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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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