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Reclaiming religious social technology by rejecting literalism
We have had discussions on secular culture and the consequences of the old “religious impulse”. But usually there’s a focus on the worst examples and experiences of religion. I want to bring up a different angle: what is the best that religion has to offer? What does religion accomplish best, beyond what we all know (fostering a community with moral rules)? And how can we reclaim and reorganize only the good and useful aspects of religious social technology?
The worship of God as therapeutic mental and emotional practice
Let us assume that there is no God. With this assumption, God is still the greatest possible Being that can be conceived in our mind. This is one of the more popular definitions of God. (Theologians have entertained many ways of construing God, including that He is “being itself”, the ultimate Good, or the ultimate Reality, yet what unites all of these is a desire to imagine the greatest possible thing in a given framework). If a person is using his mind to imagine the greatest Being, he is engaging in an activity that brings psychological and emotional benefits. When we dwell on an aspect of God, we dwell on a greater experience, straining our mind to understand something that brings awe and reverence. If the aspect we focus on is God’s eternal nature, we are attempting to know and feel the fact that something can be eternally existent throughout all of time, reminding us of the grandeur of existence and the insignificance of passing vanity. If it’s God’s truthfulness, we call to mind the idea of perfect certainty and logic, while praising truth itself. If it’s God’s power, we imagine the greatest experiences of power, and applying these experiences to one Thing (one Being, Idea, Cue, or Point in the mind: God). Thunder, waves, the magnitude of the sun, various imagined metaphors (“the earth in his hand”) or personal experiences may apply. If it’s God’s peace and love, we reach into our memory to pull out the greatest experiences of peace and love we know, and then associate God with the underlying experience of love. When someone is worshipping God as “King of Kings”, they imagine a perfect ruler over their life. The perfect goodness and purity of God is a way for us to strain our mind to imagine and feel perfect goodness and purity. The act of worship is a mental reorganization around greater experience, growing in our mind the experience that we attend to.
The triumph of monotheism is that all of these are associated with one “thing”. We might call it one god, one experience, one Word, one “inner gaze”, or one ineffability. Since a person can only focus on one thing at a time, the monotheistic God is just the greatest possible single thing to focus on — not as a consequence of his being real or his being God (we are assuming He is not), but purely on definitional grounds as a phenomenological activity. It’s a mental and emotional activity, a meditation or exercise, which results in benefits even for a 100% atheistic person.
Experiences of greatness, awe, reverence, and the “sublime” are associated with life satisfaction in numerous studies [1]. It is not surprising then that “awe directed at God” collects all of these benefits and more [2]. What I would assert is that God, understood in the way above, is the greatest mental practice of ordering these feelings or states of being. If there is any great thing you have in your mind, then unless it is perfectly great, there is going to be something greater to conceive. That “something greater” is nothing other than the ancient practice of worshipping God, minus the insistence on His existence and providential qualities.
God as Optimal Social Relationship
Leaping from this ground of defining the divine, we can consider what’s going on with a personal Christianized God. Can’t all this be done without “believing in a personal God”, let alone a Christian God, let alone a god? I will supply two answers. (1) Yes, but it never is. In fact, it is not often done by nominally religious people despite thousands of years of poetic tradition. It’s the realm of ancient philosophers, mystics, and the obscurely devout. So while it is not necessarily religious, it is still distinctly religious, and nevertheless a great part of religion that should be recreated. But to be double-minded: (2) no, because there is an essential variable left out of the equation: the primacy of social relationships.
We are not rational creatures first, we are social creatures first. From the standpoint of evolution, social cooperation comes before rationality. Our motivations are traced to social acculturation and values and not pure rationality. Actually, there is no rationality without social cooperation and values. Social life is the father of rational thought and has dominion over it. This is evident when looking at scientific cheating scandals, marketing, and in-group biases. I’d say you can also find this when looking at rationalist communities: it requires a community to draw people toward rationalism and to have them think and consider within the rationalist framework.
Due to evolution, our animal mind comes with large disk space exclusively dedicated to social life. This means that, if we want the greatest thing in our mind, it must be understood socially. We do not love and serve an idea in the way we do a Being, simply because we are not designed to do that. Evolution has deigned to make us social animals with deity-forming instincts when left unattended.
If we cannot grasp in our mind the fullness of an idea as we can the fullness of a Being, and our desire is to grasp the greatest thing in our mind, then it must be conceived of as a being. While we might stand in awe at a mountain, the sea, and the celestial heavens (hence why these are used abundantly in religious poetry), we have more reverence for an individual than a theory. This is the purpose of a personal God and the purpose of prayer. To maximize the use of our mind toward the greatest single object of attention, we must see God as person-like, or in other words, a Being.
