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Some Guy writes a riveting blog which often includes extended anecdotes purportedly from his childhood and youth. Most of these mix horror, humor, pathos, and sentimentality into a compelling brew. One of his stories ends with his Dad telling him "I don’t fucking care if you’re a faggot or anything. You’re still my son and I still love you". Another is titled "My Micronesian Stepfather was a White Supremacist Amateur Elvis Impersonator". It seems unlikely that all the stories could possibly be true; if they are his is truly one of the more unlucky childhoods of anyone in the United States, and his ability to transcend it to become (what seems to be) an upstanding citizen is miraculous. But in another sense, it doesn't really matter if these stories are true: even as fiction they lose none of their power. Each of these stories could happen, and they contain a core of truth about large swaths of our society.
Some Guy seems to (cautiously and mildly) align with Jordan Peterson on the topic of Cultural Christianity: that is, the concept that even if you don't believe in God, or the Incarnation, or the Resurrection, you should still go to church and perform the outward rituals and ceremonies of the Christian religion. Christianity has, as a meme, proved itself to be pro-social, pro-growth, and pro-peace and we don't have a better replacement. Better to treat Christianity as a Chesterton Fence and embrace it even against your reason than to cast it aside and be left in a Nietzschean void.
Some Guy recently published an article in favor of Cultural Christianity. His main goal in the essay seems to be to convince sympathetic atheists to attend religious services. He calls the "obvious" objections distractions, and seems to think that many of these objections will be naturally addressed through interactions with the religious community. If he is holds orthodox Christian views (I believe he is Roman Catholic), then such questions could only be addressed truthfully in the Church; but he asks these atheists to attend synagogues and mosques as well. Perhaps he considers any religious exposure a positive step in an atheist's journey towards Christ.
In his next section of the essay on Dawkins, he reveals another glimpse into the way he thinks of Christianity. Given the question "Do you believe Jesus died for our sins?", he answers "Yes, but you have to begin from the position that Jesus wasn’t just some guy who arbitrarily claimed a particular title. It was as if morality itself became a person. I find the moral innovations of Jesus to be something close to the mechanical equivalent of finding a functioning F-35 jet plane in ancient Egypt. Do you know what people were like before that guy got nailed to a cross? Crack open a history book.". What an astonishing thing to say! "Jesus died for our sins" is "real" because after Jesus died, we literally sinned less! We went from barbaric and cruel to civilized and moral*.
I'm guessing that the following is a fair summary of Some Guy's theology: Some Guy believes in God. He believes God reveals himself in various ways. Humanity, in its own way, tries to comprehend the transcendent Truth, and does so imperfectly. Over time, humanity gains more and more knowledge of God. Judaism may have been the best human effort to understand God until Christianity came along; and still holds much wisdom and truth. But both Judaism and Christianity merely scratch the surface of what we can possibly understand about God and should not be treated as the final or only word on the matter. The Gospel narrative was humanity's closest interaction with the divine (even if there wasn't a literal incarnation) and the resulting Testament gives us an opaque glimpse into that divine, using the only means that imperfect and distinctly sub-divine humanity could use. "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."
I disagree with this argument, but I also find it difficult to counter. It is a much more compelling line (though superficially similar) to the "all religions contain truth" platitude that many Gen Xers felt was the best way to end uncomfortable conversations in the 90s and early 00s. I do hold that humanity can never know everything about God (mathematically, this is a certainty: He is infinite, we are finite). And much like I enjoy Some Guy's writing even if his stories are fiction, I accept that there is much wisdom and truth in parables and fiction. As Jordan Peterson might say, "there is more truth in Dostoyevsky than in a newspaper". People will fight and die for an idea much more readily than they will fight and die for a fact. Someone who "believes" in Christianity in such a way could even say the Nicene Creed with a clear conscience: while the words may not be literally true they come the closest that we can come today in capturing our understanding of God.
And yet, the Bible makes many assertions that do not countenance ambiguity. "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.". "Today you will be with me in paradise". And "For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! .... If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable." These are not the words of apostles that are struggling to describe the transcendent: these are definitive statements made by those who believed they were writing factual accounts. Without the literal Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, we truly do not have hope and are among all the most to be pitied.
*Empirically, I do not find this argument compelling...humanity even in "Christian" Europe remained quite "cruel" (at least by modern sensibilities). Yes, Christianity elevated the status of children, women, and the downtrodden; but wars and violence continued (and continue) to be the norm.
Preindustrial societies were simply like that. Blackest Africa is like that today because it's a preindustrial society.
Choose any city on earth to be born in the lowest social order at a randomly selected point in the medieval period: I'm expecting that city to be very much within the Christian sphere.
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I find this an especially bizarre position to take because, quite apart from the question of whether or not Jesus is actually the messiah, the Son of God, on which everything turns... this doesn't seem particularly true to Jesus' own self-presentation?
If we trust the gospels, Jesus does not present himself as overturning or revolutionising all prior moral thought. On the contrary, when Jesus is challenged on moral questions, he typically returns to what has been written before him, and enjoins loyalty to already-revealed principles. Jesus criticises other people for their inconsistency with past morality (e.g. Mt 15:1-9), and demands others be consistent with it (e.g. Mt 19:16-22, Mt 22:34-40). Jesus consistently presents his moral teaching as a return to the origins (e.g. Mt:19:3-9). (I've only cited Matthew here for convenience, but this passages are attested in the other synoptics as well.)
It seems strange to praise a man for being revolutionary when in his own words he is constantly urging people to return to what is taught in the law and in the tradition. Is Jesus a radical prophet, or a conventional teacher? You can easily find both narratives around him.
It rather reminds me of Chesterton's Orthodoxy:
Likewise I often read about Jesus as being this wild moral revolutionary, or Jesus as just a simple re-presenter of what came before (this is particularly common from the de-mythologisers, who Jesus as merely one more eschatological prophet or messiah claimant in the ferment of first century Judea), and it seems strange to me that the same man be both a radical up-ender of tradition, and a staid product of tradition; or that he be both moral visionary issuing teachings that no one had heard before, and also simply reminding people of what they already knew.
Or perhaps the conclusion to draw is that he's actually the loyal one. He's the one in the balance point, at the centre, a slave of neither past nor future.
So did Zoroaster and Confucius. So did Mohammed and Joseph Smith. This is the standard play book of monotheistic cults. They claim they are just reclaiming the truth that the one true god proclaimed thousands of years ago.
I'm not sure about Zoroaster, actually, but certainly Kongzi presented himself as merely a humble servant of the ancient ways. Muhammad is a bit more complicated - Muhammad does not present himself as merely reiterating an old law, but rather as the product of a new revelation, given to him in the very moment that he proclaimed it. Joseph Smith is someone I'd put in another category entirely; he was a revivalist or restorationist, proclaiming not a return to living tradition, but rather the need for a radical break with that tradition in favour of conforming to the way of a (mostly imagined) ancient ideal.
Jesus, Kongzi, Muhammad, and Joseph Smith all talk about the past to an extent, but I don't think I'd say they all share an identical playbook. They do all posit some sort of corruption over the years which needs to be corrected, but the ways they conceptualise the past and the corruption in question are not all that similar.
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I'm no scholar but the answer may be two authors/traditions. The Q source of Jesus' teachings along with the book of James representing the Jewish Jesus' traditional arguments, and the rest coming out of Paul's more radical anti-law, platonic tradition that survived into modern Christianity while the James school died out.
But I agree that from what I've read, Jesus as super moral innovator seems a bit overboard, I have to imagine he cribbed a good amount from John the Baptist and there was a kind of apocalyptic Jewish movement he was joining and learning from.
As an atheist I just feel like when the Christians try to make any kind of historical argument I find it unconvincing because they gloss over the details. Obviously there's no perfect person, Jesus had flaws, and the fact he is so worshipped today is as much an accident as history as how much Mohammed is worshipped. The issue with Christians is they really want Jesus to be the messiah. If they dropped that then they could actually understand something about themselves, and then I would feel comfortable worshipping with them.
That's the whole point of Christianity. If Jesus is just some preacher, and not the son of God, the whole enterprise is worthless. What you ask of Christians is just as incoherent as asking chefs to "just drop all that cooking stuff".
