The Deification Puns

I came across a note in my Orthodox study bible that blew my mind. Did you realize the serpent tricked Eve with the promise of deification? "You shall not die by death. For God knows in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil."

When all I knew was the protestant view of salvation, I skipped right over this. But now that I see salvation as theosis, it makes PERFECT sense that the devil would trick Eve by offering a shortcut (through disobedience) to her rightful destiny. Man, that's one crafty devil ...

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on us.

Recently I came across a very interesting meme comparing Dennis O Neil's contributions to Batman and Frank Miller's. It got me thinking about the differences of opinion the fanbase holds on who Batman and how he should ideally behave, as a 70+ year old character he has had numerous interpretations and characterizations but one thing that has remained consistent throughout is his no kill rule, which is something that I believe has two conflicting opinions as to why, some say it is because it would make him no better than the people whom he puts behind bars and others state that he does so because inherently believes in compassion and rehabilitation.

I firmly believe in the latter over the former, I think in recent years there has been a lot of emphasis on portraying Batman as some sort of infallible diety that is always prepared for the most absurd and unpredictable scenarios and as someone who is nothing more than a crime fighting machine that eats, sleeps ad breathes crime fighting and has no life outside of crippling and brutalizing those whom he perceives as criminals. I think a lot of the comics take his plot armour to ridiculous lengths and in a sense he seems to be divorced from rehabilitative justice and preventative action to more of an egotistical self aggrandizing Robocop that takes his anger out on whomever he can justify doing so on.
And I think works like All Star Batman & Robin, The Dark Knight Returns, movies like Batman Vs Superman and games like Batman : Arkham Knight really buy into that.

And don't even get me started on how Geoff Johns and others write him in Justice League and other team and Multiversal events they literally slather his batcheeks with plot armour lotion.

I think this whole obsession with Batman besting his opponents and being perceived as DC's Hallmark Professional Costumed Wrestler is really putting a dent in the kind of stories that could be and have been told and I would like to see more of. They completely destroy the man behind the mask and make the mask all that there is, Bruce's humanity, his moral struggles, his psychology and most importantly his relationships are often times unexplored by such narratives, especially his compassion and his drive to help others which is what he learned from his parents in the first place, all replaced by the urge to hurt others in the name of their murder.

I like the Batman in The Long Haloween, The Batman in Tom King's run, Grant Morrison's Batman, Dennis O Neil'

Palpatine was a politician first and foremost above being a wizard. He was arguably one of the greatest Dark Lords of the Sith, but he seemed to use the Sith as a means to an end. The Sith are inward thinkers who care only about themselves- they wouldn’t care about the Sith as a society or culture. During the Old Republic era, they might’ve cared, but Darth Bane’s Sith changed tactics once they released they could never destroy the Republic from without and impress their culture on the galaxy. Their goals are driven by desire and passion- everything is a means to an end. It’s not like the Jedi who strive for the betterment of others and the order as a whole.

The idea that Palpatine would spend 31 years being worshipped by a cult that slaps the word “Sith” on everything and toiling away creating living beings from the “dark arts” doesn’t fit his character or the Banite Sith. They don’t have a society, they are driven by their own desires. And even then, these guys are schemers and manipulators above wizards. It turns Palpatine from a brilliant mastermind to a generic mustache twirling bad guy with a new weapon of the week.

He’s not a god, he’s just brilliant. And Palpatine doesn’t use weapons to win wars, he uses his mind. His force powers help him out, but he’d still be powerful without them.

I'm about 4 episodes in and love the show. I appreciate komi's struggle with verbal communication and social anxiety, though I think I that a large part of the it could be attributed to the worship and outright deification of her character. Heck, her close friend Tadano is already a target for the whole school and he got kidnapped and almost murdered out of jealousy. If she is at the center of attention to all of these worshiping fanatics that could cling onto her every word, I think its justified that she would have such paralyzing anxiety. Even a stray comment or acknowledgement could have very serious consequences to the people surrounding her, no wonder she's so nervous all the time.

https://zscruggs.substack.com/p/godslayer?r=bjopi&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=

Marx don’t miss.

In a comparison of present hegemonic productive structures (bourgeois capitalism) the economist wish to ahistorically conceptualize the capitalist mode of production as the natural order of man as society. Just as the theologian relegated their religion as the totalizing explanatory realm of the world.

