When 13 i use to code till 1-2 am. In school I slept with my eyes open till 11. The information was stored and organized but I was unaware of it. I remember tests where all of the questions talked about topics I never spend a conscious thought on. But I knew all the answers. Quite the surreal experience.
Teachers sometimes wondered if I was still in the room or they just asked questions. My mind would grep the most recent chunk of speech, parse it and respond as if nothing unusual was going on. The mind raced but I talked slowly to portray the slight delay more natural.
I learned you don't want other people's bullshit in your head. It needs to be questioned first.
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lucidity-lucid-dream-journal/i...
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.b3nz.lucidi...
Started building it 14 years ago after reading an article about lucid dreaming in my favorite science magazine, and no other apps out there existed to assist you with reality checks and the different induction methods. Recently added a 7-day lucid dreaming journey to guide you to your first lucid dream. I worked with lucid dreaming researchers for the program's content.
Feedback welcome!
So called Sleep Learning systems have been around for over 100 years but to date there is no rigorous suggesting that any of them work for acquisition of new information and/or skills.
I'll never understand HN's fascination with obvious pseudo science.
Lucid dreaming is just an unusually awake form of dreaming. Not surprising that they can hear things especially the ones that can move their eyes left and right when prompted…
The study should have simply been find people that can move their eyes left and right when prompted that still have REM brain waves tell them some random thing and see if they can remember it when you wake them up. I don’t know why that’s not completely obvious maybe it is and these guys are just grifters
TLDR, sleeping on it works.
Type LUCID in the comments for a how to guide...
Your brain is exploring the trauma-space while asleep to learn to deal with similar experiences.
Happens probably twice a week when I sleep on the problem as well.
To parlay this back to the current LLM craze, if we just export all our problems to some fuzzy non deterministic solver without ever trying to understand the problem, our collective brains will atrophy severely.
I use the LLM my work pays for, sparingly, because I refuse to let that atrophy occur.
After just a few days of obsessively playing Tetris it was all I could dream about! I heard the music, saw the pieces falling, rotating, getting faster. It was play play play all through the night! I did get better at the game pretty quickly but I have to admit: the dreams freaked me out a bit! They’re why I stopped playing entirely — I didn’t like the idea something could put itself in my head that way!
https://selfdefinition.org/tibetan/Tenzin-Wangyal-Rinpoche-T...
Immediately, a police man shows up. "No, you're not allowed to be lucid." My friend hung his head and said "okay", and was never lucid again.
Even stranger, I later heard reports from others along similar lines.
I would have thought in a society where we want a gadget or magic pill for anything and everything, our interest in this would be through the roof. You can live a whole other lifetime in a dream, either your own or of some other character or world you step into. You can replay the past see the future, countless times. Controlled lucid dreaming seems like the closest we will likely ever get to immortality. Why aren't we more bullish about facilitating it?
It's kinda a solo activity.
When I was young I somehow figured out how to control my dreams. By the time I was an adult and working in software all my dreams were always iterating over solutions to problems I had at work. And every day I would come into the office with the ability to move forward on projects with insights in leaned that night while sleeping.
honestly it's driving me crazy. i really miss just having nonsensical dreams it was refreshing.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thomas-edisons-na...
Reminds me of the studies that say lobsters can feel pain. Like, no fucking shit. What multi-cellular (and even single-celled) organisms do not feel pain? Glad we're giving the western stamp of approval on these highly contested ideas.
Me: "I'm gonna plan the workshop tomorrow, more than enough time."
7,5 h Later
Brain: "Hey, here is everything, worked the whole night, no need to thank me!!!"
Me: "I need coffee..."
Edit: Claude tells me I was a head of my time, apparently it works but not net new, you have to also be working on it awake, it's called 'targeted memory reactivation (TMR)": https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12592824/
Having said that, that sleep is incredibly important for learning anything! I practice my language learning during the day, a little bit every day, and I prioritize getting good sleep. This is mostly just trying to go to bed at the same time every night, avoiding alcohol, and giving myself an hour before bed with low lights to read and calm my mind. When you sleep, memories are consolidated, organized, and tagged for long-term storage. I will sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and bouncing around in my mind are echos of phrases and words from my target language. I figure it's working.