Not worthless, and you could come up with a coherent subset of teachings; the result just tautologically wouldn't be Christian. "Christ" wasn't a surname; it's Greek for "anointed one", like Hebrew "Messiah".
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Gee wiz, The fastest way to become an atheist is to learn the history of the early jewish/christian faith and the shenanigans the people who wrote, and over-wrote the bible got into.
An ostensibly pagan polytheistic faith, rewritten to drop all the other gods and focus purely on the god of war. Later reclaimed and used as a cudgel by the romans to consolidate a fraying empire.
Pagan wasn’t even a term coined yet by the time of Christ…
Doesn't really matter, does it? They had a bog standard polytheistic mish-mash of various gods / "elohim". With serious cribbing from other religions in the region. Half the shit in the old testament is Egyptian/Babylonian with the names filed off.
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I really disagree with this, I think the analogy would be that if all the cooks in Italy believed their work was done in the name of the flying spaghetti monster, it wouldn't make all of their work worthless.
I think it's really important that Christianity imported Jewish morality to pagan Europe along with some Platonic philosophy, and that its followers stemmed the tide of Islam. Islam or something like it may be contingent on Christianity, you start getting into a rabbit hole of alt-history, but I think a pagan Europe would have been much weaker regardless and that would have been bad. Europe as it existed with Christianity basically created modern society, vastly increased the wealth of the world, and vastly decreased its overall suffering. If Jesus died for anything, you can at least say it was for that, even if he wasn't really God. And he did get a good millenium of unquestioning worship too, it's just that it's over with now.
Either way, Merry Christmas!
Not really. Christianity is still the world’s biggest religion, and atheism a fringe thing in most places.
Given birth rates it’s questionable atheism will even be around in a few centuries
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But we know that James and Paul were, at least after some time, not leaders of conflicting factions, if you think Acts 15 is at all historical.
I'm curious what you have in mind here.
Well, he was claiming that, and fit some prophecies.
What does worship even mean here?
I don't think they were in total conflict, I just think like I said they were different schools. I also think Acts was written by the Paul school so it's going to paper over what might have been more difficult disagreements to make it look like everyone important was okay with what Paul was doing.
Worshipping with no Jesus messiah would just be worshipping God, the sacredness of each human's existence, the mystery of consciousness, the light of love and morality in a vast dark universe, channeled through the best moral teachers we have including Jesus, yada yada. Yeah it's kind of just new-age humanism, and all the mechanisms keeping the church together would probably fall apart, but I do think if everyone could let go of the superstitions and utopian ideas while still keeping the machinery running there'd still be plenty worth worshipping in neo-Christianity.
But you said you were an atheist?
Where do you think Paul got his teachings?
I think there a few seemingly fundamental mysteries of existence that make the universe a bit more than the dark void that atheists typically characterize it as, but I would bet against those mysteries pointing to some kind of 1 identity "god" type, I don't really know what the other options are, but it's a difficult question. But if I was in a worshipping group, and some people saw it in the "god" style, and I left things more open for myself, it wouldn't be a problem for me. It becomes a problem for me when it's worshipping a human being, or some subset of humanity, as God, because that seems very unlikely to me to be true.
I think there was a lot of intellectual Jewish and Greek thought at the time that an educated Jew like Paul was drawing from, in addition to certainly being inspired by Jesus. I think he clearly responded to Jesus' death differently than original apostles, not having been part of the original group and having visionary experiences afterwards, and I think intellectually he brought in platonic ideas to make sense of them and spread them through his followers. I don't think these ideas were incorporated in the Jewish Jesus groups and I think it was probably a point of tension.
And I just think his attitude in not following Jewish law went beyond Jesus' teachings and was his own innovation. Any of the original 12 could have taken Paul's role as the gentile baptizer, you could imagine half of them or more taking that role considering how many gentiles there are compared to Jews. But it's the outsider who does it and appears to mostly do it on his own. For me that strongly points to Paul having a lot of his own ideas and following them on his own accord, rather than being a outreach plan devised by the original Jewish movement.
What do you make of Peter and unclean foods in Acts? What sorts of things do you think were peculiar to Paul? What do you make of him checking notes with the apostles in Galatians 2?
Interestingly, that bit actually has surprisingly little to do with foods. It tells you what it's on about:
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I think Galatians 2 emphasizes the kind of separateness Paul has with the Jewish sect, you have some calling Paul's authority or teachings into question, probably because of not following the law and the other ideas of Paul, so he goes to get the blessing of the James etc. (who he says added nothing to his message), and they decide to accept what he's doing, but then that's it and he goes back off on his own. I don't think the groups were enemies or cut off from each other, just that they were different groups with differences of belief and that there was probably some tension there.
Specifically I think Paul's peculiar beliefs were in the holy spirit which I think he invented, how rapture/apocalypse works and ideas around afterlife which I think draw from Greek philosophy and Platonism, and not needing to follow Jewish law.
I don't have a ready explanation for the unclean foods thing, but I tend to think that the more visions are involved the less I'm inclined to believe it. It's one thing if Paul has his visions and I think that probably happened, since he seemed very intently motivated by whatever he experienced. I don't think all the other apostles were also getting visions from god, nor do I think they were actually healing people in miraculous ways etc. after Jesus' death. This story is also very convenient for Paul if you have Peter have a vision that confirms that you don't need to follow the law if God says so. Compare that to James 2:8.
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Was Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb ibn Sulaymān al-Tamīmī a radical theologian or a conventional one? Was Jehan Cauvin?
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Cultural Christianity isn’t a real thing. You don’t go around saying ‘Christianity may not be true but it’s closer than anything else’. No, you say ‘Jesus was God who died for your sins and this is what he wants you to do’. Nobody cares about the first statement.
This reminds me of Lewis: either Christ was a liar, a madman, or the Son of God.
The obviously false trilemma.
Lewis is good, but, left out the obvious 4th choice: decades after Jesus's death early Christians exaggerated his works and words to the point of making them miracles and Jesus God on Earth. Those first few decades are spotty in terms of written accounts. These were oral recitations that eventually were written down after a few decades. This view predates Lewis by centuries and there's no way he honestly isn't aware of it. Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson belived some variation of that. This false trilemma isn't Lewis' greatest moment of intellectual integrity.
Seems really odd all of his disciples decided to be killed in a variety of gruesome ways because of some miracles that they never actually witnessed
From "Mormonism: The Control Group For Christianity?" by Scott Alexander:
Interesting, I never knew of this blog post of Scott’s but I’m not sure I find Mormonism all that close of an analogous case. The persecution of early Mormon’s was gentle by comparison to what early Christian’s went through. How many of those witnesses were crucified? Fed to lions? Oh a few villages got burned and then they decided to all run away and give up on preaching? Hmmmmmm
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What a writer he was.
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I don't think decades works. Paul's one of the major authors, and he was a Christian within a few years of Jesus' death. How do you think Paul would have come to believe Jesus was God?
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I don’t find this persuasive. This argument is that there was in fact a different unknowable Jesus. Perhaps. But Lewis is talking about the Jesus of the Bible. He is right with respect to that person (regardless of whether that person was real).
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Which is Jesus is a liar restated (the lies would be in the exaggerations of his followers putting his claims of being the Son of God into his mouth after the fact).
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It’s often forgotten that the original context for this argument wasn’t targeted at atheists, but cultural Christians inclined to Jesusism, and viewing Jesus as a moral teacher rather than a divine figure:
You should notice that his point has a lot in common with the ‘slave morality’ point that following the moral dictates is incredibly foolish if there’s no eternal reward: give away all your possessions? Deny yourself? Be martyred? Such lunacy!
So he’s trying to tell people who believe in Jesus’ morals but not Christianity that Jesus’ morals only make sense if Christianity is true, Jesus was divine with a divine message of rewards for those who follow him. Otherwise, it’s total lunacy, or a complete lie.
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Eh, the fourth option is that Saul of Tarsus was the liar who corrupted the word of Jesus to further his own interests and strike the killing blow in his persecution of the nascent Christians by twisting the words of their Great Teacher until they became the antithesis of what Jesus truly wished to convey.
