Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2d ago
I would say you’re ignoring the upper crust of blacks — journalists, academics, high-ranking activists — who have built their lives and identities around an ostentatious anti-whiteness. I agree with you that there’s a large black middle class, among whom the percentage who’d be likely to donate to Karmelo Anthony is fairly small (though certainly non-zero), but I imagine there’s quite a bit of that money coming from affluent chattering-class blacks who’ve made that money spreading anti-white animus.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2d ago
FC is presumably referring to Jake Gardner
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2d ago
Do you have any evidence that the relatively small portion of the American black electorate who voted for Trump do not otherwise see themselves as part of a (capital-B) Black community with shared cultural interests, a shared fraught relationship with greater white America, etc.? Couldn’t it just be that those people did not believe that in 2024 the Democratic Party was the optimal vehicle through which to express/protect those interests? I haven’t seen enough evidence to suggest that this represents a larger fracturing of black culture and identity. Kanye West presumably voted for Trump, after all, and he is still very recognizably culturally black, still has a very defiant attitude toward White America, etc.
I don’t think we have to be at “literal race war imminent” to recognize that race relations (specifically between blacks and non-blacks) in America are in a very bad state and show no signs of long-term improvement.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3d ago
Two members of my family were, until recently, dealers at a casino. They were both somewhat clear-eyed about it; they loved how much money it brought in, as well as the opportunities to socially interact with a lot of interesting people, but they understood that their jobs only existed because of a substrate of gambling addicts whose hobby has the potential to destroy lives. I don’t know that I’d describe either of them as “proud” of their jobs, and I certainly was not proud on their behalf when telling people what they did for a living.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4d ago
This seems like a massive oversimplification. I’ve been exposed to a fair amount of Orthodox content, including by people with whom I’m in direct contact, and they all seem to be in lockstep agreement that the pagan “Gods” were in fact demons — they use that word over and over — to whom their worshippers were giving profane worship. It seems like the Orthodox mostly don’t directly blame those people for being so fooled, especially as Christ had not yet arrived to spread the good word, nor do the Orthodox apparently believe that such “demons” were (or are) purely malevolent beings. But it seems pretty clear to at least Orthodox Christians — unless I’m somehow misunderstanding their words — that pagans who believed their Gods were supreme and benevolent beings were totally mistaken about the true nature of the beings which they worshipped.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4d ago
Mass shootings that aren't explicitly political or religious in motivation tend often to turn into this (three of the four most famous American examples are "I managed to get myself locked into an elementary school classroom while on the run from the cops, my life is over anyway, might as well shoot a few for fun" [Uvalde], "I'm a jilted lover so I'm going to shoot her, she works at a school, no harm in racking up a few more on the way out" [Sandy Hook], and "the cops aren't coming in, I'm bored, might as well shoot some more" [Pulse nightclub]).
None of these are accurate descriptions of the shootings you’ve named, as far as I’m aware. The Uvalde shooter, Salvador Ramos, didn’t just end up at the elementary school by accident while on the run from police; he DMed the German teenager with whom he’d been in communication after meeting her on Yubo, first telling her he was about to shoot his grandmother, then subsequently telling her that he’d just done so and was about to drive to a nearby elementary school and shoot some kids. (That girl, “Cece”, was later criminally prosecuted in Frankfurt for failing to alert authorities.) The police weren’t even aware, before the school shooting, that he’d shot his grandmother, and were not pursuing him.
As for Sandy Hook, what information do you have that Adam Lanza was “a jilted lover”, or had any connection to Sandy Hook elementary school besides having attended it himself as a small child? I’ve never encountered any claim that he was “a lover” at all, jilted or otherwise; everything I’ve ever read about him makes it very clear that he was a total shut-in, who didn’t even have any IRL friends, let alone a “lover”. If you have any info to the contrary I’d be interested to see it.
And then when it comes to the Pulse shooting, first off, your claim that the shooting wasn’t politically motivated is simply untrue. Omar Mateen did intend to commit a mass shooting in revenge for civilian bombings in Afghanistan and the Middle East by the U.S. military. He did not attempt to commit a mass shooting against gay people; he’d originally planned to commit the shooting at the Disney entertainment complex, but, upon getting near there and realizing how well-secured it was, he panicked and literally just searched “Orlando nightclubs” and went to the first one nearby, not even having any idea Pulse was a gay club. But again, he fully intended to shoot up the place before he even got there.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4d ago
Spaceballs sequel in which Pizza the Hutt has become Pizza the Pope.
