This is the first intermission of 👯, listed as season 1 episode 7 for filing purposes. In this episode, TracingWoodgrains, MasterThief, The Sultan Of Swing, XantosCell, and Unsaying discuss religious community.
This discussion was originally slated to be released as an episode of the The Bailey podcast, but eventually it was decided that it should be published elsewhere instead, and so it finds its home here, at 👯.
The image used in the video is Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld's Pentecost woodcut for "Die Bibel in Bildern", 1860:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schnorr_von_Carolsfeld_Bibel_in_Bildern_1860_226.png
Show notes:
36:00 Unsaying's superintelligence of deity post: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/a54d99/the_compression_problem/
39:47 Despite instructions made in the moment, this tangent was not cut out, as it turned out to be relevant. Normally, any requests to cut something out would be honored, but everyone involved assented to this edit of the episode.
47:03 Xantos's snake-handling video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2dlnqRDmmds
Extended show notes:
(Discussing unsuitability for marriage and the path of monasticism) https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hkesjh/comment/fwy8ofv/
https://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/watching-spotlight-young-priest
https://babylonbee.com/news/dozens-of-bible-verses-come-forward-to-accuse-joel-osteen-of-abuse
(If people want more BG on heresies, i dunno) https://old.reddit.com/r/Catholicism/comments/4ihgog/extra_history_on_early_christian_schisms_pt_2/
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It's funny to watch de-converts from traditional religions enthusiastically adopt american culture, see his twitter https://twitter.com/The_Weed . He has ADHD now!
Well, if the goodness of a life is its experience / impact / being alive, and the problem with death is that it halts one, something quite similar happens if you don't have sex! Which might be the point of the command to have children - it's societally useful and, in a deeply similar sense, useful for the person born.
later claims that "greek conceptions of sex were more about lust than love" aren't true afaik.
More options
Context Copy link
Christians often claim "you can't get the benefits of strong communities / purpose / strong morality without honest belief in ". An atheist in the episode claimed (paraphrasing) "the community cannot be separated from the truthfulness of the religion's claims" - as if the religions morality and community depend on the truth of skypapa.
As much as it's true endorsing false claims is bad, because people (and you plausibly) will believe them, both of these aren't true - you just can have strong morals and communities without religion, you can join a religious community and believe in the morality but not the mystical part and get "the benefit", and the benefits of community morality, rituals, purpose etc were gained by all past religious communities - romans, christians, egyptians, sumerians, despite their religions being entirely false. (or, like, 95% of them being false if you hold one of them). Much of christianity, or any other religion, could be substituted wholesale for a bunch of other beliefs, and still "work" in a community that believes them. And this is clearly true, given how many times it's happened historically!
You make two claims here, first that it doesnt need to be true, and second that you dont need to believe it. Youve only given an argument for the first.
To give maybe a bit of a different perspective: I think you come to your conclusions in part because you evaluate the benefit of religion in a way thats already independent of the content of the beliefs. That way, the benefit can only be to make something happen that already ought to have happened - the typical "solving coordination problems" line of rat-adjacent cultural evolutionism.
As an analogy: Imagine there are two people on an island. In world A their goals are convex, so that both of them are better off controlling half the island than with a 50% chance of controlling it all. In world B, their goals are concave and they would rather go for the coinfilp. People in A will live together relatively peacefully, and people in B will immediately fight to the death. But it would be wrong to conclude that "Peace is a benefit of believing you live in an A world" (as statistics might lead you to). Peace is in fact bad in the B world, for both of them, irrespective of what they believe.
Basically, it seems to me that a lot of the "benefits" of religion are just things people would want to do, if the world were a more fortunate one.
More options
Context Copy link
Personally I think the chain of causality works the other way around. God created a church which both preaches the truth and gives its followers the tools they need to do what God wants. Religions work to the extent that they copy this original church, i.e. the more similar they are (both in message and in method) the more effective they will be. I think these are also interrelated in the sense that a church without 1 of message or method will eventually lose the other.
