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Full text here, go to Substack if you want the pictures and links and such.
The basic case for Universalism, or why hell must be temporary
Let’s talk about where your soul is going after you die.
A heavy way to start the article, eh? Unfortunately, this type of heavy handed language is often used by Christians to imply that non-believers or even Christians with the ‘wrong’ theology will go to hell. Not just go to hell, but go to hell FOREVER!
This frankly insane strategy has been quite successful, especially in Protestant culture. The threat of hellfire and brimstone and being poked by a demon’s trident for eternity is extremely effective at scaring some people into a brittle, false kind of faith.
Especially sensitive, neurotic, and generally imaginative types like myself.
Sadly though, while it may bring some people back to faith and have use on the margins, it tends to drive people away from Christianity more than anything. Almost every Christian apostate I’ve talked to has some story of religious trauma, where their parent or friend or pastor told them if they didn’t live a perfectly saintly life, they were going to hell.
They then obsessed over their eternal fate until they got so neurotic, so afraid, so twisted up inside they had to decide that the whole damn religion was fake. And honestly, I don’t even blame them.
So this article is meant as a quick overview of the idea of eternal hell - where it came from, and whether or not it’s valid. To be clear, this is just my own research to get a basic understanding, I’m not a theologian and I won’t be going extremely into the depths on this one.
I’ll also admit up front that even before I did this research, moral intuition insisted that eternal hell is not a true teaching. I can’t conceive of a good and loving God who creates a universe in which legions and legions of His creations, made in His image, are tortured brutally for all eternity. It simply makes no sense whatsoever.
After living as an atheist/buddhist for over ten years, I followed my moral intuition and the voice of God in my heart to Christ and the Orthodox church, so I was conflicted when I first started wondering about the fate of the damned. I was pleasantly surprised to find that many others in the Orthodox and Catholic churches felt the same way, and that the argument against eternal punishment had a long and storied history.
Some basic definitions:
Universalist: Holds that all will ultimately be saved
Infernalist: Holds that some face eternal punishment from God
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The Bible Said So
If you were raised by a certain type of Christian parent, you’ve probably been threatened with hell.
It’s sadly common in Christian circles: “do X or you’ll go to hell!” The fact that we casually threaten children with eternal torment is a bit crazy, but hey, culture is weird sometimes.
Where does this come from? Well, there are a lot of admonitions in Scripture about how sin leads to punishment in the afterlife:
Matthew 25:45
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Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
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And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.
Thessalonians 1:7
- They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might…
Revelation 14:10
- And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name.
Now, a straightforward reading of the English here would indicate okay, yes, if we are sinners in this life, or at least don’t pass the bar for God, we go to hell forever. To suffer, and be tormented, over and over and over, without ceasing.
Pretty scary stuff.
However, many scholars have argued that these translations are… faulty, to say the least. The argument typically hinges on the translation of the Greek phrase “kolasin aiōnion,” which has often been translated as “eternal punishment,” and the Greek phrase “eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn,” translated as “forever and ever.”
The problem comes in when you realize that the word “aiōnion” has a dual meaning in ancient Greek - it could either mean:
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A really long time! Literally “until the end of the age,” which in practice just meant a really long time
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Actually forever, infinite, eternal. Will never cease. Trillions and trillions of years go by and it’s still happening
The debate hinges on which of the two time periods these phrases actually refer to. Universalists are not just pulling this out of their rear ends, so to speak. There are uses of aiōnion in the Old Testament that clearly refer to a temporary happening, such as when Moses blessed the “eternal hills” of Joseph’s land in Deuteronomy 33:15, or the “eternal fire” of Sodom in Jude 7.
Another major debate is over the doctrine of “apokatastasis,” or the promised restoration of all things in eternity. Many classical writers, most notably Saint Paul, talked about this concept. Specifically:
Colossians 1:19–20 “through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven”.
1 Timothy 2:4 “God desires all people to be saved.”
2 Peter 3:9 “not wishing any to perish.”
1 Corinthians 15:22–28 “as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ… that God may be all in all.”
I could go on and on. There are all sorts of minor debates over other terms, and theological minutiae. Suffice to say, there is no clear cut, black and white answer as to whether Scripture declares eternal punishment, and the popularity of the infernalist versus universalist position has oscillated back and forth throughout Christian history depending on when and where you look.
The Church Said So
For the Orthodox and Catholic (and some Protestant) believers, we luckily have an institution to interpret Scripture for us: the Church!
Pretty much every infernalist, when backed into a corner and made to doubt their understanding of eternal torment, will immediately turn and say, “well the Church teaches that the damned suffer in hell forever!”
As in the section above, they aren’t necessarily wrong, but they also aren’t completely right.
So, what does the Church actually say? I’ll focus on the Orthodox church here, but ultimately the major decision point was well before the schism of 1054, so this section applies mostly to both Catholic and Orthodox doctrine.
