#eschatology-podcast

[battleforgodstruth]

Why I am Postmillennial - Pastor Patrick Hines Podcast

These two books are now available on Amazon. All proceeds go directly to Pastor Hines. ▶️Am I Right With God?: The Gospel, Justification, Saving Faith, Repentance, Assurance, & The New Birth…

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#christian podcasters #christian podcasts #Christianity #End Times #Eschatology #God #Jesus Christ #Last Days #last days sermons #presbyterian podcasts #reformed christian podcasters #reformed christian podcasts #reformed presbyterian #reformed sermons #reformed theology

[jackredfieldwasmyjacob]

i am obsessed with the fact that a podcast made by the most annoying gay guy and the most sickly looking blonde in which 90% is just them talking about their exes and making eschatologic jokes managed to get international popstar rosalía and president of spain pedro sánchez as guests

#don't get me wrong i listen to said podcast #but HOW

[jorrmungandr]

Book of the New Sun: Some Thoughts

Okay, let's do this. I've been ruminating on these books and the accompanying podcasts from Ranged Touch for several weeks now, and I've got some thoughts.

The last book was a bit disappointing, in the ways that it explained things I don't think needed explaining, and introduced some elements to the plot that make the whole thing feel a lot more... flat. Specifically, the nature of the aliens, and the continued focus on time travel as an explanation for mysterious happenings, along with the more and more explicitly religious nature of the narrative.

Suffice it to say, as a general opinion: I liked these books more when they were just fun picaresque fantasy/scifi adventure stories. Once we get to the end and it has to Be About Something, it loses some of that sheen of endless possibilities that makes it so intriguing. But I suppose it was inevitable, this is a world that was designed to be destroyed, after all.

There are some interesting parallels with the Book of Genesis that I noticed in retrospect. This is an end-of-the-world story that mirrors the beginning of the world. It is "Eschatology and Genesis" in one, after all. One fun one I just realized the other day: the exarchs are nephilim. If the aliens in this world actually represent the divine, then the product of aliens and humans would be half-divine monsters. This explains a) why they're held in such contempt by the story as untrustworthy and b) why they're specifically noted to be very tall. They're giants!

The reveal about the true nature of the aliens really fell flat for me. That is the precise point where my interest in learning more about an infinitely deep and wondrous world runs into the specific ideological project of the author.

In fact, it's two reveals, and I don't like either of 'em. One back in book 3 where we find out that the hierodules are not, in fact, monstrous creatures of diverse form, but actually all supremely beautiful and beyond perfect superhumans, the ones that Severian described in the garden in book 2. Far less interesting than just having a bunch of weird aliens.

The other is that they're from a previous iteration of the universe, and were "perfected" by humanity through the same process that they are now enacting upon huamnity in this universe. This just feels like breaking down the metaphor and saying that they're God and this is now a tiresome theodicy. Trying to logically prove the existence of a loving God, reminds me of my philosophy of religion class way back in community college. Seems to be a very Catholic preoccupation, so no great surprise there.

The interesting thing is that this story also has some Lovecraftian monsters living under the ocean, trying to gain dominion over humanity for... some reason. It makes the whole thing feel more Manichaean, there's a good god and an evil god, both seemingly equally powerful, fighting over the soul of humanity.

There's also these indications of like... having to make deals with some external factions to get access to energy weapons. Like there's the faction of hierodules who are time traveling around and are interested in uplifting humanity to perfection, and then there are just regular ol' aliens who are messing with us for some unknown reason.

Perhaps the idea is that these other aliens, Abaia and whatnot, know that humanity is actually the center of the universe, the most important species who have this special connection with the time travelers. Humanity has a special connection with the divine (hierodules) that nobody else gets. But, in a very Catholic way, that's not necessarily a good thing, and causes them a lot of suffering.

I suppose the whole explanation that "oh all of this pain and depravation is for your own good as part of a divine plan" thing just rubs me the wrong way. It's not convincing to me, and it never has been. This series brings that whole argument into new genre trappings, instead of a vague righteousness we have giving the very Earth a new chance at survival with a new sun, instead of a distant and mysterious God we have aliens who have clear motives and concrete existence, etc. That doesn't make it any more convincing, though it does make it easier to grapple with, I suppose.