Remember, Saul never met the physical Jesus before his crucifixion. In fact in Matthew 24:27 Jesus warns his followers against believing anyone who says they saw Jesus in the wilderness or in a secluded place after he is crucified. And what did Darth Saul do to ingratiate himself with the Christians? Yep, he claimed to "miraculously" see Jesus first in the wilderness (road to Damascus) and then in a secluded place (the Jerusalem Jail where he was held captive).
In the end Saul was successful beyond his wildest dreams when he first set out to persecute the Christians. Not only did he manage to completely pervert the religion of Jesus but like a cuckoo bird he also successfully placed himself into the religion as one of the greatest "followers" of Christ with many billions of people venerating him in the two millennia since he died; he even had the gall to "correct" Peter (Galatians 2:11), the real true greatest follower of Jesus. And worst of all this veneration still continues to this day with no sign of stopping!
TLDR: Christianity got cucked by Saul and still isn't willing to accept what really happened.
The others on the road heard the voice of Saul.
This also does a pretty awful job trying to account for the enormous effort he put into spreading Christianity throughout the world. Not to mention undergoing imprisonments and a host of other ills, culminating, if the tradition is to be believed, in his martyrdom. I can't take this very seriously.
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Well, I mean, how did that work out for him? Did he laugh all the way to the bank? Retire in a villa overlooking Lake Albano?
Nah, he just successfully placed himself into the religion he had nothing do with until well after Christ's death as one of the most venerated saints with his legacy still going extremely strong today everywhere there is any Christianity. Sure he got executed for his beliefs but the long term remembrance he got with at least half of all humans alive today having heard of him (with most having a positive valence) far outweighs merely living out your life in some villa overlooking Lake Albano only to be forgotten by everyone by the year 250 AD.
The man died for his beliefs, and wrote about them extremely eloquently as he awaited his execution. The worst charge that could be leveled against Paul is that he was mistaken. And you know, generally speaking, I don't think he was.
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For sure. I bet he couldn't even feel the pain of suffocating to death under his own weight due to the warm feeling of satisfaction he got from a legacy he didn't have any inclination of at the time.
Now I've been under the impression he was beheaded (as he was a citizen) but yes your point stands.
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In what way did Paul twist Jesus' words or teachings? What is the actual perversion?
For example, the idea of salvation through grace isn't really something Jesus really talked much about himself, that's mostly a creation of post Gospel books.
When Jesus talked about getting into heaven, he was pretty consistently telling people to do specific things to make it in: sell all your possessions, give up your life to follow him, help the poor.
The idea that just believing in him would guarantee you a place in heaven regardless of your actions was basically all added after.
Are you sure? Jesus constantly recommends moral action, but I'd say that even in the synoptics, there seems to be an awareness that this by itself is insufficient? Take, for instance Matthew 19:16-27 (which is triple tradition, cf. Mark 10:17-31, Luke 17:18-30). It seems as though in those passages Jesus presents an impossibly difficult moral demand, the disciples wonder at how salvation may be possible, and Jesus says that it comes only through the action of God. He then goes on to reassure them that everyone who has followed him will be saved.
I find it hard to fit a passage like that into a model that says that Jesus was preaching salvation through good works. Jesus evidently thinks that good works are good, and that people should do them, but they do not seem to be sufficient for him. Some divine action seems to be necessary to bridge the gap between human moral effort and salvation.
See also passages like Luke 7:36-49, in which Jesus appears to suggest that a sinful woman has been forgiven on the basis of her great faith, rather than because of any meritorious work of righteousness in the world.
This story also seems reminiscent of the Anointing at Bethany (Matthew 26:6-13, Mark 14:3-9), where the disciples protest at an extravagant sign of faith on the basis that the money could have been more efficiently allocated to the poor. Jesus chastises them and seems to approve of the woman's display of faith. (Take that, effective altruists?) Again it seems like for Jesus there is more to righteousness or salvation than the corporal works of mercy.
You may not count the epilogue to Mark as original to the gospel, and you may discount post-Resurrection appearances, but Mark 16:16 is also a statement directly attributed to Jesus saying that those who believe will be saved. You might also consider Matthew 10:8 ("You received without payment; give without payment") as relevant to Jesus' understanding of how divine favour operates?
It's true that in the synoptics Jesus never says in so many words "salvation is by grace", but there is enough, I think, to say that for Jesus salvation is something that involves both a kind of unilateral divine action, reaching out to sinful humankind, and the faithful human response to that action. The language of grace appears elsewhere. But I think it's plausible enough to see that language as an attempt to faithfully articulate a real feature of the teachings and actions of Jesus in his life.
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Perhaps you're excepting John, but it's pretty clear in John.
Jesus also forgives sins in the gospels.
I don't think Jesus actually intended every person to do every thing he spoke of. For example, he probably didn't intend for everyone to be gauging out their eyes.
I do think John deviates a bit from the other three to a suspicious extent, but what specifically are you talking about? I poked around in there but I didn't see anything that was particularly clear on salvation through grace.
Sure, but there's a big difference between "I forgive this particular act" and "mere belief in me automatically erases all acts"
Sure, maybe he's being metaphorical with some of this, but "he actually meant this unrelated and almost directly contradictory thing" should at least raise some eyebrows.
"And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell." probably doesn't mean "don't worry about it, your sins don't matter as long as you believe"
It's pretty clear that we're saved by the father drawing us (see e.g. John 6:46 and surrounding), and it's by belief (same area, also John 3:16).
See the above reference in John. But no, it wasn't individual acts, but statements in general. See, e.g. Matthew 9:2.
What unrelated and almost directly contradictory things are you thinking of?
Correct, it doesn't. Sin's an awfully serious thing. Antinomianism is far too prevalent in modern lay Protestantism. We should certainly not be sinning more that grace may abound.
Edit: Should be John 6:44.
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From what I understand, Christianity - at least what we understand now by it - more or less is what Saul created. It's like saying Homer has "cucked" the Iliad - if there were some version of Iliad that is so much better than Homer's and more "true", we certainly don't have it, so what choice is there?
But where do you think Saul got that Christianity from?
There were the apostles, who knew Jesus himself, and Saul confirmed with them that what he was saying was accurate. (See Galatians 2.)
Where Muhammad got Islam from? Where Siddhartha Gautama got Buddhism from?
I'm sure he did, otherwise we'd know nothing about him but instead would know about some other guy that did.
Do you really think that those three figures were gathering knowledge in the same way? That doesn't seem terribly likely to me. They seem pretty different in how they go about things.
I don't know what you're trying to get at there, but I don't see how it interacts with the purpose that I mentioned it for: to indicate that Christianity is not just Pauline, but accurately conforms to what the direct followers of Jesus believes.
No, probably not - each religion's foundation it a rare and complex event which surely has its own peculiarities. My point is rather that the founding of the religion traceable to a person is not some exceptional event - it happens and it's possible. My other point is that foundational concepts of Christianity - such as the sacrifice and the resurrection of Jesus - originated with Saul and thus essentially he couldn't "corrupt" the "true" Christianity any more than Homer could "corrupt" the "true" Iliad.
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Correction: Saul says that Saul confirmed with them that what he was saying was accurate. Galatians was written by Saul if the accounts are to be believed.
And it is believed Pauline by basically all scholars. You think he was just being a devious liar in that?
Anyway, Acts also confirms contact with the disciples of Jesus.
No, I'm saying that Saul saying that Saul confirmed with James etc. that what he was teaching was correct doesn't tell us much because of course he would say that.
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Eh, both Jesus and Saul believed that the end of days was supposed to happen soon. I wonder how those early Christians reacted when Jerusalem was razed to the ground and the world kept on ticking.
Presumably they felt pretty vindicated.
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I think the way that Christianity works — and the only way it can work — is if Jesus is perceived as a person in your community and becomes the sole measure of social status within your community. Everything else is corollary to this, an innocent dramatic exaggeration, or mystical poetry. You can learn every theological argument about God and not have your behavior changed; you can be an atheist yet a Bible scholar; and you can be a literalist Bible-thumper who also thumps his family. There’s no shortage of Bible-expert Church-going villainy in the world. But if Jesus (as moral exemplar) is the sole measure of all social status — all social interest, all self-worth, all peer competition and ranking, all value — then this will necessarily change your behavior. You might have your behavior changed kicking and screaming, feeling like a “prisoner of Christ”, or “a servant doing his duty”, or a chained foreign soldier dragged behind Christ’s imperial victory procession, but your behavior will certainly be changed for the better if all socially-mediated reward is contingent upon the imitation of Christ.