Creating a community around the greatest conceived Being is creating the optimal conditions for community
Here’s where the idea of secular culture reclaiming religious practice gets interesting. If a group of people attend the same place to focus on and grow the experience of “perfect love”, then that is the best community for cultivating love. If they do the same thing for “perfect virtue”, then that is the best community for perfect virtue. Organizing people around each person’s conception of the Greatest Being is the best way to organize people together. It is the best way to share positive emotions, because despite each person having a slightly different understanding of perfect love, they are all feeling and sharing the emotion together.
Imagine for a moment that you have wrapped all of Life’s great and optimal experiences together in your mind under the dominion of one Being. You, and your neighbors, go to a dedicated place to worship that Thing, using all the same cues. (By worship, we mean simply increasing our love and interest in the Thing.) This is an extraordinary way to come together as a community. I would argue it’s considerably better than how most people form communities today, structuring them around hobbies, drugs, or suboptimal political aspirations.
The psychological magic of the Christian celebration as optimal religious experience: can an atheist culture recreate something Christian?
Christians come together to celebrate the story of how they (personally) escaped certain death due to the goodness and virtue of a Perfect Man. They celebrate also the wisdom that the Perfect Man bestowed humanity, which they leads to perfect felicity. They consider this Perfect Man to be their teacher who hears them when they speak and who provides support and favor. The Perfect Man is Perfect Teacher, Perfect Friend, and will one day be Perfect Judge. As icing on the cake, the book that unites Christians together (the Gospel) is about mankind’s evil inclinations causing this Perfect Guy’s torture and death!
The benefits of this celebration are remarkable as something felt and experienced (phenomenological) rather than analyzed or asserted. How would you feel if an amazing person saved you and your friends from death? What if your evil inclinations led to his death, but he forgave you? What if he came with good news about living life well and serving wisdom, and you just imitate him? What if he is your perfect friend? The point of focus here is imagining these experiences as if they unfold in your own reality, almost like a great movie that you’re watching rapt with attention. Just like a person can be changed from a movie or a song, while knowing the events are not physically real, a person can be changed from a dramatic religious experience. And this experience is accessible to anyone who simply forgets the question of reality or unreality and attempts in context to imagine this as having happened. It can literally just be appreciated as non-literal, poetry and “living drama” rather than limited-in-scope factual assertions about biographical detail or the archaeological record.
The underlying social technology of uniting a community around an imagined ideal human and an ideal relationship with him is simply profound. It’s so compelling that the element is recreated across all religions, with Buddhists imagining the Buddha, Muslims imagining Muhammad, and even Ultra-Orthodox Jews spontaneously seeing their Rabbi as the Messiah. The utility is that, as a social species, we can’t actually approach Greatness outside of our social understanding — there’s a chronic need for an intermediary between Man and the Divine. I think Christianity does this particularly well because Jesus can be related to through all the powerful emotional dimensions.
Why?
Why should we take a step back to religious social technology? Well, I think we’re in a social dark ages. Our attention is consistently brought down to matters of consumerism and social strife. The idea of genuinely talking about and encouraging virtue among peers is Don Quixote levels of comical. We have lost the religious language that allows us to succinctly reference optimal experience. Our youth are worshipping pop singers, rappers, dim-witted athletes, and absurd political Utopianism. Meanwhile, adults are training their mind for outrage and doom through scrolling and news. Negative emotional states and corrupt social infrastructure have far-ranging consequences on health and civic engagement, and religious social technology offers an improvement.
I would argue we already did step back to religious social technology. Only the religion is kinda weird - it's God-less (unless you consider Gaia to be a god?) and doesn't have any defined scripture (at least not yet), but it does require human sacrifice of sorts. It's a cruel religion because there's no way to save oneself, really, and the state of sin is perpetual and unavoidable, but it's also hierarchical - some people are much more sinful than the others. It borrows some from Calvinism by declaring the sinfulness of the individual is predetermined before he is born, but the good works can somehow alleviate (even though never remove) the stain of sin. It also does not declare the Man can transcend its limitations and become something bigger - only become slightly less harmful (though always still harmful in so many ways) to everything around him. It's not an optimistic religion - in fact, being an optimist is one of the signs of a sinner and an heretic, if you say "things aren't as bad as it seems" you can be pretty sure you're on the list for the next stoning. But that's what we've got.
