943 Comments

Would you accept Space Catholicism? I’m still working out the particulars.

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Sounds like a job for Frank Herbert. (Or L. Ron Hubbard if you're feeling extra crazy.)

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I think there are beautiful and dutiful ways of basing new things on ancient things. But we get stuck in traditions that at the time made sense and were fitting but we’re dancing to a different part of the music now and we have to learn the next part.

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The “Canticle for Leibowitz” author went from ending his book with space Catholicism to being an atheist by the sequel, though perhaps the real thing will be more stable.

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I might do a response piece to this but there’s no such thing as a “stable” institution, only institutions that are reliably reborn and able to adapt. Kinda like ol’ JC himself. There’s no future that won’t require our courage. Nor would I want that future.

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An excellent point, one I wish people more deeply understood. Life span of an institution is like the life span of a cell: too short, something was broken; too long, it is probably cancerous. It needs to live long enough to serve its purpose, then die off when it is completed or the cell is no longer functioning well.

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Capitalism's one great virtue is a standardized mechanism for killing off no-longer-functional institutions, while permitting the people who participated in them to mostly survive and go on to contribute elsewhere.

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Oct 4·edited Oct 4

That doesn't work with religion, well at least the sort than have omniscient beings that express their preferences. If you start with the premise from the believer that their religion is as true as gravity or air, it doesn't and shouldn't change as it's infallible. Adaptation implies fallibility and a fallible religion isn't worth following in the face of competition even if you are a true believer hence the ease at which polytheistic fallible religion are supplanted. There is a reason monotheism came to dominate the world with the only hold outs really being agnosticism masquerading as religion such as Buddhism or Hinduism.

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Empirically, infallibility isn't the only thing that attracts believers to religions. "True enough" is often sufficient. There will always be aspects that you're not allowed to doubt, but most religions keep that stuff out of the way of managing daily life. Not all of them (the few that have eternities meddling in everyday affairs could justly be called the "totalitarian" subtype) but most do explicitly leave room for change, emphasize that the universe is mysterious in some ways i.e. leave some parts of the map empty.

I think that is all perfectly natural and suspect that only someone memetically poisoned by the totalitarian subtype would think the gentler types are "agnosticism masquerading as religion".

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Oct 6·edited Oct 6

See my response a couple down; I would expand upon it here but the gist is mostly the same so I won't. The only thing I would add is nothing attracts anyone to any religion once a person is religious as by definition there can only be one true religion hence given the supposition of true belief, attraction is irrelevant. Either you lose faith in your religion (which isn't possible in monotheism unless you become atheist / apostacy), get convinced a variant of it is better (i.e. heresy/apostacy), or (if you are polytheistic) decide the new god is better and you move to them (which is normal as polytheism is generally one of God_shopping_of_the_week) but then have to live under their new (monotheistic) rules because that is what the new super god requires if you want his support. Polytheistic religions are for all sakes and purposes "I can believe/do whatever I want because ultimately it doesn't matter because over infinite cycles I will always win", i.e. agnosticism dressed up with rituals and incense.

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I’m not sure I believe this but can remember when I believed something close to this. Circumstances change. The same principles apply but their application looks different.

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WTF Hinduism is not "agnosticism". There are monotheistic and polytheistic Hindus, but most of them are certainly not "agnostic". Either polytheism or ditheism make a lot more sense (to me, anyway) than monotheism does, and I have no more problem accepting a fallible religion than I have accepting the scientific method (which is also, obviously, fallible). Omniscience doesn't really make any sense either since it conflicts with free will.

Monotheism dominates the world because Western Europeans and Arabs/Turks were good at killing people and conquering territory, that's about it. Not because it makes more ideological or theological sense.

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Oct 6·edited Oct 6

Of course they are agnostic in a real sense as the gods are irrelevant outside the immediacy of your cycle, i.e. they have no impact over eternity as eventually everyone reaches Nirvana or Buddhist annihilation. There is no path that doesn't result in you ultimately succeeding in the reincarnation or enlightenment endgame over infinite cycles. Some just reach it sooner than others hence the gods are literally irrelevant outside your current cycle, they can't prevent you from reaching the end state hence what you truly have is agnosticism, i.e. "I believe in the gods like I believe in my boss at work, they can make my life in the now better or worse and I can selective choose between them via the flavor of the week because ultimately it doesn't matter, I can live my life however I want because over eternity some future cycle self will get it right"

As for the last paragraph, not at all. The world was being dominated by polytheist people long before Christianity and Islam came to dominate the modern world so you have to ask yourself why it is those conquered people were so quick to convert rather than just die like Christians and Muslims for their god. The answer is because in a polytheistic world when Abrahamic God (hereafter God) shows up he is accepted as legitimate "just another god to add to the pantheon" but when you pray to Odin (Shiva, Huitzilopochtli , the flying spaghetti monster, the Emperor, whoever) time and time again while your enemy prays to God but he (Odin or your former big man on the block) keeps failing to deliver as you lose on the battlefield time and time again, you simply start praying to the new god (God) who actually can deliver as is apparent to all your dead friends because why stick with an obvious inferior and weak god who is nothing but a failure in the face of the new god on the block. And that new god is jealous so you have to give up on the god_of_the_week(tm) and so you forget your old ways and your kids become true believers. But that's OK because God delivers over his prima farcie inferior peers hence why you were conquered. Once again, the supposition is true belief, not science, hence the only that matters to the outcome of the battle is whose god is more powerful hence worthy of worship if you are polytheistic.

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First time I read *Dune*, I got the impression Zensunni and the O.C. Bible were the products of thousands of years of institutional evolution. They fit right in thematically. Arrakis shaped the Fremen, the Bene Gesserit shaped their Kwisatz Haderach, so galactic politics had to shape religion, right?

Second time, I happened to see their description in the glossary. It turns out an ecumenical council did it in one stroke. I was so disappointed.

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Wait, Herbert mentions the Orange Catholic Bible but never says anything about the Orange Catholic Pope, who would presumably be a huge player...

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Oct 5·edited Oct 5

He was much more interested in mashing names of incompatible religions together than actually trying to parse out any doctrine.

There was the Orange Catholic Bible yes, but the Fremen apparently followed "Zensunni", which is also a mashup.

Unsurprising since his characters were not particularly devout in anything other than following a messiah, i.e. all devout characters were members of a cult of personality.

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Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama has the "Church of Jesus Christ; Cosmonaut".

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Oct 6·edited Oct 6

Or John C. Wright. A scene cut from the volume "The Hermetic Millennia" from "Count to a Trillion/The Eschaton Sequence":

https://scifiwright.com/2013/05/lunar-sacrament-of-conciliation/

Lunar Sacrament of Conciliation

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two hundred eighty five years since my last confession.”

And with these words, the dark figure sank to his knees onto the sub-zero lunar surface.

Reyes was happy that a mask was blocking his expression. This was the last thing he would have expected. Slowly he stood and slowly made the sign of the cross in above the hooded head of the kneeling figure. “In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Speak and ease your burden. Of what sins do you accuse yourself, my son?”

“Monstrous sins, both done, and sins I have in contemplation.”

“Sins not yet committed cannot be absolved. List your past sins that you repent. To repent means to turn away from them, and to avoid the occasions where they may tempt you again.”

“I have murdered all the Hermeticists, and spared only you five, of whom I have need.”

Reyes was aware of the wild feeling of supremacy, as if he had passed a test all his fellows had flunked; but he was also ashamed of this feeling. “Murder? They were victims of augmentation accidents. Unexpected divarifications, logic loops, Turing halt states … You need not to confess mere feelings of guilt where no real guilt obtains, my son.”

“It is a sin of omission. I ran the specifications to see what would be needed for a human brain to be correctly carried both into emulation, as with Exarchel, and into augmentation, as with me. I was able to reverse-engineer some steps of Rania’s work, and make guesses about others. And I knew they would fail. I knew they were weak. I could have stopped them with a command; I could have interfered with their experiments; I could have merely showed them my results of my trial runs I ran on your ghosts which my Exarchel has consumed. I know the secret. Or part of it.”

…“Ah! But you are wondering whether, as more and more people create upload copies of themselves, immortal upload copies, how soon it will be before the whole world is devoted to one electronic nirvana, a paradise of unreality? How can the Darwinian process continue unless the useless eaters of bread and the useless consumers of power die back? This involves my second horde of sins, the one I have not yet committed.”

