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Fun belated Eastertime thought. I’ve been musing over the idea of Christianity causing human domestication in Europe. It strikes me that to get anything out of the Christian ritual, you need (1) obedience to believe what the religion says, (2) empathy and guilt that your sins led to the pain and death of Jesus, and (3) gratitude and love that Jesus took your place on the Cross. As everyone was forced to believe this for so long, those who were the most obedient / domesticated would be getting the most positive emotion from the ritual. The ritual also ensures that the most obedient have the most repentance of sins, which promotes more prosocial behavior. So the Christian ritual itself would have led to some non-negligible increase in gene proliferation among domesticated Europeans. This doesn’t even factor for the effect of a widespread “Jesus” and “Mary” ideal that would influence male and female hierarchies and dating behavior.
All the talk about Jesus 'sacrifice' but no one seems to remember two problems with this idea. First is that it does not make sense why God would want his only son to sacrifice himself in order for God to forgive the sins of humans. That jesus sacrificed himself is not a sacrifice from sinful humans but from jesus, which was god's son and did not carry any fault against god. Secondly, it didnt give humans any appreciable benefit because according to traditional christian doctrine, our sins are still going to be punished in purgatory and hell in a way that is way worse than what jesus endured on the cross. Instead of this incoherent sacrifice, it would have made more sense to kill the devil which continues to lead people into sin, or as the christian story goes.
IMO this fundamentally misunderstands the nature of religion as practiced by real believers. It is not a gotcha logic game, but a spiritual drama that you understand emotionally. Sin demands extreme punishment, and Jesus willingly took our punishment out of an interested love in us individually. This frees us from the extreme punishment of our sins. This can be immediately grasped by everyone: something demanded a bad experience, a great individual out of love for us bore the bad experience to save us from it eternally. This induces feelings of guilt, love, wonder, and so forth.
Theology is just a way to flesh out this emotional dimension to satisfy our thoughts, but the theology is certainly not the point. Theology is the janitorial work to ensure that the point of the religion is clean from worries, hence why understanding theology is not necessary for salvation (withstanding a few simple paragraphs of assent in a creed). And so you have a concept like purgatory: if you die in faith, but never did penance for sins (usually easy stuff btw), there is a purifying punishment for these sins. This punishment is not greater than Jesus’ punishment, which is magnified for a number of reasons that would take a while to explain (his innocence, his being God, his emotional turmoil). Were the punishments equal, Jesus’ sacrifice would still be meaningful in that it grants Christians eternal life and access to God.
As for “why didn’t God kill Satan”, that’s like asking why we are not all already in Heaven. You can ask endless questions that have no quick answer whether you are a theist or an atheist, but theists can at least rest assured that the extra questions are irrelevant to one’s perfect happiness and destiny. I would mention that in the lore, Jesus descends into Hades and kills death itself, which is very cool and underrated.
As for “how could Jesus take our punishment”, this really isn’t problematic: because He was also God, or alternatively because our sins accrue a debt, but really, you just assent that He can to buy into the heart of the religion.
Considering the account of purgatory that christians have developed over the centuries (ie people being burned constantly for years), I would much rather be crucified than have to go through purgatory, so saying that jesus underwent a worse punishment comes off as gaslighting to me.
People ask those questions because they bring up contradictions in the beliefs espoused by the religion, a contradictory set of statements can not be true. God was the one who created Satan in the first place, and if you believe that God is omniscient, then it follows that everything Satan does is allowed by God. Moreover, in society there are consequences imposed for breaking rules, for example death penalty for muggers, in order to deter wrongdoing and remove wrongdoers from society, Satan is according to christians the most consequential wrongdoer in existence, created by and completely subordinate to God, yet God does nothing to deal with him.
It does not make sense if I punish myself to forgive you for your wrongdoing against me. Neither does it make sense if I were to pay to myself the debt you owe to me. Your suggestion to just assent to that notion is effectively telling people to disregard reason when it conflicts with christian dogma, but christianity can not overrule reason, because you must exercise reason to be a christian in the first place, ie to understand what christianity demands and whether you are acting in accordance with those demands.
Purgatory is not endless fire that can be compared to this world, though; it’s a cleansing fire that “burns off” any horrible habits that have yet to be penance’d. While this is a punishment, it’s not maximal punishment like in Hell. A good example: once as a child while doing a sport I destroyed a nail on my hand, which was halfway off the finger. The pain was unbearable. I went to a doctor who promptly burned it off. The burning off of this wound was not worse than the original pain, neither was it worse than the relief of the solution. If you can understand how a painful procedure fixes a health problem, you can understand how a purgatory can fix a spiritual problem.
