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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Is anyone still arguing this?

For the most part, the internet atheism wars have just died, so it doesn't come up much. Scott's relevant explanation suggests:

Most movement atheists weren’t in it for the religion. They were in it for the hamartiology [the study of sin, in particular, how sin enters the universe]. Once they got the message that the culture-at-large had settled on a different, better hamartiology, there was no psychological impediment to switching over. We woke up one morning and the atheist bloggers had all quietly became social justice bloggers. Nothing else had changed because nothing else had to; the underlying itch being scratched was the same. They just had to CTRL+F and replace a couple of keywords.

When it was 'obvious' and 'any rational person could easily determine its rough outlines', a good chunk of folks up and decided that the New, Obvious rough outlines were just wokeness. There was a bit of a schism, and I've found that many of the folks who were disaffected by the schism and went anti-woke instead have mostly rejected the idea that it's so obvious and such. If it was so obvious, then why are so many of their former brethren getting it so wrong? The most common result I've seen is a form of naive relativism, sometimes sprinkled with moral error theory or even just power politics dressed up as game theory (if you don't agree with "society", then we have reason to suppress and even kill you, moving the population toward some sort of 'equilibrium').

But for the most part, aside from a few old hats who went anti-woke, I'd really say that the question just mostly hasn't been considered by many of the masses. They're just not exposed to the concepts; it's not even a meaningful question to them. As Scott says, they're in it for hamartiology, not meta-ethics. They just don't even really conceive of the idea that there is meta-ethics to be done prior to hamartiology. It's just not a question that they would even think to ask, so they mostly don't care whether various schools have a position on it one way or another deep down in the theology. Yes, if you ask a queer theory prof, they can probably tell you the sect's doctrine, just as surely as if you ask a priest whether the holy spirit flows independently from both the father and the son or just from the father through the son, they can probably manage to dig up the doctrine... but who's asking? Who cares? No one thinks they can gain adherents by trying to distinguish themselves on this issue.