1. It's a joke. The hyperbole is intentional, but it does communicate something relatable.
2. You don't need a citation. Probably anyone with enough software development experience understands the substance of the claim and understands that it is (1).
The correct thing to do is to annotate the code and the PR with comments. You shouldn't be submitting code you don't understand in the first place. These comments will contain the reasoning in the prompts. Giving me a list of prompts would just be annoying and messy, not informative.
Also, we should not be submitting huge PRs in general. It is difficult to be thorough in such cases. Changes will be less well understood and more bugs will sneak their way into the code base.
While I agree there’s a childish softness in our culture in many respects, you don’t need to go to extremes and adopt thuggish or boorish behavior (which is also a problem, one that is actually concomitant with softness, because soft people are unable to bear discomfort or things not going their way). Proportionality and charity should inform your actions. Loutish behavior makes a person look like an ill-mannered toddler.
The fountain is charity. This is no mere matter of sentiment. Charity is willing the objective good of the other. This is what should inform our actions. But charity does not erase the need for justice.
It’s possible to take two opposing and flawed views here, of course.
On the one hand, it is possible to become judgmental, habitually jumping to unwarranted and even unfair conclusions about the moral character of another person. On the other, we can habitually externalize the “root causes” instead of recognizing the vice and bad choices of the other.
The latter (externalization) is obvious when people habitually blame “systems” to rationalize misbehavior. This is the same logic that underpins the fantastically silly and flawed belief that under the “right system”, misbehavior would simply evaporate and utopia would be achieved. Sure, pathological systems can create perverse incentives, even ones that put extraordinary pressure on people, but moral character is not just some deterministic mechanical response to incentive. Murder doesn’t become okay because you had a “hard life”, for example. And even under “perfect conditions”, people would misbehave. In fact, they may even misbehave more in certain ways (think of the pathologies characteristic of the materially prosperous first world).
So, yes, we ought to condemn acts, we ought to be charitable, but we should also recognize human vice and the need for justice. Justly determined responsibility should affect someone’s reputation. In some cases, it would even be harmful to society not to harm the reputations of certain people.
What specific pathologies characteristic of the materially prosperous first world? People almost universally behave better in a functional system with enough housing food education and so forth. Morality is and will always remain important but systems matter a LOT. For instance we've experienced less murder since we stopped mass lead poisoning our entire population.
It's a paradox. We know for an absolute fact that changing the underlying system matters massively but we must continue to acknowledge the individual choice because the system of consequences and as importantly the system of shame keeps those who wouldn't act morally in check. So we punish the person who was probably lead poisoned the same as any other despite knowing that we are partially at fault for the system that lead to their misbehavior.
I think the analogy with dogs is flawed. Association is merely correlative, not causal. It is irrational per se, because it does not concern itself with causes. And the more time passes, the more options there are with which to form associations. So it's not a question of brain size or anything that this might be standing in for.
Human beings can with varying degrees of success reflect on their behavior. They can recognize how certain behaviors on their part might encourage certain responses among employees. More importantly, however, they can recognize which behaviors on their part are simply not good in the first place and learn to behave as they should. It's not a question of aligning domino tiles so they fall over a certain way. First and foremost, it's a question of justice and benevolence. Be just and be benevolent, not a domino-aligning psychopath.
Humor aside, to appreciate these recurring themes, if you will, requires knowledge of, e.g., typology. Here, the cross with Christ nailed to it is transfigured into the new Tree of Life. Other important typologies are Christ as the new Adam, Mary as the new Eve, and Mary through her womb as the new Ark of the New Covenant. Noah's ark and the Ark of the Covenant are not called arks coincidentally, either. And the Church is often called the Barque of Peter.
Think of Superman. His first sacrifice is the sacrifice of his time, attention, and effort for the good of others. He puts his power into the service of others. There are also times when Superman throws himself into situations when he is indeed in danger (usually involving kryptonite). He eventually sacrifices his own life to defeat Doomsday.
