OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Put it this way - do you think there's any chance you're going to convince me, or alter my views here? Am I going to read your posts and go, "Oh my gosh! You're right! Everything I believe is ridiculous and false!"
Sometimes I think it's best to ask ourselves questions like, "What's the point of this conversation?", or "What am I going to achieve in this conversation?" In this case, my hope is that I might be able to show you that religious people aren't necessarily stupid, dogmatic, or malevolent. I doubt I can convince you that God exists, but maybe I can show you that it's possible to be religious and at the same time thoughtful, humane, rational, kind, and so on. If you come away from this conversation thinking, "Olive may believe some absurd things, but he's a smart guy and I enjoyed talking to him", I will rate that Mission Accomplished.
Maybe that's optimistic. I don't know. But I think it's a more achievable goal than the scales falling from your eyes.
Likewise in reverse. Okay, you're an atheist and you think that all religions are false, including my own. I have registered this fact. What now? I don't think you're really making arguments in favour of that claim, which might convince me or a bystander? It feels to me like you're engaging in social shaming, or perhaps meta-debate - that is, trying to argue that religious people should be shamed and put outside the circle of people who get to engage in rational dialogue here. Is that a fair characterisation?
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Well, to an extent, yes - we can only speculate about God with fear and trembling. The parable of Augustine and the seashell is an appropriate one, and it's not for nothing that the seashell is a symbol of theology.
There might be an amount we can discern about God from nature alone - and that way lies a conversation about deism or natural theology - but most religious traditions supplement this with the idea that God has revealed himself or self-disclosed in some way. For Christians, there may have been many such disclosures, but the fullest and most definitive revelation is in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The upshot is that we can know some things about God because God has revealed them to us.
As for my use of scripture - I notice you didn't make any actual argument against my use of scripture. So I will continue to hope for the welfare and salvation of many.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Personally, I believe it's unwise and probably impious for humans to speculate too confidently on the fate of individual souls. I don't know the final disposition of every soul. Fortunately, I don't believe I need to. That is a matter that I am quite happy to leave up to God.
However, while I don't know specifics, I trust that whatever God intends is both just and merciful, since that is his nature, and in that spirit I hope earnestly for the salvation and eternal wellbeing of all, including those non-Christians whom I love, and those whom I ought to love (for there are many I should love, and yet struggle to).
Scripturally, I find the idea that salvation is restricted only to those who have confessed Christ explicitly to be difficult to justify - obviously people before Jesus were saved (e.g. in Luke 16:19-31, Jesus speaks of Abraham in heaven, and the cloud of witnesses in Hebrews 11-12 seems suggestive), and the New Testament holds out explicit hope for others (e.g. 1 Cor 7:12-16 seems to suggest that an unbeliever married to a believer might be 'made holy' through the believing partner, and even be saved through them). So in that sense, if I think about those I love who don't believe, whether they be family or friends or romantic partners, I hope and pray that, should it be necessary, my faith might cover them as well.
Maybe that sounds a bit sappy, but I don't feel ashamed in any way. Why would I not hope for the salvation of many? You might suggest that some of those I hope for don't deserve salvation, but then, none of us deserve salvation. God offers it to us anyway. That grace - unearned, unmerited, yet overwhelming in its love - is what I'm responding to in my faith. And that gives me hope for everyone.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
That's not an option.
It's something that a handful of radicals talk about on the internet, mostly alongside extreme ignorance of the effects of any of the policies they symbolically recommend, but it has no purchase with the actual electorate.
As Ashlael notes, Australians care about energy prices. Energy prices win (or lose) elections, and if the Australian public feels the pinch of energy costs, or worse, starts feeling a measurable decrease in standard of living, they will turf out any government that seems responsible for it.
Climate change activists have been complaining about this for a long time, actually - the moment it hits the hip pocket, the public always pick side "lower prices, worry about climate change later". We're willing to vote for lower emissions and growth, but we absolutely will not vote for lower emissions at the cost of growth.
Degrowth is dead in the starting gates. It's not happening.
