Moses very likely wasn't historical - for one thing, the Exodus isn't a historical event, even when stripped of the supernatural bits. Wikipedia:
"The consensus of modern scholars is that the Pentateuch does not give an accurate account of the origins of the Israelites, who appear instead to have formed as an entity in the central highlands of Canaan in the late second millennium BCE (around the time of the Late Bronze Age collapse) from the indigenous Canaanite culture.[1][2][3] Most modern scholars believe that some elements in the story of the Exodus might have some historical basis, but that any such basis has little resemblance to the story told in the Pentateuch."
The architect of post-war Japan, Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida(1946-1947, 1948-1954) was a Christian. Suprisingly, the current Prime Minister, Shigeru Ishiba(no relation to Yoshida) is also a Christian. Even more suprisingly, 9 out 65 Japanese Prime Ministers have been Christian.
Also, the current Emperor's mother is from a Christian background(had to convert to Shintoism when she married the Emperor). I think its fair to say that while few Japanese are Christians, they are disproportionately represented amongst the Japanese elite.
With regards to Taiwan, Chiang-Kai shek converted to Christianity later in life. Sun-Yat Sen was also a Christian. Though I think its fair to say that Christianity does not have as much influence among Taiwanese elite compared to the Japanese elite.
Looking at the other Asian Tigers, the current leaders of South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore are all Christians, and they have had many Christian leaders in the past as well.
While obviously nowhere as influential as the West, I think its fair to say Christians are disproportionately representated amongst the elites of Asian Tigers. But how much we can attribute the economic success of these countries to the religious beliefs of their leaders is up for debate.
Hong Kong's Christian leaders are exactly the people spearheading its descent into a fascist dystopia, so I think that proves the opposite point very, very well.
Communism, Fascism, Liberalism, all emerged from a Christian millieu in Western Europe within a few decades of each other. They are all denominations of godless Christianity ;)
Yes, according to Wikipedia. This was in the 50s. The Imperial Family was also a religious role and was considered to semi-divine. Sure, the Americans abolished that concept after the war, but I am sure the traditionalists didn't suddenly just change their minds because MacArthur told them so. The Shintos also violently persecuted the Buddhists for being a foreign religion in the early Meiji period. While Shintoism is definitely less exclusivists in one sense(multiple gods), it can also be quite nationalistic, so less exclusive in that regards.
There was a Meiji decree enforcing separation between Buddhism and Shinto. The reason for the decree was that no real distinction was observed before then. Syncretism is the East Asian Way.
But the outcome of that decree is that today, instead of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines being one and the same building, the Shinto shrine is an outbuilding just outside the Buddhist temple. They still aren't separate enough that putting one inside the other's temple grounds is a problem.
(Wikipedia:
"However, the process of separation stalled by 1873, the government's intervention in support of the order was relaxed, and even today the separation is still only partially complete: many major Buddhist temples retain small shrines dedicated to tutelary Shinto kami, and some Buddhist figures, such as the Bodhisattva Kannon, are revered in Shinto shrines."
> The Imperial Family was also a religious role and was considered to semi-divine.
None of that is incompatible with some of the family being Christian, as long as they also avow Shinto. The Pope might object to that - it's not good Christianity from a Western perspective. But why would the Japanese care?
The Japanese constitution is very intentionally based on Western governments, both the original 1890 version and the post WW2 revisions. It's as much a relic of Western christian society influence as any Western constitution is. I'm not as familiar with other asian countries but I imagine it would be similar? Constitutions as a concept didn't come into vogue without Western influence.
"Space travel nonsense" has the possibility of returning to an era of lots of cultures undergoing cultural selection. Global monoculture has less selective pressure https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how-fix-cultural-drift
I'm sorry, but this is all a load of crap. Almost every sentence in this comment is incorrect.
The one example of the Sinosphere is enough to disprove your claims about culture. The Chinese empires were no more death cultures than the Roman, built through conquest, yes, but does not involve human sacrifice. Go back further, and you will find that human sacrifice is present throughout the entire world.
Furthermore, while it often isn't presented that way, the Chinese used to practice a form of pantheism as well, with deities like 土地公 ("lord of the land") and the planet Jupiter.
I assumed that I did not have to include the achievements of the Chinese, but in case you didn't know, these included the compass, paper, gunpowder, movable type printing, banknotes, and the spork.
The phrase "the Copenhagen experiment" has no referent, but I gather what you are referring to is the Copenhagen *interpretation* of quantum mechanics, which is semantically empty and has since been superseded by sensible physics like "taking the equations at face value", also known, for better or for worse, the many-worlds interpretation.
You also don't seem to realise the extreme irony of claiming that quantum mechanics is erroneous while using a device that quantum mechanics was essential in making possible to spread this drivel. Yet another irony is that you could've claimed quantum mechanics had a hand in almost anything and be correct, but you picked the one idea whose conception quantum mechanics had no hand in: the Big Bang. That was all general relativity, the one area quantum mechanics has failed and is still failing to subsume. Despite later elaboration using ideas from quantum mechanics, it was discovered by one person applying the entirely classical Einstein field equations to the universe as a whole.
And as for the claim that Oppenheimer was a third-rate scientist, well, his equations are still torturing physics graduate students to this day.
I assumed that I did not have to include the achievements of the Chinese, but in case you didn't know, these included the compass, paper, gunpowder, movable type printing, banknotes, and the spork.
Sporks, aside (which isn’t true as far as I can see) , that’s not great for thousands of years - at least two were independently found in Europe, and Europeans plainly used gun powder to greater effect.
OP was claiming that "African cultures, prob due to their pantheism, were tribes n never grew anything permanent to mans improvement [sIc]", and that all other cultures "who were great engineers via the pyramids- were death cultures- Aztec had human sacrifice- [sIc]". My comment was a response to those clearly absurd claims, by raising examples where these were achieved despite the conditions being met.
I suppose I didn't go over the many canals built across China, or the palaces, or the ziggurats, or the temples, or the terracotta warriors, or the Great Wall, or other feats od engineering, but I suppose I am still underestimating the average American population's knowledge of ancient China.
I did misremember: Sporks were used in ancient China, but they were not necessarily invented there. That's my mistake.
Shift the timeframe from 1–2000 AD to 500BC–1500 AD and they would be pretty much on par. Shift it back another 500 years and Europe is a cultural backwater and we'd be debating the Cultural Pantheism argument.
Although I'm in favour of putting our civilisation into historical perspective, which is what you're doing, I'm not sure you're engaging with the argument that the West at its peak has a rate of technological advance and infrastructure building and wealth generation utterly incomparable to the East at its peak.
If you don't like the west (or never did), then no.
Christianity was an essential part of western history for a long time, so if I argue that it played a role in how we are or were, that has a lot of prima facie validity, regardless of what you think.
If you look at India and think that that's actually a much better goal, then knock yourself out.
How do you know that it's the result of a specific religion that just takes thousands of years to develop, as opposed to just randomness or some other factor?
Vegetarianism is a lot more popular in Hinduism. So should we copy some aspect of that? Maybe that people can reincarnate into animals. Or do it like with Christianity. If banning gay sex means that 2000 years later gay marriage is accepted, maybe we need to ban vegetarian diets.
If five different loaves of bread and two different fish all succumb to the same strain of mold when left out on the kitchen counter overnight, I'm gonna want to see some actual evidence of novel mold resistance before accepting any claim that a truckload of more-of-the-same won't.
The very fact we're dealing with groups means "christian culture" didn't only collapse "one time." Group members were affected individually, following peer pressure or opportunistic curiosity or personal conscience just like the spread of any previous heresy, yet consistently enough for a broad pattern to become clear. No single raindrop defines the river, no single pebble the avalanche. The race goes not always to the swift, nor battle to the strong, but that's usually the way to bet.
Yes, but the same is true of liberal culture, so the Cultural Christianity Argument (that liberalism inevitably fails at this task compared to Christianity) hasn't yet been supported.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, not at all. Zensunni developed over thousands of years. The OC Bible was the end result of a council after the Butlerian Jihad, which was galactic politics.
The anti-AI faction prevailed in the Butlerian Jihad, making a new faith necessary for reasons similar to the "Cultural Christian" argument. They needed something universal to provide meaning that would prevent anything that could lead to AI.
So they created the OC Bible with its main commandment of "Thou shalt not create a machine in the likeness of the human mind," truly wise words we should all live by.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"[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.”
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.
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.
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).
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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").
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
<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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
Tolerating the continued existence of a deeply-entrenched, otherwise-trivial false belief is very different from building a globally-relevant one from scratch.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
"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".
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A pretty compelling description of the ways the teachings of Jesus transformed how people think and laid the foundations for much of what modern humans hold dear, including both wokeness and secularism.
Reasoning from limited evidence, a single example. If the Industrial and subsequent Technological revolutions had occurred during the heyday of liberal Islam (Moorish Spain perhaps) this article would be arguing for Cultural Islam. Or any number of other, relatively (remember Christianity became much more liberal as part of the revolutions, it was not that way to begin with) liberal cultures through history.
Please give some recommendations then. I hopped off this train back in the early-2010s around the decline of the new atheist movement so I'm unfamiliar with any new developments. Re-learning about the history of science and Catholicism was one of the important in-roads that brought me back to the church.
I accept that many people have argued that. I've even read a few. Generally they prove their assumptions by their conclusions. And they often get history wrong.
There are _many_ circumstances and environments under which the industrial revolution didn't start, because it only started in a single country at a single time. From that argument alone, you can't assign an outsized causality to Christianity.
I'd bet against you on this one. Far am I from being a historian but it seems to me like plenty of progress was made during the golden age of islam. That's why we use arabic numerals and algebra's called what it is, eh? If islamic countries had a period like that around the 18th century instead of the 10th or whatever, that'd seem like as good a place as any for it to start
That's not a bad argument per se, but the weakness in it is that the industrial revolution really could have started way earlier. The Romans were right about there in the time of Christ, as were the Chinese. Both had huge empires, one of which encompassed where the revolution actually took off 1600 years later. The Islamic world's golden age could well have produced it, but instead degenerated into the sort of top down slave society we worry about today. Almost anywhere in the western Christian world could have produced it too, but also failed.
I tend to think that Christianity is less of a requirement as a result, possibly necessary but certainly not sufficient. Certainly not Catholic Christianity or probably even 'normal' Protestant... people often forget that by the time of the industrial revolution the Church of England had been rocking its own thing for quite some time!
You aren't exactly wrong, but you are addressing the wrong aspect. We are talking the cultural/religious angle, with which ACOUP agrees: Rome didn't have the economic culture to launch the IR, as evidenced by the fact they didn't, or even get anything very close.
On the tech side... I think ACOUP is rather wrong. Primarily about the importance of coal. He does note that coal was used for fuel, but makes the common historian mistake of claiming that it was necessary for production and only started being used because people ran out of wood. (See this good explanation of the economics here: https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-coal-conquest ). Wood is inefficient, but it is farmable and had been for quite sometime.
ACOUP also focuses on the weaving industry a bit too much I think. While it was important in the Industrial Revolution we had, I don't know that it is the ONLY thing that could be important in starting an industrial revolution. I suspect many industrial clusters could spur the take off between use of mechanical procedures, specialization of roles, division of labor, and mass market trading, and cloth production just happened to be the one we got.
It is fair to say that Rome was not a few years aware from an IR but rather a couple centuries, but that is still a big deal; moving the IR 1000 years earlier is massive. The important question isn't exactly "how many 10's of years away were they?" because that isn't exactly clear, but rather why didn't they make the next few steps given they were within range. Because again, unless one hard assumes that it the IR MUST come from weaving and coal on rivers (and lots of places have coal and rivers) then the answer for why some places had an IR and others didn't seems to be either dumb luck or culture.
Likewise that mode of questioning is what is needed to think about things like "Why, when technology is seemingly very easily spreadable, are some countries rich while others poor? Indeed, why are some PARTS of one country poor while others are rich?"
> It is fair to say that Rome was not a few years aware from an IR but rather a couple centuries, but that is still a big deal; moving the IR 1000 years earlier is massive.
That isn't accurate either though! Even if you ignore everything else, they also lacked the advanced cannon technology that enabled the construction of primitive steam engines. It was only due to the arrival of gunpowder from China, followed by centuries of constant warfare in Europe spurring an existential arms race that led metallurgy to get to the point where the IR was even possible.
Islamic Golden Age ended when the Mongols literally and figuratively trampled their scientific brains under the hooves of their steppe ponies. The fall of Baghdad pretty much meant that the following Islamic culture was a Post-Apocalyptic one.
Europe and Christianity would look about the same if the Mongols decided to not stop at Legnica but push for Rome, pummel it to custard, and then strip land tot he bedrock on their way back home.
They're *called* Arabic numerals, but they actually come from India. And a lot of the Arabic knowledge of "the golden age" was imported from Egypt.
It's really hard (effectively impossible) to trace the flows of knowledge in the distant past. Most of the records have been lost. But there's significant evidence that there were flows along the silk routes (there wasn't just one). Certainly Alexander did a lot to increase the flow during his lifetime. (I have a friend who believes that Aristotle's mother came from India. I don't find the evidence convincing, but he could be right.)
We use Arabic numerals because they are more useful, and the term Algebra is borrowed from Arabic, but like alcohol, isn’t unique to Arabia. Also the areas invaded by Islam were the richest parts of the Roman Empire in the east and North Africa. Islam didn’t add much that wasn’t already there and the golden age was pretty relative.
"Arabic" numerals aren't actually Arab at all, they're from India. The most prestigious scientists of the golden age of Islam generally weren't Arabs either, but other ethnicities like Persians who had been conquered by Muslims. And scientific progress ground to a halt after such conquests, even if not immediately.
As Adrian has stated, the industrial revolution only happened once independently. The problem is that the inventions have to happen on the pathway of economic viability: the real world is not like Civilization, where a state simply decides that now would be a good time to research steam engines and allocates their research budget to them for a few years. Instead, you require coal mines which have to be pumped dry, because the first steam engines are kinda shitty and not worthwhile to run unless you can use coal for free. You need to have perfected casting cannon barrels so you have the tech to make cylinders. You need mechanized looms so that you have a viable consumer of mechanical power who can pay the bills until you eventually invent the railway.
Of course, you also have a lot of social requirements. If slave labor to pump out your mines in cheap enough, none of the elites will ever try to find a better way to do things. You need a certain class capable of working of inventors, if making an atmospheric engine gets you kicked out of the blacksmith's guild, that would be bad. You also need some class for whom it is acceptable to make money through selling machines.
I can hear you saying "well, Newton happened before the steam engine started paying any bills". This is correct: there was certainly a period of interest in science before the industrial revolution happened, and it could be argued that this was yet another prerequisite.
I am however doubtful that this was a direct consequence of Christianity. Yes, Mendel, the first to figure out how genetics work was a Catholic abbot. But if Christianity is uniquely suited for scientific discovery, why did it take them some 1850 years to make that discovery? Granted, you first need to figure out how pollination works, but that is something which you could discover with a few glass boxes and scientific curiosity.
I am very skeptical about the very hard line of economic viability of inventions you mention. I suspect many different paths of mechanization of industry exist, we just happened to get the coal-weaving path so availability bias suggests it has to be that one. There are probably dozens of other options that would have suited as well, but we just didn't get them first.
> It is not clear to me that there is a plausible and equally viable alternative path from an organic economy to an industrial one that doesn’t initially use coal (much easier to gather in large quantities and process for use than other fossil fuels) and which does not gain traction by transforming textile production (which, as we’ve discussed, was a huge portion of non-agricultural production in organic economies), though equally I cannot rule such alternatives out.
Personally, I think that the coal mines which needed to be pumped out were the bottleneck. If you run atmospheric engines for your coal mines long enough, someone is going to discover a better steam engine which will become good enough to pump out water in your other mines. The spinning jennies just waiting for something to provide torque were certainly speeding development along, but even without them we would have likely gotten the first railway by now.
Yea I know he says that. It is possible he is not conversant on all the different methods and use of fossil fuels, or even various organic fuel sources (such as clean burning whale oil, or just charcoal.) He says he can't rule them out himself.
And again, even if we grant that the coal -> steam engine -> weaving path is the necessary one, it isn't as though coal is uncommon, weaving is uncommon or the need to pump out water is that uncommon. Pumps existed, pretty much everyone weaves things, coal is all over. Britain does have the benefit of having a lot of rivers and everywhere being pretty close to the ocean, so there is that; it makes coal much easier to transport, something like 10x easier. Rivers are not terribly uncommon, however.
The best argument I've heard, from Deirdre McCloskey, is that it was specifically protestant Christianity where the industrial revolution flourished because it allowed more space for individual conscience and agency than Catholicism.
Or perhaps it's the flavor of Christianity where most people are doomed to hell, but God will save the elect. And you can tell that you're of the elect because you can make a lot of money.
It is not entirely incorrect to be suspect of proposals to "Retvrn", because indeed, the past became the present (and one cannot cut-and-paste the past to the present, regardless). However, it is also not correct to assume that the same faults are predetermined to recur; one would not necessarily expect 17th century Christianity, returned in spirit and practice to the Apostolic Era, to recapitulate Donatism, or many of the other heresies defeated in the intervening years.
A return in the sense of rewinding entails memory ablation; a return in the sense of reiteration is an opportunity to learn from mistakes.
But if we're counting on being able to learn from mistakes and not repeat the previous course of progression, we're probably best off going to something actually good in its own right, rather than something that progressed to what we like last time.
On the one hand, I expect we have different identifications of that which is good in its own right. Bracketing that, however, that something is not a priori perfect does not seem to be reason to discount it entirely, especially with complex systems. This very quickly becomes a Bayesian problem, no? Allocating proportionate commitment to refinement and iteration in accordance with perceived learning capacity, distance to goal, and clarity of target.
Alternatively, all we'd have to do is clean up and bandage the festering wound, and not deliberately cut ourselves with dirty knives again.
I don't think there's been a good case made that the decline of Christianity was an inevitable result of the conditions that we like (democracy, freedom of speech, science, etc.). It seems plausible that instead of going "none of this can be tolerated, get back to your farms, peasant" or "nothing is forbidden, everything is permissible", we could try navigating some sort of middle path, where we introspect on what exactly went wrong, and where, and try keeping as much of the conditions that we like as possible.
> I don't think there's been a good case made that the decline of Christianity was an inevitable result of the conditions that we like (democracy, freedom of speech, science, etc.).
I think that such a case can be made.
On the one hand, science is forever encroaching into the territory of religion. Before science, you had "God created Earth and Man, an placed the Earth at the center of the universe". God (or Satan) is basically the answer for any question where you don't have a good answer. What makes the plants grow? God. Why do the planets move like they do? God wills it.
Once you get science God will lose responsibility for a lot of things which matter to humans. You can still blame him for the Big Bang, but that will only get you as far as Deism. Or you could claim that he interacts with the world, but only in deniable ways.
Regarding freedom of speech, I think that religious uniformity is much easier to achieve when you can burn the heretic on the stake. A few key branches of Christianity evolved as state religions for millennia. Expecting them to do well in a free marketplace of ideas competition is like expecting Khrushchev to win a fair democratic election. In fact, it is amazing that Christianity does as well as it does.
That's all cope. Christian intellectuals *used* to think that it was important in understanding the world. It's only once science solved all the mysteries that religion had to stop making falsifiable claims about the world and retreat into the vague wishy-washy stuff we have today.
My actual position is something along the lines of: science and liberalism and democracy and capitalism all relied on key assumptions that were developed and maintained by Christianity, and so we never needed to develop independent justification for them. As Christianity faded, those assumptions were no longer universally shared, thus undermining science and liberalism and democracy and capitalism, which had never had to stand on their own. And the goal I hope for is to find a new foundation for those assumptions; I'd prefer something independent, but frankly I'm starting to think full-on Christianity is better than the current situation.
The assumptions are, roughly, from off the top of my head: That all humans (perhaps broadly defined) are at some fundamental level equal, and deserving of equal rights, and responsible for equal duties. And that the individual human is the only thing that can be considered to have moral agency and moral standing. That humans are responsible for their own actions. That human rights include things like life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and that human duties include things like behaving ethically.
And on the one hand, all of this seems basic, but on the other, I don't think any of it is provably true, and I think some might be provably false. And I think we're seeing what happens when these assumptions are questioned, and it's not good.
To expand on what quiet_NaN said, it goes back to Scotts other objection that affirming a falsehood is bad. And unlike what he wrote in this post I don't think that can be waved off as mere aesthetics. Falsehoods and good epistemics are innately hostile to each other. Scott actually wrote about this already in the Parable of Lightning:
"[T]he biggest threat is to epistemology. The idea that everything in the world fits together, that all knowledge is worth having and should be pursued to the bitter end, that if you tell one lie the truth is forever after your enemy – all of this is incompatible with even as stupid a mistruth as switching around thunder and lightning. People trying to make sense of the world will smash their head against the glaring inconsistency...
"The Church didn’t lift a finger against science. It just accidentally created a honeytrap that attracted and destroyed scientifically curious people. And any insistence on a false idea, no matter how harmless and well-intentioned, risks doing the same."
I agree that people shouldn't spread falsehoods. But, and I'm probably not going to put this very well... I'm not sure that this thing we agree would have been developed without building on the evolution of this particular religion, and I'm not sure that it can maintain itself without that foundation. I worry that it's like an early attempt at heavier-than-air flight, where we launch upwards as if from a ski jump, and have been moving upwards without contact with the ground, but now we're in the process of discovering that flapping our arms isn't enough to remain aloft.
In my view it arose much less as an evolution of the positive aspects, than as a reaction against its excesses and failures, especially as expressed in the wars of religion around the Reformation. For most of its existence, Christianity was deeply hostile to liberal values, and while it wears a relatively more gentle face now that's mostly by necessity. We shouldn't be too quick to forget the much more vicious aspects it wore 500 or 1000 years ago, or assume they won't return if given the chance.
Of course the same faults are not predestined to occur, since they did not occur to all Christian sects. Evangelicals, Pentecostals, conservative Catholics and Orthodox, they didn’t modernize and didn’t become woke. They chose a different path: which is why they’re still going strong, while the modernizing mainline churches have been hollowed out.
They've only lost control in Western European counties, and are currently in a culture war over America. There are always civilizational ups and downs: after the Muslim conquests, the only Christian countries left were the ignorant backwaters of Western Europe, with all the great centers of Christendom lost. Yet, if you had said that the Muslims had won and the Christians were on their way out, you would have been dead wrong. The situation is not yet so bad as it was back then.
In America: globally Christianity is still top dog when it comes to religion, and all signs point to it keeping that position (though those Muslims are at it again and doing their best to catch up).
There is no enemy to fight though. Christianity is not losing its faithful to another religion, but to uninterested agnosticism.
A religion can only survive if it can attract followers and punish apostates. Modern Christianity has little way of doing the former, and cannot legally do the latter.
Not according to the National Survey for Family Growth: American who attend church weekly are above replacement fertility, and have been for the last four decades. Fertility has dropped for those who attend less than weekly (more "nominal" Christians) and the non-religious fertility rate has stayed consistently below replacement rate for the same period of time.
That stat is looking at "Protestants" as a whole: which combines Evangelicals, Fundamentalist, and Pentecostals (the non-modernizing Christians) with Mainline churches like Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, etc who modernized and have mostly turned woke.
If you seperate them out, you can see that the majority of the decline in religiosity has come from those modernized mainline churches, and not the conservative Christian ones.
"if everyone who was raised evangelical stayed in that tradition, how large would it be? In 1973, about 20 percent of Americans were currently evangelicals, while another 4 percent were former evangelicals. In 2018, those numbers aren’t that much different: 22 percent are currently evangelicals, while another 4 percent were former evangelicals. In essence, defection was basically the same.
"For mainliners in 1973, 28 percent were current adherents while another 7 percent had left the tradition. In 2018, only 11 percent were currently mainline Protestants but another 6 percent had grown up mainline and left. In the most recent data, for every two mainline Protestants, there was another that had left."
One of the ways modern culture is obviously maladaptive is below-replacement fertility. Ancients were aware of falling fertility being a problem, and we've preserved quotes from them about it https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/ancient-fertility-quotes but that didn't prevent modern culture from following that path. People have written about the declines of past civilizations from Ibn Khaldun to Edward Gibbon, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Glubb Pasha, Joseph Tainter, Jared Diamond etc. This hasn't been enough to get people to take the long view https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/long-views-are-cominghtml Mere memory, or some people having awareness, isn't enough. You need some way to lock in adaptations that won't succumb to cultural drift or "rot". https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/what-makes-stuff-rothtml
Modern rates of unintended pregnancies in the US are ~40%; given the historical absence of prophylactics and abortifacients, I would wager that the majority of humans ever born were not resultant from the desire of parents to maximize the average happiness of their offspring. This is perhaps the paradigmatic example of a super-organism becoming too cerebral, faster than it can adapt other aspects of its character.
I would be very interested to see the weight of variance of teenage pregnancy on life outcomes, controlled for SES. Many aspects are actually strongly hereditary, articulated through seemingly non-hereditary factors; for example, Iceland does not have anywhere near the social dysfunction one would expect with a 2/3 out-of-wedlock birth incidence.
Also, happiness is overweighted, if not outright overrated, as a metric, both descriptively and prescriptively.
Going extinct is obviously maladaptive. If the future consists only of insular cultures which avoid influence from below-replacement cultures (perhaps think of their cultural memes as analogous to pathogens that other cultures protect themselves from), then that's failing to influence the future.
No, but secular people are headed in that direction. Despite an expected gain of 61 million people from religious deconversion, the global percentage of "religiously unaffiliated" people (agnostics, atheists, seculars, etc) is expected to decline from 16.4% of the global population in 2010 to 13.2% in 2050. Unless their fertility rates turn around, there's no reason to expect that trend to change.
"an expected gain of 61 million people" -- globally, by 2100? what is the source of that particular estimate? Curious what the logic is for such a low total looking ahead that far. Unless maybe it's using a really-strict definition of deconversion.
I don't know if I will fully agree with this. First off, the Ayaan Hirsi Alis of this world are not canvassing for Christianity in a vacuum. I'm pretty sure if the only two options were sober liberal atheism and Christianity, most of these intellectuals would and have adopted the former.
No, they are canvassing for Christianity as against Islam which courtesy of demographic change is now a substantial presence in the West. They recognize quite acutely the incompatibility of Islam with western civilization ( it is not too much of an exaggeration to say the latter begins where the former terminates) and want to avert this.
It's a Pascal's wager for the modern era but the prize is the preservation of the west rather than paradise. As with the other Pascal's wager, the implication that people can affect belief is crucial( this is what I consider unlikely).
Second, wokism is really Christianity without the aesthetic and artistic beauty and also without the concept of forgiveness( this is important because there is no one to do the forgiving as there is no God). But all the other elements are there: the concept of original sin, the obsession with the fundamental nature of reality, the morality of guilt, the emphasis on atonement, even its markedly socialist strain, et cetera. Wokism is a distinctly western phenomenon. It will not and cannot arise elsewhere. So to some degree, the pragmatic argument for Christianity bites the dust. It is Christianity, albeit shorn of its better elements, that has gotten the West to this point. What they mistake for the cure actually is responsible for the ailment.
Thank you for your reply. First, the analogy between Japan and the West lacks weight. Wokeness is more than collective guilt. I listed a set of other features and brevity did not permit mentioning others. Islam and Christianity both have many similarities( monotheisms for one with similar mythologies) and nobody would say they are anywhere close to being identical. Wokeness is a distinctly western phenomenon.
Second, it clearly lacks aesthetic and artistic value. Captain Planet and Power Rangers are not what anyone will consider great works of art or television. Furthermore, Captain Planet debuted in 1990 and Power Rangers in 1993, a full seven years before the new millennium. Most people will agree wokeness is a 21st century ideology. I cannot name five works of art which clearly embody woke ideals and are of significant aesthetic value. I don't think this is a coincidence either. Good art can be ideological but it cannot exist for the sake of ideology. That's just propaganda. Given that wokeness runs so counter to the belief systems of so many, it is likely to be unsuccessful propaganda.
Third, wokeness has no concept of forgiveness because it has no concept of a God. It shares this with other quasi religious belief systems like communism. Where communism emphasizes class and fascism emphasizes ethnicity/nationality, wokeness emphasizes race and sexuality( the others as well but not as muted; this is partly why it has been so convenient for the upper class who have adopted it enthusiastically as race and sexuality do not threaten economic interests).
In all cases, there is a simplified oppressed/oppressor dichotomy used to explain all forms of socioeconomic relations. The oppressor can either be eliminated or he can be reformed. But he cannot be forgiven largely because he is guilty of something which he cannot change ( race, ethnicity, class, etc) and will always be guilty of. That is why ideologies like these often end up supporting or instigating genocide because it is the logical conclusion of such a mindset.
If people want to see racial prejudices disappear, and I argue they never will because racists on all sides will always exist as it's fundamental human nature, the best approach is to return to what we had in the nineties where there was a genuine attempt to construct a post racial society. Prejudice will always be with us but it doesn't mean progress cannot be made. Wokeness has not offered that progress as it's fundamentally uninterested in that anyway. It has only exacerbated political, ethnic, and racial division. Perhaps, with people tiring of it, we can begin to afford better solutions.
I think we have fundamental agreement on going back to the culture and zeitgeist of the 90s - 2000s, ( although I don't think this will happen). I also think you have a good natured approach towards wokeness which I will concede certainly exists in certain quarters.
Our disagreements pertain to all the other points but I suppose those have been made quite clear by now.
One final assertion though: although race isn't fundamental to human nature, racism is. By which I mean it's not so much that race is an important classifier of human beings( although since David Reich's landmark work on human genetics and anthropology, I've been less inclined to call it arbitrary), but more so that people will consciously try to divide and organize themselves across certain characteristics. Discrimination is intrinsic to human experience. Since the concept of race, especially through the filter of skin colour is so salient, it's an obvious category for this. This is what I mean when I say it will never go away.
It seems to me Wokeness replaces the concept of forgiveness with the concept of tribalism, which is a regression in societal philosophy. "My tribe comes first, especially compared to a tribe that wronged us in the past". Christianity was always supposed to be about crossing tribal lines, from Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman at the well to Peter getting the vision prompting him to take the gospel to the uncircumsized. The veneer of original sin and such is new, but without Christianity you would still have tribalism, there would just be under a different skin.
This says more about the forgiveness of the Polish people compared to Korea, which is absolutely impossible to please on this matter.
You can't count the number of apologies in the history section -- I gave up counting by the mid 90s, when the apology rate reaches three per year, but the number of apologies addressed at Korea directly is easily double digits -- and then consider that by 2010 a quarter of Koreans believed Japan *never apologised*!
Can you point to where they've done so on record? My understanding is that Japan has refused to admit the abuses visited on Korea specifically, while Germany has denied nothing.
Your second bit was going to be my comment if no one else said it. The core of wokeness is obsession with and elevation of victimhood. That only happened because of Western Christianity. Arguing for Christianity as a bulwark against the kind of society that produces wokeness gets the problem backwards.
Christ was not a victim in the contemporary sense of a person who gets hurt on account of their powerlessness, but absolutely a victim in the sense of the Latin *victima*, a living sacrificial offering. In Catholic liturgy Christ is repeatedly described this way, indeed as a "holy, pure and immaculate victim".
Wokeness and Christianity both elevate victimhood, but in very very different ways, and those ways are the bulwark.
Wokeness treats victimhood as a Marxist class, and uses it as part of a historical struggle of the righteous against the oppressors. It's a fundamentally collectivist notion, that justifies and excuses cruelty by the victim.