Christianity as a spectacle-sport where you hear someone charismatic and then go about your week (unless your whim or nonexistent “self-discipline” tells you to do something) is not its original form. It is amply shown in the primary text document of the religion that participation is cult-like. The apostles give up everything to follow their teacher across the nation. They exist at times in complete poverty. It is required that the church become your new family (Mt 10:37, 12:49). Disagreements between members are mediated by the community and the unrepentant defector is thrown out. The Church Fathers write about banning Christians from ever going to the theater or attending sports. They share everything in common and wash each other’s feet. The religion is called “the Brotherhood” — women don’t speak in church, and they keep their hair covered.
Imagine you were transported into this world. You try to bring up the local gladiatorial games and an elder gently rebukes you. Someone else talks about being a Rome First voter — they are gently corrected. Someone tries to talk about all he knows about the Bible — he is immediately questioned on why he is claiming to know anything at all when the illiterate shepherd boy shows greater faith through his conduct. Now imagine that, because everyone believes they will be judged by every unproductive and idle word they speak, that the conversations are always centered on (1) encouragement of moral conduct, (2) support for one’s moral conduct, (3) genuine brotherly love, (4) that the only thing of value is whether moral conduct is pursued as shown through their social superior. You will not get any social reinforcement or friendship except if you do this, and the only thing being reinforced is if you do this. What an alien world: no distractions, no (false) status signaling, no “empty knowledge”, just pure… effective altruism? In a Christian sense that is. “Taking captive every thought for Christ”. Poetry and hymns and incense are piled onto this substantive kernel, as morale-boost, but are not the main thing.
I like Jordan Peterson as an “idea factory” — he has produced some great ideas and a lot of bad ones. But JP is more like a pastor than an exemplar: he gives a dramatic performance with little evidence to back up his way of life. He extols cleaning his room and his own room is a mess. He extols reason but he cold turkey’d his psychiatric medication, putting him in a coma in Russia. His daughter is a divorced single mom who once met up with Andrew Tate. He literally only eats steak. He yaps a lot and sells a lot of courses. He is very much not Christ-like, just to draw the comparison.
The world you write about has zero antibodies against a woke style purity spiral takeover where the infiltrators find their niche and then start gently rebuking everyone for everything because they don't adhere to the rituals in the 100% correct way, always ensuring that they are "holier than thou" for the people they are rebuking.
Then they can start the whole ostracizing process where they begin throwing out people permanently for more and more minor stuff, always ensuring that the group currently being thrown out is a relatively small minority to ensure you have the support of the "silent majority" with the implied threat that whoever speaks out against you are acting like the enemy of the day and you wouldn't want to be like them now would you? When they are eliminated you move on to the next slice and so on.
Extra care must be taken to swiftly eliminate anyone who might notice what you are doing but you are well placed here because your instrumental goal is takeover and you can dedicate all your time to it, only mimicking the true values of the group enough to keep up appearances while the people trying to stop you presumably actually believe in the values of the group and so they have to waste more of their time on that, meaning they have less time to fight you.
Eventually you'll end up in complete control of everything until the spiral gets smaller and smaller and the whole movement is effectively dead because most everyone who used to be in it now has a genuine grievance against it and now wants nothing to do with it, much like what's happening to woke right now. Plus because of your salami tactics people in different "layers" of being kicked out of the original movement now likely hate each other more too because you fed propaganda to the later layers about why the earlier layers were extremely bad people and should be shunned, so now they are less likely to come together and re coalesce into a new movement with similar goals as the initial one but without you.
Were I transported into such a world I'd try and do such a thing, not because I particularly dislike Christianity or anything, but for personal amusement (because like you said, no talking about the local gladiatorial games, so what else is there to do to keep myself busy other than try and take over the movement?) and just to prove to myself that I was capable of it. I'd give myself around 20% or so chance of being successful.
This world actually existed, and we can directly observe that it did not, in fact, play out this way. Based on my understanding of the historical record, your assessment appears to be straightforwardly wrong. Based on the closing paragraph, it seems to me that you're doing the thing where one assumes that humans become less complex, intelligent and willful the further they are from the seat of these properties, which is of course one's own self.
I replied elsewhere that I see Saul of Tarsus as being an example of things exactly playing out this way with how he subverted the religion of Jesus. Now he didn't use it to destroy Christianity entirely but instead inserted himself into an exalted place he had no business being in (and stays in to this day), but what was left after him wasn't anything like what Christianity was before him, so yes, in a way he did destroy Christianity.
...Based entirely on groundless supposition, since if you are correct then he did such a masterful job that he left no evidence behind. Or did he do just slightly bad enough a job that he fooled the subsequent two thousand years of Christians, and only you alone have penetrated the fog? Again, intellect centers on one's own brain, etc, etc.
Not just me, the idea that Saul usurped the religion of Jesus is not an uncommon one, see e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/exchristian/comments/1666abi/has_anyone_considered_that_saul_of_tarsus_might/
If you want an academic discussion from people who don't have a bone to pick with Christianity: https://old.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/19dcox9/did_paul_hijack_christianity/
From the Christian subreddit talking about whether Paul was a false prophet: https://old.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/185zuqe/everything_paul_says_directly_contradicts/
There's a sizable contingent of people who feel that Paul hijacked the religion of Christianity and twisted it into being more permissive of different beliefs than it was before him (no need to circumcise etc.) so as to get more members in a way that a Christ who truly believed in the divine ordination of what he was teaching would not do (if God commands humanity to do XYZ, who are you as a mere human to say that not XYZ is still fine just because it makes the word of God more palatable to potential converts).
At the very least it's very hard to deny that Paul didn't really care about the life of Jesus very much, he cared more about the fact that he was crucified and resurrected an the implications of all that in his ministry.
Bud this is just weak as hell. 3 reddit posts? You know the bible is the most discussed book in existence right? You can find people talking about it from just about any angle. Saul didn't just usurp Jesus, he did it deliberately as one of the world's first secret agents, working on behalf of his Roman masters to quell the imminent Jewish uprising by introducing passive and peaceful elements. Or maybe he wasn't a secret agent, he was just a dumb loser who got tricked by the Romans into usurping James - Jesus's brother and the true head of the church.
But frankly the whole idea is just straight boring compared to some of the other bizarre ideas put forth by people over the years. Watch out for albino monks, because Saul didn't do shit, Jesus usurped the whole religion away from his wife, the holy prostitute Mary Magdalene, and stripped it of all that sex stuff because like most men he hated sex.
Just kidding, what actually happened was Jesus was actually basically days away from setting off a cascade that would quickly enslave humanity for all eternity to a collection of cosmic horrors, if only it wasn't for humanity's greatest hero ever - Judas. Nah actually Jesus secretly tricked Judas into betraying him, something Judas would never have done if not for Jesus's knowledge of neuro linguistic programming.
Because you see, Jesus was clearly an alien all along. No wait, he was a time traveller. Or whatever the equivalent of a stage magician was 2000 years ago, he faked his death entirely and spent his last days in some villa overlooking Lake Albany. Or maybe it was France. Or Ireland. Or Tennessee. Or Mexico.
I know, I know, still too fricking boring! Jesus was actually Horus the sun and his disciples were stars! That's why he's born on the summer solstice (descending to earth as the star of Bethlehem) and dies on the winter solstice (taking three days to simulate the way the sun appears to stand still during the equinox then reverse course).
Or maybe he was just a plaything of the stars and everyone's crazy cat lady aunt was right the whole time about horoscopes. After all, are we just supposed to believe it's a coincidence he has 12 disciples and there are 12 signs in the zodiac? And that it is just a crazy fluke that 2000 odd years ago marked the end of the age of Aries and the beginning of the age of Pisces and also Jesus is associated with fish (the ichthys, feeding the five thousand, James' occupation etc) while the Jews are associated with sheep (passover, Abraham etc)?
