OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
For what it's worth, speaking from a Christian perspective, I find the entire argument you're responding to... at best irrelevant, and at worst outright contemptible?
Is Christianity pro-social? Is it a useful ideological technology for producing social outcomes? I don't really know. But one thing I do know is that if that's why a person follows Christ, they of all people are most to be pitied. If Christianity produces good social outcomes: great, I will continue to follow Christ. If Christianity produces bad social outcomes: oh well, I will continue to follow Christ. It's just not an important question.
Moreover, I don't think any of us are actually in a sufficiently distant, objective position to dispassionately analyse the most pro-social memes, entirely independent of their truth-values, and then select them. None of us are Platonic philosopher-kings in a position to select the most effective noble lie, and if we try to put ourselves in that position, even if only in our imaginations, we will fail. None of us have that perspective.
I feel a bit like it's that bell curve meme, with the no-wit asking, "Did Jesus really die for our sins?", and the mid-wit rambling about successful memes and civilisational usefulness, and the full-wit again asking, "Did Jesus really die for our sins?"
Believe what's true, and reject what's false. This is sufficient.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
In what way did Paul twist Jesus' words or teachings? What is the actual perversion?
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
In his next section of the essay on Dawkins, he reveals another glimpse into the way he thinks of Christianity. Given the question "Do you believe Jesus died for our sins?", he answers "Yes, but you have to begin from the position that Jesus wasn’t just some guy who arbitrarily claimed a particular title. It was as if morality itself became a person. I find the moral innovations of Jesus to be something close to the mechanical equivalent of finding a functioning F-35 jet plane in ancient Egypt. Do you know what people were like before that guy got nailed to a cross? Crack open a history book.". What an astonishing thing to say! "Jesus died for our sins" is "real" because after Jesus died, we literally sinned less! We went from barbaric and cruel to civilized and moral*.
I find this an especially bizarre position to take because, quite apart from the question of whether or not Jesus is actually the messiah, the Son of God, on which everything turns... this doesn't seem particularly true to Jesus' own self-presentation?
If we trust the gospels, Jesus does not present himself as overturning or revolutionising all prior moral thought. On the contrary, when Jesus is challenged on moral questions, he typically returns to what has been written before him, and enjoins loyalty to already-revealed principles. Jesus criticises other people for their inconsistency with past morality (e.g. Mt 15:1-9), and demands others be consistent with it (e.g. Mt 19:16-22, Mt 22:34-40). Jesus consistently presents his moral teaching as a return to the origins (e.g. Mt:19:3-9). (I've only cited Matthew here for convenience, but this passages are attested in the other synoptics as well.)
It seems strange to praise a man for being revolutionary when in his own words he is constantly urging people to return to what is taught in the law and in the tradition. Is Jesus a radical prophet, or a conventional teacher? You can easily find both narratives around him.
It rather reminds me of Chesterton's Orthodoxy:
And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways.
Likewise I often read about Jesus as being this wild moral revolutionary, or Jesus as just a simple re-presenter of what came before (this is particularly common from the de-mythologisers, who Jesus as merely one more eschatological prophet or messiah claimant in the ferment of first century Judea), and it seems strange to me that the same man be both a radical up-ender of tradition, and a staid product of tradition; or that he be both moral visionary issuing teachings that no one had heard before, and also simply reminding people of what they already knew.
Or perhaps the conclusion to draw is that he's actually the loyal one. He's the one in the balance point, at the centre, a slave of neither past nor future.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
To be honest, this is a perspective I have never really understood. It just goes at right-angles to me - I don't understand the moralisation of climate change. Kevin Rudd famously said that climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation, and this lens just doesn't make much sense to me.
From where I'm standing, climate change seems like a pretty straightforward engineering problem. There isn't really a hard normative debate about it - we mostly all agree on what we want in terms of the environment. The issue is just how to achieve it, and that seems like a technical problem par excellence.