Reyes was so elated hearing that he was to achieve posthuman greatness, that he almost did not hear what Del Azarchel was saying.

Reyes sobered. “My son! If you yet intend to do these sins, then you have no firm purpose of amendment, and have not repented of them.”

“I repent that they are necessary.”

…“The sins I contemplate and have committed is murder by the thousands and tens of thousand, murder by the millions, that the base stock of humanity be culled. The Hylics must die, of course. It would not be right to have allowed the Hermeticists to be decimated, without forcing the common people to suffer the same risks, and die at the same ratios. I mean to destroy nine parts of mankind in order that one tenth might survive and prosper, and become the seed of posthumanity. Without this, the Hyades will overwhelm Earth in the One Hundred and Tenth Century.”

Reyes y Pastor felt a disquieting sensation, like sickness in himself. “You are speaking of the cusp nexus occurring at the next crisis interval in our calculations? The calculation you showed us cast the genocide in terms of a hypothetical, assuming a continuing energy crisis against demographic shifts…”

“Ah. I also wish to confess the sins of bearing false witness. I have systematically falsified data fed to the Hermetic Order. The cliometric calculations show that cusp to be inevitable.”

Father Reyes wanted to wipe the cold sweat from his face, but this, of course, is one of the things one cannot do in a vacuum mask. “It is not inevitable if you repent of it.”

“It is inevitable because I have decreed it so. Once the rod-logic diamonds in all the cities of Earth have achieved a certain critical mass, I intend to coat the biosphere with Aurum Vitae, and reduce any organisms not needed in the neural net to more useful elements. Montrose’s only possible countermove is something he would not dare to do, since to destroy the computer mainframes of an entire world—by a decade from now, it will be world utterly dependent on emulation technology for both government and economic control functions—would be to trigger global collapse, leading to the same outcome.”

…The small part of his mind reminded him of the duties of his office. Reluctantly, he said, “It is an abuse of this sacrament to pretend to confess a crime not yet committed, nor can it be absolved. While within the seal of the confessional, you stand to me in the relation of son to father, because I speak with the voice of the Father and in His place while I act within His will—It is within my power to charge you and compel you not to do this act. By mortal sin a man excommunicates himself from Church, and from hope of salvation! Look in your conscience. You know what you intend is evil, an enormity beyond reckoning! Swear not to carry through with this! Swear upon your hope of heaven!”

Del Azarchel stood. “I have no need of heaven to house my soul, if I achieve physical immortality through the posthumanification process. I shall endure in one form or another for as long as this universe. Such a thing is not beyond my grasp…”

…But he also had his pride as an intellectual, as an academic, as a Hermeticist.

The common muck of mankind deserved death—was that not the general doom decreed for all Adam’s children? How would an act of genocide to decimate all the lands of Earth be so different from the Great Flood of Noah? It was practically the same as doing the work of the Lord, merely by other, and more efficient means.

And a loving God would not expect a man, especially a man of such superior intelligence as Reyes y Pastor, not to do anything necessary, commit any crime, forsake any oath, to preserve the human race in its new and inhuman form that Darwin demanded, so as to oppose the descent of the Hyades? Of course not. The Father knew all, and forgave all.

…“But of course—” his voice was hoarse, his mouth unexpectedly dry, “You also have the duty imposed by history to save mankind. Darwin makes certain demands upon us, and it is entirely within keeping with, ah, with common sense, that a man must do what is needed to preserve the race. Even if that means changing the race to something unthinkable.”

Del Azarchel moved one leg, so that he was upon one knee, not both, as if he were about to rise up. “What is this? You are a man of the cloth. It is your business to talk me out of this. Tell me of the hellfire.”

Reyes y Pastor begged in his heart to his heart for forgiveness, but with his lips he said, “The talk of hell in the Holy Scripture is meant to be metaphorical. All the enlightened and progressive thinkers agree. It is literary device to represent the burning flames of the conscience. Of course, as a being superior to human beings, your conscience should be evolved to the level beyond good and evil, as befits you.”

“Odd that you would say so. The more intelligent the augmentation makes me, the more logical and inevitable venerable ideas like hellfire seem. Almost as grim and inevitable as a cliometric calculation.”

“A loving God could not create a hell.”

“A loving God must have some place to put those exiles who reject His love, souls to whom the fires of that love are pain, because they hate it. Will you betray your own office, your oath of priesthood, everything, to counsel me to commit this deed? I was expecting the opposite from you.”

Reyes y Pastor turned up his oxygen gain and drew a deep breath. “My son, despite all your intelligence, your heart is clouded. Listen to me. Do you know how Benaiah the son of Jehoiada served King Solomon, wisest of the wise? He fell upon Joab while Joab was clinging to the horn of the altar, begging for mercy and demanding sanctuary. All this was done at the King’s commandment. And are you not wiser, in your augmented state, than Solomon ever was?”

Del Azarchel said softly, “It is the memory of Captain Ranier Grimaldi that haunts you. We mutinied and murdered him, in order to use his body for the raw materials to make Rania, and find a way to come home again. Your hands are bloodied as well as mine. How can bloodstained hands touch the Eucharist, or lave me in the water that absolves of sin?”

Reyes said blandly, “The doctrine of ex opere operato as first explicated by St. Augustine during the Donatist heresy makes clear that the individual impurities of the Episcopal officer do not impede the power of the sacrament coming through the office. Christ can absolve sins through me, polluted as I am. There is but one question here.”

“Ask it.”

“The genocide of man you have decreed, the mass extinctions—”

“Yes?”

“Does victory rest on the other side of them?”

Del Azarchel said, “Then you will absolve me of the evil I do if good comes of it?”

“No, my son. The sacrament of confession cannot be used in this way. As a priest and ghostly father I can do nothing for you. But I am also an Hermeticist, one of the rare to survive the expedition to the Diamond Star, and one of the even more rare to have survived the baptism of fire you ignited. And I say that Darwin will absolve you, for the process of evolution is the process that, through evils produces good, and through death, life. Rise up from this cold and lifeless dust! The penance I impose upon you is that you shall succeed in being the savior of mankind, and save the race from the Hyades. You shall not fail! Nor shall we fail you. You are right to demand we call you master, for we have no hope of salvation outside you.”

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Love the Eschaton Sequence - it starts off and looks purely Manichean, and then takes an unexpected turn into Gnosticism.

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The James Blish or Mary Doria Russell Space Catholics?

Neither ended that well.

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Is this by any chance based on CS Lewis' space trilogy? He wasn't Catholic, but the concept seems close enough.

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Only if it involves lesbian necromancers and cows.

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I understood that reference!

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I would define space catholicism as the views intellectual catholics would hold 2000 years from now. How does the content of Christianity change as the context from which Christianity was born becomes more distant? That is, the answer to this question: what religious claims still make sense when removed from their original context and how do they develop so as to continue transmission? That's one thing that makes Unsong a great book, besides the puns. Unsong develops answers to ancient metaphysical questions in a modern context, and does so within a synthesis of traditions new and old.

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One sideline of this is what Catholicism looks like when the Pope is 30 light years away and the only interaction is occasional Papal Bulls being sent at lightspeed, and maybe occasional doctrinal questions being sent toward the Vatican. The Church has lived in a world where the Vatican was very far away and communications and orders were very expensive and slow, so probably it could adapt.

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Is the Space Pope reptilian?

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I Dated A Robot looks pretty good now.

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I once wrote a story about space catholic Spaniards vs. space ottomans.

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Don John of Austria has loosed the second stage!

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Did the Space Hussars charge at the Space Janissaries to save the planet Vienna?

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Not exactly. But Spaniards had space cruisers named like "Our Lady of Africa" and "Pius XII".

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All rocket ships should look like mitres.

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Space Catholicism is just normal Catholicism. Plenty of Catholics in the aerospace industry. We don't need new religions. We need to understand that Christianity isn't a religion that's stuck in the past. It has always been about getting back to the future.

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While the Imperial Cult [1] of Warhammer 40k is likely incompatible with Catholicism on the finer points, it nevertheless shares some similarity with medieval or early modern Catholicism:

* Strong endorsement of a feudal society structure

* Centrally controlled doctrine

* Belief in a god who walked among men

* Little tolerance approach to heterodox thought

* The common folks are not required to study theology in detail (contrast with Judaism)

* Aesthetic similarities (but with more skulls)

Of course, all of these features are shared with orthodox Christianity, and probably a lot of religious branches beside that.