Yawn though, am I right? Horoscopes? Stars? Everyone knows Jesus was a motherfucking mushroom! Jesus Christ is actually Sumerian for amanita muscaria, if you ignore things like how words work and the fact you can't find that mushroom anywhere in the middle east! And you know the cross? Doesn't it kind of look like a mushroom if you only see it in your peripheral vision? How is that not proof the whole religion is secretly about tripping balls?
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Sure, it's trendy to go after Paul, and is frequently done by those who dislike Christianity, especially if they like the common idea of Jesus (which often does not correspond to Jesus as he actually was—he did not come to bring peace, but a sword). But yeah, secular academics, exchristians, and lefty christians all clearly have the direction of motivated reasoning going in that direction. This is especially the case for those who are precommitted to the position that Christianity couldn't possibly be, you know, true.
Anyway, Peter also sees a vision allowing the eating of unclean foods. And Paul confirms his beliefs with the apostles who were Jesus' direct followers—Galatians 2.
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Fortunately for @BurdensomeCount, there is no Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms in the United Kingdom.
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Christianity in its original form (well what I strongly believe is its original form), in a “the words of Jesus decide 99% of the focus and the theology” form, has a rigorous immune system against vain purity spiraling.
Jesus specifically condemns those who prioritize ritual over substance. In fact, he saves his greatest condemnation for these people. He is put to death by these people, either directly or indirectly depending on your theology. It’s a surprisingly major part of the gospel. Some examples:
This trains Christians to be aware of anyone who signals virtue explicitly, where the spectacle of the virtue is sought rather than the substance. It trains Christians to be aware of anyone who prides themselves on stringent rule-following and burden-bearing. It then cuts out the possibility of the vain finding satisfaction in a prideful position, because Christians are told not to take any pride in that or even call themselves “teacher” or “instructor”. Then, it sets the actual standard for obtaining status: the more one humbles himself (in substance, understood as imitating Christ with all necessary sacrifices), the more exalted he will be in the community. Yet the one who exalts himself will be swiftly humbled by the community.
A purity spiral oriented around immaterial or vain issues is criticized. There’s a priority of importance.
This trains Christians to be cautious of those who appear outwardly righteous or who seem put on an act for attention.
This is great. It instantly reminds me of some high status academic giving a land acknowledge: do you really think, you status-seeker, that you wouldn’t have been the one taking the land were you alive back then?
This is the only place where Jesus goes absolutely demon mode condemning people. He was comparatively chill with the prostitutes and tax collectors. Even the woman with five husbands isn’t condemned but joined him for dinner, and she was a Samaritan, so not in his closest community. You see, the “scribes” are the journalists, “fact checkers”, and academic writers of Christ’s time. The Pharisees are like the combined “academic instructors” and “moral police” of his time. This is sufficient to understand his ire, really. And this isn’t an exhaustive list of criticism.
The crucial thing about Christianity is that Christ is conceived as a person (topical). As such, his character can be imitated in addition to his philosophy internalized. And his character was not “holier than thou”, which means that to obtain status, one cannot act that way. They have to act as follows:
What you see as a zero-day vulnerability would require all the Christians to be blind to it happening, to ignore the central teachings they are supposed to worship, and also for the Judas-defector to somehow be better at righteous conduct than the Christians. But by the defector’s very nature, they would be unable to defeat a good Christian in exemplifying genuine humility (no acclaim to be gained in the years of this practice, and they are apparently addicted to acclaim). And the reward for all of this would be genuinely miniscule compared to entering any other institution: it’s not like they would get extra gold or girls. If there exists some vicious person who is so addicted to power and status that they wish to subvert Christianity, it would seem that the years of Christlike conduct necessary to ingratiate themselves in the community would either cure them of their vice or make them absolutely mad. They would only be able to get their status fix from habitual conduct which is, if not debasing, equalizing. Now in modern Christianity they would be able to talk well, or claim to have a vision, or claim to know the most; not so in the OC religion.
I think it would be possible for a clever 130 IQ+ sleeper agent with low time preference and a genuine desire to destroy Christianity from the inside to be able to pass off long enough to reach a position of decent authority. If then you have 10+ of these agents once a few of them get high up they can start promoting the other sleeper agents until a critical mass of them are respected enough in the community that together you can form your own little cabal whose members protect each other and can also start throwing your weight around enough to start slicing off portions of the community you've thought about and identified the rest of the group would be least concerned about cutting off (clearly the Christians would be supportive of cutting off a bunch of satanists who tried to join them so it's not like they are infinitely accepting of everyone, you just need to find the dividing line and try and convince everyone that the slice you currently want to excommunicate fall on the wrong side of it).
Once you provide this blueprint to the 130 IQ+ sleeper agent I think they can imitate it well enough that to all external appearances they are a true believer and it's only on the inside that they are secretly trying to take over the community.
As for why someone would want to do this? To misquote the climber George Mallory who replied "because it is there" when asked why he wanted to climb Everest, I say there is a type of person who'd want to infiltrate Christianity just because it is there and available to be infiltrated. All the defenses you mentioned against infiltration just make this kind of person want to do it even more because it makes the challenge more interesting. The way to protect against him is to make the task appear boring so that he gets bored and goes off and does something else, while all the things you mentioned make it seem like an even bigger achievement to successfully infiltrate the sect.
Now yes you may be right that the years of following the rules will either make someone truly convert to the cause or go mad. But that doesn't mean that in this time they can't cause real damage, even as they themselves are changed irrevocably by the religion. In fact I think this is literally what happened with Saul of Tarsus. He was an infiltrator that like a virus managed to insert himself irremovably into the DNA of the Christian religion.
Now in his late life he may well have been changed enough by the religion to really believe in what that changed Christianity was telling him (indeed, we can be pretty sure he was executed and all for his beliefs) but that doesn't mean he didn't fundamentally change the system into something it was nothing like before him (e.g. Christianity minus the Pauline Epistles but replaced with some of the apocrypha is a very different belief system, we know there was a tussle between Saul and James the Just with the Sauline fraction winning out; if instead of the Pauline Epistles you had the Apocryphon of James included in the bible Christianity suddenly becomes a lot more Gnostic of a religion). Saul may well have been "converted" eventually, but the religion he was converted to was nothing like the original Christianity of Jesus but rather a religion that was in large part about him.
Similarly the biological cell which long ago after invasion by a foreign bacteria managed to control and convert it into becoming its mitochondrial slave may in one sense be said to have won, but that presence of the mitochondria would later go on to change the descendants of the cell completely and turn them into something which relied utterly and totally on the mitochondria for survival. In much the same way even if early Christians can manage to quell and assimilate any sleeper agents and prevent them from outright destroying the movement, that doesn't mean the sleeper agents can't completely subvert it and turn it into something it never was in the first place, and that in itself is a type of success for the goals of the original unsubverted agents when they were just starting out, and in fact I think if Saul the persecutor of Christians could see a few decades down the line at what he would turn Christianity into by the time of his death, I think he would be quite pleased with himself.
There are simple ways to protect against this threat if the threat were plausible. You could mandate that everything must be judged exclusively by Christ’s words and deeds as handed down unchanged for many centuries in the Christian gospel (with the apostles in a very far second place, never overruling Christ). This means that the standard of behavior can’t be changed. You can enact a “majority rule” vote decision, if any teachings needed to be changed. You could mandate that they must be married with children and have their children attend the religious schooling — meaning anything that harms the religion now harms their children. And so on.
In real life, people’s behaviors are motivated by rewards. This sleeper agent needs a genuine compelling reason to “take over the community”, such that they bear the discomfort of helping members of the community selflessly for decades for a small chance of taking over the community. Every time he helps someone he hates, he will be demoralized, while his virtuous counterpart is moralized. The virtuous counterpart enjoys pure cognitive efficiency, whereas the vicious one needs to constantly double-think everything he does. At the same time, the sleeper agent will be spending many hours a week being propagandized into loving Christ, which may involve persuasive arguments. At best, all of those hours are spent in discomfort; at worst, he is persuaded into virtuous behavior.