We can debate culpability or responsibility all we want, and that's fine, but that's also largely irrelevant to solving the technical issue. We can talk about moral transformation or changing attitudes ("the hard work of changing"), but that is also largely irrelevant to solving the issue. It's a technological problem! The value of changing social or political attitudes is only insofar as they might help us solve the technological problem! That's it!
It makes me feel like a lunatic - or else, everybody else is.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Entirely possible! People often have different instincts around it as well - people have told me that I sometimes come off as a bit Stepford, even though I don't intentionally try for anything like that, and I find it a little creepy when other people do it. The point where politeness or outward kindness becomes creepy may differ from person to person, or according to cultural context.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Sikhism is an interesting one to me - I wasn't terribly familiar with it until the first time I visited a gurdwara and heard a lot from a Sikh community in themselves. I already had some academic and practical knowledge of both Hinduism and Islam for context, and as they explained their history, doctrines, and practices to me it felt blazingly obvious what Sikhism is.
That is, and with apologies to any Sikhs here, to me Sikhism reads as what you get out of a Hindu reform movement in a place where there is a lot of Islam already in the water supply. There's a lot of it that feels midway between Hinduism and Islam, or as a kind of hybrid. If you come from a Hindu background (as Guru Nanak did), become convinced of the oneness of God in a way that goes a little beyond the soft-monotheism of a lot of Hindu theology, and are surrounded by Islamic influences but are not interested in just becoming Muslim yourself... well, it's fairly intuitive where that ends up.
Anyway, I don't think I would be convinced that Abrahamic monotheism ultimately originates in Zoroastrianism? I think there are Zoroastrian influences in the mix in places (the magoi Matthew references, famously, but also the Zoroastrian influences are especially visible on Islam), but the genealogy is too hard to trace through ancient Judah, I think. I find it more plausible that monotheism independently evolved in several different places historically - after all, if you glance at anything from Hinduism to European paganism to even Chinese traditional religion, I'd argue there are a number of proto-monotheistic trends that often seem to appear. Most of them didn't get to full monotheism the way that Zoroastrianism and Abrahamic religion did, but Brahman or Heaven or the Stoic vision of God or what have you are enough to make it plausible to me that concepts of a unitary divine can just evolve independently.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
To be fair, the sorts of people who make this evolutionary argument will typically point out that the Old Testament is not written down in the order in which it was composed (for instance, Genesis 2 is usually thought to be significantly older than Genesis 1), so we have to do a bit more work to determine which texts came first chronologically, and then discern the evolution that way.
They're no doubt correct to an extent here, but the risk is that the way we identify a text's origin comes to be a self-fulfilling prophecy - we might create a narrative for ourselves of development from polytheism to henotheism to monotheism, and on that basis alone assign more henotheistic-sounding texts to earlier strata. So some degree of skepticism is warranted, and classic forms of the documentary hypothesis have come under plenty of fire.
Incidentally:
Interestingly (and to Goodguy's question below) my understanding is that some early Christian apologists centered some of their pitch around the idea that the old oracles had begun to die after the advent of Christ, which suggests that they thought a persuasive argument to pagans or post-pagans was "the old gods are out, the One True God has defeated them."
There are some interesting examples of this! Here's one from the epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians:
How, then, was He manifested to the world? A star shone forth in heaven above all the other stars, the light of which was inexpressible, while its novelty struck men with astonishment. And all the rest of the stars, with the sun and moon, formed a chorus to this star, and its light was exceedingly great above them all. And there was agitation felt as to whence this new spectacle came, so unlike to everything else [in the heavens]. Hence every kind of magic was destroyed, and every bond of wickedness disappeared; ignorance was removed, and the old kingdom abolished, God Himself being manifested in human form for the renewal of eternal life.
The star of Bethlehem agitated the heavens, and destroyed the power of magic. So the people who might once have been in slavery to spirits, demons, or sorcerers have now been set free, and are ready to hear the gospel.
Merry Christmas!
(cf. also New Testament contempt for sorcerers, such as Simon Magus in Acts 8, or the fortune-telling girl in Acts 16:16-19. There may be a sense that the magic is 'real' - the girl's 'spirit of divination' enables her to immediately and correctly realises that Paul and Silas are apostles of God - but even so, it's bad, and Paul and Silas exorcise her and free her, much to the consternation of the girl's owners, who were making money from her power.)