Christianity treats suffering as a component of personal virtue. I'm not an expert, but I think it has something to do with relieving others' suffering by taking it onto yourself. It's a fundamentally individual notion, that encourages forgiveness of others and a strict accounting for ones' own actions.
> my interpretation of Christianity is that it also encourages you to forgive yourself
I kinda agree, but I personally wouldn't have put it like that because of local issues. In America we sometimes run into some evangelical or fundamentalist Calvinist types, and their unknowing spiritual descendants in secular therapy, who IMHO take this too far, and use it as a solipsistic excuse to get away with all sorts of stuff. But that's more of a personal annoyance that I haven't gotten past (yet, I hope).
What is it about Eastern Christianity that insulates it from wokeness? I have some speculation but I would be interested in hearing your thoughts.
If anything, I would say that wokeness is Calvinist. Calvinism, of course, is form of Western Christianity, but it's not all of Western Christianity, or even close to a plurality of it
Any conversation about the history of concepts around "victimhood" must include the history of "rights". As far as a brief search reveals, J.S. mill proclaimed a skeptic's stance.
Thanks for the interesting comments! Here's my take:
1) Ayaan is a convert to genuine Christianity. As I understand her story, she was depressed and suicidal in her atheistic worldview, tired every scientific remedy, and was finally saved (resurrected, born again) when she prayed to Jesus. She talks about cultural Christianity to point out that it's wrong to treat all religions the same (in particular putting Christianity and Islam together in the same basket), and because it points secular humanists to actual Christianity, which she found to be lifesaving.
2) While there may be some superficial similarities, I see wokism as being fundamentally opposed to the message of Jesus. Wokism is centered around dividing and accusing.
In the Bible, Satan is literally 'the accuser' and Diabolos literally means 'divider' or 'scatterer'. The gospels portray Jesus's religious opponents as the ones who were doing the accusing. The Pharisees judged themselves better than tax collectors and prostitutes. The chief priest, Caiaphas, accused Jesus and had him crucified. Jesus, instead, desired reconciliation through forgiveness ("forgive our sins as we forgive those who sin against us") and self-accusation ("take the plank out of your eye before you attempt the speck in your neighbors").
Jesus was a victim, but he didn't handle it in the woke manner. He didn't call for reparations, nor incite his followers to avenge him, nor ask the Jews to defund the Romans ("give to Caesar what is Caesar's"). Instead, on the cross, after being accused, betrayed, humiliated, tortured, and wrongfully sentenced to death, he uttered "Father forgive them, they know not what they're doing."
The impression I get about wokism is that it's an ever-hungry accusation machine. It devours everyone from long-dead slaveholders to celebrities who make a single politically incorrect joke. And forgives no one.
Hello, David. Thank you for the warm reply. I appreciate it.
I can't speak to the genuineness of Ayaan's conversion. It's a matter between her and God. We may, with some humility, interpret it as a response to the trauma of her Muslim youth and she's right of course to point out the fundamental differences in morality between Christianity and Islam, a distinction those in the west often fail to realize to their own detriment.
I also agree with you that at the end wokeness and Christianity are in conflict primarily because Christianity's central message is forgiveness through Christ and the offer of eternal redemption while wokeness, as I've already pointed out, operates without the possibility of forgiveness.
However, the similarities, from where I'm standing, are much deeper than superficial but I guess that would take a longer reply to fully articulate. Have a good one.
I suppose by spotlighting victims, wokism is closer to Jesus than, say, SPQR or what I know about Hinduism. And I am curious to hear more about the deep similarities you've found, if you have the time to explain them.
Kind regards,
David
PS To me, the NT also seems pretty anti-woke in its communion of all believers regardless of class, gender, or ethnicity. ("There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.")
I will try to articulate the many and deep similarities between Christianity and wokism. This might take a little while.
Wokism is more than just accusing and dividing others. It's a fine start but any religion or ideology can and has done that. Wokism has a set of attributes I've already listed but I will take them apart one by one to show how it connects to Christianity. In many ways, wokeism is Christianity's bastard offspring.
First off, wokeism is the understanding of historical and socioeconomic relations through the application of an oppressor-oppressed matrix centered primarily around gender, sexuality and race. In this way, it borrows from Marxist socialism but where Marxism's fundamental unit of analysis employs class struggle, wokeism is centered on race and gender struggle ( Many old school and classic Marxists don't like wokeism for that reason since they regard it and social justice warriors as a distraction from the important issue of class warfare).
But other than changing the centre of emphasis, the rest is largely similar. The oppressor exploits the oppressed and there can be no true negotiation between them because there's a power imbalance. The only resolution is extensive reparations. Note that unlike Marxism where the focus is the violent redistribution of material resources, wokeism wants this too but since it's more concerned with gender and race struggle, what it is after more specifically is the redistribution of status and representation( hence, why they are obsessed with changing traditionally heterosexual or white characters into other races and sexualities or flying pride flags across important seats of power). Note that both ideologies operate with a zero sum mindset: there's a fixed amount of wealth or status in this world, the oppressor class has historically hoarded it, and it is now time to redistribute it to the oppressed without consent.
Now, for the similarities with Christianity.
First off, Christianity has always been deeply sympathetic to socialism. Jesus has many messages condemning wealth, the early disciples lived in communal settlements where they shared everything equally. Indeed, over the centuries, many christian cults and sects such as the Arborites, Albigenses, the Society of the Free Spirit, and many more have preached a socialist paradise of sorts where all property is publicly owned, the family ceases to exist, and there is no distinction between thine and mine. One of the earliest works of socialist philosophy, More's Utopia, is heavily influenced by christian doctrine. For a longer, more thorough analysis, consult the first few chapters of Russian mathematician and philosopher Igor Shafarevich's landmark work on communism.
Indeed, it is in part Christianity's attitude towards usury and wealth that allowed social outcasts such as the Jews take up these roles in society and grow wealthy as a result. They were often resented by the christian communities for that reason, a resentment that ironically carried over into Marxism, famously in the anti semitic The Jewish Question, given that Marx himself was also a Jew. There is thus an interesting and deep connection between Socialism, Marxism, Christianity, and Wokeism, although all four are distinct from each other.
Second, the redistribution of status Wokeism is so concerned about finds parallels and antecedent in Christ's sermon on the mouth, an historical break with pre christian ideology where as Nietzsche often noted, the virtues of strength were extolled and the virtues of weakness such as humility, et cetera, were denigrated. Christianity is the first or at least most thorough to apply this inversion and instead assert that it is the meek, the poor, the needy, and so on who shall inherit the kingdom of God. Indeed, the tension between these two kinds of morality was discussed recently on this substack where Andrew Tate was cited somewhat misleadingly as an example of the Nietzschean ideal. Wokeism goes even further: The gay person but even beyond that, the trans person must receive more status than the heterosexual, the disabled must receive more status than the able-bodied ( it's no wonder that more people are claiming all kinds of disabilities now), minorities before whites, so on. In this moral framework, you are more moral based on how powerless you seem and how little harm you have done historically. You accord yourself status as an ally by cutting yourself down to size and shrinking yourself in support of those who have historically been mistreated( I don't even disagree on the premise here; I just think wokeism isn't the solution).
Third, consider how in Islam, the classical split between Sunni and Shia is over Muhammad's legitimate successor. It is essentially a power struggle, no different from a political succession. But in Christianity, the classical split between Catholic and Orthodox is philosophical, over the godhead of the Trinity. Christianity's fundamental split was over the nature of reality. I am straining here but I find similar echoes in today's pointless wrangling over gender and sexuality. The absurdity of such debates as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is similar to the modern absurdity of how many genders there are, et cetera. You will find no similar philosophical conflicts in Islam or Judaism.
Fourth, I think it's certainly interesting that while there have of course been christians who have been terrorists eg the Irish terrorists during the troubles, there have been very few terrorists who performed their acts of terrorism in the name of Christ or Christianity. The Irish terrorists were embroiled in a political struggle over independence and their terrorism followed from this.
Contrast with Islam where terrorists often commit these ghastly actions in the name of religion and regard themselves as entitled to a divine reward for blowing themselves up.
However, Christianity has often featured witch-hunts to a scale and a degree unseen in other religions. Witch-hunts are interesting because those being punished are ostensibly christian but merely of a different faith and they are not wars as such but communal spasms of violence or ostracism which can be just as damaging( Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is a memorable example).
Although a lot less severe, there is something to be said about how cancel culture often targets heretics for being just slightly out of line by fundamentally ostracizing them. It is, in my opinion, one of the darker attributes of Christianity which has of course survived into wokeism.
There are other similarities, of course. The fundamental differences, however, make Christianity a much more rewarding and wholesome ideology primarily because Christianity is at its heart, individualistic while wokeism is collectivist and Christianity always extends the possibility of redemption and forgiveness, at the very least as an ideal. Last but not least, wokeism is religious in character but not a religion while Christianity is a religion.
My thoughts on the subject are rather scattered and unpolished but those are my observations on the subject. If you have indulged me so far, thank you. Have a lovely one.
Thanks so much for taking the time to explain all of this. Your connections are impressive, and I don't see anything that I overtly disagree with. Just three thoughts from my point of view:
1) I personally draw a bright line between Jesus's ministry and historical Christianity. Christianity is filled with immoral hypocrisy, and I agree that The Scarlet Letter and witch hunts and inquisitions are certainly a part of Christian history, but I don't read any legitimate justification for that behavior in the gospels. To me, it's important to separate Christ's ideal from what the screwed-up sinners did who claimed to follow him. Jesus gave us the highest morality humanity has ever considered, and part of his assessment is that humans are screw-ups and will always screw up.
2) As for Christianity and Marxism, I'd say that any good idea can become evil through coercion. I am pleased to see people being baptized... but I'd be horrified to witness it done by the sword the way Olaf Trygvesson did it.
Similarly, a few dozen people pooling their wealth and living communally to serve the poor is far different from assassinating the tsars and exterminating the kulaks. ("I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all the contrary of a Christ... I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don't get nailed to a cross or any other place." —Che Guevera)
3) I agree that ostracizing just-slightly-out-of-line believers is a dark attribute of Christianity, but again, I don't see that grounded in Jesus's ministry. On the contrary, Jesus said "he that is not against us is for us." In the gospels (and Acts), it was the Jewish Pharisees and Sadducees who were wrangling over minor points of interpretation. Freud observed this as a universal social phenomenon and coined the term "narcissism of small differences".
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts! I wasn't familiar with Shafarevich and he seems very interesting!
> No, they are canvassing for Christianity as against Islam which courtesy of demographic change is now a substantial presence in the West.
And yet we motor along quite well together. The hysteria about Islam is in direct opposition to the power of Islamic countries who are getting pulverised by the west every 5 years or so.
Ayaan Hirsi Alis is part of that neo con cabal who want to fight Islamists by bombing or overthrowing secular leaders in the Middle East and North Africa, thus creating vacuums for Islamist movements to grow. You would think that would work only once, but it works every time.
Like Scott, I have no sympathy for "cultural Christianity," as described.
Many have claimed that the seeds of whatever-we-have-now lie, not in the loss of Christianity, but in Christianity itself. Nietzsche, hostile to Christianity, did so in On the Genealogy of Morality. Voegelin, friendly to Christianity, did so in The New Science of Politics. (Voegelin, and others like him, qualify this claim by saying it is heretical variants of Christianity that are at fault, not the orthodox kind.)
Whatever the details, I think it is a powerful observation that we did indeed try Christianity –– and got to exactly where we are. In order plausibly to make the argument that Christianity is the solution, one needs an additional account of what we'd need to do differently this time.
If no one tried it in 2000 years of theistic rule, I'm happy to infer that human's won't try it again even if we bend our society towards trying to make them do it.
If I look into some "productivity" software, and it turns out to be difficult enough to use that productivity is not improved as a result, the software has in fact been found wanting.
That is the strange predicament of history. All people could love their neighbor as themselves, and if we did, society would become incredibly productive. Think about all the waste involved with making sure people can be trusted, contacts are honored, the truth is being told, software isn't malicious, etc.
Iron could come out of the ground as conveniently-sized sheets and ingots rather than ore, which would save a tremendous amount of waste involved with crushing, smelting, forging... but, empirically speaking, it doesn't.
Ideal oracles could solve any (and thus, every) NP-complete problem as fast as an RNG can write down the answer. If somebody has such an oracle, they must be doing a heck of a job keeping it quiet.
Fig trees could bear fruit out of season, lions could lay down with lambs, and software could turn out bug-free on the first draft, if God willed it so. Apparently He has other plans, thus we need to do some things the hard way. http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/tasks-at-hand
Sorry, I don't follow your point here. It is possible for each of us to love our neighbors. Are you suggesting the reason we aren't doing that has something to do with the way iron is found in ores or other features of the natural world?
Indeed I am. Boiling it down to one word, the problem is "entropy." Humans are not all the same, and we can't even precisely measure many of the most relevant differences. Coordination requires accommodating and/or overcoming those differences.
If someone intends to love their neighbor as themselves, but they don't know the back of their neighbor's hand as well as they know their own hand, are they actually, truly and effectively, loving their neighbor? Or are they loving the inaccurate image of their neighbor (with a slightly different hand, and whatever else) which exists only in their own mind?
They might, for example, knit a glove which perfectly fits a hand-shape they imagined their neighbor having, but is uncomfortable, possibly even injurious, when worn by the actual hand for which it was intended.
I personally draw a bright line between Jesus's ministry (the "Christian ideal") and historical Christianity. Christianity is filled with immoral hypocrisy, and I agree that crusades, indulgences, witch hunts, and inquisitions are certainly a part of Christian history, but I don't read any legitimate justification for that behavior in the gospels. To me, it's important to separate Christ's ideal from what the screwed-up sinners did who claimed to follow him. Jesus gave us the highest morality humanity has ever considered.
That Christianity wasn't able to keep from decaying into bad-things-are-good is an important consideration. When we think of all the good things of the 1950's, we have to remember that it immediately decayed into the 60's.
The hope of cultural Christianity would be that we could do better the second time round. As for sincerity, it is not necessary to perjure yourself, just to encourage Christianity. Benjamin Franklin donated whenever a church was being built, I think, even though he didn't belong to any of them. Jordan Peterson has been saying lots of nice things about Christianity even though he can't seem to bring himself to believe it as fact.
Scott's second argument, and the argument of many comments here, is that Christianity didn't prevent wokeness and therefore it can't prevent wokeness.
Although I'm comfortable calling religion a technology, Christianity isn't a set-and-forget civilization-maximizer. It's a set of values and claims that require personal commitment. The argument for cultural Christianity is that it works to sustain civilization when a sufficient number of people make that commitment. We now have our lesson, and the next time around we should be teaching the lesson of what happens when you don't make that commitment.
I think the real argument is actually the one Scott says he isn't interested in talking about here. I think Scott could accept your argument that we should push for more of this Christian Technology, except that he doesn't personally believe it and doesn't like lying about his beliefs.
Low, crime, high trust. Women and children could walk on the streets without fear. People got married and stayed married. The elite was educated. People knew their neighbors.
How much of what changed can be traced straight back to real estate speculation?
If housing is selected primarily based on eventual resale value, could turn out that the only thing you have in common with your neighbors is how they were able to do the same basic math and could afford a similar mortgage. http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/moral-dilemmas
The iconic uneducated elite is "Teflon" Don Trump, who got his money mostly from the real estate market despite not being a particularly competent businessman.
Inability to afford a house makes it harder to credibly commit to building a family, which seems like it could plausibly have some sort of impact on marital stability.
Crime and unsafe streets are particularly associated with inner-city slums, which result from landlords buying up real estate with obvious potential value (thanks to its proximity to the rest of the city), then letting buildings decay (to minimize expenses, both in maintenance and property tax), and vaguely hoping to someday resell to someone with a plan for converting it to actual value.
I am not sure one can make the argument that humans changed so much. What did change is technology and economics. The problem is not bad people. Few people really have power. How much power does a shareholder have over what their corporations are doing? Corporations are maximizing profit (that is why people own shares). If a human person would only think of maximizing profit, we would call them sociopathic. So not bad people, but sociopathic organizations are the problem.
I cant see what that would have to do with Christianity.
Agreed, I think modern capitalism (plus historical memory holing of what was bad in the past) explains everything Scott objects to about the present much better than any cultural/religious axis.
One of the more under looked and I think worthwhile angles here. People who are intellectually inclined like to explain things in terms of ideas, but... "People were persuaded by bad ideas so things are bad; we just need to convince them of the right idea and then things will be good" is I think too facile an explanation of long-term historical trends. "Ideology as superstructure" is an oversimplification in the other direction, but... The modern sexual landscape, for example, I think owes more to the pill and the washing machine and other technological --> economic changes (more demand for jobs requiring communication than brute strength/endurance etc) than a few feminist agitators and authors and/or loss of faith.
Christianity seems like a more accurate depiction of reality than the one that preceded it, where you went to the temple and made sacrifices and the gods would battle it out on your behalf, or you would see something in a dream and that meant you should kill your friend/switch jobs/change your will.
Likewise Protestant christianity seems like a more accurate depiction than Catholicism where priests have special access to the divine and indulgences work.
Both of these "level ups" have beneficial effects on how people live their everyday life, and how society functions. When people convert to Christianity they spend less time and energy on sacrifices and look elsewhere for advice.
Likewise, what we have now is more accurate than christianity. It's not that great, but no consensus reality in history has been. They take a noisy path but generally progress in the right direction.
You can rest assured that the consensus reality you dislike will also progress towards truth.
exactly. Christianity was uniquely good for its time in comparison to the alternatives available. But we evolved out of it since.
I think of Christianity like some sort of our cultural grandma. Loved, but old-fashioned, wise, but a lot of things she says just no longer hold up. And that's okay.
This isn't my area of expertise (being wrong on the internet is), but the assertion that the 1880s to the 1930s "wasn't very religious" is very strange to me. Some German weirdo saying "God is Dead" didn't really have much effect on the widespread religious practices of the American populace. The whole temperance movement was essentially rooted in Protestant churches, which were also enjoying a major boom during that time. Perhaps you could say that the rarefied heights of the artistic and intellectual world were more atheistic, but I'd still be somewhat skeptical of that claim...
Nietzsche was a weirdo, but he observed the contemporary trend *in Europe*, which pretty clearly went towards secular nationalism, especially in the most important countries (Germany, Italy, France, England).
As usually, statements like that only have regional validity. Even in Nietzsche's Europe, the Poles and the Irish were very religious. But his assessment was that these pockets wouldn't matter in the big picture, and he was right.
Interesting read. That is not how I have interpreted cultural Christianity. I hear the term and think of a person who lives mostly accepting the basic norms of Christianity and subsequent structure of society based on those norms, while not accepting the claims of universal truth, miracles and the divinity of Christ.
Same here, or more so — I'm familiar with "cultural Christianity" meaning stuff like wanting a day off on 25th December. I don't think anyone is arguing that social values and norms are deeply shaped by those trappings. I hadn't heard the usage that Scott is talking about.
People are using this term in different ways. I think we need a taxonomy here, so I hereby declare there to be four varieties of cultural Christian:
1) The Pragmatic Cultural Christian. A Christian of convenience who wants a day off at Christmas, wants an excuse to gorge on chocolate at Easter, and may pretend to be Christian to join a better or more convenient public school (quite common in England).
2) The Aesthetic Cultural Christian. Someone who feels some genuine attachment to the art, architecture, music, and rituals of Christianity, or enjoys the community of church. They may also feel a sense of cultural heritage, but probably doesn't have any stronger beliefs about the virtues of the Christian doctrine. (This, to me, is the "purest" cultural Christian.)
3) The "Personal Virtue" Cultural Christian. Someone who, despite not actually believing in the supernatural stuff, thinks that Christianity cultivates virtues that we should try to follow and teach to our children, but doesn't try to expand this to society at large. (This seemed the mainstream in my (English village) upbringing.)
4) The Civilizational Cultural Christian. Someone who makes macro-level intellectual arguments about how society needs the uniting civilisational virtues of Christianity that keep society functioning, and in order to fight the onslaught of Islam, hedonism, nihilism, fertilty collapse etc. (This is probably the rarest in "real life", but the most common in post-rationalist blogging circles).
If #4 is the rarest, perhaps that's because it's dependent on #3. If civilization is going to unite around Christianity to fight those enemies, there needs to be buy-in on the individual level. And I don't think that simply liking architecture or music is going to be enough motivation to stand up to these foes. Someone might like a beautiful building or classical music but that preference is no match when academe comes along saying that ionian columns are phallic and Mozart was racist.
Interesting. This very well may be correct. I am curious about #1, as i am unsure why that would have an impact on public school eligibility. I am in the US, so I am unfamiliar with the scenario.
I was a #2, but did not consider myself a cultural Christian, but a non-militant atheist. I just felt an affinity to the familiar experiences of my childhood in a very religious, Christian home.
Upon having kids, I shifted to #3, and would in fact consider myself a cultural Christian.
I never considered those as two points on the same spectrum, but can see how they may be a sliding scale.
That I understand, having attended a private religious university. It is the inclusion of public school that lost me. It seems to have been addressed, above, although my ignorance regarding the public school system in England is obvious!
My friend lives near to a small, good quality, in-demand Church of England village school, which his kids can walk to (potentially saving him hundreds of hours of school-runs over the next decade). The school has multiple criteria by which they select attendees, one of which is being a member of the local church. Because it's 2024, almost no-one under the age of 70 is actually a committed Church of England Christian, but it's a very good trade-off to pretend to be for a couple of years before your first child enters school. Somewhat ironically, my friend who I would actually consider a type #3/#4 cultural Christian, didn't do this, because he thought it was dishonest, and almost failed to get his daughter into the school.
The ills identified are so miniscule, and the modern world has delivered so many riches and freedoms to so many people, this is a bizarre "through the looking glass" analysis. What fall, what decadence? Or am I going crazy? "wokeness" and corporate dei is a threat to civilization?? Have you lost all sense of proportion??
"US scores in both math and reading have been trending up for decades"
Having lived in a Late Stage Communist country, impressive statistics mean nothing. On paper, we were a major industrial power, producing shittons of steel etc. In practice, people would queue for coveted goods such as washing machines, if they had a chance to get them.
"yet we do far more innovation than any other OECD country"
This is a stronger argument, but how much of that innovation is done by the adult immigrants whom you mention, and who weren't exposed to the farce of the US public school system in their youth?
This is more than countered by the increased total number of games. Take something like Minecraft for example, I've seen it played with little difficulty by someone who barely knows how to read. He just comes up with his own names for the items instead of reading what they are called.
Most court reporters in the US don't even understand African American English, which, given that they're arrested far out of proportion to the rest of the population, is an insane notion to me. They literally have one job. But no, *wokeness* is the thing we should focus on right now.
Set aside wokeness, the most obvious way modern culture is maladaptive is fertility falling below replacement levels. Robin Hanson made a series of posts on the issue (though it's really a sub-issue of maladaptive cultural drift) relatively recently and you can find many of them collected here https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-fertility-posts
Not everything is about the US. Fertility has gone down in places like Tehran, Belgrade and Jakarta, all fairly distant from the US culture wars and having very different culture wars on their own.
In fact, the strongest correlation between total fertility and something social that you can get, is whether girls get education until the age of 15 or so. Once they do, regardless of the country, their total TFR drops to less than a half of their illiterate peers. All the other steps (with regard to total education achieved) are much less steep.
I agree! And also, the idea that our time has fallen from an imagined better past is as old as it gets. Every age feels that way. It's only an illusion that life in 1890 had anything over on us today (asthetics included). In fact, it's patently ridiculous, the world is SO much better now than then. Whatever the merits of Christianity, cultural or otherwise, it has nothing to do with our feeling of loss. Thus it's ever been.
I’d agree with most of that except the aesthetics, which is clearly rubbish. Medieval peasants could build better architecture, abs the renaissance produced greater art. TV is better now though.
Do you imagine that advocating for Cultural Christianity means that we must also advocate for the elimination of indoor plumbing? Are you assigning the development of every helpful technology to the rejection of Christianity?
Don't worry: in a restored Christian monarchy you'll still be able to take antibiotics.
Please advocate for whatever religion or cultural norms you like. Characterizing today's world as fallen or decadent is specious. I would take 2024 over 1890 in absolutely every way.
Here you demonstrate that your above comment was a giant motte-and-bailey, where the motte is that technology (which nobody's proposing to reverse) and basic democracy (that predated the decline of Christianity) are better now than in the past...and the bailey is that now is better "in absolutely every way" than the past.
The former is obviously true but irrelevant, as nobody's arguing against it. The latter is a pure assertion that you've provided no argument for at all (and no engagement with the long list of bad things about the present that have been listed in many of the comments).
I'd submit that both motte and bailey are "everything is indeed better" and I hope you allow a little rhetorical flourish when I say "everything". Nearly, overwhelmingly, everything.
Not just technology and basic democracy.
The thrust of the article was anti-modernity and how we have descended into wokeness and decadence. Having reread it I'm yet more struck by how weak the rationale for overturning or returning to some earlier order is.
There's been a lot of obvious problems with modernity mentioned, including crime rates, family breakdowns, children never born to committed families to begin with, below-replacement fertility, level of social trust, state of modern art and architecture, state of mental health and happiness in the population, and so on. Plus more debatable things like declining education level (it seems to me more people are going through school, but school is doing a far worse job on average for them, but I could be wrong). Could you list the counterveiling objective benefits of the present not related to technology or the existence of a liberal democracy?
(By objective I mean things like I tried to list above that near-everyone agrees are bad or good. So not things like maximal sexual freedom or too much guilt over slavery which they obviously don't.)
And then we might make some progress on this debate.
Crime records in England going back to 1200. They are meticulous with record keeping. And also a broader analysis across other European countries. Look at chart after chart and trend after trend. Never in that recorded time have we had it as good as now. Unless you are referring to high crime in Sudan in the present time. In which case they are already neck deep in orthodoxy and tradition so you need some other solution for the civil war.
They are way up, so is single parent-hood. Lower stigma attached to this plus fall in "shotgun" marriages. You may think access to contraception and abortion is a net negative. I think it's a net positive, which does mean there are real costs but we are still better off because we can provide public support to poor children, EITC, etc. with greater freedoms. And personally, I would much prefer this world for my daughter than one of shame, ostracism, and abandonment.
May I suggest that the author and many commenters may be experiencing "declinism" -- viewing the past more favorably than the present due to cognitive biases. We all mistakenly think our childhood was a time of "simplicity" and "order" and "care freeness". Or that there was a golden age in some past time, and if only we could return to those norms, glory will be ours.
Yeah. The world has never been better, and that's held true for the longest time (it annoyed me that Covid put a brief dent in it and for a couple of years you could reasonably reply "well, 2019", to the question "when has the world ever been better?")
I fell way from the cultural Christianity argument when one of the new atheists pointed out all the northern European countries are decades ahead of the US in terms of secularization and they seem to be holding it together pretty well. If there's a cultural decline that follows from the decline of Christianity, it seems like it will be decades away relative to the US.
Europe is busily abolishing itself. Not that America isn't, but I don't see America even having an interstitial period of sitting around and enjoying life. When you are steering the ship, it is a bigger philosophical crisis to be going nowhere. America will be hurtling toward something for a while yet.
Western Europe has a serious problem integrating its Muslim immigrants, some of which seem to be more on a path of conquest than co-existence.
That said, this is random fluke of geography, because the Muslim world is close to Europe and far from the US. If the entities were switched, I doubt that the US would fare any better. Too much Islam will destabilize any secular society, and "too much" probably begins at 5 per cent of really religious mainstream Sunni Muslims.
If only. I did see a few Muslims protesting here outside a school teaching gender woo woo to primary school children but that’s been the extent of Muslim interference in local affairs, and sadly it didn’t work.
I think it's also a matter of culture. The US has an identity as "a nation of immigrants", which thus makes it much easier to assimilate people. European countries have ethnicity based identities, and that makes it a lot hard for immigrants to assimilate.
I too dislike the "Cultural Christianity" argument as you outline it, due to your first reason: you should not believe false things are true just because it results in a better outcome. I am a Christian first and foremost because I believe it is true: there is a God, he did incarnate and die for our sins, we can be saved, it is actually better to love your enemy than to hate him, etc. If it's not true, don't believe it. Veracity is one of the chief Christian values! How can you expect to act like a Christian if you are lying?
I disagree strongly with your second reason though, because it is simply not true. Yes, the sects of Christianity that accepted "modernism" have succumbed to modernism. But this is not the model Christian. Evangelicals, fundamentalists, Methodists and Catholics anywhere outside the West, Pentecostals, these traditions have not succumbed to modernism and are alive, well, and thriving. Those Christians who modernize stop being Christians, and become moderns. Those Christians who do not remain Christian. It is a tragedy that so many Christian sects and societies went down the modernizing route, but it wasn't inevitable. It was just a bad choice.
Of course, those sects that chose to modernize were also the most likely to espouse cultural Christianity: that it isn't true, but we should believe it anyway. No wonder they mostly abandoned Christianity with that kind of foundation. If you want a Christian culture, then you need a culture of Christians who actually believe the creeds. Cosplay Christianity cannot stand against modernization; your examples prove that.
Basically all Christians except the Amish aren't insulated enough from modern culture and are just following it with a lag, as evidenced by their dropping fertilities.
Fertility for Americans who attend church weekly has remained consistently above replacement for the last 40 years, with no decline. There has been significant declines for Americans who are religious but don't attend church weekly: in other words, the Christians most likely to have "modernized" or be solely "cultural" Christians.
We don't have great fertility data broken down by denomination. The best I can find is from Pew, from 2015. They have Evangelicals at 2.3, Mainline at 1.9.
Did you look at the data in the link? Among Christians attending church weekly fertility is the same as it was in 1982. How can that happen if all Christian denominations were declining in fertility over the same time period?
If you’re talking about a decline from 1900 then yes, everybody’s declined. In 1982 the national fertility rate was 1.83, today its 1.78, and between that same time the “weekly church” crowd fertility has remained constant.
For the world as a whole, the Christian fertility rate just makes up for the loss of people from "leaving to become moderns". According to Pew based on conversion and fertility trends, they expect that by 2050 Christians will be 31.4% of the global population: the exact same share they had in 2010. Over the same period they expect Christianity to lose about 66 million people to "deconversion", with almost all of them becoming religiously "unaffiliated" which basically means your average secular modern type.
Notably, because of the lack of fertility among the "unaffiliated" despite an expected gain of over 61 million "converts" from other religions Pew expects the percentage of unaffiliated to drop from 16.4% of global population in 2010 to 13.2% in 2050.
I came here to write something very similar to your first point - thank you for doing it so eloquently. I'm reminded of a section from the Screwtape Letters here:
"On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that “only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilisations”. You see the little rift? “Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.” That’s the game,
The reason that many people change is because the world around them has changed. The ideals and frameworks of religious practice and philosophy were created by a powerful elite during times of cruelty and overbearing control of the masses.
We have evolved to the point where we can see through the wishes of the elite - to maintain control over their 'subjects' through fear of punishment at the end of their lives - and we are no longer naive enough to believe in the myths that they created or the wealth and power they amassed in their humble service...
If people have moved away from the 'core' of Christisn belief, it's because it no longer has social, political or economic relevance and seems to want to remain anchored in a past where ignorance was the principle means of control.
This is known as entropy. Things tend toward chaos and separation from their original state. It's not possible to go back to a previous time or state.
To you, different movements are 'false', to them you are in denial of the reality of living in a modern world where power is fundamentally an archaic and. corrupt artefact and the wish to wield power is not a characteristic of enlightened thinking.