What is controversial about the claim that, on average, a person is less physically vigorous at age 80 than at age 30? I’m not aware of anyone who would say that this is controversial. Similarly, what person who has even a cursory knowledge of world cultures would consider it controversial that an Arab Muslim is less likely to consume pork and alcohol than a white German Protestant?
I would ask “what is controversial about the claim that a woman is more likely to have the ability to become pregnant than a man is”, but this is one issue about which there is, inexplicably, a controversy, and I’m very confident that you come down on the side of “Why would anyone dispute this very obvious claim? The entire point of our species having two sexes is that one of them gets pregnant and the other does the impregnating.” If you met an individual woman who is infertile — due to health issues, age, a hysterectomy, or any other reason — you would have no trouble understanding that this doesn’t in any way invalidate the general principle.
Yet you have no answer, nor have you even attempted to offer an answer, for why that’s different, and why every other category of individual must be treated as a total blank slate, whose observable characteristics provide no valuable predictive information whatsoever until you’ve had the chance to personally get to know the person and observe his or her behavior. This is an absurd standard and I don’t think you’d actually defend it, except for you feel morally obligated to do so when it comes to race and are too obstinate to admit that the principle holds in regards to the many other observable characteristics that people can have.
As a result, you’ve backed yourself into the corner of having to adopt the same stance as a stereotypical blue-haired college progressive: “Um, excuse me, did you just assume that person’s age? Did you just assume that person’s religion?” And so on. Apparently you’re an unexpected ally of the progs! Literally all you have to do, in order to dig yourself out of that hole, is to admit, “Yes, okay, obviously we can make assumptions about people, even if we don’t know them as individuals” and then explain why race is different from those other characteristics.
It’s not even hard to do so! There are plenty of strong arguments for why race, unlike age, doesn’t provide valuable predictive data. I could even make some of those arguments for your although I have no interest in bailing you out. It seems like you can’t make that argument, though, because, truth be told, you haven’t thought that deeply about it.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7d ago
Why is it India, which has famously low human capital in its vast hordes of low-caste peasants, and not, say, Japan, which is still essentially pagan in character and on which Christianity has never had any significant impact?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7d ago
Of course it does; it tells us that disagreeableness is not especially concentrated in either East or West. You are the one who made the strong claim that what specifically differentiates “the West from China* is that Europeans cannot be at peace with themselves and that they persecute religious/intellectual/political reformers. Yet China also has a huge history of conflict, and also has a fraught history with its reformers and rebels. To me that makes a pretty compelling case against your original claim.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7d ago
I think it’s pretty wild to posit “disagreeableness” as the key trait distinguishing “the West” from China, given China’s famously extensive list of civil wars, rebellions, splintering religious movements, etc.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7d ago
you are still trying to argue that knowledge of group differences is more valuable and informative than fine-grained information about individuals
I am literally and explicitly arguing the opposite, and you’re just obstinately insisting otherwise, despite (again) not actually demonstrating that you’ve made an attempt to understand the specific arguments I’ve made and why.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8d ago
6 paragraphs of why that's actually a good thing doesn't change the underlying argument.
Nowhere did I say anyone should “focus” on group differences. In fact I made it very explicit multiple times that when fine-grained information about an individual is available, you should use it to override the assumptions you made before you had it.
You didn’t make any effort to actually engage with the specifics of any of the examples I brought up, the distinctions I drew, etc. This is by far the most common outcome of my interactions with you. You just repeat some stock phrases and act like they’re knockdown arguments for every situation. It’s very tiresome, and I feel that you’re an especially poor ambassador for the general constellation of ideas you ostensibly advocate.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8d ago
“Racism”, in the sense that both Yglesias and yourself describe is about devaluing individual merit by in favor of an emphasis on group differences/membership.
How? How does it “devalue individual merit”? I genuinely have to wonder whether you don’t understand what I’m actually talking about, or are just unable to accurately model the mind of someone who believes as I do.