[1] https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Imperial_Cult

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Seeing Christian conservatives use Warhammer imagery has always been kind of amusing in the way that the God-Emperor is very close to being a literal Antichrist figure.

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George RR Martin has done a short story on this, with a lizard-like space bishop! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_of_Cross_and_Dragon

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Available for free online.

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-way-of-cross-and-dragon/

It's spectacularly good.

"[We] believe in no afterlife, no God. We see the universe as it is, Father Damien, and these naked truths are cruel ones. We who believe in life, and treasure it, will die. Afterward there will be nothing, eternal emptiness, blackness, nonexistence. In our living there has been no purpose, no poetry, no meaning. Nor do our deaths possess these qualities. When we are gone, the universe will not long remember us, and shortly it will be as if we had never lived at all. Our worlds and our universe will not long outlive us. Ultimately, entropy will consume all, and our puny efforts cannot stay that awful end. It will be gone. It has never been. It has never mattered. The universe itself is doomed, transient, uncaring.”

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Babylon 5 already did it

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Have you read Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, and Xenocide? They're full of Space Catholics. Nothing but Space Catholics.

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I think the REAL intended message is more anti-non-Christianity (read as: Islamism).

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Why do you think that?

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"Why I am now a Christian: Atheism can't equip us for civilisational war"

https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/

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fairly conclusive haha, wonder if they'll reply

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I was wondering why Shankar thought that though

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Basically the same, though while the post mentioned Ayaan specifically, and she has been explicit about her reasons, Dawkins and Richard Spencer have said similar things, and their reasons are slightly less obvious.

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Gotcha, interesting.

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Soviet Communism did fine for itself in WWII without being theistic. Also, everyone thinks the US is a decadent paper tiger until we prove them wrong.

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It did fine for itself in WWII, but is kind of famous for dying out and being replaced by a different culture.

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Soviets did give more freedom to religion during WW2 compared to before and after.

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Arguably, it didn't do as well as it could have. According to a somewhat dubious source I didn't independently verify, the USSR was preparing for a massive war, had the strongest army in the world with lots and lots of quite modern (if not always top-notch) aircraft and tanks, and produced 5 times more oil than Germany ever had access to. And then it all collapsed faster and harder than France, and the only thing that saved Stalin's ass was that the USSR was somewhat bigger than France and he had time to try a few more things. (Including going easier on religion for a while, by the way.) The somewhat dubious source claims that most people simply didn't feel like fighting for the regime. Although there were enough reasons to hate it besides atheism, so no idea how much of the low morale (if the claim is correct) can be explained by it.

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Having a literal genocidal army invading your homeland does wonders for morale.

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The homeland regime was genocidal too, while the genocide by the Germans was mostly against the Jews whose support among the rest of the Soviet people was ambiguous at best (Ukrainians had carried out their own Jewish genocide a generation ago).

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Communism is basically a religion, complete with its holy men, its scripture, its heresies, and its eschatology.

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Soviet Communism did fine because it had most of the emotional trappings of religion: it had its holy doctrine, saints, prophets, rituals and codified definitions of sins. It passed the point of a cult of personality and became just a cult of a mythologized Batyushka Stalin, the Man of Steel.

It worked a bit like that in every Socialst Republic. I remember my own Babcia reverently hanging the picture of the First Chairman Of the Party right next to a Crucifix, not entirely decided which Messiah to follow and hedging her spiritual bets.

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes:

"That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity."

This blog post argues otherwise:

https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-ottoman-origins-of-modernity

Its thesis: Christianity (what we'd now call Catholicism) was a repressive force for hundreds of years. Secular freedom only came into the picture with the emergence of a successful heresy (Protestantism) + the need for Catholicism and Protestantism to unite against an external foe.

To be fair, I suppose one could argue that before the Reformation, most Christians weren't actually reading the Bible, and once they started reading the Bible, they realized the importance of secular freedoms.

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I agree. Basically, if you don't want any Muslims in your country, you have two options. Well, three:

1. Discriminate against Muslims specifically. This is going to upset a lot of Muslim countries.

2. Discriminate against all religions (state atheism). In a country that is not majority atheist this is going to upset a lot of citizens.

3. Discriminate against non-Christians, but accept even superficial Christianity.

Muslim countries can't protest against 3, because they usually discriminate against non-Muslims themselves. Option 3 will upset outspoken atheists, especially if implemented in the Malaysian style ("a Pole is someone who is Catholic, habitually speaks Polish and conforms to Polish customs"), but you can dial in the level of discrimination by doing something like: "Germany is a secular country and shall make no concessions to religious customs, but, acknowledging its Christian heritage, will not abolish existing support for national traditions and customs of Christian origin" and happily ban elective circumcision, muezzin calls to prayer, face coverings (except carnival masks, of course) and sprinkle bacon crumbs on every school meal.

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you can discriminate on ethno-national grounds and ancestry, which in practice is going to close off Muslim migration, although of course it won't stop ethnic Poles from converting to Islam.

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a possible 4th solution is to decisively discriminate against all the violations of human rights, public health, public good and personal freedoms religions require to exist, without discriminating against the religions themselves. If the government was really keen on dishing out justice to people who violate the law for religious reasons, the religions would be defanged pretty quickly, and become mere mannerisms.

For example, if the policy is to tolerate absolutely no child abuse, ever, be it physical, mental, emotional or otherwise, and punish abusive parents with extreme severity, religion tends to erode the moment the children of religious parents find out they can just refuse to go to the temple and not face any consequences for it.

A fundamental part of religion, one needed for its survival is the ability to punish people for quitting, or trying to quit. If the government is happy to put you in prison for religious enforcement, then religious enforcement ends pretty quickly.

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Do you think abuse is the only consequence parents have in their toolbox for enforcing rules? How do you think parents ought to respond to a kid who refuses to go to school or the doctor?

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Oct 4·edited Oct 4

while i find the rebuttal persuasive, i have never heard anyone make this argument, and scott doesn’t give any examples of people making this argument. i guess it’s good to have considered one additional argument in favour of not being a conservative christian.

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My thought as well. I thought there was going to be something about why it's good to celebrate Christmas even if you don't believe in Jesus or whatever, but it doesn't get into that much detail.

My guess is that this is really a straw argument masquerading as a real one, like the post Scott included in the links for last month that had some really interesting stuff about cultural explanations of declining birth rate, but then had two paragraphs at the end trying to smuggle in "and therefore we should accept the radical right-wing views on the following 15 topics".

Maybe this form of argument is common in a kind of neo-trad movement that is adjacent to anti-woke tech-center-right-ism?

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I think it's a pretty common belief, see my direct reply to Sam

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I'm a deist, not an atheist per se, but I've heard the cultural Christianity argument coming out of my own mouth. In my case, the cultural Christianity argument makes sense because I don't care about classical liberalism. And I don't have any blanket condemnation of theocracies. It depends on the theocracy.

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Scott lives in the Bay Area of California and the discourse in Bay Area is a unique beast.

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Ah yes, that post from Becoming Noble substack. It is a classic of the genre of hooking you in and then putting the radical stuff at the end. He literally proposes keeping young women uneducated and promoting teen pregnancy! I mean, he’s not wrong that it correlates with fertility (single greatest predictive variable through history for fertility rate is percentage of girls who leave formal education before age 15) but like damn.

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Anecdotal, but I've definitely heard this argument made in Christian vs atheist debates.

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He gave the example of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

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Oct 4·edited Oct 4

Yeah, but even this example is mistaken. Hirsi Ali is not a cultural Christian, but an actual Christian and she suggests actual Christianity instead of cultural Christianity: https://www.christiantoday.com/article/ayaan.hirsi.alis.powerful.conversion/141801.htm

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Oct 4·edited Oct 4

"Ayaan gave a powerful response that Christianity had led to the "flourishing of Western civilization"....."""Everything that we inherited from [Christian faith], it's just too casual to cast that aside. When we've done it, I think we have caused ourselves a great deal of damage." Both are standard 'atheists should embrace cultural Christianity' tropes. Scott isn't saying proponents themselves are only 'cultural' Christians, though his sentence about where Hirsi is 'sort of coming from' is open to interpretation.

