints at once.

There's even more truths besides children. Often in discussions like this people start going "So you're saying if a man and a woman are infertile they shouldn't be married?", but there's things other than children that marriages are for.

The postmodernists correctly point out that not all labor in a relationship is economic. People need to divide labor on childrearing, but also on cleaning the house, doing the yard, maintaining things, and stuff like throwing parties, arranging birthdays, setting up cards, and so on. The problem is that postmodernists are modernists, and so they only see the world through the lens of economics, and assume that if labor isn't paid then someone is being exploited. In reality, a good marriage sees division of labor that should include helping to build communities locally.

The promise in a marriage to stay together does something important, it takes a huge resource sink off the table. People spend huge amounts of time, resources, and effort trying to find connections, and cutting and remaking them adds to that, then that's a potential waste of resources. If you can keep good people together, then there's value in that. They spend resources doing productive things instead of rebuilding lost connections.

That promise also helps with something critically important for humans: Planning ahead. If we assume a more traditional family structure of one main bread earner, then the main earner can plan for a retirement with their spouse and supporting the kids they know they'll have, and the other partner can focus on non-economic plans both short and long term without worrying about trying to half-assed save for retirement because they know they'll be taken care of. It's a big part of what makes family an institution and not just a group of folks.

There's a powerful psychological component to a long marriage too. People you know a day, a week, a month, a year, these people don't know everything about you. they don't know about your childhood. They don't know about the time you backed into a parked car. They don't know about your deepest hopes and dreams and fears. That's what people who have been with you for a long time are for. And those people are your rock. Someone who has been by your side when you got that big raise. When your puppy died. When you finally got the house. The person who held your hand when the baby finally came. That person is something more important than an economic relationship. They're a part of you. There's a reason why married men live so much longer than unmarried men.

Speaking of love (since it's implied in the last paragraph but not stated), love is something broader than love songs. It's not just the butterfly you feel when you see your crush, it's a strong stone foundation one builds over time upon which you build your life. I can't really write about it in a meaningful way because it's personal and it's big and broad and thick. Today "love" is seen through the economic modernist lens as something to be consumed rather than something to be nurtured and built. The verses on love in Corinthians are ancient wisdom on love and it's a good start. Most people don't know that Christianity was considered a fairly pro-woman religion at the time it was founded, because the Romans shared a lot of sexual mores with today's sexual liberation, to the detriment of women -- You'd have powerful men with massive and neglected harems, and many men who never got to touch a woman. Moreover, Roman society was truly patriarchal, and the male head of the family could go so far as killing his wife and kids and it was understood to be acceptable as part of his duties and powers as family head.

So understanding there's so many positive aspects to marriage outside of the modernist/postmodernist viewpoint really changes your view. A marriage can be bad and worth ending, but marriage itself? It's not an evil. There's a reason why both men and women tolerated this thing and continue to tolerate this thing.

He can continue his previous work on making homes in Canada totally unaffordable to all but the 10 richest kings of Europe.

Would be a lot more if they were still available. How many people are still playing Final Fantasy 6?

My dad's pretty based usually, I want him to be around for a nice long time. But the whole 51st state thing is really rubbing him the wrong way, especially since it seems to be helping the liberals in the polls.

If you don't want to eat ham and banana hollandaise, why I would call you un-American.

I mean I don't want to eat it either but....

Oh god, can you imagine making that your main dish, and all your guests have to pretend to like the Ham and banana Hollandaise?

The only sad thing is that there's a lot of people in these countries who don't realize what he's doing for them yet.

My dad is retired, so he's getting an awful lot of his news from the establishment media, and he doesn't realize the good that's being done because Trudeau is spending $60 million a year to get good press.

So I guess if the other branches of government can execute the laws then the executive is allowed to make and adjudicate them?

Good thing there aren't miles of tent farms where the destitute live, because that would be a really bad look doing something like this if that were true.

Noooo stop, Solo Leveling! You don't need to go so hard! Who said you have to go so hard! You're going to kill yourself if you keep going this hard!!

I don't really know, because by the time I turn around to check I've already looked at it. :p

It's an interesting idea though, I saw a YouTube video a few months back where the camera for the unreal engine was moved away from where it normally sits to some ways away, and as the player character moved around you could see the slice of the world coming into existence. It totally works in the unreal engine because you can only look at what you are looking at.

