Christianity, with Jesus and the New Testament, claims to be the updated form of Judaism. Islam, with Muhammad and his Quran, claims to be the updated form of both of them. They form a chain of succession.
The Baha’i faith claims to be the next step after Muhammad and the Quran; that of Baháʼu’lláh with his Kitáb-i-Aqdas. His holy book is largely instructional and has very little narrative. The bulk of it is made up of rules to follow.
The Faithists claim the same succession from Christianity as Islam does, but with John Newbrough and his Oahspe. It’s a pretty bizarre tome and it’s massive. I haven’t studied it in depth though I do own a copy.
Thelema falls among these as well with Aleister Crowley and his Book of the Law. It’s the succession of Islam. Crowley received The Book of the Law from the Angel Iwass much like Muhammad did from the angel Jibril.. It’s the succession of Islam. The Book of the Law and the other Holy Books of Thelema are the new holy book for the new æon; the æon of Horus, the crowned and conquering child. It is the æon of the individual. Muhammad is a Thelemic saint, and a new Kaaba is Boleskine House.
“Abrogate are all rituals, all ordeals, all words and signs. Ra-Hoor-Khuit hath taken his seat in the East at the Equinox of the Gods; and let Asar be with Isa, who also are one. But they are not of me. Let Asar be the adorant, Isa the sufferer; Hoor in his secret name and splendour is the Lord initiating.” –The Book of the Law I:49
The Christmas truce of 1914 was a moment where humanity won. But it wasn’t to last. Instead of using that momentum to change the course of history. To stand up to their leaders and refuse to fight and forever do away with war, prejudice and national barriers. However everyone went right back to fighting the next day as if nothing ever happened. Letting that moment slip away. Humanity is tragic like that. Everything dark eventually snuffs out the light if we let it. Everything can go right back to the mundane ignorance of life, of love, and of freedom if we do not stand guard against such things. Do thy will, not the will of some pretentious “leader”. After all…
Given the subject matter I’m going to forgo the typical pleasantries.
I’ve watch a lot of videos about pedophiles getting caught and arrested. Stuff like To Catch a Predator. I find them cathartic seeing them be caught. People who without ambiguity deserve it. It’s a nice escape from the fucked up world we live in because it’s this little bubble of real world cases of people being stopped from being able to harm children. Every time they get out the handcuffs it’s a little moment of justice and it keeps my hopes up that there’s still good in the world and it’s worth fighting for. In this society so often the bad guy wins but in cases like this it’s nice to see the good guys win for a change, and outside of fiction to boot.
The demographics of what kind of people do this have been interesting. Never have any of them been women. Some of them have been gay. Plenty have been from all different ethnicities. However its only ever been men. I wonder why and I’d love to know the answer.
Throughout these videos, I’ve seen a disturbingly high number of times where they try to use Christianity as an excuse for their behavior or tried to use it as a distraction. No other religion has been used or even mentioned in all the hundreds of videos on this I’ve watched.
Beyond these videos, there’s been so many pedos who were church staff that got caught over the years that I’ve seen in the news. And there’s the whole thing about the Roman Catholic Church that I feel like I don’t even need to get into. So then, my question is, what is it about Christianity specifically that either creates or entices pedophiles? And why only ever men?
Rise of the Triad Ludicrous Edition just dropped. Rise of the triad is what Apogee developed after Id broke off to work on Doom. They used the Wolfenstein 3D engine and massively upgraded it. The original version was Rise of the Triad: The HUNT Begins was the shareware version. Then the retail version Rise of the Triad: Dark War was released, but it doesn’t include the content from the shareware game so it’s technically the sequel to that. Then later they released an expansion pack called Extreme Rise of the Triad. Then nothing for years until 2011 when the fans created a sequel in the GZDoom engine. It’s a standalone iwad. It replicates the design and gameplay from the original but expanded in ways that take advantage of the features in GZDoom. Then after a little wait, in 2013 they officially released Rise of the Triad (2013). It’s an upgraded game utilizing full 3D graphics. Despite the name, it’s not really a remake as it doesn’t attempt to replicate the levels etc from the original game but rather be an entirely new game.