This discussion centers around the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553. Imagine a room full of men with long beards, in fancy robes, full of the Holy Spirit, conferring in the heart of Constantinople, at the Hagia Sophia. (Arguably the most beautiful church in the world at the time, though sadly a mosque now.)
So all of these guys get together to discuss some problems in the early church, and figure out what was going on. A side character in this drama, a man by the name of Origen of Alexandria, had caused some problems with interpretations of his teachings a while back, and he was on the list to discuss.
Specifically, Origen believed in the pre-existence of souls before birth, and reincarnation after death, as well as universal reconciliation or the restoration of all things and beings. Even the devil, and fallen angels!
The council ruled definitively that this specific system of Origen’s belief as a whole was condemned. The line that is often trotted out, which I admit looks quite bad, is as follows:
“If anyone says or thinks that the punishment of demons and of impious men is only temporary, and will one day have an end, and that a restoration [apokatastasis] will take place of demons and of impious men, let him be anathema.”
The way most universalists combat this objection is that:
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This was referring to Origen’s overall system, not specifically claiming that the damned are tormented forever or even giving a concrete definition of punishment in the afterlife
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The ‘restoration’ discussed here is actually referring more to Origen’s belief that humans existed somehow outside the body before birth, and would be ‘restored’ to that state afterward. Not how most universalists use ‘restored’, to mean reconciled to God.
To be absolutely clear on this point: there is no specific Church dogma that definitively declares the damned are punished eternally. In fact, glorified saints such as Saint Gregory of Nyssa and Saint Isaac the Syrian explicitly taught universalism and held universalist positions until they died, and have not been condemned by the Church.
I emphasize this because when you wade into online discussions of universalism versus infernalism, the argument via doctrine is by far the most common problem infernalist argument you see. Sadly many people see this argument then simply take it at face value that their church believes the damned will be tortured forever, not being bothered enough by that teaching to actually check for themselves.
So again, in terms of actual church doctrine, just like with interpretation of Scripture, we have a somewhat murky picture in which neither the universalist or infernalist position clearly wins out.
I’ll add as well that at least in the Orthodox tradition, church doctrine is not strictly binding forever and ever as it is in the Catholic church. The councils are not perfectly infallible. Through consensus and the living tradition of the Church, our dogmas and doctrines can be updated as new information or revelations come out.
So even if there was a strong consensus that infernalism was what a council taught, it could be changed!
Sadly, many ‘Orthobros’ in America have converted from Protestant backgrounds where “sola scriptura,” or a strict black and white, legalistic understanding of the faith, is the default worldview. Even after conversion, this way of seeing the faith is carried over, and they tend to try and use church councils as a bludgeon, with a liberal use of the words “heresy” and “heretic.”
You’d think if they cared so strictly about the rules they would let the bishops decide who was heretical instead of taking it upon themselves, but that’s how it goes on the internet.
Meaninglessness or the Noble Lie
Finally I will give a notable mention to another couple of arguments.
The first goes something like: “life has no meaning if there isn’t eternal punishment.”
Another argument is that the doctrine of eternal hell acts as some sort of “Noble Lie,” where it’s not really true, but the masses just aren’t ready to understand the truth and they will act up if they learn that they’ll eventually go to heaven.
Speaking about universal salvation online, I’ve gotten well over a dozen responses forwarding these lines of belief. They aren’t very compelling to me, so my only guess here is that these people have a misunderstanding of the actual universalist position.
When a universalist argues that God will reconcile all things in the end, they are not saying that hell doesn’t exist. Instead, simply that hell is not eternal.
For instance, if you have somebody really bad like an unrepentant serial killer die and go to hell, they may be there a long, long time. Perhaps hundreds, thousands, or millions of years, subjectively. That still constitutes an extremely strong reason to avoid sin, and work out your salvation! Just because hell isn’t fully, forever eternal, does not mean hell has no value as a deterrent.
Eternity, forever, infinite, etc. are complicated concepts, and it makes sense as to why people wouldn’t really grok it or be able to reason about it well. Heck, I don’t even understand it fully, and there are some tricky arguments about how true Eternity is “outside of time” that make eternal punishment make sense. I don’t want to get into that here.
In conclusion, if you are a Christian of any stripe, even Orthodox or Catholic, and you want to hope for universal salvation, you are well within your rights to do so. No church has explicitly condemned it, and there are very good reasons to believe it. As I owned up to in the beginning of this article, I see it as a requirement to satisfy my own moral intuitions about the goodness of God. How could a loving Father create children in His own image knowing many, or even most, are condemned to eternal torture?
Be warned however that if you decide to hope for universal salvation, you may want to keep it close to your chest. The infernalist position tends to correlate with extremely dogmatic, rigorist, and frankly spiteful believers who are often extremely difficult to have open and productive conversations with. I’d caution you against arguing too much, unless you’re like me, and simply can’t help yourself.