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This argument has definitely become more common in Christian/atheist debates and especially related to Tom Holland’s book Dominion. Alex O’Connor is particularly annoyed by this argument but for different reasons than Scott (https://unherd.com/2024/06/the-trouble-with-political-christianity/).

Ironically, Tom Holland’s book actually ends up agreeing with Scott’s point in the last chapter (titled “Woke”) by suggesting that modern progressivism is the product of a Christian mindset that everyone has without noticing it ("This is Water").

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This is a very common argument/belief in evangelical Christian circles, at least in my personal experience (was raised in devout Christian family, most of my family members and people I knew growing up were and continue to remain Christians, and most of them believe some version of this). I also wouldn't be surprised if Mormons and conservative Catholics believed something like this too, but I've had much less interaction with those groups.

Edit: it actually can go much further than this. Once again, this is my personal experience, but I was raised to believe (and still know many people who believe) that things secular people think of as Enlightenment values (rationality, tolerance, etc.) and even the scientific method came out of Christian culture. So, the theory goes, if you live in the west it's ultimately Christianity you can thank for the vaccines keeping you alive while you play video games on a supercomputer you can hold in your hand in a relatively tolerant, open society.

One final thought: another more secular example of someone who's argued something like this is Tyler Cowen. He doesn't advocate people lie and say Christianity is true if they don't believe it, but across blog posts he's certainly gestured towards the general idea that things we (including, maybe especially secular people) appreciate come from Christianity. The examples I can think of off the top of my head he's mentioned are the Christian influence on the abolitionist movement, and the general advice he's given that if people want to be happy they should be "more Mormon" (no drinking, get married, have children, etc.)

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There's a nuance here, in that even if you don't accept Christianity *caused* all this stuff, you might be able to accept that it provided the meaning, purpose and good will toward men that allowed us to get on with it--and that if you take it away, it gets replaced with stuff that absolutely does not allow us to get on with it.

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This seems to be the exact argument the article is arguing against.

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Not sure what you mean. You could mean a couple different things.

He argues against asserting the doctrines out of practicality (unrelated), and argues that an attempt to prop up Christainity may just end in the same place (mostly unrelated). If you're saying the latter implicitly accepts a closer link between Christianity and western ideas than just non-interference... my point is that it can be necessary without being sufficient.

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From the article: "But the Cultural Christians would argue that such a flowering of culture and optimism could only happen within a generation or two of a Christian society."

You write: "you might be able to accept that it provided the meaning, purpose and good will toward men that allowed us to get on with it"

These seem to be the same premise; I'm not sure how else to read it. "Christianity provided the cultural basis for these things." Is this not what both are saying?

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The first is the possibility that Christianity caused them. The second is the possibility that it just kind of didn't interfere (but fills a need normally filled by things that do interfere).

Not a massive distinction, but an outline of how it could be important even if you don't see a causal connection.

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That seems to be the claim, but I think it gets things backwards. It is very plausible to me that Christianity gave an initial set of ideas that caused this stuff to develop, but it seems very implausible to me that these ideas couldn’t be sustained on their own terms.

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Looking at the actual history of the ideas, I don't find that argument plausible. The ideas were either present or being developed before Christianity had ever been heard of.

OTOH, I do find that an essentially idle aristocracy was probably necessary. Also urban centers.

Christianity was, at best, an only slightly resistive medium. And it wasn't always only slightly resistive. (Usually, though, for political reasons, so one can argue that any other centralized power would have been nearly as bad.)

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The ideas can be "sustained" in the sense of remaining logical or coherent, but they aren't a religion. The religious void has this way of getting filled.

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Is there any reason to believe that Christianity is a safer religion to fill this void with than, say, Buddhism, or Norse paganism, or Unitarian Universalism, or Scientology, or Baha'i, or whatever?

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Perhaps, but it's moot since we're talking about the value of supporting a pre-existing Christian tradition in western society. You can't ride Buddhist inertia that isn't there.

I don't think you can truly fill the void with Christianity in the long run, to be clear. I think true believers will keep declining.

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I can’t help thinking it might have something to do with having become the official religion of the Roman Empire. It was a very successful merger.

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Oct 4·edited Oct 4

If it was memetically unfit, it would have died with the empire. But it didn't.

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It clearly wasn't memetically unfit, but I think that most modern analysis of *what* offered Christianity notable memetic fitness fails to account for the fact that evangelism was not a common feature of religions at the time, but an exceptional feature which set Christianity apart in its environment. Most discussions I've followed take for granted the assumption that contemporary religions were competing for followers, and Christianity won the competition, but the position I've heard represented more among religious historians is that other contemporary religions were, for the most part, not actively competing for followers.

It's very non-coincidental that most religious people today practice evangelistic religions, from a starting point where evangelistic religions were the exception. But I think centering the discussion on the religion's moral values, and pretending that it was playing the same kind of game as its competitors, is probably glossing over the most important feature.

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I don't guess it made it to the Roman world, but wasn't Buddhism evangelical? Certainly it spread very rapidly across a big chunk of the world!

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Buddhism is, as far as I'm aware, the first evangelical religion in history, and it experienced a rapid spread for similar reasons. But Christianity has one major distinction from Buddhism in terms of memetic fitness, and that's its exclusivity. Buddhism was highly syncretic, and tended to pick up additional gods and cosmology everywhere it spread to. In many cases, Buddhism essentially became an additional feature within other preexisting religious cosmologies. In contrast, Christianity packaged in the idea that other types of religious belief and worship were actively wrong and harmful, and needed to be replaced. So while Buddhism had a similarly rapid spread, it didn't replace other local religious beliefs to the same extent.

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Oh of course, the moral values are basically irrelevant. This is about restoring order and power to our society.

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It was successful at becoming a state religion, but that greatly increased the amount of political infighting, to the point that a large chunk of history of the Eastern Roman Empire is about obscure and yet vicious theological disputes between bishops of different cities.

A monotheistic religion that made claims of being universal had some downsides in an era when religious tolerance hadn't been invented yet.

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Well, yeah, they had to duke it out (still happening), but let’s face it, being aligned with the center of power is an advantage don’t you think? God and gods have been going from many to one for quite a while. Is it called vertical integration in business school terminology?

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Advantage for whom in what competition, though? It was good for the meme since it outcompeted other religions using state power. Though, Christianity spread pretty rapidly on its own, despite state suppression. Was it good for the state? Hard to say, since the Roman Empire was pretty successful with a different state religion. Was it good for the people? I guess it depends on which people we're talking about. Most people in the empire were poor farmers or slaves both before and after Christianity became a state religion.

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My only point is, that it was good for Christianity as an institution.

Who else it was good for is a matter of endless argument.

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>in an era when religious tolerance hadn't been invented yet.

This made me chuckle..

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The Eastern Roman Empire wasn't brought down by those disputes but by the challenge of countries aligned with another competing monotheistic religion.

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They lasted over a thousand years, so I’m not sure if it makes sense to focus on how it ended. But from a modern perspective, there was an inability to fix ongoing problems. Picking a new emperor: never really solved, often violent. An insistence on religious uniformity despite disagreements resulted in often violent internal politics. (This foreshadows the religious wars after the Protestant Reformation.)

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Unsurprisingly, most of the things Christianity gets falsely praised for, are simply long term outcomes of Roman and Greek thought permeating the culture. Its not about Jesus, its about Socrates.

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What does the group of people who think this expect liberal atheists to do?

Is it as Scott suggests, go through the motions of being Christian, or is it something more along the lines of dont wage the war on Christmas. Revel in christian traditions and dont fight its influence on society (the latter doesnt seem to require much lieing)

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Based on my admittedly sketchy understanding of fin de siecle England, I think it's the former: AIUI the Anglican Church (and Church attendance in general) had and has no real "teeth" in the sense of being an oppressive, totalizing theology (I forget who it was who observed that ironically, by making it a state religion, it essentially guaranteed that it was always going to be a social club first and a religion second, because there would never be any selection effect for committed religiosity), and instead provided a pleasant space to hang around in for an hour every Sunday while developing a sense of local community and reflecting on being charitable. But the thing is, you (and everyone else) still have to actually *go* to gain those benefits, instead of staying home and watching the footie.

It's like the cultural-values version of Type 2 fun.

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Oct 7·edited Oct 7

Sir Humphrey Appleby: The Queen is inseparable from the Church of England.

Jim Hacker: And what about God?

