Cult Logic - Plastic Pills on Religion I
Added 2025-03-23 03:49:44 +0000 UTCGetting back to it with a new bang. I've been storing up this latent content, and I hope it lands somewhere. This is about deflating philosophy into its primeval social form: religion.
Comments
I had to pause you so I could read Durkheim ‘Elementary Religion’…. half way through. What a book!!!!!! 1912 (noteworthy to compare to Freud’s Totem and Taboo and the essay on the Uncanny. ) Anyway… after this book I will read Weber Protestant ethic and also try and catch up on your content. So good. Too bad I have to work a stupid ass day job…….
Zachary Manenti
2025-04-13 15:35:27 +0000 UTCLook at Kenneth Burke's Sin-Redemption cycle.
DAT
2025-04-06 13:33:59 +0000 UTC41:35 - “Tribal societies struggling to survive in a hostile environment manifest a characteristic and considerable semantic effort to propitiate the gods, to discover scapegoats, and to consecrate the victims of unheralded calamities.” (Luhmann, Risk, 1993) Morality abounds in times of crisis, and who is less moral than the fascists? A functional de-differentiation of American society? Meanwhile my beloved UK government is rolling out facial-recognition policing. Maybe they’ll catch those work-shy loiterers making our economy stagnate!! Great pod.
John Stuart Pills
2025-03-24 10:44:39 +0000 UTCThe original point of the pills podcast to be sort of a new form of philosophical academia in a sense and I think the beautiful part is I have come to a similar conclusion and it happened when I was teaching a evolution class on hardy weinberg equilibrium and have been listening to the pod: If you stare at your nose for 30 seconds then stare up at a wall you can’t unsee your nose. Your nose is always there but your brain subjectively chooses to ignore it to minimize energy and distraction. Our brains seems fundamentally subjective at least in this sense. What is hypothesis testing? It’s just a way of seeing if the question we are asking is on to a pattern or not and we never accept the null because we never accept defeat. It is a way of introducing objectivity into the questions we ask biased by our subjective experience. There’s a fundamental bias variance trade off in all statistics. However, this is a mutualism because you need data points and also someone to communicate the idea to among other reasons it requires cooperation. Math is rooted in religion, in a literal genealogical sense. That’s why it pops up so often for a reason it’s sort of an expatiation in the jay gould sense kind of like bird feathers were originally adaptive to function like fur, then underwent sexual selection, then back to natural selection for wings in a adaptive cycle the same thing with math and religion adaptive mathematics comes from religion all the time. Abstract math versus applied in a way. Example reverend bayes is the sort of (he had the stats wrong a bit) first inventor of bayes therom and Bayesian probability methods and he invented these to have a framework to find god. Ironically, bayes theorem is computationally really expensive and not easily done since I think like the early 20s a psuedo religion of cladest formed and these people were viscous they would destroy the career of any one trying to build phylogenies with anything other than parsimony. But as technology advanced and Bayesian and maximum likely hood methods outperformed parsimony in forming accurate evolutionary narratives, parsimony is essentially just kinda a neat trick now I’ll shut up but if you want to talk more about any of this I would love to! And I don’t know how to say this but I feel like you teaching me nietche fixed my entire family life which has been destroyed since my mom died when I was a kid. So always keep your head up people are listening because you’re a grand saint pills thank you for every episode you’ve ever done!!!! 😛
Michael
2025-03-24 09:51:11 +0000 UTCGod is a shapeshifter
Alex B
2025-03-24 08:17:47 +0000 UTCwhen morale breaks down, so does morality.
