And they're always in motels, aren't they?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=q_YJRe7yiZYCurious people's thoughts on Langan's take on God here.
First of all, this shouldn't have any bearing in your mind on the truth or falsity of his theories, but it should be known that his IQ claims are doubtful, and likely very exaggerated:
So here are my issues with the CTMU (I'm going to use some words and concepts from his paper so refer to it if you need it:
https://infolab.ho.ua/Langan_CTMU_092902(1).pdf):
1. He assumes that discursive human reason is capable of penetrating all of metaphysical reality, so he ends up making really bold cataphatic claims about the divine essence, identifying God as the "Global Operator-Designer," implying that He's composed of the same self-transducing infocognition as everything else, and even treating sentential logic as an intrinsic aspect of Him.
2. The paper deliberately attempts to establish only a generic deity rather than argue directly for the Christian God, and relegates his arguments for Christianity to separate writings comparing it to other religions (the only one I recall seeing is some basic lowbrow argument about Muhammad being a pedophile or something). He frequently refers to the CTMU as a "metareligion" and says things along the lines of "It can accomodate everything which is true from all the various religions" so he has a very perennialist bent.
3. His account of sentential logic emerging from Unbound Telesis through tautological self-reinforcement has a distinctly Gnostic flavor, describing an ordered logical principle arising from a primordial undifferentiated potential. However, this narrative appears internally incoherent. If Unbound Telesis is genuinely pre-logical, atemporal, and devoid of informational constraint, then there is no meaningful basis for any time-like causal arrow from UBT to the logical supertautology. The narrative is an implicit higher-order superlogical medium capable of relating these two states, creating the kind of "tower of turtles" explanatory regress that he himself talks about trying to avoid in the paper.
4. The claim that reality must be a closed linguistic manifold because anything in it needs to be isomorphic to the 'algebraic languages of perception or cognition' seems unjustified. I don't see how there's anything stopping you from having a metaphysical "black box" whose inputs and outputs are linguistically describable and interact coherently with the rest of reality, while its internal operation fundamentally transcends language.
5. The concept of telic recursion is presented as optimizing a generalized utility function, yet the paper offers almost no metaphysical account of what this utility function actually is. Where does it exist? How is it defined? Why should it exist at all? What is his justification for even believing in it? It's just completely ad hoc.
Jay Dyer is probably the most infamous of these obnoxious morons, and he's exactly what you pointed out: all talk and Xitter posts, nothing about actual doctrine. The only reason they pick up a Bible is to denigrate and purity spiral other Christians. Their favorite targets are Protestants by showing the most "woke" and cringe Churches possible while ignoring the same thing going on in theirs.
He has plenty of videos and debates about serious doctrine stuff, I think the disproportionate amount of stuff about making fun of woke churches and whatnot is because he wants to be a comedian while everybody else is expecting him to be a religious apologetics guy all the time, so he compromises. And I've seen him pull up the Bible for plenty of reasons other than "denigrating or purity spiraling other Christians", that's just false. (a couple examples: showing a Jewish caller the theophanies in the Old Testament, showing his viewers a passage from Proverbs he thought would be enlightening)
We don't need to say that Catholics have their own issues to deal with, but people seem to forget that the Orthodox Church is accepting of divorce and even abortion until around 2000.
Regarding divorce, do you seriously believe that it should never ever be an option? What if the moid is raping his own children or something?
Regarding abortion, your claim is false. Already in the 4th Century, St. Basil the Great taught that abortion is murder, and the teaching has remained the same ever since. Do you have a source to back this up, I can't even find what you might be referring to.
First off, anyone who writes a hundred notes on each page is proof you have no idea how to read.
They teach you to do this in humanities classes in college. It's so that you can reference and remember things you thought were important without having to reread entire paragraphs if you read hundreds of books and would otherwise have difficulty keeping all of the information straight. I personally don't find it useful but it's attributable to his background and has nothing to do with whether he knows "how to read."
It's a case of the lost and retarded following the equally lost and retarded. It would be funny if he didn't have so many people actually take him seriously, and if he can't get basic history right, you want to trust him with theology?
Him making a mistake about history has nothing to do with whether his theological arguments are true or not. This is like if the top part of this post where I replied to
@Twix Eatr consisted of nothing but this screenshot where Chris Langan mistakenly wrote
∨ and OR where he clearly meant ⊻ and XOR, and then I acted like that means he's a drooling retard and called anybody who bothers to listen to him stupid, while not actually adressing anything he says. It's stickling over snca details that aren't even relevant.