Never heard of this before. Is it a real thing? I mean, in the context of psychedelics experiencies. I've tried DMT a few times expecting the legendary all-healing trip everyone talks about but never worked.
I woke up convinced that it was a real bug, went to work the next day, and proved it. It was exactly as I dreamed. I never had access to our internal codebase, but had seen enough of the front-end and what we stored on disk to piece it together in my dream.
While it made me popular with some folks, it was a strange lesson indeed to discover that not everyone was as thrilled to have an up-start from tech support make such a discovery.
Fast forward almost 20 years later and I've never had anything even remotely close happen again.
It was a completely random series of notes.
Here's the pearl of wisdom I captured for posterity:
"Emotions — it's emotions that invented and fricasseed the invisible ravioli."
(I still have the card.)
I wonder if I did compose them, or did I just have a memory of having composed a great song?
What is experience, if not our very latest memory, right?
I made noises with my mouth, and it still sounded cool. Instead of recording those noises into any recording on my phone, I went back to sleep and couldn’t remember it the next morning :(
I wish it would happen more often, that's only happened for one other song of mine. Most of the rest are a lot of gritted teeth and frustration.
On Saturday I already had some ideas for most problems, but there was one that I didn't knew how to approach and stayed a bit late thinking about it.
On Sunday morning I woke up really exited as I solved the damn problem. I immediately knew that probably like dreams, the memory was fragile, so I rushed to my desk to write the sketch for the idea, which after grabbing coffee turned into my solution to it.
There's no way I didn't spent my sleep thinking about it and solving it, likely around the last sleep cycle when I woke up.
I had an old MSDOS computer, which had a mouse, but the mouse did not work at all. Perhaps that computer didn't have the drivers or maybe no such thing existed at that time. That computer had DOS games on it. Just that I could not access some of the applications, when their executables were not immediately children of a top level folder, because I didn't know how to expand folders in the tree view pane, without having the mouse to click on the + in front of the folder name.
One day I had a dream of me sitting at the computer (I spent a lot of time playing as a kid). In my dream I was lamenting, that I could open those folders. Suddenly a voice in my head said: "Well, why don't you simply try pressing the + key?"
I woke up and was excited. Immediately I started that computer to try it. And what do you know ... it actually worked!! More games for me to play!
Years later I also found myself often dreaming of chess games and thinking about best moves, only to have the board grow dynamically and somewhere far away a bishop appearing, pinning exactly the piece I needed for my best move ... back to the drawing board. Those chess dreams were actually somewhat exhausting.
I woke up and indeed I made that mistake. (This was during covid so the exam was done remotely and I still had the paper with the calculations at home).
Then I fell asleep and when I woke up in the morning, I had a very strong feeling that the issue was definitely the memory and I had to move the ram to the set of slots for the other channel. And that was the issue, broken slots.
What's impressive is not that it worked, but that after waking up I had no doubt that was the problem, even though practically I couldn't conciously identify why I was so confident about it.
There's research out there that supports dreams as places we process emotions. I wouldn't be surprised if that tied in to other kinds of problems.
The closest I've come since is involuntary obsessions with playing video games in my dreams. Not something I'd ever want to seed. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In the 90s I was obsessed with Tetris, and actually found new strategies while dreaming. It is such a simple game that the dreams weren't unrealistic, contrary to other dream epiphanies that turned out to be gibberish to the awakened mind.
For me this a big eye opener about the importance of sleep and relaxed thinking to solve challenging problems.
YES! I have never told anyone this (because it feels so random) but it's great to know I'm not the only one. I pretty much expect this when I am in depths of an issue I cant somehow consciously resolve, so much that I keep a pen and writing pad next to me, before I sleep, because the code I saw in my dream often gets lost by the time I go to my office and resume the laptop.