All this being said, I also want to emphasize the fact that not all universalists are going to heaven, and not all infernalists are going to hell. Having the ‘right belief’ does not give us a free pass. We must love one another, and purify our hearts to the best of our ability. As a wise friend cautioned me during this discussion:
Where is the heart? are there tears of longing for light, and love, and holiness, for the capacity to heal others? on either side of the universalist/infernalist debate, there are people whose hearts are longing for God, and people who are just manipulating words with pride and worshipping their minds.
I hope this article has been helpful or at least interesting for you, and may we all move our hearts closer to God.
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What is the deal with these people who are super-successful offline (e.g. Chamath, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk), but on social media have such mediocre, cringe, or bad opinions, getting easily-verifiable facts wrong or just repeating sale or boring stuff, or digging in when wrong? Why is there such a large disconnect between being so successful in one domain (e.g. creating companies) and the ability to produce good, well-informed opinions online?
My answer: People who are really successful offline tend to be specialists--they find something that works, and then scale or repeat it. People who have "good opinions about a broad range of topics" are generalists, but this does not necesailty lead to large wealth, which typically requires specialization.
Generalists tend to be higher IQ and get bored more easily, seeking novelty, but this comes at the cost mastery at a skill to become wealthy. Becoming a billionaire at running restaurants means knowing everything about the restaurant industry--perhaps not exactly intellectually simulating work--but necessary for success. Specialists can be really smart, but I would say generalists are smarter in the aggregate. There is no "industry person" who is as broadly read about history and other humanists topics as Moldbug, for example, as the ultimate generalist.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Newcomb's problem splits people 50/50 in two camps, but the interesting thing is that both sides think the answer is obvious, and both sides think the other side is being silly. When I created a video criticizing Veritasium's video This Paradox Splits Smart People 50/50 I received a ton of feedback particularly from the two-box camp and I simply could not convince anyone of why they were wrong.
That lead me to believe there must be some cognitive trap at play: someone must be not seeing something clearly. After a ton of debates, reading the literature, considering similar problems, discussing with LLMs, and just thinking deeply, I believe the core of the problem is recursive thinking.
Some people are fluent in recursivity, and for them certain kind of problems are obvious, but not everyone thinks the same way.
My essay touches Newcomb's problem, but the real focus is on why some people are predisposed to a certain choice, and I contend free will, determinism, and the sense of self, all affect Newcomb's problem and recursivity fluency predisposes certain views, in particular a proper understanding of embedded agency must predispose a particular (correct) choice.
I do not see how any of this is not obvious, but that's part of the problem, because that's likely due to my prior commitments not being the same as the ones of people who pick two-boxes. But I would like to hear if any two-boxer can point out any flaw in my reasoning.
Since a lot of us here have expressed interest in not starving to death in a gutter, I figured I'd start a weekly thread to discuss financial matters.
Ground Rules
- Remember that we're all just Internet randos. Don't bet your life savings on a hot tip from this thread.
- Keep culture war in the culture war thread. Yes, global events may impact our personal finances, but that does not mean we have to incessantly harp on culture war aspects here. If you are going to discuss it, please stick to the practical impacts of it on an individual level.
- Be kind. Remember that everyone here comes from different circumstances. We all have different resources available and different risk tolerances.
- Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Better is better. Celebrate people when they take a step up and work to move their finances in the right direction. Don't flame out because they haven't followed what you consider the optimal path. Everybody has to start somewhere.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Another blog post, reproduced here in full, but go to substack if you want the pictures and such.
On Writing, Fiction, and Modern Escapism
Do our stories bring us down to earth, or keep our heads in the clouds?
“Interesting Reading” by Theodor Kleehaas, c. 1890
Dear reader, it’s time to read my writing about writing.
I’ve got a complicated relationship with the ol’ written word. I grew up having my parents read Lord of the Rings and other classics to me before I could even speak. While I come from a long line of rural southerners without a ton of education or wealth, I truly admire that my parents were both readers, despite the anti-reading social stigma in their class, and worked hard to pass that on to me.
As soon as I could read, I became obsessed with the written word. I remember clearly how my mother would always brag about how I could read and pronounce the word ‘indubitably’ by the time I was three years old. (She still brags about this, occasionally.)
Growing up, I lived a typical ‘millennial nerd-life’ so to speak. Both of my parents were working, and I had no siblings, so I spent a lot of time alone. As I’ve written elsewhere, much of my time I spent gaming; the time I didn’t spend gaming was mostly spent with my nose in a book.
Fantasy and science fiction, speculative fiction as it’s now called, gripped me far more than anything else. I still read non-fiction, especially scientific reading, since my mother had a career in laboratory science, so it felt relevant to me.
With hindsight, it’s obvious that my obsession with fantasy in the broader sense - worlds beyond the one I am actually in - was perhaps not the most salutary way to spend my time as a child. Instead of playing outside, socializing, or learning discipline, I took every spare moment I could to escape the physical realm and into the realm of imagination.
I’m not attempting to bemoan my situation overmuch though.
