ParaTulip

This has all been a bit vague and nebuelous, so I hope you do not mind me bringing in a more concrete case. How do you feel about this case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, the 2025 Supreme Court of the United States? I assume by your use of the phrase "Pursuit of Happiness" you are either US American or somewhat familiar with the laws and customs of the same.

What about beliefs over innate minorities? Consider the case of children. Unless something has gone majorly wrong with a society, children are rarely the majority group compared to adults. Further, it is a common belief among many structures of family that parents are entitled to some measure of ownership and rights over their child. Can this structure be allowed? Further, does this mean we ought to accept belief's like "It is harmful to my child to witness certain practices or representations"?

So, you are saying Roshar just has a terrain based moral debuff, and Scadrians have units that can alter unit morale. Fascinating. Too bad the RTS genre is dead.

I think you too my words too directly. What I meant to draw was an analogy to how engaging in probabilities with infinities behaves non-intuitively. This is not very meaningful, but it the forum converting "C\:" into an emote really messed with the vibes. Does d colon... I actually have heard a good account of how to make that make sense, but it is more to do with the nature of God and hell. Now, I am going to preface this by saying I don't see the premise of a "soul" or a "next life" or any such thing as being meaningfully real. Never the less, there are interesting thought exercises that emerge from the idea as a sort of anti-unifromitarianism for morality. The idea goes that rejecting God in life means being without God in the afterlife, in accordance with the freedom of the individual. However, since God is identical with The Good in a sense like Plato meant such, then the goddless residence of the soul is without anything good in proportion to how much the soul rejected God. I would further note that rejecting God does not just mean the truth claim of God existing, but also the claims of what God says is the right way to live. This idea fits well with a ontology of evil where there is not such thing as "evil in itself" but only the profound absence of good from something. Ergo, a wholly Godless realm would be a realm of evil. Also, what is up with all of the accounts named "Ookla the" all of a sudden? I think what you are hitting upon are the questions of cosmopolitanism. How do we have a society where people hold differing fundamental values? Is such a society good? If so, are there any limits to what tolerant society can tolerate without its tolerance being compromised?

I just like picking at logic and arguments. I agree with your conclusion: I too am against organized religion and ideas like gods or God that call for worship. Point F seems really weak due to the use of the notion of infinite possibilities. Imagine the geometry problem of "where will a dart hit on a dartboard?" If we imagine the dart board as being a finite plane, which is composed of infinitely many points, and we suppose the dart is a line, which is 1 point wide, then each point on the dart board only has a 1 out of infinity, or practically 0, chance of being hit. I think this shows that probabilities do not work properly with infinities that emerge from continuous possibilities. I also suggest you consider reading Spinoza's Ethics or some secondary work that brings up the idea of God developed there. Spinoza's God is something like "The sum of all existing things", which I think is very interesting to think about.

Oh cool, new data for people who want to keep theorycrafting Roshar vs Scadrial war stuff. Turns out the Scadrians have a higher morale stat. Not what you would expect from the vibes of each planet.

Just to note something here: Most religions don't have the kind of "impossibly more than a person" being that is the God of Abrahamic religion. The hellenic 12 divinities were all kinds of petty and crappy to each other and mortals, but they were considered so supremely powerful that it was absurd to oppose them. Ishtar famously got super mad that Gilgamesh wouldn't sleep with her, so she unleashed the bull of heaven. The gods of the Aztecs spent so much of themselves in making and maintaining the world that they needed humans to sacrifice of themselves or make offerings of others to continue to make the sun rise and the world function. The notion of an all-wise, all-loving, God of all things who cannot be meaningfully harmed by the affairs of the mortal world is not the only way to conceive of the divine. I think we can't really judge the state of Scadrial and how important it not being destroyed due to the events in the Elendel basin region is without knowing how the southern continent is coming along. Maybe they are actually doing a lot of good progress besides retreading the early 1900s of Earth but without any of the radical social potentials.

That is just what it is to wield power as a sovereign. Jasnah's position is one where she thinks the power of monarchy is bad in the abstract, but that she is wholly willing to use it to achieve good ends. This doesn't make her aims false. She is still clearly against slavery as well as aristocratic class privilege and sexism. Also, the kind of reform Jasnah is doing doesn't actually require mass literacy. Elsewhere, I have made the point that she is basically doing the Napoleonic reforms, including introducing a new law code. France was not that widely literate in the early 19th century. The thing Jasnah should gain in place of the feudal ties that she can't use any more is a wild devotion among the common people, though the fact her reforms were in place for less than a year might mean no one even got to enjoy them.

