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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25447 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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I'm not a priest nor an apologist, but this reasoning seems incomplete-

The God of the signifier, the God who turns everything upside down. Ancient commentators, in traditions as diverse as neoplatonism and Buddhism, recognized a problem: if God is perfect, unchanging, atemporal, mereologically simple, then how was it metaphysically possible for him to give rise to this temporal, dynamic, fallen, fractured creation? How did The One give rise to The Many? The orthodox answer is that “He did it out of love”

Love is partially the answer, but as you observed it is rather incomplete. The traditional Catholic response is that free will and original sin, which causes suffering, is part of His divine plan of giving people free will and the autonomy to disobey him. Imagine for a second that you have no choice but to worship a deity, is that actual worship? Is following a law with a gun pointed to your head a good law? Free will and its consequences of suffering ultimately stems from the truth is that adoration without choice is not worship.

I understand your conflict about Christianity, but it seems a lot of your conflict comes from the popular social media representation of Catholicism. CS Lewis points this out in the Screwtape letters:

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread but through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes I our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather in oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print.

This quote also addresses the next thing you mentioned - the declining attendance and participation of the Church. I agree that it is a sad state of affairs that church attendance is largely the invalid and the old. However, I also see it as a chance for the Church to realign itself to church teaching instead of chasing the leaving masses. The 'trad catholic' you see and push against online is, as you see, disingenuous tik tok coomer bait for lost meant to spend their simp bucks on their OF equivalent. However, I see the performative aspect is rooted in a desperate desire to get back to the Church forms that go back to its foundation. Even though the pope has been cracking down on Latin mass, I highly suggest trying to attend one in your area if it is still allowed to be performed.

From what I've read of your criticism, your problem is the state of your local church and the online personas that 'promote' it rather than church teachings or doctrine. I would argue that if you think the church is so lacking in direction, volunteer and participate in your church as much as possible! I am a big believer of being the change you want to see in the world, where you see decline, I see opportunity (if I have time, I currently am pretty swamped).

Attempts to give art a rational “purpose”, saying that it “teaches us moral lessons” or “provides entertainment”, all sound so lame because they are so obviously false. The purpose of art is to bring us into communion with The Beyond - that’s it, that’s the long and short of it. To make art is to attempt to do magic, and to be an artist is to be a person who yearns strongly for this Beyond, at least on an unconscious level. If the artist does not ultimately believe in the possibility of transcending this realm, he simply dooms himself to frustration - but the fundamental animating impulse of his actions does not change. The aesthetic is what remains when the vulnerable overt metaphysical claims of religion have been burned away: under threat of irrationality, I am compelled to reject God, free will, and the immortality of the soul, but you cannot intrude on the private inner domain of my sentiment and my desire.

Maybe because these aren't the purposes of art? Art's primary goal is communication. To convey an idea or thought that words fail to fully transmit. Beethoven's 5th symphony communications the light triumphing over darkness. The Sistine chapel exists to celebrate and communicate the love of the divine Christ. One of the reasons why I'm somewhat okay with AI taking over productive is because it will fulfill the commercial and consumptive aspects of art, leaving the artists who are looking to express and idea that is difficult to put into words.

Can you expand how the failure of the artist leads you to compelled to reject God? I fail to see the logical connection there, but I may be misreading something.

Unlike you, I am not particularly worried about the end of the Church, but actually rather hopeful that the 'decline' of the current church is a rejection of the modernizing reform from Vatican II and for the church to find its way to better represent the core beliefs of the church. Catholicism has been historically persecuted and actively hunted for long stretches of time, so the latest pushback against the church is nothing new and in the long term not something I find particularly disheartening.

Art's primary goal is communication.

This word makes me nervous.

At the most simplistic level you get the sorts of awful things that go on in high school English classes, where students decode the "symbols" of the text, which is how you end up with nonsense like "the message of Hamlet is that revenge is bad". Well why didn't Shakespeare just come out and say that? Why go through the trouble of making up a whole story? It makes the artist out to be some kind of lunatic. I think we're in agreement that this is no good.

But even this idea of "communicating things that can't be put into words", I think it still doesn't capture the magnitude of what goes on in authentic creativity. I think it makes the process too subjective - it conjures images of like, the artist just has a feeling one day, or comes up with a thought, and thinks "ah, it would be nice to communicate this".

Derrida gave a lovely description of what he felt when he was writing Of Grammatology:

"I actually had the feeling that something very unique for me took place. I had the impression that an interpretive edge, a lever, appeared to me. It's not as though I created it myself. I never have the feeling, even when I'm happy with a text I write, I never have the feeling that it's me. This is why I have a feeling both of responsibility and irresponsibility when I write a text. When I write, I feel strangely responsible and irresponsible, as though I had transcribed something that had imposed itself on me. In Of Grammatology, I had this feeling in an even stronger way. I felt as though something had happened to me. I don't want to give this a religious sensibility - it wasn't an apparition or an ecstasy - but that something had taken hold of me and happened not by me, but to me."

I think moments of genuine creativity always have this sort of texture - this feeling that you've discovered something that is common property.

I'm somewhat okay with AI taking over productive is because it will fulfill the commercial and consumptive aspects of art, leaving the artists who are looking to express and idea that is difficult to put into words.

That would be a catastrophe.

