Sin against the Holy Spirit

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I’ve been watching that interview between Jordan Peterson and Charlie Kirk, and their discussion about the concept of the sin against the Holy Spirit, which Jesus mentioned as the only one that’s unforgivable, struck me as very interesting.

Charlie said it’s about using the garb of religion as a bludgeon against people, and in service of your ego, basically, and Jordan said it might be about rejecting the call of God to fulfil your destiny, or the failure to “aim up”, towards God. I thought they both have a valid point there, but something else came to my mind as I was taking a shower now.

I think the Evangelical, “sola scriptura” attitude, is the sin against the Holy Spirit. It’s the attitude that Holy Spirit was present when the Bible was written, and then took a permanent vacation. It’s the attitude that you can ignore people like St. Augustine or St. Theresa of Avilla because they are not in the Bible, and only the Bible matters because it’s the word of God, and God somehow went mute after it was completed. It’s the attitude that you own God, that everything outside of your own religion is of lesser quality, that it’s something that can be summarily dismissed, that it can’t have been inspired by God, and even if it were, it can be only to a far lesser degree than what you have in your own religion. To sin against Holy Spirit is to reject it in all things that don’t fit the mental framework of your religious beliefs.

It’s also about rejecting the living presence of God when it confronts you, and you think you are safe in your scripture and your religious rites and customs. It’s thinking you are always the one whose position is to teach, because that’s what your religion assumes, even when you’re confronted with “the living Force” that is trying to tell you something. It’s the sin of the Pharisees, who would lecture Jesus and try to trick him, assuming they own God and he’s some upstart.

Yes, it’s definitely about rejecting the path that leads up, and not walking through the door God opened before you, and it’s definitely about using the idea of God as a tool of your ego, in service of your self-aggrandisement. It’s also having the keys to the heavenly kingdom, but neither using them to enter yourself, nor allowing the others to enter, choosing to make the door an obstacle instead of a place of passage. It may also be using gifts of the Holy Spirit in order to confuse others and lead them away from God. There are indeed too many candidates, and I think all those interpretations are valid in their own way. Rejection of transcendence in service of your own lower nature, and using the form people associate with transcendence in order to deceive them away from transcendence and to give yourself power over others, though, seem like the best interpretation.

Godlessness is the root cause of all evil

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America is a smouldering powder keg at the moment. Some pro-trans leftard killed Charlie Kirk, one of the well known right-wing speakers who believed in inviting people to talk to him and try to beat his arguments. He was a civilised, well-spoken person with too much belief in the power of arguments when dealing with the insane ideologues who believe in using force to suppress dissent.

The murderer shot him from the roof of the adjacent building while he was doing his usual thing, inviting people to discuss issues on an open microphone. He left behind a wife and two children, because he made the same mistake as Gonzalo Lira. He understood that his opponents are unhinged cultists who have absolutely zero respect for the life of anyone they disagree with or find inconvenient, including but not limited to mothers murdering their own unborn children for the crime of messing up with their plans. Unfortunately, his actions were not consistent with his understanding, because he stood there in the open, having a discussion with people who would rather shut him up with a bullet than with a well made argument, and eventually one did just that. He’s dead, his wife is a widow, his children are orphans, and the leftists are celebrating his death as if they single-handedly defeated Hitler or something, rather than killing an unarmed man whose arguments were driving them insane because they were, for the most part, just logic and common sense.

I talked to Romana yesterday about it on the phone, and she said something along the lines of “Aren’t the right-wingers the ones who are supposed to like guns?”, and I answered “True, the right-wingers like guns, but the left-wingers like killing people”. Basically, the right-wingers will go to the woods and shoot a deer or a hog, and then make barbecue for the neighbourhood, waving American flags, or they will dress themselves up in tactical gear and go shoot at targets, thinking they are in “Call of Duty” or something. The leftists invented the guillotine and the extermination camps. They dream of rounding up and exterminating their political opponents as if they were vermin. They want to kill people, they want to solve discussions with a bullet to the head of their opponent. JFK was shot in the head from the roof by a gunman who was an unhinged extreme leftist, so unhinged that KGB refused to recruit him when he went to Russia because they thought him so crazy they wanted nothing to do with him. The right-wingers like to play with guns, but the leftists see them merely as means to an end, and this end is murder of their political opposition. They would in fact prefer the guillotine, the gulags or the killing fields, but the guns will do in a pinch; and all the while, they think they are the heroes beating Hitler, because Hitler is somehow a cardboard cutout they place in front of every person they don’t like, making them anonymous and killable. They even call the Jews Nazis, without stopping to think how idiotic that makes them sound.