Anyway, enough about hierodules.

I found the resolution of Severian's personal story very satisfying. Tying up all the mysteries of his parentage with a neat little bow, the explanation of how the Autarchy works, all of that stuff, it was very good. Especially the way that the next Autarch could just be any random person off the street. It's a very cool idea.

My favorite thing is how it recasts the rest of the book, knowing that it was written with a thousand extra eyes looking over Severian's life, peer-reviewing it. It explains so much about the clinical, detached tone, and the judgments he was making about himself and his own actions along the way. It's going to be very fun to re-read these books with that knowledge in the future.

I agree with the Shelved by Genre crew about the depiction of the Ascians: the stuff that was added later, with the guy in the hospital, is much more interesting than the just out-and-out weird racism we see later in the book. That felt very flat and stupid, like the villains in Narnia books. The rulers are nothing but pure evil and will to dominate, the uderlings are either resilient victims of circumstance or mindless drones, etc etc. Just not that interesting compared to the rest of the world building in these books.

Really, it's just the old "those people are BRAINWASHED VICTIMS OF IDEOLOGY, not like me, the smart and independent thinker" thing, but blown out to the biggest possible size in a fantasy genre fashion.

I am completely and utterly uninterested in theories about who is a clone or a robot or a secret time traveler. I just do not care. Things like that feel like... they're just not part of the story. The idea of clones gets introduced, but it's deployed in one very specific way.

This is a fictional story, you could come up with any theories about it, and they'd all be equally valid. I could concoct some sort of theory that Severian was actually corrupted by Abaia along the way and is going to undermine the mission of the hierodules, or that he was secretly replaced with a Jonas-like robot, or that the Autarch was every character that he met on his journey, etc etc. It's kinda fun in its own way, but it never feels worth arguing about?

That reminds me, there's one thing that kind of annoyed me on the podcast sometimes: they explained the ambiguity, but didn't say their own read. Like, "here's the thing, it could be X or Y, how interesting!" Well, give me an argument. Whaddaya think? Part of that is being poisoned by future knowledge, even of the fifth and final book and maybe even that whole other series of prequel books Gene wrote, but whatever. Just a little irritating, not a big deal.

Overall, I liked it a lot. Mostly for the world and the characters, the text itself, not the meta elements. I'm not interested in how this is actually about how an author treats his characters in fiction or whatever. It's just a cool scifi world. I'd love to see extended visions of it, and I suppose I have in things like Caves of Qud.

Can't wait for Earthsea!

#book of the new sun #gene wolfe #shelved by genre #ranged touch #pext toast

[aesrot]

sorry for sending you so many things but I'm in a talkative mood rn. Anyway have you heard of all tomorrows (I think thats what its called) its a sci fi horror thing about the "future" of humanity and "humans" after this eldritch race of Gods(?) came and mingled with humans.

It's probably one of the most disturbing things ive ever seen and I was unable to get through an entire video talking about it because it was so disturbing

please do not apologise, im having a fucking blast!!! and im afraid my sci-fi background is uhh very poor, so nope, havent read it (but adding to the list!!); but oh m y god, this can go in so many ways, love love love this, it reminds me a lot of coc actually.

theres this one brazilian podcast in which the guys played coc (i cannot stop talking abt them asjfhfsa so fucking sad its in portuguese, bc i want to make everyone listen to it), and the people involved w the cult of cthulhu were trying to create the 'perfect race' (it was set in the eve of the WWII, they were nazis, so that fits the whole thing) and were messing and combining humans with other eldritch creatures, and the descriptions were mmmm so good (the dm is a writer who really enjoys eschatology, so you can imagine how that went)

#lua answers #phantom my beloved

[epitome-the-burnkid-viii]

Apocalyptic news updates revealing good, evil, and much more!🔥 Come find my show #SupplementalBroadcast 🎱 #youtuberecommendedchronicles🔮 on YouTube & Rumble! New episodes posted regularly!!! 🧩 #CurrentEvents #Politics #Eschatology #News #History #TheGreatResist #TheGreatAwakening 🙏

#youtube #youtuberecommendedchronicles🔮

[geopolicraticus]

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Nikolai Berdyaev and Eschatological Providentialism  

Monday 18 March 2024 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (Никола́й Алекса́ндрович Бердя́ев; 18 March, Old Style 06 March, 1874 – 24 March 1948), who was born in Obukhov, near Kiev, on this date in 1874.