This example isn't actually so bad if you are just doing ring counting in a base of 3. Basically, rather than counting in a line that extends indefinitely, you count in a circle that goes 0, 1, 2, 3, and then loops back to that first 0. Most computers tend to behave a bit like this when doing integer operations, but with a much bigger circle that includes negative numbers and is way larger. Pascal's Wager has a problem when you consider any other religion though. Like, why not become a worshiper of Juipiter in the tradition of the pre-christian Romans or embrace Tzecatlipoca as the god of the black sun that is the night sky? Or if the religion needs to be actively followed by a large number of people, why not Buddhism or some form of Hinduism? Pascal's Wager seems to only work in a world where there is only 1 religion. I am going to have to demand a source on that claim for at least Julius Caesar. I have read some of his account of the Gaulic war in the Latin. I don't think anyone claims to have any extant texts written by Jesus' own hand that correspond to major historic events like that.

Ehhhh, this one is dubious. It is more like she's started a process of domesticating and training spren instead of just abducting them. That's not really symbiosis; in real life humans don't have a symbiotic relationship with our livestock. But yeah, Jasnah's whole project was about trying to get the portion of Roshar that she coudl control to stop being one of overwhelming special privilege and oppression.

Yeah, I am good. I am not so invested in being some kind of anti to the LDS movement that I would want to do a master's degree worth of work about it. This is an intellectual passtime for me on a web forum. I have some passion for my own ideas, as you clearly do yours, but I am content with noting the gaps I see in the assumptions of religion while trying to remain polite. There's a nice tension to it. If I was going to put that much work into understanding the hermeneutics of a text, I would probably do it for something more distant to the USA like taoism, the vedic traditions, or Islam. Seems to me like I would experience more distinct ideas that way.

Maybe not creating Adhesion Fused was part of the math that went into making the Unmade? Could be that it would simply be more difficult for Odium to enable that power by whatever unit of accounting the balancing rules Koravellium came up with.

Then he was a remarkably creative person, just like the authors of the Iliad and Oddesy. Those stories are really long, with lots of characters and they are regarded as foundations for the entire tradition of literature in Europe. Their authorsseemingly composed them and passed them down for generations without writing. I actually had been told that Muhammad was illiterate and that was seen as a sign of the divine inspiration of the Koran, but apparently that's disputed. I know that our modern society. where literacy is assumed to be something every intelligent person posseses, gives the impression that illetarate people are mentally defective, but the truth is that many creative and intelligent people are simply not afforded the opportunity to learn. Furthermore, I am reminded of the work of Plato, Phaedrus, and of some idea from Nietzsche, on the importance of forgetting. In the former, there is a point made by Socrates that writing has changed, and perhaps in some ways impaired, the way people learn things. If you have ever been made to memorize a poem or learn lines in a play, you might understand what Socrates meant by this. When information is held solely in the mind, rather than being able to be accessed from a page, it is able to become part of how someone thinks. I think most students find memorizing things tedious, since we have come to be so used to our cybrog brains that store memories outside themselves and can devices to perform computation, but what we miss in this is that the taking into the self of these patterns changes how we think. Consider the history of China, where government officials were expected to memorize notable works by Confucius and scholars of his ideas, and were tested by exams. The effect of this process were to make the officials have the thought processes which were believed to be desirable for a stable government. But on the other hand, being too ladden with memory is like being chained down. Neitzsche saw in those who knew less the profound ability to think in new ways, because they were not falling back on prior ideas. To see this another way, a person who travels through woods without being told the way makes a new way. Combining these notions, someone who was illiterate, but who still came to know some amount of Christian Scripture, would be the exact kind of person who would produce a highly novel addition to it to the canon. Such a person would not think to reach into the centuries long discourses of theologians for answers to their feelings of wrongness with the existing narratives. Also, Smith was involved in protestant Christianity before starting his own church. He would have had a basis to iterate upon from that.

Okay, so this is your question? I don't think this is the right way to view the text becoming controversial. Smith's group became such a controversy because of how they clashed with their neighbors and yet went on to colonize what is now Utah, ensuring the group's continued exstancy. That and Smith got up to the classic new religious movement behavior thing of having intimate relationships with young women. This happened with a bunch of reformation era figures too. As for how an illiterate person could craft such a narrative, it's not like storytelling is a skill only found in literate cultures. I am willing to accept that Joseph Smith was as sincere in believing that he thought his ideas came from a supernatural source as William Blake, the Prophet Muhammad, or Siddhartha Gautama, but that doesn't mean I believe any of them to be right. While the historicity of the claims of the blind poet Homer originating the epic cycle of the Trojan war are dubious, it's generally believed that the whole 10 part cycle was transmitted orally for a long time before ever being written down, meaning that it's creator too was without the written word. This doesn't mean actual divine muses gave the stories to their author, right? Also, if you mean "literally how did his ideas end up on a page" I thought it was common knowledge that he had a scribe? Like, even as someone with little particular interest in these details, I had heard this.