But the root cause of all this leftist madness is the rejection of transcendence; the war on God, and the concept of humanism, of Man as the measure of all things. When you start seeing yourself and others as mere biological automata without a transcendental core, you start seeing them in a utilitarian way; basically, people are things that are either useful to you, or they are in your way, and there’s nothing more important than power, defined as imposing your will on others by force, and simply killing those who fail to submit. If they are in your way, they are Hitler, and of course you’d shoot Hitler if you had the chance.

Godlessness is the root of all sins and is the greatest sin as such. The problem we’re having now is merely a culmination of the evil that started before the French revolution, and caused unseen slaughters and dehumanisation. Godless people will lie, deceive, manipulate and murder. They have no compunctions or moral inhibitions, because why would they? Power is all that matters, and all is good that serves a good cause.

Atheism is not merely a crime in God’s eyes; it’s the supreme crime. It’s the negation of the most fundamental of all realities upon which all existence and virtue are built. It needs to be rejected and resisted.

Wrong equipment

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I was thinking about the four thirds system I was using for a few years, between 35mm film and 35mm digital. Was it a mistake?

I don’t think so. Olympus E1 with the ZD 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 lens was the best camera/lens combo I could’ve bought in 2004, especially since it was discounted. At full price, it would’ve been too expensive, but for what I paid for it, 1000€, it was a good deal. Compared to the 6-8MP Canons and Nikons at the time, it had similarly limited resolution – yes, percentage-wise the difference between 5 and 8 sounds like a lot, but it really wasn’t; whatever you couldn’t do with one, you couldn’t to with the other, either. So, as a singular camera-lens entity, it was great and it served me well in the transition from film to digital. Essentially, I used it for the same kind of photography I did on film, just with less money spent on film, development and scanning.

The problem with four thirds wasn’t that it didn’t make good pictures, or that I was unhappy with the camera and the lens. The problem was that I wanted to replace 35mm film with 35mm digital because that was the look that I wanted, and four thirds wasn’t 35mm. Also, the upgrade path was either very expensive, to the point where getting everything I wanted would cost as much as a 35mm system or more, and so when the 35mm Canon 5d became available, I did the math and decided that I might as well buy the stuff that I actually wanted in the first place, and I could get both resolution, dynamic range, and the reduced depth of field that I wanted, all at the same time.

So, the reason why I used the four thirds gear was the same as the reason why Canon and Nikon users used their APS-C cameras at the time. It’s not that they wanted APS-C, it was that 35mm was beyond reach so they used what they could get for reasonable money. I’m sure some stayed with APS-C even when 35mm became ubiquitous, but I’m also sure that most upgraded to 35mm. It was just a normal thing in that phase of development of digital technology, where not all was there yet. This is why I don’t consider it a mistake; driving a 1980s car in 1980s wasn’t a mistake, it was just what everybody had back then. Yeah, a 1980s car didn’t have airbags, wasn’t anywhere near as safe as today’s cars, and didn’t have equipment that’s anywhere near today’s standards, but nobody says buying an Audi 80 in the 1980s was a mistake. It was a very good car by the standards of the era, but technology progressed significantly since. If I had to go back in time and pick a camera to buy, I’d buy that same Olympus set in a heartbeat. What I would likely not do, however, is buy my first digital camera, the Fuji S602. Sure, it was a learning experience about digital, but it was a completely wrong camera for me and didn’t fit my style, requirements or criteria at all. For something as expensive as it was, I would have been better off buying more film gear immediately, rather than later, but then again, if I didn’t get burned on early digital, would I be able to tell what the problems were? I don’t think so. I think everybody needed to get burned somewhere in order to know what’s not good for them, what needs to improve and so on. Still, I have one good photo with that early digital camera:

In fact, I had a film camera with a 50mm f/1.4 lens with me when I took it, and tried to take it with film gear, as well, and the depth of field was so much of an issue that the photos weren’t anywhere near this good. So, a camera that sucked for me in most ways turned out to be just right for taking this picture. If it helped me do that, and if it helped me learn about what the limitations of small sensor digital were, and helped me figure out what I wanted, was it really a mistake?

That’s why I say mistakes are a part of the learning process, and I’m not worried about them. Mistakes are a problem if you fail to learn, and fail to move on. They are a problem if you get stuck in them. A correct path is sometimes navigation between wrong choices, between not enough and too much, between what you know for sure you don’t want, and what you think you want until you try it and see it’s an overkill. It’s not just a photography thing, it’s a life thing.

 

Evolution of style

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Had you met me when I was younger, between 1984 and 2005, and told me that most of my lenses would be wide angle, and my photographic style would be defined by wide compositions, I wouldn’t have believed you; in fact, I’d say there’s no way. In my early photography, I defined good photography as successful presentation of a beautiful detail through isolation, using depth of field.

Here are some of my earliest preserved works:

Those are all colour negative prints, 35mm film, year 2000 or earlier, but nothing earlier than than 1998, I think. Everything earlier than that was left at my parents’ place when I moved out. You can see the pattern in all of them – basically, get close, get the detail, isolate it from the rest of the world, and capture that feeling. It’s not a matter of equipment; I used a 35-70mm zoom lens, so I could have gone wide enough, but I didn’t; even when I did, I sucked at it because I didn’t know how to compose wide.

This is my first successful wide-angle shot:

Probably because I used Romana’s film point and shoot camera which didn’t have the closeup functionality I instinctively relied on, I composed the picture differently, but that did not result in a change of style. In fact, my pictures in the following years were more in the line of this:

You get the picture; again, remove the detail from the world, find the beauty as separate, isolated, in a photographic equivalent of meditation.

It’s not that I stopped taking such pictures completely; they still make up a significant portion of my work. However, a typical shot I am aiming for these days is something like this:

I’m trying to figure out the differences and similarities myself, because it’s not that the wide-angle compositions lack that meditative feeling of the closeup shots. It would be too easy to say that I just learned to evoke a similar feeling with a different technique, but I don’t feel that it tells the whole story. You see, in order to do a closeup shot, you need to remove almost everything from the composition. With an ultrawide lens, everything that is in front of you will be in the frame, even your shoes or tripod legs if you’re not careful. With it, you can no longer abstract ugly and the mundane from your composition and create beauty by omission. You need to compose the entire world in front of you into an artefact of beauty. It’s not just a matter of photographic technique; it’s something about the worldview, about not fearing chaos and ugliness and escaping into reduction.

It’s not just a matter of using an ultrawide lens. The picture above is made with an 85mm portrait lens, at f/1.8, but I would never have used such a wide composition in my early years. Even when using a long-ish lens and shallow depth of field, I’m leaving more of the environment in the composition.

I mean, this is taken with a 400mm telephoto wide open, for fuck’s sake. If you gave this lens to my 2000 self, I’d have composed it so tight you’d see nothing but the cyclist’s head and shoulders, most likely. This is a normal, slightly wide composition, just with telephoto spatial compression. I remember a conversation I had with two people, somewhere around 1999-2000, about what equipment I’d like to have. The first thing would be a digital camera that has a 35mm sensor capable of full film quality, not the stupid toys that existed those days, but real replacement of film with digital technology with preservation of everything that’s good about film. The second thing I wanted was a big zoom lens, essentially this 100-400mm telephoto that I have now. What I couldn’t imagine then was the way I would use that big zoom lens. I would expect portraits of birds in their environment. I wouldn’t expect, essentially, normal to wide compositions with spatial compression:

I think I’m starting to understand what I’m doing there. It resembles the difference between meditating in a quiet, isolated room with your eyes closed, and learning to meditate with your eyes open while walking or interacting with people. It’s a difference between having to hide from disturbances, learning to ignore them, and finally learning to make them part of the experience. It’s a transition between waiting for your wife to stop taking pictures and remove herself from the composition, then composing her into the shot as a joke, and then intentionally composing her into the environment as a stylistic choice that makes the compositions what they are.