In its persistence, capitalism as an ideology has deified itself as eternal, just like every single power structure before it thought itself the natural order of man, and god of society. With each revolution man qua man killed yet another ruling class socially imposed god, in its momentum toward post-scarcity.

Now we’re here. In the twilight of capital, trying to kill the commodity form, a god that necessarily requires some social self-destruction.

We can carry that abstraction forward, into the the larger concatenation, the abstract holy grounds of the commodity, the market, autonomous, and behaving much more like the destructive Gods of the Old Testament, of Zeus enraged, of the world destroyers.

This begets the question, how, historically were the old gods replaced by the new? Explanatory power, and social revolution in production. Marx, in demystifying capital, did what the revolutionary scientists of modernity did to the mysteries of nature systematizing scientific literacy, what the Christ figure did to the Judeo curtain of separation from God to common man, to making the form of God inherently human. Marx made the mysteries of money and commodity accessible, understandable, and knowable.

Know thy history; to kill a god one only need to unravel the mysteries of its divinity.

>Many Christian writers—including those of the New Testament—consciously or unconsciously re-inscribed divine traits of Mediterranean gods and deified figures into their discourse concerning Jesus. The result was the discursive deification of Jesus Christ.
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>As the adjective “discursive” indicates, the term “deification” does not mean that Jesus was thought to become a god (a theological statement), but that Jesus came to be depicted as a god (a historical judgment). Both kinds of deification are “processes” of a sort. One process is “emic” and focuses on Jesus in Christian theology (or christology), the other is “etic” and focuses on the conceptions of historical Christian communities that worshiped Jesus. Although from an emic point of view, early Christians accepted the unique divinity of Jesus, from an 'etic' perspective they also played an active role in constructing that divinity through their literary depictions of him.
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>The poet Ovid once wrote that “gods, too, are created by verse” (di quoque carminibus . . . fiunt) (Pont. 4.8.55). What was true for other gods was also true for the god Jesus: in their gospels, epistles, apocalypses, poems, and apologetic tractates, Christians constructed what it meant for Jesus to be divine using the language, values, and concepts that were common in Greco-Roman culture.

M David Litwa, Iesus Deus

This is quite an obscure question, so I'm not really expecting an answer, but would like to hear others' thoughts on the matter.

I'm one of the rare breeds of people who actually enjoy Shakespeare's History Plays, and have a reasonable familiarity with them. A theme I have noticed crop up is that the plays' kings can see themselves as ordinary, vulnerable humans. Of two examples of note, the first would be the famous 'Let us sit upon the ground' speech of Richard II, where the titular monarch says:

>For you have but mistook me all this while:
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>I live with bread like you, feel want,
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>Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
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>How can you say to me, I am a king?

The second example is from Henry V, who monologues:

>And what have kings, that privates have not too,
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>Save ceremony, save general ceremony?
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>And what art thou, thou idle ceremony?
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>What kind of god art thou, that suffer'st more
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>Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?

Both speeches, among others, highlight the ordinary nature of kings that is masked by the pomp and circumstance. They suffer just as much as their subjects, if not more so because of all their cares. This does not necessarily make the character seem worse; indeed it could show their strength through withstanding their greater worries.

But my question is how would Shakespeare's audience, especially his royal audience, have seen such scenes as these? Would it have seemed in any way offensive to the monarchs of the day to suggest that they too are troubled, ordinary figures who are shrouded in a ceremony that inexplicably commands obedience? Or rather did his audience accept this as literary character-building, creating more fleshed-out and dynamic characters whose natures should not be extrapolated to contemporary rulers? Clearly, given that Shakespeare was not sent to the Tower to have his head cut off, it cannot have been in any way treasonous, but I wonder if there was any reaction towards it, positive or negative.

In much of the material i've read during my initiation i have come across the subject and find a pull to study and possibly pursue it as a long term goal in my own path. I have studied it and understand it a bit however i'm curious to learn more about it and how this is attained in forms of high magick.

In my own research it seems there are many forms and ways to pursue this but it has my interest, usually i only hear about it in slight ways or brief mention. Are there any good sources or texts which go further into detail about this and how it is done?

Nujabes is and always will be one of the top artists listed in chillhop/lofi, and his legacy lives on very well, especially on the indie/underground scenes of these genres in 2021.

But Nujabes was, in essence and in his own words, an ordinary guy.

