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Don't let the people online and their questionable motives disuade you from attending a Cathlic church. My wife and I went through nearly the exact journey you did for the exact reasons. I am a "cradle catholic" (that is: I was raised catholic from the cradle), and my wife was part of a non denominational evengelical protestant christian church as a child.
We both left the church for different reasons during our teens, and were both extremely annoying internet atheists for 15+ years.
The things you are feeling about The Church being a stable force in an unstable world are correct. The Catholic Church has existed as an institution for between 1700 and 2000 years, and has been a background force keeping western civilization alive through every major war, every pandemic, every crisis, through the 'dark' ages, through everything.
The tradition is extremely alluring. There's something difficult to describe about participating in a ritual that has been practiced nearly without pause, for 2000 years. There is no other way to engage with your role as a member of western society than that, and there is nothing more long term stable than that.
If you want something even more traditional, find a Traditional Latin Mass. Despite what people online say, this is very much alive and well, and growing. Even my parish, in a very progressive part of a very progressive city, has a mass which is largely in latin, with very little singing, etc.
Something I think you'll find if you pursue this (I hope you do, like I said my wife and I did for the exact same reason you are and are now somewhat vocal about what a good choice it was) is the large gap between the internet, and The Church. This is a feature imo. Good luck.
Could you talk more about your actual faith? - as opposed to the woes of the world that have led you back to it?
The church is freaking cool. That’s just a given. Crusades, dope gear, eternal heaven, long ass running institutions, an enemy (or thousands) … I’m not being facetious, all cool things.
But how do you believe? Why do you choose to believe this rather than any Indian thing, and Japanese thing, any anything? Is it just that this is the Western version of something you want?
Your answer doesn’t just have to be about you per se - just maybe your ideas surrounding the entire thing.
Aside from Sam Harris and a few others, I always fairly hated atheists. I probably am one, maybe. Maybe agnostic. Like my music genres, I don’t care - it’s all metal.
However - no religion is correct. And we [[[all]]] (((know))) that. It’s just a tale built upon other tales seemingly and there’s a thousand of them.
I guess I want to know what a man of intelligence has to say about it.
I thought about going to church a few times in the past decade but the dreaded ‘ this isn’t true ‘ always reared its head.
I know what you mean by "no religion is correct" or I assume you mean it cosmologically, as in "no religion correctly describes the cause of existence." I was going to say you mean it metaphysically but morals are part of metaphysics, and there is one provably morally correct text and it is the Bible. I also know that is quite the claim and is itself worthy of a separate discussion so I will collapse it to this: as a set of rules for the people of a society to follow, we find empirically Christianity produces outcomes superior to all other belief sets.
The reason this discussion exists, the reason this website exists as a place for this discussion, the reason for the internet, for your internet-connected device, for the grid that powers your device, is the give or take 2,000 years of Christianity that raised this civilization.
What we can say of Christianity that we cannot say of any other faith on this planet is how perfectly it is tailored to key human biotruths. No other faith approaches Christianity's understanding of man, of his weaknesses, his wickedness, his worst excesses, but and of course also, our strengths, the best of ourselves, and how we use these to address our shortcomings. How we may edify ourselves and conquer the worst of ourselves in pursuit of becoming the best of ourselves. This flows out, it defines the people and the nation, it raises the civilization.
Take monogamy: most men who have ever lived did not procreate. In religiously-proscribed monogamy, until death, women were given value beyond their wombs, and men were simply given value. This implicitly but so crucially and truly individualizes, it recognizes the inherent value of the person. For each and every man to be a husband and each and every woman a wife, that we might be joined as one. Civilizationally this produces buy-in. As the couple is wedded and has children, they are invested in their place, in their community, in their people and in their nation. Young men who are not invested in their nation time and again burn it down, it is the precipice the West hangs upon today, large numbers of unmarried young men with little or no hope for the future, just waiting for the match.
Islam explicitly endorses polygyny and the keeping of concubines, as does Hinduism. Buddhism and Taoism do not circumscribe, and polygamy has a history of being widespread in China, among other traditionally high-practicing nations. Shinto also does not circumscribe, though Shinto endorses monogamy and polygamy was historically rare in Japan, a practice limited to their elite and largely for heir production and the securing of alliances. Similar most to Western Europe. Why is it that the most highly developed nations on this planet are the most historically monogamous?