There are many observable qualities about an individual which can allow someone to make probabilistic assumptions about that person! If you see a man with a long black beard, olive-colored skin, and wearing a keffiyeh, you can pretty safely assume that the man is from the Middle East. Given that assumption, you can assume that he is most likely Arab, although there is a smaller possibility that he’s Kurdish or even Yazidi. If he is Arab, there’s a high likelihood that he’s Muslim; depending on which country or region he’s from, one can assess the probability that he’s Sunni or that he’s Shia. If he is Muslim, you can assume that he probably drinks alcohol either rarely or not at all; that he eschews pork; that he prays daily, etc.
Any of these assumptions could be wrong! He could be born and raised in the U.K., or America, or Canada, and not be from the Middle East, though he’s dressed in a manner more common in that part of the world than it is in Anglo countries. He could be a Greek or a Persian, and not one of the ethnicities I previously named. He could be irreligious, even though most Arab men are not. He could even be a Christian, or a Druze, or, as mentioned, a Yazidi. If he is Muslim, he could be Sufi, or from some other fairly small sect. He could be a non-observant Muslim who professes Islam but still drinks alcohol and doesn’t pray. He could even be a white guy in a costume, wearing a fake beard and some bronzer!
Still, though, I think you would agree that my initial assumptions about what’s most likely to be true about him are broadly accurate and representative of reality. In order to discover what’s actually true about him, I would need to personally get to know him, or somehow otherwise obtain accurate information. Without being able to do so, I may need to rely on probabilistic assumptions.
The same types of assumptions can be made about a woman (likely to be able to become pregnant, to be sexually attracted to men, to have interests more common among women than they are among men, etc.) even with the full knowledge that some not-insignificant portion of women have some other combinations of traits. You can do it with people from different parts of the world, people who dress a certain way, etc. If someone has MS13 tattoos, I would have some major concerns about hiring him to babysit my kids, unless he has a very convincing story about why he came about those tattoos by totally innocent means.
Literally all I’m saying is that race carries useful, if not perfectly dispositive, information that can be used to make similar probabilistic assumptions. The question of “individual merit” doesn’t even enter the occasion, because the entire point here is that we usually do not have very much information about the “merit” of strangers. We have to use other methods to predict their behavior. Most of the time this process is pretty low-stakes, and we can assign both low confidence and low salience to our assumptions while we wait for more fine-grained info to become available. If I have to make an important snap judgment, though, stereotypes are far more useful than simply pretending as though I have no information to go on.
Again, I think you would trivially recognize this as true when it comes to all sorts of categories of people! Old people are likely to be weaker and less energetic than young people, even though there are wacky outliers who run marathons at age 90. Fat people probably have less self-discipline than skinny people, and are probably going to be worse at basketball, if you’re picking people to be on your team. Most of these assumptions are totally non-controversial outside of the contrarian upside-down world of academia. Why, then, is race the one category from which we must totally taboo gleaning any useful information?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8d ago
the emphasis we place on individual merit is a key trait of Western Civilization.
“The West” had racial chattel slavery for centuries, which coexisted quite comfortably with a robust (far more pervasive and sincere than nowadays) Christianity. (The same “Western Civilization” very comfortably celebrated hereditary monarchy and nobility, again a slap in the face to “individual merit”.) The “West” you’re grasping at is a phantom. That it existed in the heads of so many does not make it real or coherent.
Racism is effectively the rejection of individual variance/merit in favor of group variance/merit.
“Racism”, in the sense that Yglesias is using it in the OP’s linked essay, is simply the recognition that although there is a substantial variation among individuals, it is still not only possible to draw reliable probabilistic conclusions about a given individual’s likely traits based on observable characteristics (many of them immutable), but also that in the absence of detailed information about that individual, it’s often necessary (or at least valuable) to make those probabilistic assumptions. Once more fine-grained detail about the individual is available, then it becomes possible to adjust one’s assumptions. This is entirely consistent with a belief in broadly-predictable population-level averages.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8d ago
This criticism only works if you assume that the target of it believes that “racism” is a priori a bad thing. What do you say to someone who doesn’t believe that this is the case, or who at least has a substantially different understand about what “racism” is or what specifically about it is bad?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8d ago
As I have pointed out many times, Yglesias’s colorblindness politeness norms for white liberals will inevitably come crashing against the rocks, as they always do, the second that BIPOCs refuse to get with the program. All of this handwringing about how to execute a delicate social dance to obfuscate universally-understood truths, and it’s all taking place without the input, and without the buy-in, of the core group being spoken about.