Since the 70s or so, the two-income household has been the norm, and leads to the majority of kids spending very little time with their parents. Historically, this was not the norm at all. We live in a society of orphans, raised by the state more than their parents.
Either way, one concept that helped me make sense of what I was doing as a kid is the emotional pattern sometimes called the ‘Leaving Pattern’. I first encountered it in the book The Five Personality Patterns, but it’s an older psychological pattern first typified by Wilhelm Reich, the schizoid typology. Whatever you call it, the basic idea is as follows:
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A child, for one reason or another, grows up feeling unsafe in their body / in the physical world
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As a defense, they end up ‘leaving’ their body, often going into an imaginary world, or physically withdrawing into themselves
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In order to function in the world, they create a persona that is split off from their ‘true self,’ and keep said true self in the fantasy world
Now I’ll be the first to admit that psychology is a spotty science at best, and it’s good not to read too much into these sorts of types. You can quite easily become trapped by an abstract concept, and psychology can never capture all of what a human being is. However, I still find myself relating to this pattern quite strongly, and thinking about it has helped me combat some of my problematic habits.
Okay, But… Writing?
“A Man at his Desk” by Salomon Koninck, c. 1655
Now you might be thinking, ‘Ok thanks for the dramatic sob story Thomas, how does this relate to writing again?’
Growing up, due to my love for and even obsession with reading, my career dreams such as they existed revolved around becoming a writer. I felt that good books had taught me so much, had saved me from a difficult world, and truly given me a reason to live, when I didn’t have much of one during the worst parts of my youth.
I dreamt of writing a book series that could reach out to other young children and grip them the same way. Teach them good values via stories, help provide solace in their pain, and save them the way I thought good books and stories had saved me.
Ironically, I’ve come to question this story a bit.
As I outlined above, I’m not so sure that getting deep into fantasy, science fiction, and gaming was good for me as a youth. In fact, I’m pretty confident it led to some bad outcomes for me later on. When you always cope by retreating into fantasy, you set yourself up for delayed maturation in the ‘real world,’ at the least.
Many young people who get obsessed with fantasy worlds essentially never grow up, permanently stuck in an adolescent phase. You see this quite often nowadays with Marvel, or Disney, or other major commercialized fantasy worlds.
So I have had to take a step back and ask myself: is it truly helping the world to add yet another fictional realm for people to escape into? What if I simply perpetuate the tendency for people to ‘leave’ themselves and cause the same problems I’ve had to deal with as I grew up and was forced to confront reality?
These musings are a large part of why I ended up starting this blog, and done much of my writing in a more non-fiction, ‘serious’ realm so to speak, where I’m trying to confront real problems instead of go into a fantasy realm.
I’ll also admit that, having tried to write speculative fiction, it is quite difficult. I’ve started more novels than I can remember, only to peter out a little ways into them. Part of what has stopped me is my philosophical wranglings above, but it would be dishonest not to admit that a lack of discipline and commitment plays into it as well.
And if we zoom out from just writing, looking at the modern world as a whole, it seems to me that with the rise of phones, social media, and the digital realm generally, we are increasingly plunging ourselves into the abstract, the mental, the imaginary. We are leaving our bodies en masse in favor of intellectualized distractions, artificial connection, and disembodied dopaminergic entertainment.
A large part of my own path to healing has been learning to embrace my body, the sensations from it, and ground within the physical world, instead of spending all of my time running away from uncomfortable sensations.
While I love fantasy, science fiction, video games, and other imaginative delights, I can’t help but see these things more and more as junk food, as an unhealthy indulgence that may be good to have occasionally, but certainly should not be the core of an adult life.
And yet… I still remember being a young child, and diving into my first few fantasy worlds. I remember being exposed to depths of being and understanding that I had no conception of beforehand. I remember learning about heroism, about sacrifice, and about the depths of love that human beings can attain, with the right measure of wisdom and courage.
I remember finding something holy within the pages of these fictional worlds, something that I still feel resonates deep in my heart to this day.
Ultimately, as Jonathan Pageau, Jordan Peterson, and many other Christian writers have discussed, stories are fundamental to who we are as humans. When Christ was presented with dilemmas during His teaching, He would often teach others by telling stories, or parables. There’s a way in which stories can get at a truth deeper than ‘reality’ can, a way in which the narrative realm speaks to the deepest parts of us, makes us come alive. We desperately need stories just in order to make sense of the world.
So perhaps the problem isn’t whether fictional stories as a whole are good in themselves, but the types of stories we choose to tell, and whether they keep us trapped in our heads, or ground us in reality.
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Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
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This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.
This past weekend we took a short couples trip to an away game in Cincinnati with some good friends. The Tigers got trucked. Anyway, while wandering the downtown, we ran across a huge public fountain. There was an earnest white girl singing folk music in a corner of the plaza, and we took a few minutes in the shade to let the girls rest. I got looking at the fountain and realized it was a giant middle finger to the city it sat in. The most brilliant troll job I've seen in recent memory.