And Christ preached this in Rome in the first century Anno Domini. Morality is a technology and I wish I could recall the exact analogy I read on this point because it was a historian who understood far, far better the moral context of Rome and he put it in appropriate technological terms for these principles to have emerged during Tiberius' reign. Western civilization's moral framework laid out entirely in a few years of Christ's teachings, was it like if they had instead progressed to landing men on the moon? It feels appropriate, as Aldrin took communion there.
This moral framework, this inconceivable leap forward--if God walked this Earth as a man, it was as Christ, and his historicity is not at question. The totality of manuscripts and indeed the existence of Christianity is attestation of its namesake. But here we do have a critical problem in the debate. The naturalist historian and the layman atheist operate from a fallacious first premise: Miracles can't happen, so this text is false. If the texts lacked any and all content the naturalist could dismiss on first-principle rejection of the supernatural the accounts would be universally accepted as overwhelmingly true. But the miracles are in the accounts, foremost that he rose from the dead. If it didn't happen, why did his first followers believe he did? We reinvite that fallacious premise. The premise is God doesn't exist, the premise is miracles can't happen, so they don't conclude that they were lying, they premise that they were lying and reason back.
I say all this, and I believe it, even as I know this isn't a place for proselytizing nor me the suitable evangelist. I also know this isn't something that can be reasoned into. I've personally always felt the truth of Romans 1, that God is evidence in his creation. I do wish I could impress this feeling on others, I think it's the only thing that I would ever view as something I could give as testimony, that I can step back from myself and invite this awe in creation and axiomatic apprehension of the creator. But these are words on a page and saying how obvious it is to me has worth only to me. I might then appeal to logic, at one point I had here a full formula for the argument, but you can't logic yourself into this either. Even if I convinced you of Christianity's moral supremacy and its historic solidity or else you found my logic unassailable, even if you then for a time pursued it, you might and rightly feel it was for the wrong reasons, that your heart wasn't in it, that you were lying to yourself.
I don't know what to say, I don't have the words, and this isn't the venue.
It is nice to feel truly known. I've been thinking a lot lately about Orson Scott Card's depiction of love. Ender of course; to defeat the formics he needed to understand them truly. To understand truly was to love them, to love truly was to understand them. This I must believe informed Card's depiction of the character Jane, an AI that started as a program to understand Ender, and she does, and she loves him, it is in loving him she gains her specific personage. So I'll say again, it is a nice thing to feel truly known. It is nice in this to have something that makes sense of existence.
But this is me, and maybe you don't feel like you need to make sense of existence, or that you feel your view of things already makes enough sense of existence, and you don't need any more. You might also wonder if I am reliant on this, if I need this to be true, if I am as guilty as making the conclusion of its truth my premise, and reasoning backward. On the last you'd be right, it's what makes me an unsuitable evangelist, my lack of testimony. I know it's true. Not for any moment, I've had no definable spiritual moments, nor do I feel like I need to. I know it's true regardless. Why, though, and what good is that to tell others? You can tell it's true by the way that it is. Such elucidation. I don't have the words!
You say you've thought about going to church a few times in the last decade, but each time "this isn't true" rears its head. Why, then, do you think you consider going? This might be worth considering, and deeply, how this feeling has arisen repeatedly within you despite your belief that you know better. Maybe you do know better, just not in the way that you think.
I thought of going because I agree with you that due to the various form of Christianity, humans were led to current Western Society, which is empirically superior to other forms of hmmm humans. As well as because my country of birth (Poland) and entire social upbringing religion meant Christianity.
As the pundits all say, I have a feeling if I were born in Pakistan then maybe I’d go visit their local place of worship for a need of community.
My fear with the fast downturn of Christian faith in Western society is that nothing will hold us fast in the face of upheaval - from Islam to Communism to AI to what have you. There’s no commonality.
Great post - thank you for writing it.
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We do not all know that.
Yes, faith claims are unfalsifiable. That does not make them wrong; it makes them unprovable. Every set of ideas comes down to unfalsifiable eventually.