This is kind of like saying that an evil person who hates SpaceX will join SpaceX in an attempt to subvert it. SpaceX easily filters for people who genuinely care about the mission: they are made to work on it with their whole mind and heart and strength, to participate in “all night vigils” where they work on their project. A hater is less likely to be able to do all of this, because every aspect of it lacks the feedback loop of motivating reinforcement. Yet unlike SpaceX, Christianity involves rituals for propagandizing the faith, with music and poetry and spectacle and drama and stories.
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On the contrary, such a culture would, at first blush, seem to be substantially hardened against such threats compared to the current mainstream one. As our dear departed Barnaby and Hlynka were fond of pointing out, you don't survive as a sincere traditionalist in the year of our lord twenty-twenty-something without developing strong "antibodies" against entryism and parasites.
How do you plan to status-maximize and "take over" a society where overt status-maximization gets you kicked out? Sure you might be able to fool some people some of the time but you'll never fool everyone all of the time.
Sure, I agree modern day trad societies are rightfully very wary of overt status maximizers because they have plenty of comparable real life examples they can learn from but the comparison in the parent comment was being made with Early Christians. Those people were a virgin population that had zero defenses against this sort of stuff. Honestly they'd probably even welcome the initial stages of the takeover because at that point they would have zero idea just what was setting itself up among its midst and treat the infiltrators as just another ordinary bunch of converts which were more keen than most people.
If only they could have possibly been not completely naive to the idea that folks like you would intentionally do evil things in attempts to wreck stuff. Hmmm... what's this?
Oh, but you say, it's only a particular type of evil attempt to subvert others that you'd try. You'd try being overly-restrictive in your readings, giving you license to ostracize others and kick them out. If only they weren't completely naive to some people being overly-restrictive in their readings! Hmmm... what's this?
Obviously, there are no guarantees when trying to protect something from evil people such as yourself trying to subvert it. Like all of civilization, it takes work and effort to be on guard for folks like you. You've done a pretty good number on society in general, but at least now you've come clean in saying that you like to destroy societies for the lulz. I'll try to remember that you're a self-admitted bad faith actor the next time you make suggestions as to what our current society should do.
Evil? I do not consider myself evil at all, I would do this out of boredom rather than evil. Provide me with a more interesting way to spend my time (say by discussing the local gladiatorial games) and I'd spend my life doing that instead. Our current society has enough other high quality outlets for boredom that attempting to destroy it doesn't make sense, plus I mostly like our current society and think tinkering around the edges is better than destruction.
I don't consider my hypothetical discussions here as being any more evidence of me being evil than a similar discussion I might have about eradicating every last trace of the Carolingians from the earth in Crusader Kings III. That wouldn't make me a genocidal maniac, just a bored person looking for a way to spend my time in an interesting way. In fact if you put me in the environment above but gave me access to a super secret side room with a PC installed with enough of the latest games to last a lifetime I'd probably just whittle my life away playing the games rather than try and usurp society because the former is simply more fun than the latter (which is at least more fun than dedicating your life to be closer to Jesus).
In fact I will go one step further: I will say a society where everyone has a mindset like me will very likely be extremely successful while a society where everyone is like the ordinary man will collapse post haste. Only caveat is that I am not smart enough to invent all the things we take for granted these days, so a society of BurdensomeCounts will probably stagnate around the Iron Age, but then again the society made up of copies of the ordinary man only wouldn't even get past the mesolithic. But assuming that there's a proper distribution of intelligence for both cases (so we have the few super geniuses who really propel humanity forward) a society made up of people like me would very quickly get settled into a game theoretic positive equilibrium where any deviations are swiftly punished (we would be able to impose this equilibrium because we are smart enough to understand the payoffs), and then everyone, down to the lowest mentally retarded BurdensomeCountClone would behave because e.g. the rest of society would be open to beating him whenever he defected, realizing that he is so stupid that the only thing that works on him is something that works on dogs, namely operant conditioning.
However a society made up of people who think like the ordinary man would devolve very quickly into some socialism-esque monster that keeps everyone poor and suffering where the members preferentially give scarce resources to the failures rather than the successes (you'd prefer to invest in a successful company rather than a failing one, wouldn't you? So then why to we pretend it's better to invest in failing humans rather than successful ones?) who proceed to squander them, but yet another fault of this society is that it is too "luvvie" to impose the correct punishment on defectors so the farce will go on, leading to a veritable kakistocracy before long that goes nowhere and squanders all its potential.
Such a world would in fact be an affront to Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw and I would say that it is Just and Right, nay, a Duty, for the next BurdensomeCount genetic mutation that arises to attempt to take over and rule in a manner that better befits humanity. Eventually one of these mutations will be successful and then that society can break out of its self imposed trap and proceed on the path to Greatness.
Now of course our real life society is none of these, fortunately we have enough correct thinkers running things that we can control the worst impulses of the ordinary masses and we've ensured a system where there's at least some sort of link where the successful get more stuff to play with which means Humanity will eventually reach escape velocity but the current situation can be thought of more like a horse cart in how quickly it gets us to our rightful place as suzerain of the observable universe while I want a society where we're more like a rocket ship in how quickly we get there.
But this works both ways: yes you can use it to criticize the person who tries to be holier than thou, but the person who wants to discuss the local gladiatorial games can also use this to push back against and usurp the elders who want to stop people discussing the local gladiatorial games because it's not Christ-like. This makes me think a better strategy for usurpation would be to use a two pronged approach where we have two groups of usurpers secretly working together, one on the ultra strict side where they try to slice off the less intensely committed genuine believers (Apollonian) while on the other side you have a rabble of superficially committed people who slowly yet openly try to degrade community norms, all the while using passages like your ones above to discredit the true elders (Dionysian) and lead a bottom up revolt against them. So now instead of just slicing people on one side you're doing it on both sides.
You'd need to ensure that there's minimal friendly fire (the Apollonians never go after the Dionysians unless absolutely necessary to keep up pretenses) but an additional benefit you get now is that the true believers are gonna see the hypocrisy of the Apollonians who are blended in with the true elders in how they go after them for minor infractions but seem to leave the Dionysians relatively unchecked. Assuming the Apollonians are relatively well blended the true believers will blame the hypocrisy on all the church elders as a group, thereby causing further internal strife and fragmentation.
All this is not even getting to the fact that the early Church members were very willing as a group to die for their beliefs. Your opponents an-heroing themselves is one of the biggest blessings you could ever ask for. Getting the most zealous true believers to choose to be persecuted and die (like how Ignatius of Antioch did) is a boon to you, even if it leads to more short term converts as the new members are likely the most uncertain about the faith so if you can get one of your agents to go over and feed them your twisted version of the beliefs before the OG ones reach them you'll have a higher success rate than trying out your tricks on already committed members. Plus once the true believer elder is dead they are no longer able to contradict you and what you are doing, you can even try to coopt their teachings and twist them around to to your goals by saying stuff like "XYZ is what St. ABC really meant in their writings, we are the true intellectual descendants of their thought rather than those other guys there" after they are gone.
Like I said, all these passages people are quoting are making it sound like a bigger and bigger challenge and all that's doing is piquing my curiosity and making me even more interested in trying my hand at it (this is probably a more general trait of Elite Human Capital but that's a discussion for another day). Maybe 20% was generous for me on my own, but I think if you give me 50x clones of me and a definable target, e.g. "you and your group are placed in Antioch in the year 200 AD. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to usurp the Church so much that by the year 400 AD Mithraism has a bigger following than Christianity across the Roman empire" I'd still say we would have like a 20% chance of success.
EDIT: Reading this again I sorta sound like Judge Holden which doesn't really help me when I'm trying to say "I'm not evil", maybe a different tone would have been better.
A bit, yeah. I don't think it's all that redeeming to say that it is everyone else's job to entertain you, because if you get bored and can't think of anything other than rapin' and murderin' to do to keep yourself busy, well then...
Boredom is not evil, but it is also not an excuse for choosing evil acts. You could instead put your bored mind toward coming up with positive acts to improve matters.
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While I don't argue against your Christ-as-social-measure view of what successful Christianity looks like, I do have to say that this is a kind of Christianity I do not recognize as occurring very frequently. Perhaps we can say that Mormons and the Amish come pretty close and seem to leverage this into successful pro-social cycles within their communities. But I don't think that this is how very many Catholics/Protestants actually act or contemporary Evangelicals - the latter being what I see as the most influential (on society) Christian group in the US today.