Surely you must know the response to this right? Just like the model Christian hasn’t succumbed to modernism, the model liberal atheist hasn’t either! Lots of groups we can point to who have embraced liberal norms and not fallen for wokeness or brutalism. You’re still missing the analogy!
Among other things, such arguments are ultimately insulting than ordinary atheism - that don't say that Christianity's truth claims are wrong, they say that the truth claims don't matter.
Atheists aren't all alike, and while an atheist might believe that always telling the truth is good, many do not--- marxism, for example. A hard question for anyone, atheist or not, is why we shouldn't all pretend to believe X, and even deliberately induce ourselves to believe X, if believing X will make us healthier, safer, and happier. Mormons seem to live good lives; why not encourage Mormonism, even if it is false?
As a practicing Mormon, I take stories about "intense coercion" with a grain of salt. My family traces its roots in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints clear back to it's founding, yet when my sister stopped going to church, and married a non-Mormon, my parents didn't disown her or raise the roof. Instead they had the wedding at our house. When I was at my parents' for Thanksgiving one year, they also had over a same-sex couple that lived down the road. And they aren't outliers either. All my life I was taught at church that it was important to be good to everyone, whether they eventually got baptized or not, whether they stay active or not. While I can understand others having different experiences (bad apples in every barrel), the concept of the crazy fundamentalist family that beats their kids, disowns them when they go their own way, and never associates with anyone or anything outside their tiny bubble is as foreign to me as the hippie lifestyle.
As another practicing Mormon who grew up in the "bubble" (ok, bubble-adjacent) of the heavily Mormon areas of the West, I fully agree.
Not only that, my older 2 brothers left the church a long time ago. And my parents have gone through hell trying (in the bad years) to maintain contact. It wasn't us who rejected them--rather the reverse. Things are better now, but they weren't then. And my parents were not exactly highly restrictive.
My dad grew up Mormon. He spent day after day in church learning things he knew could not be right and that were at odds with common sense and modern science. He and his brothers were miserable. They reached adulthood, left home, attended Cal, and promptly became far happier than they’d ever been. They never looked back.
Mormonism doesn’t create happy people. Some are happy. But there are tons of unhappy Mormons. Many either leave or are booted from the faith or lie about how they feel because they fear being ostracized.
If you build your methodologies on falsehoods, you can’t troubleshoot them. If you believe a sun god powers your car and it eventually breaks down, you’ll never even consider popping the hood.
My experience has been largely the opposite. The vast majority of Mormons I know are happy, not because they pretend everything's perfect; many are quite open about their struggles, but they view the Gospel as their lifeline. I've known those who've left the church that pretended to be happy but it was quite evident they weren't. (Also see my comment above).
As for science and "common sense", I get that not everything can be explained through religion...yet. But not knowing everything doesn't take away from the knowledge I do have, and the experiences I've had within the church that brought me peace I haven't found anywhere else.
When you say the LDS church brought you peace you haven't found anywhere else, I’m genuinely glad to hear it, just as I’m sure you’re glad to hear of my dad’s peace outside of it. From what you said about not being able to find peace anywhere else, I take it you’re a convert, or that you’ve been both inside and outside the church, like my dad and uncles. If you don’t mind my asking, what was it about the LDS church’s specific scripture that most convinced you it was the truth?
I was born and raised in the Church, (again, see my reply to The Digital Entomologist further up the thread), but I'm a "convert" in the sense that I have a testimony of Christ and the restored gospel, as opposed to just going through the motions. As the kind of geek who would find his way to a blog like Astral Codex and stick around, I'm plenty familiar with alternate creeds and philosophies. I've seen all the arguments against religion, Christianity, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints specifically, and ultimately I found them all wanting. It's not just any specific scripture or grand spiritual experience that has kept me in the Church, it's a broad combination of things.
First, I was fortunate to be raised by loving parents who've lived a Christ-like lifestyle, without fanaticism or hypocrisy.
Second, living the church lifestyle has kept me out of the gutter; no drugs or alcohol, no STDs or unplanned pregnancies, no jail time...
Third, the inspiration of my ancestors. One of them, Cyril Call, at one point had a mob come to his home and say, "Neighbor, we like you, just sign this document renouncing Joseph Smith and we won't have to burn your house down." His response: "You may as well apply the torch." That's not a belief you adopt out of mere convenience.
Fourth, and most important, the feelings I've gotten serving in the church, reading the scriptures, attending the temple, and serving a mission, are unlike any other good feelings I've experienced. The peace, the purpose, the "rightness", I can't deny. I realize this is completely personal and subjective, but it's my own lived experience.
Thanks for answering. I am convinced the correctness of the church is clear and unmistakable to you, or else you wouldn’t have persuaded others through your mission to stake everything on its validity.
Certainty like yours is foreign to me. I’m chronically uncertain. I find I’m always holding mistaken beliefs, and the only way I can identify and correct them is to doubt them all and accept any reasonable evidence that contradicts them. For instance, I don’t know if god exists. I can’t prove it either way. I’m even less certain Jesus was his son. Or that Jesus traveled to North America after his death. Or that Joseph Smith wasn’t mistaken in his recollection of translating golden plates for an angel with the help of stones and his hat between 1827 and 1829. This is all possible, I guess, as far as anything is possible, but it’s difficult for me to understand why it’s obvious that this is a) true and b) the most vital thing anyone can learn.
My family is much like yours. They were among the first Mormons to arrive in Utah. But some of them eventually found the stories behind the church’s claim to divine authority at odds with testable knowledge about the world. Despite this, we don’t have STDs and have managed to stay out of the gutter and jail much like you.
To me, if you put aside the scripture, what you have in the Mormon people is an admirable community of close-knit, prosperous folks who try very hard to do the right thing. But they are not perfect and it’s worth considering they may be mistaken about some matters. As I said, I’m glad you found the truth. I’m not sure how you did it, or how you know you did it, but I’m also not sure about most things.
I suspect that someone is going to successfully come up with a Totally Not A Religion based on the simulation argument. It already has a plausible argument(for the rationalist) for God, you just need some kind of rule set. I could also see someone tying Christianity and the simulation argument together.
Hopefully someone figured it out because our society’s nihilism is going to lead people to argue that AI is better than us and we should let ourselves be supplanted by them.
> "Even the Middle East is gradually becoming less Muslim. "
Is it? Half a century ago Lebanon had non-muslim majority. Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan had secular governments. In most ME countries that are still ruled by officially secular governments wearing of burqas seems to have become significantly more common.
A lot of the backsliding has to do with pushback against the chronic American/ Western meddling in Muslim majority countries that allowed the worst elements of those countries to come to power.
I think a fair bit of that is aggressive proselytization by the Wahhabi sect, a strict version of Sunni Islam which has pushed out many other varieties. It's sponsored by the government of Saudi Arabia, and thus gets a pass from the US government.
I'd guess that's a result of the new leader disliking independent domestic power bases, rather than a commitment to any position I'd endorse. And I'm highly dubious that it will have any immediate effect on the continuing spread of Wahhabist teaching outside Saudi Arabia.
Everything decayed after WW1. So if you reset everything and then successfully avoided a world war, you might be able to avoid the 20th century loss of faith problems.
I think WW1 is the worst that ever happened. It killed the spirit of optimism in Europe, who then infected America with their malaise and also led to Stalin, Hitler and all kinds of bad things.
Agree with this. Scott’s “1880-1930” here is a weird era. EVERYTHING changed after the charnel house of Europe in WW1.
For a great read on this: the first several chapters of “Into The Silence” by Wade Davis which is mostly about the British Everest expeditions of 1921-1924 but the first third of the book is about how WW1 reshaped society. Even the devout didn’t come out of that Hell on earth with the same view of a loving God that they had before.
Did you intentionally avoid mentioning Christmas, Halloween etc.? They are clearly cultural imports from Christianity, but they are also wholesome family fun for a lot of the members of our shared society and I think we would all be worse off if they didn't exist.
I would much rather dwell on the fringes of it than have it abolished outright. From the title I was expecting this to be taking the side of "Christmas in America is bad from a saecular perspective" in the "Is Christmas in America bad from a saecular perspective?" debate, this seems to be rebutting an argument I have never encountered.
>Did you intentionally avoid mentioning Christmas, Halloween etc.? They are clearly cultural imports from Christianity, but they are also wholesome family fun for a lot of the members of our shared society and I think we would all be worse off if they didn't exist.
There's nothing special about Christmas and Halloween. Those could easily be replaced with Lunar New Year and the Ghost Festival.
Absolutely, but in our culture they haven't been, and if we got rid of them I expect we'd have nothing as opposed to immediately picking up their Asian analogues.
I think Europe has done a better job of keeping the fringes of Christianity than America has. The line between Christianity and atheism is much brighter in America. Atheists can still say the Lord’s Prayer here and attend Holy Communion and go to church at Easter. Once you become an atheist in America, you are out.
I was talking about protestants, not Catholics. But I wasn't referring to the behaviour that the church allows or disallows. I meant how the culture and how other non-Christians react. Atheists rarely go to Holy Communion or midnight mass in America. They definitely wouldn't say The Lord’s Prayer.
When I came back to England after 24 years in the States, I (atheist) went to Evensong based on a recommendation from Richard Dawkins. I ended up going 3 or 4 times a week and often took (atheist) friends with me. I went to church occasionally in California but never with other atheists.
I think the biggest difference is that people my age (approaching 60) sang hymns and said prayers in school every day (it was the law) in England. We all have fond, cultural memories of it even if we didn't literally believe it. We were and are cultural Christians.
>I'd say American atheist is more a outward militant rejection of religion whereas in Europe it's more of religious apathy bordering agnosticism in my experience from living on both continents. I found my atheist German friends never even really thought about religion whereas my Americans ones were consumed with it.
This is a very defined subset, but not every American atheist is so stunted and trapped in 2013 that they resort to performative antisocial behavior like that. However, a normal person wouldn't label themself an "Atheist"
I think the steelmanned argument SA should tackle is not that Christianity is the predecessor of “what SA likes” (WSAL), but an essential ingredient of WSAL. Sure, it’s not an ingredient that ensures that WSAL will last forever, but there will be no WSAL without this ingredient. Maybe we need Christianity plus another ingredient or just a more resilient version of Christianity that doesn’t give way to too much atheism. This version of the argument requires an empirical refutation not merely a logical one like the one proposed here.
You always have to remember that the Abrahammaic cults all derive from marginal arid-land herder culture which values cattle over human life and is full of morally repugnant concepts like scapegoating which is Christianity’s foundation. The fact that half the New Testament was lifted word for word from Epictetus is no saving grace either. Nietzsche was right about a couple of things. And we see the whole middle east consumed by absolute bullshit that us Northern Europeans should never have allowed ourselves to be drawn into. Let them destroy themselves.
A quick google tells me that he was born in AD 50 and died around 135AD. After Jesus, after St Paul’s epistles and after most of the New Testament. This kind of rhetoric is why I stopped calling myself an atheist a while back. Though I still don’t believe.
I must be missing the point of this. There have been prior Christian cultures which had worse aesthetics, and some which had better, especially when you think about the distribution of aesthetics. The decline in esthetics (degeneration, if you wish), arguably has more to do with the death-grip rise of late-stage capitalism than with a decline in Christianity. And of course, this ignores aesthetics in non-Christian cultures, such as in India and China.
Also, factually, this is just factually wrong. Reform Judaism came before Conservative Judaism; Conservative Judaism was arguably a reaction to Reform Judaism.
As far as the quality of art goes, people have been wondering forever why it tanked after the Roman Empire Christianized. There's no obvious reason that would happen.
But, it does tend to undermine the idea that quality artwork requires a background of Christianity. The power of Christianity seems to have a pretty strong negative correlation to the quality of artwork, with realistic Roman portraits giving way to vague blobby Christian ones as the Dark Ages begin and then coming back as the Renaissance arrives.
The simple explanation would appear to be that the quality of artwork is negatively related to poverty - it's expensive to develop the skills - and the power of organized religion is positively related to poverty. But this theory has trouble explaining why official imperial portraits deteriorated so badly. Poverty can't have been the problem there.
<i>As far as the quality of art goes, people have been wondering forever why it tanked after the Roman Empire Christianized. There's no obvious reason that would happen.</i>
It didn't -- it "tanked" (or rather, became less realistic -- it still looked nice, aesthetically speaking) during the Third-Century Crisis, when the Empire was not only still pagan, but engaged in periodic bouts of anti-Christian persecution.
Christians never claimed that pagans couldn't make works of beauty. That's a symptom of atheist culture (one that does not believe in metaphysics), not pagan (one with mistaken metaphysics).
Edgy atheists are wrong when they claim that atheism is to monotheism as monotheism is to polytheism. Christians can see a lot of truth in e.g. Neoplatonism; Christian missionaries often work by claiming - with full sincerity - that Christianity is the full revelation of truths discovered in part by other religious traditions. Atheism isn't just rejecting one more god, it's rejecting a way of seeing the world common, at its most fundamental level, to almost every human culture throughout history.
But, yes, artistic quality is often a function of money and stability. Artists need money to pursue their vocation full time, and engage in costly projects, and entire communities of linked professions are required to build things like the Hagia Sophia. (Eastern) Rome was capable of great art again by the 500s, not just grand buildings, but excellent portraiture and mosaic work. Then it degraded due to the devastation of the Islamic conquests, and eventually Western Europe surpassed it - but Italy was churning out artistic masterpieces centuries before the Renaissance, when the greatest painters were still working on icons.
IMO, high art dies when it becomes about expressing the ego rather than pursuing beauty. The art world fully embraced egoistic expression over service to a higher ideal in the wake of WW1; that's why everything looks like crap nowadays. If you're disillusioned with higher ideals, and think there's nothing but the world and will, how could it be otherwise? There are far more ways to be original and ugly than original and beautiful.
The other interesting factor is pigments. Pigments require both chemistry / alchemy / scientific-ish knowledge, AND robust trade networks, because both pigments and raw source materials come from various far flung and outlandish places.
Creating esthetically appealing representational art is fundamentally a "tacit knowledge" sort of domain too. If you have one civilizational upset that kills off most of the masters and apprentices, you're kind of boned from there on, because people will have to relearn and reinvent techniques from scratch - see the Renaissance.
The shift from the Roman / Greek wax-encaustic style to paint-on-canvas / other surfaces likely also played a role.
Philip Balls book "Bright Earth" talks about much of these things - I wrote a review here where people can see if they'd be interested in reading the book itself:
Seems like the rebuttal to the ultimate failure of restoring either 1890s norms or 1700s Christianity is that if most everyone were convinced it was a good idea they would have the lesson of 1960-2020 to remind them that what they have is fragile. But we’re a long, *long* way from convincing most everyone that it’s at all desirable to do one or the other. So it’s kind of moot.
Has anyone got a link for context on where Ayaan Hirsi Ali is coming from more specifically?
Her wikipedia bio says "She is a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women" so I wouldn't have guessed that she was arguing in favor of a return to Christianity.
I don't know very much of the context but she recently converted to Christianity after being atheist, and had a coming out article that went somewhat viral in which she outlined her reasoning: https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/
> The Muslims in the US seem pretty liberal. On abortion, they are more liberal than Catholics and black Protestants:
Which is why the US conservatives fear of Islam is such nonsense. But then 80% see Iran as a threat, which is the same number who can’t find it on a map.
So the west can integrate Muslims in the one country where there is more hysteria about the Islamic threat, than anywhere, and the result of the anti Islamic rhetoric generally ends up with some destruction of a secular country and the rise of militant Islam
Not unique. Conservatives worldwide tend to distrustful of each other because by definition they strongly believe in their own culture/religion etc. Liberalism is universalist ideology, an Arab liberal, American liberal, and an Indian liberal probably believe similar things, just a matter of degree. Conservatism is localist ideology. American conservative love of guns doesn't translate to a Japanese conservatives love of the Emperor.
I find this cultural Christianity argument especially silly because my strong perception is these people don't at all mean the 1890s when they say Retvrn. The imagery is Crusades, Benedictine robes, idyllic mediaeval villages. Oddly I find it has something in common with regrowth environmentalism.
The pretension that anyone who has accepted modernity ought to help them is strange. I personally get the appeal they're going for, it ends up on my feed and friends send me reels in this style, but it's so obviously a hollow larp. If they were serious they'd be getting out there and living it.
Maybe they are, mind you, maybe that sort of thing is kept off the internet. I don't think a mediaeval village (with near exclusively white people, odds on) would last under the ire of the modern state. One glance from a middle aged bureaucrat and it gets messy. All that to say we might be a little harsh on this viewpoint since anyone who follows the ethos to it's conclusion doesn't stick around to make their case.
Then again sans ladies it won't happen, so I doubt it.
Of the folks I'm talking about, I think you're right, but I personally think I've got a nuanced point of view. We've lost a great deal in the march into modernity. Maybe it's worth it, but some of us look back with sadness.
Thanks. What I was trying to say was the RETVRN those people are looking for might have more in common with 1890 than you or they realise. E.g I'm Catholic and go to the traditional latin Mass. Whilst I strongly believe what I'm doing is in continuity with medieval culture, the liturgical culture I support is that of c.1850 - 1960. E.g frequent communion does have some pedigree but it did fall out of use in places and was vigorously promoted by Pius X at the turn of 19th/20th century.
Interesting point. Reminds me of how most Viking revival aesthetics have no roots past Wagnerian romanticism.
I don't feel vulnerable to this criticism myself though. I've gotten my ill feelings about modernity and admittedly romantic feelings about mediaeval times from reading of a time before industrialisation, the times when commons still existed, and man lived closer to a state of nature. Nature in the sense of an emergent pattern, infinitely complex like the unfolding of a living creature, and undisturbed by the Cartesian cult of measurement and rationality that would break the world against our whims. Now our reality is an invention of our hubris, our abstracted and rootless fancy. I envy you that you have religion in these times, I've never been to a church service myself.
Of course I would choose today on the balance. High child mortality, dogmatic religion, pervasive and hard poverty, I wouldn't want them back and they come in that package. But I won't then ignore what we have lost, and I sincerely wonder if all this can last if we remain estranged from nature.
Yes, Christianity descended into wokeism, but the people pushing it in this direction in the beginning didn't know that's where things were headed. Are we not allowed to learn from our mistakes? To try cultural Christianity again recognizing where it's weak points were, and patching them?
Sure, but that argument applies to anything. Try the New Deal again while patching the weak points. Try Golden Age Islam again. Heck, try Communism again! What you need is an argument that Christianity has a unique benefit beyond other ideologies or belief systems.
A mathematical translation of the sermon on the mount is: “You can use a greedy algorithm to obtain a future outcome far better than your ability to plan for. Instead of trying to control the branching space of future possibilities, All you have to do is, aim at the highest good you can think of each morning, and then focus on the problems of the day. The ROI of doing good things goes up much more if you’re voluntarily suffering to do those good things.”
This is predictive theory and can easily be tested by anyone who is interested. I think this core is what made Christianity produce such powerful cultures, and it’s accessible to anyone of a scientific bent, even an atheist. All you have to do is try it and see how it works for you. It does require pretending that “good” means something real, but the only real barrier there is willingness to try the experiment.
This might be good advice, but where are you finding it in the Sermon on the Mount? Maybe 6:25-34, where Jesus says to focus on doing the will of God and not worry about where your next meal and clothing will come from? I don’t see how to read it in your way without some extremely aggressive heresy, especially not when it comes to being testable. The Kingdom of God is not of this earth; almost the entire point of the religion, not to mention other parts of this is very sermon, is not to look for your reward in the kingdom of man.
Humans gonna human. There are still some kinks to work out, but we'll get them worked out at some point. Ultimately, the organized are more powerful than the violent even if there are regressions, and we might be heading into one of those regressions as we speak. But seeing the world clearly is important; and shedding superstition, while it may not happen in our lifetime, will be an important part of advancing civilization.
I think we’ll eventually get this worked out too. We have a couple of hundred years before it gets existence-threatening and culture and/or technology will have figured something out by then.
It seems this argument only holds if we believe that the progress of a religion is inevitable from any given starting point. If we think that the progression to modernity was contingent on something else, then you might argue that you could retvrn to Christianity and stay there.
I'm much more interested in the argument about whether morality, meaning, purpose, etc. can be established on a secular foundation. I think they can and should be, but this seems to be a minority view.
I also think we shouldn't give up on the “but it's not actually practical to believe false things” argument, that seems important.
I doubt atheism itself is the reason for less crime, much more likely that atheists are generally more intelligent, and intelligent people are much less likely to commit crime or at least much less likely to be caught...
Can morality be established on a secular foundation? Sure. Jeremy Bentham already did that. It's just likely to be some form of utilitarianism because deontological ethics is harder to establish without some form of religion. And it is unlikely that whatever the society comes up with will stay secular.
Human beings need something to believe in and they have a tendency to believe in the irrational. Ergo, quasi religious beliefs will pop up. I will venture and say no civilization can last a full century without some kind of religion stitching the populace together.
Individuals can be atheist and moral. Societies cannot be atheist. Societies are brought together by myths. Those myths become religious in character if not in substance. This is the distinction that the New Age atheists failed to consider. They had imagined a world of sober, moral atheists going about their business without recourse to christianity. They got instead new flavours of irrationality and hysteria, the emergence of Islam thanks to demographic change, the blossoming of cults, et cetera.
When it comes to religion, it's a strictly pick your poison game. And I've got to say of all the many out there, Christianity is far superior to most other alternatives. That much, I think, is obvious from all of the change currently going on
I think the model is something like increased wealth from industrialization -> secularism & modernity. (I think that Scott has made this argument more explicitly elsewhere.)
Actually looking at the history of secularization in the West in detail makes it seem much more contingent. France secularized in the mid 1700s, at least 100 years before the rest of Europe and well before France industrialized. Much of the rest of Europe secularized in the late 1800s or early 1900s. The US has had waves of secularization interspersed with Great Awakenings.
I’m perpetually baffled by complaints like the ones Scott is expressing on behalf of fin de siecle art/architecture/society. For one, just google “rococo molding” and you’ll find suppliers of the most ornate, opulent, maximalist millwork you can install in your very own home! You can also find both vintage and newly manufactured art nouveau fixtures to live in your own little Viennese retreat.
And if your complaint is more about the buildings you see on the streets, get together with some friends, buy some land, and build a lovely little 3-story with a decorative facade.
Markets—the great obsession of libertarianism—decreed the architecture we enjoy now, but as a consequence of rising living standards. Stone work is now highly skilled labor and is hideously expensive. This is a result of cheaper materials obsoletising many stone masons and labor being generally more expensive than it used to be.
Nothing old (with some very rare exceptions) is gone, it’s just gotten more expensive. You can still have that old world, it’s just likely not where you are.
I don't think I can ever buy the notion that aesthetics is anything but purely subjective taste. That may be the YIMBY in me when NIMBYs oppose perfectly fine buildings on aesthetic grounds which ultimately leads to homeless people 20 years down the road leaving litter all over the park, despite the fact that nobody has more time to put garbage into a trash can than a person with absolutely nothing else to do.
<i>I’m perpetually baffled by complaints like the ones Scott is expressing on behalf of fin de siecle art/architecture/society. For one, just google “rococo molding” and you’ll find suppliers of the most ornate, opulent, maximalist millwork you can install in your very own home! You can also find both vintage and newly manufactured art nouveau fixtures to live in your own little Viennese retreat.</i>
That's a bit like saying "I'm perpetually baffled by people complaining about living in a society of drug addicts when they can easily just not do drugs." Yes, personal choice is a thing, but having to endure the stench of weed every time I leave my house is still going to impact my quality of life, even if I myself never touch the stuff.
<i>Markets—the great obsession of libertarianism—decreed the architecture we enjoy now, but as a consequence of rising living standards. Stone work is now highly skilled labor and is hideously expensive. This is a result of cheaper materials obsoletising many stone masons and labor being generally more expensive than it used to be.</i>
(1) It's possible to mass produce architectural decorations. Indeed, people did mass produce them back in the Victorian era, using ceramics or concrete.
(2) Lots of the ugliest modern buildings are hideously expensive both to build and to maintain.
(3) Lots of pretty classical buildings don't actually have loads of fancy decoration.
"Stone work is now highly skilled labor and is hideously expensive. This is a result of cheaper materials obsoletising many stone masons and labor being generally more expensive than it used to be."
This is apparently only technically true. Scott once linked to an article about how you can now get concrete that looks exactly like traditional stonework, and is much cheaper.
There's also the intriguing possibility of AI+robots soon being able to automate stonecutting, doing away with the part that makes it prohibitively expensive.
The then-ascendant Authoritarian/Identitarian strain of the progressive movement fundamentally overplayed its hand in the covid-fueled madness of 2020, and while it momentarily achieved an impressive degree of success in getting mainstream institutions to signal support for its values, that very success has been their undoing as it was enough of a shock for a lot of moderates (who the radicals still rely on to form any kind of effective coalition) to realise, after the dust settled, how crazy things were getting and quietly return to a footing where they're at least capable of being sceptical of the dominant progressive argument (which they mostly seemed to stop being after the 'opposite' shock of Trump's election in 2016).
Identitarian progressives have gained a lot of ground in the past decade, but their offensive has culminated - very few major new institutions have changed course in a direction that favours them in the last 2-3 years, and some (like the elite US universities, which are a bellwether for this kind of thing) have even begun to swing gently back away from it. I do fear that if Trump is re-elected in november that the same panic as before will re-empower the worst elements of the movement.
Doesn't the argument given in your preface already incorporate the substance of your second objection?
The argument 'if you want the cultural values of the 1890s, you should try to build the truly robust Christian culture from which that culture arose' assumes the degeneration you're pointing to- otherwise how will rebuilding a truly robust (Medieval?) Christian culture produce your desired outcome of the 1890s?
Maybe it's not explicitly stated, and maybe Christianists who make the argument are just being shallow or dishonest, but the argument you open with is *only a persuasive argument* if it *assumes* that the process of degeneration will recur, no?
Might be easier to view cultural Christianity as being useful to flatten the curve, as we tried doing with COVID, so not to overwhelm and break the system, while we we're sitting at its table.
> The few sects that escaped decay - ultra-Orthodox Jews, Amish, the Taliban - seem neither clearly scaleable
Why don't they seem scaleable? Islamic caliphates that the Taliban harks back to once spread over relatively large scales.
> At the very least, they suggest one would need a very different kind of Christianity than the West had in 1700s - one as strict, isolationist, and inward-looking as the Amish - to have a fighting chance.
Roughly true, though there is the possibility of a cyclical process whereby you have something like Orthodox Judaism following the progression to Conservative, Reform, and nothing, at which point it gets replaced by a resurgence of Orthodox Judaism to begin the cycle again.
> If modern atheists want a society better than our current one (or rather, better than wherever modern culture is leading us) they'll have to invent some new cultural package that's never been seen before. I don't know what that is, but I prefer to maintain my intellectual integrity while I look for it
It's possible that modern atheists are just never going to find it, just as stable cultural packages of the past weren't invented by modern atheists.
I say no to the idea of Cultural Christianity, Cultural Judaism, or Cultural Islam. We don’t need to replace Wokeness with anything. Just get rid of it and move on. If something like Wokeness emerges, don’t let it become dominant. Are we not intelligent beings?
“Cultural Christianity” makes total sense… if you completely disregard the contributions to modern civilization made by the Greeks and preserved and refined by Muslims while “Christian Europe” decayed during the dark ages. It wasn’t until explorers went to the universities and libraries of Baghdad and bought the works of Plato and Aristotle back to Europe that significant cultural change occurred. St. Augustine was smart enough to understand the value of these ideas and crammed them in to the version of Christianity that people think of as the foundation of liberalism. It’s not - it’s just Greek philosophy filtered through Islamic scholars and fused with Christianity.
Ayan Hirsi Ali was scarred by effed up people who took the Quran seriously. Everyone who takes religion seriously is usually effed up - it doesn’t matter if those people are Muslim or Christian Evangelicals or Catholics or Orthodox Jews or Amish or Son of Sam or Trump Supporters. But Ali isn’t great at nuance and couldn’t acknowledge this fact.
To be fair, I’m sure it was difficult to do once she fell in with the Sam Harris/Douglas Murray/Bill Maher crowd who lauded her for her “brave anti-Islam stance” because it reinforced their own beliefs.
If you're referring to the Greek Dark Age, that's not accurate - they had no presence in written history beforehand. (They do have tangential mentions in Egyptian and Anatolian records, but nothing at the level of, say, specifying where they live.)
It really depends on the nature of the contributions to western civilization that you are concerned with. If you mean technological and scientific contributions, then Christianity had much less to do with that. In fact, it was often in the way( the most memorable example of this is of course Galileo's inquisition with the church even though the church was much less antagonistic than popularly taught). Were many of the scientists who led the scientific revolution such as Newton religious? Sure, but their religion was incidental to the science.
But if you mean sociopolitical, economic, and legal contributions, the history of the West would look very different and a lot worse without Christianity. It is Christianity which outlawed polygamy thereby preventing the kinds of family formation that obtain elsewhere which encourage nepotism and lower parental investment.
It is Christianity with its emphasis on the equality of all before God, an idea that survives most memorably in the American constitution. The greeks did not believe in the equality of all.
It is Christianity, protestantism in particular, which encouraged high literacy rates and extolled the virtues of hard work as a way to distinguish yourself as one of the chosen, an effect Max Weber famously noticed.
It is Christianity with its give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unti God that which is God's ideal that contributed to the separation of church and state, a distinction that did not exist elsewhere in the world at the time.
It is Christianity with its practice of extensive donations to the church and the poor that sowed the seeds for the modern welfare state. It's not a coincidence it happens first in extremely protestant Prussia.
And finally, it is Christianity with its new testament ideals and its linear narrative of history with the promise of an eternal paradise that has gone on to inspire countless works of western art, literature, philosophies, and ideologies.
The West has a lot to thank this uniquely strange religion for. It forgets that to its own peril.
Galileo's trial for heresy occured after the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving. Yet that's the only example than anyone ever gives of the Church's suppression of scientific inquiry.
Well, if you are looking for plenty of anti scientific things the church either did or was done in the name of Christianity, there are the recurring witch-hunts and the very last one was in the nineteenth century in Prussia, less than 200 years ago.
It is true that the church was much less antagonistic to scientific inquiry than commonly taught though and the pattern of interference seems to be strongest when it came to cosmology and astronomy( Giordano Bruno for instance was burned at the stake when he refused to recant and Galileo's strides in the discipline certainly didn't win him many friends). This makes strategic sense for the church because those ideas directly challenge biblical notions of God and Heaven. They were much less concerned with scientific work in biology or natural physics for instance until evolution of course.
It's also interesting that by the medieval era, Christianity had been fused with Aristotelianism and so it's difficult to say how much of the church's reaction was due to scientific contradictions of Aristotle rather than the bible strictly per se.
However, religious devotion and scientific inquiry generally do not mix well. Christianity is fully guilty of this and so interestingly enough is wokeness which has weaponized pseudo science to its own benefit. A religion will always make honest evidence based inquiry a secondary concern because it has to. Its edicts must always come first.
You're equating witch-hunts with restrictions on scientific inquiry? Is it your understanding that Prussian witches were lady scientists, with covens full of Marie Cuties doing important work to discover the properties of the atom? Do you think the Church was restricting anyone doing actual science 200 years ago? If the Church had been looking to restrict science 200 years ago, they should have focused on Michael Faraday, James Watt, and Joseph Henry, not on a bunch of lesbians chanting in the woods.
I don't think it's hard to comprehend how in an environment full of witch-hunts, honest scientific inquiry might be harder to come by. The opportunity cost of such a rigid hysteria is obvious after a few moments of consideration, unless you believe witches and covens actually exist, in which case the argument ceases to be logical.