Well, not quite unfalsifiable. Proving a contradiction would falsify. And, of course, at the last day.
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We're in the same boat, you and I. I nearly went Anabaptist twenty years ago after comparing each branch's doctrine with the Bible. The only thing that saved me was my realization that I had no reason to choose the Bible over the Quran, the Talmud, the Guru Grant Sahib or the Tao Te Ching.
Since that moment I've been an atheist, and I agree that outspoken atheist spokesmen all suck. But who cares? They are not the leaders of an organized religion; I don't have to justify associating with them because I am not.
Yes, I've just finished my digital Lent, so this all might sound a bit hypocritical, but it's like denying your children Christmas presents because Christmas has "Christ" in it.
Isn't doing nothing the most foolish option, due to Pascal's wager?
Take the chance that God even exists in the first place, then divide that by the chances that he doesn't care about worship, or doesn't like cynical odds-based worship, or doesn't actually punish anyone, then divide whatever value you have left at this point by all the mutually exclusive religious options with nothing in particular to recommend them over one another, and what are you really left with?
Nothing worth restructuring your life over. If I actually considered vague abstract probabilities like this worth acting on I'd probably be doing all kinds of dumb shit all the time.
A value that's still more than you sitting around and doing whatever else you do.
This wouldn't actually be the case, if you were convinced a single path was better expected value. Then you'd just do that single thing.
I disagree. Doing whatever I want without having to consider what Zeus might think of it has value unto itself. I'm not pulling a mythology out of a hat and basing my life around it because there's an abstract philosophical nonzero chance that Tiamat is real or something and maybe I'll have lucked out and guessed correctly.
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The wager presupposes too much. What if God wanted burnt offerings or specific prayers and not just belief? What if she's really pissed you imagined her as a bearded dude once?
Then it's in your interest to estimate the probability space and act accordingly. Not to assume everything magically cancels.
Throwing up your hands and doing nothing is lazy and irresponsible, considering the stakes.
Pascal was quite right to criticize this attitude of carelessness or dismissal in Pensées 195:
How can you estimate the probability space on a thing which, as the wager argues, is fundamentally unknowable through reason? Shouldn't every possible God be equally probable in a situation of zero knowledge?
The wager only works because it smuggles in the assumption that it's Christianity or nothing, but this is an unproven assumption.
It may still be possible to estimate things that are more likely. In fact, it would be extremely surprising if it were literally impossible to do that, if everything were exactly equal.
It doesn't require that it be Christianity or nothing. If there's more than one religion/source of infinite concerns in question, it'll endorse the course of action with the highest expected value.
Pascal's Wager is compelling because it claims to prove a benefit through logic. For the argument to still hold, may be possible isn't enough. I also have opposite intuitions and would find it incredibly surprising if we could logically go from zero knowledge to greater than zero knowledge.
If what you mean by more than one religion/source of infinite concerns is the modern version of Pascal's Wager that doesn't specify a religion and just says you should pick one, that version is still assuming a limited list of religions rather than the unconstrained list of any possible religion that a state of zero knowledge would require.
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I've estimated the probability space and accepted that we are bipedal meatbags driven by complex neural networks.
Bipedal meatbags driven by complex neural networks in dire need of something to believe in in order for their societies to function.
This, while apparently true, is the concern of societies, not the truth-seeker.
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This appears to me to be a good example of what they call a deepity. Not only do you assume that your advice has not been followed before, but you don't show any acknowledgment of how useless your advice truly is, if taken at face value.
The issue with "there are 1000 religions, which one do I believe" is not that they are all equally compelling, it is that they are all equally sourced by wishful thinking and social engineering.
You didn't engage with the argument in a substantive way.
It's okay if you think they're all sourced by wishful thinking. It would still be the case that the remote chance that any of them are not, if they are actually claiming to bound up in matters of infinite value, is of greater expected value than what you'd get by ignoring the matter.
I'm not assuming that it's not followed, but he's not considering the right things by his previous responses. There were other things that he could have said that would not have caused me to respond in that way.