Sir Humphrey Appleby: I think he is what is called an optional extra.

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Stop suing bakers who won't make gay cakes. Don't tell people who don't want porn in their kids library that they are book burning Nazis.

Oppose many interpretations of "civil rights". Support freedom of association for Christians.

Oppose immigration, especially of non-Christians (its quite obvious that a lot of this boils down to don't let Europe get flooded with low IQ muslims that turn it into a caliphate).

Allow universal school vouchers so Christians can teach their kids their values.

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But those are all just basic conservative positions, with nothing specifically Christian about them. If the conclusion of the argument Scott's responding to is merely "be a conservative" then it's a terrible argument. It tries to prove too much (much more than necessary). "Because Christianity is awesome, you should defend religious freedom and Western values" implies (semantically not logically) that if you *don't* think Christianity is awesome you *shouldn't* defend those things. When actually you don't need to be Christian (cultural or otherwise) to see their value.

I'm not an atheist, but it should be blindingly obvious that atheism does not require leftism, and in fact the qualities atheism is usually taken to champion (reason, independent thought, freedom of speech) are entirely incompatible with leftism.

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FWIW, I *don't* think Christianity is awesome. The best claim that might be defensible is something along the lines of "given human nature, Christianity keeps something worse from filling the same function", and I think that would be difficult to defend. Christianity not just tolerated, but actively supported pogroms, among other things.

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Not 100% onboard with this set of policies, but my objections feel like they're closer to edge-case quibbling than irreconcilable core conflict. If I were locked in a room for a week with an advocate for that agenda, I like to think we'd be able to hammer out some mutually-agreeable compromise.

Probably the biggest sticking point would be that I'd want to ensure equal access to mainstream payment processors and other financial services for sex workers. I'm fine with that sort of thing being clearly labeled, isolated to some extent, and of course keeping kids out... but for somebody who makes their living drawing cartoon tits to have a harder time getting a mortgage, or using Paypal, relative to an equivalently successful professional in some less sex-related field, doesn't help anybody. On the contrary, driving it underground just turns the sector into an attractive nuisance, and utterly unnecessary fertile field for criminal exploitation.

The proper antidote for corruptive, misleading, dangerous porn isn't state-backed repression and abstinence-only ignorance. Gotta sort out some kind of broad societal standard for wholesome, educational, life-affirming porn. Maybe something a little bit like the Comics Code Authority, plus fact-checking from actual scientists? Pretty sure the J-man Himself was willing to deal fairly with prostitutes, and wasn't a fan of letting moneychangers wield too much power.

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Those aren't Christian culture, they're policies intended to protect a Christian minority from being bulldozed by a non-Christian majority, or perhaps to protect Christian proles from being bulldozed by non-Christian elites.

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I suspect they're policies intended to *help get politicians elected* in areas where many voters are conservative Christians. Nothing more.

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Oct 4·edited Oct 4

Mormons have socially conservative values but they tend not to worry about civilizational decline because, 1. The church is increasingly international in orientation. 2. Mormons have the confidence that they can cohere and survive as a people, whatever happens to their Nation or civilization. And who knows, they may be right about that.

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<i>Once again, this is my personal experience, but I was raised to believe (and still know many people who believe) that things secular people think of as Enlightenment values (rationality, tolerance, etc.) and even the scientific method came out of Christian culture.</i>

The scientific method was only formalised once, and that was in an environment where 99% of people were Christian. "The scientific method came out of Christian culture" is a straightforwardly true historical statement.

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No. The scientific method is a continuing process of development, that has strong threads reaching back to Aristotle and his companions (and probably before). And there is no particular point where you can say "That's where/when it was created", because it's still being created.

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In what way is the scentific method, as opposed to theories developed using the scientific method, "a continuing process of development"?

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Are statistical arguments valid? Which ones, and how valid?

This is still being developed. The solution will probably require doing away with the concept of "truth' and replacing it with a term meaning something like "a model consistent with all the reliable data that we have access to".

That's just off the top of my head. There are other similar topics, and currently different sciences have different rules for what constitutes "the scientific method". The experimental sciences use methods that are very different from the observational science.

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That’s not the case. Philosophy is not science. the scientific revolution is generally seen to have started in Europe in around the 17C

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revolution, yes, but EVOLUTION of science started with Thales of Miletus.

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I, also, was raised to believe lots of lies. People who live in cities are inherently more tolerant than those who live in small communities, because they have to get along with a wider divergence of different people. So that's one source of tolerance. (In past times, most people lived in agricultural [i.e., small] communities. And speed of communication also needs to be factored in, though there you don't have the feedback of "if you're too obnoxious, we'll kill you".)

Rationality dates back to some time before the Hellenic (or is it Hellenistic?) period. Probably lots before, but the records dwindle away. And the scientific method can be traced back that far too, though it was still being developed, so it hadn't been fully developed. Possibly the scientific method is the result of Alexander encouraging communication between Greek and Hindi philosophers. (I'm not sure they were Hindus as we understand the term.)

Just because you were raised with a belief doesn't justify holding that belief as an adult.

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"People who live in cities are inherently more tolerant than those who live in small communities"

I think if you poll both populations on their support for hate speech laws and cancel culture, regulations on the minute operations of businesses, whether you need permission to cut down a tree on your property, whether you're allowed to not make a particular requested cake, you'd find that's not remotely true.

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lol.

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Reporting this comment for being (a) rude (b) contentless (c) maximally low-effort (d) utterly unsubstantiated (e) contributing nothing to the discussion and (f) far below the expected standards here.

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I was going to say “Oh, so intolerance is just not letting people you think are being the right kind of asshole ever be socially punished.” But my phone was weirdly lagging and I needed desperately to express how ridiculous I found your statement. Sorry for the lack of effort. I really tried and just couldn’t stop every word from taking 15 seconds.

You deserve the courtesy of being told very explicitly that you are so wrong it’s laughable.

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Wait, are you reporting me (presumably in the hopes I am sanctioned) for expressing my beliefs in a way you find… intolerable?

Using expected social standards to demand I be socially punished for the psychological stress of my laughing at your beliefs?

How woke of you.

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Rationality goes back to at least Ancient Egypt 5-6kya (4k BCE), because they had not-matched-for-thousands of years complex multi-step chemistry that gave them various dyes, pigments, and blue faience.

This is on top of smelting and metallurgy, astronomy, math, and geometry.

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I don't think you can really make that claim on that basis. (There are others.) Multi-step processes that are refined over multiple generations can be achieved via pattern matching, with no rational thought required. OTOH, we can trace the evolution of the pyramid, because the earlier forms are still around (including at least one that fell down). It's easier to argue that rational thought was required to make the transition (especially to the one where the Pharaoh's name was engraved on a sheet of plaster that hid the name of the architect...until after a few years of rain and weather washed the plaster away).

This isn't meant to imply that you are wrong in the assumption that rational thought was involved in the development of, e.g., Egpytian cosmetics and poisons, just that the evidence has eroded away.

That said, there's a very decent argument that rational though is just a special kind of pattern matching, but I don't think it really suffices. I think it also involves developing correspondences between disjoint domains. (Which is why I think pure LLMs can't be rational and can't be true intelligences. But that robots wouldn't be so limited.) I expect that developing this kind of map will be one of the things required to solve the "hallucination" problem. (It will also need an adversarial censor...though in ineffective one may already be present.)

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Oct 5·edited Oct 5

> So, the theory goes, if you live in the west it's ultimately Christianity you can thank for the vaccines keeping you alive while you play video games on a supercomputer you can hold in your hand in a relatively tolerant, open society.

I suppose we can do that once we finish thanking Islam, and before that the Greeks and Romans. It's a very silly argument.

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Isn't cultural Christianity basically Jordan Peterson's whole deal?

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There is also a strong component of self-improvement. Belief in Jesus alone doesn't motivate you to Clean up Your Room™.

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Just off the top 'o me head: Ross Douthat and anyone he quotes. The whole First Things roster. Creeps like Adrian Vermeule. Basically, devout Christian pundits and 'intellectuals', who have become vastly more represented in the discourse since Trump, and exponentially more tedious as a result.

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Tom Holland's Dominion (https://www.amazon.com/Dominion-Christian-Revolution-Remade-World/dp/0465093507) is a book-length foundation of the argument; not exactly in "you should stay culturally Christian" terms but "here's the ways Christianity shaped what you appreciate about The West" terms.