Also, the church did obstruct scientific inquiry. They banned several books, they were and in many ways still are unfriendly to Darwin's theory of evolution, and they clearly were no friends of the Enlightenment, although by that time the power of the church as an ideological hegemony was mostly spent.
" If the church wanted to go after scientific inquiry, they should have gone after Faraday, ..." That was already the later half of the nineteenth century. That's like saying because Soviet Union did little to counter the spread of capitalism in the 1980s, they were aligned with it. They were already, by that time, well past their peak.
I'm not sure what you think the Enlightenment has to do with science. The Scientific Revolution of the late-Renaissance preceded the Enlightenment, and by some accounts concluded at the outset of the Enlightenment, which was a philosophical movement. Of course, the shared atheist and Protestant myth is that everyone was bumbling around in the dark, not doing any Science until along came the Enlightenment Proto-Dawkinses came in and showed everyone that God was fake and chemistry was real.
Most of Faraday's important work took place in the first half of the 19th century, right around the time of the witch hunts that you say demonstrate that that Christianity was anti-science.
<i>It's also interesting that by the medieval era, Christianity had been fused with Aristotelianism</i>
No, the idea that medieval people were slavishly devoted to Aristotle is a myth spread by early modern polemicists. It's like the 17th-century equivalent of "I'm a bold truth-teller, people who disagree with me are normie sheeple who unthinkingly swallow the party line".
I think that kind of implies that Christianity and Islam developed in a vaccum and then later encountered Greek philosophy? Or at least they initially had no Greek influence and then later were influenced by it. But Christianity is a product of the Greco-Roman world. Greeks were likely amongst the very first Christians(Saints Luke and Timothy come to mind) and within a decade or two of its founding, I reckon most Christians were Greeks. Christianity is one of the heirs of the ancient Greek world(And Islam developed from some variations and mixtures of Christianity and Judaism(and thus so was also an heir of the Greeks from its birth). In my view, the West is the heir to Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome, all influenced by and influencing each other.
I'd say the religion does matter quite a lot in *how* effed up one can be. Ayaan may focus on Islam for personal reasons, but it is a uniquely problematic set of religious beliefs in the modern age - there are no-to-minimal suicide bombings, for example, without a fervent belief in martyrdom, which is not present in all religions. There are other problematic differences, but Harris has done this topic to death, and you're aware of him, so I won't go on.
Why do you think that Islam has especially “fervent beliefs about martyrdom” compared to other religions - including one that is *literally symbolized* by a device that was used to kill someone for their religious beliefs?
Is it because you subconsciously associate a Christian “martyr” as someone who is unjustly persecuted for practicing religion while associating a Muslim “martyr” as someone who is willing to die for their beliefs *by harming others*? Why the distinction? Especially since the Greek term *martyr* and the Arabic term *Shahid* both translate to something like “witness” or “testimony”?
Islam is close to 1,500 years old. Were suicide bombings (or the equivalent) a hallmark of Muslims throughout that time? Why not?
Japanese *Kamikaze* pilots notably used suicide attacks during World War II. Were they inspired by Islamic teachings? Does Shintoism also have “especially fervid beliefs about martyrdom” that explains why Japanese pilots preferred that mode of attack while American Christian pilots preferred killing their enemies with nuclear weapons?
Could it be possible that “Islam has fervent beliefs about martyrdom” is just a convenient retcon some dude named Altman came up with to explain why suicide bombing is more commonly used by aggrieved Muslims than other aggrieved populations? Could there be other non-religious based explanations to explain this correlation?
I also just reject that Christianity was anything other than incidental to classical liberalism. People tend to equate Christianity with the founding of america, even though the pilgrims were probably less important than the capitalists, and the actual philosophers/writers of the time were mostly skeptical of Christianity.
Personally, I think Weber has it exactly 180 degrees wrong there. People in charge will invent a religion that says they're good people if their old one doesn't.
You can proffer whatever opinion you like; in fact capitalism started only in Protestant states, then spread from there.
So it’s not a law of nature, obviously, and no one can prove all counterfactuals. But unlike you, he’s got facts on his side, where you have only speculation.
P.S. I happen to agree with your second sentence. But it’s an almost entirely different subject then your original assertion about Christianity being incidental to the rise of classical liberalism.
If it was incidental, then where was the classical liberalism of non-Christian cultures? I would go further and say that classical liberalism was also absent from, for example, Orthodox Christianity.
I'm not sure I agree - I think you and I might be using "classical liberalism" differently - but I would be very interested in reading more about this, if you'd care to expand on it?
It would be a better argument if we meant something a bit more specific here. There are and have been lots of Christian cultures (missionaries do that), but we typically only refer to one time period in a couple places as classically liberal. Why haven't any nascent Christian cultures developed on to classical liberalism in Africa or Asia?
If "Christianity collapsed into wokeness and postmodernism", it's because wokeness and postmodernism are broken forms of Christian belief in disguise. "The last shall be first", "saints and sinners", the apocalypse -- all easily map to wokeness, which forms the appeal for people who grew up in Christian culture without the religious/ritual pieces. The "Cultural Christian" argument is to embrace the ritual parts (Bible stories, baptism, forgiveness, funerals that talk about heaven and hell). You don't have to "believe" these rituals any more than "Cultural Jewish" believes in circumcision or bar mitzvahs. Wokeness will collapse too unless it recognizes this.
So what’s the best way in the medium term to transmit Judeo-Christian values to the masses?
Because in practice, that’s what we’re talking about, right?
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and all that.
Your logic seems to miss a step - even if what you assert is true - that Christianity begets liberalism begets doom - if nothing else, you left out of the analysis that the sooner Judeo-Christian values decay, the sooner the badness occurs.
IMO you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I.e. your argument is that since Culture Christianity is imperfect, why support it at all?
Churchill had the answer to the question: Democracy is the worst form of government ever invented…
Cultural Christianity is also not necessarily useful. If you really do think that the societies built on Christianity were preferable and that Christianity was a necessary component to their continuation, you should wish there to be authentic Christians in society to rehabilitate these cultures, rather than erzatz cultural Christians who were not the key component in these societies’ successes and failures to begin with.
Just as there are secular Jews today, there could be or already are secular Christians (who respect and admire the essential aspects of Christian spirituality and ethics but are not devoted religious individuals). This is a good contribution to modern and liberal Western civilization. But this is something peripheral to your central point.
A "secular Jew" is a member of the Jewish ethnic group, so there's the level of cultural cohesion that continues to exist even when the religion is removed. Christianity doesn't work that way.
The closest Christianity can come to this is to tie certain aspects of Christianity to ethnic identity, e.g. the Italian tradition of the Seven Fishes dinner on Christmas Eve. In other words, if you're italian, you do this Christian thing even if you don't believe in Christianity.
Nietzsche also argued in the Geneology of Morals that Christianity has undermined the concepts of traditional good and evil, leaving us with a slave morality that has persisted for hundreds of years (e.g. slavery bad, equality is good, etc. ). If Nietzsche is right then I think it is very hard for western atheists to escape from being a 'cultural christian'. This is the core criticism I think: if you are rejecting Christianity but not the morality then you are still a Cultural Christian. Repackaging Christian beliefs as rational precepts doesn't feel very authentic. And those do really escape find themselves in uncomfortable places in doing so. (e.g. Overman, Will to power, etc.)
A long list of "firsts" in morality, but very thin on theology & hierarchy. Rather adherence to a set of practices (an hour of silent prayer unless one feels lead to share a message, acting only in unity, etc).
Not much for the decorative arts though
Moral revelation "firsts"
Beginning - Men, women and all people are equal
1690s - Prison should be to reform and not punish
1730s to 1770s - Slavery is a moral outrage
WW 1 - Strangers starving far away should be feed
1962 - Gay marriage is as acceptable as straight marriage
I was told that our British Friends published a book "Quakers and Sex" in 1962 or 1963 (approved) with the quote "The genders of a couple in a loving committed couple make no moral distinction".
I'm pro-religion in the sense that I think the world would be better if more people were religious. I'm also pro-science, and think we can have religion without the supernatural. I don't think we need "cultural Christianity" specifically, but I claim that a functional society needs cultural religions to teach useful values and help people figure out how to live well.
I believe we need religion because adult developmental psychology suggests we do. For those not familiar, the basic idea is that psychological developmental stages aren't just for kids, but also for adults. Kegan's model is probably the most popular, but Cook-Greuter's is better. I'll use Kegan's to make my case since more people know it.
Kegan's model contains 5 levels. I'll skip 1 and describe the rest (with some help from Claude):
2. Imperial Mind (childhood to adolescence): People at this stage develop a sense of self separate from others. They focus primarily on their own needs and interests, struggling to fully consider others' perspectives. They understand rules mainly in terms of personal consequences rather than social contracts. Relationships are viewed in terms of personal benefit. They can delay gratification for short-term goals but struggle with long-term planning. Self-regulation is developing but still limited.
3. Socialized Mind (adolescence to adulthood): People at this stage operate within shared social values and expectations. They derive their sense of self largely from relationships and social roles. They rely heavily on the beliefs of others to understand the world, especially those of authority figures. They struggle with conflicting expectations between different social groups and have difficulty critically analyzing social norms.
4. Self-Authoring Mind (some adults): People at this stage develop their own internal authority and value system. They can critically examine societal expectations and create their own ethical framework. They mediate between different values and construct personal solutions to complex problems. They take responsibility for their choices and pursue long-term goals despite social pressures. While they consider others' perspectives, their sense of self isn't dependent on others' approval.
5. Self-Transforming Mind (rare in adults): People at this stage recognize the limitations of their own ideology and identity. They can simultaneously hold multiple, even contradictory, systems of meaning without needing to reconcile them. They have a fluid, continually evolving sense of self. They engage with and learn from radically different perspectives, recognizing the interconnectedness of all systems. They navigate complexity with ease and have a meta-awareness of the process of meaning-making itself.
If this is your first time hearing about Kegan, a few things probably jump out to you, like that some adult-aged people fail to fully make the transition from 2 to 3. What you might also notice, which David Chapman of meaningness.com has explored extensively, is that the modern world asks people to operate at least at stage 4 and ideally at stage 5, but also contains few structures for supporting people at stage 3. Chapman calls this the "meaningness crisis", and he's worked hard to produce content to help people make the transition from 4 to 5.
I'm personally a bit more interested in all those people we've abandoned at stage 3. This is traditionally the role religion fills. But modernism chased people away from religion. Political parties have stepped in the fill the void, but they do the same job worse because they exist to gain power, and only support people to the extent it helps the party gain power.
Religions on the surface don't seem much better. But religions don't exist for a single purpose like political parties do (in the sense that religions don't go away if you pull out any one of the things they are about, but political parties dissolve immediately if they are not an effective path to power). This gives them the excellent quality of not being incentivized to optimize for any one thing to the exclusion of other things. And in that optimization slack, they have taken up the purpose of helping people live their lives well. Sometimes they do this for theoretical reasons, like wanting to bring people close to God, but they also do it for practical reasons, like it's better to live surrounded by people who are better to get along with.
Now, I want to be clear, I'm not here to say all religions are equally good at the thing I care about, which is supporting people at stage 3, and ideally also supporting them in their transition to 4 and 5. But if you go back and look at what people at stage 3 need and you look at what a religion like Christianity offers, you'll discover a lot of overlap.
If I've convinced you, what should we do? I think you should find and join a religion that doesn't care what you believe. Christianity and Islam and unusually focused on belief, whereas most religions care more about actions. This makes them both have weird failure modes, and one of those is scaring away people who get to stage 4 and realize there's no God as he has been literally described by religious authorities. That's how we got where we are today with modernism driving people away from religion.
I decided to adopt Zen Buddhism. Other people I know who consider themselves rationalists and don't believe in invisible dragons have become Quakers or Unitarians or started practicing Buddhisms other than Zen. I can't say it's all easy: lots of people have religious trauma that makes it hard for them to connect with religion. But it's my belief that religions fill a common psychological need that most people have, especially when they are at stage 3, and the lack of something to fill that need causes societal disfunction.
My assumption is that people being more whole is better than them being less whole. The idea that society should be constituted mostly of people who are less whole than they could be is morally and spiritually objectionable, whatever the practicalities of the matter may be.
(one reply to this would be to assert that most people will never get to stage 4 or 5 anyway, so any such measures would make a direct difference to the experience of only a minority of people, even if they thereby succeed in maintaining society for all others. )
From a stage 3 perspective, we don't. But people are going to bust through stage 3 anyway.
The bigger issue is that today we have a society designed only for stages 4 and 5. That's what modernism and postmodernism are about. But by not providing real options to support people at stage 3, they end up trapped in various weird stages of development.
Some people stay stuck at stage 2 because they lack the structure they need to get to stage 3. Some of them manage to get to stage 3 only with the help of our remaining stage 3 organizations, like the military.
Other people get stuck in a weird version of stage 3 that is based on a compression of modernism or postmodernism into stage 3 terms. This is what happens to, for example, the people who "believe in science" as if it were a religion or make a political party or company they work for (a structure you can only maybe navigate without it taking advantage of you at stage 5) their replacement religion.
There's much we could say about the modern world and why it structurally tries to force people out of stage 3 whether they're ready for that or not. David Chapman has written on this extensively, and I recommend reading his writing on this rather than mine. A good starting point is: https://meaningness.com/systematic-mode
Yes. Frankly, stage 4 and 5 remind me of people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder that I used to know. Or in one case, someone who could easily have become a cult leader but decided to do something more productive with their life.
I'd talk about "modernity" rather than "modernism", which is an artistic movement.
Modernity has a few ideologies, mainly: liberalism, socialism, fascism.
Maybe the only "coherent" way out of modernity is if science fully decodes the human brain and the human consciousness (and its interplay with human DNA), opening the door to the cyborg.
A transcendent overcoming of modernity rather than literal reactionary conservatism.
This is standard Yuval Harari, and I think he's right on this.
Somebody has probably already pointed this out, but the New Testament explicitly points out that if Christianity is bogus then Christian’s are the lamest folks fit to be pitied only.
But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep
in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement of cultural Christianity…
Besides the arguments in this post, I don't see why we should assume the ways you describe some past societies were better had anything to do with their being more religious (or closer to a more religious past). I see wokeness and excessive slave morality as orthogonal to Christianity at best, if not in some cases mildly supported by its ethics; past societies were unwoke and less slave moralist despite Christianity, not because of it.
To me, Christian ethics and thus "cultural Christianity" is unappealing in the first place, from the easy targets like treating victimless sexual activities as sins, to the whole "turn your other cheek" ethic.
50 percent of a society is below median -- by any metric you choose. Ergo, somebody has to be better than median to offset those below. Democratic government cannot provide this -- by definition.
There needs to be organizations which strive to be better than median, without expectation that everyone meets those standards. Christianity began as such an organization. Christians were to be "salt of the earth" and to get through a "narrow gate."
But then the Church tried to shove everyone through that narrow gate. This led to both really ugly forcible conversions and watering down of Christian standards.
The restoration of religious freedom is in many respects a return to original Christianity. But, alas, the urge to get everyone through to door has led many a denomination to dumb down Christianity. We are experiencing the results...
As a Christian, in my circles "cultural Christians" is a well-known term and not a positive one: we don't really want more of them. The idea that when Christianity is the dominant culture there's a ton of people who are "Christian" by default without really having any serious commitment to the faith.
From a Christian perspective, there are certainly downsides to Christianity's loss of cultural centrality, but the falling off of "cultural christians" is, I think, often viewed as a good thing. It's better, in a lot of ways, to have a smaller-on-paper religion consisting just of the more serious members than to have a huge religion where a huge chunk of the "adherents" only show up on Christmas and Easter and don't think about it all on the other 363.24 days of the year.
This "smaller but more committed" faith is both the original form of the faith - there weren't many "Chreasters" when Christianity was an illegal, underground faith in Rome - and it's also a form that has been seen in modern times in places that have been hostile to the faith, like China where it's shown to be strain of the religion that's pretty resistant to eradication.
If things keep going the way they're going culturally (and they might, and they might not, and as Dan Carlin would say, either way is interesting), this is where I see Christianity going in the West - not extinct but not a dominant force in the culture, either. And I don't think it's only 'extreme' versions that will survive - I think there's going to continue to be mainline Catholics and mainline Protestants, just in smaller numbers.
---
If there's a point to the 'cultural christianity' argument, I think it's just that it'd be nice if people did appreciate the extent to which modern 'liberal' values have largely come from Christianity - this is the point that historian Tom Holland (not that Tom Holland) makes in Dominion (not the animal-welfare "Dominion" book that was in the book review contest) - not that I want people to be 'cultural Christian' but it's a good antidote to the frankly revisionist histories going around about how all the church ever did was oppress people, burn witches, murder scientists, and start wars.
It's tricky - on the one hand, yeah, what you say can happen - someone can be a cultural Christian, then go through some (often difficult) life-experience and end up getting serious.
... but I'd say the far more common outcome is that cultural Christianity often "inoculates" people against a more serious strain of Christianity - people are exposed to weak and distorted strains of Christianity and it makes them non-receptive to stronger strains. "Moral therapeutic deism" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moralistic_therapeutic_deism) is a great description of what that sort of 'inoculation' dose of Christianity looks like.
---
But like I said, it's tricky - at the end of the day is it better to have a religion consisting of a million nominal believers of which 20% are serious or one consisting of a hundred thousand people, of which 100% are serious? The first has double the number of serious believers, but the second is probably a lot more Effective. (But of course, ultimately, it's not our call to make)
I was scrolling down looking for this perspective from somebody who actually believes in Christianity. In the Book of Revelation, Jesus says to one of the churches:
"I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth."
It sure sounds from this quote like Jesus would be happier with a society divided between serious Christians, and committed nonbelievers (especially if the latter are genuinely trying to follow the truth); rather than a society full of lots of nominal Christians who show up every week because that is the socially respectable thing to do.
It's true there are some real benefits from more people being exposed to Christian ideas in a "Christian" culture. But, real examples of such cultures are inevitably still heavily influenced by worldliness and avarice, traits that are quite incompatible with genuine Christian ethics. In a Christian flavored culture, the fact that Christianity is socially "approved", and therefore accepted by the rich and famous, may actually make it more difficult to acquire an authentic spirituality. In some ways it is harder to follow the "narrow way" marked out by the gospel, when the broad road is also labelled as "Christianity"!
As you say, there are some advantages on both sides. But, if the choice ever comes down to a society in which Christians are persecuted, or a society in which Christians do the persecuting---while I'd rather have neither!---it seems obviously more in accordance with the spirit of Christ's teaching to pick being persecuted. There are lots of supposed Christians out there talking online about how they definitely would use the Ring of Power to dominate the bad guys, if they ever got it. Fortunately, they aren't very likely to get it. (For example, it is always amusing to see online integralists debating whether they *should* turn America into an officially Catholic society, as if that were on option on the table. But, lots of Protestant evangelical forms of this as well.)
Exposure in cultural Christianity is often a perversion of Christian beliefs, e.g. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, or blue laws.
I often think about an episode of the sitcom "Step By Step" from the early 90s where the dad doesn't want to go to church because he'd rather watch football (The Simpsons had an episode around the same time in a similar vein). Eventually he reluctantly attends church but sneaks off to the attic to watch, ending with him crashing through the ceiling in the middle of the sermon. That seems representative of cultural Christianity in the 90s. We can draw a line directly from that to where we are today.
I definitely think people are free riding on the religiosity of others. Perhaps it would help if we framed it with the Chinese Confucian concept of Li. Ritual, etiquette, propriety are loose translations for a concept that reminds me of "manners on steroids". Society has a bunch of arcane rules and procedures, from TSA to job interviews to therapy reports to (in some places) addressing adults in a particular way. Perhaps you don't know why these rules exist. But as a good Confucian, you accept them and try to tie your soul to them for they are part of li. In order to play your role, you need li. What li does for society, according to Xunzi, is that it ensures a harmony of action among all parties. It is the set of ritual actions and expectations for behavior that makes society lower cost to navigate, because the decision has been made for you.
In the western context, we might call it piety: best personified by Aeneas fleeing Troy with his father and household gods on his back, and son in his hand. There may exist a set of beliefs and attitudes and rituals which makes society tick and preserve its culture. Piety is a real thing like justice. A type of honor paid to the values of a society, rather than cynicism or hypercritical readings.
Christian culture cannot be replaced by beloved 1890s progressive irreligious culture, because that era, much as I love it, does not provide a full set of answers for how to live. It is not a practice of a community. Sure there was Bloomsbury, but it was low fertility. If their number John Maynard Keynes echoed the same view you dislike, "We had the best of both worlds. We destroyed Christianity and yet had its benefits." Maybe he was being hyperbolic, but there is something to it.
I think that that something is this. Christian religons provide a framework and in practice many, many details for how to live life well and virtuously. In the streets Christianity can be liberal, but rarely in the sheets. There it is particular. For while the very intelligent and wealthy recover from vice pretty easily -they snap out of addictions, an extramarital affair won't leave them destitute, and alcoholism tends to be functional - for normal people, for children, and for those lacking in natural and secular advantages, Christian religion provides a thicker moral safety net to pull them out of self-destructive tendencies. It provides li.
All major religions probably also serve a function like this, and so you have to judge which network of li obligations you like best or lead to the best results. But if most people are shedding the old rituals and NOT replacing them with new useful or beautiful manners, then you might look at the live options available and shout, "Christianity!"
That's the value of being culturally Christian. You accept some amount of Christian li, and in exchange you get the benefits of the li being taught to the next generation. It is possible to assess Christian cultural norms, decide they are really good, and promote them without yourself subscribing the Nicene Creed. That's not hypocritical! But someone has to run the institutions which teach and instantiate those values.
Who says you have to assert Christian doctrine? I openly say I do not believe it, but that I am "pro-Christian" and I miss many things about it.
I recognize it's part of western identity and history, I acknowledge the value of it, and I do not go around asserting that (say) Islam is just as good or better because it's foreign. I don't try to deconvert Christians and I support the priviledged display of Christian symbols and traditions in the west, rather than the notion that all religions are of equal cultural and historical significance here.
I don't think cultural Christianity can dissolve into Woke because it isn't a real religion. Maybe it needs a nucleus of real Christians to operate (and one day that will run out), and maybe it just buys time.
grab bag of a notion to denote modernity/ modernism, while at the same time purporting to link it to a specific time (how about place - Germany, UK, France, Russia, the US??), that there is no hope for deriving any meaningful analysis from these premises.
An allegory: In a certain village, the people gathered fish bones and mingled them with their soil, believing this would summon the spirits of the fish to bless their crops. For many years, their fields flourished more abundantly than any in the land. With this prosperity, the villagers found more time for contemplation, and in their contemplation, they slowly ceased to believe in the fish spirits. Eventually, they discontinued their ancient practice of enriching the soil with fish bones. For a time, the earth remained fertile, yielding bountiful harvests. Yet, as seasons passed, the land grew weary and barren. The wise elders among them counseled a return to the old ways, hoping to revive the tired soil. But a certain scribe, renowned among the people, persuaded them otherwise, arguing that it was this very practice of bone mixing that had brought them to their current plight. The villagers, swayed by his words, diligently tried other methods while the land continued to languish.
Moses very likely wasn't historical - for one thing, the Exodus isn't a historical event, even when stripped of the supernatural bits. Wikipedia:
"The consensus of modern scholars is that the Pentateuch does not give an accurate account of the origins of the Israelites, who appear instead to have formed as an entity in the central highlands of Canaan in the late second millennium BCE (around the time of the Late Bronze Age collapse) from the indigenous Canaanite culture.[1][2][3] Most modern scholars believe that some elements in the story of the Exodus might have some historical basis, but that any such basis has little resemblance to the story told in the Pentateuch."
+1 on East Asia being a refutation. Taiwan and Japan are both doing pretty well without Christianity.
Japan was militarily occupied by a majority-Christian country which replaced its constitution (and forced it to tolerate Christianity).
Japan still has the Constitution imposed by that country.
Tolerating Christianity ≠ culturally Christian
The architect of post-war Japan, Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida(1946-1947, 1948-1954) was a Christian. Suprisingly, the current Prime Minister, Shigeru Ishiba(no relation to Yoshida) is also a Christian. Even more suprisingly, 9 out 65 Japanese Prime Ministers have been Christian.
Also, the current Emperor's mother is from a Christian background(had to convert to Shintoism when she married the Emperor). I think its fair to say that while few Japanese are Christians, they are disproportionately represented amongst the Japanese elite.
With regards to Taiwan, Chiang-Kai shek converted to Christianity later in life. Sun-Yat Sen was also a Christian. Though I think its fair to say that Christianity does not have as much influence among Taiwanese elite compared to the Japanese elite.
Looking at the other Asian Tigers, the current leaders of South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore are all Christians, and they have had many Christian leaders in the past as well.
While obviously nowhere as influential as the West, I think its fair to say Christians are disproportionately representated amongst the elites of Asian Tigers. But how much we can attribute the economic success of these countries to the religious beliefs of their leaders is up for debate.
Hong Kong's Christian leaders are exactly the people spearheading its descent into a fascist dystopia, so I think that proves the opposite point very, very well.
Communism, Fascism, Liberalism, all emerged from a Christian millieu in Western Europe within a few decades of each other. They are all denominations of godless Christianity ;)
> Also, the current Emperor's mother is from a Christian background(had to convert to Shintoism when she married the Emperor)
Did she have to convert? I wouldn't expect Shintoism to be exclusive of other beliefs.
Yes, according to Wikipedia. This was in the 50s. The Imperial Family was also a religious role and was considered to semi-divine. Sure, the Americans abolished that concept after the war, but I am sure the traditionalists didn't suddenly just change their minds because MacArthur told them so. The Shintos also violently persecuted the Buddhists for being a foreign religion in the early Meiji period. While Shintoism is definitely less exclusivists in one sense(multiple gods), it can also be quite nationalistic, so less exclusive in that regards.
There was a Meiji decree enforcing separation between Buddhism and Shinto. The reason for the decree was that no real distinction was observed before then. Syncretism is the East Asian Way.
But the outcome of that decree is that today, instead of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines being one and the same building, the Shinto shrine is an outbuilding just outside the Buddhist temple. They still aren't separate enough that putting one inside the other's temple grounds is a problem.
(Wikipedia:
"However, the process of separation stalled by 1873, the government's intervention in support of the order was relaxed, and even today the separation is still only partially complete: many major Buddhist temples retain small shrines dedicated to tutelary Shinto kami, and some Buddhist figures, such as the Bodhisattva Kannon, are revered in Shinto shrines."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinbutsu_bunri )
> The Imperial Family was also a religious role and was considered to semi-divine.
None of that is incompatible with some of the family being Christian, as long as they also avow Shinto. The Pope might object to that - it's not good Christianity from a Western perspective. But why would the Japanese care?
I understand that Christianity is very trendy in South Korea.
The Japanese constitution is very intentionally based on Western governments, both the original 1890 version and the post WW2 revisions. It's as much a relic of Western christian society influence as any Western constitution is. I'm not as familiar with other asian countries but I imagine it would be similar? Constitutions as a concept didn't come into vogue without Western influence.
"Space travel nonsense" has the possibility of returning to an era of lots of cultures undergoing cultural selection. Global monoculture has less selective pressure https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how-fix-cultural-drift
I'm sorry, but this is all a load of crap. Almost every sentence in this comment is incorrect.
The one example of the Sinosphere is enough to disprove your claims about culture. The Chinese empires were no more death cultures than the Roman, built through conquest, yes, but does not involve human sacrifice. Go back further, and you will find that human sacrifice is present throughout the entire world.
Furthermore, while it often isn't presented that way, the Chinese used to practice a form of pantheism as well, with deities like 土地公 ("lord of the land") and the planet Jupiter.
I assumed that I did not have to include the achievements of the Chinese, but in case you didn't know, these included the compass, paper, gunpowder, movable type printing, banknotes, and the spork.
The phrase "the Copenhagen experiment" has no referent, but I gather what you are referring to is the Copenhagen *interpretation* of quantum mechanics, which is semantically empty and has since been superseded by sensible physics like "taking the equations at face value", also known, for better or for worse, the many-worlds interpretation.
You also don't seem to realise the extreme irony of claiming that quantum mechanics is erroneous while using a device that quantum mechanics was essential in making possible to spread this drivel. Yet another irony is that you could've claimed quantum mechanics had a hand in almost anything and be correct, but you picked the one idea whose conception quantum mechanics had no hand in: the Big Bang. That was all general relativity, the one area quantum mechanics has failed and is still failing to subsume. Despite later elaboration using ideas from quantum mechanics, it was discovered by one person applying the entirely classical Einstein field equations to the universe as a whole.
And as for the claim that Oppenheimer was a third-rate scientist, well, his equations are still torturing physics graduate students to this day.
>
I assumed that I did not have to include the achievements of the Chinese, but in case you didn't know, these included the compass, paper, gunpowder, movable type printing, banknotes, and the spork.
Sporks, aside (which isn’t true as far as I can see) , that’s not great for thousands of years - at least two were independently found in Europe, and Europeans plainly used gun powder to greater effect.
OP was claiming that "African cultures, prob due to their pantheism, were tribes n never grew anything permanent to mans improvement [sIc]", and that all other cultures "who were great engineers via the pyramids- were death cultures- Aztec had human sacrifice- [sIc]". My comment was a response to those clearly absurd claims, by raising examples where these were achieved despite the conditions being met.
I suppose I didn't go over the many canals built across China, or the palaces, or the ziggurats, or the temples, or the terracotta warriors, or the Great Wall, or other feats od engineering, but I suppose I am still underestimating the average American population's knowledge of ancient China.
I did misremember: Sporks were used in ancient China, but they were not necessarily invented there. That's my mistake.
I’m not American. China is a great civilisation but that’s not an impressive list for thousands of years. But the rest of your points are good.
Shift the timeframe from 1–2000 AD to 500BC–1500 AD and they would be pretty much on par. Shift it back another 500 years and Europe is a cultural backwater and we'd be debating the Cultural Pantheism argument.
Although I'm in favour of putting our civilisation into historical perspective, which is what you're doing, I'm not sure you're engaging with the argument that the West at its peak has a rate of technological advance and infrastructure building and wealth generation utterly incomparable to the East at its peak.
Is there a rational basis for claiming Christian culture specifically is the solution, and not Hindu culture or something else?
If you don't like the west (or never did), then no.
Christianity was an essential part of western history for a long time, so if I argue that it played a role in how we are or were, that has a lot of prima facie validity, regardless of what you think.
If you look at India and think that that's actually a much better goal, then knock yourself out.
How do you know that it's the result of a specific religion that just takes thousands of years to develop, as opposed to just randomness or some other factor?
Vegetarianism is a lot more popular in Hinduism. So should we copy some aspect of that? Maybe that people can reincarnate into animals. Or do it like with Christianity. If banning gay sex means that 2000 years later gay marriage is accepted, maybe we need to ban vegetarian diets.
If five different loaves of bread and two different fish all succumb to the same strain of mold when left out on the kitchen counter overnight, I'm gonna want to see some actual evidence of novel mold resistance before accepting any claim that a truckload of more-of-the-same won't.
The very fact we're dealing with groups means "christian culture" didn't only collapse "one time." Group members were affected individually, following peer pressure or opportunistic curiosity or personal conscience just like the spread of any previous heresy, yet consistently enough for a broad pattern to become clear. No single raindrop defines the river, no single pebble the avalanche. The race goes not always to the swift, nor battle to the strong, but that's usually the way to bet.
Yes, but the same is true of liberal culture, so the Cultural Christianity Argument (that liberalism inevitably fails at this task compared to Christianity) hasn't yet been supported.