I can't quite tell what you're saying here.
If you intend 'a church' to mean christianity, like, specific type of christianity is correct, religion goodness is how christian it is, old religions were 'shards of not yet known christianity': Why does islam seem to "work" so well, then? And why did greek, indian, buddhist, sumerian, etc etc etc etc religions work so well? Baptism is much more similar to anglicanism, catholicism, eastern orthodoxy than it is to islam, to say nothing about hinduism, or atheism, yet the 'effectiveness' level - conversion, strength of institutions, etc, seem comparable. Also, atheism is beating christianity. A causal, relational, non-unified, evolutionary explanation that takes various practices and beliefs as separate and related in complex ways fits much much better than 'there is one true religion and similarity to all is what matters'
If you intend this to be perennialist - there's one true church, and it's mystical and complicated and beyond understanding, and all religions are attempts at it but don't come that close, but are vaguely similar in how close they are - why is that true? Consider how religions having different niches - "god says you can't eat X berry" because X berry is poisonous, "god says we must have X social relation" because X is a socially useful (but not perfect, given different ones replace it later) social relation. This makes more sense if religions are just complex groups of beliefs and practices rather than "surviving based on similarity to the true church". And - what are the beliefs of this true church, anyway? What does perennialism actually mean, beyond "religions have some good points sometimes"?
You're right, this is a complicated subject and I didn't explain myself very well. I gestured towards two things, the "method" and "message" of religion. The message just refers to how true it is, i.e. whether the most important claims of the religion are correct. The method refers to everything else about the religion, including both its social technology (i.e. its organization, how it gains converts and followers, etc.) and its social usefulness to adherents (to simplify a lot, how psychologically healthy it is to adhere to the religion).
I am a Christian, but I believe that most atheist claims are more accurate than most Christian claims as far as how reality works. I think that nowadays staunch atheists generally will understand the world better than staunch Christians because they identify much more with scientific methods of inquiry. I'm not so sure about the methods, though--it appears that religious people are generally more psychologically healthy. It's unclear whether this is due to communal effects, selection effects, other obvious factors (such as belief in the afterlife meaning being less scared of death) or whether the principles which religion teaches truly do help people. I'm inclined to believe it's some combination of all of the above, which isn't to say that atheism has no claim to psychologically healthy principles. Atheists lay the strongest claim to psychology etc., and while I think we overestimate its efficacy nowadays, there is definitely some truth there to be learned.
I will push back a little bit though, because I think a lot of "atheism is beating Christianity" is just lukewarm people living life on autopilot without carefully considering these questions. In this sense the tide really has not shifted much--lukewarm people are generally just going from "Christian-by-default" to "Atheist-by-default" with little change in their behaviors either way.
Getting into specifics more, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints believes that Christianity actually was known and then fell away many times throughout history. This implies that old religions really are emulating an even older religion which is just Christianity.
I'm not convinced that at this point general Christian churches have much more of the truth than Islam does. Each church has spent millennia arguing and debating esoteric points of doctrine, and nowadays it seems to me that the churches are founded much more on those arguments and their scriptural interpretations than they are on the scriptures themselves. First example that comes to mind is the Nicene creed, the foundation for most Christian churches. I only bring this up to say that if your prior is "The NT church was more true than Muhammad's church" then you still have to account for millennia of doctrine on top of either beginning, which has pushed both religions in chaotic directions only somewhat correlated with their starting positions.
The vast, vast majority of non-LDS Christians that I've talked to have pretty much read exclusively from Revelations and Psalms, two books which I consider much less rich than most of the rest of the Bible. Between those 2 books and the Quran I'll bet the Quran is more useful in describing who God is, how he wants you to live, etc.
