A while ago, I got into a bit of a weird habit. There were a bunch of emotional states I couldn't in any way remember. I always had to actually recreate the circumstances that led to them in their entirety, and only then would they resurface. So I practiced.
They are quite pleasant, so I played around. I couldn't recreate the perception, but I could, to some degree, bring up the reaction, which is all I initially wanted. I then imagined, daydreaming, what post-singularitarian technology I might want to employ to further enhance the state. How to make it more permanent, more intense, and so on. And as I went through the process, I noticed I had solidified the state, not to a high degree of perfection yet, but still absent any perception. I also noticed that I did not experience any habituation. I could maintain this particular pleasant state indefinitely, completely independent of anything else, if I wanted to.
In the spirit of my old lingo choice, I had unlocked Slaanesh. She was tempting me before, but never came under my full control.
I've retired anything I considered either broken, semi-embarrassing or useless. I thought about my old rule of never deleting anything, which I introduced for two good reasons:
1. Several times in my life have I become fed up with or wanted to isolate myself from stuff I had done, and deleted everything, including backups. Some of these deletions were good ideas, some not. I don't feel I need these drastic methods anymore, so I wanted to preserve everything because you never know.
2. I don't like when people take their stuff offline.
Still, there are important reasons for me to fully retire old stuff, and if you *really* care, the [git repo][Source] still exists and has all the old versions in it, so I haven't thrown anything away, just removed it from circulation. (Sorry if I broke your links. If anyone actually misses anything I removed, just comment, I'll put it up somewhere again.)
The sites are much smaller now and the content has been moved elsewhere. The "blog" is kinda closed. The logs (i.e. what you're reading now) are my real day-to-day writing location (well, for flexible interpretations of "day"). I first thought about merging the "main site" and "the blog", but just decided to keep the "main site" as an easy portal / "who the fuck is muflax?" site, and moved all decent self-contained content to the "blog".
I've merged the content from the other sub-domains - sutra and letsread - into the blog and closed these sub-domains.
For the sake of <del>my devout fans</del><del>obsessive internet stalkers</del> all three readers, here's my reasoning for some deprecations:
- The antinatalism FAQ is gone because I can't be bothered to repair it. It *should* be a serious (non-strawman) neutral overview of antinatalist arguments, but I don't care about that anymore, nor have I any interest in antinatalism left, so it's better to just kill it.
I've lost interest in antinatalism primarily because virtually all arguments for it are crap. The only defensible notion is that humans over-value their life satisfaction, but I don't see how that gets you down to anywhere close to indifference, even under really pessimistic assumptions. "Some techniques we think work actually don't" is a perfectly sensible position, and I'd agree that depression and suicide treatment is abysmal (because they aren't grounded in science and other buzzwords[^science]), and I even see how, based on only slightly broken assumptions, you'd conclude that a small minority of people is better off dead - but to get that number up to a majority? Nonsense, the evidence is firmly the opposite.
I also strongly disagree with the implicit values of most antinatalists, but that doesn't generally affect the arguments, and is not the reason I'm abandoning it.
[^science]:
Buzzwordy as it is, I actually mean it. People are way too confused about "depression" and "feelings", and don't think enough in terms of behavior. I can't pretend I'm a model reductionist behaviorist myself, but I certainly aspire to be one, fucktarded as I occasionally am. (Ok, often.) (Ok, please don't read anything I ever wrote.)
- The speed-reading post got deleted because it should just read "use shaping, idiot". I might write a new, better version (that would also be much shorter), or include "learn speed-reading" as an exercise in a future post that explains how to use shaping. Dunno, but for now, it's just gone.
- A lot of personal stuff is gone because I can't identify with the person who wrote it. It felt like hosting someone else's diary.
- I've deprecated the Dark Stance. It's not that it's wrong per se, but that it works differently than I thought, and my old presentation doesn't help you at all and is likely to just send you down the wrong path. There *is* a right path, and I still intend to teach it one day, but until then, you're on your own. If you can't re-invent it, you probably shouldn't be using it anyway.