The fountain can be seen here. It was donated to the city by some robber-baron hardware magnate back in the day, and includes drinking fountains around the edge of the pool. An example of the smaller fountain sculpture can be seen better here. Four of these ring the pool of the fountain. Each depicts a nude young male in the Greek tradition, with an animal head hanging between his legs. In one, the young man rides a dolphin, in another, has a snake coiled around his thighs, etc. The head of the animal is the drinking part of the fountain itself. The water stream issues from the mouth.
Might be a history buff, but I had no idea who Henry Probasco was. Apparently he was a wildly wealthy purveyor of tools and traveled to Europe to find an artist to build the fountain he donated to the City of Cincinnati in honor of his deceased business partner, one Tyler Davidson, whose name graces the monument. I imagine it went something like this:
Probasco blames the city for his partner's untimely demise.
Probasco: “Goddammit Jenson, fuck this city! The whole place can suck my dick. Is there any way to make that happen?”
Jenson the faithful butler: “Perhaps figuratively sir, I could not say. Almost certainly not literally.”
Probasco: “Figuratively eh?”
TWO YEARS LATER
Jenson: “Sir, the city council is refusing to accept the design with actual dicks.”
Probasco: “Will their infernal complaining never end? I'm offering them free clean drinking water for all time in the middle of town, and these whiny cunts don't like my design?”
Jenson: “Perhaps they object to putting their mouths on a bronze penis to get water, sir. I've taken the liberty of speaking to the artist. He suggests something a bit more....metaphorical.”
Probasco:”Like what, man!”
Jenson: “Well sir, he suggests a series of animal motifs with........elongated necks.”
Probasco:”Be direct, Jenson! What are we talking about here? Are you saying I have to make it a real snake rather than a trouser snake?”
Jenson: “Essentially, yes sir. Among others, such as goose and a turtle.”
Probasco: “Well, it's not quite what I had in mind, but making the children of this city drink out of the head of a snake dangling between my statue's legs is probably as close as we're going to get eh?”
Jenson: “I fear so, sir.”
Fin
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Since @ThomasdelVasto has made a couple "main-Motte" religious posts I thought I'd join in the fun.
I'm a Protestant with strong Reformed leanings. My wife, on the other hand, has just converted to Catholicism. This has led me to explore aspects of Catholic teaching, though necessarily at a surface level given the rich history. Aquinas alone would take months if not years to digest. I expected to disagree on Mary (perpetual virginity, immaculate conception, assumption) and the Pope (infallibility); and I still do (though I was surprised how recently these have become "dogma": I would have found it much easier to be a Catholic in 1800 than today). I am pleasantly surprised at how much weight they place on Scripture, Christ, and Assurance: there are far more shared hymns than I had anticipated, as as an example.
What follows is some of the reflections I had to this surface exploration. I would be thrilled to be corrected or critiqued by any of the Motte's Catholics, if nothing else to better understand my wife's flavor of the Christian faith. Many of these are reactions to "Catholicism" by Bishop Robert Barron, which my wife kindly bought to introduce me to the titular topic. While I presume he is orthodox Catholic, his interpretations may not be universally accepted by Catholics. If I challenge particular arguments from Barron, it should not be interpreted as an argument against Catholicism unless Barron is arguing for Church Dogma. His "Catholicism" is also meant as an introduction and for popular consumption, and his actual beliefs may have more nuance.
As part of this journey (which is certainly not over yet!), I also read (the dense and repetitive) "Divine Will and Human Choice" by Richard Muller and "Christus Victor" by Gustaf Aulén. These, too, have varying degrees of rigor. Muller and Aulén were both Protestants.
God’s freedom
While Reformed theology would affirm that God predestines both those who are saved and those who are damned, Catholics balk at this concept; arguing that this implies a God who would cause sin. God cannot will that which is against his nature. Catholics would appeal to God’s provision and common grace that allows humans consciences to (partially and weakly) discern good and evil. Yet we cannot perfectly discern this apart from divine revelation (scripture). And scripture states multiple times in the Exodus narrative that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Aquinas (as if often the case) provides the most rigorous Catholic argument I’ve heard for this hardening. God through an act of his will withdrew what grace was granted to Pharaoh. Absent God’s grace Pharaoh drew more into his sin. While Aquinas argued this case for the individual case of Pharaoh, it seems consistent to assume that were God to withdraw his common grace more broadly that all would fall into a state where our consciences are no longer capable of even partial discernment of good and evil. This is also consistent with God giving humans over to their lusts in Romans 1.
So far, this interpretation is consistent with scripture, though I am discomfited by the constraints this threatens to place on God: constraints that come perilously close to being primarily informed by our own interpretation or perspective of scripture and sin. God works and wills, including in sin.