I even figured out a hack - I just force myself to go to sleep if I can't consciously resolve it for more than an hour. It's as if my brain gets an otherwise untapped firepower.
That said, this absolutely destroys my sleep cycle for the next day or two and spikes my BP for the rest of the day to the point where I feel sick.
Although in theory I'm sleeping more than the 8h, I feel horribly mentally exhausted. I can work out, physically just fine but my brain is on empty - because of this, I limit this to critical blockers.
IMO this is under-appreciated in current AI models. RL is not very effective in avoiding crocodiles for example, by the time like 5 of your tribe-mates are eaten it's far too late. You need some mechanism that ensures the danger is learned after just a single incident.
But I somehow managed to have a regular schedule and now I start to sleep at 00:00-01:00 very often, sometimes even earlier.
No idea how I managed to do that. I guess I just did improve many small things, like getting rid of bad habits, being more content, appreciating sleep more, prioritizing things differently.
I wish everyone good, healthy sleep.
Have a good day.
like, how does this communication work? how does one sleeping person communicate skills to another sleeping person?
have we found the mechanism? was it awake poeple communicating to sleeping people? the reverse?
On other hand, I used to have a long-distance girlfriend 25 years ago and we'd talk on the phone before falling asleep and attempt to induce ourselves into having the same dream and seeing each other in it, a la Wheel of Time, which sometimes worked, but of course that kind of communication between two sleepers isn't real, just a testament to the power of suggestion, especially while hypnogogic.
There are umpteen stories in Hindu scriptures of baby learning in the womb of the mother and how the expecting mother must only be exposed to good thoughts and a good environment for giving birth to an intelligent and well rounded child: stories of Abhimanyu (learning how to break the Chakravyuha formation in his womb while mother was learning it but his learning was incomplete when mother fell asleep during the lecture) and Prahlada (mother learning about Lord Vishnu against the wishes of her demon husband Hiranyakashyapu). Wonder if any studies have been done on this as well.
And if so, would you say it has improved your pants wearing performance on the job?
It's pretty fascinating. What's even more fascinating is often times when I do remember the dream, a lot of it is nonsense. And yet I'm doing better at the things I dreamt about.
I would love to believe.
Very common phenomena that is discussed frequently in the souls community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory#Sleep_effects_on...
Very real phenomenon. Happened so many times
It is important to note the study they are referring to is "targeted memory reactivation with sleep disruption", there are methods of doing targeted memory reactivation without sleep disruption.
I work in neurotech/sleeptech as the founder of affectablesleep.com, and though we are mostly focused on slow-wave (deep) sleep, we have been looking into memory reactivation, lucid dreaming and other stimulations for additions.
I was interested enough to click through the different links in the footer. And just as I reached the purchase page, I see that it requires "an iPhone running iOS". Unsure why it requires an iPhone; and no info on a timeline for iPhone-less customers. But that immediately rules me out as a customer.
I feel like the landing page would be a lot better if it started out focusing on what it is & how it can help me.
Apologies again for the unsolicited advice. Just wanted to share my impressions in case it's helpful.
Unfortunately most employers see this as slacking. It cannot be done in a noisy open plan office.
At one place few other devs were into this. We would be spending most of the working day in the park. Managers were not happy, but work was delivered always.
As a total aside, I've had sleep issues my whole life and can sometimes inadvertently induce lucid dreaming, and then I can think for hours while sleeping; it's amazing. Unfortunately a bit inception-y, but whatever.
I remember getting on the board, pushing as I'd dreamed, and voila! Off I went. Something about it did not feel new at all. I'd really visualised the process and it just worked. God I miss skating sometimes, but my self-preservation always far outweighed my desire to eat concrete.
And, in very deadpan style, after a few seconds (as if to choose one's words carefully), some answer would come to me audibly in my voice in my mind.
"Have you tried X?" No, I hadn't tried X, and holy smokes that was a workable approach! Sometimes, it would tell me to go back to some bit of code or configuration I had moved on from and tell me to go back and focus on that, it was almost always right that there was where I had goofed up. I experimented with posing multiple questions and follow up questions. I even asked it how it was that these answers were derived.