First step, *which* Mark? For our purposes, we'll need to recreate a super-gospel by merging all parts that we're reasonably sure have been considered part of Mark by some early Christian or another (up to 5th century or so). We know we don't have any *direct* evidence what the "early versions" (wherever they came from) looked like, so we'll have to reconstruct the separate sources through higher criticism anyway. However, looking at *where* and *how* separate variants have been merged into the text will tell us how *other* variants have likely been inserted, even when we don't have the pre-merged manuscripts anymore.
You've probably heard of the Documentary Hypothesis, according to which the Torah is the result of merging four previously independent narratives into one text. This *may* imply multiple authorship, but it doesn't have to - the original author might've just used multiple sources and didn't edit out the seams. Before we speculate about specific authorship and chronologies, we first have to identify the internal layers.
So let's try to disentangle the layers of Mark!
Remember that the current chapter division is a late addition with considerable disagreement, so I've entirely disregarded it and added a new one, based on content and style. I've prepared a "complete edition" based on the [Open English Bible][] (because it is in the public domain). I don't consider this version definitive (yet), but it will serve us well until I can do my own translations. I have abandoned "chapters" and "verses" and have instead split it into *stories*. Because I don't believe in a "proper" order or definitive text anyway, I have also introduced a numbering system entirely based on content. Because this is the first collection, the numbering still follows conventional chronology. Later additions and new super-gospels won't.
As a naming convention, I'll use S-1 for the first story, or S-1-mark if I want to emphasize a particular version (compared to, say, S-1-luke). I've also given each story a name if it didn't have a conventional one already. The name does not reflect any interpretation; it is purely tl;dr. I've tried to highlight important interpolations in the text as well if there is good manuscript evidence for them.
Because I don't expect you to have memorized Mark entirely (or to read my complete version first, even though I've written longer posts than that before), we'll use this summary:
"Catholic" represents a way of thinking - an *attitude* - not a specific church. I agree that calling any pre-Nicene theology "proto-orthodox" is somewhat dishonest because there wasn't any mainstream consensus yet, but the *attempt* to establish an ortohdox, unified church certainly did exist, and that I call "Catholic".
Some of these are obvious, like the limitations on fasting. As RMP and many others pointed out, this points to a (late?) 2nd century editing of these sections. This fits into a fairly late composition of Mark in general (early 2nd century), which I find very plausible, but won't argue for here. I also reject Markan Priority, but again won't argue it here because our focus is not the relationship to Luke (and Ur-Lukas), but the distinctly Markan content. But before we get there, a few notes on some unrelated stories, which might still be of interest, if only as a reminder of some other mythicist themes.
Look how isolated the Legion arc is! I agree with the conventional reading that it is based on the encounter with Polyphemus the Cyclops in the Odyssey and so an attempt to remix a popular story to claim it for Jesus. Whether the version that finally got written down only *accidentally* also contains a straightforward political dig at the Romans, I'll let the reader decide.
The account of John the Baptist's death is fairly sympathetic to Herod. Contrast that with Matthew!
Note that in Jesus' rejection at home, we aren't actually told *where* that is. Mark takes no position on this because either it wasn't settled yet (likely), or because it is of little concern to its primary authors, who don't consider Jesus earthly to begin with and couldn't care less about Jewish midrash (except for trolling purposes).
Note that "the Nazarene" is used in all stories I labeled as Simonian.
Before
Some other layers are my interpretation. Let me explain.
- The Feeding of the 5000 and 4000 look like two variants of oral miracle stories, but the main reason I consider them parables instead is the focus on exact numbers. Jesus doesn't just feed them with a few loaves, but exactly 5 loaves and 2 fishes. These numbers are repeated again and again, and the same in the second telling, with different numbers. This makes them look an awful lot like a numerological inside joke - a reference maybe to a specific classification. There's even a later reminder by Jesus to look deeper. This makes me suspect design, but the oral interpretation is still very plausible. That I think they are *Simonian* parables is bit of a stretch because I have no idea what they mean or refer to. It is purely based on a hunch.
The problem is that the primary reason to suspect Basilides is that he fits the profile. Our reference pool is so small that we only know like three Gnostics, and if two of them couldn't have written it, and it looks Gnostic, well it must've been the third!
