Astral Codex Ten

God

14 min read

God

Article

God is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 25 times across 25 issues between March 10, 2021 and December 17, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “My usual metaphor is ‘if God came down from the heavens and told you…’”; “God could be this figure”; ""because it comes together with the idea that humans are made in God’s image"". It most often appears alongside Jesus, Christianity, America.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 25
  • Issue count: 25
  • First seen: March 10, 2021
  • Last seen: December 17, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality
March 10, 2021 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Book Review: Order Without Law
April 08, 2021 · Original source
This might work even with just the perception of such an enforcer. God could be this figure, but so could “a critical mass of self-disciplined elders or other good citizens, known to be committed to the cause of cooperation”. Art and literature could help too.
Your Book Review: Humankind
May 28, 2021 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Book Review: Lifespan
December 02, 2021 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Movie Review: Don't Look Up
January 04, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Book Review: The Castrato
June 03, 2022 · Original source
Farinelli drew every Body to the Haymarket. What a Pipe! What Modulation! What Extasy to the Ear! But, Heavens! What Clumsiness! What Stupidity! What Offence to the Eye! Reader, if of the City, thou mayest probably have seen in the Fields of Islington or Mile-End or, If thou art in the environs of St James', thou must have observed in the Park with what Ease and Agility a cow, heavy with calf, has rose up at the command of the Milk-woman's foot: thus from the mossy bank sprang the DIVINE FARINELLI.
Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
July 15, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
The Prophet And Caesar's Wife
September 02, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
October 10, 2022 · Original source
The whole great history of the Arian heresy might have been invented to explode this idea. It is a very interesting history often repeated in this connection; and the upshot of it is in that in so far as there ever was a merely official religion, it actually died because it was merely an official religion; and what destroyed it was the real religion. Arius advanced a version of Christianity which moved, more or less vaguely, in the direction of what we should call Unitarianism; though it was not the same, for it gave to Christ a curious intermediary position between the divine and human. The point is that it seemed to many more reasonable and less fanatical; and among these were many of the educated class in a sort of reaction against the first romance of conversion. Arians were a sort of moderates and a sort of modernists. And it was felt that after the first squabbles this was the final form of rationalised religion into which civilisation might well settle down. It was accepted by Divus Caesar himself and became the official orthodoxy; the generals and military princes drawn from the new barbarian powers of the north, full of the future, supported it strongly. But the sequel is still more important. Exactly as a modern man might pass through Unitarianism to complete agnosticism, so the greatest of the Arian emperors ultimately shed the last and thinnest pretense of Christianity; he abandoned even Arius and returned to Apollo. He was a Caesar of the Caesars; a soldier, a scholar, a man of large ambitions and ideals; another of the philosopher kings. It seemed to him as if at his signal the sun rose again. The oracles began to speak like birds beginning to sing at dawn; paganism was itself again; the gods returned. It seemed the end of that strange interlude of an alien superstition. And indeed it was the end of it, so far as there was a mere interlude of mere superstition. It was the end of it, in so far as it was the fad of an emperor or the fashion of a generation. If there really was something that began with Constantine, then it ended with Julian.
But there was something that did not end. There had arisen in that hour of history, defiant above the democratic tumult of the Councils of the Church, Athanasius against the world. We may pause upon the point at issue; because it is relevant to the whole of this religious history, and the modern world seems to miss the whole point of it. We might put it this way. If there is one question which the enlightened and liberal have the habit of deriding and holding up as a dreadful example of barren dogma and senseless sectarian strife, it is this Athanasian question of the Co-Eternity of the Divine Son. On the other hand, if there is one thing that the same liberals always offer us as a piece of pure and simple Christianity, untroubled by doctrinal disputes, it is the single sentence, 'God is Love.' Yet the two statements are almost identical; at least one is very nearly nonsense without the other. The barren dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful sentiment. For if there be a being without beginning, existing before all things, was He loving when there was nothing to be loved? If through that unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is the meaning of saying He is love? The only justification of such a mystery is the mystical conception that in His own nature there was something analogous to self-expression; something of what begets and beholds what it has begotten. Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate the ultimate essence of deity with an idea like love. If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family.
Book Review: Malleus Maleficarum
October 28, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Book Review: The Alexander Romance
September 19, 2023 · Original source
It is ordained by Providence above that we shall all be slaves and servants of the divine will. The sea does not move unless the wind blows it, and the trees do not tremble unless the breezes disturb them; and likewise man does nothing except by the motions of divine Providence. For my part I would like to stop making war, but the master of my soul does not allow me. If we were all of like mind, the world would be devoid of activity: the sea would not be filled, the land would not be farmed, marriages would not be consummated, there would be no begetting of children. How many have become miserable and lost all their possessions as a result of my wars? But others have profited from the property of others. Everyone takes from everyone, and leaves what he has taken to others: no possession is permanent.
Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
November 17, 2023 · Original source
He mentions one semi-credible attempt to stop the divine Word: Friedrich Nietzsche’s project to brand Christianity as “slave morality”. Girard admires Nietzsche for correctly identifying the core of Christianity as a previously unprecedented form of morality that supported victims and the oppressed (as opposed to pagan “master morality”, which supported the powerful and popular). He rejects Nietzsche’s theory that the Christian impulse comes from petty resentment by dumb weak poor people against their betters - Girard believes it comes from the genuinely true fact that victims are being unfairly victimized and we should help them. But he thinks otherwise Nietzsche was pretty prescient.
Links For January 2024
January 18, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Book Review: Dominion
June 28, 2024 · Original source
Scully is adamant that we should not pass judgment on farmers, hunters, or furriers of the past. At one point we needed all that meat and fur to survive. Now we have tractors, plant-based proteins, and synthetic fibers. Can’t we thank the animals for their service and send them on their way? Scully thinks so. Once we no longer need the animal, “Responsible dominion calls for a reprieve. The warrant expires. The divine mandate is used up. What were once ‘necessary evils’ become just evils.”
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
July 30, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
August 08, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Book Review: Nine Lives
September 13, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Book Review: Deep Utopia
October 17, 2024 · Original source
What about religion, Bostrom’s other holdout? What if, after we all have IQ one billion, we can just figure out which religion is true? If it’s atheism, the whole plan is a no-go. But if it’s some specific religion, that’s almost as bad. Imagine a world where religion has been emptied of its faith and mystery, and we know exactly how each act of worship figures into the divine economy. Going to church would be no more meaningful than doing our taxes - another regular ritual we perform to appease a higher power who will punish us if we don’t.
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity
November 12, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Lives Of The Rationalist Saints
February 20, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's Mathematical Universe
February 21, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Contra MR On Charity Regrants
May 22, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
This is the prophecy that seems to me like the best evidence against Joan’s divine inspiration. She says that her voices flatly tell her something that never happens. On the other hand, the context is that she needs to not try to escape and not confess; if we want to defend her we can either suggest memory error (she was told this just before jumping out of a tower window and badly injuring herself), translation error (she does see the leader of the English, Bedford, briefly, but he's regent for a king who’s a small child89) or point out that this is a conditional, and she disobeyed the voices. But I take it as pretty good evidence against the divine theory, just - frustratingly - inconclusive.
Inline links: 89
The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
October 01, 2025 · Original source
Someone should figure out whether the Divine Mercy shrine in the Philippines really sees sun miracles every year, or only some years. How many people go there? Do they all see it? Are there years when people go there and try to see and don’t? Do they all not see it? Can we go there?
The Pledge
December 17, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.