Berdyaev was a Russian aristocrat who became a Marxist and then a Christian, and who always seemed to find himself on the wrong side of the authorities in his homeland. Berdyaev applied his Christian personalism to philosophical anthropology and produced a philosophy of history that raises eschatology over salvation history. Like the thought of Simone Weil, this is a providential philosophy of history with a difference.

Quora:             https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

Discord:          https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD

Links:              https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/

Newsletter:     http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/

Podcast:          https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nick-nielsen94/episodes/Nikolai-Berdyaev-and-Eschatological-Providentialism-e2h9212

Text post: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/nikolai-alexandrovich-berdyaev

#philosophy of history #youtube #Nikolai Berdyaev #providentialism #Christian existentialism #eschatology #existentialism #Youtube

[apocrypals]

Gentiles huddling in their masses, just like witches at black masses

#apocrypals #podcast #bible #podcasts #religion #apocrypha #dead sea scrolls #war scroll #war of the sons of light and sons of darkness #war of the messiah #end times #eschatology

[brianchilton]

(S5 E22) Christology (Part 10): The Second Coming of Christ

(S5 E22) Christology (Part 10): The Second Coming of Christ

By: Brian G. Chilton and Curtis Evelo | March 16, 2022 During the winter months, the Bellator Christi Podcast examines a major arm of systematic theology. For this Winter Theology Series, we are exploring Christology–that is, the study of Christ. This week Brian and Curtis look into the Second Coming of Christ. What is the Second Coming of Christ? Do the Scriptures definitively claim that Christ…

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#Bellator Christi #Bellator Christi Podcast #Brian Chilton #Christology #Curtis Evelo #eschatology #Revelation #Second Coming of Christ

[isaiah504blues-blog]

Rejoice in That Which I Create

Rejoice in That Which I Create

The former things are gone. Our God is making something new for you–fully worthy of your joy and delight!

Hear the full audio of “Rejoice in That which I Create”

A sermon on Isaiah 65:17-25 / Last Sunday of the Church Year / 24 November 2019

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#Christian #eschatology #eternal life #Fulfilment #Isaiah 65 #Last Sunday of the Church Year #LCMS #Lutheran #new creation #One Year Lectionary #Podcast #Sermon

[mugasofer]

It seems like many, perhaps most, people historically believed in some immanent apocalypse.

Many philosophies claim that the world is passing into a degenerate age of chaos (Ages of Man, Kali Yuga, life-cycle of civilisation), or divine conflict will shortly spill over & destroy the Earth (Ragnorok, Revelations, Zoroastrian Frashokereti), or that the natural forces sustaining us must be transient.

Yet few panic or do anything. What anyone does "do about it" is often symbolic & self-admittedly unlikely to do much.

Maybe humans evolved not to care, to avoid being manipulated?

Many cults make similar claims, and do uproot their lives around them. Even very rarely committing mass suicide or terror attacks etc on occasion. But cults exist that don't make such claims, so it may not be the mechanism they use to control, or at most a minor one. "This is about the fate of the whole world, nothing can be more important than that, so shut up" may work as as a thought terminating cliche, but it doesn't seem to work that strongly, and there are many at least equally effective ones.

Some large scale orgs do exist that seem to take their eschatology "seriously". The Aztecs committed atrocities trying to hold off apocalypse, ISIS trying to cause it. Arguably some Communist or even fascist groups count, depending on your definition of apocalypse.

But even then, one can argue their actions are not radically different from non-apocalypse-motivated ones - e.g. the Aztecs mass-executed less per capita than the UK did at times & some historians view them as more about displaying authority.

I'm thinking about this because of two secular eschatologies - climate apocalypse and the Singularity.