“Alright, Nikole Hannah-Jones. I and the other white liberals have had a long conversation, and we’ve decided that talking about race is no longer acceptable.”
“Fuck you, honky.”
These social taboos have only ever gone in one direction. They’re a unilateral surrender by non-blacks. What mechanism does Matt Yglesias have with which to enforce his preferred taboos on black people? Black people, writ large, are not going to stop seeing themselves as a distinct group with an inherently fraught cultural relationship with White America! They’re not going to stop noticing disparities, nor are they going to stop thinking about the reasons for these disparities! And no white liberal, least of all Matt Yglesias, has ever demonstrated that they have any clout within the black community to even begin to promulgate any “colorblind” norms among them.
It’s not as if white liberals don’t know how black people think about them. White liberals obsessed about the film Get Out, which is a raw expression of the psychodrama blacks experience around white liberals and their labyrinth of strained politeness norms around race, which blacks see as hostile and profoundly dishonest.
Yet Matt believes that by writing Substack posts, he’ll not only be able to get white people to recommit to not thinking too hard about race, but that he’ll get black people to make that same commitment? It’s delusional.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
The relationship is built on gratitude and trust; gratitude for the many good things he provides for us, and trust that he will care for and preserve us…
I want to interrogate what the word trust means in this sentence. When we talk about “trust” in the context of human relationships, we recognize that trust is something which can be broken. We recognize that there are degrees of trust — that some people are more trustworthy than others, and that when determining how much trust to extend to another person, one consideration is usually a probabilistic determination of how likely that person is to behave in the way I’m trusting him or her to behave. As I gather more data about that person’s actions, I can decide to upgrade or downgrade my level of trust in that person. Obviously a healthy marriage, for example, necessarily involves a great degree of trust; however, if one spouse commits proven adultery, that necessarily alters the level of trust the other spouse can extend to that person moving forward. Trust isn’t independent of evidence and observation, in other words.
If I pray to God every day to keep me and my family safe and healthy, and then one of my children contracts leukemia and dies, I’m struggling to understand what you think that event should do for my level of “trust” in the proposition that God will “care for us and preserve us”. If leukemia was just something that happened to people all the time, like stubbing a toe, then I agree that it would make little sense to downgrade one’s trust in God based on that occurrence. But since so few children die of leukemia, the fact that it happened to my child specifically, despite my daily prayers to God for the opposite outcome, may very well have some import.
And particularly, if the children of devout Christians who pray daily for their family’s health are, upon observation of data, no less likely to die of leukemia than the children of atheists, then an outsider may begin to wonder what the “relationship” is actually for. What level of “trust” can there be in a relationship if one party is committed to total indifference about whether the other party fails at doing what that party has been “entrusted” to do? It’s an idiosyncratic definition of “trust” indeed if one commits to loving another party with the exact same level of devotion whether that other party behaves well or badly. “Trust” divorced from any expectation of outcomes, and any judgment on those outcomes, seems not to be trust at all.
Only to the extent that Therapy is, in its essence, a relationship, but perhaps that's close enough from your perspective.
It’s a specific type of relationship, though. It’s a relationship in which the purpose of the therapist is, ultimately, to just be a sounding board to which one can vent one’s problems. The therapist has no power to materially affect the situations about which you’re complaining to him. At best, he can offer helpful advice on how you should psychologically frame those situations. He’s just there to help you better order one’s internal life. Not to actually change it, except to the extent that one’s outlook and emotional state can change one’s problem-solving approach. A valuable contribution, to be sure, but one very different from what one would expect from a God to whom many great miracles and divine interventions are attributed.
And indeed, a cursory examination of Christianity or the Bible will reveal the belief that some suffering, pain and death, even extreme forms of these, are a positive good, admirable, desirable even, with no shortage of examples of Christians acting on this belief and other Christians admiring them for it.