Barron, if I read him correctly, goes a step further. He puts the "problem of sin" as one of the best arguments against God. I’ve never understood this as a problem for Christians. It is a deep problem for atheists, who have to explain or excuse their visceral (though often mis-aligned) desire for justice despite no objective basis for these judgments. Christians have no such need to explain or excuse: of course we are all deeply desirous for justice since we have (again, weakly and with great room for error) a sense of what transcendent goodness could be. A consistent perspective on the problem of evil would be that God defines good, and if we don’t understand his actions to be "good" that is a fault (a mis-calibration) of our fallen nature. The fact that Barron does not take this tack hints that he believes humanity’s desire for a "good" God is compatible with humanity’s definition of "good". This runs the grave risk of putting ourselves as a "judge" or external arbiter of God’s behavior.
Barron continues to put a soft face on hard truths. Later in the book, Barron says "God sends no one to hell, people freely choose to go there". This sharply contradicts scripture. Jesus talks about casting sinners into the outer darkness. Peter says the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. John’s Revelation describes those who receive a mark on their forehead drinking the wrath of God, mixed in the cup of his anger, and tormented with fire and brimstone. If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. Again, God is not passive: he works and wills.
How does God work and will (1)? Does God have a an array of potential actions, any of which he can actualize? Yet this runs the risk of these potential actions being "outside" God. Does God create the potentials as he actualizes them? Thus no "possibles" exist for God, simply "actuals"? This also could be seen as a constraint on God and limit his radical freedom. Both these potential concepts of God’s will and freedom (of which I’m sure there are hundreds of alternative concepts) seem to be operating at a level above how Barron conceptualizes God’s freedom. Put crassly, Barron seems to be hinting that God could not "make a triangle a square", that is, that God is constrained by logical impossibilities. But this is such a small view of God. God creates our minds and universe. Our minds invent or discover things like logic, or define things like squares or circles. Whether spawned by our intellect or embedded in the structure of the cosmos, these concepts (including logic!) are part of Creation itself. God created the conditions under which we can model physical reality with math, structure, and logic. Logic is a model. Logos is Truth. Logic is created. Logos is the Creator.
God’s atoning work
The freedom God enjoys in his omnipotence has implications for a theological understanding of Atonement. The "big two" theories of Atonement, Satisfaction and Substitution, emphasize the sacrificial nature of the cross. This sacrificial interpretation retains God’s complete sovereignty with Christ’s death being an act of perichoretic propitiation. The incarnation and death was necessary because of God. It was not necessary because of anything external to God.
Catholics consider Substitution theory, which is the most common concept of Atonement in Reformed circles, to be heresy. Belief in the other concepts of Atonement are allowed. In the Satisfaction theory, which my understanding is that most if not all Catholics affirm, Jesus is our great high priest and a perfect offering, but does not receive the judgement of God. Christ died for our sins, but not in our place.
"Christus Victor" makes the historical case for Ransom theory. In principal, this theory could bring Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox together: the church Fathers at least strongly hinted at Ransom theory being the primary lens through which they interpret the cross, and the church universally recognizes the importance of the church Fathers. Aulén makes the case that Luther was also an adherent to Ransom theory. Yet this theory risks making God subservient to morality or law, proposing that Jesus was paid to Satan in exchange for humanity (2). Uncharitably, this theory makes God beholden to the "laws" of commerce, even transaction with a brigand.
However, I do find Ransom theory to have its merits. In heavily Reformed theology Satan is almost considered an afterthought. Satan plays no necessary role in the arc of human redemption and salvation. Ransom theory, on the other hand, puts Satan in a prominent place: he is either the kidnapper of human souls or is the (legitimate, in some sense) owner of human souls. The exchange of Christ for humanity and the subsequent torture and murder of Christ was simultaneously Satan’s crowning achievement and his destruction. This interpretation echos Jesus’ parable of the landowner who sent servants to collect from the tenants only to have them beaten or killed. The frustrated landowner finally sent his own son, but the tenants murdered him hoping to take his inheritance. At the conclusion of the parable, the chief priests react that the landowner will bring the tenants to a “wretched end”. Christ’s death and resurrection was the ultimate victory over Sin, Death, and the Devil, bringing this triumvirate to a “wretched end”. Indeed, this victory can be interpreted as more complete than Satisfaction or Substitution theories: it not only removes the penalty of sin, but defeats the sin itself.
Conclusion?
I plan to read and think more on this topic. Next on my list is "Deification through the Cross" by Khaled Anatolios. Any other book recommendations are welcome. I'm particularly interested in Catholic perspectives Atonement that go deeper than Barron's book.
(1) As I read "The Divine Will and Human Choice" I had to continuously bite my tongue. My mathematical training was screaming "But Kolmogorov!". Yet Kolmogorov is but a model, and Muller was trying to describe reality. Muller, though, had merely words to try to describe reality and I kept mentally begging for a more rigorous algebraic representation to more clearly and concisely communicate. Of course, the algebraic representation is itself a model, but so are words: anyone who uses ChatGPT or Claude is implicitly recognizing that words are not reality but just a map or model of reality.