There are between 200 billion and 1 trillion galaxies and the universe. In other words, there are between 25 and 125 galaxies in the universe for every man woman and child on Earth today. The universe itself is unfathomably large. We believe that the age of the universe is about 13 billion years, and the current hypothesis of the universe is that reality races out to fill the void lacking in space and time at the speed of light, suggesting that the current universe is generally a sphere of about 26 billion light years across. If you were to look at a map of that universe, it would just look like a dull glow from all of the galaxies. And you might say "this is everything" and you would be right. As you start to zoom in, you might eventually start to see differentiation, so instead of a general Haze of galaxies, you might start to see the individual galaxies, and you might say "this is everything", and while you are missing the big picture you are still correct. As you keep on zooming in, eventually you zoom in on a single galaxy, and the tendrils of Stars look like they form lines in the sky, and if you were focusing on our own Galaxy you might say "this is everything", and you'd be right. As you keep on zooming in, you start to see the individual Stars, and you see all of those individual stars. There are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. As you start to get down to of you close enough that we can start seeing individual stars, you might see all of these individual dots of light and assume "this is everything", and you'd be right. So you keep on zooming, keep on zooming, keep on zooming, and eventually you make it to our solar system. Planetoids, asteroids, planets, moons, meteors, and vast distances. You look at all of these things, and you might say "this is everything", and you'd be right. Now from here, you might assume that we must be taking off to go take a look at one of those giant gas planets far from that massive Sun, but we're not, we're going to be heading for -- keep zooming in, keep zooming in, keep zooming in -- this tiny little clump of dirt called Earth. And for the purposes of visualization we're going to take the surface of that Earth and we're going to flatten it out into a map. So now you can see every continent, every ocean, and you might look at that and claim "this is everything", and you'd be right. But if you zoom in just a little bit more, you start to see the lines between nations, and they seem very important. As you zoom in, you start to see the major rivers, you start to see provincial lines or state lines, and these also seem very important, and you might proudly proclaim "this is everything!", and you'd be right. If you keep on zooming in, you'll eventually reach a city, and you can zoom in on that city, and see all the streets, and you can state "this is everything", and you'd be right. But if you keep on zooming in, eventually you're going to find your street, your neighborhood, and you can see where all the roads intersect in your neighborhood, and you might loudly proclaim "this is everything!" And you'd be right. And then you can travel down the street and look for your house, and open street maps happens to have individual buildings drawn, each individual house is placed on the map, and you will look at that map and you will think that you have finally reached it, you might finally say "this is everything", and you'd be right. But there's so much stuff that the map can't show. It doesn't show the people living in the house, it doesn't show the relationships between those people, you know inside of each person is an ecosystem of many different organisms which live in the gut. The yard is filled with soil which is filled with microorganisms, each speck of dust could contain all kinds of invisible organisms to the naked eye, and the yard is filled with them. Spots nobody thinks about, under the sink, there is a biofilm on the pipes and if you put that under a microscope every square millimeter is a fascinating story of biodiversity. And if you keep on going, you'll eventually reach the level that you can see viruses at, and there's a whole ecosystem of viruses and they behave in their own way we don't even think of them as life, and yet in some ways we consider them to be alive because of the way that they infect and spread to every corner of our Earth. And then you can keep on zooming in, and eventually orders of magnitude smaller you start to see individual atoms, and orders magnitude smaller still you start to see individual electrons, and nothing at this level behaves in a way that somebody who lives in the macro world would find remotely intuitive, but it follows its own set of rules, and you can keep on going to find subatomic particles that are even smaller than the atom, even smaller than the electron. and if there's anything smaller than that we don't know, because we can't measure that far. And you might think that that is everything, and it might not be we don't know.

So what does this view of the universe tell us? Before you answer that we need to understand, by the way, this is assuming that we are the only universe. Multiversal theory exists, and some theories exist that suggest that this is just the latest iteration of the universe and eventually everything will crunch down into another singularity that will eventually become another big bang and start a cycle again that's completely different from ours.

So the first thing is that there are unlimited pieces of information in the universe, and the idea that some laplace's demon could understand everything might feel realistic because we understand so much, but only if we don't understand how much there is to know.

There's a whole other layer of things that we haven't even explored yet, we have proven in a laboratory that energy is matter and matter is energy. We have managed to produce a very small amount of matter from nothing but energy. You took an overwhelming amount of energy to create that tiny piece of matter, but ultimately what that means is even the things we think of as real stuff are just a structured form of energy, and even though we understand that matter is energy we don't fully understand entirely how even that all works.