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Certainly I'm inclined to give a fair amount of weight to the "being right" hypothesis. Eschewing the spirit of impartiality for a moment, it is at least partly because monotheism is true, Jesus is Lord, and many (one may even hope most) early Christians behaved as if this were true.
That last part is especially important. All sorts of things are true but don't spread; all sorts of things are false but do spread. The conviction and behaviour of the witnesses matters.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
I don't see the Mormon comparison as particularly accurate today? I would have thought that the stereotypical view of Mormons is not that of selflessly compassionate people on the margins of society tending the needy, albeit with a distressing tendency to refuse political or civic loyalty. Rather, my picture of a stereotypical Mormon is more 'Stepford nice', if that makes sense? I picture polite people in clean white shirts who never swear and who are conspicuously observant of propriety. If I think 'Mormon', I think 'clean, upstanding, good citizen', and so on. Mormons have put a lot of effort into respectability.
If I set the stereotypes aside and instead think about Mormons I actually meet, in that context what I mostly see them is actually a very strong effort to make themselves less recognisable - it is unusual that I talk to a believing Mormon for very long before I reach the part where they say, "See, we're just like you, we're Christian, we believe in Jesus, there are no differences!" In other words, in my experience they try pretty hard to play down the weird beliefs that make them different, which is not something I suspect a first or second century Christian would do vis-a-vis pagan Romans.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
I'm not wholly convinced that there's a clear or objective definition here, or that 'the autism spectrum' isn't a concept that shifts and expands, changing the people included within it. I say this as someone who has never had a formal diagnosis of any mental illness, but who has been speculated to be on the spectrum before, and who has then gone on to have actual psychologists investigate and then dismiss the possibility. My experience has been that, while there is a fairly identifiable core, the boundaries around what is and is not autism are sufficiently porous that you should be a little skeptical around reported numbers.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Perhaps, but then I think I would have to deal with a new epicycle - what makes Abrahamic religion different to other monotheism? If there's an Abrahamic advantage separate from just monotheism, what is it?
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
I'm not sure what part of pigeonburger's narrative makes it implausible that Christians might have done a good job of convincing pagans of this?
Indeed, on a more macrohistorical level, one of the observations I would make is that firstly polytheism seems remarkably fragile or weak in the face of robust monotheism, and secondly monotheisms seem remarkably resilient to each other.
Both Christianity and Islam expanded remarkably quickly and did excellent jobs of sweeping over pagan resistance - what efforts there were (sorry Julian) were mostly ineffective. Even factoring in that both Christians and Muslims used the sword and other incentives to an extent, they did this very rapidly. (And the sword by itself hardly seems to explain it - after all, polytheists are just as good at using brute force as monotheists.) To an extent we can continue to see this today, where traditional religions frequently don't put up much of a fight, looking through more recent evangelical or da'wah efforts in Africa or Asia. Hinduism is probably the only great polytheism to have resisted very strongly, and Hinduism has always had a bunch of quasi-monotheistic tendencies of its own.
Meanwhile, Christianity and Islam have both been noticeably ineffective at converting each other. There are a handful of exceptions (Muslims in Spain, Christians through parts of the Middle East), but for the most part, and barring a handful of individual exceptions, monotheist-to-monotheist conversions are quite rare. Judaism is also a strong example here. The biggest exception I think of here is Zoroastrianism, which did mostly collapse in the face of Islam (though it took a few centuries; most of early Islamic Persia remained Zoroastrian for a few centuries), and maybe you could argue Manichaeism or something as a Roman monotheism that also fell before Christianity, but in general it seems that when a monotheistic religion gets entrenched, it is extraordinarily difficult to convert people away from en masse.