(2) In CS Lewis' The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan (representing Christ) is beholden to the "deep magic".
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Had some more people asking about my conversion lately, finally got around to writing more about it. Link to substack article here if you want pictures etc., otherwise reposting the text below:
Been thinking about the above post from QC a lot since I’m basically exactly the type of guy he’s is calling out here. I didn’t reply initially because I felt kind of attacked or insecure, and still do a bit, but either way I think this is a great time to go into more detail with my own conversion story.
I’ve already talked about my conversion to Orthodox Christianity a bit in a previous post, which you can check out if you want more backstory / a different focus (more on my chronic pain issues):
Ultimately I convert for a variety of reasons, which I still don’t fully understand myself. A big part of it was that, as QC said, I did a ton of inner work, meditative, and psychedelic stuff for a long time. I went to a woo-woo Christian church as a kid, and was meditating and getting into Buddhism from like 13 years old onward. I was also an avowed atheist for much of that time.
Sadly Buddhism just kind of failed me. At least that’s how I saw it. I consumed soooo many books and podcasts and talks on Buddhism, spent so much time meditating and trying different techniques. I even went to a couple of Buddhist temples, but they were so alien to me culturally I basically left immediately after the service.
Looking back, I’m sure that someone who’s really into Buddhism could point out a ton of ways I didn’t try the path of the Buddha in the ‘right way’. For instance:
- I never went on a ‘serious,’ multi-day meditation retreat (though I did do a few partial day ones, some solo some with others)
- Didn’t have a formal sangha, or group of people I meditated with
- Never went and studied under an actual Buddhist teacher, got the vast majority of my instruction from the internet or books or other Buddhist dabblers who didn’t really know what they were doing
- My lifestyle throughout all of this was still quite hedonistic, was doing drugs, having casual sex, eating whatever I wanted, etc. Not practicing right action or any of the formal Buddhist moral strictures
Oftentimes I look back myself and wonder, what could have happened in my life if I managed to find the right teacher, or the right group, or even stumble into this corner of Twitter I’m in now, that actually has a lot of more grounded & mature buddhists, back before I gave up on Buddhism? I honestly don’t know.
Maybe I’d be a meditation teacher now, gallivanting around the country, no job, sleeping with hot Buddhist women (but in a totally cool, consensual, morally correct way ofc), doing DMT at cool parties in the woods, dipping to chill in a monastery whenever I want, and other things I see Buddhist teachers in the tpot/online dharma scene doing. The lifestyle certainly looks attractive, and a deep part of me still really longs for a life like that.
Regardless, it didn’t work out for me that way. The Buddhism that I encountered and that informed so much of my teenage and early adult life left me hollowed out, addicted, and broken. I had such deep issues with chronic pain, depression, and anxiety that I had to quit multiple jobs, and turned to pretty hardcore substance abuse just to numb the suffering.
I saw Buddhism and spirituality as a lifeboat, a rope thrown down that could save me from my pain and my struggles. That’s what the Buddha promised, after all! An end to suffering! But it never worked for me. I beat my head against the wall of Buddhist meditation and teachings and therapy and emotional work for over a decade, and while I would find temporary relief here and there, overall I felt I was going nowhere with it.
Encountering Christ
Christ Appears to Mary Magdalene on Easter Morning (Noli me tangere), by Peter Paul Rubens & Jan Brueghel the Younger
That’s when Christ came into my life.
It wasn’t something I actively looked for. Just happened to have a couple of friends I had really admired pop back into my life and mention hey, maybe Christianity is cooler than you think. Some of them encountered Christian teachings through AA and recovery, some had always been Christians, I just never knew it before because we hadn’t talked about it.
Either way, I took a hard look at my life, and realized I hadn’t given Christ a fair shake. I had a bachelor’s degree in history at this point, so I knew a bunch about Christ and Christianity from a sort of dry, objective, historical perspective. I had even read the New Testament a couple of times. But I had never taken the ideas seriously. I had never actually gone and looked at Christ, what He said, what He did, with anything close to an open mind.
As part of the therapy and emotional work I was doing, I realized I had a huge chip on my shoulder when it came to Christ, and had for most of my life.
You see, when I was eight years old, my dad had a stroke.
I got sent to the neighbor’s house while he and my mom went to the hospital, some of those evangelical Protestants who talk a big game about being godly and everything, but ultimately were completely uninformed assholes in real life. I stayed up all night pacing around, not knowing if my dad was going to live or die.
My neighbor woke up from me pacing around, grumpily said “if you just pray hard enough, God will save your dad, don’t worry,” and went back to sleep. So of course as an anxious kid with OCD tendencies, I prayed nonstop all night. I pleaded and bargained and begged God with every ounce of my being, telling Him I would do whatever He wanted if he just saved my dad.
As you might have guessed, it didn’t work, and the next day I woke up to find my father gone.