Would you accept Space Catholicism? I’m still working out the particulars.
Sounds like a job for Frank Herbert. (Or L. Ron Hubbard if you're feeling extra crazy.)
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, not at all. Zensunni developed over thousands of years. The OC Bible was the end result of a council after the Butlerian Jihad, which was galactic politics.
The anti-AI faction prevailed in the Butlerian Jihad, making a new faith necessary for reasons similar to the "Cultural Christian" argument. They needed something universal to provide meaning that would prevent anything that could lead to AI.
So they created the OC Bible with its main commandment of "Thou shalt not create a machine in the likeness of the human mind," truly wise words we should all live by.
Wait, Herbert mentions the Orange Catholic Bible but never says anything about the Orange Catholic Pope, who would presumably be a huge player...
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.
Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama has the "Church of Jesus Christ; Cosmonaut".
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.”
Love the Eschaton Sequence - it starts off and looks purely Manichean, and then takes an unexpected turn into Gnosticism.
The James Blish or Mary Doria Russell Space Catholics?
Neither ended that well.
Is this by any chance based on CS Lewis' space trilogy? He wasn't Catholic, but the concept seems close enough.
Only if it involves lesbian necromancers and cows.
I understood that reference!
What is it? Pratchett?
The Locked Tomb, by Tamsyn Muir.
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.
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.
Is the Space Pope reptilian?
I Dated A Robot looks pretty good now.
I once wrote a story about space catholic Spaniards vs. space ottomans.
Don John of Austria has loosed the second stage!
Did the Space Hussars charge at the Space Janissaries to save the planet Vienna?
Not exactly. But Spaniards had space cruisers named like "Our Lady of Africa" and "Pius XII".
All rocket ships should look like mitres.
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.
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
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.
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
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.”
Have you read Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, and Xenocide? They're full of Space Catholics. Nothing but Space Catholics.
I think the REAL intended message is more anti-non-Christianity (read as: Islamism).
Why do you think that?
I was wondering why Shankar thought that though
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.
Gotcha, interesting.
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.
It did fine for itself in WWII, but is kind of famous for dying out and being replaced by a different culture.
Soviets did give more freedom to religion during WW2 compared to before and after.
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.
Having a literal genocidal army invading your homeland does wonders for morale.
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).
Communism is basically a religion, complete with its holy men, its scripture, its heresies, and its eschatology.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
I think it's a pretty common belief, see my direct reply to Sam
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.
Anecdotal, but I've definitely heard this argument made in Christian vs atheist debates.
He gave the example of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
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
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").
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.)
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.
This seems to be the exact argument the article is arguing against.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>in an era when religious tolerance hadn't been invented yet.
This made me chuckle..
The Eastern Roman Empire wasn't brought down by those disputes but by the challenge of countries aligned with another competing monotheistic religion.
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.)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I suspect they're policies intended to *help get politicians elected* in areas where many voters are conservative Christians. Nothing more.
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.
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.
<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.
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.
In what way is the scentific method, as opposed to theories developed using the scientific method, "a continuing process of development"?
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.
That’s not the case. Philosophy is not science. the scientific revolution is generally seen to have started in Europe in around the 17C
revolution, yes, but EVOLUTION of science started with Thales of Miletus.
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.
"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.
lol.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
Richard Dawkins? https://breakpoint.org/richard-dawkins-a-cultural-christian/
Isn't cultural Christianity basically Jordan Peterson's whole deal?
There is also a strong component of self-improvement. Belief in Jesus alone doesn't motivate you to Clean up Your Room™.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
Yes, there is value. That does not make them true. That’s where I break from JBP
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.
Yes, and I disagree with the use of that word to describe it. Capitalizing it doesn’t help.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
That was one of the worst, as we're now seeing the descendants of that population suffering for their lack of clannish tendencies.
‘The first is boring: I hate asserting false things, even if they're "practical".’
This is *exactly* where I get stuck.
Except that Scott has previously espoused doing basically that if it’s helpful to address a mental illness (e.g. the hairdryer).
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.
What's the "false thing" with the hairdryer?
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.
Yes that’s the one
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.
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
Yes, but Scott doesn't endorse that believe. He just endorses dealing with that pre-existing belief pragmatically, if you can't change it.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing simpler. Bring Your Stove To Work day!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
Anxiety is not a belief. That’s the problem with trying to draw an analogy here.
Tolerating the continued existence of a deeply-entrenched, otherwise-trivial false belief is very different from building a globally-relevant one from scratch.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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".
You don't have to actually assert the propositions of Christianity.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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
I don't believe in god, but I was raised Calvinist so it doesn't matter
The way I see it, the idea of hell is incompatible with an omnibenevolent god anyway.
I can't even accept it as practical, unless my goal is to manipulate others. Sometimes I've seen it work in that sense.
Wouldn’t Christianity be a victim of the pattern of secularism and degradation in society, not coming to this fate separately
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?
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.
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.
> 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."
Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Normans still remained the best warriors of Christ for a few centuries. They kept the positives of both traditions ;)
Are you implying that the antebellum South was not Christian?
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.
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.
I think Galileo would love to hear how the idea of science came from Christianity.
I guess a comprehensive treatment of this thesis is the book Dominion by Tom Holland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(Holland_book))
A pretty compelling description of the ways the teachings of Jesus transformed how people think and laid the foundations for much of what modern humans hold dear, including both wokeness and secularism.
Reasoning from limited evidence, a single example. If the Industrial and subsequent Technological revolutions had occurred during the heyday of liberal Islam (Moorish Spain perhaps) this article would be arguing for Cultural Islam. Or any number of other, relatively (remember Christianity became much more liberal as part of the revolutions, it was not that way to begin with) liberal cultures through history.
you mean against :)
The connections between Christianity and such things as the rise of science and of limited government is not accidental, many people have argued.
The Draper-White "warfare of religion against science" thesis has no intellectually serious defenders.
That you've read.
Please give some recommendations then. I hopped off this train back in the early-2010s around the decline of the new atheist movement so I'm unfamiliar with any new developments. Re-learning about the history of science and Catholicism was one of the important in-roads that brought me back to the church.
Any historian of science, historian of Christianity, or historian of medieval or early modern Europe would tell you the same thing.
As opposed to the books you haven’t read on everything to do with the subject.
I would expect may people to argue that whether it were true or not.
I accept that many people have argued that. I've even read a few. Generally they prove their assumptions by their conclusions. And they often get history wrong.
It's probably not a random coincidence that the industrial revolution didn't occur under any variety of Islam.
There are _many_ circumstances and environments under which the industrial revolution didn't start, because it only started in a single country at a single time. From that argument alone, you can't assign an outsized causality to Christianity.
I'd bet against you on this one. Far am I from being a historian but it seems to me like plenty of progress was made during the golden age of islam. That's why we use arabic numerals and algebra's called what it is, eh? If islamic countries had a period like that around the 18th century instead of the 10th or whatever, that'd seem like as good a place as any for it to start
That's not a bad argument per se, but the weakness in it is that the industrial revolution really could have started way earlier. The Romans were right about there in the time of Christ, as were the Chinese. Both had huge empires, one of which encompassed where the revolution actually took off 1600 years later. The Islamic world's golden age could well have produced it, but instead degenerated into the sort of top down slave society we worry about today. Almost anywhere in the western Christian world could have produced it too, but also failed.
I tend to think that Christianity is less of a requirement as a result, possibly necessary but certainly not sufficient. Certainly not Catholic Christianity or probably even 'normal' Protestant... people often forget that by the time of the industrial revolution the Church of England had been rocking its own thing for quite some time!
No, the Romans were never close to an industrial revolution.
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
You aren't exactly wrong, but you are addressing the wrong aspect. We are talking the cultural/religious angle, with which ACOUP agrees: Rome didn't have the economic culture to launch the IR, as evidenced by the fact they didn't, or even get anything very close.
On the tech side... I think ACOUP is rather wrong. Primarily about the importance of coal. He does note that coal was used for fuel, but makes the common historian mistake of claiming that it was necessary for production and only started being used because people ran out of wood. (See this good explanation of the economics here: https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-coal-conquest ). Wood is inefficient, but it is farmable and had been for quite sometime.
ACOUP also focuses on the weaving industry a bit too much I think. While it was important in the Industrial Revolution we had, I don't know that it is the ONLY thing that could be important in starting an industrial revolution. I suspect many industrial clusters could spur the take off between use of mechanical procedures, specialization of roles, division of labor, and mass market trading, and cloth production just happened to be the one we got.
It is fair to say that Rome was not a few years aware from an IR but rather a couple centuries, but that is still a big deal; moving the IR 1000 years earlier is massive. The important question isn't exactly "how many 10's of years away were they?" because that isn't exactly clear, but rather why didn't they make the next few steps given they were within range. Because again, unless one hard assumes that it the IR MUST come from weaving and coal on rivers (and lots of places have coal and rivers) then the answer for why some places had an IR and others didn't seems to be either dumb luck or culture.
Likewise that mode of questioning is what is needed to think about things like "Why, when technology is seemingly very easily spreadable, are some countries rich while others poor? Indeed, why are some PARTS of one country poor while others are rich?"
> It is fair to say that Rome was not a few years aware from an IR but rather a couple centuries, but that is still a big deal; moving the IR 1000 years earlier is massive.
That isn't accurate either though! Even if you ignore everything else, they also lacked the advanced cannon technology that enabled the construction of primitive steam engines. It was only due to the arrival of gunpowder from China, followed by centuries of constant warfare in Europe spurring an existential arms race that led metallurgy to get to the point where the IR was even possible.
Islamic Golden Age ended when the Mongols literally and figuratively trampled their scientific brains under the hooves of their steppe ponies. The fall of Baghdad pretty much meant that the following Islamic culture was a Post-Apocalyptic one.
Europe and Christianity would look about the same if the Mongols decided to not stop at Legnica but push for Rome, pummel it to custard, and then strip land tot he bedrock on their way back home.
And algorithms.
They're *called* Arabic numerals, but they actually come from India. And a lot of the Arabic knowledge of "the golden age" was imported from Egypt.
It's really hard (effectively impossible) to trace the flows of knowledge in the distant past. Most of the records have been lost. But there's significant evidence that there were flows along the silk routes (there wasn't just one). Certainly Alexander did a lot to increase the flow during his lifetime. (I have a friend who believes that Aristotle's mother came from India. I don't find the evidence convincing, but he could be right.)
We use Arabic numerals because they are more useful, and the term Algebra is borrowed from Arabic, but like alcohol, isn’t unique to Arabia. Also the areas invaded by Islam were the richest parts of the Roman Empire in the east and North Africa. Islam didn’t add much that wasn’t already there and the golden age was pretty relative.
"Arabic" numerals aren't actually Arab at all, they're from India. The most prestigious scientists of the golden age of Islam generally weren't Arabs either, but other ethnicities like Persians who had been conquered by Muslims. And scientific progress ground to a halt after such conquests, even if not immediately.
As Adrian has stated, the industrial revolution only happened once independently. The problem is that the inventions have to happen on the pathway of economic viability: the real world is not like Civilization, where a state simply decides that now would be a good time to research steam engines and allocates their research budget to them for a few years. Instead, you require coal mines which have to be pumped dry, because the first steam engines are kinda shitty and not worthwhile to run unless you can use coal for free. You need to have perfected casting cannon barrels so you have the tech to make cylinders. You need mechanized looms so that you have a viable consumer of mechanical power who can pay the bills until you eventually invent the railway.
Of course, you also have a lot of social requirements. If slave labor to pump out your mines in cheap enough, none of the elites will ever try to find a better way to do things. You need a certain class capable of working of inventors, if making an atmospheric engine gets you kicked out of the blacksmith's guild, that would be bad. You also need some class for whom it is acceptable to make money through selling machines.
I can hear you saying "well, Newton happened before the steam engine started paying any bills". This is correct: there was certainly a period of interest in science before the industrial revolution happened, and it could be argued that this was yet another prerequisite.
I am however doubtful that this was a direct consequence of Christianity. Yes, Mendel, the first to figure out how genetics work was a Catholic abbot. But if Christianity is uniquely suited for scientific discovery, why did it take them some 1850 years to make that discovery? Granted, you first need to figure out how pollination works, but that is something which you could discover with a few glass boxes and scientific curiosity.
I am very skeptical about the very hard line of economic viability of inventions you mention. I suspect many different paths of mechanization of industry exist, we just happened to get the coal-weaving path so availability bias suggests it has to be that one. There are probably dozens of other options that would have suited as well, but we just didn't get them first.
From https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
> It is not clear to me that there is a plausible and equally viable alternative path from an organic economy to an industrial one that doesn’t initially use coal (much easier to gather in large quantities and process for use than other fossil fuels) and which does not gain traction by transforming textile production (which, as we’ve discussed, was a huge portion of non-agricultural production in organic economies), though equally I cannot rule such alternatives out.
Personally, I think that the coal mines which needed to be pumped out were the bottleneck. If you run atmospheric engines for your coal mines long enough, someone is going to discover a better steam engine which will become good enough to pump out water in your other mines. The spinning jennies just waiting for something to provide torque were certainly speeding development along, but even without them we would have likely gotten the first railway by now.
Yea I know he says that. It is possible he is not conversant on all the different methods and use of fossil fuels, or even various organic fuel sources (such as clean burning whale oil, or just charcoal.) He says he can't rule them out himself.
And again, even if we grant that the coal -> steam engine -> weaving path is the necessary one, it isn't as though coal is uncommon, weaving is uncommon or the need to pump out water is that uncommon. Pumps existed, pretty much everyone weaves things, coal is all over. Britain does have the benefit of having a lot of rivers and everywhere being pretty close to the ocean, so there is that; it makes coal much easier to transport, something like 10x easier. Rivers are not terribly uncommon, however.
Was there anyplace else that had coal and iron ore so close to each other?
Also, there are a lot of varieties of Christianity. It's possible that only one of them was special.
An alt-history Islamic Industrial Revolution might have been based on oil.
China seems to have a lot of coal and iron at hand, and even in Britain wood was heavily used for a long time to produce a whole lot of iron. See https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-coal-conquest
The best argument I've heard, from Deirdre McCloskey, is that it was specifically protestant Christianity where the industrial revolution flourished because it allowed more space for individual conscience and agency than Catholicism.
Or perhaps it's the flavor of Christianity where most people are doomed to hell, but God will save the elect. And you can tell that you're of the elect because you can make a lot of money.
It is not entirely incorrect to be suspect of proposals to "Retvrn", because indeed, the past became the present (and one cannot cut-and-paste the past to the present, regardless). However, it is also not correct to assume that the same faults are predetermined to recur; one would not necessarily expect 17th century Christianity, returned in spirit and practice to the Apostolic Era, to recapitulate Donatism, or many of the other heresies defeated in the intervening years.
A return in the sense of rewinding entails memory ablation; a return in the sense of reiteration is an opportunity to learn from mistakes.
But if we're counting on being able to learn from mistakes and not repeat the previous course of progression, we're probably best off going to something actually good in its own right, rather than something that progressed to what we like last time.
On the one hand, I expect we have different identifications of that which is good in its own right. Bracketing that, however, that something is not a priori perfect does not seem to be reason to discount it entirely, especially with complex systems. This very quickly becomes a Bayesian problem, no? Allocating proportionate commitment to refinement and iteration in accordance with perceived learning capacity, distance to goal, and clarity of target.
Alternatively, all we'd have to do is clean up and bandage the festering wound, and not deliberately cut ourselves with dirty knives again.
I don't think there's been a good case made that the decline of Christianity was an inevitable result of the conditions that we like (democracy, freedom of speech, science, etc.). It seems plausible that instead of going "none of this can be tolerated, get back to your farms, peasant" or "nothing is forbidden, everything is permissible", we could try navigating some sort of middle path, where we introspect on what exactly went wrong, and where, and try keeping as much of the conditions that we like as possible.
> I don't think there's been a good case made that the decline of Christianity was an inevitable result of the conditions that we like (democracy, freedom of speech, science, etc.).
I think that such a case can be made.
On the one hand, science is forever encroaching into the territory of religion. Before science, you had "God created Earth and Man, an placed the Earth at the center of the universe". God (or Satan) is basically the answer for any question where you don't have a good answer. What makes the plants grow? God. Why do the planets move like they do? God wills it.
Once you get science God will lose responsibility for a lot of things which matter to humans. You can still blame him for the Big Bang, but that will only get you as far as Deism. Or you could claim that he interacts with the world, but only in deniable ways.
Regarding freedom of speech, I think that religious uniformity is much easier to achieve when you can burn the heretic on the stake. A few key branches of Christianity evolved as state religions for millennia. Expecting them to do well in a free marketplace of ideas competition is like expecting Khrushchev to win a fair democratic election. In fact, it is amazing that Christianity does as well as it does.
That's all cope. Christian intellectuals *used* to think that it was important in understanding the world. It's only once science solved all the mysteries that religion had to stop making falsifiable claims about the world and retreat into the vague wishy-washy stuff we have today.
I've been wondering what it would be like to see a rainbow and have no idea what caused it.
Fair enough.
My actual position is something along the lines of: science and liberalism and democracy and capitalism all relied on key assumptions that were developed and maintained by Christianity, and so we never needed to develop independent justification for them. As Christianity faded, those assumptions were no longer universally shared, thus undermining science and liberalism and democracy and capitalism, which had never had to stand on their own. And the goal I hope for is to find a new foundation for those assumptions; I'd prefer something independent, but frankly I'm starting to think full-on Christianity is better than the current situation.
The assumptions are, roughly, from off the top of my head: That all humans (perhaps broadly defined) are at some fundamental level equal, and deserving of equal rights, and responsible for equal duties. And that the individual human is the only thing that can be considered to have moral agency and moral standing. That humans are responsible for their own actions. That human rights include things like life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and that human duties include things like behaving ethically.
And on the one hand, all of this seems basic, but on the other, I don't think any of it is provably true, and I think some might be provably false. And I think we're seeing what happens when these assumptions are questioned, and it's not good.
To expand on what quiet_NaN said, it goes back to Scotts other objection that affirming a falsehood is bad. And unlike what he wrote in this post I don't think that can be waved off as mere aesthetics. Falsehoods and good epistemics are innately hostile to each other. Scott actually wrote about this already in the Parable of Lightning:
"[T]he biggest threat is to epistemology. The idea that everything in the world fits together, that all knowledge is worth having and should be pursued to the bitter end, that if you tell one lie the truth is forever after your enemy – all of this is incompatible with even as stupid a mistruth as switching around thunder and lightning. People trying to make sense of the world will smash their head against the glaring inconsistency...
"The Church didn’t lift a finger against science. It just accidentally created a honeytrap that attracted and destroyed scientifically curious people. And any insistence on a false idea, no matter how harmless and well-intentioned, risks doing the same."
I agree that people shouldn't spread falsehoods. But, and I'm probably not going to put this very well... I'm not sure that this thing we agree would have been developed without building on the evolution of this particular religion, and I'm not sure that it can maintain itself without that foundation. I worry that it's like an early attempt at heavier-than-air flight, where we launch upwards as if from a ski jump, and have been moving upwards without contact with the ground, but now we're in the process of discovering that flapping our arms isn't enough to remain aloft.
In my view it arose much less as an evolution of the positive aspects, than as a reaction against its excesses and failures, especially as expressed in the wars of religion around the Reformation. For most of its existence, Christianity was deeply hostile to liberal values, and while it wears a relatively more gentle face now that's mostly by necessity. We shouldn't be too quick to forget the much more vicious aspects it wore 500 or 1000 years ago, or assume they won't return if given the chance.
Of course the same faults are not predestined to occur, since they did not occur to all Christian sects. Evangelicals, Pentecostals, conservative Catholics and Orthodox, they didn’t modernize and didn’t become woke. They chose a different path: which is why they’re still going strong, while the modernizing mainline churches have been hollowed out.
They've only lost control in Western European counties, and are currently in a culture war over America. There are always civilizational ups and downs: after the Muslim conquests, the only Christian countries left were the ignorant backwaters of Western Europe, with all the great centers of Christendom lost. Yet, if you had said that the Muslims had won and the Christians were on their way out, you would have been dead wrong. The situation is not yet so bad as it was back then.
In America: globally Christianity is still top dog when it comes to religion, and all signs point to it keeping that position (though those Muslims are at it again and doing their best to catch up).
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/
They've lost the culture war over America.
They've been losing ground ever since the phrase "culture war" got brought up, and show no indication of any way to reverse that.
There is no enemy to fight though. Christianity is not losing its faithful to another religion, but to uninterested agnosticism.
A religion can only survive if it can attract followers and punish apostates. Modern Christianity has little way of doing the former, and cannot legally do the latter.
Nope, judging by declining fertility they're just on a lag. Even Mormons aren't insular enough.
Not according to the National Survey for Family Growth: American who attend church weekly are above replacement fertility, and have been for the last four decades. Fertility has dropped for those who attend less than weekly (more "nominal" Christians) and the non-religious fertility rate has stayed consistently below replacement rate for the same period of time.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2022/08/birth-rates-church-attendance-decline-fertility-crisis/
It seems like religiosity or at least church attendance is declining across the board. https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declined-religious-groups.aspx
That stat is looking at "Protestants" as a whole: which combines Evangelicals, Fundamentalist, and Pentecostals (the non-modernizing Christians) with Mainline churches like Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, etc who modernized and have mostly turned woke.
If you seperate them out, you can see that the majority of the decline in religiosity has come from those modernized mainline churches, and not the conservative Christian ones.
This article brings some more context and nuance to the decline (https://www.christianitytoday.com/2021/07/mainline-protestant-evangelical-decline-survey-us-nones/)
"if everyone who was raised evangelical stayed in that tradition, how large would it be? In 1973, about 20 percent of Americans were currently evangelicals, while another 4 percent were former evangelicals. In 2018, those numbers aren’t that much different: 22 percent are currently evangelicals, while another 4 percent were former evangelicals. In essence, defection was basically the same.
"For mainliners in 1973, 28 percent were current adherents while another 7 percent had left the tradition. In 2018, only 11 percent were currently mainline Protestants but another 6 percent had grown up mainline and left. In the most recent data, for every two mainline Protestants, there was another that had left."
One of the ways modern culture is obviously maladaptive is below-replacement fertility. Ancients were aware of falling fertility being a problem, and we've preserved quotes from them about it https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/ancient-fertility-quotes but that didn't prevent modern culture from following that path. People have written about the declines of past civilizations from Ibn Khaldun to Edward Gibbon, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Glubb Pasha, Joseph Tainter, Jared Diamond etc. This hasn't been enough to get people to take the long view https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/long-views-are-cominghtml Mere memory, or some people having awareness, isn't enough. You need some way to lock in adaptations that won't succumb to cultural drift or "rot". https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/what-makes-stuff-rothtml
> partly for reasons of sustainability
Overt downwing death cultism - thank you for being straightforward in your thanatomania.
Ask rather what is the population necessary to generate a spacefaring, asteroid mining, orbital manufacturing civilization?
Modern rates of unintended pregnancies in the US are ~40%; given the historical absence of prophylactics and abortifacients, I would wager that the majority of humans ever born were not resultant from the desire of parents to maximize the average happiness of their offspring. This is perhaps the paradigmatic example of a super-organism becoming too cerebral, faster than it can adapt other aspects of its character.
I would be very interested to see the weight of variance of teenage pregnancy on life outcomes, controlled for SES. Many aspects are actually strongly hereditary, articulated through seemingly non-hereditary factors; for example, Iceland does not have anywhere near the social dysfunction one would expect with a 2/3 out-of-wedlock birth incidence.
Also, happiness is overweighted, if not outright overrated, as a metric, both descriptively and prescriptively.
for first pregnancies it's more like 2/3 IIRC
Genetic continuity persists by co-opting the pursuit of proxy goals.
Going extinct is obviously maladaptive. If the future consists only of insular cultures which avoid influence from below-replacement cultures (perhaps think of their cultural memes as analogous to pathogens that other cultures protect themselves from), then that's failing to influence the future.
No, but secular people are headed in that direction. Despite an expected gain of 61 million people from religious deconversion, the global percentage of "religiously unaffiliated" people (agnostics, atheists, seculars, etc) is expected to decline from 16.4% of the global population in 2010 to 13.2% in 2050. Unless their fertility rates turn around, there's no reason to expect that trend to change.
"an expected gain of 61 million people" -- globally, by 2100? what is the source of that particular estimate? Curious what the logic is for such a low total looking ahead that far. Unless maybe it's using a really-strict definition of deconversion.
Yes, if insular cultures like the Amish & ultra-Orthodox retain their separate norms, then they can survive even if other cultures go extinct.
Optimizing for "happiness" is maladaptive.
I do not deny world-historic efforts will be necessary, but certainly "try something new" is also of this caliber.
I don't know if I will fully agree with this. First off, the Ayaan Hirsi Alis of this world are not canvassing for Christianity in a vacuum. I'm pretty sure if the only two options were sober liberal atheism and Christianity, most of these intellectuals would and have adopted the former.
No, they are canvassing for Christianity as against Islam which courtesy of demographic change is now a substantial presence in the West. They recognize quite acutely the incompatibility of Islam with western civilization ( it is not too much of an exaggeration to say the latter begins where the former terminates) and want to avert this.
It's a Pascal's wager for the modern era but the prize is the preservation of the west rather than paradise. As with the other Pascal's wager, the implication that people can affect belief is crucial( this is what I consider unlikely).
Second, wokism is really Christianity without the aesthetic and artistic beauty and also without the concept of forgiveness( this is important because there is no one to do the forgiving as there is no God). But all the other elements are there: the concept of original sin, the obsession with the fundamental nature of reality, the morality of guilt, the emphasis on atonement, even its markedly socialist strain, et cetera. Wokism is a distinctly western phenomenon. It will not and cannot arise elsewhere. So to some degree, the pragmatic argument for Christianity bites the dust. It is Christianity, albeit shorn of its better elements, that has gotten the West to this point. What they mistake for the cure actually is responsible for the ailment.
Thank you for your reply. First, the analogy between Japan and the West lacks weight. Wokeness is more than collective guilt. I listed a set of other features and brevity did not permit mentioning others. Islam and Christianity both have many similarities( monotheisms for one with similar mythologies) and nobody would say they are anywhere close to being identical. Wokeness is a distinctly western phenomenon.
Second, it clearly lacks aesthetic and artistic value. Captain Planet and Power Rangers are not what anyone will consider great works of art or television. Furthermore, Captain Planet debuted in 1990 and Power Rangers in 1993, a full seven years before the new millennium. Most people will agree wokeness is a 21st century ideology. I cannot name five works of art which clearly embody woke ideals and are of significant aesthetic value. I don't think this is a coincidence either. Good art can be ideological but it cannot exist for the sake of ideology. That's just propaganda. Given that wokeness runs so counter to the belief systems of so many, it is likely to be unsuccessful propaganda.
Third, wokeness has no concept of forgiveness because it has no concept of a God. It shares this with other quasi religious belief systems like communism. Where communism emphasizes class and fascism emphasizes ethnicity/nationality, wokeness emphasizes race and sexuality( the others as well but not as muted; this is partly why it has been so convenient for the upper class who have adopted it enthusiastically as race and sexuality do not threaten economic interests).
In all cases, there is a simplified oppressed/oppressor dichotomy used to explain all forms of socioeconomic relations. The oppressor can either be eliminated or he can be reformed. But he cannot be forgiven largely because he is guilty of something which he cannot change ( race, ethnicity, class, etc) and will always be guilty of. That is why ideologies like these often end up supporting or instigating genocide because it is the logical conclusion of such a mindset.
If people want to see racial prejudices disappear, and I argue they never will because racists on all sides will always exist as it's fundamental human nature, the best approach is to return to what we had in the nineties where there was a genuine attempt to construct a post racial society. Prejudice will always be with us but it doesn't mean progress cannot be made. Wokeness has not offered that progress as it's fundamentally uninterested in that anyway. It has only exacerbated political, ethnic, and racial division. Perhaps, with people tiring of it, we can begin to afford better solutions.
I think we have fundamental agreement on going back to the culture and zeitgeist of the 90s - 2000s, ( although I don't think this will happen). I also think you have a good natured approach towards wokeness which I will concede certainly exists in certain quarters.
Our disagreements pertain to all the other points but I suppose those have been made quite clear by now.
One final assertion though: although race isn't fundamental to human nature, racism is. By which I mean it's not so much that race is an important classifier of human beings( although since David Reich's landmark work on human genetics and anthropology, I've been less inclined to call it arbitrary), but more so that people will consciously try to divide and organize themselves across certain characteristics. Discrimination is intrinsic to human experience. Since the concept of race, especially through the filter of skin colour is so salient, it's an obvious category for this. This is what I mean when I say it will never go away.
It seems to me Wokeness replaces the concept of forgiveness with the concept of tribalism, which is a regression in societal philosophy. "My tribe comes first, especially compared to a tribe that wronged us in the past". Christianity was always supposed to be about crossing tribal lines, from Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman at the well to Peter getting the vision prompting him to take the gospel to the uncircumsized. The veneer of original sin and such is new, but without Christianity you would still have tribalism, there would just be under a different skin.
But there are still tribes, with very deliberate efforts to keep them divided.
I disagree on Japan. Its Western equivalent, Germany, has been considerably better at feeling guilty, to the extent that its relations with Poland and Israel and so on are now very good, whereas Japan still has problems with South Korea over this issue. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements_issued_by_Japan#Controversy
I agree (with your disagreement).
This says more about the forgiveness of the Polish people compared to Korea, which is absolutely impossible to please on this matter.
You can't count the number of apologies in the history section -- I gave up counting by the mid 90s, when the apology rate reaches three per year, but the number of apologies addressed at Korea directly is easily double digits -- and then consider that by 2010 a quarter of Koreans believed Japan *never apologised*!
Can you point to where they've done so on record? My understanding is that Japan has refused to admit the abuses visited on Korea specifically, while Germany has denied nothing.
I've also read that WW2 history is still highly revisionist in Japan.
> people in Japan feel guilt over imperialism and World War II way more than people in the West feel about anything the West ever did
Do they really? Can you imagine any german chancellor denying the nazi crimes the way Shinzo Abe denied the Nanking massacre or forced sexual slavery?
Your second bit was going to be my comment if no one else said it. The core of wokeness is obsession with and elevation of victimhood. That only happened because of Western Christianity. Arguing for Christianity as a bulwark against the kind of society that produces wokeness gets the problem backwards.
Christ was not a victim in the contemporary sense of a person who gets hurt on account of their powerlessness, but absolutely a victim in the sense of the Latin *victima*, a living sacrificial offering. In Catholic liturgy Christ is repeatedly described this way, indeed as a "holy, pure and immaculate victim".
Wokeness and Christianity both elevate victimhood, but in very very different ways, and those ways are the bulwark.
Wokeness treats victimhood as a Marxist class, and uses it as part of a historical struggle of the righteous against the oppressors. It's a fundamentally collectivist notion, that justifies and excuses cruelty by the victim.
Christianity treats suffering as a component of personal virtue. I'm not an expert, but I think it has something to do with relieving others' suffering by taking it onto yourself. It's a fundamentally individual notion, that encourages forgiveness of others and a strict accounting for ones' own actions.
> my interpretation of Christianity is that it also encourages you to forgive yourself
I kinda agree, but I personally wouldn't have put it like that because of local issues. In America we sometimes run into some evangelical or fundamentalist Calvinist types, and their unknowing spiritual descendants in secular therapy, who IMHO take this too far, and use it as a solipsistic excuse to get away with all sorts of stuff. But that's more of a personal annoyance that I haven't gotten past (yet, I hope).