Ironically, I think the combination of left-wing policies actually makes it less likely, not more - the white-supremacism-and-colonialism argument only has appeal to liberal middle-class white people who feel a sense of collective guilt. However, as Australia becomes more ethnically and culturally diverse, that means that guilty white people will only come to make up less and less of the overall population, and have less power as a voting bloc. Chinese or Indian migrants largely do not respond to arguments about white supremacism or colonialism or historical injustices, for hopefully obvious reasons.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I feel obliged to note that I specifically said nothing of the sort, and I object to the idea that any given theist should be on the hook for anything said by any other theist.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
It's hard to judge - the stats that we have generally compare members of the Stolen Generations (in Australia) typically compare them either to non-Aboriginal people of the same cohort, or to other Aboriginal people in general, rather than to members of remote communities.
These statistics suggest that an SGer is on average worse off than the median Aboriginal - but as you say, SGers were specifically selected from among the worst-off Aboriginals. Is an SGer better or worse off than they would have been had they not been removed? That's the question we don't have an answer for. AIHW's full 2018 report is here. From page 74 on they show that SGers were worse off than 'the reference group', but the reference group is Aboriginal people in general, not remote communities. We have some stats on health in remote communities here and here, but cross-referencing those is more work than I'm up for at the moment. Suffice to say that we know remote communities are significantly worse off.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
For what it's worth, I'm not a Catholic, trad or otherwise.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I'd request firstly that you not make assumptions about what I know or believe, and secondly that you don't misrepresent me. I haven't ceded anything - I've merely declined to argue for a position that I don't hold.
That said, since moderation has gotten involved, and we're pretty far from anything about the top-level comment, would you like to call the conversation here?
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I don't think there was ever anything in the comics at the time, i.e. the 1940s, indicating how Captain America voted? He's always been a character deliberately open to interpretation - he stands for the best vision of what America can be, but he shifts over time and is often strategically vague so that readers can project their idea of what that means on to him.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
...I...
...do you think you've won a debate?
What?
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Let's recap here:
Olive: "Is there a specific religious claim you'd like to debate?"
French: "The efficacy of prayer."
Olive: "I don't believe in the efficacy of prayer in the way you've described. I do believe in other potential effects it has, but those don't seem to be what you're interested in."
French: "That's cope!"
Olive: "...I'm sorry, is your position that I ought to defend a position that I don't believe is true?"
French: "Still cope!"
Look, I don't believe I'm obligated to defend a strawman or weak-man position just because you think I ought to.
I'm not arguing to you that prayer has effects on on the person praying (in part because that's so obviously true that it'd be pointless), and in fact I explicitly acknowledged that you don't care about that.
What I'm asking you is - do you want me to take a position I don't believe is true? Why? Moreover, why should prayer not having immediate empirical results matter? Christianity or indeed any other religion isn't built on the material efficacy of prayer.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I don't see where it's cope to say that one of prayer's effects is on the person praying. At any rate, in that very sentence I said that you don't seem to care about that.
Sp to clarify - are you demanding that I defend a position that I do not hold?
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Yes, I am profoundly grateful for the way that living in Australia makes so many of these arguments moot.
Turnout is irrelevant. All elections have 90+% turnout. It is impossible to win by turning out the base.
All votes must be full-preferential. It is therefore impossible to harm your own side by voting third party. All votes will ultimately flow to either the first-ranked or the second-ranked party.
The Australian system isn't perfect and it's possible to contrive weird edge cases where you get unintuitive results, but in the main it is just so much better than, well, almost any other country in the world (and especially messes like the US or the UK) that I have to feel grateful for it.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Why would that be something I need to prove?
I grant that prayer doesn't have reliable, repeatable empirical effects; at least, not on the external world. I'm not going to argue otherwise.
I'm prepared to argue that prayer has significant effects on the person who prays, as well as on communities of prayer, and I'm also quite prepared to say that God acts in the world in various mysterious ways according to his will (albeit not in a mechanistic way where chanting the right magic words always produces a particular outcome), but you don't seem to care about either of those things.
So, sure, prayer does not do the thing that you've arbitrarily decided it ought to do. So what?
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
The effects of prayer, if any, seem like another more specific issue than the broader veracity of any particular religion. At any rate, you can't leap from "prayer does not have detectable empirical effects" to "God does not exist". That too is a non sequitur.
As for the rest... that just seems like bare assertion, to me. If there were real 'Potterists', who believe in the literal historical truth of the Harry Potter novels, I would not find their beliefs plausible. There are a number of arguments I would make against them, from the known history of that text to its inconsistency with reality as I understand it. But Potterism being wrong does not do anything to demonstrate that Christianity is also wrong. Potterism's claims are false, but since Christianity's claims are different, refuting Potterism does nothing to Christianity. It would just be a straw man. Christianity would require refutation on its own merits. Shoot down Harry all you like; Jesus is not hiding behind him.