Furthermore, while later depictions of Superman only manage an allegorical approximation of the Christ figure, that that allegorical link is made at all is crucial, because it is suggestive. After all, Christ is the ultimate heroic figure. He is both God and Man, both invincible and vulnerable. Through his humanity, a kenotic act, he endures suffering and death to save mankind - an act that is not necessary, but as Aquinas says, most fitting - but through his divinity, he is not just a powerful being, but the fullness of power. The latter does not prevent the possibility of ultimate heroism. Even in his divinity, he has the fullness and perfection of heroic virtue. Meaning, what is most definitive in heroic virtue is perfection in charity, and God is the pinnacle and perfection of charity.
There's a lot of stuff to nitpick in the christ story but I've always thought they did a particularly poor job of justifying the sacrifice as being required.
I suspect it resonated more strongly with people of the era whose primary mode of interacting with gods was via sacrificial propitiations, modern relgions rarely stress that part.
> There's a lot of stuff to nitpick in the christ story but I've always thought they did a particularly poor job of justifying the sacrifice as being required.
Are there? Or are these gaps of knowledge?
For instance, you claim that "they did a particularly poor job of justifying the sacrifice as being required". The first problem is that no one claims it was absolutely necessary. God is not compelled or coerced by anything greater or outside of him. This is why I wrote "an act that is not necessary, but as Aquinas says, most fitting". It is most fitting as part of a freely chosen, greater providential plan that you can say best manifests the divine nature and especially in relation to mankind. You might call this a necessity relative to this plan or under the presupposition of this plan, but it is not absolutely necessary. God could choose to forgive sin with a snap of the proverbial fingers.
> I suspect it resonated more strongly with people of the era whose primary mode of interacting with gods was via sacrificial propitiations, modern relgions rarely stress that part.
What are these "modern religions"? New Age cults? Various Westernized consumerist varieties of Buddhism? Occult stuff like theosophy? Other neopagan attempts to retreat from history back into myth? Whatever they are, and putting aside principled criticism, their "modernity" already works against them, as empirically, it can take a little time for the inner faults of a worldview or religion to result in tangible crises. History is littered with all sorts of cults and heresies that have since long been swept into the dustbin of history. Does anything remember the Cathars, the Gnostics? (Curiously, we're experiencing a bit of an unwitting gnostic revival now in secular Western culture. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.)
In any case, modern ideologies often gladly dismiss the sacrificial demands of justice, because they first dismissed sin. And they dismissed sin, because they did not wish to think of what they desired to do as sinful. It chafes and eats at the conscience and contradicts a certain desire for a kind of ontological autonomy, which is to say, self-idolatry. But denial of sin - with sin as an choice taken with some degree of conscious assent - is always a bad move. Repressing such knowledge or losing the vocabulary to talk about it only places you in helpless submission to it. Every sin causes a disintegration of the self, however minor. The universally observed and conspicuous pre-Christian sacrificial propitiation of ancient peoples may have been mythological, but it drew from the well of the human psyche. (The tradition of the Church would say they prefigured the true and perfect sacrifice of the mass. Even here, many low-information Catholics, encouraged by the opportunistic cultural upheaval after Vatican II, have absorbed modernist sensibilities, failing to recognize that the mass is, above all, a sacrifice made on an altar.) There is no justification for the belief that modernity has somehow transcended the human condition and banished human nature. We have merely obscured the meaning of certain impulses at our own peril, dressing them up in what is often a flaky pop-psychological terminology. We still project guilt and scapegoat. We still experience the impulse, but without the proper outlets, it becomes a destructive and self-destructive force. The demand for sacrifice still exerts pressures on the psyche, whether it is acknowledged consciously or not, resulting in all sorts of weird and pathological behaviors and mental states.
1. It's a joke. The hyperbole is intentional, but it does communicate something relatable.
2. You don't need a citation. Probably anyone with enough software development experience understands the substance of the claim and understands that it is (1).
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