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Just addressing the sentences about the author’s dad, it’s extremely common and normal to find people in the third-world who are practically white supremacists in the sense that they will believe and express sentiment to the effect that white people are superior in some inherent ways.
It doesn’t even necessarily imply affection, people hold such views while still being very nationalistic and somewhat hostile to the West sometimes.
It’s typically only after they had some exposure to the western style leftism that they will learn to express their sentiments regarding the superiority of the western peoples in politically correct ways
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I feel that in spaces like the motte this idea is taken so much for granted that it doesn't get the proper pushback it deserves. This goes back to the unfashionableness of internet atheism and the meta-contrarian nature of this space so Christians get away with all kinds of things nobody else would. A similarly bold claim about the value of wokeness would be absolutely destroyed here.
Honestly I have no idea if this is true. Christianity is certainly a successful meme (or at least it was) I can say that much, however is it pro-anything or purely parasitic? I'm not sure. I can say it certainly isn't entirely incompatible with civilizational flourishing, which is worth something and maybe places it above communism. But obviously the Roman civilization was able to grow and succeed prior to Christianity, so it's not like growth and all that was impossible without Christianity. Pro-peace? I have no idea, maybe to some extent but Christianity obviously isn't incompatible with war or genocide.
I feel pretty confident in saying you'll never get a majority of people to "believe" in Christianity in this ridiculous and performative way. If this is what Christianity is depending on in the future you might as well find a new meme because this one is past its expiration date. For all things there is a season, what was once adaptive is not always viable. Christianity's (supposed) pro-social aspects are unfortunately tied to a bunch of absurd factual claims that may have seemed more plausible centuries ago but are no longer so persuasive.
Edit: Meta-meta-contrarian fashion has turned back towards atheism. Keep up!
For what it's worth, speaking from a Christian perspective, I find the entire argument you're responding to... at best irrelevant, and at worst outright contemptible?
Is Christianity pro-social? Is it a useful ideological technology for producing social outcomes? I don't really know. But one thing I do know is that if that's why a person follows Christ, they of all people are most to be pitied. If Christianity produces good social outcomes: great, I will continue to follow Christ. If Christianity produces bad social outcomes: oh well, I will continue to follow Christ. It's just not an important question.
Moreover, I don't think any of us are actually in a sufficiently distant, objective position to dispassionately analyse the most pro-social memes, entirely independent of their truth-values, and then select them. None of us are Platonic philosopher-kings in a position to select the most effective noble lie, and if we try to put ourselves in that position, even if only in our imaginations, we will fail. None of us have that perspective.
I feel a bit like it's that bell curve meme, with the no-wit asking, "Did Jesus really die for our sins?", and the mid-wit rambling about successful memes and civilisational usefulness, and the full-wit again asking, "Did Jesus really die for our sins?"
Believe what's true, and reject what's false. This is sufficient.
To present the opposite perspective as succinctly as possible:
How on earth should I know?
Yep.
Sorry I can't be blessed with your effortless understanding of what's true and false, but I for one appreciate @coffee_enjoyer and others for continuing to discuss the subject. Lots of us were raised in a culture of deracinated modernity to be dispassionate meme-analysers and the iron has long since cooled into the shape it's going to stay. So we have to start from where we are and we have to walk the road in front of us. Pity us if you must.
I'm not asserting that it's easy to know the truth of Christianity. Certainly I'm not saying that it was effortless for me! Nor am I even suggesting that the only or obvious good-faith answer is yes. What I'm asserting is that it is, for better or for worse, the relevant question.
"Does Christianity produce good societies?" may be an interesting question, in an academic sense. But you cannot get from "Christianity produces good societies" to "Christianity is true". B does not follow from A. And since "is Christianity true?" is a question of, I would suggest, ultimate import, what that says to me is that we need a bit more here than a question about memetic adaptability.
Look, people become Christian for all sorts of reasons, including stupid ones, and as Alan Jacobs reminds us, what matters is not where you start, but where you finish. Someone who was only interested in Christianity at first because it seems pro-social, but who, because of this belief, came to church, encountered Christ, had a conversion of the heart, and eventually became a genuine believer has ended up in the right place, despite the poverty of the original motive. Probably most Christians are like this to some extent - they thought cathedrals looked cool, or wanted their parents to be proud of them, or enjoyed singing in a choir, or whatever else might get someone through the church door.
But what happens once they're in there is what matters, and I'd suggest that what happens inside the church is everything to do with Jesus, God, and the redemption of the sins of the world, and not very much to do with social engineering. If interest in the noble lie gets you through the door, great, but we must not content ourselves with noble lies. It matters whether or not it's true. That is, perhaps, in the end the only thing that matters.
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Maybe I'm completely delusional, looking at the past with distorted lenses, and/or just plain wrong, but internet/pop culture atheist activism(Richard Dawkins et al) was very popular and trendy with the terminally online set back when being terminally online was a very weird thing to be. And the Motte(and the people whom make it up), through it's various iterations, are directly born from that period.
If anything, the Motte consistently going 'Ah, Christianity as Social Technology is perhaps the best thing that can be done for a modern civilization' isn't the result of unthinking acceptance but from the various social scars and bruises we've all taken and witnesses over the past several years.
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Deserves for what reason? You don't appear to have given this matter much thought considering the only thing you say with confidence is that it doesn't seem likely you can get the majority of the world to view Christianity through the lens of the enlightenment. (I agree, but it is a good stepping stone to the actual Truth.) It's not that you know we're wrong and Christianity isn't a pro-social meme, you don't. It might be parasitic, you don't know. Well good news! I do know, it's pro-social. There is shit loads of evidence demonstrating this. By design however, none of it will appeal to the myopic materialist worldview.
If you figure out where you stand and want to make some arguments supporting your position I'd be happy to argue. I have strong confidence that we will reach a stalemate because we have fundamentally different approaches to the world, but I and the other Christians here can give you a lot to think about. But you need to make the arguments first.
Tldr: meta-meta-contrarianism is passe, the new hotness is meta-meta-sincerity.
Edit: damn you auto-correct
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It expanded, for sure. Usually though, when I see people argue Christianity is pro-growth they mean in modern terms: Christianity (allegedly), through mechanisms like banning child marriage and insisting on monogamy created societies stable enough to function as market economies that advanced to an unprecedented level.
Yeah, I've never been able to get past Paul's question of the value the things he subjected himself to to spread the the faith if Jesus be not risen.
A faith isn't just words. It's motivation. Peterson seems to be the sort of person capable of the effortful control of maintaining his Christian code regardless of whether we find some early source tomorrow that vitiates Jesus' divinity.
How scalable is this? How many people got the short end of the stick when it comes to conscientiousness who would be kept in check by strong social norms and a bone-deep fear of roasting in hell but not any of more loosey-goosey stuff? "Do this or burn in hell" can be understood by anyone. Once you start quoting Chesterton your audience shrinks.
But maybe it's because my background is in Islam. I've found it incredibly difficult to fulfill even a few of the pillars without faith motivating me. I'm not praying 5 times a day or fasting in perhaps the worst and most annoying way I can think of if I don't think it's for something. The omnipresence of Arabic certainly doesn't help. It sounds nice but a lot of the time you have to bring your own context to things.
I suppose it's much easier for Protestants. (On the other hand, maybe this doesn't bode well for cultural Christians when it comes time to sacrifice. Maybe they're just putting it off)
I think the big one was that it was a missionary religion that essentially downplayed ethnic differences. Once you became Christian, the old tribes no longer mattered as much. There is neither Jew nor Greek thus you can integrate into the culture. This would serve to stabilize an empire as you ideally no longer have people who put their ethnic identity first. We can certainly see tge fruits of tribal thinking in our age when people can think their religion, race, sexuality or gender is more important than being an American.
Both normative monogamy and the idea of a higher identity making ethnicity irrelevant were part of Roman culture before the Roman Empire Christianised.
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I'm not sure this is really true – centuries ago we didn't have the archeological evidence we do today, so it was a lot easier to dismiss the New Testament record as something closer to a complete fabrication. The Pilate stone, for instance, wasn't discovered until 1961, and Papyrus 45 wasn't publicly known until 1933.