In the sense that a Christian martyr’s death might serve as a useful example to other Christians, sure. “That man bore his persecution with dignity and stuck to his principles. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.” I just really struggle to understand what positive message or example you expect us to glean from the instantaneous, terrifying death of several hundred thousand people from a freak natural disaster. Those people didn’t have the option to choose otherwise, as, for example, a Christian martyr might choose to recant his faith to avoid suffering. They didn’t even have time, in the fleeting moments between normalcy and calamity, to reflect on Goodness and to make peace with it. It just doesn’t seem to carry within it any positive, hopeful, or moral message. Maybe there’s just some fundamental psychologically dismally between you and me — either cultivated or innate — which explains why I cannot glean a message of hope, and of a confirmation of trust in God as my shepherd, in the way you can.
I am all for preventing pain and death, and even paying significant costs to do so. It's not even obvious to me that our metric for what costs are unacceptably high is too terribly different.
This seems directly in contradiction to your statement that the Bible teaches that suffering and death are admirable “and desirable even.” If the message of the Bible is that one should be indifferent to one’s suffering, then why bother to buckle your children’s seatbelts, let alone your own? God wills what he wills, and your child’s death could be desirable per God’s plan! I don’t really understand the purpose here of taking actions to forestall the potentially grisly fate God may — for reasons which you’re content to allow to remain inscrutable — have in store for you and/or your loved ones. If God wills it, it will be, and an ostensibly “bad” outcome actually isn’t any worse than an ostensibly “good” outcome! It’s all a matter of outlook!
What's your assessment of voluntary human extinction? That's one way to solve pain for good, right?
“If we can’t entirely eradicate pain, then we should actually be fine with infinite pain, and actually a God who causes us infinite pain is no worse than a God who causes us no pain at all.”
There are obviously degrees of pain and suffering. If I stub my toe, or have a mildly unpleasant interaction with a stranger, it does not produce within me an existential crisis or cause me to curse God. But if I developed a terribly painful disease, through no fault or action of my own, which led me to suffer daily, and a Christian told me that this is good, actually, and that the God who either willed this or failed to prevent it is benevolent and that his actions toward me are rooted in love — that I should trust such a God — then, again, I have to wonder what the words “love” and “trust” mean in this worldview. I would like to be able to “trust” that a God of immense power and benevolence could proffer to his adherents — those with whom he has a “relationship” — at least some degree less suffering and pain than that which is meted out to those with whom he doesn’t have a relationship. Otherwise God really is nothing more than a therapist — valuable, but not the King of Kings.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
The popularity of bodycam footage on the right is directly correlated to the turn against it on the left. Both are, frankly, gross.
What’s gross about it?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
they are a small sect which has not been terrible successful as a meme
Zoroastrianism was the official religion of multiple dominant empires spanning over a millennium. Its influence didn’t wane because it was “an unsuccessful meme”; the final Zoroastrian Persian empire was militarily defeated by Muslims, who then ruthlessly persecuted the Zoroastrian holdouts, forcing them to flee to the Indian subcontinent, where, even as a minority religion vastly outnumbered by the populations around them, they managed to maintain their religion over a thousand years later. I don’t think it makes sense to treat it as some obscure sect that “lost out on the marketplace of ideas.”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
My kids are healthy. I routinely pray that they will stay healthy. If they don't stay healthy, and in fact if they were to die of a sudden illness, I would not expect this to damage my faith, because I do not "expect" my prayer to ensure their health. I do not view my prayers as a way to gain leverage over the material world, and I don't think doing so is the correct way to practice Christian prayer.
Then what are prayers for? What do you expect them to “do”? Do you expect them to produce any outcome, either in this life or the next, that’s more tangible than simply a lessening of your own internal anxiety? Is my accusation of “God as Therapist” more or less accurate here?
In short, it seems to me that Christians, generally speaking, have all the same data you do. Speaking generally, we draw different conclusions because we are operating off different axioms, not because we are ignorant of the facts in evidence.