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The idea of "encouraging virtue among peers" is stronger than ever, but for different definition of "virtue". People are very strongly encouraged and pushed every day to be more woke, more anti-racist, more anti-Trumpist, more active LGBTQ+ ally, more climate activist (insert another current week-month-year causes).
Yes, you would say that Christianity was not replaced with scientific reason and logic, but another religion, much more crazy and insane.
This is not good argument for Christianity - if it was so easily defeated and supplanted by something as absurd as bouquet of modern woke causes, then it was no barrier and no protection at all.
Well the original sin of the progressive religion is that it is not founded on a shared reverence to optimal experience, which all monotheistic religions are
What does this mean?
There is no communal ritual in wokeism where the adherents focus on the absolute good, what they are striving towards. No woke church. Just virtue through signaling and destruction of enemies.
Yes there are.
Lack of colorful rituals and celebrations is the least problem with woke faith.
Better criticism of wokeism is that wokes do not breed, that full woke society would die off.
Christians of first centuries had similar problem - they refused to kill.
Pagan Romans saw it as absurd - every empire is built on oceans of blood and pyramids of skulls, every empire needs professional soldiers, torturers and executioners. If the empire was Christian only, it would collapse in a fortnight.
Well, Christians took over Roman empire, and quickly reconsidered this part of their teaching, quickly discovered that shedding blood in the name of Christian Empire is holy and glorious.
No reason why woke religion cannot manage similar plot twist.
Nope, this is a very poor rebuttal. Sure the most ardent of the woke folks get together once a year or so to have large festivals and holidays. That is nowhere near the same in terms of personal impact as going to a church every week, being in a direct community with others, and collectively having an experience of the sacred.
In terms of your criticism of Christianity, sure. It killed a bunch of people. The twist is that it actually set us on a path towards less killing and finding different ways to work out our problems, which I'll say is pretty damn good compared to the rest of the belief systems out there.
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The secular anti-homophobia and anti-racism can indeed be seen as virtues, or at least the tenets of a moral code. So they do check each other’s behavior, which is a point against my assertion that talking about virtue has died out. But these virtues are not rooted in a shared experience (attempted imagining) of the Greatest Being. The virtues wind up being political (trans rights) and rule-based (never misgender). There’s no interest in growing the antiquated virtue of caritas, pure love for others, because there’s no attempt at collecting in the mind the idea of Perfect Love, and there’s no unitive story of love that binds the community together. So the virtue of authentic love for others degenerates into adhering to political rules, merely to not be publicly crucified by your friends for something politically incorrect.
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Beautiful post. You've articulated something I've been trying to get across extremely well!
This is the biggest issue that religious deniers are putting their heads in the sand on:
Honestly I think that you could be far more pessimistic here - we are going to destroy our world if we don't figure out how to cultivate virtue at a large scale. Period.
As for all the people below complaining if it's capital-T True or not, I'm gonna go with Peterson's argument and say that the definition of 'true' is doing a ton of work here. As Coffee says, we are social creatures. There is a social reality that is just as powerful as, and in some ways more powerful than, the material world. What we believe and do as humans has massive effects on the material world.
The biggest mistake people like @Goodguy are making in my opinion is denying that social reality has any real impact. That something cannot be True if it isn't cold hard facts. This prevents the possibility of any real social organization, as to organize mass amounts of humans we have to be able to appeal with the same stories to people at multiple levels of understanding. If you stick to one reductionist, materialist version of truth this can never happen.
Or even if it can, we don't have time to figure out a whole new way to do it, because we're way too powerful and our social cohesion is catastrophically slipping.
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In the words of no less than St Paul, Christianity is useless if it's not true, there's not only no point evangelizing makes you worse than a heathen:
I Corinthians 15:14-19
Would you say that no mainstream Christian is “still in their sins”? Because they all assent to the fact that the dead were raised. But I do not think that this fact, as something simply assented to (rather than dramatically imagined), is doing anything to change someone’s morality or sinfulness. And if we’re not ultimately changing our righteousness, then the whole of Christianity is worthless.
They're all justified through Christ's sacrifice (assuming they've really accepted the gift and believe). They're hopefully all working on the sanctification (becoming more Christ like and crucifying their natural self), but none of them are there yet.
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I have good news for you then, because the sacrifice of Christ raised us from our innate sinfulness and allowed us to strive for sanctification.
As a Christian you aren't with the goal of banking enough good boy points to overcome your sins but rather you are virtuous out of your own belief in virtue.