And what's known about the early New Testament isn't a closed door, either, there are new discoveries being made and research being done. For instance, there's been some work (which I sadly don't know as much about as I would like) has been done in the early 2000s that apparently shows the name-frequency use in the Gospels matches the name-frequency use in surviving archeological records from 1st century Palestine (which is very unlikely if the Gospels were not, at a minimum, based on solid oral traditions that originated in 1st century Palestine).
In short, there's a reason that the theory that Jesus was myth entirely and not a historical figure took off in the Enlightenment but is outside of mainstream historical thought today: we have better reasons to believe in the historicity of the Gospel accounts in 2023 than we did in 1723.
The absurd factual claims OP's talking about aren't that 'Jesus existed', it's the 'Jesus was simultaneously God and son of God, resurrected from the dead and is conveniently obscured from our vision, along with God, angels, saints and all the good people who believe in Christianity (who are having a really good time having transcended death)' part. Or the universe being 6000 years old part. Or the 'Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom' part.
That last one is said immediately prior to the transfiguration.
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I don't know why any of those were more plausible centuries ago – people 1723, 23, and 2023 BC were all very much aware that e.g. people did not come back from the dead, and Christ's proclamation that He was one with God was considered so outrageous at the time that it nearly led to His being stoned according to the New Testament text. We haven't made any revolutionary discoveries in science over the past few thousand years that have made those sorts of things seem less plausible. (If anything, rather the opposite – for instance, although a virgin birth in the 1st Century remains miraculous, one happening in 2023 is merely an oddity. This line of thinking inevitably concludes in things like Ridley Scott trying to incorporate Jesus into the Alien canon.)
If you think this is an admission against evidence, it follows that you think that Matthew was written in the 1st century, while eyewitnesses were still alive (somebody writing Matthew in, say, the second century would be less likely to include this if it was obviously untrue) which of course makes it more likely that Matthew is an accurate account, not less.
HOWEVER (although this puts me in mind of John's visions in Revelation, where he does see a vision of the the Son of Man coming to rule the Earth) what's going on here is likely significantly less interesting than either an admission against evidence or a reference to the last and perhaps most controversial book in the New Testament canon: Matthew is setting up what happens immediately in the very next verse, when Jesus is transfigured before some of the people present in the previous chapter. (Chapter divisions were not present in the original text, so this is arguably a case where they confuse more than clarify).
Back in the day people were constantly engaging with the divine/spiritual world. Generals would routinely consult oracles, soothsayers and the entrails of various animals. There were all kinds of spells, rituals and magical forces going on. It wouldn't be a big stretch to imagine that this fellow resurrected from the dead, conjured up some bread, healed the sick. That was pretty standard stuff, especially in Judea. There were of course doubters and pragmatic sorts but the cultural milieu was far more accepting of this kind of thing.
There was plenty of witchcraft going on in Early Modern Europe, though 1723 is towards the end of that era.
But now witchcraft and magic (taken seriously) is mostly a sub-Saharan thing.
Regardless of when the line was written, I think it's very reasonable to say that the Son of Man did not come in his kingdom. Surely we would've noticed?
I don't doubt that Jesus lived but I don't think he was the son of God, just as I don't think Muhammed was given divine instructions and is the most perfect man to ever live. Jesus and Muhammed likely got some kind of power surge, so did some others. Sometimes people emerge with great charismatic abilities, it doesn't mean that they're divine.
And to the extent that this was true but not longer is, past Christians may have taken as a sign that Christianity was correct: as I've mentioned on here before, early Christian apologists made use of the decline in paranormal phenomena as evidence that Christ's coming at upended the old order of things.
But I'm not so sure things are that different from 1st century Judea. In Christ's time, generals consulted the entrails of animals; roughly two thousand years later, the generals consulted psychics. Divination and astrology remain popular, rogue billionaires fund research into the question of life after death, insiders from shadowy oracular government agencies tell Congress that UFOs could be coming from other dimensions, the New York Times runs articles about demon exorcism. I could see future generations looking back on 21st century America as a heyday of superstition and belief in the paranormal.
It might be true that OP's statement "claims that may have seemed more plausible centuries ago but are no longer so persuasive" is true in the literal sense that, as you say, the "cultural milieu" may be more skeptical of them now. But I'm not sure the cultural milieu is the best way of evaluating the truth of a claim. And even if it was, it seems fairly constant to me that the majority of people believe in the paranormal or spiritual, while a minority of people (often well-educated) express skepticism of it, with varying levels of outspokenness.
I've got a note on the context above you may have missed. That being said – two of my favorite passages of Scripture (and quite topical to Christmas, for they roughly bookend the Gospel accounts of Christ's life) touch on this question:
The above is from Matthew 2. Below, from John 18 - 19:
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Lots of surface area to attack though. Things have clearly not gone as well for archaeologists hoping to prove the Exodus which early modern biblical archaeology was all about. Now you have modern historians like Dever so embarrassed by even the name they want to be called "Syro-Palestinian” archaeologists"
A lot of the Old Testament is in someone's crosshairs. YMMV on how much that kicks Christianity's legs out from under it. A lot of people just deal with it.
Common misconception!
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x.com/lymanstoneky/status/1625145864397135873#m
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A lot of the Old Testament was confirmed non-historical even well before the last few decades. Nobody serious after the widespread acceptance of evolution can believe in the Genesis account for example.
As @Shrike points out, the idea that portions of the old testament, specifically Genesis and the other books of moses are more allegorical than historical is arguably as old (if not older) than Christianity itself.
The default Roman or Orthodox Catholic response to "A lot of the Old Testament was confirmed non-historical" is basically "no shit Sherlock".
Yes there are young earth creationists out there but they are a weird fringe of a fringe hence the "young earth" appelation to distinguish them from more conventional creationists.
From what I understand with Genesis specifically, it's is speculative at best to suggest that it was understood as a scientific account of creation at the time, so it seems unlikely it was intended to be received in the way a 21st Century American would receive it. There's some pretty interesting textual evidence that at least part of the point of the creation story was about exploding certain other "hostile" creation myths. (Given the time of year, it's worth remembering Genesis 3:15, which is some extremely advanced foreshadowing even if you take the story as a parable!)
BUT
I have played Civilization V, which has an option to simulate the age of the Earth (I think at 3, 4, and 5 million years, don't quote me on that). And anyone inside my Civilization game would think the Earth was millions of years old and had undergone millions of years of evolution and such, which of course is patently untrue – I created the game (ex nihilo if you will) one second ago on my computer, with barbarians springing forth as if out of Jove's forehead and such.
My point here isn't to argue about Genesis (although I enjoy discussing it and would be happy to, in a friendly way!), just to point out that if you believe an omnipotent God is a viable hypothesis the range of possibilities about the nature of reality is broader even than the range of possibilities under e.g. the simulation hypothesis.
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The strain of Christian thought holding that at least parts of the Old Testament were allegorical is almost as old as Christian thought itself, so while it might be difficult on some parts of Christian thought I doubt it has as much pull either way to the degree that New Testament findings do. Of course, even if you're committed to interpreting the majority of the Old Testament as a purely historical record, the older something is, the fewer traces it will leave, so it's easy to dismiss archeological conclusions you don't like (especially if they are based on a lack of findings).
From what I can tell, though, at least some things (such as the historicity of David) have also followed the trend discussed above, of being more supported as more archeological evidence becomes available, although of course there's a debate over how to interpret the evidence.
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I would sooner assume that there were plenty of Jesus-like people before Jesus - it's just that none got popular enough - than assume that Jesus was the first one to think of "just literally be kind to everyone, bro", not to mention being God.
Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher most likely. Specific individual beliefs were not unique. The faith created by him and his followers though, has been argued by at least some scholars to be very distinct in the ancient world. because of its combination of bookishness, strong moral rules and evangelism. Certainly in terms of its ability to motivate certain forms of behavior.
The idea of God being man and the importance of his crucifixion or him incarnating as the least of us, for example, is likely a response by his followers to his actual brutal death. Which would make it specific to him.
Martin Hengel argues in his book that it was a combination of several factors:
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