My view on climate change, which as far as I can tell is the scientific consensus, is that it is real and bad but by no means apocalyptic. We're talking incremental increases in storms, droughts, floods etc, all of which are terrible, but none of which remotely threaten human civilisation. E.g. according to the first Google result, the sea is set to rise by 1 decimeter by 2100 in a "high emissions scenario", not to rise by tens or hundreds of meters and consume all coastal nations as I was taught as a child. Some more drastic projections suggest that the sea might rise by as much as two or three meters in the worst case scenario.

It really creeps me out when I hear people who confess to believe that human civilisation, the human species, or even all life on Earth is most likely going to be destroyed soon by climate change. The most recent example, which prompted this post, was the Call of Cthulhu podcast I was listening to casually suggesting that it might be a good idea to summon an Elder God of ice and snow to combat climate change as the "lesser existential risk", perhaps by sacrificing "climate skeptics" to it. It's incredibly jarring for me to realise that the guys I've been listening to casually chatting about RPGs think they live in a world that will shortly be ended by the greed of it's rulers. But this idea is everywhere. Discussions of existential risks from e.g. pandemics inevitably attract people arguing that the real existential risk is climate change. A major anti-global-warming protest movement, Extinction Rebellion, is literally named after the idea that they're fighting against their own extinction. Viral Tumblr posts talk about how the fear of knowing that the world is probably going to be destroyed soon by climate change and fascism is crippling their mental health, and they have no idea how to deal with it because it's all so real.

But it's not. It's not real.

Well, I can't claim that political science is accurate enough for me to definitively say that fascism isn't going to take over, but I can say that climate science is fairly accurate and it predicts that the world is definitely not about to end in fire or in flood.

(There are valid arguments that climate change or other environmental issues might precipitate wars, which could turn apocalyptic due to nuclear weapons; or that we might potentially encounter a black swan event due to our poor understanding of the ecosystem and climate-feedback systems. But these are very different, as they're self-admittedly "just" small risks to the world.)

And I get the impression that a lot of people with more realistic views about climate change deliberately pander to this, deliberately encouraging people to believe that they're going to die because it puts them on the "right side of the issue". The MCU's Loki, for instance, recently casually brought up a "climate apocalypse" in 2050, which many viewers took as meaning the world ending. Technically, the show uses a broad definition of "apocalypse" - Pompeii is given as another example - and it kind of seems like maybe all they meant was natural disasters encouraged by climate change, totally defensible. But I still felt kinda mad about it, that they're deliberately pandering to an idea which they hopefully know is false and which is causing incredible anxiety in people. I remember when Greta Thurnberg was a big deal, I read through her speeches to Extinction Rebellion, and if you parsed them closely it seemed like she actually did have a somewhat realistic understanding of what climate change is. But she would never come out and say it, it was all vague implications of doom, which she was happily giving to a rally called "Extinction Rebellion" filled with speakers who were explicitly stating, not just coyly implying, that this was a fight for humanity's survival against all the great powers of the world.

But maybe there's nothing wrong with that. I despise lying, but as I've been rambling about, this is a very common lie that most people somehow seem unaffected by. Maybe the viral tumblr posts are wrong about the source of their anxiety; maybe it's internal/neurochemical and they world just have picked some other topic to project their anxieties on if this particular apocalypse wasn't available. Maybe this isn't a particularly harmful lie, and it's hypocritical of me to be shocked by those who believe it.

Incidentally, I believe the world is probably going to end within the next fifty years.

Intellectually, I find the arguments that superhuman AI will destroy the world pretty undeniable. Sure, forecasting the path of future technology is inherently unreliable. But the existence of human brains, some of which are quite smart, proves pretty conclusively it's possible to get lumps of matter to think - and human brains are designed to run on the tiny amounts of energy they can get by scavenging plants and the occasional scraps of meat in the wilderness as fuel, with chemical signals that propagate at around the speed of sound (much slower than electronic ones), with only the data they can get from input devices they carry around with them, and which break down irrevocably after a few decades. And while we cannot necessarily extrapolate from the history of progress in both computer hardware and AI, that progress is incredibly impressive, and there's no particular reason to believe it will fortuitously stop right before we manufacture enough rope to hang ourselves.

