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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34915 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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"My marriage is a contractual obligation with clearly defined responsibilities and benefits. I fulfill my responsibilities and am entitled to my benefits. I tell my wife I love her three (3) times a day, spend a minimum of one hour each day engaging in social interaction with her, take care of my hare of the chores, work my job, offer flowers and presents on the appropriate holidays. In exchange, she holds up her end. Beyond this, my life is my own to do with as I please, and her feelings are more or less irrelevant."

I don't think I've ever heard a Muslim state something like this growing up.

This actually sounds like a highly (and Allah forgive me for uttering this word) liberal worldview. "It's not God's business what you do in X past Y" was a staple of early 2000s atheist rhetoric, but would be utterly blasphemous to most devout believers.

The second is analogous to a rules-based approach. It fails because no set of rules is ever actually sufficient to constrain human will: malicious compliance is still compliance, and self-interested interpretation and loophole hunting are always available options.

What makes you think that members of the more nomistic faiths believe that the purpose is to close out all malicious compliance and loophole abuse? Is it just that they don't see this problem, or the entire theory simply doesn't accurately map to how they view the world?

This seems like one of those arguments that's devastating from within Christianity but not other views - like the "well, no one can truly earn righteous" one.

This actually sounds like a highly (and Allah forgive me for uttering this word) liberal worldview. "It's not God's business what you do in X past Y" was a staple of early 2000s atheist rhetoric, but would be utterly blasphemous to most devout believers.

Practical examples are not hard to find. Have you heard of bubble porn? I've been plagued by similar delusive desires to have my cake and eat it too. It's a very human failure mode, not at all confined to any particular worldview.

What makes you think that members of the more nomistic faiths believe that the purpose is to close out all malicious compliance and loophole abuse? Is it just that they don't see this problem, or the entire theory simply doesn't accurately map to how they view the world?

I'm not really familiar with the term "nomistic", but going from context... I think that confusing the rules for the ends the rules aim for is a basic failure mode of human thought. I see it absolutely everywhere, in the secular world and the religious, in a variety of cultures and faiths, including various branches of Christianity. The case of particular strains of Judaism comes easily at hand because it's used as the go-to example in the bible, old and new testaments alike. I don't claim that particular strains of Judiasm or Islam have this problem; I don't know enough about them to make that claim. I suspect that at least some do, as some branches of Christianity do, because it seems to be a very easy mistake to make. And if some religion doesn't see it as a mistake, but asserts it as basic truth, I think they're just flatly wrong.

Have you heard of bubble porn?

Fair point. I would say that, theologically, such things would probably not be looked kindly upon when I was growing up but that doesn't mean it never happens.

Though, a lot of the "problems" I saw with rituals were people who would overweigh in-group markers (e.g. not drinking alcohol) while doing other bad shit moreso than something like bubbleporn.

I'm not really familiar with the term "nomistic"

I just meant religions with law codes like the Torah or Sharia.

in the secular world and the religious, in a variety of cultures and faiths, including various branches of Christianity. The case of particular strains of Judaism comes easily at hand because it's used as the go-to example in the bible, old and new testaments alike.

That's actually the site of a bit of a debate. Just how much Judaism actually fits the hyper-transactional viewpoint* criticized by Christian scholars is one of the questions raised by the New Perspective

Sanders' work actually goes and looks at the sources in Paul's time (since Christians assume Paul must have been responding to some major deviation) and...it was more complicated. As I said, I'm not against there being a distinction, but there are strong incentives for polemics and contentious descriptions of other faiths that they themselves wouldn't necessarily have used ( e.g. your second approach)

* Though there is an argument that it applies more to Islam than Judaism

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