I’m sure for my neighbor, this comment was a relatively minor thing. She was annoyed, tired, this kid just got foisted on her and she needed sleep. She was a single mom, after all, and had her own worries I had no idea about. But still, her throwaway advice that night completely changed the trajectory of my life. From the next morning onward, I decided that I hated God. If He even existed, He must have been so unspeakably evil that the world was completely fucked. It was easier to just think He didn’t exist, and that the universe was a bunch of atoms randomly bumping into one another. It was in vogue at the time, after all.
Anyway, all this to say, when Buddhism failed to fix my problems, I was desperate enough to examine the chip on my shoulder. As I started poking at Christianity, I got more and more interested and surprised. I began to realize just how ridiculously deeply Christianity informed everything in our culture, from morals to random references in songs and movies to the names of cities and towns.
I devoured Jordan Peterson’s early lectures on Genesis, feeling an incredible tsunami of insight while listening to them, that I failed to get even after hours of vipassana meditation. Talking to more seriously intellectual Christians, I found out about Girard, and read a book by one of his students, Violence Unveiled, that blew my mind even harder about the impact of Christ on humanity, on history.
Then I reconnected with another friend, who I hadn’t spoken to in years. He happened to be Orthodox. We chatted a lot and slowly rekindled our friendship, mostly talking about Christianity. He had fallen away from the faith in college and early adulthood, and was coming back to it at the same time I was learning about it really for the first time.
Somewhere in all this, I also did some more psychedelics, and spent some weekends camping solo wilderness in the mountains, far away from civilization and any other campers. I had some experiences with Christ that caused me to question my materialist assumptions, and which I won’t recount more deeply here.
Converting to Orthodoxy
Later on, my Orthodox friend invited me to his church, for a Divine Liturgy. The first time I saw it, I was overwhelmed. He sat next to me and was explaining how the Liturgy was largely the same as the one they practiced in 300 AD, giving me all the little tidbits of symbolism and tradition. Told me about how people would reach out to touch the priest’s robe during the Grand Entrance, calling back to the woman in the Gospel who was healed by touching Christ’s garment.
I was overwhelmed. Half of it was in Greek, and I barely knew what was going on. But I knew there was something special there, something beautiful.
A few weeks went by, maybe a month or two, I don’t remember. I continued learning about Christianity and Orthodoxy, and went to another Divine Liturgy. My buddy either wasn’t there, or showed up late, so I sat by myself in the back, with a view right into the altar, looking at the crucified Christ hanging under the giant icon of the Theotokos.
It’s hard to explain what happened during that service, but something broke open in me. I remember looking at Christ, willing Him to talk to me, to become more real, to help me, to save me. And then the tears came. For some reason, in the midst of hundreds of people I had never met, in a weird church service that was half in a different language, I started crying. Tears poured out of my eyes nonstop for well over an hour. I wasn’t sobbing hysterically, just silently crying, trying not to draw attention to myself.
I had never cried like that before in my life, and never have since. I cried for so long, staying after the service, that one of the parish council members had to come and gently shoo me out of the sanctuary, as they were locking up the church.
I remember being shocked afterwards that I had been able to cry at all. I rarely cried, even when I wanted to. And I had horrible social anxiety, so crying in public like that was extremely out of character. But for some reason, I finally felt safe enough to let out the pain I had carried since I was a youth. To start to thaw the walls around my heart that had kept me from really connecting with other people my entire life.
From there, I was hooked. It still took me years to convert formally to Orthodoxy. A lot of conversations with my priest going over my doubts, and him explaining that faith was an action, not a propositional belief. That the Resurrection, the Trinity, and other core Christian teachings were Holy Mysteries, something to be approached with the heart, not with the intellect.
And here I remain, in the church, and I feel like I belong. Not because I’m an upstanding Christian, or because I deeply believe Christ was the Son of God with an intense zeal, or anything like that. But because I was, and still am, sick.
I think that, whether it’s true of ‘Real Buddhism’ or not, when I was a Buddhist I was hoping to fix myself. I was sitting there acting as if I had the power, the tools, the skill and ability to look at who I was as a person, fiddle around with my mind, and set everything in the right place. Make myself whole, perfect enlightened.
Coming to Christ was a different story. It was more about acknowledging that I am sick, and I need saving. That I can’t do it on my own, I can’t get anywhere on my own. That I need someone else, something else, to pull me out of the hole I had dug myself into.
It’s not easy. I’m not married and settled down (yet) so to go back to the original quoted tweet from QC, it’s really not a ‘relief’ in that sense. I still have tons of doubts and questions, I still look at Buddhism and other ethical systems and wonder, think about what they say, and how it compares to Christianity.
But I have been healed, in a real way. I’m sick, but on the mend, and obviously trending in the right direction. At least from my perspective. And that’s enough for me, for now. I pray it continues to be enough, and that I get to stay with Him for the rest of my days, and for life everlasting.
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