Yeah, it's got a lot of what makes Hunter x Hunter surh peak shounen battle manga (powers that are expressive of characters, intense emotional drama, excellent art) but with a story that has a clear path towards its conclusion thanks to well thought out settup and payoff. Also, Gojo. He's so great. https://www.crunchyroll.com/series/GRDV0019R/jujutsu-kaisen

@FRENZEE, I am not going to engage with the archeology stuff. I have very little background on the history of knowing who knew what about where in the 19th century America. I have simply never taken too keen of an interest in such. I have a small interest in the Aztec myths around Tzecatlipoca, but that's a different matter. I will say that the stuff about olives reminds me of people who believe that Shakespeare's works were not written by someone with the biography of William Shakespeare, supposing that he was either a noble who hid his status due to the recent War of the Roses or his works were actually composed by someone else. Either way, people can just learn about things even if they are not getting formal education. Or Smith happened to live near someone trying to grow olives. They are pretty widely cultivated. Olive oil is good stuff. This is what makes religion something that irks me. What is good in people, to me, is that we are each unique and we are each transient things. We are like flickering flames against an infinite dark, all the more wonderful to watch for that we will snuff out and never come again. But then religions like Christianity, Islam, and Pure-Land Buddhism come and smother this. They suppose the lives we live are mere preparation for something else, that the point of life is not even found in death, but in more life beyond death. All people are to be given over to a single purpose, and in such they surrender so much of their true ability to be unique by will. If you want your life to have a purpose, then choose one and pursue it. If you want your spirit to linger, live such that a great many people will recall your life. Gilgamesh is still with us because the idea of that most ancient hero is still understood. Religion acts so much like opium in this. By the same means that it removes the pains of fearing death or the dread of being faced with the freedom to choose but one way to live our lives (this second idea is well formed by Jean Paul Sartre), it also removes the ability to seize upon the finite time we have in life. Worse still, like opiates, it tends to threaten those who attempt cessation with all manors of new pains and agonies in withdrawal, both in the threat of hell but also in the form of whatever social punishment is put upon apostates. Where, vaguely, do you live? What sort of religious community are you thinking of? Where I am, I would imagine that there are communities around attending music concerts that are larger than the average church congregation, since Philadelphia has a strong live music scene and also the churches tend to be on the smaller side.

I don't think Kaladin or Chana, just to pick two Heralds, seem like the kinds of people to want to be some other Shard's warrior for all time. Kaladin wants to be done with fighting already, and Chana literally wanted out of that all so badly that she had several children and was willing to murder her daughter to escape her struggle. Even after loads of therapy, I doubt they are going to enlist in some post-Retribution military order.

I think that seeing it as a discordance might be extending the framework that was layed out by the example of Sazed and Harmony too far. Consider: Is the Dor in concordance or discordance? It's not really clear. I think it might be better to use a different framework from Scadrial: Push vs Pull. With Harmony, Ruin and Preservation are pulling each other towards one another, restraining both from taking much deliberate action. The Dor would be in a Push configuration. The manifestation of the Dor in the CR is emitting energy and the two Shards are seemingly trying to disentangle; Fjorden is trying to make the whole world follow the pattern of Dominion while Elantrians are showing up away from Sel. I see Retribution as in a Push and Pull configuration right now, but the stability of this is probably not great. Odium is in a Push state, Taravagian is no longer drawing in the feelings of his followers. Meanwhile Honor is binding his actions and making his past deeds harder to get away from. I could imagine that a Pulling Odium in this would enable something like Redemption, where the combined dishard is really useless because all it is trying to do is soak up to negative psychic energies from people seeking to escape bindings while giving form to new relationships to replace that bondage; here I am using old meaning of redemption, which is "to return from enslavement" and not the more common one of "to restore to good moral standing". The two meanings are entwined due to particularities around Christian metaphors around the meaning of original sin.

I don't think this is actually true though. Sometimes things are a matter of taste, but facts do exist. Something more like "My truth shall not be a tyrant" gets at the idea that people can see things differently without denying objective reality or the idea of having values that one sees as needing to be universal.