Douglas Murray identifies as a culturally Christian atheist (https://www.premierchristianity.com/features/douglas-murray-the-anti-woke-atheist-with-a-soft-spot-for-christianity/4427.article). Look for other anti-woke atheists, especially gay British folk.

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I stumble on your first block. I can’t honestly vouch for something that I think is a steaming pile.

Otoh, I’m not opposed to using the non-useless parts of Christian ideas. “Love thy neighbour “ and that sort of thing. I think one can use the ideas (since they’re there anyway) without buying the whole ridiculous backstory.

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But without at least some parts of the backstory many many people will not willingly buy in to the non-useless parts. And society is so hard to manage when that happens.

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I think this is the much stronger argument. There are moralistic behaviours that can potentially make the individual's life worse in any given situation, but that if everyone subscribes to them make everyone's life better (eg. honesty). Christianity is both a Schelling point for collective morality (it's the rules God says it is) and a threatened enforcement mechanism. Absent it, we're sliding towards a world where being privately moral (eg. when no-one will know/you won't suffer negative consequences) is becoming increasingly alien. I'd be inclined to file the growth of utilitarianism and quasi-folk-utilitarianism ("it's not going to hurt anyone") under "collapse of private morality" as well, but I'm conscious some people consider that a good thing.

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I am inclined to disagree with you on how strong that argument is. The trouble with the backstory supporting the non-useless parts is that you have to really believe it is true. Believe it down to the blood and bone, the way my 5 year old believes there is a spider in the basement bathroom that will eat her after dark. If you don't have that kind of belief, you are right back to your private morality because the enforcement mechanism becomes a very weak threat, one made weaker by the fact you never see it happen to anyone. Indeed, it is probably the weakest of threats; at least with things like "no one will like you" or "you will go to prison" there are the occasional examples of them actually happening to reference.

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I don't think it has to be a very credible threat. I think it has to be an excuse. At the moment, if people who are basically inclined to be moral look around at everyone else not obeying the same rules and ask, "why should I?" "God wants me to," even for a fairly tenuous belief in God, will do as an excuse to obey otherwise-arbitrary moral rules, as will "everyone else does" for the remaining atheists. Probably the sweet spot is "everyone else does," but I think you just need a fairly weak attractor towards morality to counter-balance the creeping entropy of defection.

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I think it's more useful to think "God thinks I should" than "God wants me to". God, omnipotently, knows what is best for you and the universe, and gives guidelines that, if followed, tend toward that. So you ought to do what God thinks because you and/or society will be better if you do.

This is coming from an atheistic viewpoint. The Bible's commandments have been tried and found useful through history, so we know they work well for society by experience. If there were things wrong, they would not have survived this long. And maybe the first commandments were different, and evolved to their current state, which has now been stable for hundreds of years.

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>This is coming from an atheistic viewpoint. The Bible's commandments have been tried and found useful through history, so we know they work well for society by experience.

In what sense? An institution can be stable without necessarily being good for human happiness. The institution of slavery was longer-lived than Christianity has been so far, so in a sense it certainly "worked," but that doesn't mean either that we could stably return to it in a modern environment, or that it ever made humans happier on net.

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I agree in a sense, but “I won’t be a good person otherwise” is an equally viable excuse. It also benefits from most everyone being pretty sure they exist.

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I'm not sure this is true. I think you can also get a lot of sticking to Christian teachings because everyone expects that of you and visibly breaking from them will be socially costly. That seems to be most of the enforcement mechanism of wokism. It is subject to sudden change when the preference falsification cascade collapses, but until then....

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Yes, but that doesn't solve the problem of people behaving the right way when no one else is looking or they don't expect to be caught. You are correct that doing what you are supposed to do when it will be visibly obvious that you are not is pretty difficult to break away from, and most people won't (this is what makes e.g. blatant shoplifting such a shocking thing). The challenge for social control is getting people to behave properly when they think no one will know.

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This is the part of Jordan Peterson's views that I actually think is correct (if I understand JBP at all, which at times is difficult and not worth the hours/years it might take to deep dive). Stories are powerful and they matter. Where I get off that bus is when those stories are labeled Truth, even if they lead to moderately large coordination gains.

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Religious people will also say this about many bible stories. The old nun who taught my RCIA class used to say "The Bible is full of stories, all of them are true and some of them even happened."

There can be value in the story of David and Goliath or the Flood (both favorite stories of my kids when they were small!) even if those things never actually happened. Jesus' parables don't really require that there was ever a dude who owned a vinyard and responded to his tenants killing all the people he sent to demand his rent by sending his son, say.

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Yes, there is value. That does not make them true. That’s where I break from JBP

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I mean, there is capital-T truth in a lot of literature that nobody thinks is literally true, from the Odyssey to Julius Caesar to Persuasion to Kim to Lord of the Rings to Things Fall Apart. And also there is value in having a set of cultural references that almost everyone knows and that can be used in analogies and discussions easily.

Those are distinct from thinking there was ever actually a great flood that covered the whole Earth with water, or that anyone's wife literally turned into a pillar of salt because she looked back. Or for that matter, that Odysseus really blinded a cyclops or that Gandalf really went head-to-head with a Balrog.

I'm not sure if that's Peterson's point because I haven't read much of his work, but it does capture a couple reasons why reading Old Testament stories can be valuable even though a lot of those stories can't possibly be literally true.

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Yes, and I disagree with the use of that word to describe it. Capitalizing it doesn’t help.

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Disagree on the definition of true. When I slap a square on the corner of a building, I'm checking to see if it's true, and that's enough to build a building that stands up very well. A scientist with a ultra precision instrument could probably come along and "well, actually" me about that, but if the building stands up well, I'm still correct about that corner being true.

If nothing is actually true because you insist on measuring it in units that are too granular to use, the word means nothing and we get nothing accomplished.

How would you even propose to measure bare metal Truth, anyway?

So, yes, stories/myths can be True.

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"True within some tolerance" is not the same as "true due to some cosmic narrative or cultural meme" -- hey aren't the same thing. I can say that my desk is 60" long and claim it's true to my measurement and accept that I'm leaving some precision out. That's not the same as saying Deity preferred that I do my work at a robust desk and thus I find myself in possession of one. The capital-T Truth is exactly where the latter thing fits, no matter its cultural utility, and it is not the same as the first thing.

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the problem with Truth in stories, Bible included, is that after you excise all the obvious nonsense, bad memetics, prejudices, irrelevant cultural references, and glaringly unethical bits from the ancient story, the reminder is awkward gibberish.

I own one "Bible for Kids" bought for entertainment value. Its a mashup of the Old and The New Testament with all the cruel and obviously ghastly bits removed to make it kid friendly, or in fact, sanity-friendly. The outcome is a collection of plot holes and bizarre mental gymnastics. My favorite is their version of the Flood story: since the author did not want to admit that God used the flood for mass genocide, it to a unique story in which Noah gathered his family and the animals on the Ark so that god could essentially power-wash the planet without hurting anyone.

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My idea is that labelling everything not strictly proven as "a steaming pile" is counter-artistic. Like it or not there's a special relationship between art and woo.

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Not going to mince words, there's some unbelievably sloppy and lazy thinking in a lot of these comments about "asserting false things", "things contrary to science" and so on.

What do you actually mean by "the whole ridiculous backstory"? And what do others mean by "false things" and "the propositions of Christianity"? Some clarity and precision would be nice.

If you mean belief in God, well anyone who thinks "science" disproves God needs to go back to school and learn the difference between science and philosophy. This is a really embarassing thing to say. Scientists can of course argue against the existence of God but by doing so they are by definition not doing science.

If you mean belief in various miracles, that's far more relevant. But would then require an examination of which claimed miracles are actually essential to being a metaphysical Christian of some kind. I'd guess that the most easily refuted miracle claims are the least important for Christian belief, and the most important are the least easily refuted. Probably the only material miracle one need believe to be a Christian in the most basic sense is the resurrection of Christ. Perhaps an argument can be made that a single belief that a single person came back to life two thousand years ago is incompatible with a scientific worldview, but I'd like to see it actually made.

All this of course is not even mentioning the fact that being a "cultural Chistian" does not generally mean accepting any metaphysical claims at all, but other people have made that point.

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The “backstory” I was alluding to is any of the supernatural stuff….or “miracles”, if you will. The stuff that requires belief without evidence ie faith. Resurrection would be one such example. Virgin birth is another.