What is it about Eastern Christianity that insulates it from wokeness? I have some speculation but I would be interested in hearing your thoughts.
If anything, I would say that wokeness is Calvinist. Calvinism, of course, is form of Western Christianity, but it's not all of Western Christianity, or even close to a plurality of it
That's something for to think about, thanks. But you keep saying Augustine. Don't you mean Aquinas? Orthodoxy leans on Augustine a lot. Like whoa.
Any conversation about the history of concepts around "victimhood" must include the history of "rights". As far as a brief search reveals, J.S. mill proclaimed a skeptic's stance.
Reminds me of what Hitchens said about Mother Theresa: “She doesn’t love the poor, she loves poverty.
Hi RI!
Thanks for the interesting comments! Here's my take:
1) Ayaan is a convert to genuine Christianity. As I understand her story, she was depressed and suicidal in her atheistic worldview, tired every scientific remedy, and was finally saved (resurrected, born again) when she prayed to Jesus. She talks about cultural Christianity to point out that it's wrong to treat all religions the same (in particular putting Christianity and Islam together in the same basket), and because it points secular humanists to actual Christianity, which she found to be lifesaving.
2) While there may be some superficial similarities, I see wokism as being fundamentally opposed to the message of Jesus. Wokism is centered around dividing and accusing.
In the Bible, Satan is literally 'the accuser' and Diabolos literally means 'divider' or 'scatterer'. The gospels portray Jesus's religious opponents as the ones who were doing the accusing. The Pharisees judged themselves better than tax collectors and prostitutes. The chief priest, Caiaphas, accused Jesus and had him crucified. Jesus, instead, desired reconciliation through forgiveness ("forgive our sins as we forgive those who sin against us") and self-accusation ("take the plank out of your eye before you attempt the speck in your neighbors").
Jesus was a victim, but he didn't handle it in the woke manner. He didn't call for reparations, nor incite his followers to avenge him, nor ask the Jews to defund the Romans ("give to Caesar what is Caesar's"). Instead, on the cross, after being accused, betrayed, humiliated, tortured, and wrongfully sentenced to death, he uttered "Father forgive them, they know not what they're doing."
The impression I get about wokism is that it's an ever-hungry accusation machine. It devours everyone from long-dead slaveholders to celebrities who make a single politically incorrect joke. And forgives no one.
Kind regards,
David
I appreciate this comment. It has some of my thoughts, but written more coherently than I would have done.
Seconded!
Hello, David. Thank you for the warm reply. I appreciate it.
I can't speak to the genuineness of Ayaan's conversion. It's a matter between her and God. We may, with some humility, interpret it as a response to the trauma of her Muslim youth and she's right of course to point out the fundamental differences in morality between Christianity and Islam, a distinction those in the west often fail to realize to their own detriment.
I also agree with you that at the end wokeness and Christianity are in conflict primarily because Christianity's central message is forgiveness through Christ and the offer of eternal redemption while wokeness, as I've already pointed out, operates without the possibility of forgiveness.
However, the similarities, from where I'm standing, are much deeper than superficial but I guess that would take a longer reply to fully articulate. Have a good one.
Hi RI!
I suppose by spotlighting victims, wokism is closer to Jesus than, say, SPQR or what I know about Hinduism. And I am curious to hear more about the deep similarities you've found, if you have the time to explain them.
Kind regards,
David
PS To me, the NT also seems pretty anti-woke in its communion of all believers regardless of class, gender, or ethnicity. ("There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.")
Hello. I appreciate the reply.
I will try to articulate the many and deep similarities between Christianity and wokism. This might take a little while.
Wokism is more than just accusing and dividing others. It's a fine start but any religion or ideology can and has done that. Wokism has a set of attributes I've already listed but I will take them apart one by one to show how it connects to Christianity. In many ways, wokeism is Christianity's bastard offspring.
First off, wokeism is the understanding of historical and socioeconomic relations through the application of an oppressor-oppressed matrix centered primarily around gender, sexuality and race. In this way, it borrows from Marxist socialism but where Marxism's fundamental unit of analysis employs class struggle, wokeism is centered on race and gender struggle ( Many old school and classic Marxists don't like wokeism for that reason since they regard it and social justice warriors as a distraction from the important issue of class warfare).
But other than changing the centre of emphasis, the rest is largely similar. The oppressor exploits the oppressed and there can be no true negotiation between them because there's a power imbalance. The only resolution is extensive reparations. Note that unlike Marxism where the focus is the violent redistribution of material resources, wokeism wants this too but since it's more concerned with gender and race struggle, what it is after more specifically is the redistribution of status and representation( hence, why they are obsessed with changing traditionally heterosexual or white characters into other races and sexualities or flying pride flags across important seats of power). Note that both ideologies operate with a zero sum mindset: there's a fixed amount of wealth or status in this world, the oppressor class has historically hoarded it, and it is now time to redistribute it to the oppressed without consent.
Now, for the similarities with Christianity.
First off, Christianity has always been deeply sympathetic to socialism. Jesus has many messages condemning wealth, the early disciples lived in communal settlements where they shared everything equally. Indeed, over the centuries, many christian cults and sects such as the Arborites, Albigenses, the Society of the Free Spirit, and many more have preached a socialist paradise of sorts where all property is publicly owned, the family ceases to exist, and there is no distinction between thine and mine. One of the earliest works of socialist philosophy, More's Utopia, is heavily influenced by christian doctrine. For a longer, more thorough analysis, consult the first few chapters of Russian mathematician and philosopher Igor Shafarevich's landmark work on communism.
Indeed, it is in part Christianity's attitude towards usury and wealth that allowed social outcasts such as the Jews take up these roles in society and grow wealthy as a result. They were often resented by the christian communities for that reason, a resentment that ironically carried over into Marxism, famously in the anti semitic The Jewish Question, given that Marx himself was also a Jew. There is thus an interesting and deep connection between Socialism, Marxism, Christianity, and Wokeism, although all four are distinct from each other.
Second, the redistribution of status Wokeism is so concerned about finds parallels and antecedent in Christ's sermon on the mouth, an historical break with pre christian ideology where as Nietzsche often noted, the virtues of strength were extolled and the virtues of weakness such as humility, et cetera, were denigrated. Christianity is the first or at least most thorough to apply this inversion and instead assert that it is the meek, the poor, the needy, and so on who shall inherit the kingdom of God. Indeed, the tension between these two kinds of morality was discussed recently on this substack where Andrew Tate was cited somewhat misleadingly as an example of the Nietzschean ideal. Wokeism goes even further: The gay person but even beyond that, the trans person must receive more status than the heterosexual, the disabled must receive more status than the able-bodied ( it's no wonder that more people are claiming all kinds of disabilities now), minorities before whites, so on. In this moral framework, you are more moral based on how powerless you seem and how little harm you have done historically. You accord yourself status as an ally by cutting yourself down to size and shrinking yourself in support of those who have historically been mistreated( I don't even disagree on the premise here; I just think wokeism isn't the solution).
Third, consider how in Islam, the classical split between Sunni and Shia is over Muhammad's legitimate successor. It is essentially a power struggle, no different from a political succession. But in Christianity, the classical split between Catholic and Orthodox is philosophical, over the godhead of the Trinity. Christianity's fundamental split was over the nature of reality. I am straining here but I find similar echoes in today's pointless wrangling over gender and sexuality. The absurdity of such debates as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is similar to the modern absurdity of how many genders there are, et cetera. You will find no similar philosophical conflicts in Islam or Judaism.
Fourth, I think it's certainly interesting that while there have of course been christians who have been terrorists eg the Irish terrorists during the troubles, there have been very few terrorists who performed their acts of terrorism in the name of Christ or Christianity. The Irish terrorists were embroiled in a political struggle over independence and their terrorism followed from this.
Contrast with Islam where terrorists often commit these ghastly actions in the name of religion and regard themselves as entitled to a divine reward for blowing themselves up.
However, Christianity has often featured witch-hunts to a scale and a degree unseen in other religions. Witch-hunts are interesting because those being punished are ostensibly christian but merely of a different faith and they are not wars as such but communal spasms of violence or ostracism which can be just as damaging( Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is a memorable example).
Although a lot less severe, there is something to be said about how cancel culture often targets heretics for being just slightly out of line by fundamentally ostracizing them. It is, in my opinion, one of the darker attributes of Christianity which has of course survived into wokeism.
There are other similarities, of course. The fundamental differences, however, make Christianity a much more rewarding and wholesome ideology primarily because Christianity is at its heart, individualistic while wokeism is collectivist and Christianity always extends the possibility of redemption and forgiveness, at the very least as an ideal. Last but not least, wokeism is religious in character but not a religion while Christianity is a religion.
My thoughts on the subject are rather scattered and unpolished but those are my observations on the subject. If you have indulged me so far, thank you. Have a lovely one.
Hi RI!
Thanks so much for taking the time to explain all of this. Your connections are impressive, and I don't see anything that I overtly disagree with. Just three thoughts from my point of view:
1) I personally draw a bright line between Jesus's ministry and historical Christianity. Christianity is filled with immoral hypocrisy, and I agree that The Scarlet Letter and witch hunts and inquisitions are certainly a part of Christian history, but I don't read any legitimate justification for that behavior in the gospels. To me, it's important to separate Christ's ideal from what the screwed-up sinners did who claimed to follow him. Jesus gave us the highest morality humanity has ever considered, and part of his assessment is that humans are screw-ups and will always screw up.
2) As for Christianity and Marxism, I'd say that any good idea can become evil through coercion. I am pleased to see people being baptized... but I'd be horrified to witness it done by the sword the way Olaf Trygvesson did it.
Similarly, a few dozen people pooling their wealth and living communally to serve the poor is far different from assassinating the tsars and exterminating the kulaks. ("I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all the contrary of a Christ... I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don't get nailed to a cross or any other place." —Che Guevera)
3) I agree that ostracizing just-slightly-out-of-line believers is a dark attribute of Christianity, but again, I don't see that grounded in Jesus's ministry. On the contrary, Jesus said "he that is not against us is for us." In the gospels (and Acts), it was the Jewish Pharisees and Sadducees who were wrangling over minor points of interpretation. Freud observed this as a universal social phenomenon and coined the term "narcissism of small differences".
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts! I wasn't familiar with Shafarevich and he seems very interesting!
Have a great weekend!
Kind regards,
David
> No, they are canvassing for Christianity as against Islam which courtesy of demographic change is now a substantial presence in the West.
And yet we motor along quite well together. The hysteria about Islam is in direct opposition to the power of Islamic countries who are getting pulverised by the west every 5 years or so.
Ayaan Hirsi Alis is part of that neo con cabal who want to fight Islamists by bombing or overthrowing secular leaders in the Middle East and North Africa, thus creating vacuums for Islamist movements to grow. You would think that would work only once, but it works every time.
Like Scott, I have no sympathy for "cultural Christianity," as described.
Many have claimed that the seeds of whatever-we-have-now lie, not in the loss of Christianity, but in Christianity itself. Nietzsche, hostile to Christianity, did so in On the Genealogy of Morality. Voegelin, friendly to Christianity, did so in The New Science of Politics. (Voegelin, and others like him, qualify this claim by saying it is heretical variants of Christianity that are at fault, not the orthodox kind.)
Whatever the details, I think it is a powerful observation that we did indeed try Christianity –– and got to exactly where we are. In order plausibly to make the argument that Christianity is the solution, one needs an additional account of what we'd need to do differently this time.
It's strange to blame Christianity for the bad stuff that happened when we stopped doing Christianity.
"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."
Kind regards,
David
If no one tried it in 2000 years of theistic rule, I'm happy to infer that human's won't try it again even if we bend our society towards trying to make them do it.
If I look into some "productivity" software, and it turns out to be difficult enough to use that productivity is not improved as a result, the software has in fact been found wanting.
Hi James!
That is the strange predicament of history. All people could love their neighbor as themselves, and if we did, society would become incredibly productive. Think about all the waste involved with making sure people can be trusted, contacts are honored, the truth is being told, software isn't malicious, etc.
Kind regards,
David
Iron could come out of the ground as conveniently-sized sheets and ingots rather than ore, which would save a tremendous amount of waste involved with crushing, smelting, forging... but, empirically speaking, it doesn't.
Ideal oracles could solve any (and thus, every) NP-complete problem as fast as an RNG can write down the answer. If somebody has such an oracle, they must be doing a heck of a job keeping it quiet.
Fig trees could bear fruit out of season, lions could lay down with lambs, and software could turn out bug-free on the first draft, if God willed it so. Apparently He has other plans, thus we need to do some things the hard way. http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/tasks-at-hand
Hi James!
Sorry, I don't follow your point here. It is possible for each of us to love our neighbors. Are you suggesting the reason we aren't doing that has something to do with the way iron is found in ores or other features of the natural world?
Kind regards,
David
Indeed I am. Boiling it down to one word, the problem is "entropy." Humans are not all the same, and we can't even precisely measure many of the most relevant differences. Coordination requires accommodating and/or overcoming those differences.
If someone intends to love their neighbor as themselves, but they don't know the back of their neighbor's hand as well as they know their own hand, are they actually, truly and effectively, loving their neighbor? Or are they loving the inaccurate image of their neighbor (with a slightly different hand, and whatever else) which exists only in their own mind?
They might, for example, knit a glove which perfectly fits a hand-shape they imagined their neighbor having, but is uncomfortable, possibly even injurious, when worn by the actual hand for which it was intended.
"That was not *true* Christianity"?
Hi Johan!
I personally draw a bright line between Jesus's ministry (the "Christian ideal") and historical Christianity. Christianity is filled with immoral hypocrisy, and I agree that crusades, indulgences, witch hunts, and inquisitions are certainly a part of Christian history, but I don't read any legitimate justification for that behavior in the gospels. To me, it's important to separate Christ's ideal from what the screwed-up sinners did who claimed to follow him. Jesus gave us the highest morality humanity has ever considered.
Kind regards,
David
That Christianity wasn't able to keep from decaying into bad-things-are-good is an important consideration. When we think of all the good things of the 1950's, we have to remember that it immediately decayed into the 60's.
The hope of cultural Christianity would be that we could do better the second time round. As for sincerity, it is not necessary to perjure yourself, just to encourage Christianity. Benjamin Franklin donated whenever a church was being built, I think, even though he didn't belong to any of them. Jordan Peterson has been saying lots of nice things about Christianity even though he can't seem to bring himself to believe it as fact.
What specific things will we change the second time around? How will it avoid the problems that happened the first time?
Scott's second argument, and the argument of many comments here, is that Christianity didn't prevent wokeness and therefore it can't prevent wokeness.
Although I'm comfortable calling religion a technology, Christianity isn't a set-and-forget civilization-maximizer. It's a set of values and claims that require personal commitment. The argument for cultural Christianity is that it works to sustain civilization when a sufficient number of people make that commitment. We now have our lesson, and the next time around we should be teaching the lesson of what happens when you don't make that commitment.
I think the real argument is actually the one Scott says he isn't interested in talking about here. I think Scott could accept your argument that we should push for more of this Christian Technology, except that he doesn't personally believe it and doesn't like lying about his beliefs.
What good things about the 1950s? A post-WWII economy?
Low, crime, high trust. Women and children could walk on the streets without fear. People got married and stayed married. The elite was educated. People knew their neighbors.
How much of what changed can be traced straight back to real estate speculation?
If housing is selected primarily based on eventual resale value, could turn out that the only thing you have in common with your neighbors is how they were able to do the same basic math and could afford a similar mortgage. http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/moral-dilemmas
The iconic uneducated elite is "Teflon" Don Trump, who got his money mostly from the real estate market despite not being a particularly competent businessman.
Inability to afford a house makes it harder to credibly commit to building a family, which seems like it could plausibly have some sort of impact on marital stability.
Crime and unsafe streets are particularly associated with inner-city slums, which result from landlords buying up real estate with obvious potential value (thanks to its proximity to the rest of the city), then letting buildings decay (to minimize expenses, both in maintenance and property tax), and vaguely hoping to someday resell to someone with a plan for converting it to actual value.
I am not sure one can make the argument that humans changed so much. What did change is technology and economics. The problem is not bad people. Few people really have power. How much power does a shareholder have over what their corporations are doing? Corporations are maximizing profit (that is why people own shares). If a human person would only think of maximizing profit, we would call them sociopathic. So not bad people, but sociopathic organizations are the problem.
I cant see what that would have to do with Christianity.
Agreed, I think modern capitalism (plus historical memory holing of what was bad in the past) explains everything Scott objects to about the present much better than any cultural/religious axis.
One of the more under looked and I think worthwhile angles here. People who are intellectually inclined like to explain things in terms of ideas, but... "People were persuaded by bad ideas so things are bad; we just need to convince them of the right idea and then things will be good" is I think too facile an explanation of long-term historical trends. "Ideology as superstructure" is an oversimplification in the other direction, but... The modern sexual landscape, for example, I think owes more to the pill and the washing machine and other technological --> economic changes (more demand for jobs requiring communication than brute strength/endurance etc) than a few feminist agitators and authors and/or loss of faith.
One of the things that struck me reading ACOUP is how much of culture and values is downstream of economics, technology, etc.
Projecting modern values into the past is just as dumb when woke people and conservatives do it.
Christianity seems like a more accurate depiction of reality than the one that preceded it, where you went to the temple and made sacrifices and the gods would battle it out on your behalf, or you would see something in a dream and that meant you should kill your friend/switch jobs/change your will.
Likewise Protestant christianity seems like a more accurate depiction than Catholicism where priests have special access to the divine and indulgences work.
Both of these "level ups" have beneficial effects on how people live their everyday life, and how society functions. When people convert to Christianity they spend less time and energy on sacrifices and look elsewhere for advice.
Likewise, what we have now is more accurate than christianity. It's not that great, but no consensus reality in history has been. They take a noisy path but generally progress in the right direction.
You can rest assured that the consensus reality you dislike will also progress towards truth.
Human extinction would stop that progression.
Well, at least it would stop us worrying about it.
>the gods would battle it out on your behalf
They never did this; they took sides but we had to do the battling.
exactly. Christianity was uniquely good for its time in comparison to the alternatives available. But we evolved out of it since.
I think of Christianity like some sort of our cultural grandma. Loved, but old-fashioned, wise, but a lot of things she says just no longer hold up. And that's okay.
This isn't my area of expertise (being wrong on the internet is), but the assertion that the 1880s to the 1930s "wasn't very religious" is very strange to me. Some German weirdo saying "God is Dead" didn't really have much effect on the widespread religious practices of the American populace. The whole temperance movement was essentially rooted in Protestant churches, which were also enjoying a major boom during that time. Perhaps you could say that the rarefied heights of the artistic and intellectual world were more atheistic, but I'd still be somewhat skeptical of that claim...
Let's say they were less religious compared to the middle ages.
Nietzsche was a weirdo, but he observed the contemporary trend *in Europe*, which pretty clearly went towards secular nationalism, especially in the most important countries (Germany, Italy, France, England).
As usually, statements like that only have regional validity. Even in Nietzsche's Europe, the Poles and the Irish were very religious. But his assessment was that these pockets wouldn't matter in the big picture, and he was right.
Interesting read. That is not how I have interpreted cultural Christianity. I hear the term and think of a person who lives mostly accepting the basic norms of Christianity and subsequent structure of society based on those norms, while not accepting the claims of universal truth, miracles and the divinity of Christ.
No need to claim to believe anything.
Same here, or more so — I'm familiar with "cultural Christianity" meaning stuff like wanting a day off on 25th December. I don't think anyone is arguing that social values and norms are deeply shaped by those trappings. I hadn't heard the usage that Scott is talking about.
People are using this term in different ways. I think we need a taxonomy here, so I hereby declare there to be four varieties of cultural Christian:
1) The Pragmatic Cultural Christian. A Christian of convenience who wants a day off at Christmas, wants an excuse to gorge on chocolate at Easter, and may pretend to be Christian to join a better or more convenient public school (quite common in England).
2) The Aesthetic Cultural Christian. Someone who feels some genuine attachment to the art, architecture, music, and rituals of Christianity, or enjoys the community of church. They may also feel a sense of cultural heritage, but probably doesn't have any stronger beliefs about the virtues of the Christian doctrine. (This, to me, is the "purest" cultural Christian.)
3) The "Personal Virtue" Cultural Christian. Someone who, despite not actually believing in the supernatural stuff, thinks that Christianity cultivates virtues that we should try to follow and teach to our children, but doesn't try to expand this to society at large. (This seemed the mainstream in my (English village) upbringing.)
4) The Civilizational Cultural Christian. Someone who makes macro-level intellectual arguments about how society needs the uniting civilisational virtues of Christianity that keep society functioning, and in order to fight the onslaught of Islam, hedonism, nihilism, fertilty collapse etc. (This is probably the rarest in "real life", but the most common in post-rationalist blogging circles).
If #4 is the rarest, perhaps that's because it's dependent on #3. If civilization is going to unite around Christianity to fight those enemies, there needs to be buy-in on the individual level. And I don't think that simply liking architecture or music is going to be enough motivation to stand up to these foes. Someone might like a beautiful building or classical music but that preference is no match when academe comes along saying that ionian columns are phallic and Mozart was racist.
Interesting. This very well may be correct. I am curious about #1, as i am unsure why that would have an impact on public school eligibility. I am in the US, so I am unfamiliar with the scenario.
I was a #2, but did not consider myself a cultural Christian, but a non-militant atheist. I just felt an affinity to the familiar experiences of my childhood in a very religious, Christian home.
Upon having kids, I shifted to #3, and would in fact consider myself a cultural Christian.
I never considered those as two points on the same spectrum, but can see how they may be a sliding scale.
That I understand, having attended a private religious university. It is the inclusion of public school that lost me. It seems to have been addressed, above, although my ignorance regarding the public school system in England is obvious!
For #1, I don't have data, but I have anecdotes!
My friend lives near to a small, good quality, in-demand Church of England village school, which his kids can walk to (potentially saving him hundreds of hours of school-runs over the next decade). The school has multiple criteria by which they select attendees, one of which is being a member of the local church. Because it's 2024, almost no-one under the age of 70 is actually a committed Church of England Christian, but it's a very good trade-off to pretend to be for a couple of years before your first child enters school. Somewhat ironically, my friend who I would actually consider a type #3/#4 cultural Christian, didn't do this, because he thought it was dishonest, and almost failed to get his daughter into the school.
The ills identified are so miniscule, and the modern world has delivered so many riches and freedoms to so many people, this is a bizarre "through the looking glass" analysis. What fall, what decadence? Or am I going crazy? "wokeness" and corporate dei is a threat to civilization?? Have you lost all sense of proportion??
"US scores in both math and reading have been trending up for decades"
Having lived in a Late Stage Communist country, impressive statistics mean nothing. On paper, we were a major industrial power, producing shittons of steel etc. In practice, people would queue for coveted goods such as washing machines, if they had a chance to get them.
"yet we do far more innovation than any other OECD country"
This is a stronger argument, but how much of that innovation is done by the adult immigrants whom you mention, and who weren't exposed to the farce of the US public school system in their youth?
I expect that Nintendo had more to do with illiteracy than wokeness did.
This is more than countered by the increased total number of games. Take something like Minecraft for example, I've seen it played with little difficulty by someone who barely knows how to read. He just comes up with his own names for the items instead of reading what they are called.
Yeah. You don't have to play the game the way it was intended, you just have to find a way to play the game so that it's addictive to you. :-(
+1
Most court reporters in the US don't even understand African American English, which, given that they're arrested far out of proportion to the rest of the population, is an insane notion to me. They literally have one job. But no, *wokeness* is the thing we should focus on right now.
Set aside wokeness, the most obvious way modern culture is maladaptive is fertility falling below replacement levels. Robin Hanson made a series of posts on the issue (though it's really a sub-issue of maladaptive cultural drift) relatively recently and you can find many of them collected here https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-fertility-posts
The demographic transition began centuries ago in France. The term "woke" is relatively recent.
Not everything is about the US. Fertility has gone down in places like Tehran, Belgrade and Jakarta, all fairly distant from the US culture wars and having very different culture wars on their own.
In fact, the strongest correlation between total fertility and something social that you can get, is whether girls get education until the age of 15 or so. Once they do, regardless of the country, their total TFR drops to less than a half of their illiterate peers. All the other steps (with regard to total education achieved) are much less steep.
+10000
I agree! And also, the idea that our time has fallen from an imagined better past is as old as it gets. Every age feels that way. It's only an illusion that life in 1890 had anything over on us today (asthetics included). In fact, it's patently ridiculous, the world is SO much better now than then. Whatever the merits of Christianity, cultural or otherwise, it has nothing to do with our feeling of loss. Thus it's ever been.
I’d agree with most of that except the aesthetics, which is clearly rubbish. Medieval peasants could build better architecture, abs the renaissance produced greater art. TV is better now though.
Most old art sucks, and the rest is just selection bias and special pleading. Same with architecture and everything else.
Yes.
Do you imagine that advocating for Cultural Christianity means that we must also advocate for the elimination of indoor plumbing? Are you assigning the development of every helpful technology to the rejection of Christianity?
Don't worry: in a restored Christian monarchy you'll still be able to take antibiotics.
Please advocate for whatever religion or cultural norms you like. Characterizing today's world as fallen or decadent is specious. I would take 2024 over 1890 in absolutely every way.
Here you demonstrate that your above comment was a giant motte-and-bailey, where the motte is that technology (which nobody's proposing to reverse) and basic democracy (that predated the decline of Christianity) are better now than in the past...and the bailey is that now is better "in absolutely every way" than the past.
The former is obviously true but irrelevant, as nobody's arguing against it. The latter is a pure assertion that you've provided no argument for at all (and no engagement with the long list of bad things about the present that have been listed in many of the comments).
I'd submit that both motte and bailey are "everything is indeed better" and I hope you allow a little rhetorical flourish when I say "everything". Nearly, overwhelmingly, everything.
Not just technology and basic democracy.
The thrust of the article was anti-modernity and how we have descended into wokeness and decadence. Having reread it I'm yet more struck by how weak the rationale for overturning or returning to some earlier order is.
It's like saying I hate paper and printing and books because of an occasional paper cut.
There's been a lot of obvious problems with modernity mentioned, including crime rates, family breakdowns, children never born to committed families to begin with, below-replacement fertility, level of social trust, state of modern art and architecture, state of mental health and happiness in the population, and so on. Plus more debatable things like declining education level (it seems to me more people are going through school, but school is doing a far worse job on average for them, but I could be wrong). Could you list the counterveiling objective benefits of the present not related to technology or the existence of a liberal democracy?
(By objective I mean things like I tried to list above that near-everyone agrees are bad or good. So not things like maximal sexual freedom or too much guilt over slavery which they obviously don't.)
And then we might make some progress on this debate.
Crime: https://www.vrc.crim.cam.ac.uk/system/files/documents/manuel-eisner-historical-trends-in-violence.pdf [PDF]
Crime records in England going back to 1200. They are meticulous with record keeping. And also a broader analysis across other European countries. Look at chart after chart and trend after trend. Never in that recorded time have we had it as good as now. Unless you are referring to high crime in Sudan in the present time. In which case they are already neck deep in orthodoxy and tradition so you need some other solution for the civil war.
Out of wedlock births:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/an-analysis-of-out-of-wedlock-births-in-the-united-states/
They are way up, so is single parent-hood. Lower stigma attached to this plus fall in "shotgun" marriages. You may think access to contraception and abortion is a net negative. I think it's a net positive, which does mean there are real costs but we are still better off because we can provide public support to poor children, EITC, etc. with greater freedoms. And personally, I would much prefer this world for my daughter than one of shame, ostracism, and abandonment.
May I suggest that the author and many commenters may be experiencing "declinism" -- viewing the past more favorably than the present due to cognitive biases. We all mistakenly think our childhood was a time of "simplicity" and "order" and "care freeness". Or that there was a golden age in some past time, and if only we could return to those norms, glory will be ours.
Yeah. The world has never been better, and that's held true for the longest time (it annoyed me that Covid put a brief dent in it and for a couple of years you could reasonably reply "well, 2019", to the question "when has the world ever been better?")
Thank you!!!
I fell way from the cultural Christianity argument when one of the new atheists pointed out all the northern European countries are decades ahead of the US in terms of secularization and they seem to be holding it together pretty well. If there's a cultural decline that follows from the decline of Christianity, it seems like it will be decades away relative to the US.
That's cute, but as it applies in this context, unfalsifiable.
Native-born Danish population hasn't grown for decades.
hmm, fair comment.
Europe is busily abolishing itself. Not that America isn't, but I don't see America even having an interstitial period of sitting around and enjoying life. When you are steering the ship, it is a bigger philosophical crisis to be going nowhere. America will be hurtling toward something for a while yet.
Western Europe has a serious problem integrating its Muslim immigrants, some of which seem to be more on a path of conquest than co-existence.
That said, this is random fluke of geography, because the Muslim world is close to Europe and far from the US. If the entities were switched, I doubt that the US would fare any better. Too much Islam will destabilize any secular society, and "too much" probably begins at 5 per cent of really religious mainstream Sunni Muslims.
If only. I did see a few Muslims protesting here outside a school teaching gender woo woo to primary school children but that’s been the extent of Muslim interference in local affairs, and sadly it didn’t work.
I think it's also a matter of culture. The US has an identity as "a nation of immigrants", which thus makes it much easier to assimilate people. European countries have ethnicity based identities, and that makes it a lot hard for immigrants to assimilate.
While true, second- and third generation Greeks or Italians are usually completely assimilated in, say, Germany.
Turkish people much less so, even though from the outside, they are the same Mediterranean type of person.
Same in the UK with Indians vs. Pakistanis. There is a huge dollop or religious apartheid in Islam, and it shows.
I too dislike the "Cultural Christianity" argument as you outline it, due to your first reason: you should not believe false things are true just because it results in a better outcome. I am a Christian first and foremost because I believe it is true: there is a God, he did incarnate and die for our sins, we can be saved, it is actually better to love your enemy than to hate him, etc. If it's not true, don't believe it. Veracity is one of the chief Christian values! How can you expect to act like a Christian if you are lying?
I disagree strongly with your second reason though, because it is simply not true. Yes, the sects of Christianity that accepted "modernism" have succumbed to modernism. But this is not the model Christian. Evangelicals, fundamentalists, Methodists and Catholics anywhere outside the West, Pentecostals, these traditions have not succumbed to modernism and are alive, well, and thriving. Those Christians who modernize stop being Christians, and become moderns. Those Christians who do not remain Christian. It is a tragedy that so many Christian sects and societies went down the modernizing route, but it wasn't inevitable. It was just a bad choice.
Of course, those sects that chose to modernize were also the most likely to espouse cultural Christianity: that it isn't true, but we should believe it anyway. No wonder they mostly abandoned Christianity with that kind of foundation. If you want a Christian culture, then you need a culture of Christians who actually believe the creeds. Cosplay Christianity cannot stand against modernization; your examples prove that.
Precisely! The parable of the sower comes to mind…
Basically all Christians except the Amish aren't insulated enough from modern culture and are just following it with a lag, as evidenced by their dropping fertilities.
Fertility for Americans who attend church weekly has remained consistently above replacement for the last 40 years, with no decline. There has been significant declines for Americans who are religious but don't attend church weekly: in other words, the Christians most likely to have "modernized" or be solely "cultural" Christians.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2022/08/birth-rates-church-attendance-decline-fertility-crisis/
If you graphed by denomination, they would all show a decline.
Do you have any data to back up that assertion?