Anyways, I hope I've responded pretty well. In general it seems that a lot of these religious discussions turn into people talking past each other due to differences in how they understand religious terms, so I've tried to avoid using those at all. Given that [there was originally a church with both correct beliefs and correct methods], I think it follows that many of both the beliefs and methods would survive through the eons, and that many religions nowadays would still be benefitting from traditions passed down from the true church.
So here's a better response to OP:
I think this is only true because this is already what many "religious" people do who are measured as part of "the benefit". And yes, they still benefit, but not as much as they could. I also am unsure that you can really 100% believe in the morality without believing in God.
This is because those religions were not entirely false. While their specific claims about gods may have been mostly false, other things like philosophy were probably mostly true, and their adherents gained the benefits of a mostly true philosophy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this would have benefitted immensely by the inclusion of somebody who has experience with non-Abrahamic or pre-Abrahamic religion: paganism, Shinto, various folk religions, etc. When I was into atheist Tumblr, I often encountered the idea that Western atheists, since their only point of reference for what religion can look like is Christianity - which makes explicit claims to universality and is full of propositional claims which its adherents are expected to accept on a personal epistemic level - they have an arrogant, overly-dismissive, and unjustifiably contemptuous attitude toward religion as a category.
Since I was indeed one of those arrogant Western Christianity-hating atheists, this always struck me as ludicrous - just more woke “white men do atheism like that, while us wise Atheists Of Color do atheism like this”. Now that I’ve started to dig deeper into pre-Christian religion, though, I’m starting to really appreciate what those people meant, and I wish this podcast had included the perspective of somebody who has experienced a type of religious community which does not resemble the Abrahamic religions-of-the-book.
Yeah, "religious" is just the default state of pre-modern-atheist communities - the differences between two of those (aside from technology) is comparable to the differences between one of them and us. And most of the, say, problems with religious communities won't be innate to their religiosity, but be practical decisions that, though related to or justified by the religion, could easily be implemented without said religion, or the religion be used to justify different practices.
You don't (contrary to a lot of modern christian rhetoric) need a person-as-God to have "purpose", "strong morals", or a non-atomized community, the "multiple gods" counterexample is obvious but non god-centered rituals and beliefs could back those up with other sources. And by extension, the reason we don't have the latter is not 'lack of christianity', but other causes leading to both.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What does "👯" mean? I get that it's "bunny girls" or maybe "Playboy bunny with the serial number filed off." But why use it for a podcast?
More options
Context Copy link
Will have to give this a watch, however, I'm merely noting here that as much as I cringe seeing abasement before God*, nothing but explicitly religious communities are thriving in the modern day. (Militaristic ethnostates aside).
No matter how many downsides there are to something, if it's the only game in town, what can one do ?
Barring evolutionary adaptation of people to modern fertility patterns; there's some evidence that that is going on, some of the nations that have undergone the demographic transition the earliest - France - have the highest birth rate in their native population. (IIRC)
*having sat through a few catholic services, I found the mindset and the words alien beyond belief.
France's birthrate is driven up by large populations of both native religious fundamentalists and imported religious fundamentalists.
IIRC, even native French birthrate is up at the high end for Europe. Of course, as modernity progresses, you can expect an ever higher proportion of population to consist of religious fundamentalists, those traits offer protection from some of the dangers of modernity.
More options
Context Copy link
And also by secular non fundamentalists motivated by the more important tax deduction for the 3rd child.
Tax systems should not be neglected in birth rates. Germany gives you tax credits for being married, but none for having children. Together with a well-functioning system of child care, France does taxing families right - and this is reflected in births.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I didn’t listen / watch this. I just want to register my dislike of emojis, and doubly so in a title. Petition to remove emojis from thread titles?
I will sign your petition, and I'd like to also petition for some way to disable emojis site-wide, if that's somehow a possibility.
That would kill the Wordle sub-thread of the Friday Fun Thread, since Wordle uses the “colorful squares” emojis to convey information.
I'm okay with it being a user-specific setting. Ideally, there would be an option to have me see text equivalents wherever there would be an emoji.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link