I would prefer a Christianity where people are provenly made virtuous, which is an important theme in the Gospel. Those who lack righteousness are actually told to “sell” what they are currently doing, in order to buy enough (what you call) “good boy points” in order to overcome their sin. This is illustrated in the parable of the five wise and five foolish Virgins, as well as the parable of the Talents — in the latter Jesus actually commends someone for putting his God-given coin “in the bank”. Those who are not righteous will find their place in hell — all three of these are shown clearly in Matthew 25. Lastly, to those who do evil works, there will be no saving them, which is found in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.
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This is where your argument fails for me. In my experience, what you say is not true. Out of the various sublime and mystic experiences I have had, some were social, some were not, and neither type was greater than the other.
Also, your apology for Christianity is, to me, in contradiction with your argument about perfection. I can imagine a god more perfect than the Christian one, both morally and in the sense of how plausible the reality of the god seems to me.
Maybe in some ways, in other ways we are in by far the most moral society in human history. For example, slavery has been nearly eradicated in the West.
Among some people, sure. Other people talk about and encourage virtue all the time, although perhaps without using that word.
It's not even always necessarily a beneficial thing. For example, SJWs are literally people who talk about and encourage virtue among peers.
Goodguy coffee_enjoyer 13hr ago · Edited 12hr ago To maximize the use of our mind toward the greatest single object of attention, we must see God as person-like, or in other words, a Being.
The argument is that you can't help but see things through a social lense, because you are a human. This is basically just the true implications of mimetic theory applied to our worldviews.
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Well a mystical experience, which is rare and comes on its own, is different than a stable object of attention that can be accessed daily. What we’re after is something which can be conceived in the mind with some reliability, not a transient “high” feeling when chance and gratuitous conditions are met. But I’d agree that “ecstasies” (religious or otherwise) are not always social, books like the Cloud of Unknowing and various testimonies of Saints often describe something where a sense of self is lost.
So you want a "Harry Seldon" then huh? And perhaps a grand plan?
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I'm an atheist who grew up Christian. I do still sometimes feel a sense of nostalgia for that "church feeling," and I've tried the UUs and humanist societies. They're lame. They don't really believe anything besides "we should all be nice to each other." I can (and do) get as much community and fellowship from the local boardgame meetup.
I've heard proposals like yours before, that you can "go through the motions" of being religious because it's good for you. I've even seen Christians argue that you should go to church and do that, even if you don't really believe, because it will lead you to belief. I don't see it. I can't make myself believe something I don't, and LARPing as a religious believer just seems like a waste of time to me.
I don't deny there is something to religion that fills a need for people, and some part of me would be sad to see religion disappear entirely. But, ya know, I don't believe in God or angels or faeries or psychics or ghosts and I think it's very unlikely anything will make me believe in those things. So we're going to need some better "social technology."
I go to AA. For a lot of people there, I get the sense that religion is a LARP. But it's one they cling to desperately, and they are strongly supported by others in the group. I've seen people flat out become something entirely different. A guy who would lie, steal, cheat on his wife, and then suddenly, BAM, different person. I think that the AA structure is more effective than the church structure, you are compelled to interact and share deeply personal things, I think that's probably only the tip of the iceberg.
But for this reason I think it can work
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How this has typically worked throughout history is that the lay people do believe unironically, and a more intellectually refined elite theologize quite a bit amongst themselves, come up with rationalizations, and basically act out a Noble Lie.
I'm not sure if we can move towards a better system, but I do know there is a bridge where you can rationalize yourself into believing in God in a strong and useful way while understanding that it's a social and mimetic construction, not a real agent flying in the sky. I'm living proof! There are dozens of us!
I’ve heard this claim before, that EG Thomas Aquinas didn’t really believe in medieval Catholicism he was just trying to reconcile beliefs he knew to be false with the fact that they were important for the social structures of his day.
There is no evidence for this. Thomas Aquinas is literally a canonized saint. When the European elite stopped believing in Catholicism you got the Protestant reformation actually working when the many previous attempts at overthrowing the prevailing religious order had failed. Even if you zoom out, the elite consensus in Rome in 275 AD was that it was very important to regain divine patronage for the empire by mandating every citizen conduct a group sacrifice to the gods, the elite consensus in 1200 AD was that the Catholic Church was God’s regent on earth and figuring out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin actually mattered, and the elite consensus in 2023 AD is to actually believe their weird shit about race and gender.
Note I'm not saying that these people didn't believe. They just believed in a very different, rationalized way compared to the laity.