Strange to reread the above and refer to my own thoughts as 'it'. They were bidden ideas that came from me for sure. But, I disassociate from them because I have no memory of the chain of thought that led to the responses.
There's a lot going on upstairs, higher mind stuff. I am older now, and I no longer experience this phenomena. Have I lost it to age, or have I integrated it somehow into my conscious mind?
My dominant personality is one of control (for order) so I can focus on problem solving. Some sort of raw insight/intelligence comes from a personality that isn't always on, but seems to erupt from periods of calm and relaxation. eg Shower solutions or bedtime revelations are common.
Many people have told stories of voices that nudge them this way or that at just the right time, which I've experienced as well. Whatever part of me dreams is uses memories and fantasy, striving to experiencing new scenarios through thought experiments. The better I sleep, the more I find very recent events are incorporated...so it's some sort of shared space and speaks to how physical state affects mental states, even in sleep. I also feel like the personalities fight for dominance when the body or mind is overly-stressed (puberty, mortal danger, etc) but normally resolve into a sort of basal state.
I never wanted to be a psychologist. I often think that maybe I'm just crazy. It would explain a lot.
It's similar to what Jaynes described in his "bicameral mind." Man of antiquity "heard" disembodied wisdom dispensed to him, seemingly at random, from an incorporeal source: "gods." Today we simply regard such pseudo-auditory phenomena as "thought," which may throw light on Cartesian-style equation of "the soul" with "the mind," and enduring mathematical truths with divinity.
Following the Bronze Age collapse and the "breakdown of the bicameral mind," human culture is replete with examples of people trying to hear the voices of gods, who were now being crowded out by the conscious, egoic, individualistic mental chatter of the newly developed default mode network - the crying out of the Psalms, elaborate rituals and procedures for invoking divine inspiration in the oracles, various forms of divination, augury, etc.
Tarot, properly understood, is not a means for divining the future, but a debugger or reverse engineering tool for probing the internal psychological state of the querent, and hopefully coaxing out these moments of unconscious, unbidden inspiration.
Much of modern esotericism is about trying to steer the brain into states of mind where these vestigial, intuitive, subconscious, nonlinear, pattern matching, Kahneman System 1 facilities of thinking, become once again accessible to conscious prompting and dialogue. Jaynes calls this "the induction," the Romans called it "the genius," Thelemites know it as "the knowledge & conversation," and it may be most broadly described as "union with God."
Sleep is a strange and magical thing.
Amazing how our brains work. Went back and sure enough I’d omitted that final connection.
I recall my father (also a mathematician, incidentally) often repeating this to me.
> I proved a topology theorem in a dream once.
> Before I went to sleep, my inability to prove it had been bugging me all day long, and I suspected it'd be featured on the next morning's (way too early) final exam for my university course. I solved it in my dream, woke up, wrote on my whiteboard what I remembered and sure enough, it was correct. I worked it a few more times to cram it into my memory before running to my exam.
> To my great delight, the ability to prove that theorem was featured heavily in one of the exam's questions, and helped me do quite well on the exam overall.
The hard part is paying attention to it. With enough attention your mind will fix it.
Had physics problems to solve and can remember to this day when I woke up in the library after I got exhausted from not solving the last one, that my subconscious discovered during sleep that I missed that certain vectors were orthogonal (which was the necessary key insight to solve it).
10-hour days practicing. Full night sleep afterwards.
But at least for me, the price was dreams, the moment I go lucid, ceasing to be self directed. I get that I’m in a movie, and I have to always create the next step. Nothing surprises or horrifies anymore. (If I’m lucid.) I have to kind of create my own magic, which isn’t particularly restful.
I haven't lucid dreamt since a child, but I recall everything about the dream continuing to be autonomous as before becoming lucid, but if I wanted to do something, I could add that element. I definitely could still be surprised, as the dream fulfilled wishes like a genie would, meeting it technically but perhaps not as I meant when I willed the change. The few times I reigned my subconscious so I had full power and there were no longer any surprises, I would wake up.