Of course, today there's a third combatant in the ring in the form of atheism/secularism/irreligion, and it seems to be doing pretty well at smashing both Christianity and Islam. Perhaps in a few centuries my descendants will be discussing how zero-theism outcompeted monotheism just as monotheism outcompeted polytheism. But please forgive me if I hope that is not the case.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
The scriptures interestingly can go back and forth a bit on this. Some passages can be extremely 'disenchanting', firmly asserting that idols do not correspond to any kind of living or spiritual being, and have no power of any kind. In some places the New Testament seems to agree with this logic - for instance, 1 Corinthians 8:4, Romans 1:22-23, or the protest of the idol-makers in Acts 19:23-27 is remarkably materialistic. In other places, however, there is a sense that the gods of the nations may exist in some sense. Famously in Exodus, for instance, the Egyptian priests seem to possess magical powers of some kind as well (e.g. Exodus 7:20-24), and in places the New Testament also seems to flirt with this idea. Galatians 4 and Colossians 2 talk about the believers formerly being enslaved to "the elemental spirits of the universe", and while these are probably not gods in the proper sense (cf. Galatians 4:8), they do at least seem to be real, or possessed of some kind of power, even if that power is meagre and false in comparison to that of Christ. Indeed, that power seems to have been enough to make liberation from them necessary. This seems consistent with the various exorcism narratives in the gospels and Acts - whether 'god' is an appropriate name for them or not, the world appears to be populated with invisible spiritual powers, most of which are in some measure of rebellion against the Lord.
You can probably reconcile these perspectives to an extent - the world is full of hostile spiritual powers, and human beings deludedly believe that images made of stone and wood can influence these beings, or that the images come to contain power themselves - but I think it's nonetheless interesting that you can find the tension there.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
This may be a cheap shot, but this is another of the increasingly many Freddie articles that convince me that he's bubbled, and most importantly, needs to get off Twitter and/or Bluesky. I know he says he doesn't have an account on either, but he's clearly reading both of them, and he's overly concerned about or invested in niche cultural or elite scenes that nobody of sense should be paying attention to.
For instance, just to spork a little bit:
This piece by Phillip Maciak on whether Saturday Night Live is too online these days is innocuous enough, generally not wrong. I find SNL hard to enjoy in general, these days; the series is the site of unpleasant tensions between its various historical and contemporary impulses.
Who is actually watching SNL? Is it important? Why is Freddie watching it, and if he is, why is a mediocre comedy show a pressing issue?
You’d think that we could, at least, agree that there’s such a thing as too much exposure to screens and the disorienting rush of online life for young children. But you’d be wrong. Here’s Amil Niazi for New York, and here’s Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker. [...] ther words, they soothe the kind of hip parents who read New York and The New Yorker, reassuring them that what they’re already doing regarding screentime is fine, and anyway, it’s so hard that probably everybody else is already doing it.
Surely it bears some gentle reminder here that most people don't read New York or The New Yorker, and that the tastes of this small, relatively exclusive group of Americans does not necessarily communicate more than the pathologies of that particular set?
In the 2000s there were so goddamn many “uh, selling out isn’t actually a thing” essays. SO many. Reams of them. Every writer you know was busily digging the grave for the concept of selling out, and pretending to be the first to ever take that stance when they did so.
Were they? Every writer I was reading in the 2000s? I can't think of any, and Freddie isn't that much older than me. I seem to remember there was plenty of mainstream entertainment still decrying the concept of selling out - heck, School of Rock is from 2003, and that was sympathetically ranting about the mainstreaming of rock music. Now, twenty years later, I think there are still plenty of people very concerned about selling out - I googled "site:reddit.com selling out" and there appears to be an awareness of what it is and a dislike for it. It may well be true that people writing for prestigious publications don't believe in selling out, but the key there might be the phrase "writing for prestigious publications". Of course the people working for The Man are going to defend The Man! So it has ever been.
But then online life happened, and we were stuck in these various networks and mediums that were fully the product of choices we made, where how we appeared to others was in every sense orchestrated to some degree. Instagram is the notorious example; few of us actually live lives that are composed of nothing but tasteful minimalism, inspiring visuals, and enviable brunch spreads, but that’s how everybody started to present themselves.