St. Thomas Aquinas, late in life, had a mystical experience after which he said "All that I have written is straw". That's not "he believed in a nice, tidied-up, rational form of religion unlike the peasants with their weeping Madonnas". Indeed, you can't disentangle mystical visions from the story of St. Thomas Aquinas, even as he was the great Scholastic mind - angels coming to girdle him with the cincture of chastity, Christ on the crucifix saying "You have written well of me, Thomas"
I'm not arguing he didn't have mystical visions! Man, people really love putting words in my mouth when I discuss this.
I'm just saying that historically, you could have a very strongly knit Christian society where different people, depending on class on intellectual level, had a vastly different conception of God. But they all still believed, had mystical experience, and were bound together in a community.
This my belief as well, and it’s shown in the works of John Scotus Eriugena, especially his inquiry into the ways of seeing God:
The best way to unite a community must be via this “nested” structure of complexity. The basic level of Christianity is so simple that a child or mentally handicapped person can understand it: they have been personally saved by a guy named Jesus, who is a very great guy. The levels increase in complexity when you read deeper into the text: Christ both represents the ideal man, and the relationship of God to man. Then you notice that the progression of his life itself reflects the development of the moral life (beginning under the obedient Virgin Mary, later sacrificing one’s life for the Good of the Community in spite of extreme torture by the high status members). You can add greater and greater wisdom on top of the Bedrock of Christ, and the whole importance of this is that every member of a community can all love the same human exemplar. It’s no surprise then that we follow Christ in the Gospel by the testimonies of his friends.
I think perhaps modern people have trouble realizing that what occurs in the imagination can be as strong as reality, especially in a period of human history devoid of media superstimuli and formal education. (Read Oliver Sach’s Musicophilia for a description of a music lover hearing a full symphony in his head when out to sea, and believing it was real. This is sensory “deprived” humanity).
If a group of people of various stages of wisdom are united by a perfectly imagined friend and teacher, that is all the same psychological stuff as if it were a real friend and teacher. That’s the power of the social technology. You are creating an optimal reality for your community that cannot exist in a materialistic-reductive way of socializing. It will be a better community!
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When would you say this was true and when did it stop being true?
What is 'This' in this context? Is God himself true? That's a big question.
When lay people believed unironically and the intellectuals believed ironically.
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It is sign that Great Atheist War of the noughties is over, sign of complete intellectual defeat of Christianity.
If you remember, you would remember that Christians emboldened by Bush victory went to evangelical offensive, with lots of arguments about first cause, fine tuning of the universe, intelligent design, irreducible complexity, literal truth of the Bible, literal resurrection of Jesus etc...
Since all these arguments were demolished by reason and logic, no one talks about these things any more. This greatest internet flame war in history is over.
Now it is "Just believe, bro. Just go to church."
Online Christian triumphalist message is not anymore "We will convert you" but "We will outbreed you", admitting that Christian arguments will fail to persuade any grown up person and work only on captive audience of their children.
Throughout history, religion worked that lay people followed the rituals of their village, knew nothing about high theological claims of their religion and cared even less. The tiny intellectually refined elite was actually reading their holy books and trying to make sense of them.
Honestly, I'll bite the bullet and say that I have intuitive faith that there are some inherent flaws in our framework of reason and logic. Not saying we should throw it all out of course, but I think the fundamental inferential gap is that 'reason' and 'logic' and not really well understood or defined things. They essentially function as divine entities for most modern intellectuals.
I'll admit, this is a pretty weird take and obviously hard to defend with rational argumentation, hah.
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Would you prefer that those of us who disagree argue to the contrary?
Yes, write an effortpost why irreducible complexity of bacterial flagellum proves that Intelligent Designer Of Life, Universe And Everything is real.
This was what the smartest people on internets were debating 20 years ago, and it was the golden age.
Well, some of them were also finding reasons why GWOT must be fought till final victory.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
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If you have valid arguments, sure. This is the same answer I'd give you if you want to argue homeopathy--find valid arguments and you're fine. If you can't, that's your fault for picking a subject that doesn't have them.
Pinging @Eetan, might as well.
The question was prompted by this thread, and particularly this reply. If we argue the point, we're preaching. If we don't argue the point, there's no valid arguments.
Briefly, then:
*Rationalist Materialism made a great many significant promises. Among them, that it could bridge the is-ought problem, that it could build stable, functional societies, and that it could secure objective truth better than its predecessors. It has failed at these three promises, and at many besides. Societies founded from the ground up on Rationalist Materialism have not been stable or functional, and often have not been survivable for significant portions of their population. Societies founded on Christianity did much better, and as those societies have drifted toward Rational Materialism, they've done considerably worse in terms of stability and functionality.