More recently, the original Rise of the Triad game was released on Steam. When you open it, you have the option of selecting between The HUNT Begins, Dark War, and Extreme. Then recently a new project appeared on Steam slapped with a “coming soon” release date called Rise of the Triad Ludicrus Edition. It’s an updated version of the original games plus Return of the Triad, the fan game. Words cannot express how cool that is that they turned a fan project into an official game. I haven’t had the chance to pick it up yet now that it’s out, but I tried the demo and I’m already impressed. I’ll be grabbing it next paycheck.
The ridiculous ways tech companies have been talking about using AI would be laughable if it wasn’t so destructive towards real human jobs and their ability to make a livelihood to support them and their families. In short, AI isn’t what they want you to think it is.
AI uses probability to decide what’s next in the output. That’s why it’s able to fake human speech and art. However that technology is already a thing under a different name. It’s called autocorrect, and pretty much everyone knows how bad that is. All these tech companies hyping AI are essentially talking about shoving a supped-up version of autocorrect into everything, and are placing real human workers’ jobs in jeopardy while they beta test this disaster waiting to happen by unleashing that it on the general population to beta test. That’s why AI art is as wonky as it is and why it can only output text based on other text. It can only output art based on other art. It can’t create anything wholly unique beyond just something akin to the uniqueness of your kid exhibits placing letter magnets on the fridge before they learn to read. Sure, what they line up looks like a word you might put on the fridge, but “cafatw” isn’t an actual word.
When I’ve tried to put in a description of the art I want it to generate, I couldn’t get it to actually output my request*. It was a simple enough request any human artist could have understood and created without issue, but the AI failed despite making multiple attempts on my part to rewrite the original request statement in an effort to try to get any of them to generate what I was actually asking for. I tried various different AI art portals with the same disappointing result. In fact, the image it generated closest to the query were grossly malformed.
The problem is, if it doesn’t have something similar in its database to plagiarize, it just selects elements it does have that it determines is the next most probable element without any of the nuance or context that an actual human can understand with relative ease. The researchers call this phenomenon “hallucinating” despite having nothing to do with the kind of hallucinations a real human could experience. They’re trying very hard to humanize the thing to try to sell it to human investors, but it is fundamentally not human.
This capability of human conceptual understanding is what our brains seem to do best and what other species of animals seem to struggle with. It’s that ability that gave rise to the development of language, technology, writing, poetry, mythology, ritual and beyond. Without that capability, our society would never have been built. Sure, other species can communicate to each other through various means, but it doesn’t ever seem to be anywhere close to the kind of communication humans are capable of. After all, it’s why our species came to dominate the world rather than the myriad other hominid species roaming the Earth. It’s what gave us the advantage and the capability to survive in an ever-changing mostly hostile world. Without the power of language, it’s hard to coordinate anything at all. Imagine a group of dogs trying to build a skyscraper.
The human brain is a complex organ evolved to be very good at conceptual understanding. It’s not something a machine running probability algorithms to predict what words or images to use next is likely ever going to be good at. Unless something fundamental changes dramatically in the way this sort of technology is created and functions, it almost certainly never will be. Human biology isn’t even fully understood by humans in the first place and neuroscience is still in its relative infancy. (Though it’s amazing what human scientists and doctors can already do with what we do know.) Given that, and the complexity of such a task, how do you expect a bunch of IT nerds to be able to replicate that capacity in its entirety using machines? Why do we assume it’s even possible to create a functioning synthetic brain capable of the kinds of tasks humans do with relative ease? And beyond that, why even try to do that at all? Human artists and writers aren’t going away anytime soon. If paid well and properly valued as people, human creatives are capable of producing some of the best things this life has to offer. It’s the kind of things that make life hold meaning. Why would we even want to give such an important task to unthinking and unfeeling machines in the first place? If they could make mathematical computation processors behave in a convincing enough way to trick humans, we’d be robbing it of its inherent beauty and the wonder of the accomplishment.
Love is the law, love under will.
With a toast to human creatives, Vanessa
*I was trying to get it to generate an image of a woman in a full suit of armor emblazoned on the front with a unicursal hexagram holding a lance and the holy grail while the sun shines brightly behind her. Some of the best results are shown above. Some are unquestionably beautiful images, sure, and if it was made by a human artist rather than plagiarized from one, I’d be impressed, but it wasn’t, and it wasn’t what I asked for. The one closest to holding what I actually described is horribly malformed. Interesting that despite using several different AI art portals, most of them have come up with images that seem on the surface to be of the same person until you start looking closer at the details.