We don't have great fertility data broken down by denomination. The best I can find is from Pew, from 2015. They have Evangelicals at 2.3, Mainline at 1.9.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/chapter-3-demographic-profiles-of-religious-groups/pr_15-05-12_rls_chapter3-07-png/
Did you look at the data in the link? Among Christians attending church weekly fertility is the same as it was in 1982. How can that happen if all Christian denominations were declining in fertility over the same time period?
A single snapshot can't say anything about a decline. But I assume you know that fertility used to be significantly above replacement.
If you’re talking about a decline from 1900 then yes, everybody’s declined. In 1982 the national fertility rate was 1.83, today its 1.78, and between that same time the “weekly church” crowd fertility has remained constant.
That 2.4 replacement number covers people dying. Does it also cover people leaving to become moderns?
For Evangelicals in America at least the answer is yes. In 1973 20% of Americans were part of Evangelical churches, in 2021 22% of Americans were.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2021/07/mainline-protestant-evangelical-decline-survey-us-nones/
For the world as a whole, the Christian fertility rate just makes up for the loss of people from "leaving to become moderns". According to Pew based on conversion and fertility trends, they expect that by 2050 Christians will be 31.4% of the global population: the exact same share they had in 2010. Over the same period they expect Christianity to lose about 66 million people to "deconversion", with almost all of them becoming religiously "unaffiliated" which basically means your average secular modern type.
Notably, because of the lack of fertility among the "unaffiliated" despite an expected gain of over 61 million "converts" from other religions Pew expects the percentage of unaffiliated to drop from 16.4% of global population in 2010 to 13.2% in 2050.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/
That's interesting. Thank you.
Here’s another interesting fact, London is the most religious part of the U.K., rural Scotland the least.
The Amish are pretty isolated but they are still impacted by trends in fertility
https://x.com/lymanstoneky/status/961697119353569281?t=BDMPs_D7oQt57XDeTTENIA&s=19
Mormons?
Not insulated enough.
I came here to write something very similar to your first point - thank you for doing it so eloquently. I'm reminded of a section from the Screwtape Letters here:
"On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that “only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilisations”. You see the little rift? “Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.” That’s the game,
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape"
The reason that many people change is because the world around them has changed. The ideals and frameworks of religious practice and philosophy were created by a powerful elite during times of cruelty and overbearing control of the masses.
We have evolved to the point where we can see through the wishes of the elite - to maintain control over their 'subjects' through fear of punishment at the end of their lives - and we are no longer naive enough to believe in the myths that they created or the wealth and power they amassed in their humble service...
If people have moved away from the 'core' of Christisn belief, it's because it no longer has social, political or economic relevance and seems to want to remain anchored in a past where ignorance was the principle means of control.
This is known as entropy. Things tend toward chaos and separation from their original state. It's not possible to go back to a previous time or state.
To you, different movements are 'false', to them you are in denial of the reality of living in a modern world where power is fundamentally an archaic and. corrupt artefact and the wish to wield power is not a characteristic of enlightened thinking.
Surely you must know the response to this right? Just like the model Christian hasn’t succumbed to modernism, the model liberal atheist hasn’t either! Lots of groups we can point to who have embraced liberal norms and not fallen for wokeness or brutalism. You’re still missing the analogy!
Among other things, such arguments are ultimately insulting than ordinary atheism - that don't say that Christianity's truth claims are wrong, they say that the truth claims don't matter.
Atheists aren't all alike, and while an atheist might believe that always telling the truth is good, many do not--- marxism, for example. A hard question for anyone, atheist or not, is why we shouldn't all pretend to believe X, and even deliberately induce ourselves to believe X, if believing X will make us healthier, safer, and happier. Mormons seem to live good lives; why not encourage Mormonism, even if it is false?
Having known some ex-Mormons, I'd say the coercion is a problem. Nowhere near as bad as the Scientologists, but pretty intense.
As a practicing Mormon, I take stories about "intense coercion" with a grain of salt. My family traces its roots in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints clear back to it's founding, yet when my sister stopped going to church, and married a non-Mormon, my parents didn't disown her or raise the roof. Instead they had the wedding at our house. When I was at my parents' for Thanksgiving one year, they also had over a same-sex couple that lived down the road. And they aren't outliers either. All my life I was taught at church that it was important to be good to everyone, whether they eventually got baptized or not, whether they stay active or not. While I can understand others having different experiences (bad apples in every barrel), the concept of the crazy fundamentalist family that beats their kids, disowns them when they go their own way, and never associates with anyone or anything outside their tiny bubble is as foreign to me as the hippie lifestyle.
As another practicing Mormon who grew up in the "bubble" (ok, bubble-adjacent) of the heavily Mormon areas of the West, I fully agree.
Not only that, my older 2 brothers left the church a long time ago. And my parents have gone through hell trying (in the bad years) to maintain contact. It wasn't us who rejected them--rather the reverse. Things are better now, but they weren't then. And my parents were not exactly highly restrictive.
>Mormons seem to live good lives; why not encourage Mormonism, even if it is false?
"We're going to take away everything you know and love if you don't listen. So smile for the camera!"
My dad grew up Mormon. He spent day after day in church learning things he knew could not be right and that were at odds with common sense and modern science. He and his brothers were miserable. They reached adulthood, left home, attended Cal, and promptly became far happier than they’d ever been. They never looked back.
Mormonism doesn’t create happy people. Some are happy. But there are tons of unhappy Mormons. Many either leave or are booted from the faith or lie about how they feel because they fear being ostracized.
If you build your methodologies on falsehoods, you can’t troubleshoot them. If you believe a sun god powers your car and it eventually breaks down, you’ll never even consider popping the hood.
My experience has been largely the opposite. The vast majority of Mormons I know are happy, not because they pretend everything's perfect; many are quite open about their struggles, but they view the Gospel as their lifeline. I've known those who've left the church that pretended to be happy but it was quite evident they weren't. (Also see my comment above).
As for science and "common sense", I get that not everything can be explained through religion...yet. But not knowing everything doesn't take away from the knowledge I do have, and the experiences I've had within the church that brought me peace I haven't found anywhere else.
When you say the LDS church brought you peace you haven't found anywhere else, I’m genuinely glad to hear it, just as I’m sure you’re glad to hear of my dad’s peace outside of it. From what you said about not being able to find peace anywhere else, I take it you’re a convert, or that you’ve been both inside and outside the church, like my dad and uncles. If you don’t mind my asking, what was it about the LDS church’s specific scripture that most convinced you it was the truth?
I was born and raised in the Church, (again, see my reply to The Digital Entomologist further up the thread), but I'm a "convert" in the sense that I have a testimony of Christ and the restored gospel, as opposed to just going through the motions. As the kind of geek who would find his way to a blog like Astral Codex and stick around, I'm plenty familiar with alternate creeds and philosophies. I've seen all the arguments against religion, Christianity, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints specifically, and ultimately I found them all wanting. It's not just any specific scripture or grand spiritual experience that has kept me in the Church, it's a broad combination of things.
First, I was fortunate to be raised by loving parents who've lived a Christ-like lifestyle, without fanaticism or hypocrisy.
Second, living the church lifestyle has kept me out of the gutter; no drugs or alcohol, no STDs or unplanned pregnancies, no jail time...
Third, the inspiration of my ancestors. One of them, Cyril Call, at one point had a mob come to his home and say, "Neighbor, we like you, just sign this document renouncing Joseph Smith and we won't have to burn your house down." His response: "You may as well apply the torch." That's not a belief you adopt out of mere convenience.
Fourth, and most important, the feelings I've gotten serving in the church, reading the scriptures, attending the temple, and serving a mission, are unlike any other good feelings I've experienced. The peace, the purpose, the "rightness", I can't deny. I realize this is completely personal and subjective, but it's my own lived experience.
Thanks for answering. I am convinced the correctness of the church is clear and unmistakable to you, or else you wouldn’t have persuaded others through your mission to stake everything on its validity.
Certainty like yours is foreign to me. I’m chronically uncertain. I find I’m always holding mistaken beliefs, and the only way I can identify and correct them is to doubt them all and accept any reasonable evidence that contradicts them. For instance, I don’t know if god exists. I can’t prove it either way. I’m even less certain Jesus was his son. Or that Jesus traveled to North America after his death. Or that Joseph Smith wasn’t mistaken in his recollection of translating golden plates for an angel with the help of stones and his hat between 1827 and 1829. This is all possible, I guess, as far as anything is possible, but it’s difficult for me to understand why it’s obvious that this is a) true and b) the most vital thing anyone can learn.
My family is much like yours. They were among the first Mormons to arrive in Utah. But some of them eventually found the stories behind the church’s claim to divine authority at odds with testable knowledge about the world. Despite this, we don’t have STDs and have managed to stay out of the gutter and jail much like you.
To me, if you put aside the scripture, what you have in the Mormon people is an admirable community of close-knit, prosperous folks who try very hard to do the right thing. But they are not perfect and it’s worth considering they may be mistaken about some matters. As I said, I’m glad you found the truth. I’m not sure how you did it, or how you know you did it, but I’m also not sure about most things.
Hey Freddie, congratulations on your big news! Best wishes to you and Ami!
Thanks!
I suspect that someone is going to successfully come up with a Totally Not A Religion based on the simulation argument. It already has a plausible argument(for the rationalist) for God, you just need some kind of rule set. I could also see someone tying Christianity and the simulation argument together.
Hopefully someone figured it out because our society’s nihilism is going to lead people to argue that AI is better than us and we should let ourselves be supplanted by them.
>I could also see someone tying Christianity and the simulation argument together.
Maybe the explanation for the Incarnation of Christ could be the simulator briefly visiting inside the simulation.
Sure but then the question is why anyone should believe that.
Probably it's an ethical requirement from their IRB: don't do anything to sims that you wouldn't do to yourself.
> "Even the Middle East is gradually becoming less Muslim. "
Is it? Half a century ago Lebanon had non-muslim majority. Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan had secular governments. In most ME countries that are still ruled by officially secular governments wearing of burqas seems to have become significantly more common.
I think its mostly Christians who left and I imagine its mostly them who secularized.
Unfortunately that's my impression too
A lot of the backsliding has to do with pushback against the chronic American/ Western meddling in Muslim majority countries that allowed the worst elements of those countries to come to power.
I thought the backsliding was precisely due to American intervention.
I think a fair bit of that is aggressive proselytization by the Wahhabi sect, a strict version of Sunni Islam which has pushed out many other varieties. It's sponsored by the government of Saudi Arabia, and thus gets a pass from the US government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism
I'd guess that's a result of the new leader disliking independent domestic power bases, rather than a commitment to any position I'd endorse. And I'm highly dubious that it will have any immediate effect on the continuing spread of Wahhabist teaching outside Saudi Arabia.
People are becoming more secularized.
Governments aren't.
https://x.com/MaxCRoser/status/1185895820555640832
Everything decayed after WW1. So if you reset everything and then successfully avoided a world war, you might be able to avoid the 20th century loss of faith problems.
I think WW1 made the biggest dent in Christianity. Much bigger than technology or democracy or modernisation.
I think WW1 is the worst that ever happened. It killed the spirit of optimism in Europe, who then infected America with their malaise and also led to Stalin, Hitler and all kinds of bad things.
Agree with this. Scott’s “1880-1930” here is a weird era. EVERYTHING changed after the charnel house of Europe in WW1.
For a great read on this: the first several chapters of “Into The Silence” by Wade Davis which is mostly about the British Everest expeditions of 1921-1924 but the first third of the book is about how WW1 reshaped society. Even the devout didn’t come out of that Hell on earth with the same view of a loving God that they had before.
Did you intentionally avoid mentioning Christmas, Halloween etc.? They are clearly cultural imports from Christianity, but they are also wholesome family fun for a lot of the members of our shared society and I think we would all be worse off if they didn't exist.
I would much rather dwell on the fringes of it than have it abolished outright. From the title I was expecting this to be taking the side of "Christmas in America is bad from a saecular perspective" in the "Is Christmas in America bad from a saecular perspective?" debate, this seems to be rebutting an argument I have never encountered.
>Did you intentionally avoid mentioning Christmas, Halloween etc.? They are clearly cultural imports from Christianity, but they are also wholesome family fun for a lot of the members of our shared society and I think we would all be worse off if they didn't exist.
There's nothing special about Christmas and Halloween. Those could easily be replaced with Lunar New Year and the Ghost Festival.
Absolutely, but in our culture they haven't been, and if we got rid of them I expect we'd have nothing as opposed to immediately picking up their Asian analogues.
I think Europe has done a better job of keeping the fringes of Christianity than America has. The line between Christianity and atheism is much brighter in America. Atheists can still say the Lord’s Prayer here and attend Holy Communion and go to church at Easter. Once you become an atheist in America, you are out.
I was talking about protestants, not Catholics. But I wasn't referring to the behaviour that the church allows or disallows. I meant how the culture and how other non-Christians react. Atheists rarely go to Holy Communion or midnight mass in America. They definitely wouldn't say The Lord’s Prayer.
Right. I agree with all of that. Plus…
When I came back to England after 24 years in the States, I (atheist) went to Evensong based on a recommendation from Richard Dawkins. I ended up going 3 or 4 times a week and often took (atheist) friends with me. I went to church occasionally in California but never with other atheists.
I think the biggest difference is that people my age (approaching 60) sang hymns and said prayers in school every day (it was the law) in England. We all have fond, cultural memories of it even if we didn't literally believe it. We were and are cultural Christians.
>I'd say American atheist is more a outward militant rejection of religion whereas in Europe it's more of religious apathy bordering agnosticism in my experience from living on both continents. I found my atheist German friends never even really thought about religion whereas my Americans ones were consumed with it.
This is a very defined subset, but not every American atheist is so stunted and trapped in 2013 that they resort to performative antisocial behavior like that. However, a normal person wouldn't label themself an "Atheist"
Hi, I'm an atheist in America who still goes to church on Easter if I'm in the area.
Edit: But on further reflection, mine does seem to be an uncommon situation.
I think the steelmanned argument SA should tackle is not that Christianity is the predecessor of “what SA likes” (WSAL), but an essential ingredient of WSAL. Sure, it’s not an ingredient that ensures that WSAL will last forever, but there will be no WSAL without this ingredient. Maybe we need Christianity plus another ingredient or just a more resilient version of Christianity that doesn’t give way to too much atheism. This version of the argument requires an empirical refutation not merely a logical one like the one proposed here.
You always have to remember that the Abrahammaic cults all derive from marginal arid-land herder culture which values cattle over human life and is full of morally repugnant concepts like scapegoating which is Christianity’s foundation. The fact that half the New Testament was lifted word for word from Epictetus is no saving grace either. Nietzsche was right about a couple of things. And we see the whole middle east consumed by absolute bullshit that us Northern Europeans should never have allowed ourselves to be drawn into. Let them destroy themselves.
"The fact that half the New Testament was lifted word for word from Epictetus is no saving grace either."
I do not think this is true, either in literal sense, or as hyperbole. It seems wild that someone would say this.
Aside from anything else, a good portion of the New Testament was written before Epictetus began teaching philosophy.
A quick google tells me that he was born in AD 50 and died around 135AD. After Jesus, after St Paul’s epistles and after most of the New Testament. This kind of rhetoric is why I stopped calling myself an atheist a while back. Though I still don’t believe.
Where are you getting your dates from?
https://books.google.com/books/about/Epictetus_and_the_New_Testament.html?id=7J_4wwEACAAJ
The only way out of modernity is through, eh?
We had to pass it to find out what was in it.
I must be missing the point of this. There have been prior Christian cultures which had worse aesthetics, and some which had better, especially when you think about the distribution of aesthetics. The decline in esthetics (degeneration, if you wish), arguably has more to do with the death-grip rise of late-stage capitalism than with a decline in Christianity. And of course, this ignores aesthetics in non-Christian cultures, such as in India and China.
Also, factually, this is just factually wrong. Reform Judaism came before Conservative Judaism; Conservative Judaism was arguably a reaction to Reform Judaism.
As far as the quality of art goes, people have been wondering forever why it tanked after the Roman Empire Christianized. There's no obvious reason that would happen.
But, it does tend to undermine the idea that quality artwork requires a background of Christianity. The power of Christianity seems to have a pretty strong negative correlation to the quality of artwork, with realistic Roman portraits giving way to vague blobby Christian ones as the Dark Ages begin and then coming back as the Renaissance arrives.
The simple explanation would appear to be that the quality of artwork is negatively related to poverty - it's expensive to develop the skills - and the power of organized religion is positively related to poverty. But this theory has trouble explaining why official imperial portraits deteriorated so badly. Poverty can't have been the problem there.
<i>As far as the quality of art goes, people have been wondering forever why it tanked after the Roman Empire Christianized. There's no obvious reason that would happen.</i>
It didn't -- it "tanked" (or rather, became less realistic -- it still looked nice, aesthetically speaking) during the Third-Century Crisis, when the Empire was not only still pagan, but engaged in periodic bouts of anti-Christian persecution.
If we are judging art by how realistic it is then this era is going to get a pretty bad reputation from future historians.
Christians never claimed that pagans couldn't make works of beauty. That's a symptom of atheist culture (one that does not believe in metaphysics), not pagan (one with mistaken metaphysics).
Edgy atheists are wrong when they claim that atheism is to monotheism as monotheism is to polytheism. Christians can see a lot of truth in e.g. Neoplatonism; Christian missionaries often work by claiming - with full sincerity - that Christianity is the full revelation of truths discovered in part by other religious traditions. Atheism isn't just rejecting one more god, it's rejecting a way of seeing the world common, at its most fundamental level, to almost every human culture throughout history.
But, yes, artistic quality is often a function of money and stability. Artists need money to pursue their vocation full time, and engage in costly projects, and entire communities of linked professions are required to build things like the Hagia Sophia. (Eastern) Rome was capable of great art again by the 500s, not just grand buildings, but excellent portraiture and mosaic work. Then it degraded due to the devastation of the Islamic conquests, and eventually Western Europe surpassed it - but Italy was churning out artistic masterpieces centuries before the Renaissance, when the greatest painters were still working on icons.
IMO, high art dies when it becomes about expressing the ego rather than pursuing beauty. The art world fully embraced egoistic expression over service to a higher ideal in the wake of WW1; that's why everything looks like crap nowadays. If you're disillusioned with higher ideals, and think there's nothing but the world and will, how could it be otherwise? There are far more ways to be original and ugly than original and beautiful.
The other interesting factor is pigments. Pigments require both chemistry / alchemy / scientific-ish knowledge, AND robust trade networks, because both pigments and raw source materials come from various far flung and outlandish places.
Creating esthetically appealing representational art is fundamentally a "tacit knowledge" sort of domain too. If you have one civilizational upset that kills off most of the masters and apprentices, you're kind of boned from there on, because people will have to relearn and reinvent techniques from scratch - see the Renaissance.
The shift from the Roman / Greek wax-encaustic style to paint-on-canvas / other surfaces likely also played a role.
Philip Balls book "Bright Earth" talks about much of these things - I wrote a review here where people can see if they'd be interested in reading the book itself:
https://substack.com/@performativebafflement/p-148905508
Seems like the rebuttal to the ultimate failure of restoring either 1890s norms or 1700s Christianity is that if most everyone were convinced it was a good idea they would have the lesson of 1960-2020 to remind them that what they have is fragile. But we’re a long, *long* way from convincing most everyone that it’s at all desirable to do one or the other. So it’s kind of moot.
Has anyone got a link for context on where Ayaan Hirsi Ali is coming from more specifically?
Her wikipedia bio says "She is a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women" so I wouldn't have guessed that she was arguing in favor of a return to Christianity.
I don't know very much of the context but she recently converted to Christianity after being atheist, and had a coming out article that went somewhat viral in which she outlined her reasoning: https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/
> The Muslims in the US seem pretty liberal. On abortion, they are more liberal than Catholics and black Protestants:
Which is why the US conservatives fear of Islam is such nonsense. But then 80% see Iran as a threat, which is the same number who can’t find it on a map.
So the west can integrate Muslims in the one country where there is more hysteria about the Islamic threat, than anywhere, and the result of the anti Islamic rhetoric generally ends up with some destruction of a secular country and the rise of militant Islam
Not unique. Conservatives worldwide tend to distrustful of each other because by definition they strongly believe in their own culture/religion etc. Liberalism is universalist ideology, an Arab liberal, American liberal, and an Indian liberal probably believe similar things, just a matter of degree. Conservatism is localist ideology. American conservative love of guns doesn't translate to a Japanese conservatives love of the Emperor.
You assume the liberals have been in power for a long time, when most of the Middle East is still a warzone.
Liberals have been in power in the west for a long time, and attempts to integrate Muslim immigrants have been a dismal failure.
In the same way that integrating Christians have been a dismal failure: You don't hear about the successes.
Thanks!
The mention of "civilizational war" suggests to me that she's not quite making the same argument that Scott is.
I find this cultural Christianity argument especially silly because my strong perception is these people don't at all mean the 1890s when they say Retvrn. The imagery is Crusades, Benedictine robes, idyllic mediaeval villages. Oddly I find it has something in common with regrowth environmentalism.
The pretension that anyone who has accepted modernity ought to help them is strange. I personally get the appeal they're going for, it ends up on my feed and friends send me reels in this style, but it's so obviously a hollow larp. If they were serious they'd be getting out there and living it.
Maybe they are, mind you, maybe that sort of thing is kept off the internet. I don't think a mediaeval village (with near exclusively white people, odds on) would last under the ire of the modern state. One glance from a middle aged bureaucrat and it gets messy. All that to say we might be a little harsh on this viewpoint since anyone who follows the ethos to it's conclusion doesn't stick around to make their case.
Then again sans ladies it won't happen, so I doubt it.
My image of a medieval village is anything but idyllic in the first place.
Matter of what you value I guess.
What you and they think of as medieval is actually a vision of "medieval" mediated by the 19th century imagination.
Of the folks I'm talking about, I think you're right, but I personally think I've got a nuanced point of view. We've lost a great deal in the march into modernity. Maybe it's worth it, but some of us look back with sadness.
Thanks. What I was trying to say was the RETVRN those people are looking for might have more in common with 1890 than you or they realise. E.g I'm Catholic and go to the traditional latin Mass. Whilst I strongly believe what I'm doing is in continuity with medieval culture, the liturgical culture I support is that of c.1850 - 1960. E.g frequent communion does have some pedigree but it did fall out of use in places and was vigorously promoted by Pius X at the turn of 19th/20th century.
Interesting point. Reminds me of how most Viking revival aesthetics have no roots past Wagnerian romanticism.
I don't feel vulnerable to this criticism myself though. I've gotten my ill feelings about modernity and admittedly romantic feelings about mediaeval times from reading of a time before industrialisation, the times when commons still existed, and man lived closer to a state of nature. Nature in the sense of an emergent pattern, infinitely complex like the unfolding of a living creature, and undisturbed by the Cartesian cult of measurement and rationality that would break the world against our whims. Now our reality is an invention of our hubris, our abstracted and rootless fancy. I envy you that you have religion in these times, I've never been to a church service myself.
Of course I would choose today on the balance. High child mortality, dogmatic religion, pervasive and hard poverty, I wouldn't want them back and they come in that package. But I won't then ignore what we have lost, and I sincerely wonder if all this can last if we remain estranged from nature.
Yes, Christianity descended into wokeism, but the people pushing it in this direction in the beginning didn't know that's where things were headed. Are we not allowed to learn from our mistakes? To try cultural Christianity again recognizing where it's weak points were, and patching them?
Sure, but that argument applies to anything. Try the New Deal again while patching the weak points. Try Golden Age Islam again. Heck, try Communism again! What you need is an argument that Christianity has a unique benefit beyond other ideologies or belief systems.
A mathematical translation of the sermon on the mount is: “You can use a greedy algorithm to obtain a future outcome far better than your ability to plan for. Instead of trying to control the branching space of future possibilities, All you have to do is, aim at the highest good you can think of each morning, and then focus on the problems of the day. The ROI of doing good things goes up much more if you’re voluntarily suffering to do those good things.”
This is predictive theory and can easily be tested by anyone who is interested. I think this core is what made Christianity produce such powerful cultures, and it’s accessible to anyone of a scientific bent, even an atheist. All you have to do is try it and see how it works for you. It does require pretending that “good” means something real, but the only real barrier there is willingness to try the experiment.
This might be good advice, but where are you finding it in the Sermon on the Mount? Maybe 6:25-34, where Jesus says to focus on doing the will of God and not worry about where your next meal and clothing will come from? I don’t see how to read it in your way without some extremely aggressive heresy, especially not when it comes to being testable. The Kingdom of God is not of this earth; almost the entire point of the religion, not to mention other parts of this is very sermon, is not to look for your reward in the kingdom of man.
Humans gonna human. There are still some kinks to work out, but we'll get them worked out at some point. Ultimately, the organized are more powerful than the violent even if there are regressions, and we might be heading into one of those regressions as we speak. But seeing the world clearly is important; and shedding superstition, while it may not happen in our lifetime, will be an important part of advancing civilization.
We won't get them worked out if we go extinct (which will eventually happen on a long enough timescale).
I think we’ll eventually get this worked out too. We have a couple of hundred years before it gets existence-threatening and culture and/or technology will have figured something out by then.
My current expectation isn't actually that we go extinct, but we can decline for a long time before bouncing back. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how-long-will-population-fall
The idea of selection effects causing the growth of families with high fertility is interesting.
It seems this argument only holds if we believe that the progress of a religion is inevitable from any given starting point. If we think that the progression to modernity was contingent on something else, then you might argue that you could retvrn to Christianity and stay there.
I'm much more interested in the argument about whether morality, meaning, purpose, etc. can be established on a secular foundation. I think they can and should be, but this seems to be a minority view.
I also think we shouldn't give up on the “but it's not actually practical to believe false things” argument, that seems important.
I doubt atheism itself is the reason for less crime, much more likely that atheists are generally more intelligent, and intelligent people are much less likely to commit crime or at least much less likely to be caught...
Can morality be established on a secular foundation? Sure. Jeremy Bentham already did that. It's just likely to be some form of utilitarianism because deontological ethics is harder to establish without some form of religion. And it is unlikely that whatever the society comes up with will stay secular.
Human beings need something to believe in and they have a tendency to believe in the irrational. Ergo, quasi religious beliefs will pop up. I will venture and say no civilization can last a full century without some kind of religion stitching the populace together.
Individuals can be atheist and moral. Societies cannot be atheist. Societies are brought together by myths. Those myths become religious in character if not in substance. This is the distinction that the New Age atheists failed to consider. They had imagined a world of sober, moral atheists going about their business without recourse to christianity. They got instead new flavours of irrationality and hysteria, the emergence of Islam thanks to demographic change, the blossoming of cults, et cetera.
When it comes to religion, it's a strictly pick your poison game. And I've got to say of all the many out there, Christianity is far superior to most other alternatives. That much, I think, is obvious from all of the change currently going on
I think the model is something like increased wealth from industrialization -> secularism & modernity. (I think that Scott has made this argument more explicitly elsewhere.)
Actually looking at the history of secularization in the West in detail makes it seem much more contingent. France secularized in the mid 1700s, at least 100 years before the rest of Europe and well before France industrialized. Much of the rest of Europe secularized in the late 1800s or early 1900s. The US has had waves of secularization interspersed with Great Awakenings.
I’m perpetually baffled by complaints like the ones Scott is expressing on behalf of fin de siecle art/architecture/society. For one, just google “rococo molding” and you’ll find suppliers of the most ornate, opulent, maximalist millwork you can install in your very own home! You can also find both vintage and newly manufactured art nouveau fixtures to live in your own little Viennese retreat.
And if your complaint is more about the buildings you see on the streets, get together with some friends, buy some land, and build a lovely little 3-story with a decorative facade.
Markets—the great obsession of libertarianism—decreed the architecture we enjoy now, but as a consequence of rising living standards. Stone work is now highly skilled labor and is hideously expensive. This is a result of cheaper materials obsoletising many stone masons and labor being generally more expensive than it used to be.
Nothing old (with some very rare exceptions) is gone, it’s just gotten more expensive. You can still have that old world, it’s just likely not where you are.
I don't think I can ever buy the notion that aesthetics is anything but purely subjective taste. That may be the YIMBY in me when NIMBYs oppose perfectly fine buildings on aesthetic grounds which ultimately leads to homeless people 20 years down the road leaving litter all over the park, despite the fact that nobody has more time to put garbage into a trash can than a person with absolutely nothing else to do.
housing is very expensive and people do in fact get priced out of it
<i>I’m perpetually baffled by complaints like the ones Scott is expressing on behalf of fin de siecle art/architecture/society. For one, just google “rococo molding” and you’ll find suppliers of the most ornate, opulent, maximalist millwork you can install in your very own home! You can also find both vintage and newly manufactured art nouveau fixtures to live in your own little Viennese retreat.</i>
That's a bit like saying "I'm perpetually baffled by people complaining about living in a society of drug addicts when they can easily just not do drugs." Yes, personal choice is a thing, but having to endure the stench of weed every time I leave my house is still going to impact my quality of life, even if I myself never touch the stuff.
<i>Markets—the great obsession of libertarianism—decreed the architecture we enjoy now, but as a consequence of rising living standards. Stone work is now highly skilled labor and is hideously expensive. This is a result of cheaper materials obsoletising many stone masons and labor being generally more expensive than it used to be.</i>
(1) It's possible to mass produce architectural decorations. Indeed, people did mass produce them back in the Victorian era, using ceramics or concrete.
(2) Lots of the ugliest modern buildings are hideously expensive both to build and to maintain.
(3) Lots of pretty classical buildings don't actually have loads of fancy decoration.
"Stone work is now highly skilled labor and is hideously expensive. This is a result of cheaper materials obsoletising many stone masons and labor being generally more expensive than it used to be."
This is apparently only technically true. Scott once linked to an article about how you can now get concrete that looks exactly like traditional stonework, and is much cheaper.
There's also the intriguing possibility of AI+robots soon being able to automate stonecutting, doing away with the part that makes it prohibitively expensive.
I think the first 90% already can be.
"I do hope the worst is over"
Seems like a relatively naïve hope, but what do I know?
The then-ascendant Authoritarian/Identitarian strain of the progressive movement fundamentally overplayed its hand in the covid-fueled madness of 2020, and while it momentarily achieved an impressive degree of success in getting mainstream institutions to signal support for its values, that very success has been their undoing as it was enough of a shock for a lot of moderates (who the radicals still rely on to form any kind of effective coalition) to realise, after the dust settled, how crazy things were getting and quietly return to a footing where they're at least capable of being sceptical of the dominant progressive argument (which they mostly seemed to stop being after the 'opposite' shock of Trump's election in 2016).
Identitarian progressives have gained a lot of ground in the past decade, but their offensive has culminated - very few major new institutions have changed course in a direction that favours them in the last 2-3 years, and some (like the elite US universities, which are a bellwether for this kind of thing) have even begun to swing gently back away from it. I do fear that if Trump is re-elected in november that the same panic as before will re-empower the worst elements of the movement.
Doesn't the argument given in your preface already incorporate the substance of your second objection?
The argument 'if you want the cultural values of the 1890s, you should try to build the truly robust Christian culture from which that culture arose' assumes the degeneration you're pointing to- otherwise how will rebuilding a truly robust (Medieval?) Christian culture produce your desired outcome of the 1890s?
Maybe it's not explicitly stated, and maybe Christianists who make the argument are just being shallow or dishonest, but the argument you open with is *only a persuasive argument* if it *assumes* that the process of degeneration will recur, no?
Might be easier to view cultural Christianity as being useful to flatten the curve, as we tried doing with COVID, so not to overwhelm and break the system, while we we're sitting at its table.