(I am not clear, incidentally, on why ghosts couldn't exist - personally I am an agnostic on the matter. G. K. Chesterton actually addresses the question in the final chapter of Orthodoxy - you exclude even the possibility of ghosts because, whether rightly or wrongly, you have a dogma that says that ghosts can't exist. That doesn't mean you're wrong - dogmas aren't bad; we all have dogmas - but just that it's a judgement that precedes observation.)
Anyway, if you would like to narrow down a specific claim that you object to, I suppose I could make an affirmative case for it and we could have a debate?
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I'd caution you that maybe you don't know what I'm looking for in terms of my spiritual life or faith. I certainly don't perceive myself as looking for mere increasing physical mastery of the universe. On the contrary, that strikes me as a rather paltry prize.
At any rate, I don't see how anything that you've just mentioned demonstrates that any given religion is false. It's true that science is very productive, and has enabled humans to do many impressive things. None of that entails atheism or materialism or metaphysical naturalism. I'm just going to shrug and say, "so what?" You can't leap from any given scientific discovery to materialism. It's a non sequitur.
I don't underrate the value of scientific discovery, nor even the value of physical mastery of the universe. It's just not everything.
Anyway, I did not mention prayer, so I don't know why you're bringing that up. And if you think that the fact that keyboards work is 'proof of [your] world view', then... you're just wrong. "Keyboards therefore atheism" is just as wrong, and for just the same reason, as "tides therefore theism".
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Let me remind you of something you just said:
The universe is a physical system that can be entirely explained by natural laws that we can discover.
This is something you asserted without evidence. Should it therefore be dismissed without evidence?
That claim broadly approximates to what I would term metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism is a claim about ontology - about what sorts of things can conceivably exist. Because it's an umbrella theory about what can or cannot exist, it can't be empirically verified - like all ontologies, it's a matter of philosophical speculation, rather than empirical study.
(I have more thoughts about it, including more controversial ones - specifically I think that the idea of 'nature' is philosophically incoherent, and that 'natural' and 'supernatural' are words without meaning - but I'll leave those aside for now.)
The problem is that you are firstly making a bunch of evidence-free assertions while loudly condemning others for (supposedly) doing so, and secondly smugly dismissing entire schools of thought without differentiating them from each other, or even, it seems, making a cursory attempt to understand what they actually say. You say that you think "a lot of religious people know it is all fake in their heart". Please consider that you may be typical-minding.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Well, now you're back to just appeals to incredulity, and flatly asserting that religious people are wrong. You're neither appealing to empirical evidence nor to any kind of reason. Heck, you're not even replying to anything I actually said.
For the record, there's no empirical test for metaphysical naturalism. There can't be - it's not logically possible, since naturalism is a claim prior to empirical observation.
You may also want to consider that 'fantastical' is not proof that a claim is false. Maybe God sounds fantastical to you - but so what? Plenty of true things sound fantastical. "Does this sound intuitively ridiculous to me?" is not a good metric.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
FCfromSSC already covered much of what I would want to - that what you take as obvious is not actually obvious. It may seem clear to you that the universe is merely a physical system, but that's actually a potentially contentious judgement, based on priors that you learned and assimilated when you were a small child. Part of the value of philosophy, not to mention theology, is that it teaches you to identify and question some of those priors. Is the universe a physical system, construed such as to eliminate any possibility of the existence of God? (Also, define 'physical', 'system', and 'God'.) The answer to that question is not obvious. Not as much as you suggest. And considering that a very large number of undeniably intelligent people have taken different views to you on it, I think it would be appropriate to take a more humble approach here. Again, you might be right, but you're not obviously right, in a way that admits of no rational questioning.
Two other side points, I think.
Firstly, I think you rely too much on a kind of appeal to incredulity here. This person hypothetically raised in ignorance of major religions wouldn't believe in 'all kinds of crazy magic'? That doesn't seem obvious to me. People often idiosyncratically come to believe all sorts of strange things. If someone were raised in the absence of any existing religious dogma, that doesn't necessarily mean they would become a hard-headed atheist. They might embrace all sorts of superstitions. Lots of people are plenty superstitious as it is, even people who aren't particularly religious.