warren the bard
2025-03-23 19:35:06 +0000 UTCi've never commented before due to a combination of insecurity and desire to never be seen. but now you've seen me first, in this episode. yes pills, yes. this is it. you've distilled philosophically exactly the noise that's been in my head for years, something i intuitively knew to be true but could never express due to no one ever taking it seriously. your best work yet. thank you. i used to be obsessed with the hard anti-theist stuff. the atheist experience, and the like. extreme 20-year-old behavior. but eventually i realized that they were exactly as dogmatic as the religious, and it all fell apart. we cant cut in line due to the Other, but what might happen if we did? you might be ostracized, you might be sneered at, you might be shoved out of the way. under a ritualistic social code of sufficient severity, you might be killed. The Other is in our minds, it overshadows Thought, but is then embodied in the actions of people, the body of God is expressed in Extension as human social relations. those relations are now breaking down: the body of god is decaying. look into mainländer. distill him through spinoza. you're on the right track. communists attempt to destroy the religious form of the state in order to actively create Communism: a benevolent god/society made up of conscious human relations for the benefit of all. the techno-faschoid-feudalist-whatevers are trying to destroy the religious form of the state in order to allow the god Capital to assume its full potential, and completely overwrite humanist/liberal society/the old god(s). the absolute pessimistic conclusion is that we're witnessing capital hit the level of development of a 20-year-old, and we're not anywhere close to its end. i mean, look at its most direct expression: elon musk. he might literally have the mental capacity of a severely disturbed 20-year-old. yes, this is a crisis point. now we have the (already determined) choice: do we go the way of kierkegaard, and assume the path of the faithful, then ethical? or do we go the other way, and eschew gods and society altogether? but if language, and society, and individuals, all are born through an interdependent co-arising, how coul you ever get rid of god? i mean.... deus sive natura. hm, sounds like abstracted "marxism" vs anarchism, respectively. zhuangzhi, eat your heart out. my recommendation to people going into uni: if you have to choose between them, dont study philosophy. study literature and narrative theory. it'll go further in our era of media disillusion and post-hyperreality. and, welcome back pills! we missed you.
warren the bard
2025-03-23 19:17:53 +0000 UTCGood to have you back Pills. Did you fire em all😋? You totally lost me on this one, but... Time to watch "The Sunset Limited" (2011). https://youtu.be/xJq5tqJVX9c?feature=shared
Mrityunjay Awasthy
2025-03-23 18:20:24 +0000 UTCThis was one of the most engaging (possibly responsible for dangerous inattention whilst driving)… I really hope it’s an abstract for a more fleshed-out series of talks
Marcus Elia
2025-03-23 15:31:16 +0000 UTCAnd welcome back!
Bobby Bancroft
2025-03-23 13:32:46 +0000 UTCI think the agents of change are an indicerable jumble of 'zealots' and performative zealots. Even within a single embodied subject, it seems to me that some brains exist with a paradoxical sense of personal identity: simultaneously adherants to a totalizing faith, yet totally faithless. Nice analysis. The problem isn't necessarily the opinion, or religious inclination but how hard we're clinging on to it.
Bobby Bancroft
2025-03-23 13:32:26 +0000 UTC25:11 Religion of the guillotine/Luigi -> religion for maintaining morality (I like to take this as "morale"-ity) when the ship starts to sink. Lol 19:48 is savage 😆. Yes, probably most people converting at that age without family members of the same religion is likely due to grasping crisis of the individual or as a fashion statement accessory of profilicity or whatever butttttt ... you can also have this occur in individuals that know they are playing a game yet still play it authentically. Say individuals who find genuine peace in practicing the rituals with near 100% bodily investment of attention. I'd say it's subversive but not in the traditional sense of the word, but in the Traditional sense of The Word.
ageOfBumFires
2025-03-23 13:31:54 +0000 UTCAlso one of your best pods yet. Thank you
Matt S
2025-03-23 12:44:55 +0000 UTCReturn of the pills!
Matt S
2025-03-23 12:25:56 +0000 UTC16.42..... https://youtu.be/vEiyBbP28g8?si=_o3BD0FF9bVNPHRF
Bobby Bancroft
2025-03-23 12:22:06 +0000 UTCWelcome back Pills!
Andy Madeley
2025-03-23 10:51:50 +0000 UTC