I, on the other hand, never lucid dreamed, so a few years ago, I spent a lot of time journaling and doing wakefulness tests to see if I could learn to do it. One night, I did -- I was dreaming and then had an 'awakening' in which I realized I was asleep. Finally, a lucid dream! Naturally, the first thing I did was start to fly. About five seconds in, I told myself, "Wait a sec... People can't fly." That took the wind out of my sails, so to speak, and I couldn't fly again in the dream. I believe I woke shortly after, too.
I keep wanting to get back to it and try it out, but I'd love a more efficient way to get there instead of constant wakefulness checks and first-thing-in-the-morning journaling.
If you want to achieve lucid dreaming consistently you also have to develop a habit of doing reality checks. The most effective one is to pinch your nose and try to breath through it, in your dreams it will almost always work and the surprise is major.
Lucid dreaming even works for people with aphantasia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia>.
The nicer lucid dreams are those were you can fly or make spectacular light and colors, but I find that it's usually a difficult balance to avoid waking up.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/when-keith-ric...
generally they don't work out.
I may have overstated what I said. The environment continues to be dynamic, and characters enter and exit and cause their usual mayhem (alongside me). But if something unexpected happens, there is–in my mind–a theatrical explanation for it and thus a plot-driven solution. The stuffed animals are upset I'm going to wake up and kill them, so I put them in a zoo where they believe they continue to exist after I stop dreaming, et cetera. (And sure enough, they're there next time I'm in that "place".) If you're trapped somewhere, you know an exit will materialise because you're the main character, and sure enough, it eventually does. If I break something I love, I know something will happen that makes it whole again. When anything that happens can be undone, action is robs of its meaning.
There is a Peter Pan tendency, at least to my dreams. You know you can’t fly. But then you remember you have, and believing it’s true makes it happens.
That’s what I was getting at with the film-script effect. I’ll be in a bind and then realize that there “must” be a solution in a particular form, otherwise the dream wouldn’t make sense, and that sort of conjures that thing into existence.
Maybe fortunately, maybe sadly, the one thing I’ve not been able to do is conjure up lost loved ones. I’ll get a bunch of puppies who know my dog, but he just couldn’t show up, or I’ll get strangers or living loved ones who know my grandmother or best friend; they’re just constantly indisposed.
Unfortunately, this is becoming less and less of a "tell"! You're going to have to find a new one.
World history is a scrambled mess of lies and amnesia (from repeated collective concussions, heh) Who knows what is truth and what is the Victor writing the history books?
One's life is untraceable - how did we get here? Literally too much went into that story, majority unseen, and none of us can fully say.
And so at the personal level, are thoughts borne out of a chain (or DAG??) of memories that cannot ever be fully traced?
Was my homunculus voice who gave me detailed clues/answers just returning the highest probable solution gleaned from thousands of simulations in the problem space I presented? Of course I should not be privy to such musings, I wouldn't have the patience for it - so it seems to me to be "out of nowhere".
I do sometimes wonder though with all my weird experiences if I am merely the "doer in the body" whereas I have a higher self who is the real "thinker" running things in the background and who has access to the big picture.
Yes, precisely.
There is a classic initiatory text in the Thelemic tradition, Liber LXV, that personifies these different parts of the self. The "doer in the body" is the scribe that wrote the work, which is a dialogue in the scribe's mind between his egoic awareness (V.V.V.V.V, the namesake of the titular character from V for Vendetta) and the background "thinker," Adonai.
There is a lot of vocabulary in this space used to describe the self at very fine levels of detail.
I interview people about this kind of thing and have noticed a trend.
Also, I got my copy signed by Jaynes back in the '80s
> I often think that maybe I'm just crazy.
Often called “the imp of the perverse” from the Poe story of the same name.
Bad sleep habits at that time ultimately led me to do a lot of daytime napping.