The problem with trying to riddle with God is that, by definition, He is greater than anything we can conceive. But riddling again also defeats the purpose of religion. We don’t abstain from walking on bridges because of the high-level problems involving Newtonian physics and the movements of atoms. You don’t flesh out the entirety of philosophy and theology before you assent to a religion, otherwise no one would ever be saved — you can’t read every book a theologian has written.
One the ways that theologians solved this trivial punishment is through a “Satan’s debt” atonement theory. Jesus tricks Satan into taking our place on the Cross; we “owed” Satan a debt due to our sins. Surely you can understand how someone like Jesus can trick Satan, and this requires no further explanation. Another theory is that the Father demands that bad actions are punished, but out of Love the Father allowed the Son to take our punishment, and so by witnessing this happen and witnessing the terrors of sin’s punishments we are saved. There are other atonement theories, and I’m sure you can find one that is persuasion to your own frame of mind. I would just allege that the crucifixion is not correct or incorrect based on an atonement theory; it is correct if it is believed in an emotional reality, because this is the way that it changes a person’s heart (the original Greek meaning of repentance btw).
God’s relation to Satan is, again, argued by theologians. What’s more important to understand is that (1) God, much like science, doesn’t care for you understanding every nuance of His ways, and neither could you understand every nuance in a lifetime; (2) God is beyond our comprehension, hence why the door to eternal life is accessed through faith and not the accumulation of human knowledge.
what do you mean by burning off horrible habits, how does that work? if somebody died having stolen on some occasions, burning in purgatory is not going to reverse any of the thefts he did. and once he gets into heaven why would he need to steal anyway and if he steals in heaven, there is nothing in christianity about being kicked out of heaven, and if there was, purgatory would no longer be needed by your rationalization. the real reason why purgatory is a tenet in christianity is that it provides further deterrence against people breaking its rules, which means it would be included the same whether or not there was a story about jesus dying on the cross to save us.
But if the religion contains contradictions, then it must be false, so why should I bother with it, and why are you lying to people about it?
I have never heard this notion that we owe something to Satan in christianity. And no, its not a convincing story that Jesus tricked Satan like that, because Jesus dying in the cross is not a price paid by anybody except Jesus.
Why not dole out the punishment to satan rather than to his only son? And if its out of love, the more compelling question is why not forgive without having to punish an innocent person?
The reason there are so many theories proposed is because it does not make sense, and that you need to throw a lot of flawed theories so that one is able to slip through the scrutiny filter of an inquirer because of his particular oversights.
God is so different from and incomprehensible from us, yet he seems to care a lot about what we do in our lives, funny how that works. In any case, the most reasonable explanation for why your religion does not make sense is because your religion is fraudulent.
Imagine the world as a reinforcement learning environment that's intended to produce Good Servants of God. Emphasis on willing to serve God. Now the thing is, God doesn't care at all about punishing anyone, it only cares about burning out whatever parts of one's personality that prevented them from obeying His rules. An evil person who rejected God completely will have only a few parts of his personality lifted into the Godhood. A nice person who sinned occasionally and was upset about it will have the sinning part of himself removed, as he wanted all along, and get uploaded mostly intact.
okay but parts of the personality are not burned, if you think that's a metaphor, then you should realize that catholics talk about people actually being burned in purgatory with all its pain, its understood to be a punishment and that is why believers are concerned about it.
in order to change somebody's personality, you need to rewire their brain, this should not be a painful process, and it prompts the question about why god did not do this in their first life.
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Let's flip the just so story: Christianity breeds in the "defect" gene. Pagan religions reward successful adherence with numerous progeny. Genghis Khan was probably really fucking good at mongol religion. A Viking who was really good at viking stuff got a ton of kids by a ton of unhappy women. Confucian cultures allowed for concubines. Even Islam at least allows you to quadruple your take on the up and up. If you choose cooperate, and succeed, you'll have more kids than if you defect.
Men who are good at Christianity have one shot at having one spouse, if she's infertile forget the whole thing. If he's REALLY good at Catholicism, he probably doesn't even get tha. Men who produce tons of kids with lots of different women under Christianity aren't good Christians, they're bad Christians. Bigamists, cheaters, adulterers, fornicators. A rich man who succeeds at Christianity may manage to have seven kids with his spouse, or he may not. A rich man who defects might have children with a half dozen girls.
