Oddbean

The signature pattern of evil is to turn meaning upside down, to mock truth. Its not simply to confuse meaning - it seeks to trick the righteous into working towards their own destruction. When you see this, have the courage to face this reality : it is on purpose.

That reminded me of this St Augustine City of God page, where he's pointing out to Romans that their gods apparently try to hoodwink the 'better people ' with clandestine moral instruction and purposely ignore instructing the rest of the public who run about direction-less. https://image.nostr.build/6461950794e026b3b4f4fc50862b2e418c78a3be07816e0895c4f958427b6018.jpg

The real God does that too. There's a verse where Jesus explains that he gives the true instruction to his disciples but only gives allegory to everyone else, so that they will be confused. That verse, IMO, has to be connected with the verse where he says the Haves will get more and the Have Nots will lose even what they have - paraphrasing of course, but I think he's talking about spiritual knowledge. The blind lead the blind, they don't have ears to hear or eyes to see - to tie in that verse from John. I should track these down and do a write up while its on my mind... Matthew and John, I think. With the Roman cults, I do think they got hijacked by what is essentially demons - idk if real demons exist, but I know a collective psyche can manifest, which is called "egregor" - that term seems to be in fashion right now, its popping up everywhere. IMO the core value of the cults was that they offered initiation to young men, which I think our modern society lacks, and the lack of an initiation leaves men vulnerable to even worse influences emanating from the media and academia. Its the search for initiation, instinctually, that causes people to throw themselves into a false worldview, such as socialism and its justifications (climate change, bad rich people) and wokeness. Maybe even false religiosity... Idk what the fix is... I just see that verse - to those who have much, more will be given ; to those who have little, even that will be taken. Its spiritual knowledge.

This quote is a little adjacent to your point, but since you mentioned " initiation of young men", the very next section contrasts what I assume is a Christian church service. St Augustine praises "the separation of the sexes". I normally read stuff like that and think about how much more advanced we are nowadays and scoff. However, since the rest of his stuff is so logical, I'm trying to think why does a smart man 1700 years ago see a need to separate sexes in a public place. In the back in of my mind the AI videos of giants building the pyramida are playing, and I'm thinking was it there dress code, maybe they use the same restrooms. Were they just so much healthier that their hormones and sex drive were better? Or is sex like a battery and he's keeping the terminals separate. And that's how they built all those aqueducts https://image.nostr.build/8f061ef60c92600673610edab250c013779522d99408a020278b3f3cda9f1aba.jpg

yeah, i couldn't find it in the time range i thought it was but it may have been further back... i might see if i can make nostrudel pull all my notes for the last few weeks and dump em on my newly deployed relay on my VPS

meh... way too much data to sift through, it's around somewhere, i made a reply, and i'm pretty sure it was to a post that Marakesh made of someone else's stuff the repost event id is: d3226b6e537a70b866ee83c09d48165d98e079104bf782f957f1bfd468c45d0e and their pubkey is: dace63b00c42e6e017d00dd190a9328386002ff597b841eb5ef91de4f1ce8491 the event that it reposts is: 5a3cf3e4b3dda1513148977f58e4d88ddddf57f58399934d3f1449105317d5a0 and the pubkey of the author is: 35c327905920ee1d1c2aa110208fc4f08807928dcea1ffbf9f3ad5418bbe56ea if you know of better tools to do these searches then you'll certainly find it

and yes, it was easy to find, just not easy to find where to find the rest of the thread it would be really nice to have a simple tool that just trawls all of the relays with a custom filter... actually, ... this would be the filter: { "authors":["dace63b00c42e6e017d00dd190a9328386002ff597b841eb5ef91de4f1ce8491"], "#e": ["d3226b6e537a70b866ee83c09d48165d98e079104bf782f957f1bfd468c45d0e"], "limit": 200 } i tried doing it with nostrudel's event console but it gave no results on my relay list, maybe you would have better luck

this is just a classic example of how broken nostr clients are i have no problem finding this event, EASILY by just grepping the output of my relay export probably if i just string some greps together i can find it...

i'm just exporting the entire db, running it through a two greps to find my npub and that post i'm replying to... maybe it will eventually find it... 120mb/s lol damn i'm just not sure why these clients don't find this shit, i write queries in the database and all that shit and pop in seconds

grep flagged a match on "binary" data so idk, this is another hint that there is something wrong with the binary codec i'm going to write some tests... i have a motherlode of events that i know at least some dozens or hundreds of these don't encode/decode correctly, i can just write a simple test that you feed this file to it and it spits out the ones that don't get through the encode/decode cycle