Yes, but I think that one of the “axioms” on which you’re operating — the one people call “faith” — is that none of the potential arguments which could potentially prove fatal to your continued adherence to Christianity can possibly be true. Such arguments are necessarily false, because your religion is necessarily true. Therefore everything else is an argument backwards from that — a series of post-hoc epicycles designed to lessen the impact of various arguments which seem to reveal contradictions within the doctrines and claims of your religion. Some of those epicycles are fairly persuasive and do a pretty good job of repelling certain criticisms — clearly there are many poor arguments against Christianity, and against other religions as well — but some of the epicycles (and again, I think the ones dealing with theodicy are the chief example here) are genuinely pretty unpersuasive in the eyes of those who have not already taken to heart the centra faith-based axiom that Christianity, despite its myriad apparent contradictions, is true.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
Yes, I know what theodicy is. I’ve thought a lot about it too, and I’ve looked into many of the various answers which sincere Christians have offered as solutions. Maybe, though, the fact that over the course of 2,000+ years of Christianity (and, of course, centuries of Judaism before that) so many people have had to come up with so many different answers points to something: None of their answers have been very good! None of them have made much sense, or satisfactorily answered the problem at hand without highlighting important contradictions within the logic of the faith.
The core dilemma here is that Christianity is very explicitly dedicated to, among others, two key claims about God: 1. He is benevolent, loving, and invested not only in the future of humanity as a whole, but in the well-being and spiritual life of each individual living human. 2. He intervenes, at least subtly, in the lives of individuals, to effectuate positive life outcomes for them.Those two claims are what make theodicy so incredibly difficult for Christianity specifically to deal with.
Paganism has no problem explaining why something like a natural disaster happens. The various gods and supernatural entities are capricious, they’re in competition with each other, they frequently act wrathful or even tyrannical, and humans’ primary relationship with them is transactional. We propitiate the gods by offering them praise and things of value, so that we can remain in their favor and persuade them to intervene helpfully on our behalf, and to not curse us or slaughter us. This view of the order of the world leaves much to be desired emotionally; it offers little in the way of a message of hope, love, inspiration, and salvation. But if nothing else, it makes it very easy to explain the wanton suffering which so many humans experience — and not always at the hands of each other — without producing any cracks at the heart of the religion.
Judaism, too, famously has a certain fatalism and moral ambivalence about God. The Old Testament, as you note, features many episodes in which God acts wrathfully and in a way which, if a human ruler acted the same way, we would recognize as tyrannical or even monstrous. (Of course, Judaism also offers an explanation: We deserved it then, and we’ll probably deserve it again in the future. God doesn’t especially love the Jews, even if they are his chosen people, and he’ll gladly throw any individual Jews into a shredder if they disappoint him — and that’s to say nothing of what he will do, or instruct the Jews to do on his behalf, to the gentiles!)
In contrast, I think Christianity is really at a loss when dealing with natural disasters of this nature, though. Theodicy is uniquely corrosive to the doctrines of Christianity, which is why so many of its theologians have obsessed about it, and why they’ve reached for such contradictory answers. Of the three explanations you put forward, at least two of them are wildly insufficient to deal with a problem of the magnitude of the example I offered. In fact, one of them —
Still others say that we couldn't have free will without evil existing in the world.
— doesn’t address natural disasters at all! Sure, I can totally understand and appreciate the idea that a world in which humans have free will is necessarily a world in which humans have the power to murder each other, to make war on each other, to firebomb each other’s cities, etc. That has nothing to do with a natural disaster, though. Whether or not humans have free will would have made no difference in the outcome of an earthquake or tsunami; again, the only “free will” any human exercised was the “choice” to happen to be in its path. (Not a choice at all, of course, since nobody could have predicted it nor seen it coming.) It isn’t even a “problem of evil”, since “evil” implies intention, and a tsunami has none. Any supernatural entity which did intentionally send that tsunami toward blameless human habitation would indeed be evil, and any supposedly benevolent supernatural entity which could have prevented it but chose otherwise is, at best, ineffectual.
As for one of your other proposed explanations —
Others say evil exists to help teach us to become good.
— you must recognize why non-Christians find this answer so exasperating. Suppose I’m a child, and I break some sort of rule. To punish me and to teach me a lesson, my father strangles one of my siblings to death in front of me. Obviously if a human father did this, we would universally recognize it as psychopathic. No benevolent person acting out of love would do so. So, if the Christian God did indeed intentionally make the tsunami happen, in order to teach people a lesson, what does it actually mean to say that this same God “loves us”?
That leaves your third explanation — the one you put first, which may be seen as implying you lean toward it:
Some say it's because the devil is still at work in the world with his demons, implying God isn't fully omnipotent as we might understand it.