(At the very least, artists don't experience commercial art as a burden that's keeping them from making "real" art - they need the money! And they're very happy to get paid for something they enjoy doing anyway! Take commercial art away and they still need to find some way to make a living.)

Can you expand how the failure of the artist leads you to compelled to reject God?

Sorry if I was confusing here. I didn't stop believing in God because of art or aesthetic considerations or anything like that. I stopped believing in God because of a confluence of philosophical arguments - the conceptual incoherence of "free will", severe difficulties for substance dualism as a philosophy of mind (would it necessarily violate the causal closure of the physical? how does it handle hypothetical split-brain cases?), and in general the alleged evidence for religion not passing the "smell test" and having a similar epistemological profile to other discredited phenomena like ESP and cryptids.

I've softened on some of these considerations over the years and I'm willing to keep an open mind. But those were my initial motivations at any rate.

the conceptual incoherence of "free will", severe difficulties for substance dualism as a philosophy of mind (would it necessarily violate the causal closure of the physical? how does it handle hypothetical split-brain cases?)

I don't see any reason why Christianity would necessitate either of these. I'm personally pretty uncertain about the latter (I have no good model of what a soul would involve/not involve (and what would be materially handled), but I also really don't understand consciousness, which I definitely have), and I definitely reject the first (at least, if we mean libertarian free will), and that seems perfectly compatible with Christianity. In fact, I think the net evidence from the scriptures definitely leans against libertarian free will.

I stopped believing in God because of a confluence of philosophical arguments - the conceptual incoherence of "free will", severe difficulties for substance dualism as a philosophy of mind (would it necessarily violate the causal closure of the physical? how does it handle hypothetical split-brain cases?), and in general the alleged evidence for religion not passing the "smell test" and having a similar epistemological profile to other discredited phenomena like ESP and cryptids.

Counterargument: you are going to die, the concept of caring about truth more than happiness is incoherent in a world without objective value, and so you really ought to cleave yourself to whichever tradition forms the greatest happiness in yourself and your loved ones. The Good is always and forever sovereign over the Truth because it is only via the Good that we care about the Truth, and indeed, we can dwell endlessly on how the Genesis narrative presents this, and how our goal is really a renewal of paradise (from the Persian word walled garden)

the concept of caring about truth more than happiness is incoherent in a world without objective value, and so you really ought to cleave yourself to whichever tradition forms the greatest happiness in yourself and your loved ones.

I think that's a complex issue and the proper response varies on a case by case basis.

I will note though that I only have so much control over my beliefs. I can't just will myself to believe that modus ponens is false, or that I don't exist, or that people can fly. There's a give and take with what the world imposes on me by force.

Art isn't for communicating information, it's for communicating viewpoints, "what-it's-like-to-be"s. If I write a song true enough, I can make you feel for a minute what it was like to be me losing my wife. (I can't actually do that, but some people can.) The only purpose of art is to make us feel less alone, which is why AI art is a contradiction and is fake and gay.

Adding onto this, I will be interested in AI art on the day that it becomes like-something to be an AI, and those AIs create art to express what that's like to us. I'm looking forward to that very much, but I don't expect to see it in my lifetime.

Imagine for a second that you have no choice but to worship a deity, is that actual worship?

If the Deity had created us such that we would always freely choose to love and worship the Deity, it wouldn't be an impingement on our free will, anymore than the Deity creating us without the ability to teleport is robbing us of our right to "choose" not to teleport.

I think that situation is different. I actually agree that If the Deity had created us such that we would always freely choose to love and worship the Deity, it wouldn't be an impingement on our free will. But I think creating us without the ability to teleport is actually a larger impingement, assuming it was ever an option.

The difference is, we want to be able to teleport, whereas beings engineered to love a deity wouldn't want to not love the deity.

One is constraining what you can think and the other what you can do no? I can't really think of any other desire or valuation (whatever mental category worship falls into) that can't conceivably be negated, though maybe somebody could suggest one. It would be odd to have one where there really is no choice.

One is constraining what you can think and the other what you can do no?

There are probably thoughts human minds cannot think, though obviously I can't think of any. I don't think it really makes a big difference though. Why would constraining thought be an unacceptable restriction on free will but not constraining action? When it comes to human government, thought-control is considered especially bad (hence Orwell), because controlling what someone thinks is impossible for a human dictatorship, so one that even attempts it is proving itself to be insanely megalomaniacal. But for God, who already controls everything, there doesn't seem to be much of a difference.

There are probably thoughts human minds cannot think, though obviously I can't think of any.

The squared-circle is the most common example, but then I am sort of thinking about it already and if I turn mad I might worship it.

Why would constraining thought be an unacceptable restriction on free will but not constraining action?

A Christian might correct me here, but I think the answer is that what you can or cannot do in this temporal world is simply unimportant compared to what you do in your soul. And so we have free will in the things that matter.

The squared-circle is the most common example, but then I am sort of thinking about it already and if I turn mad I might worship it.

This is my impression of how the trinity doctrines came about.

Thought control isn't really considered bad. Its just called different things depending on whether we think it's good or bad. Orwellian Thought Control is considered bad primarily because the party fails to control the thoughts of the lead character effectively. If the party had aligned its citizens more effectively, there would be no dissatisfied human to relate to. We'd just be reading a story about a Drone going about its day. At the very least it would look much more like Brave New World.

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