Of course, you might mean that this hypothetical person was raised with some kind of specific education against superstition of religion (maybe they were taught rationality, critical thinking, the scientific method, etc.), but what that basically rounds to is "if someone were taught my point-of-view as a child they would agree with me". Quite possibly so! But how is that different to someone who was taught a different point-of-view, such as a religious one? The argument-from-childhood-indoctrination proves too much.
Secondly, I'm not sure what the relevance of aliens here is? Evangelising aliens might be an interesting question, but what makes it in principle different to the first contact between representatives of a religious tradition and people unfamiliar with it? Matteo Ricci or Francis Xavier had to explain Christianity to people who had never heard of it before, and the Chinese or Japanese did not automatically laugh their heads off. The ideas were taken seriously, and some people converted. Aliens don't seem any different. I'm sure any actually-existing aliens would be quite unusual and religious dialogue with them would require us to do a lot to try to understand their nature, biology, culture, mode of thought, any existing religious or spiritual beliefs, and so on. I do not see any reasonable justification for assuming that aliens would all be Dawkins-like atheists. I have no idea what aliens would believe, if anything, and neither do you, or even whether or not aliens might exist. I do not think we can draw any conclusions from the hypothetical beliefs of hypothetical beings.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I'm certainly not trying to claim a special genius or anything - on the contrary, I think the implication that being Blue Tribe is desirable or preferable to being Red Tribe is probably just prejudice or tribal bigotry. I'm just trying to be honest about being firstly a believer and secondly from a stereotyically Blue Tribe background.
As for the other half, I'm not particularly inclined to debate theism with you in this moment. If you're an atheist, well, good for you, I suppose? I disagree, and would gently suggest that if you think that atheism is so obvious that any halfway intelligent person should immediately conclude it's true, you might benefit from a little bit more intellectual humility. I'm not going to argue that theism in general or Christianity specifically is definitely true, but I would suggest that a sufficient number of undeniably intelligent and introspective people have believed that you shouldn't be surprised. Again, theism might be untrue, but it is not so obviously untrue that any intelligent and reflective person would automatically realise that. There are too many intelligent theists out there for it to be so.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Well, that's a very uncharitable way of putting it. I'm not trying to feel superior to anyone. Nor do I feel like I'm being hypocritical in any way.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I'd categorise 'relatives' differently, I think? My relatives are not the people I agree with. My relatives are something closer or more intuitive than that. I'd say it's more about where I instinctively feel at home, or what feels natural to me, and that means that things like language or custom count for more than agreement on any specific issue.
That said, you are correct that this is a semantic dispute. We would presumably both agree that in terms of custom or background, I fit with other well-educated middle-class suburban people in knowledge careers, even though in terms of ideas or substantive metaphysical beliefs, I probably fit in better with other groups.
I think custom is a better way to define the boundaries of 'tribe', and closer to the way Scott defined it in his original essay, but you can make words mean anything you like, so that's up to you, I guess.
(For what it's worth, I'm not downvoting you - I don't downvote conversations that I'm enjoying, and I don't downvote just because of disagreement. I only downvote if I believe the Motte would be better off if that post didn't exist, and you've certainly not hit that point for me.)
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I think that relies on a value judgement about what 'the big stuff' is. The issues that actually divide people in terms of social class are not necessarily the most important issues in an objective sense. On one level, it's hard to think of an issue bigger than the existence of God, or the truth of a given religion - whether Christianity or Islam or somesuch is true or false would affect pretty much everything. Yet I think tribe or class sometimes hinges on much smaller things than that, like the clothes you wear, the accent you speak with, or the kinds of parties you go to. That's why, to stick with Christianity, an Episcopalian bishop from New Hampshire and a charismatic evangelical from rural Georgia are very much not the same tribe, despite ostensibly being of the same religion.
I don't think I've asserted anywhere that it should be the baseline view, or that you or anybody else must adopt it. I'm quite conscious that it's a minority view. On the Motte and in rationalist or rationalist-adjacent spaces in general, it's a small minority. In the West more generally, Christianity has been declining for decades and I expect it to continue doing so.
However, none of that suggests to me either that Christianity is wrong, that I should not adopt a Christian worldview, or that I shouldn't be treated with the same respect due to anyone who makes a good-faith if fallible attempt to understand the world.
More options
Context Copy link