@SubstantialFrivolity had a much better response, and I wouldn't have this objection if you'd said something like that. I only warn you, for the sake of your soul at the day of judgment, to consider things seriously instead of as a mechanism of getting me to shut up. There are much more important concerns than shutting me up.
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I don't think so, personally. Back when I was an agnostic I had people propose Pascal's wager to me, but it didn't really seem like a good bet to me. It seems to me that God would have more respect for honest skepticism than feigned belief (at least to the extent he distinguishes the two at all, which he might not). Accordingly, I felt in terms of Pascal it was better to continue to honestly disbelieve and seek answers, rather than pretending to a belief I didn't have.
Well, then look for options that don't require belief, and do those?
Or at least be researching the options extremely diligently on the off chance that one of them is true and you're convinced or God directly causes faith in you (for the positions that believe that happens) or something.
Any of these paths seem obviously to dominate over uncaring atheism.
I have to ask, are you dedicating all your time free of finding sustenance to this cosmically important search, or are you already convinced you've found the most likely true thing? If you are convinced, are you truly convinced enough to do anything but eat, sleep and search?
No, I'm not spending all my time searching, I'm a Christian. Now, the proper thing to do is to live accordingly with all my might. I admittedly don't do at all as much of that as I should. But that's a failing on my part, and I'll admit to it being one.
"You could be wrong!" you're surely about to say. Certainly. But is the expected value of investigating other options higher than that of trying to live out a pious Christian life?
Why are you so much more sure that it isn't compared to living a virtuous atheist life, or unitarian, or w/e?
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In my understanding, digging into how Belief itself actually works helped a whole lot. It appears to me to be trivial to observe that the consensus narrative about the nature of belief is pretty clearly wrong, and it is that an ingrained acceptance of that consensus narrative that causes people to be "unable to believe". They "believe" that beliefs are forced by evidence, and that the evidence is all on one side on this issue, so the choice is between rationality and irrationality, and they are already strongly committed to rationality, so the cognitive dissonance eats them up.
But in fact, beliefs are pretty clearly not forced by evidence, and the relevant evidence is not all on one side on this issue. People are believing what they want to believe, always have and always will. "Belief" is not a deterministic result of evidence, it is a prerational act of the will. Once this is understood, belief becomes much, much easier to control.
But evidence definitely matters!
It does. Just not in the way I was taught it did, and not in the way many people appear to claim it does.
We reason from axioms. Axioms have a shape. That shape allows some evidence to fit inside, and excludes other evidence. Or to be more accurate, it fits specific interpretations of evidence and rejects others. Axioms sufficiently specific so as to be useful generally reject significant amounts of evidence, but this is ignored because they organize a much more obviously significant central mass of corelated evidence, and this evidence-mass is central to the focus of the person adopting the axiom, so they are motivated to ignore the outliers. If the outliers become sufficiently relevant, they might switch to a different axiom that accommodates them, but evidence in and of itself does not cause this to happen.
That's my understanding, at least.
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I find it helpful here perhaps to share this early passage from Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI)'s Introduction to Christianity which sheds light on how this condition is inescapable.
Perhaps anything is true. Perhaps I have an invisible unicorn. That seems like a really weak defense of faith.
It isn't a "defense" or frankly a whole argument for faith, let alone Christian faith specifically. You're missing the point if you're trying to parse it as that. It's quite literally the first chapter of a book that does contain that if you want it, but that's not why I'm quoting it.
The point of the story is that the general feeling and condition of doubt is inescapable. We do not and can not know any metaphysic to be true from experience alone. Anything we do is ultimately under the rubric of dealing with things we do not comprehend.
What if Russel's teapot indeed? I personally hold that claims of knowledge on metaphysical matters are unwise, and that we have to deal with a condition that is and remain mysterious. If acting as if invisible unicorns or Saturn orbiting teapots existed granted visible boons, I'd consider the idea even if I am unable to reconstruct a logical justification for it.
To not consider it because anything could be true seems silly. The world is full of things we can't understand and still use.
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Yeah, I definitely would agree with that. If my parish was anything like the terminally online Catholics you see on social media and stuff, I would've probably run away a long time ago. But it's really nothing like that. They are just a bunch of normal people trying to do the right thing and get closer to God.
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