As something that looks like an aside for a minute, in World War ii, a cat's whisker radio was a very simple crystal radio where you would take crystal, and connect a couple of electrodes to it, and eventually be able to hear radio waves. Now, we knew that that worked, but we didn't really know why at all. And after the war we began investigating that phenomenon of being able to use a crystal to create a radio. Eventually, that led us to an understanding of semiconductors and it was also a major development in the field of quantum mechanics because you needed to understand the quantum mechanical systems in order to understand why the cat's whisker worked when the electrode was in one place but not another. Ultimately, this cat's whisker radio led the development of semiconductor such as transistors, which ultimately ended up leading to the development of microcomputers, and eventually the sort of incredible smartphones that we have today. The idea that placing a couple of electrodes on a piece of crystal relates to something as unimaginably complex as a smartphone is almost absurd, but it's true.

In this way to an extent, the scientific endeavor of the enlightenment has in a sense directly refuted the core conceits of modernity, that the universe can be understood rationally and logically, that everything can be measured, and once measured everything can be understood. Even within its own wheelhouse, modernity breaks down.

It's also important to note however, that pure relativism is also obviously incorrect. Every layer that we measure for the purposes of our thought experiment is absolutely and factually true. The fact that other things are also true doesn't change the fact for example that there is a planet called Earth in the solar system whose star is locally called Sol, in a relatively insignificant Galaxy called the Milky Way by many of the inhabitants of that Earth. This isn't a game of power, this isn't something to be constructed, notwithstanding the limitations of our models of viewing reality they are all absolutely true.

None of these photos look confused for no good reason like they're really not understanding what's going on at this moment.

I'm aware there are people who are basically totally "normal" -- say a girl who thinks she's a girl and she likes guys -- but call themselves "queer", and it's purely a political thing, identitying as part of a tribe.

Of course as with everything related to postmodernism, it's pretty stupid -- in order to combat boundaries, a bunch of people place themselves within a set boundary.

This is the irony and it might be the deconstruction of postmodernism, the fact that ideologies utilizing postmodernism are not actually postmodernists, they are modernist for themselves and postmodernist for everything else. It isn't that they have a problem with grand narratives or objective truths, it's just that they have a problem with everyone else's grand narratives and everyone else's objective truths.

(Sending way later than expected, thought I already sent send on this)

With his amazing verbal jiu jitsu I'm amazed he couldn't talk his way out of it.

His trial was like watching a real lawyer. I mean, a real lawyer who was high on heroin andayahuasca and drunk, but a real lawyer!

That's fast enough to download the latest mid COD game in only an hour!

I'm doing some worldbuilding for my next book, and ended up with this as one of a handful of essays I built along the way. Maybe someone else might find it interesting, just remember I'm just some random loser on the Internet, I'm not claiming to know anything.

Meditations on the post-metamodern churches

So before we start, I’m just a dude. I’m not some cardinal, I’m not a pastor, I’m not deeply engaged with things, so keep that in mind because otherwise you might think too much of just guy saying just some things. Next, please consider that I’m not saying anyone has to do anything to *your* church, this is a thought experiment about *a* church, playing with an epistemological framework, not a big call to action. Finally, if you’re not Christian, instead of getting offended that someone would talk about Christianity succeeding and taking over society, just take it for some dude having some thought experiment because that’s what it is. That’s all it will ever be.

A post-metamodern church at first glance seems like a contradiction in terms.

The church emerged shortly after the axial age, an era where many of the world’s religions and philosophies were developed to resolve the issue of a growing world. The coin meant that you didn’t need a direct relationship with every person who did work with you, which led to a societal collapse because people didn’t need to be ok with other people they worked in the community with, and so values fell apart. Religions came about to provide a superstructure people could work in that would ensure a stable society in spite of the disconnection between people. In some ways, it’s an interesting parallel to today, where you can survive without ever coming into direct contact with another human being for any reason – your food is contactless delivered by an app, your job is work from home, your entertainment is online and pre-recorded.

Of course, the primary purpose of a church isn’t social cohesion, it’s spirituality, and it embedded radical ideas about suffering, redemption, and moral absolutism that hadn't really taken hold in the same way before. It’s fundamentally a different thing than most things, especially today.

It was a pre-modern organization that was brought into the modern age and harmed by enlightenment ideals then cut down to nothing in the postmodern age like many social institutions.

The thing is, such a contradiction isn’t something we necessarily need to resolve under post-metamodern superposition. It can be true that some of the lessons of Christianity don’t make sense today, but it can also be true that it’s worth following Christianity. The modern age science strongly suggested that God doesn’t exist according to logic and reason, but it can also be true that outside of that realm there is evidence all around us that God does exist, including the fact that once we stray from the commandments of God society seems to start falling apart. It’s a metaphysical truth that if God created the universe then it doesn’t make sense to assume one can find His footprints here, in the same way you own a television, but most of you have never opened up the back to look inside. The fact that you can’t put a gram of God on a scale and balance Him against a gram of brass doesn’t mean He doesn’t exist, and to assume that it does only shows you can’t conceive of viewpoints other than the present dominant one.