> The few sects that escaped decay - ultra-Orthodox Jews, Amish, the Taliban - seem neither clearly scaleable
Why don't they seem scaleable? Islamic caliphates that the Taliban harks back to once spread over relatively large scales.
> At the very least, they suggest one would need a very different kind of Christianity than the West had in 1700s - one as strict, isolationist, and inward-looking as the Amish - to have a fighting chance.
Roughly true, though there is the possibility of a cyclical process whereby you have something like Orthodox Judaism following the progression to Conservative, Reform, and nothing, at which point it gets replaced by a resurgence of Orthodox Judaism to begin the cycle again.
> If modern atheists want a society better than our current one (or rather, better than wherever modern culture is leading us) they'll have to invent some new cultural package that's never been seen before. I don't know what that is, but I prefer to maintain my intellectual integrity while I look for it
It's possible that modern atheists are just never going to find it, just as stable cultural packages of the past weren't invented by modern atheists.
I don't think there's enough land to scale Amish farming practices for 7 billion people. Of course, declining fertility rates may solve that problem.
Apparently the Amish have already shifted into other jobs. "The percentage of Amish families that depend on agriculture as their main source of income is only around 10–15% nationally" https://www.wisbank.com/serving-amish-and-mennonite-communities-in-rural-wisconsin/ Lancaster County PA is the largest Amish settlement in the world, and there only a third are farmers. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/17/755906226/as-amish-leave-farming-for-other-work-some-leave-their-homestead
I say no to the idea of Cultural Christianity, Cultural Judaism, or Cultural Islam. We don’t need to replace Wokeness with anything. Just get rid of it and move on. If something like Wokeness emerges, don’t let it become dominant. Are we not intelligent beings?
“Cultural Christianity” makes total sense… if you completely disregard the contributions to modern civilization made by the Greeks and preserved and refined by Muslims while “Christian Europe” decayed during the dark ages. It wasn’t until explorers went to the universities and libraries of Baghdad and bought the works of Plato and Aristotle back to Europe that significant cultural change occurred. St. Augustine was smart enough to understand the value of these ideas and crammed them in to the version of Christianity that people think of as the foundation of liberalism. It’s not - it’s just Greek philosophy filtered through Islamic scholars and fused with Christianity.
Ayan Hirsi Ali was scarred by effed up people who took the Quran seriously. Everyone who takes religion seriously is usually effed up - it doesn’t matter if those people are Muslim or Christian Evangelicals or Catholics or Orthodox Jews or Amish or Son of Sam or Trump Supporters. But Ali isn’t great at nuance and couldn’t acknowledge this fact.
To be fair, I’m sure it was difficult to do once she fell in with the Sam Harris/Douglas Murray/Bill Maher crowd who lauded her for her “brave anti-Islam stance” because it reinforced their own beliefs.
Christian scholars did not get Greek texts from Baghdad. They got them from Constantinople.
Well, Greek culture did disappear off the face of written history once, but it's probably not the one most people are taught.
If you're referring to the Greek Dark Age, that's not accurate - they had no presence in written history beforehand. (They do have tangential mentions in Egyptian and Anatolian records, but nothing at the level of, say, specifying where they live.)
The Greek Dark Ages were named that because they had writing prior (Linear B) and lost it before adapting the Phoenician alphabet.
I know that. Nobody claims that they had history, though. The typical Linear B text is supposed to be an inventory list.
I suspect because Constantinople was clearly Roman so the whole Islam preserved western ideas is can’t really be pushed there.
It really depends on the nature of the contributions to western civilization that you are concerned with. If you mean technological and scientific contributions, then Christianity had much less to do with that. In fact, it was often in the way( the most memorable example of this is of course Galileo's inquisition with the church even though the church was much less antagonistic than popularly taught). Were many of the scientists who led the scientific revolution such as Newton religious? Sure, but their religion was incidental to the science.
But if you mean sociopolitical, economic, and legal contributions, the history of the West would look very different and a lot worse without Christianity. It is Christianity which outlawed polygamy thereby preventing the kinds of family formation that obtain elsewhere which encourage nepotism and lower parental investment.
It is Christianity with its emphasis on the equality of all before God, an idea that survives most memorably in the American constitution. The greeks did not believe in the equality of all.
It is Christianity, protestantism in particular, which encouraged high literacy rates and extolled the virtues of hard work as a way to distinguish yourself as one of the chosen, an effect Max Weber famously noticed.
It is Christianity with its give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unti God that which is God's ideal that contributed to the separation of church and state, a distinction that did not exist elsewhere in the world at the time.
It is Christianity with its practice of extensive donations to the church and the poor that sowed the seeds for the modern welfare state. It's not a coincidence it happens first in extremely protestant Prussia.
And finally, it is Christianity with its new testament ideals and its linear narrative of history with the promise of an eternal paradise that has gone on to inspire countless works of western art, literature, philosophies, and ideologies.
The West has a lot to thank this uniquely strange religion for. It forgets that to its own peril.
This was quite amusing. Thanks!
Galileo's trial for heresy occured after the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving. Yet that's the only example than anyone ever gives of the Church's suppression of scientific inquiry.
Well, if you are looking for plenty of anti scientific things the church either did or was done in the name of Christianity, there are the recurring witch-hunts and the very last one was in the nineteenth century in Prussia, less than 200 years ago.
It is true that the church was much less antagonistic to scientific inquiry than commonly taught though and the pattern of interference seems to be strongest when it came to cosmology and astronomy( Giordano Bruno for instance was burned at the stake when he refused to recant and Galileo's strides in the discipline certainly didn't win him many friends). This makes strategic sense for the church because those ideas directly challenge biblical notions of God and Heaven. They were much less concerned with scientific work in biology or natural physics for instance until evolution of course.
It's also interesting that by the medieval era, Christianity had been fused with Aristotelianism and so it's difficult to say how much of the church's reaction was due to scientific contradictions of Aristotle rather than the bible strictly per se.
However, religious devotion and scientific inquiry generally do not mix well. Christianity is fully guilty of this and so interestingly enough is wokeness which has weaponized pseudo science to its own benefit. A religion will always make honest evidence based inquiry a secondary concern because it has to. Its edicts must always come first.
You're equating witch-hunts with restrictions on scientific inquiry? Is it your understanding that Prussian witches were lady scientists, with covens full of Marie Cuties doing important work to discover the properties of the atom? Do you think the Church was restricting anyone doing actual science 200 years ago? If the Church had been looking to restrict science 200 years ago, they should have focused on Michael Faraday, James Watt, and Joseph Henry, not on a bunch of lesbians chanting in the woods.
I don't think it's hard to comprehend how in an environment full of witch-hunts, honest scientific inquiry might be harder to come by. The opportunity cost of such a rigid hysteria is obvious after a few moments of consideration, unless you believe witches and covens actually exist, in which case the argument ceases to be logical.
Also, the church did obstruct scientific inquiry. They banned several books, they were and in many ways still are unfriendly to Darwin's theory of evolution, and they clearly were no friends of the Enlightenment, although by that time the power of the church as an ideological hegemony was mostly spent.
" If the church wanted to go after scientific inquiry, they should have gone after Faraday, ..." That was already the later half of the nineteenth century. That's like saying because Soviet Union did little to counter the spread of capitalism in the 1980s, they were aligned with it. They were already, by that time, well past their peak.
I'm not sure what you think the Enlightenment has to do with science. The Scientific Revolution of the late-Renaissance preceded the Enlightenment, and by some accounts concluded at the outset of the Enlightenment, which was a philosophical movement. Of course, the shared atheist and Protestant myth is that everyone was bumbling around in the dark, not doing any Science until along came the Enlightenment Proto-Dawkinses came in and showed everyone that God was fake and chemistry was real.
Most of Faraday's important work took place in the first half of the 19th century, right around the time of the witch hunts that you say demonstrate that that Christianity was anti-science.
Giordano Bruno was a mystic, not a scientist.
<i>It's also interesting that by the medieval era, Christianity had been fused with Aristotelianism</i>
No, the idea that medieval people were slavishly devoted to Aristotle is a myth spread by early modern polemicists. It's like the 17th-century equivalent of "I'm a bold truth-teller, people who disagree with me are normie sheeple who unthinkingly swallow the party line".
Saint Augustine was around long before Islam.
I think that kind of implies that Christianity and Islam developed in a vaccum and then later encountered Greek philosophy? Or at least they initially had no Greek influence and then later were influenced by it. But Christianity is a product of the Greco-Roman world. Greeks were likely amongst the very first Christians(Saints Luke and Timothy come to mind) and within a decade or two of its founding, I reckon most Christians were Greeks. Christianity is one of the heirs of the ancient Greek world(And Islam developed from some variations and mixtures of Christianity and Judaism(and thus so was also an heir of the Greeks from its birth). In my view, the West is the heir to Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome, all influenced by and influencing each other.
It depends on definitions. There’s a distinction between religion, philosophy, jurisprudence and culture though they’re all inter-related.
Among other errors: St.. Thomas Aquinas, not St. Augustine.
Thanks. My memory has been lousy since I got sick. What are the other errors?
I'd say the religion does matter quite a lot in *how* effed up one can be. Ayaan may focus on Islam for personal reasons, but it is a uniquely problematic set of religious beliefs in the modern age - there are no-to-minimal suicide bombings, for example, without a fervent belief in martyrdom, which is not present in all religions. There are other problematic differences, but Harris has done this topic to death, and you're aware of him, so I won't go on.
I think that’s an overly simplistic narrative.
Why do you think that Islam has especially “fervent beliefs about martyrdom” compared to other religions - including one that is *literally symbolized* by a device that was used to kill someone for their religious beliefs?
Is it because you subconsciously associate a Christian “martyr” as someone who is unjustly persecuted for practicing religion while associating a Muslim “martyr” as someone who is willing to die for their beliefs *by harming others*? Why the distinction? Especially since the Greek term *martyr* and the Arabic term *Shahid* both translate to something like “witness” or “testimony”?
Islam is close to 1,500 years old. Were suicide bombings (or the equivalent) a hallmark of Muslims throughout that time? Why not?
Japanese *Kamikaze* pilots notably used suicide attacks during World War II. Were they inspired by Islamic teachings? Does Shintoism also have “especially fervid beliefs about martyrdom” that explains why Japanese pilots preferred that mode of attack while American Christian pilots preferred killing their enemies with nuclear weapons?
Could it be possible that “Islam has fervent beliefs about martyrdom” is just a convenient retcon some dude named Altman came up with to explain why suicide bombing is more commonly used by aggrieved Muslims than other aggrieved populations? Could there be other non-religious based explanations to explain this correlation?
I also just reject that Christianity was anything other than incidental to classical liberalism. People tend to equate Christianity with the founding of america, even though the pilgrims were probably less important than the capitalists, and the actual philosophers/writers of the time were mostly skeptical of Christianity.
Excellent point!
I didn't mean capitalism as an economic (or certainly moral) theory, but sure. I meant people who crossed the sea for economic reasons.
Maybe go read The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism before proffering your rejection…
Personally, I think Weber has it exactly 180 degrees wrong there. People in charge will invent a religion that says they're good people if their old one doesn't.
You can proffer whatever opinion you like; in fact capitalism started only in Protestant states, then spread from there.
So it’s not a law of nature, obviously, and no one can prove all counterfactuals. But unlike you, he’s got facts on his side, where you have only speculation.
P.S. I happen to agree with your second sentence. But it’s an almost entirely different subject then your original assertion about Christianity being incidental to the rise of classical liberalism.
If it was incidental, then where was the classical liberalism of non-Christian cultures? I would go further and say that classical liberalism was also absent from, for example, Orthodox Christianity.
I'm not sure I agree - I think you and I might be using "classical liberalism" differently - but I would be very interested in reading more about this, if you'd care to expand on it?
It would be a better argument if we meant something a bit more specific here. There are and have been lots of Christian cultures (missionaries do that), but we typically only refer to one time period in a couple places as classically liberal. Why haven't any nascent Christian cultures developed on to classical liberalism in Africa or Asia?
Similar to how Orthodox Christianity didn't develop classical liberalism: Christianity by itself is not sufficient.
If "Christianity collapsed into wokeness and postmodernism", it's because wokeness and postmodernism are broken forms of Christian belief in disguise. "The last shall be first", "saints and sinners", the apocalypse -- all easily map to wokeness, which forms the appeal for people who grew up in Christian culture without the religious/ritual pieces. The "Cultural Christian" argument is to embrace the ritual parts (Bible stories, baptism, forgiveness, funerals that talk about heaven and hell). You don't have to "believe" these rituals any more than "Cultural Jewish" believes in circumcision or bar mitzvahs. Wokeness will collapse too unless it recognizes this.
So what’s the best way in the medium term to transmit Judeo-Christian values to the masses?
Because in practice, that’s what we’re talking about, right?
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and all that.
Your logic seems to miss a step - even if what you assert is true - that Christianity begets liberalism begets doom - if nothing else, you left out of the analysis that the sooner Judeo-Christian values decay, the sooner the badness occurs.
IMO you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I.e. your argument is that since Culture Christianity is imperfect, why support it at all?
Churchill had the answer to the question: Democracy is the worst form of government ever invented…
Cultural Christianity is also not necessarily useful. If you really do think that the societies built on Christianity were preferable and that Christianity was a necessary component to their continuation, you should wish there to be authentic Christians in society to rehabilitate these cultures, rather than erzatz cultural Christians who were not the key component in these societies’ successes and failures to begin with.
Just as there are secular Jews today, there could be or already are secular Christians (who respect and admire the essential aspects of Christian spirituality and ethics but are not devoted religious individuals). This is a good contribution to modern and liberal Western civilization. But this is something peripheral to your central point.
A "secular Jew" is a member of the Jewish ethnic group, so there's the level of cultural cohesion that continues to exist even when the religion is removed. Christianity doesn't work that way.
The closest Christianity can come to this is to tie certain aspects of Christianity to ethnic identity, e.g. the Italian tradition of the Seven Fishes dinner on Christmas Eve. In other words, if you're italian, you do this Christian thing even if you don't believe in Christianity.
Well, many are simply catholics! A multi-cultural cosmopolitan or global faith. With 1.4 bilion of christians.
Yes. https://open.substack.com/pub/toonsday/p/hey-zeus
Nietzsche also argued in the Geneology of Morals that Christianity has undermined the concepts of traditional good and evil, leaving us with a slave morality that has persisted for hundreds of years (e.g. slavery bad, equality is good, etc. ). If Nietzsche is right then I think it is very hard for western atheists to escape from being a 'cultural christian'. This is the core criticism I think: if you are rejecting Christianity but not the morality then you are still a Cultural Christian. Repackaging Christian beliefs as rational precepts doesn't feel very authentic. And those do really escape find themselves in uncomfortable places in doing so. (e.g. Overman, Will to power, etc.)
And what of Quakerism ?
A long list of "firsts" in morality, but very thin on theology & hierarchy. Rather adherence to a set of practices (an hour of silent prayer unless one feels lead to share a message, acting only in unity, etc).
Not much for the decorative arts though
Moral revelation "firsts"
Beginning - Men, women and all people are equal
1690s - Prison should be to reform and not punish
1730s to 1770s - Slavery is a moral outrage
WW 1 - Strangers starving far away should be feed
1962 - Gay marriage is as acceptable as straight marriage
“Christians” (defined by Christ Himself as goats (reread Matthew 25:31+) are directly responsible for too many people’s aversion to “Christianity”
Weird that anyone still believes in prison as reform.
I haven't been able to find anything corresponding to that 1962 date, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quakers#Marriage instead provides an incident from 1986.
I was told that our British Friends published a book "Quakers and Sex" in 1962 or 1963 (approved) with the quote "The genders of a couple in a loving committed couple make no moral distinction".
See Scandinavian prisons.
https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-myth-of-the-nordic-rehabilitative
Thank you, this is excellent (and makes one absolutely furious at the professional reporters who stoked the myth, not for the first or last time).
I'm pro-religion in the sense that I think the world would be better if more people were religious. I'm also pro-science, and think we can have religion without the supernatural. I don't think we need "cultural Christianity" specifically, but I claim that a functional society needs cultural religions to teach useful values and help people figure out how to live well.
I believe we need religion because adult developmental psychology suggests we do. For those not familiar, the basic idea is that psychological developmental stages aren't just for kids, but also for adults. Kegan's model is probably the most popular, but Cook-Greuter's is better. I'll use Kegan's to make my case since more people know it.
Kegan's model contains 5 levels. I'll skip 1 and describe the rest (with some help from Claude):
2. Imperial Mind (childhood to adolescence): People at this stage develop a sense of self separate from others. They focus primarily on their own needs and interests, struggling to fully consider others' perspectives. They understand rules mainly in terms of personal consequences rather than social contracts. Relationships are viewed in terms of personal benefit. They can delay gratification for short-term goals but struggle with long-term planning. Self-regulation is developing but still limited.
3. Socialized Mind (adolescence to adulthood): People at this stage operate within shared social values and expectations. They derive their sense of self largely from relationships and social roles. They rely heavily on the beliefs of others to understand the world, especially those of authority figures. They struggle with conflicting expectations between different social groups and have difficulty critically analyzing social norms.
4. Self-Authoring Mind (some adults): People at this stage develop their own internal authority and value system. They can critically examine societal expectations and create their own ethical framework. They mediate between different values and construct personal solutions to complex problems. They take responsibility for their choices and pursue long-term goals despite social pressures. While they consider others' perspectives, their sense of self isn't dependent on others' approval.
5. Self-Transforming Mind (rare in adults): People at this stage recognize the limitations of their own ideology and identity. They can simultaneously hold multiple, even contradictory, systems of meaning without needing to reconcile them. They have a fluid, continually evolving sense of self. They engage with and learn from radically different perspectives, recognizing the interconnectedness of all systems. They navigate complexity with ease and have a meta-awareness of the process of meaning-making itself.
If this is your first time hearing about Kegan, a few things probably jump out to you, like that some adult-aged people fail to fully make the transition from 2 to 3. What you might also notice, which David Chapman of meaningness.com has explored extensively, is that the modern world asks people to operate at least at stage 4 and ideally at stage 5, but also contains few structures for supporting people at stage 3. Chapman calls this the "meaningness crisis", and he's worked hard to produce content to help people make the transition from 4 to 5.
I'm personally a bit more interested in all those people we've abandoned at stage 3. This is traditionally the role religion fills. But modernism chased people away from religion. Political parties have stepped in the fill the void, but they do the same job worse because they exist to gain power, and only support people to the extent it helps the party gain power.
Religions on the surface don't seem much better. But religions don't exist for a single purpose like political parties do (in the sense that religions don't go away if you pull out any one of the things they are about, but political parties dissolve immediately if they are not an effective path to power). This gives them the excellent quality of not being incentivized to optimize for any one thing to the exclusion of other things. And in that optimization slack, they have taken up the purpose of helping people live their lives well. Sometimes they do this for theoretical reasons, like wanting to bring people close to God, but they also do it for practical reasons, like it's better to live surrounded by people who are better to get along with.
Now, I want to be clear, I'm not here to say all religions are equally good at the thing I care about, which is supporting people at stage 3, and ideally also supporting them in their transition to 4 and 5. But if you go back and look at what people at stage 3 need and you look at what a religion like Christianity offers, you'll discover a lot of overlap.
If I've convinced you, what should we do? I think you should find and join a religion that doesn't care what you believe. Christianity and Islam and unusually focused on belief, whereas most religions care more about actions. This makes them both have weird failure modes, and one of those is scaring away people who get to stage 4 and realize there's no God as he has been literally described by religious authorities. That's how we got where we are today with modernism driving people away from religion.
I decided to adopt Zen Buddhism. Other people I know who consider themselves rationalists and don't believe in invisible dragons have become Quakers or Unitarians or started practicing Buddhisms other than Zen. I can't say it's all easy: lots of people have religious trauma that makes it hard for them to connect with religion. But it's my belief that religions fill a common psychological need that most people have, especially when they are at stage 3, and the lack of something to fill that need causes societal disfunction.
My assumption is that people being more whole is better than them being less whole. The idea that society should be constituted mostly of people who are less whole than they could be is morally and spiritually objectionable, whatever the practicalities of the matter may be.
(one reply to this would be to assert that most people will never get to stage 4 or 5 anyway, so any such measures would make a direct difference to the experience of only a minority of people, even if they thereby succeed in maintaining society for all others. )
From a stage 3 perspective, we don't. But people are going to bust through stage 3 anyway.
The bigger issue is that today we have a society designed only for stages 4 and 5. That's what modernism and postmodernism are about. But by not providing real options to support people at stage 3, they end up trapped in various weird stages of development.
Some people stay stuck at stage 2 because they lack the structure they need to get to stage 3. Some of them manage to get to stage 3 only with the help of our remaining stage 3 organizations, like the military.
Other people get stuck in a weird version of stage 3 that is based on a compression of modernism or postmodernism into stage 3 terms. This is what happens to, for example, the people who "believe in science" as if it were a religion or make a political party or company they work for (a structure you can only maybe navigate without it taking advantage of you at stage 5) their replacement religion.
There's much we could say about the modern world and why it structurally tries to force people out of stage 3 whether they're ready for that or not. David Chapman has written on this extensively, and I recommend reading his writing on this rather than mine. A good starting point is: https://meaningness.com/systematic-mode
Yes. Frankly, stage 4 and 5 remind me of people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder that I used to know. Or in one case, someone who could easily have become a cult leader but decided to do something more productive with their life.
I'd talk about "modernity" rather than "modernism", which is an artistic movement.
Modernity has a few ideologies, mainly: liberalism, socialism, fascism.
Maybe the only "coherent" way out of modernity is if science fully decodes the human brain and the human consciousness (and its interplay with human DNA), opening the door to the cyborg.
A transcendent overcoming of modernity rather than literal reactionary conservatism.
This is standard Yuval Harari, and I think he's right on this.
A little piece of evidence: so many of contemporary social changes are consequence of the contraceptive pill.
Somebody has probably already pointed this out, but the New Testament explicitly points out that if Christianity is bogus then Christian’s are the lamest folks fit to be pitied only.
But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep
in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement of cultural Christianity…
Besides the arguments in this post, I don't see why we should assume the ways you describe some past societies were better had anything to do with their being more religious (or closer to a more religious past). I see wokeness and excessive slave morality as orthogonal to Christianity at best, if not in some cases mildly supported by its ethics; past societies were unwoke and less slave moralist despite Christianity, not because of it.
To me, Christian ethics and thus "cultural Christianity" is unappealing in the first place, from the easy targets like treating victimless sexual activities as sins, to the whole "turn your other cheek" ethic.
50 percent of a society is below median -- by any metric you choose. Ergo, somebody has to be better than median to offset those below. Democratic government cannot provide this -- by definition.
There needs to be organizations which strive to be better than median, without expectation that everyone meets those standards. Christianity began as such an organization. Christians were to be "salt of the earth" and to get through a "narrow gate."
But then the Church tried to shove everyone through that narrow gate. This led to both really ugly forcible conversions and watering down of Christian standards.
The restoration of religious freedom is in many respects a return to original Christianity. But, alas, the urge to get everyone through to door has led many a denomination to dumb down Christianity. We are experiencing the results...
No. It implies that the shifting needs to be done by people and organizations which represent something above the median.
As a Christian, in my circles "cultural Christians" is a well-known term and not a positive one: we don't really want more of them. The idea that when Christianity is the dominant culture there's a ton of people who are "Christian" by default without really having any serious commitment to the faith.
From a Christian perspective, there are certainly downsides to Christianity's loss of cultural centrality, but the falling off of "cultural christians" is, I think, often viewed as a good thing. It's better, in a lot of ways, to have a smaller-on-paper religion consisting just of the more serious members than to have a huge religion where a huge chunk of the "adherents" only show up on Christmas and Easter and don't think about it all on the other 363.24 days of the year.
This "smaller but more committed" faith is both the original form of the faith - there weren't many "Chreasters" when Christianity was an illegal, underground faith in Rome - and it's also a form that has been seen in modern times in places that have been hostile to the faith, like China where it's shown to be strain of the religion that's pretty resistant to eradication.
If things keep going the way they're going culturally (and they might, and they might not, and as Dan Carlin would say, either way is interesting), this is where I see Christianity going in the West - not extinct but not a dominant force in the culture, either. And I don't think it's only 'extreme' versions that will survive - I think there's going to continue to be mainline Catholics and mainline Protestants, just in smaller numbers.
---
If there's a point to the 'cultural christianity' argument, I think it's just that it'd be nice if people did appreciate the extent to which modern 'liberal' values have largely come from Christianity - this is the point that historian Tom Holland (not that Tom Holland) makes in Dominion (not the animal-welfare "Dominion" book that was in the book review contest) - not that I want people to be 'cultural Christian' but it's a good antidote to the frankly revisionist histories going around about how all the church ever did was oppress people, burn witches, murder scientists, and start wars.
Wouldn’t you want as many people at least exposed as possible? Some cultural Christians might have become the real thing with enough nudging
It's tricky - on the one hand, yeah, what you say can happen - someone can be a cultural Christian, then go through some (often difficult) life-experience and end up getting serious.
... but I'd say the far more common outcome is that cultural Christianity often "inoculates" people against a more serious strain of Christianity - people are exposed to weak and distorted strains of Christianity and it makes them non-receptive to stronger strains. "Moral therapeutic deism" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moralistic_therapeutic_deism) is a great description of what that sort of 'inoculation' dose of Christianity looks like.
---
But like I said, it's tricky - at the end of the day is it better to have a religion consisting of a million nominal believers of which 20% are serious or one consisting of a hundred thousand people, of which 100% are serious? The first has double the number of serious believers, but the second is probably a lot more Effective. (But of course, ultimately, it's not our call to make)
I was scrolling down looking for this perspective from somebody who actually believes in Christianity. In the Book of Revelation, Jesus says to one of the churches:
"I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth."
It sure sounds from this quote like Jesus would be happier with a society divided between serious Christians, and committed nonbelievers (especially if the latter are genuinely trying to follow the truth); rather than a society full of lots of nominal Christians who show up every week because that is the socially respectable thing to do.
It's true there are some real benefits from more people being exposed to Christian ideas in a "Christian" culture. But, real examples of such cultures are inevitably still heavily influenced by worldliness and avarice, traits that are quite incompatible with genuine Christian ethics. In a Christian flavored culture, the fact that Christianity is socially "approved", and therefore accepted by the rich and famous, may actually make it more difficult to acquire an authentic spirituality. In some ways it is harder to follow the "narrow way" marked out by the gospel, when the broad road is also labelled as "Christianity"!
As you say, there are some advantages on both sides. But, if the choice ever comes down to a society in which Christians are persecuted, or a society in which Christians do the persecuting---while I'd rather have neither!---it seems obviously more in accordance with the spirit of Christ's teaching to pick being persecuted. There are lots of supposed Christians out there talking online about how they definitely would use the Ring of Power to dominate the bad guys, if they ever got it. Fortunately, they aren't very likely to get it. (For example, it is always amusing to see online integralists debating whether they *should* turn America into an officially Catholic society, as if that were on option on the table. But, lots of Protestant evangelical forms of this as well.)
Exposure in cultural Christianity is often a perversion of Christian beliefs, e.g. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, or blue laws.
I often think about an episode of the sitcom "Step By Step" from the early 90s where the dad doesn't want to go to church because he'd rather watch football (The Simpsons had an episode around the same time in a similar vein). Eventually he reluctantly attends church but sneaks off to the attic to watch, ending with him crashing through the ceiling in the middle of the sermon. That seems representative of cultural Christianity in the 90s. We can draw a line directly from that to where we are today.
The past is a foreign country and they don’t allow immigration
They're powerless to stop theft and appropriation though.
But if the future doesn't grant us asylum, we're constantly in a state of illegal alienation.
I definitely think people are free riding on the religiosity of others. Perhaps it would help if we framed it with the Chinese Confucian concept of Li. Ritual, etiquette, propriety are loose translations for a concept that reminds me of "manners on steroids". Society has a bunch of arcane rules and procedures, from TSA to job interviews to therapy reports to (in some places) addressing adults in a particular way. Perhaps you don't know why these rules exist. But as a good Confucian, you accept them and try to tie your soul to them for they are part of li. In order to play your role, you need li. What li does for society, according to Xunzi, is that it ensures a harmony of action among all parties. It is the set of ritual actions and expectations for behavior that makes society lower cost to navigate, because the decision has been made for you.
In the western context, we might call it piety: best personified by Aeneas fleeing Troy with his father and household gods on his back, and son in his hand. There may exist a set of beliefs and attitudes and rituals which makes society tick and preserve its culture. Piety is a real thing like justice. A type of honor paid to the values of a society, rather than cynicism or hypercritical readings.
Christian culture cannot be replaced by beloved 1890s progressive irreligious culture, because that era, much as I love it, does not provide a full set of answers for how to live. It is not a practice of a community. Sure there was Bloomsbury, but it was low fertility. If their number John Maynard Keynes echoed the same view you dislike, "We had the best of both worlds. We destroyed Christianity and yet had its benefits." Maybe he was being hyperbolic, but there is something to it.
I think that that something is this. Christian religons provide a framework and in practice many, many details for how to live life well and virtuously. In the streets Christianity can be liberal, but rarely in the sheets. There it is particular. For while the very intelligent and wealthy recover from vice pretty easily -they snap out of addictions, an extramarital affair won't leave them destitute, and alcoholism tends to be functional - for normal people, for children, and for those lacking in natural and secular advantages, Christian religion provides a thicker moral safety net to pull them out of self-destructive tendencies. It provides li.
All major religions probably also serve a function like this, and so you have to judge which network of li obligations you like best or lead to the best results. But if most people are shedding the old rituals and NOT replacing them with new useful or beautiful manners, then you might look at the live options available and shout, "Christianity!"
That's the value of being culturally Christian. You accept some amount of Christian li, and in exchange you get the benefits of the li being taught to the next generation. It is possible to assess Christian cultural norms, decide they are really good, and promote them without yourself subscribing the Nicene Creed. That's not hypocritical! But someone has to run the institutions which teach and instantiate those values.
I like this framing, thank you!
Who says you have to assert Christian doctrine? I openly say I do not believe it, but that I am "pro-Christian" and I miss many things about it.
I recognize it's part of western identity and history, I acknowledge the value of it, and I do not go around asserting that (say) Islam is just as good or better because it's foreign. I don't try to deconvert Christians and I support the priviledged display of Christian symbols and traditions in the west, rather than the notion that all religions are of equal cultural and historical significance here.
I don't think cultural Christianity can dissolve into Woke because it isn't a real religion. Maybe it needs a nucleus of real Christians to operate (and one day that will run out), and maybe it just buys time.
But maybe buying time is important.
You use such an ill-defined and ahistorical
grab bag of a notion to denote modernity/ modernism, while at the same time purporting to link it to a specific time (how about place - Germany, UK, France, Russia, the US??), that there is no hope for deriving any meaningful analysis from these premises.
An allegory: In a certain village, the people gathered fish bones and mingled them with their soil, believing this would summon the spirits of the fish to bless their crops. For many years, their fields flourished more abundantly than any in the land. With this prosperity, the villagers found more time for contemplation, and in their contemplation, they slowly ceased to believe in the fish spirits. Eventually, they discontinued their ancient practice of enriching the soil with fish bones. For a time, the earth remained fertile, yielding bountiful harvests. Yet, as seasons passed, the land grew weary and barren. The wise elders among them counseled a return to the old ways, hoping to revive the tired soil. But a certain scribe, renowned among the people, persuaded them otherwise, arguing that it was this very practice of bone mixing that had brought them to their current plight. The villagers, swayed by his words, diligently tried other methods while the land continued to languish.