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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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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:

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.

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.