During those sessions I occasionally experienced sleep paralysis, one out of body waking dream, and disturbing stuff like hearing head-splitting trumpet sounds upon waking up.
One time, I awoke and heard an attenuated trumpet sound, and through the rush I heard two voices nearby. Just as I finished struggling to get control of my body, I distinctly remember hearing one of them say, "I can see it!"
I was living alone at the time, and that was so alarming and made me question my life choices. Looking back now I view that episode as a probable spiritual attack on a vulnerable young man.
Sounds like the Geoff Day scene in Infinite Jest ... the sound resonance of a window fan and a violin opens a portal and something Lovecraftian comes through: "a small part of the wing of something far too large to be seen in totality."
Anyhow, studies had shown that preemies could benefit from just laying with the parents skin to skin, called "kangaroo care". So, I got to experience that with both boys one or two times! Wow, that was really something. I couldn't hold them or touch with my hands, just have them be laid on my bare chest. Very special to just love on them and feel them squirm around there a bit.
I thought, ok, I'm going to give them a little well wishing because the kid I was given was in the worst shape healthwise between the two. I closed my eyes, and concentrated on baby. I said mentally, "heal". "If you can take away anything from me that helps, do it! You have to grow and take food!" And I probed mentally.
Suddenly, I had a visual hallucination. It was a projected 3D scene of reverse images to the color of light coming through my eyelids. I could see some sort of movement of blobs rotating out, coming back. If they got too far outside my field of view they would fade and disappear. There was something like 3 visible blobs, a stationary one and two smaller moving ones. It was like I was seeing autonomic or mental processes in baby, visualized.
So I just loved on him for a bit and sat with that experience. And then I thought, maybe I can see my own processes if this is really happening to me? So, I said in my mind, "Show me what I look like". And the view changed!
What I saw was mostly out of my field of view, so many things were faded, but the blobs I could see were cycling in all different directions including away and back towards me and at different speeds. It was like a factory scene compared to my son's machine shop. I told him to take from that scene whatever would help, and the session ended soon after.
When I kangaroo cared with my other son I tried to repeat this experience and well wish him and communicate mentally, but I could not connect. That made me sad and secretly a little worried about this one's health, but I could not tell anyone my feelings because it was so odd what I had experienced with baby A. And was it just nerves and all my own imagination? Maybe, but it felt real.
A week later my wife misses her period and she is pregnant. It turns out my vision is more accurate than the 99% accurate pregnancy test.
I never had a similar vision since.
In Christianity, Satan and demons are recognized as a reality. God allows them access to humanity. That doesn't make God evil, and in fact God uses evil forces to drive people to Him. And we are given the choice to go with whatever party we choose, so the whole experiment hinges on choice. I know that the prince of Earth, Satan, isn't sporting; of course he preys on the vulnerable and the weak first. That was one of the low points in life for me when I heard the voices and when I had no faith.
At one point I was working so hard that Claude actually suggested, all on its own, that I should get some sleep.
In the good old days you would reach flow and actually know when you're too tired to continue. Now you can just say "please just fix it" over and over again and get yourself in a slophole much easier.
So far I’m not that impressed.
At the gym, the bodybuilder increases the mass of the weights until a workout generates the correct amount of stress, because thats how they get to the next step.
Or dont, stay where you are and atrophy, whatever :))
Wouldn’t go that far. But you have to consciously make it interesting by creating the weirdness.
"flying" was limited. I didn't have full control and sometimes felt dynamically pinned to the top of a 2D scrolling video game as if there were driver incompatabilities.
drifting off to sleep in a session, it was very disturbing- i felt like i was being dragged by my ankle across the bed before lucid dreaming began, "here it comes..."
Sometimes there would be ominious sounds/visuals that I could not influence that scared me so much I was glad I could wake up because it felt like a nightmare was approaching.
Two big tells I'm lucid dreaming: I'm with a group of people who can't answer a very obvious question ("why is the sky blue?") or, I look at my hand - as if it were LLM it absolutely does not render well... like a tree trunk with a bunch of branches.