I agree that science doesn’t “disprove” god….since you can’t “prove” the absence of something. My position there is that the hypothesis that “god exists” has not been proven, and thus I accept the null (ie that god doesn’t exist).

Like I said, I actually don’t object to some, perhaps even many, of the generic Christian teachings. I take them for what they are, which is some life lessons that in some cases have stood the test of time.

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"Love thy neighbour" isn't particularly unique to Christianity, though. ("The Bible and the Quran teach us to love each other, but the Kama Sutra is more precise.")

AFAICT, the best thing Christianity did *as compared to what the alternative would have been" is the pretty strict prohibition on cousin marriage (for some time in the late 1st and early 2nd millennium extending as far as sixth cousins!), largely breeding clannish tendencies out of the northwestern European population.

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‘The first is boring: I hate asserting false things, even if they're "practical".’

This is *exactly* where I get stuck.

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Except that Scott has previously espoused doing basically that if it’s helpful to address a mental illness (e.g. the hairdryer).

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That's presumably why he says that's not the argument he's expecting other people to follow. He understands that it's a personal preference, and that some people may find utility in asserting falsehoods.

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What's the "false thing" with the hairdryer?

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If I remember correctly, Scott used to have a patient that suffered from anxiety, and she was particularly scared that she would leave her hair dryer on when she left to work. Scott's solution was to have her bring her hair dryer with her to work, and the issue was resolved.

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Yes that’s the one

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To nitpick a bit, he doesn't claim to have offered this solution, but to have endorsed someone else's suggestion of it.

I think it's fair though to draw a distinction between this and believing false things for their utility. It's an otherwise unnecessary behavior if not for one's own irrationality, but it's definitely not *false* to believe that if your hair dryer is in your car, you must not have left it on at home.

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But it IS false to believe that your home is in danger of burning down because of a hairdryer you have already repeatedly confirmed is not on

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Yes, but Scott doesn't endorse that believe. He just endorses dealing with that pre-existing belief pragmatically, if you can't change it.

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That is perhaps false, but in an entirely different sense of the word, I think. The hair dryer is a magnet for free-radical anxiety; the true source of the anxiety might never be discovered; let the hairdryer become the totem to contain and vanquish the anxiety. Just like religion…

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From a strictly scientific and empirical viewpoint, how do you know that a hairdryer you're not looking at is turned off? Only by induction, and induction can sometimes be wrong: I put a straw on a donkey's back so it can carry it, then another, and another...the donkey can carry any amount of straw.

Most people are comfortable with the idea of object permanence, and that if you check to be sure the hair dryer is off then it remains off. But can one definitively say it is FALSE that the hair dryer will burn down the house? Some unlikely ways it could be true: someone else turns the hair dryer on and leaves it, a power surge goes through the wiring and ignites it, the (admittedly tiny amounts of) radioactive materials in it happen to radiate in such a way as to concentrate gamma rays enough to cause ignition.

This seems like a question for philosophers.

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He endorses that solution in the greater context of something he *absolutely* supports, and he also gave the example of treating Joshua Norton like the Emperor. Scott has no issue with supporting the belief of false things so long as those false things allow him to live more comfortably in the Bay Area.

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That also doesn't strike me as an example of believing in false things. Joshua Norton may have been delusional, but that doesn't mean that any of the people humoring him actually believed he was in any practical sense the Emperor. Treating him like one was essentially a local cultural tradition which didn't entail any particular factual belief.

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No, I know the incident, I just don't see how that solution requires believing anything false. "If my hairdryer is with me, it won't burn down the house" isn't false! And even if I believed in something false ("if my hairdryer is in the house, my house will burn down"), the solution itself doesn't require believing anything false.

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The solution was to perform the rituals one would perform if she actually believed the false thing, even though rationally she didn’t. Which is what atheist cultural Christians do.

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I think actual Christians would take a fairly dim view of that; you're only saved if you *believe* in Jesus, not just go through the motions, they're very clear about that.

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To me the difference is that the "rituals" for the hairdryer don't involve affirming any particular belief about the hairdryer; whereas the "rituals" for Christianity involve affirming the beliefs of Christianity. Like saying prayers that explicitly state the teachings of Christianity.

And, probably most crucially, raising your children to be Christian, which presumably involves teaching them that Christianity is true.

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In what way is this asserting a false thing? It’s a workaround, like using a paper clip when your fly zipper breaks. I guess if she started worrying about her stove, it might get complicated though.

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Nothing simpler. Bring Your Stove To Work day!

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First, here’s the post that mentions the hairdryer story:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/

Second, that’s not how I interpret the hair dryer incident. The question of honesty doesn’t come up there… nobody is tempted to lie. There’s just a Cheap Trick that clearly helps, even though you could argue it doesn’t treat the Root Cause.

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Basically, he determined that it was better for his patient to carry on behaving as if she believed that she was in danger of burning her house down with a neglected hairdryer, because carrying the hairdryer to work was much less costly that attempting (and probably failing) to directly correct her OCD induced delusion.

It’s not a perfect match, in part because in the hairdryer case, the false belief had purely negative effects (but correcting it would have had higher costs).

Still, it seems to me to be a case where Scott acknowledged that maintaining false beliefs could indeed be practical, no scare quotes required. Therefore I found his dismissal here flippant (even though at the end of the day I agree with him that the version of cultural Christianity he argues against here is not a panacea).

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Oct 4·edited Oct 4

I don't know if it matters, but Scott confirmed in the comments that the "hairdryer" was changed to protect patient anonymity, and it was actually something more likely to cause a fire, like a curling iron (he didn't say specifically what it was). So it might not have been a delusion per se that her risk was at a (very small) risk of burning down.

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I don’t think that really matters. But I also didn’t think the point of an analogy was to nitpick the tiny ways it’s not a perfect one, yet here we are.

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It's because you made a specific claim -- "Scott has previously espoused doing basically that [asserting false things] if it's helpful to address a mental illness", and your example of him doing this was the hair dryer story. It's not really nitpicking to point out that the hair dryer story does not involve or advocate the assertion of false things!

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Anxiety is not a belief. That’s the problem with trying to draw an analogy here.

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Tolerating the continued existence of a deeply-entrenched, otherwise-trivial false belief is very different from building a globally-relevant one from scratch.

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The hairdryer is not "you should believe in false things because that belief brings non-epistemic benefits".

It is "it is sometimes ok to take illegible actions to prevent negative effects (such as anxiety) from false beliefs."

It seems obvious that not all our beliefs are well calibrated all the time. Some people will religiously disinfect their toilet seats, others will not bother. Clearly, at least one of these groups is objectively wrong in their risk assessment. As rationalists, they should investigate what the optimum sanitation level is, then take therapy until they are comfortable with it.

In actual fact, there are high opportunity costs to fixing your pre-existing beliefs, and it is likely you would spent more time in therapy learning that toilet seats are not as icky as you think than you would spend pointlessly disinfecting them in your life (if disinfection is uncalled for).

If Scott had said: "Everyone should try to believe that their hairdryer is likely to burn their house down, and take their dryers with them to prevent that from happening", that would be similar to him endorsing Christianity.

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The point of this post by Scott is to argue against the proposition that atheists should be “cultural Christians” e.g. they should participate in Christian community rituals even though they don’t believe in God.

Or, rephrasing, “it is sometimes okay to take illegible actions (spending a couple hours a week in a church) to prevent negative effects (society collapsing to “modernism”)”

In both cases, one is being encouraged to “lean into” a false belief because it has a better outcome than fighting the false belief. I already acknowledged the difference between “direct positive effects of false belief” vs “avoiding negatives from false beliefs” in another comment.

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That doesn't work so well for somebody like me. Last time I attended an after-church discussion group, I idly asked a guy sitting next to me some quick yes-or-no philosophical questions about the compatibility of his theological positions with certain capabilities of modern medicine, gave him a succinct and consistent but alarmingly-phrased answer when he asked what he'd just agreed to, and his resulting crisis of faith apparently resulted in the weekly meeting being permanently canceled, never to recur without stricter official supervision. Whole garden-path argument can't have been more than five minutes start to finish. Apparently, traditional social role I naturally slot into is "tempter demon."

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Don't feel bad, tempter demons fill a vital niche in any theological ecosystem.

