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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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An uncharitable mirror-statement: "We understand that you atheists don't want your self-serving delusions shaken because it's important to maintaining your hedonistic lifestyle and you probably couldn't handle it, so we theists just don't bring it up."

The major difference between your statement and mine is that I didn’t say anything negative about your religion at all, unless you think saying something is false, but useful and beneficial to those who believe it has an identical valence to saying something is a “self-serving delusion” and that it is only useful to maintain “a hedonistic lifestyle”. Sure, I think it’s fair to infer that I believe that the truth claims of, at least, Christianity will be harder to take seriously once subjected to high-quality atheist arguments, but in no sense to I mean to imply that any of us atheists would just CRUSH you with FACTS and LOGIC if we deigned to bother arguing with you. It’s more that we have a stable equilibrium here as it regards religion which most of us, both the theists and the non-theists seem to derive significant benefit from, and neither party seems strongly incentivized to threaten that equilibrium.

Also, I can’t speak for a lot of people here, but I’m personally not living a particularly “hedonistic” life at all; I barely drink, I don’t use drugs, I haven’t hooked up with anyone outside of the context of a monogamous relationship in years, and I strongly desire to marry and have children in the very near future. All of this is eminently possible and reasonable without taking pretty much any of Catholicism’s truth claims seriously; contrary to popular belief, pre-Christian peoples all over the world were practicing monogamy and relatively “non-hedonistic” lifestyles long before Christ showed up, so I dispute that there’s any significant observable inverse relationship between “Christian-style theism” and “hedonism”.