Super interesting, because I have the same thing. Also none of my technology works. I usually try to do something on my phone a few times, fail because the UI is putty, and then remember that smartphones don’t work in my dreams.
I also get that it's a personal relationship, but it troubles me because that mindset allows for an incredible amount of damaging behavior for society as a whole. What's worse is that this relationship becomes part of one's self-identity, so that any critique of that worldview is received as a personal attack rather than a philosophical debate.
History, law, civilization, anti-slavery and the dignity of man all come from judeo-christian teaching, it's not just comfort/assurance. You just gotta be careful who you follow, there's loads of shysters and crummy humans in religion just like everywhere else as you are probably aware.
Church is supposed to be about community, but it never really was for me. I didn't put in enough effort. I still go for the kids.
What hooked me was Bible Study Fellowship[1] where I got a real education in the Bible. That gave me a community where I have a men's group and they know me and we meet weekly and they give good advice and support when things turn sour.
If you want to understand the architecture of the world, check it out. Next year they're doing Romans, holy shit, that one goes deep. Maybe you're searching, and that's a safe place to simply learn.
We are experiencing a battle of religious fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism that impacts us all. This is why I understand and respect the personal relationship bits, but I fear the fanatics who think their beliefs should be applied to all.
My take on those fanatics is that they are fucking insane and dangerous. The foundation that they rest upon is approved of and validated by the "non crazy, good religious people".
My fear is valid: there are millions of my fellow citizens who would have no concern if I was "terminated" as I am an unbeliever. I wish this was hyperbole and would love to be proven wrong.
The current Secretary of War believes that the actions in Iran are divine and subscribes to the notion of Armageddon as a good thing and is in the position to make that happen. Thus, I find your faith to not be as benign as you do.
edit: I need to emphasize that there's no personal enmity intended in my comment, it's a fear and frustration with the outcome of faith itself.
On the other stuff, I will only observe that war is not a human thing. It's too organized, requires inhuman (evil) top down control. Iran is a detestable war just like every other war.
But, there is also the unlimited psychological warfare being waged everywhere now that affects us more directly.
You saw Hegeseth doing a disgusting Deus Vult routine, but I guarantee you the majority of people are tuned out and missed that entirely. (So they get away with it.)
In my opinion, that was another targeted demoralization psyop intended to wound and stun people like us, and for different reasons. It is so far outside the acceptable narrative frame that it cranks everyone up who is paying attention, makes them bewildered and furious and that drowns out other news stories they want everyone to miss.
It is all "fake and ghey", as the kids like to say. How do I know? They're all actors reading scripts, Hegeseth especially. Right out of central casting as Trump says.
What is really happening is a complete toss up. The greatest casualty in war is the truth.
I have no solutions to offer. Just please don't take your frustrations out on normie Christians, even if you think they're misguided, they have no power.
I worry when the rhetoric gets angry and scared. Fear and disgust can lead to atrocities. Who stands to gain when we fight? Who capitalizes every time a lefty shooter pops off? I'd prefer you challenge the rage bait narrative, roll your eyes at how outlandish it all sounds, and become more cynical than scared.
Other insane/outlandish psyops meant to stun and confuse:
* The Charlie Kirk memorial
* Everything that comes out of Stephen Miller's mouth
* Trump coin, Trump nft, Trump Card (immigration)
* The Whitehouse Twitter account, yikers!
I appreciate your recognition of ugliness that can come out when it is wielded as a weapon, but it's still in the context of "you're holding it wrong".
> war is not a human thing
Au contraire, mon frere. It's been part of humanity the whole time (and we recently learned about chimpanzees doing the same thing. And here you illustrate a facet of my concern: ascribing horrible behavior to some supernatural entities rather than the the reality of human psychology and power dynamics.
This is not just a philosophical exercise -- this is going forward at full tilt and literally represents an existential threat: https://thefulcrum.us/democracy/project-2025-christian-natio...
You must be aware of the fate of heretics and blasphemers in theocracies, right? That is what faith brings when allowed access to power.