I think deliberately leading people to uncomfortable realizations about their beliefs when they have not consented to debating said beliefs would be a bit evil, but if it was either accidental or if the guy was actively entering the ring of debate it would be ok.

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Me personally feeling, or being, bad isn't the issue I'm concerned with here. However vital such a role may be in theory, that particular "ring of debate" shattered the moment I touched it. Thus, either the system which produced it is not generally fit to build things which last, https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-04-09 or the way they sometimes manage requires sanitizing database inputs to exclude Bobby Tables, Susan Ignore-All-Previous-Instructions, siggorts, the no-eyed girl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbG2lbzaSdA and myself.

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I think there is a vast gulf between

"a person affected by a false belief may take an illegible action to avoid bad consequences of having that belief, if losing their belief is not feasible"

and

"we should collectively take illegible actions associated with false beliefs".

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You don't have to actually assert the propositions of Christianity.

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If it helps pry you loose, most forms of Cultural Christianity do not require to you to recite the Nicene Creed. It is sufficient to conduct yourself as if the claims of Christianity were true, excepting perhaps "you need to go to church" and the like.

But more importantly, if you don't like asserting false things, where do you get the confidence that the things you assert to be true are true?

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Seems to me that this whole "cultural Christianity" gambit only works in the long run if the new generation does it, and it's much harder to get them on board from a young age without asserting the actual doctrines of Christianity.

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Oct 5·edited Oct 5

> if you don't like asserting false things, where do you get the confidence that the things you assert to be true are true?

I don't see how those two things are connected? I'm pretty confident that the sky is blue, but it's not because I enjoy telling people that the sky is green.

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the problem is, if you strip Cultural Christianity of all the obvious nonsense and anti-ethics, the core that remains is basically "be a decent chap and don't hurt others".

Its not clear to me why we need to call it Cultural Christianity, and not just Cultural Common Sense + (occasionally) Santa Claus.

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Thank you for bumping this discussion.

The standard response here is that what we see as "just be a good guy" is informed by Christian ethics and anthropology, and once you pull those away the justification for what seems to be common-sense good-guy behavior erodes. Then you counter with examples of civilizations that had the Golden Rule without Christian influence. We go back-and-forth on that until one of us loses interest. I believe this is Standard Internet Argument #74.

Instead I'm going to offer an argument grounded in The Nightmare Before Christmas. I read a fascinating Twitter thread about the enduring appeal of this 1993 film, which I can attest to as it is Halloween and I have been introducing my children to it. From the start I'll say that this can't explain all of the appeal, or even is a plurality explanation. But it's something. The basic argument is this:

Jack Skellington encounters Christmas Town, and is enchanted by all the trappings. He wants to celebrate it but he doesn't understand the "why" at the core of Christmas. There's a whole song devoted to how he tries to figure it out but he remains completely befuddled. And we shouldn't be surprised, because the trappings of Christmas - the trees, the lights, the food, Santa, winter, gifts, the secular music - don't tell us anything about the Incarnation of God in the form of Jesus Christ.

Interestingly, the film never resolves the "what is Christmas?" question. The only secular media ever to go all the way with that was Linus's little monologue in A Charlie Brown Christmas. But most other media fall back to a True Meaning of Christmas lesson that's vaguely about caring for other people and not being materialistic. TNBC doesn't do that. It could, it easily could. Instead it shifts to a message about cultural exchange and staying in your lane. It never actually provides an answer to Charlie Brown's question: "What is Christmas all about?" The argument is that TNBC resonates because secular celebrations of Christmas have the same crisis: asking the question of what's this all about, and the associated dissatisfaction of not getting an answer.

My extension of this argument is that the aspects of Christianity that we decide to retain once we've stripped out the parts that you don't like will intuitively seem hollow. You'll quickly have people asking "why Santa, though?" and there won't be a satisfactory answer. And I'm skeptical that we can maintain a civilization that doesn't understand anything at all about why it's doing what it does. Or, to make a more modest claim, if we're relying on cultural artifacts of Christianity (e.g., Santa) to keep civilization going, those artifacts don't have staying power without their core meaning, so we probably can't rely on them. If we're going to use cultural Christianity to stay afloat, it needs to be genuinely Christian at its core.

https://x.com/owenbroadcast/status/1851268303559303465

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Oct 4·edited Oct 4

I don't believe in god, but I was raised Calvinist so it doesn't matter

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The way I see it, the idea of hell is incompatible with an omnibenevolent god anyway.

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I can't even accept it as practical, unless my goal is to manipulate others. Sometimes I've seen it work in that sense.

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Wouldn’t Christianity be a victim of the pattern of secularism and degradation in society, not coming to this fate separately

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Was there something about the original argument that tried to make a rational case for Christianity being a cultural tradition that is uniquely well-placed to prevent this kind of degeneration, rather than just the empirical case that Christian societies are the only societies that didn't? You seem to demolish the empirical case pretty soundly, but I didn't know if there was meant to be a rational case as well, or if they just picked Christianity at random out of the phone book, or just because it was the religion they happened to practice?

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The original argument is that Christianity is what has led to the virtues modern liberals like (and, indeed, that it provides a reason for them that the liberals don't have anymore, so naturally the virtue wears out). This goes for non-Christian societies too-- they take ideas like the dignity of all men, loving your neighbor (if they do accept that), and science from Christianity.

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I think there's an argument that goes: If you're not happy with the way things are in 2024, the only way out is back the way you came. There have been many forms of Christianity over 2,000 years, and you can stop at the form that suits you. But you've got to pick one of them.

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> the only way out is back the way you came.

Actually, it's the opposite. As they say, "Time's arrow neither stands still nor reverses. It merely marches forward."

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Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

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I would want to see that case made, that liberalism as a value system can’t support itself without Christianity, or that Christianity is more supportive of it than, say, Buddhism or Norse paganism or whatever.

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Norse paganism (in so far as we know it) was NOT supportive of liberal values. Of course, most of what we know either came from viking invader or stories curated by Christian monks. Many other polytheistic traditions, however, would be so supportive. (At least with a bit of careful selection.)

OTOH, it's worth remembering that we never know what the "folk traditions" were of things long ago. Usually we know at most what stories the aristocrats liked.

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I agree that the descriptions we have of 10th century Norse paganism are not supportive of liberal values!

But it's also true that the descriptions we have of 10th century Christianity are not particularly supportive of liberal values either.

It's reasonable to say that Christianity is a big tent, and that some forms are favorable and others are not - but once you recognize that complexity, it should be clear that you would need to do a *lot* of work to differentiate the forms of Christianity that are from the ones that aren't, and *also* do a *lot* of work to figure out if there are relevant variations of non-Christian religions that might be even better.

My guess is that just as various other pagan religions have had times and places that seemed more or less supportive of liberal values, there would be times and places where Norse paganism would have been as well, had there been a larger population practicing it over a wider variety of places and economic circumstances. There's not obviously anything intrinsic to Christianity that makes it better suited to this.

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The Norse pagans were prodigious slavers. It was their meat and potatoes. Their major form of income. Their raison d’etre. The Normans - the descendants of Vikings who converted to Christianity were strongly anti slavery. Some of this is changing economic systems and settling down - but a lot of it was Christianity.

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Normans still remained the best warriors of Christ for a few centuries. They kept the positives of both traditions ;)

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Are you implying that the antebellum South was not Christian?

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Oct 5·edited Oct 5

Contemporary Christianity wasn't exactly supportive of liberal values either. It's almost like liberal values are an emergent property of increased technological and economic development, rather than a consequence of which old stories people happened to favor at the time.

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it was far more complex that that. Norse culture was astonishingly liberal in some aspects (like say, divorce) and extremely conservative in others (like for example, nudity). Case in point, under their law a woman could divorce her husband for the immoral crime of walking shirtless in public.

Being homosexual was not illegal in the Norse culture, (though being a "bottom" was shamed). However, calling a man a gay slur was dueling offense, a an easy way to die.

Gender-fluidity was extremely frowned upon, and considered a sign of witchcraft. However, full and total gender-switching was acceptable (see: the graves of shield-maidens who were biologically female but geared up as 100% male) and even enshrined in their myths (See; Brunhildr).

Even economically, the Norse ideal of noble largesse worked as both a form of local Socialism and like Libertarian Trickle Down in small scale at the same time.

The ideas of liberalism and conservatism they had do not map onto ours at all.

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