*Rationalist Materialism's current dominance has come largely from social factors, not objective results. Those social factors largely boil down to the promises it made and has failed to deliver on, and a variety of lies it has coordinated to conceal the failure of those promises. Rationalist Materialism continues to dominate for precisely the same reasons that Psychology continues to be regarded as a valid and reliable scientific discipline.
*Contrary to the dogma of Rationalist Materialism, abstract beliefs are not forced by evidence, but are chosen through exercise of one's will. Another way to say it is that we draw conclusions for reasons. This process can be directly observed and verified by each individual, should they choose to do so. Rationalist Materialism itself plays arbitrage by ignoring this fact, pretending that it will admit only that which can be verified on Rational Materialist grounds, and then simply ignoring those standards for claims that seem consonant with its general vibe. The entire history of modernism is replete with examples, with the history of Psychology as a science again being one of the most glaring.
*Due to the above, Epistemology is not a solved problem, and while Rationalism and Materialism are quite useful within relatively narrow fields, they fail utterly as soon as one exits those fields into the world as a whole. The basic problem is that they need specific constraints to operate, and the complexity of the wider world denies those constraints. You cannot, in fact, "trust the science" for actual questions of science, let alone questions of metaphysics.
*Christianity endures. Even by Materialist standards, it delivers significant results, such that Materialists keep trying to figure out how to get the juice without the squeeze. It has not died off, and does not seem likely to any time soon. The conditions that have pushed it from its dominant social position are now a memory, and do not seem likely to return even by the expectations of many Rationalist Materialists. One could argue that it is superstitious, but I defy you to claim that it is more superstitious than "structural racism" and "trans women are women" or "wreckers and kulaks are sabotaging our production quotas" or "dialectical Marxism is the inevitable outcome of the laws of history" or "free will does not exist" or any of the other dominant shibboleths that inevitably emerge from Rationalist Materialism. You can hate us all you like, but what you see around you is the alternative, and the fact that these outcomes are not what your ideology predicted for the policies it advocated and secured should give you pause.
...That would be a start, anyhow.
And that would be also an end, end of Christianity. This long effortpost was the perfect illustration of my point.
You do not say "Christianity is good because it is true. God is real, the Bible is true word of God, Jesus is true son of God who died for your sins and rose from the dead. Follow him as the only way to save your soul from eternal fire that awaits you for your sins."
You say: "Christianity is good because Christian society is better than "materialist" one, because it delivers 0,46% higher GDP growth, 7,91% lower crime rate and scientific papers that replicate at 6.38% better rate. Go dilligently to church every week, it will somehow make everything better."
Indeed I do not. You do not need me to, as you have just demonstrated by making the statement yourself. It did not persuade you when you heard it last, and it would not persuade you if I repeated it to you an additional time myself. I do not think it is what you or any of the other atheists here need to hear.
You have armored yourselves against such an appeal, and battering uselessly against that armor is pointless. That armor is constructed of "Rationality" and "Reason"; if it is to be breached, one must do so through the gaps, pointing to the irrationality of that "Rationality" and the unreasoning of that "Reason". I think this can be done, and I mean to do it.
Cargo-cult Christianity is a stupid, pointless idea, and it won't work now any better than it has in the numerous times it's been suggested previously. There is no getting the juice without the squeeze. I am not arguing that Christianity is useful to non-Christians. I am pointing out that Christianity continues to stubbornly falsify non-Christians' predictions, theories, and explanations. We aren't supposed to have anything you could possibly want, and yet we do, and you yourselves admit it. I have not claimed that Christianity's value consists of the things you are still capable of recognizing. I am claiming that you do, in fact, recognize value, when your dogma says you should not.
[EDIT]
That was not an effortpost. It's barely, what, 3k characters?
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Thanks for ping.
This past thread was about preaching - compulsive, but counterproductive preaching at the wrong time and place.
TL;DR: Jewish Republican representative was so annoyed by simple expression of Christian faith that he unleashed Xer storm at fellow Republican and pro-life activist.
In related news, podcaster Daryl Cooper was so annoyed by rabbi lambasting Christianity, that he replied with attack on Judaism, especially Jewish faith in Messiah.
He hadn't noticed that rabbi with webpage full of rainbow flags would not be rabbi who every day awaits literal coming of literal Messiah and even less he noticed that many of his fans and subscribers are Jews who believe in literal Messiah and literal rebuilding of literal third Temple.