In Muslim societies it mainly just benefitted the upper class, who has the funds to have more wives. Because early Islam had a loose class system based on progeny of Muhammad, this just guaranteed Muhammad’s children had more children etc
Yes and Muhammad, his children, and his early followers were remarkable for one thing: their ability to get together and cooperate, their submission to the Muslim law and social order, that assabiyah the DR keeps banging on about.
You don't reach the upper class from the lower class, or get to stay in the upper class, if you defect from societal rules too often and too viciously. In Christianity an upper class man could at most father a few bastards like Charles V; in Islam he would have at least four wives bearing as many children as they could. A Christian who obeys societal values cannot have multiple wives bearing him children, a Muslim who obeys societal laws can. Under which system are those who are genetically wired to be obedient to social laws going to produce more progeny and spread those obedient genes further?
The Imam Ali, the Shia commander of the faithful, had twenty seven children. No faithful Christian could hope to match that.
The Islamic world immediately erupted into a civil war after the death of Muhammad, and there were three more “fitnas” (civil war) over the next 120 years.
As opposed to the very orderly, domesticated processes by which the Carolingian succession, the Reformation, the breakup of the Habsburg and Russian empires, and various French/English royal conflicts were handled.
But surely the ancestors of Muhammad were not especially domesticated or obedient if they had bloody infighting in the century that followed Muhammad’s death. This is the problem of privileging a bloodline with polygamy versus a character trait (Christ-like).
But what you're missing is that being Christ like might be upheld as an ideal, but it does not lead to increased offspring, which is the mechanism of selection. I see no reason Christian societies would increase the reproduction or survival of cooperators over other societies, given that extreme cooperators in Christian societies would be more likely to be monogamous, or even celibate. Extreme cooperators in Muslim societies or in Chinese dynastic societies have more opportunities to reproduce.
That’s fair to a degree, but do we even know if these societies selected for these traits? If you obtained resources by being a vicious war lord, or an excellent trader, or simply the child of a war lord, this does not indicate that you have more domesticated traits as usually conceived. While polygamy allows for certain men to have a lot of wives, this could bring about the opposite problem in that you might be picking the wrong men. A society in which only the rich and the warlords have the most children may not actually be what you want to create a safe, prosperous, civilized society. While you want some who are laser-focused on resource acquisition, and some who are focused on power, you want the majority to be a little bit more well-rounded snd peaceful.
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There’s also the whole eradication of blood feuds and distaste with marrying cousins that helped have better genetic outcomes.
Then again Christians weren’t exactly domesticated, they fought wars all the time. Also many of the elite were not exactly ideal Christians.
That being said Christianity absolutely led to a lot of scientific inquiry and building of knowledge, something often forgotten nowadays.
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See also Dune. Specifically Emperor Leto II’s Golden Path, a plan tobe such a dick that humanity will have decentralization burned into their DNA.
Frankly, I find the Christian version less convincing. Less time, less explicit selection, and a bunch of competing factors. Not just between 1, 2, and 3, but between Christian thought and other drives. Monasticism alone would probably have a bigger effect than any artificial selection for obedience.
Protestantism and the European wars of religion spun up in what should have been the most docile, domesticated region. Meanwhile, those obedient dogs tore through entire continents of “noble savages.” Their descendants would go on to win two world wars, while Continental philosophers would popularize atheism and argue about successor ideology.
Ugh such an incredible plot point. Why can’t anyone do it as good as Herbert? With AGI on the horizon he’s a god damn prophet.
Even more of a prophet than you probably realize. I once collected every single mention of the Butlerian Jihad from the first four books, which was surprisingly few, about a page of relevant text all together, and apparently it was not about any kind of Skynet type of situation, but the machines naturally forcing the society to be more convenient/predictable/understandable to themselves. Think along the lines of choosing extra classes in college not because of something that interests you but because you know that an AI would consider that when recommending your career, and you know that you'll accept its recommendation because it's the best for you and so on. And with the AIs optimizing the society for predictability it was robbing humanity of its future, kinda like Leto II's plan actually but without the reverse psychology part.
Yep, and farther in the series it's revealed that the prophecy/oracle function is the real key. Oh Herbert where are you when we need you?
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Not even Herbert could do it as good as Herbert. Everything I've read by him that wasn't Dune 1-4 was rather meh.
True he must've had some sort of divine inspiration for that series. It's truly remarkable.
A vision of the future, perhaps, while tripping balls out on the Pacific coast.
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