What you are describing here is a notion of factuality and with a touching upon the existence of systems of knowledge. I imagine the kinds of truth that a Truthwatcher is meant to be sharing and uncovering are much more about how systems of knowledge work or about factualities which have been distorted. For example, a Truthwatcher would probably be more interested in showing how Singers and Humans are able to be united, that it is true that peace can exist between them, rather than the specific facts of how horneater biology works.

Why do you suppose only humans have these traits? I can agree that humans have the most elaborate social systems of any animal, but how does a bird not exhibit agency when it flies a certain way or sings at a certain point in time? This notion smacks of Descartes' thought that everything that can't engage in Philosophy lacks a soul. This idea wasn't even wholly convincing to people contemporary to Descartes, and I think we mostly carry it forward because it soothes the discomfort industrial animal agriculture gives people. As for the ability for predict the outcomes of actions, doesn't a crow dropping a nut on a road to get cars to crack it demonstrate a certain sophisticated ability to anticipate the outcomes of its actions? Or any animal which can be trained to engage in complex behaviors must be able to predict the outcome of a reward. Finally, the notion of the conscious is something I am going to have to ask you to explain as a distinct notion apart from our capacity to form complex social organizations. What is it exactly? I can hardly imagine such a thing that is not able to be seen as a synonym for herd/pack/colony behavior patterns seen in other animals, an instinct to conform. To address the OP, I really would need to be told which form of God is being asked after for this. I definitely do not believe world, in the grand scope, is the product of any form of intelligence that especially cares about humans. But if anyone knows Branch Spinoza's notion of God, then they know that such a thing is absurd to suppose does not exist. Yet, since Spinoza described this idea, people have been keen to note that Spinoza's notion of God is nothing more than nature.

Maybe more pithy as "I will not allow my ignorance to stop me from doing what is right."?

The examples we have of 4th ideals are kind of sparse, but it seems like they are either goal driven (Ideal of Crusade for Skybreakers, "I want to understand you" for Bondsmiths) or about tempering intensity of the prior ideals ("I will accept there are those I cannot protect" for Windrunners). So I imagine the Truthwatcher one would be "I will restore lost truth" (which has a completion requirement) or it is "I will not make the truth a harm to others".

I could see it being something like "I will embrace challenging truths." this could be worded as "the truths that change me" or "the truths that are uncomfortable". The Enlightened version would be"those truths I/others despise".

To get back at trying to work out what we can know about the topic of god metals, we have only three points of canon data, granting the atium retcon which makes them actually a bit clearer. Those are: Pure Lerasium, Atium-Gold alloy (Malatium, the 11th metal, etc), and lastly the Electrum-Atium alloy that everyone had just been calling Atium in era 1. Lerasium seems to give a person a strong Connection to Preservation, such that they become a Mistborn, and that Connection is passed down genetically, such that their children tend to be mistings and mistborn. The two versions of Atium we see both seem to reverse the targeting of the internal temporal metals; Gold-Atium shows another person's potential self while Electrum-Atium shows all other future actions instead of the users'. This suggests to me that there's at least two possibilities for a God-metal's effects, maybe having to do with how the Intent of the Shard in question relates to Preservation. Either the metal adheres the user to the Shard in some way, or the metal produces some kind of abberation in the normal burning of an alloy. I would also note that Elend seems to get Leras' plans in a leap of intuition, so that adhering might take on a kind of Cognitive dimension as much as a Spiritual one. So, for Tavastium, it might produce something like an innate ability to use the surges of the honorblade from which the metal is taken from. An aside: Does anyone have any clue what makes each honorblade have different functions? My guesses would be that they are either alloyed with some amount of mundane metal(s) or it's their physical shape. I lean towards the first one, since I feel like chipping the blade bondsmith blade would have done something really weird otherwise. If that's the case, the pure Tanavastium might be impossible to get without trying to refine it out of the Honorblades. Either way, I imagine this connection to Honor would come with some intuitions towards what the words to radiant oaths are. The effeciency of this ability is probably really bad, like as bad as the Honorblades but with a lower maximum output, since it's Connection to Honor via a material process and not oaths, and it's only part of the honorblade is being used. Raysium is harder to guess at, since it's only known property is conducting Investiture. I assume burning it is bad for the mental health of whoever is doing it, since Odium's investiture seems to be negative mental health juice, but otherwise I would just imagine it being able to move Investiture between bodies while burned, a kind of Chromium plus, but I think that guess is based on the intuitions that came from Atium being presented as unalloyed. Otherwise, it might provide an effect like how Curse Energy in Jujutsu Kaisen is created: The consumer of Raysium produces Voidlight when experiencing intense, overwhelming, emotion. This would fit in with how Taravagian "feeds" Odium with his own intensity and how Rayse used to drain away his follower's emotions.