He was much more a collector of music, a junkie, who found a particular liking to Latin Jazz that is seen all over his work. After all, he owned a record shop in Tokyo and collected all kinds of rare vinyls.

Lately, I find the amount of praise heaped onto him fairly ridiculous in the sense that none of this praise ever makes its way to the artists of the original samples. It also wildly over-extends Nujabes production ability. He was no J Dilla, in fact, he was an amateur producer clearly still learning (also his own words), who had an insanely good taste for finding samples among jazz songs.

Some of his songs almost seem downright stolen in the sense that the entire song is an un-adulterated or modified sample with a fairly standard beat. No real rythmic modulation. Maybe a hi/lo pass filter. I hear people describe 'his sound' as dreamy, fluid. No thats not HIS sound, thats Ivan Lins' sound, thats Yusef Lateef's sound, that's Una Ramos' sound, that's Laurindo Almeida's sound.

Ill end by stating that Nujabes will always be one of my favorite artists, but more for introducing me to these other giants I would have never found without his help.

Declaring a dead pope a saint and declaring a dead emperor a god seem pretty similar. The ideas that a deceased person is worthy of a public cult and can intercede on behalf of those who pray to them also seem very pagan to me. Is this practice a continuation of pagan deification and worship?

So, every couple of years, I go and check whether I can find any news on that fantastic trailer that dropped a couple of years ago for the movie Master Jiang and the Six Kingdoms. Now, I found this ScreenRant article that stated that the movie got changed quite heavily: Not only did it drop its hand-drawn style (which I was aware of because wasn't this movie originally supposed to be animated by just two guys?) but it also got retitled and I don't really know how much of the concept from the original trailer remained since I haven't seen Jiang Ziya yet. Apparently, it came out in October of last year. Can anyone confirm that this is that movie? Also, how much of the original concept we see in the 2016 trailer is still in the movie?

There is also talk about it being the next entry in "the Fengshen Cinematic Universe" (going by Wikipedia) as a sequel to Ne Zha. (2019). This does honestly seem a little weird to me: Like, who would've thought in 2016 that Master Jiang and the Six Kingdoms would go on to become the sequel to China's highest grossing movie? Is it just because they share the same source material with the Investiture of the Gods novel? And what is the deal with this cinematic universe? All the sources I can find on this are in Chinese.

Thanks in advance. :)

Hello everyone,

So I have been studying the Ahmadi religion for several months now and have gotten into various debates or dialogues with Ahmadis on their unofficial Discord server before I had suddenly been banned for spurious reasons.

One thing which I had noticed when speaking and debating with Ahmadis is how many of them happily ridicule amongst themselves Orthodox Muslims over some of the miracles that the vast majority of Orthodox Muslims have interpreted from the very beginning of Islam differently to how they shamelessly do so.

For example, many of these young Ahmadis I would dialogue with would openly amongst themselves mock the idea of Isa عليه السلام returning from the heavens to the point where they'd happily misrepresent the Orthodox Muslim belief and go as far as to label our conception of Isa عليه السلام as "superman" or "superhuman".

At the same time they would mock the idea of Orthodox Muslims believing that by the support and will of Allah عزّ وجلّ‎ the son of Mary had really raised the dead (not metaphorically) or actually spoke as a newborn. In doing so, they usually in their mockery and arrogance charge the Orthodox Muslims without shame of committing SHIRK for continuing in persisting and believing in such beliefs.

It would get to the point where if someone tried to highlight to them that the above claims of a superhuman Isa عليه السلام or accusations of SHIRK are all based on misrepresentation of Orthodox beliefs that they would usually move onto other topics; namely their favourite topic, the so-called death of Isa عليه السلام.

It seems they do not care to mention that Isa عليه السلام would descend by relying on the support of two angels and by keeping hold of their wings rendering any comparison to "Superman" as fallacious since Isa عليه السلام would not be able to "fly without support" or "fly" at all.

They even care not that the claim of SHIRK is answered in the same Ayah's they and Christians misinterpret since the Ayah's they allude to 1.) usually include the words "with the will/permission of Allah" and 2.) Isa عليه السلام made supplications for such signs and miracles to occur and this would be something discernable if they were familiar with the true character of Isa عليه السلام when he supplicated for signs/miracles to be shown at the request of his disciples. See Al-Ma'idah 5:112-113.

It should be noted if they prefer not to listen to me, then why not for once listen