Everyone? Really? How many people are actually spending all their time comparing themselves to Instagram models? In this case I genuinely don't know. Statista tells me that about 170 million Americans, or a bit over half the country, is on Instagram. That's a lot. What are the usage patterns among those people? Are they all regular checking Instagram, or is that figure inflated? (It follows Facebook numbers pretty closely and it's owned by the same company - is it just the same account?) I'm not particularly informed here (I have never used Instagram), but my point is just that there are a few more questions I'd ask before concluding that this is actually as ubiquitous as Freddie suggests.
There was plenty of celebrity obsession in the late 20th century; you can certainly find critiques of it here in the 21st. And I’m going by vibes the same as anyone else. But I find it indisputable that in many ways our culture has essentially surrendered to the unhealthy elevation of celebrity to the pinnacle of all human desire. It used to be considered kind of trashy and embarrassing to read US Weekly, but celebrity obsession got laundered in under extremely dubious third wave feminism logic, and here we are in a cultural place where questioning a fixation on celebrity logic will get you called an elitist and a misogynist.
Again, I just ask... is it? Really? Where? By whom? The last I checked, the tabloids like Woman's Weekly at the supermarket checkout were full of celebrity gossip and were still generally perceived as trashy. In what world is he living where the same old celebrity garbage is not low-class?
Relatedly, consider crypto bros or hustle bros or WallStreetBets types. This whole genre of young man, who emerged largely from the Rogan-sphere but whose presence has grown and grown, may partially be defined by stuff like resistance to vaccines or a rejection of woke niceties or the pursuit of abstracted masculinity.
Once more time I will ask - how prevalent is this type of person actually? Is this a widespread phenomenon, or is this just Freddie reacting to a particularly annoying type of person on the internet? There is a very striking gap between the kind of strange person I can run into on the internet (including, alas, in places like the Motte), and in men I meet in real life or on the street, most of whom, actually, I do see with real jobs and families and realistic long-term aspirations. This is just anecdotes versus anecdotes, but my point is - don't let anecdotes based on a handful of personal experiences shape your picture of an entire generation.
Adults used to feel social pressure to not just consume arts and media for children; the vision of a 35-year-old with Star Wars bedsheets was once widely understood to be a sad one. Comic books were for kids - you could certainly read some, especially if you called them graphic novels, but you needed to contextualize your tastes and make sure they were included among other reading habits, adult ones.
How many thirty-year-olds do you know in real life who would not be embarrassed to admit to having a Star Wars bedspread? How many actually read comic books? It might be worth the gentle reminder that the comics industry is not doing particularly well. Movies are one thing, but comics qua comics just don't seem to be a cultural juggernaut.
Go on BlueSky and say “I think it’s good if pop fans challenge their tastes a little and see if there’s stuff the like in more challenging genres,” see that goes in contemporary elite culture.
'Contemporary elite culture' is the key phrase here. I don't know how the BlueSky hive mind would respond to that question - I haven't asked them. But even if they respond exactly the way Freddie says they would, that is a small, highly-selected-for group, and I would be wary about generalising anything about wider American culture from BlueSky.
And so we’re in a world where saying you don’t like Sabrina Carpenter is a hate crime and anyone who knows how to tie a tie is a representative of The Man.
I have never heard of Sabrina Carpenter and have no idea who she is. Is it possible - just possible - that Freddie is taking the habits and rhetoric of a highly rarefied group and generalising them to the whole of the Western world?
On a side note:
Hang on, Freddie was criticising selling out before, and now he's in favour of dressing respectably? Does no one else sense a tension here? Is The Man good or bad in this narrative? The Man is the one who says people need to dress nicely and eat their vegetables and read adult novels and not have bedrooms full of science fiction posters and video game figures; but The Man is also the person people sell out to. The Man is the one who defines popular music tastes and demands conformity with them.
Are we supposed to resist and rebel against The Man when it comes to music or art, but obey and conform to The Man when it comes to fashion or interior decoration? Doesn't that seem a bit contradictory? How do you have both at the same time?
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Yes, if an additional data point is needed, I had never heard of Tubman before there was some culture war nonsense about putting her face on money.
