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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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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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