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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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