I mean, isn’t this getting pretty dangerously close to paganism, or at best Henotheism? There are many powerful supernatural entities at work in the world, and God is, at best, only arguably the strongest? He can intervene in people’s lives sometimes, to help with relatively quotidian issues — you can pray to him before an important job interview, and maybe he’ll subtly help that interview go well for you — but he can’t reliably do anything about the really big stuff if there’s some other entity, like Satan, who’s directly working against him. This is, again, satisfactory to me as a plausible explanation for how the world actually works, but it seems to be in contradiction with some of Christianity’s stronger claims about God’s omnipotence.
I want to be clear that I’m not saying any of this because I hate Christianity. I’m not some fire-breathing atheist like I was when I was younger. I would like very much if Christianity were true, and if someone could provide to me an answer to these questions which I could psychologically wrap my head around. I’ve prayed to God myself, and even explicitly to Jesus Christ. I’ve no idea if any of these prayers produced a tangible effect on the world, although I do know that they produced some level of internal comfort within me.
Still, though, the 2004 tsunami, and then Hurricane Katrina the very next year, made a very profound effect on me. Seeing that level of wanton suffering (some of the footage of people being swallowed by the floods is still seared into my brain) delivered to people who had done nothing particularly wrong, while so many individuals who were so much more blameworthy continued to prosper unharmed, put theodicy at the very front of my mind at the very point in my life in which I was first starting to ponder these religious questions. Christians seem two-faced about the issue. When confronted directly about it they’ll claim that God isn’t as omnipotent as we think, and therefore he simply can’t be expected to step in and save people from things like this; in their own lives, though, they routinely pray for God to intervene on their behalf in issues which have, comparatively, so much less importance.
@FCfromSSC claimed below that Christians do not expect God to make any changes to anyone’s appointed hour of death, but this is directly belied by Christians’ actions. God can help you get a raise at work, but he can’t help you not get hit by a car? Christians pray for each others’ safety and health all the time. They pray before surgeries, before flights, before risky endeavors, etc. If they don’t expect these prayers to do anything, then is God no more than a therapist? Just there to be a sounding board for whatever’s making us anxious, to help us order our internal lives and soothe ourselves? This seems highly unsatisfactory compared to the loftier claims which the Bible seems, to me, to make about God’s capabilities.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
I’m very confident that Christians pray that, for example, their children with leukemia are delivered from it, or that their child survives an impending major/risky surgery. This seems flatly incompatible with the claim that Christians don’t expect prayer to change the hour when death will arrive.
Many pagan societies were at the same level of technological development as their Abrahamic/Confucian contemporaries, though. They weren’t comparatively primitive. They were defeated militarily, yes, but it’s nowhere near as simple as saying that this was because their societies were not able to maintain civilization and technology while the non-pagan ones were.
A huge number of the “conversions” of pagans to Christianity were compelled by military force and just straight-up slaughter and torture. Charlemagne had to fight the brutal thirty-year Saxon Wars to conquer, subjugate, and forcibly convert the pagan Saxons, who were a peer society.
The Northern Crusades were fought in the 12th century to conquer and forcibly convert the pagan Slavic, Baltic, and Finnic people, who had managed to resist Christianization over a thousand years after the birth of Christ. These peoples were not savages living in mud-huts.
The Muslim conquest of the Zoroastrian Persians led to such brutal persecution of those who refused to accept Islamization that they had to flee all the way to the Indian subcontinent, where their modern descendants, the Parsees, are very disproportionately successful and wealthy relative not only to Hindus but also to the Abrahamic Muslims who, in your formulation, should be the ones who are the most successful and civilized.
Abrahamic religions didn’t simply “win in the marketplace of ideas.” Certainly a great number of conversion were sincere! A much larger number of them, though, were made either out of political/economic considerations — leaders wishing to become integrated into the political and financial networks emanating from the Christian Mediterranean — or by force. We didn’t have any opportunity to observe how a pagan society with a European level of human capital would have handled the Industrial Revolution, as they’d all been wiped out hundreds of years prior. The closest example we do have — Japan post-Meiji Restoration — is one of the most successful and civilized industrial societies on earth. I think it’s wildly dishonest to claim that paganism can’t sustain civilization or technology, when we simply have no idea whether or not it could. We have little to no data to work with.
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