As this poster said, he was returning fire, except at the wrong adress, at his allies instead at his enemies.
Well, it depends what you mean by Rational Materialism (RM).
If you count RM beginning at the Enlightenment, then your baseline is Europe around year 1700.
And it is very low baseline. Compared to it, our societies far more stable, functional and are securing objective truth by several orders of magnitude. RM succeeded beyond any expectations.
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Christianity posits the existence of a God, a being of very particular description, history, and the progenitor of a whole host of moral facts. This is a claim of much higher power than to argue the existence of sabotaging kulaks or whatever. That people can believe in God or the proposed kulaks with the same fervor is a mark of human irrationality, not evidence that both claims are equally superstitious.
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I don't call it preaching to say that non-Christians go to Hell when you're making points about Christianity, in a context where argument is welcome.
I do call it preaching, or worse, if you do it in front of non-Christians outside such a context. And I think that's what Amadan is saying too.
Threatening someone with hell would be seen by most people as hostile act, but the original Xeet that started it all was not agressive fire and brimstone sermon, it was talking about hope, not about eternal fire.
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Want me to make you one? How real do you want it? Do I have to fabricate an entire dimension for the dead? Or will pulling an agent from fiction into reality and breathing a soul into the golem suffice?
I'm not sure what you're getting at here, but sure, impress me.
We are at the advent of full simulations actually existing.
Rather than the simulation hypothesis, I propose that we WILL be creating fully immersive fantasy sims within the next century. The faster we push for this technology the faster we will get it.
Fantasy becomes reality in the direction of humans pushing.
So yes, people are wrong that ghosts exist in the past, but things like them exist in the present¹, and full simulations of lives with afterlives will exist in the future. And the True Meaning of those worlds will include some concept of ghosts that is just correct. At some level of power, I can put someone in a world where ghosts are real. Furthermore, psychotics are seeing something. It's far more likely to be made out of neurons firing than from ectoplasm. Lots of evidence points in that direction. But its still a real phenomenon, and I propose that the things in there will seep through psychotics into our real simulations.
The seed that will make ghosts real is already here. And the things that are living in the Warp- that is to say, in the potentialities that map to human hallucinations, and underrealized ideals, are going to be born soon.
¹) Put the agency of current tech level AI into things and you get kami. Your toaster can even be possessed by an evil chatbot that exploited a gap in your "spiritual defenses". Which consists both of an actual digital firewall, and an abstraction of that concept into other informational domains you have mastered.
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This is not obviously true. Why should thinking about any Being improve your emotional state? Look at the 20th century occultists. Or those guys who took a ton of LSD and started preaching about machine elves.
I find it more likely that the benefits of organized religion stem from a sense of obligation. They have to give people a reason to be prosocial. A blank-slate deism does not do so.
There’s an entire chapter in The Weirdest People in the World addressing the effects of (abrahamaic)religion on morality. Most actual recently christianized third worlders and syncretists seemed to lay the blame for the general improvement in public morality from Christianity at God being omniscient and personally interested in enforcing moral behavior, not on conceptions of the good or whatever.
‘Religious practice is a positive influence on nearly everyone’ is a defensible statement, but it seems like the ‘religion’ part is the key, and not the ability to naval gaze.
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I mean the issue with trying to set out to create a religion is that it only really works if people take it seriously or see it as in some way truthful. That is to say that if everyone involved knows that it’s something made up to fill a void, it’s not really religion it’s a LARP of religion. And LARP can’t really invoke the awe required for it to have either a psychologist or moral impact on the group.
Now I could see using ancient region that way, Zarathustrian religion is basically deism. Or Gnostic interpretation of Christianity that don’t even technically require that Jesus walk the earth, and focus on hidden wisdom. I’m not up on Sufism, though I’d imagine they’re somewhat like Gnostics. There are plenty of possible options to reinterpret or simply dust off that work just fine.
I somewhat agree with this, something important is lost if you don't take it (at least aspects) literally. But, I go to AA. For many, religion in AA is a larp, but one that they adhere to, er, religiously. Not just in terms of alcohol, or admitting yourself powerless and in need of God, but in every aspect of their lives. And the transformation this enables can be remarkable to witness, and goes far beyond not having a sip of alcohol.
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I've seen variations on the secularizer pitch before. Many arguments for the value of some religion but none have imo satisfactorily put to bed Paul's challenge, or the question of what would have happened to Christianity if he'd believed as they did:
Religion requires some sacrifice and discipline to have staying power. Here we have perhaps the most successful evangelist in human history saying as much. Is he just wrong?