To show the falsity of empirical materialism as the sole epistemological basis of the universe only works if you cease being human or cease paying attention to being human. You can't measure love empirically. Some people might say "Oh, but we can measure the parts of the brain that cause love, we can measure the chemicals that trigger love", but that's not the question -- the question isn't "can you find signs of love in the real world", it's "can you measure love", and the answer is without a human being telling you something to convert one epistemological framework to another, you cannot. You have to consider multiple frameworks at the same time, each one true and meaningful but incomplete.
In the same way we try to measure love, we try to measure God. We prove that people do feel something special when they deeply pray, and we think because we can see blood flow levels in a brain scan it proves there is no god because our brains behave in a way. Does this mean that love doesn’t exist either? Such an argument could also be extrapolated into “Well it proves that God only exists in our heads”, but does it? If we can prove that religious experiences are something with measurable effets, but we also know that God is a metaphysical entity, then all we’ve proven is that we can measure at least one aspect of religion as having a real and tangible effect on reality.

There are some important theological implications with the superposition epistemology. One of the most important is that Christianity holds many lessons, and people will need certain lessons more or less at different times. For some people, what is needed is the loving grace of Jesus's message, but today what's needed for many people is the harder edged truth of the old testament moralism. Both are true and absolutely parts of the biblical canon, but sometimes an individual doesn't need forgiveness, they need to be told that right and wrong exist and they are expected to be good or they'll lose their kingdom, and even if they repent their kids will lose their kingdom even if you're ok. On the other hand, some people need to be told that God is all-loving and will forgive you of your sins if you repent because otherwise the weight of those sins will crush individuals who are otherwise good people. Part of the role of a post-metamodern pastor is understanding that different parts of the bible are more or less weighted situationally.
This view of the world is explicitly not relativistic -- there is one whole truth revealed by God in the bible, and it is all true at all times. Instead, it is a view that God's Word is truth -- there is a solid ground we can walk on, but different roads are built on the ground, and sometimes different roads are more relevant than others for individuals in the moment. This point is important because premodern Christian theologians would almost certainly attack any application of God's Law which claims any part of the bible is simply false, and rightly so -- to reject part of God's Law as presented in the Bible is to reject Christianity.
One postmodern deconstruction of the bible which has been quite successful as an attack on Christianity is that different parts of the bible advocate for different things. The Simpsons (a TV show which is the epitome of postmodern deconstruction) has Ned Flanders, its epyxy of Christianity in its purest and most righteous form, telling God in a prayer "I followed all of the bible, even the parts of the bible the disagree with the other parts!" -- but postmodernism is modernism, and so it is the linear, rational view of truth which requires every line of Truth to be perfectly interconnected at applicable at all times like Newtonian Physics (which aren't themselves so because the universe isn't rationalist the way the enlightenment thinkers believe -- it turns out we have mysteries such as dark energy, dark matter, neutrinos which barely interact with matter, and quantum physics which have rules of their own but are totally unintuitive to people living at a macro scale), so for people in a modernist and postmodernist worldview such a criticism seems devastating to the religion. Under a superposition viewpoint, just as newtonian physics, dark matter and dark energy and neutrinos, and quantum physics are all truths that simply exist in the same space, all the different lessons of the bible also exist in the same space.
My conception of the post metamodern and superpositional church is as the core of a new culture, and one of the superpositions that it will have to hold is figuring out how to deal with the issue of non-believers. One of the problems with churches that exists today is that it doesn't seem to really have any idea of how to handle this. On one hand, you have churches which disregard all of God's law in order to try to get people into the door. They say that there are no such things as sins if the postmodern world doesn't agree that those are sins, and that's anyone who comes in regardless of even whether they believe in God in any sense of the word is essentially free to rampage however they wish. On the other hand, other churches look upon anyone who doesn't follow the exact teachings of that specific Church to the letter as heretics to be shunned. Now I don't think that either one of those extremes is wise. Individuals who come to church for spirituality aren't going to find any value in being told that no matter what they do it's right. On the other hand, individuals who come to church hoping to find something that they don't have aren't served in any way by turning them away at the door. When an unbeliever is in the church, I believe that the superposition at work would be that on one hand everyone accepts that they don't believe and that there is a commandment in the Bible against bearing false witness, so trying to force religion down people's throats and trying to bully them into claiming belief in the thing that they don't believe in is actually a violation of the ten commandments. At the same time, a Christian ought to be trying to save souls, and it is very much true that if you can help convince somebody that Christianity is true and the Bible is the word of God and that they should participate in the church, then you should do that thing. At the same time, a Shepherd can only herd a sheep that is in his flock, if the sheep is in someone else's field at Shepherd will never be able to herd them. So the truth ends up sounding almost like a Taoist proverb, that simultaneously one must be and soft as the morning grass, but as firm as the mountain. In this case, it is because the believers must be accepting of others and embrace them into different activities and the like, but be unyielding in terms of their own moral certitude. If Christianity is the truth, and Jesus is the light, then simply showing people a better way will results in people changing their mind. For a world that absolutely requires a new way forward in terms of building local communities, becoming that community and having a strong moral background behind it is essentially a salve for what ails the world, and to be that salve is to own the culture for generations to come.