Right now, at time of writing, we have neural nets that can write basic code, appear to scale linearly in effectiveness with the available hardware with no signs that we're reaching their limit, and have not yet been applied at the current limits of available hardware let alone what will be available in a few years. They absorb information like a sponge at a vastly superhuman speed and scale, allowing them to be trained in days or hours rather than the years or decades humans require. They are already human-level or massively superhuman at many tasks, and are capable of many things I would have confidently told you a few years ago were probably impossible without human-level intelligence, like the crazy shit AI dungeon is capable of. People are actively working on scaling them up so that they can work on and improve the sort of code they are made from. And we have no ability to tell what they're thinking or control them without a ton of trial and error.

If you follow this blog, you're probably familiar with all the above arguments for why we're probably very close to getting clobbered by superhuman AI, and many more, as well as all the standard counter-arguments and the counter-arguments to those counter arguments.

(Note: I do take some comfort in God, but even if my faith were so rock solid that I would cheerfully bet the world on it - which it's not - there's no real reason why our purpose in God's plan couldn't be to destroy ourselves or be destroyed as an object lesson to some other, more important civilization. There's ample precedent.)

Here's the thing: I'm not doing anything about it, unless you count occasionally, casually talking about it with people online. I'm not even donating to help any of the terrifyingly-few people who are trying to do something about it. Part of why I'm not contributing is, frankly, I don't have a clue what to do, nor do I have much confidence in any of the stuff people are currently doing (although I bloody well hope some of it works.)

And yet I don't actually feel that scared.

I feel more of a visceral chill reading about the nuclear close calls that almost destroyed the world in the recent past than thinking about the stuff that has a serious chance of doing so in a few decades. I'm a neurotic mess, and yet what is objectively the most terrifying thing on my radar does not actually seem to contribute to my neurosis.

#x risk cw #futurism #we live in the future #long #rambly late night posting #history #religion

[cassianus]

New Podcast Up

Tonight we concluded letter 73 to Anastasia. Once again St. Theophan is seeking to help prepare her for the path that God has called her to take. Even though she is still living at home she is not to remove her hand, as it were, from the plow or look back. She must keep her focus intently upon Christ and not lose that gaze even for a moment. Walk circumspectly, he tells her. Guard your heart in all the ways that you have been shown - for God is a jealous God and would have your heart completely. In the rarest of ways she is to be the spouse of Christ, giving herself to him in mind and body and with an undivided heart. She must even admonish herself at times - knowing that she cannot rely upon her zeal or constancy. A life that is lived in half measures is destined for great sadness. This is true and whatever station in life or vocation we find ourselves. The consecrated virgin becomes for us the eschatological sign par excellence; we are destined to share in the fullness of the life of the holy Trinity and to be wrapped in an eternal love that would have us completely.

#philokalia ministries #st Theophan the Recluse

[epitome-the-burnkid-viii]

Apocalyptic news updates revealing good, evil, and much more!🔥 Come find my show #SupplementalBroadcast 🎱 #youtuberecommendedchronicles🔮 on YouTube & Rumble! New episodes posted regularly!!! 🧩 #CurrentEvents #Politics #Eschatology #News #History #TheGreatTaking 🙏

#youtube #youtuberecommendedchronicles🔮

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Als Sysadmins die Erde beherrschten

When the lockdown started, I got a ton of messages from readers  who were thinking of my 2005 story "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth," set in a sealed data-center where network admins struggle to keep global comms going in the midst of a global biowar.

https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth.html

I revisited the story then, recording a special reading of it on my podcast, where I recounted the circumstances of writing it, in the midst of the London 7/7 bombings, which hit my usual morning bus and my wife's usual morning train:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#eschatology-watch

It was indeed timely, and as the new edition spread around the world, I started hearing from IT workers who were living out a real-world version of the tale:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/09/all-hail-morlocks/#morlocks

A year later, the story still resonates. Christoph Jansen, a German reader, used the Creative Commons Non-Commercial/Share-Alike license and made an open access German edition ("Als Sysadmins die Erde beherrschten"), which I've hosted here:

https://craphound.com/als-sysadmins-die-erde-beherrschten/

#pluralistic