 

Forums

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I am occasionally nostalgic about the Croatian usenet foto group, where I was quite active in the early- to mid-2000s, but which died along with the rest of the usenet. Unfortunately, there has been no obvious replacement to host the community, so basically it all dispersed. I occasionally look at the forums on the Internet – dpreview.com, for instance. Most threads on the Sony forum are like “I have more money than brains, and I just bought 4 super expensive lenses I don’t know how to use properly, and now I’m thinking about replacing one of them with an even more expensive lens that’s bound to get me the respect and admiration I crave in my midlife crisis”. I check the micro four thirds forum, they are still arguing about focal length and aperture equivalency and trying to convince themselves and others that four thirds is not just good enough, but better than full frame or whatever. I close it in resignation. Then I look at the pictures they send in the dedicated threads, because that’s the bottom line of it all. I have to admit, there’s a few excellent photographers in every forum, I’ve seen great examples of landscapes and wildlife. Of course, most people post generic snapshots of nothing in particular, but that’s expected. The good examples more than make up for it.

But then I get curious about the Croatian photographic community, and I look into the forum.hr site which has a photography section. I look at one of the threads, Sony vs. Canon. “Sony photos have colours like they were taken with a smartphone, Sony is shit”, “No Sony is great, Canon has obsolete sensor design with low dynamic range, Canon is shit”. Ah, so Canon vs. Olympus flame wars are now replaced with Canon vs. Sony flame wars, but everything else remains the same. Honestly, I didn’t miss that at all. Close the browser tab.

Honestly, I don’t know what I expected. Probably something along the lines of pictures from some good location, accompanied by a thread with comments on how to get there, which time of the day is the best, how many tourists are there getting in the frame and how to find spots they don’t know about, and so on. Stuff you actually care about when you’re interested in photography, not just gear-themed dick measuring contests. Or maybe someone’s review of equipment accompanied by their best photographic work with said equipment. Something nice to look at, something that makes you think, something useful and helpful.

I’ve been criticised on the photo group for always saying good things about the gear that I’m using, instead of “being objective”. Honestly, I don’t even know what that means. I use the gear that works for me, and since it works for me, I find it great. It always has flaws, and I also write about those occasionally. If it’s really bad, I get rid of it very quickly and get something that works better, so it’s not like I’m going to whine endlessly about how much something sucks. Yeah, it sucked, I sold it, and got something that didn’t suck, problem solved. I whine if I don’t have an obvious solution for a problem I’m having, for instance when I was in the four thirds system, I was kind of stuck with one lens, because I wasn’t sure if the system was long-term viable, and I actually wanted 35mm but those either cost car money or just didn’t exist. When the technology advanced to the point where that was solved, I had nothing to whine about and just took pictures. I also can’t really write comparative reviews because I use one system at a time. I can’t really tell you whether a Nikon, Canon or Sony version of a certain lens is better, because I use one, and it’s the one that’s in the system that I’m currently using. If people can’t make up their minds about which is better, it means that both are likely so similar in practice that it doesn’t matter which one you use, which solves the problem.

Sony user taking a picture of a Canon user taking a picture. 🙂

It’s not that I’m averse to gear talk. I like gear talk. I’m very technically minded and prefer to get into the physics of how something actually works. If I had to name something I miss from those photographic forums, it’s sharing experiences with gear, and opinions about relative importance of certain metrics, for instance how focal length, aperture and shape of the iris influence bokeh, or how sensor construction parameters influence colours. But those brand flame wars,… kill me now please. 🙂