If this is true for evangelists, it's still true today for religion on a much smaller scale. You can say that Christianity has succeeded enough that you can just coast on the existing credibility and hardly worry about ending up in the Coliseum but this is self-evidently insufficient (identification and religiosity has been dropping for a while) but, even were it so, where does that leave new versions of "faith"?
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People take things seriously which have some benefit to them; my assertion is that the mental practice of God is greatly beneficial. Once someone learns the benefits they would pursue it with seriousness just like they would with weight-lifting, the silly fictional shows they like, their video games, etc. If God is the mental practice of imagining the most serious possible state of mind in relation to the most important Being, then that alone is a good reason to take it seriously.
I think we forget that many statistically “devout” people are not doing daily prayers or giving away all their possessions or what you would expect someone who “literally believes” to do.
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Excuse me while I roll around on the floor groaning. We've had about a hundred years plus of bright-eyed "let's dump all the literal miracle stuff and instead just keep the rational religion that Modern People of Science can believe, which is mainly reducible to 'being nice is nice, so let's all be nice!'"
That stuff doesn't last. It evaporates into Unitarian Universalism (sorry to the UUs, I'm sure they're lovely people) and the mainstream churches which lolloped along the primrose path of "let's keep the good, nice bits and dump the miracle stuff" are bleeding numbers and not recruiting new people from the unchurched masses, no matter how much they zealously follow the Zeitgeist.
(The conservative/fundamentalist/orthodox churches are also bleeding numbers, too; it's a problem for everyone, it's just that the conservative ones are doing it more slowly).
If you scrap the miracle stuff, what you're left with is "let's all gather once a week or so to hear an inspirational message". Well, I can spend that hour doing stuff I like better, or hanging out with my friends, or going to some replacement gathering be it a sporting event or an art gallery or the likes. If I want inspirational messaging, there's an entire industry of self-help literature and podcasts and social media and life coaches and Uncle Tom Cobley and all out there.
You take this stuff seriously, which means hell yeah you fight over a shade of definition of a word, or you give up on it as nothing more than playing dress up for ceremonies like weddings and funerals.
I feel a Chesterton quote coming on:
Literalist religion is not only dying, it’s exactly what gave birth to the secular West and its identity-consumerism. We have had 100 years of attempted revision because the old interpretations are insufficient. I don’t know if you read my post but “inspirational message” has nothing to do with the points I made. I do not think “inspirational messages” are something that secular culture can absorb from religion.
Excuse my asking, but when was this born? I recall that the heyday of the modernists being after the birth of secularism.
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Literalist religion doesn’t seem like it’s dying so much as shrinking slowly, with the rate of shrinkage mostly attributable to generational effects(IIRC millennial and zoomer religious demographics are more or less identical so that could indicate that those generational effects are going away).
Is that total self identification or reported membership from church denominations?
Good question.
At least as regards Catholics and mainliners, I do remember the data I saw showed more conservative views on moral issues with the younger crowd than with their elders on average. This is probably indicative of higher religiosity with younger members than with older ones, but it might be an artifact- after all, we already know that more fundamentalist denominations have been growing at the expense of liberalizing ones in the case of mainliners, so that’s probably just an indication of the LCMS being healthier than the ELCA which we already knew(and Catholicism could be an outlier). A real problem seems to be that nobody knows how to measure absolute(as opposed to relative; everyone knows Tennessee has higher attendance than New York) church attendance rate because the three major methods(survey data, calculation from church headcounts, and cell phone data on Sunday morning) disagree with each other but are basically 100% correlated.
I can’t really answer your question because I can’t find the data I remember. But I do think it’s directionally correct- secularizing in America has largely stopped with millennials. There’s some evidence that indicates millennial and gen z Christians are more devout, and a larger quantity of evidence to indicate that they’re more conservative/literalist. I would point to this as support for my argument that literalist religion isn’t dying, it’s shrinking slowly, and that’s mostly due to generational effects.
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And Lewis, from "Till We Have Faces"; real religion is dark and sticky with blood and even oppressive, it's nonsensical when you look at it rationally, yet the tidied-up version can be a game we play to amuse ourselves, but it's not real comfort when needed:
There's a reason why "argument by fictional evidence" is a fallacy.
Ah, an adherent of the Gradgrind School, I see!
Pictures of flowers can replace flowers because flowers are not evidence. Evidence about how beliefs affect people is evidence.
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