Churches today, perhaps because that's what their remaining attendees demand, focus so much on forgiveness, and it's a hollow message for most people. We've got forgiveness. We are living in the most forgiving era of human history, where you aren't held responsible for anything you do ever. What people want is to be told "No, there's a right way and a wrong way to live, and you're living the wrong way" -- but that's not what people hear. All they hear is "Jesus loves you and forgives you". That's the message for a different step -- At first you need to learn the rules, then you need to internalize the rules, and once you've done that and you realize how flawed you are -- that's the moment that forgiveness is required because you need to repent and ask forgiveness for your flaws or wallow forever under the weight of your sins -- but you can't do that until you understand the weight of your sins.

So one question would be “Why do we need any of the above? The government provides charity, and the Internet can provide many support groups and other functions”, which I think must be pushed back on. The government leviathan is not sustainable and is on the verge of collapse. Historically speaking, socialism in this form (not marxist socialism, but a large welfare state that is intended to bodge fixes into social problems) doesn’t last. Bread and circuses kept the Roman Empire going for a while, but once they had lost their moral center, it is surprising how quickly it fell, and Christianity picked up the pieces. Although it was arguably less effective, the orthodox church in Russia following the fall of the Soviet Union played a similar role. Second, the Internet is not a real place. We used to understand that. You can have 10,000 friends on facebook and nobody to help you move a couch or clean up a park. You require local, offline social networks as a human being, and our collapsing society is proof of that. In terms of self-help groups as ideological foundation, I tend to think ideology has to be local. You can’t pay 4.99 a month to some website and have your soul saved, you need to be able to look a wise man in the eye and bare your soul. Besides that, the Internet is a product of our time, and it is a fleeting one. Go back to the fall of the western Roman empire, and many of the roads the Romans built became impassable after the empire fell. A relatively minor regional war between Ukraine and Russia has resulted in oil pipelines being destroyed and potentially many internet underwater fiber optic lines being cut. Imagine a world where the hegemonic powers of today collapse – will your Internet friends be there to help protect your home, or will you even know how to find any of them in a world where we don’t even tell each other our real names and certainly not our addresses?

As a sign of its transcendent wisdom, Jesus already fully embodies post-metamodern superpositional thinking. He demanded his follower accept the truth of God’s Law alongside the truths of grace, love, and mercy. His treatment of the Pharisees mirrors criticism of modernist thinking which requires a single absolute truth they can twist as they do.

One interesting criticism is that this makes theology too difficult, but I’d argue the opposite: If one tries to simplify complex things too much, one makes them more complicated thereby. Take a 4-way stoplight. If you look from overhead, it’s obvious which direction cars will move based on the lane they’re in and the state of their turn signals. If you look at it from the side, it’s more complicated but typically people will be able to figure it out. If you look only at the middle of the intersection it will be impossible to know anything because all the additional complex information has been removed.

I suspect that nearly every breed of theologian would have major issues with how I’ve considered things here. A counter-argument to most of them would be that they need to to explain why their institutions are failing so hard before criticizing a new idea of how to do things. It's like "Wow how many followers have you lost in the past 20 years? That's impressive. Tell me more about how you have all the answers."

Some people might be deeply skeptical of these ideas. I think it's right to be skeptical. I'm just a man, and I'm using a limited view of the universe to try to figure out what could happen in the future. One of the truths one must keep in mind while engaging with the superpositional model is that the model itself could be wrong, and the ways we think of the model could be wrong, and the conclusions we come to could be wrong. It isn't a model with great surety of its own superiority like modernism, it's just "well, this makes the most sense to me right now". The idea that I’d come up with a perfect theology is facially absurd.

In some ways, Trump taking on traditionally left wing talking points is genius.

"Down with big pharma! They're just the worst!"

"Yeah! Fuck those guys!"

"Wtf we need to save big pharma!"

After the first 5 words I'm like "this has gotta be on standing"

And look at that, standing.