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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Not sure how you got “because they can learn, they can learn to be good” as the source of the dilemma from the article. It says

    In Tolkien’s Christian framework, [being open to morality, like Men] in turn meant they must have souls, so killing them would be wrong without very good reason.

    It’s not them thinking and feeling that’s the problem, it’s that Tolkien believed (as a Catholic) that you shouldn’t kill things with souls.

    This is a nice contrast to Frieren where demons don’t have souls and don’t seem to be open to morality, either; they understand it in order to manipulate humans but consider themselves outside its framework.




  • “You read Tolkien and there’s times where it feels infused with an almost scriptural kind of feeling,” [Rings of Power showrunner J.D. ] Payne told the Deseret News, adding that Tolkien’s work “feels deeply influenced by sort of a wisdom tradition”

    Ah yes, the old “sort of a wisdom tradition”. This is exactly the level of insight I expect from the producer of Rings of Power. :)

    LOTR is religious in the sense that there is a right thing to do and a wrong thing to do, and doers of good things prosper while doers of bad things suffer. Fantasy, in other words.

    The only slightly-Catholic bit is that wrongdoers don’t necessarily suffer at the hands of others (though there is certainly a lot of that) but that doing wrong is a psychic punishment in and of itself. Gollum, Denethor, even Saruman by the end all were mostly tortured by their own thoughts. In other words, doing the right thing has nothing necessarily to do with others – it’s simply the only healthy way to live.












  • wzddtoAsk LemmyIf it's acceptable...
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    2 years ago

    I don’t think so (and I say this as a vegetarian), because as you move up the intelligence scale your ethical obligations become more defined. For example, animals practice infanticide, murder, rape, etc etc, and we can’t really expect them not to, or judge them for it. We, on the other hand, should hold ourselves to higher standards. So should the superintelligent alien race.