My opinion is that she seems like a silly, politics-driven addition to VII. I don't necessarily insist that leaders in Civ games always have formally occupied the office of head of state or what have you, but I do think that leaders in Civ should be people who can be meaningfully said to have been the leader of their civilisation. Gandhi was never prime minister of India, but he can be reasonably said to have been the leader of the Indian people in his time.
There's clearly no sense in which you could say that Harriet Tubman was ever the leader of the United States. She'd be fine as a Great Person in Civ, but... leader? No. That's silly.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
I will risk drama and say that I enjoyed V and VI more than IV.
IV just has too much that doesn't work that well in hindsight - in particular, IV has really bad and tedious combat.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
I can't argue with that. I think a schema like this is reasonable in the abstract, but the moment you start positing regulating information on this basis, you run into the question of who judges.
I don't know if I have an absolute rule here, because it seems in principle reasonable for a government to act to curtail certain forms of false information (e.g. false advertising), as well as certain forms of malevolent communication (e.g. propaganda fron an enemy power), but I think I would want to permit those only to the minimum extent necessary.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
I think that, regardless of objective statistics or anything, it is felt to be right-leaning by the kind of people who migrate to Bluesky.
Is it possible that they're just so used to unchallenged left-wing dominance that any presence of non-censored, non-battered-and-fearful conservative voices at all seems 'right-leaning' to them? Entirely plausible, to me.
But even if it's just illusionary or a product of absurd expectations of cultural dominance, that would still get you the Neutral vs Conservative effect, where the most extreme witches flee, create their own space, and that space ends up terrible.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
To me that seems much too broad, particularly since 'harm' is difficult to clearly define, and no one can reasonably foresee all the effects of their speech. For instance, is it malinformation for Lisa Simpson to tell Springfield that their beloved founder was a murderous pirate? It's true, and her intent is to promote historical truth and increase everyone's genuine knowledge of the past - her motive is disinterested truth-seeking, not to promote or conceal any political agenda. However, it's also clear that the knowledge will make most of the townspeople unhappy. Malinformation? What if the truth would do such damage to the town's annual festival as to cause real economic damage? That seems like real harm, at least in an economic sense. Malinformation?
Intuitively I feel like to be malinformation there has to be a motive that is, broadly speaking, malevolent - it has to be true information that is intended to in some way mislead or disadvantage the people receiving it, usually to further the agenda of the person revealing it.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
So this gives us four quadrants along two axes, right? The true/false axis and the benevolent/malevolent axis.
True and benevolent - information. Facts offered with the intent of illuminating another person or improving their understanding.
False and benevolent - some (but not all) misinformation. Offered with the intent of improving someone else's understanding, but failing in this regard due to good-faith error.
True and malevolent - malinformation. Facts offered in order to harm another or decrease their overall understanding, whether through selective choice of facts, removal of context, inflammatory content, or similar.
False and malevolent - disinformation (a subtype of misinformation). Offered with the intent of deluding another, decreasing their understanding, or causing them to take action based on false foundations.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Some are, certainly. More than zero of the people furiously angry at Singal are trans.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
That's not quite what I'm talking about in the specific example of myself - I meet a lot more Muslims in person than I do Mormons. It's the identity claim that gets under my skin.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
I wonder, actually, if Twitter/Bluesky is an inversion of the old battle between neutral and conservative? Twitter is currently an officially-neutral-but-soft-right-leaning mainstream site, and the left defected from it to go and make their own space, which predictably went badly, and now is evolving much stricter and harsher purity norms than even pre-Elon Twitter had. They attract only the refugees from a right-slanted system, and so they get not only progressives, but the worst and most extreme progressives.
There's almost a schadenfreude in it - "Ha! Now you know how it feels!"
Unless, of course, Twitter craters even more. Other possible dynamics are right-echo-chamber-Twitter and left-echo-chamber-Bluesky, both of similar reach and power, which I would take to be the worst of all worlds; or Twitter collapses entirely and Bluesky takes its place as the default short-messaging platform.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Well, yes, and I take the whole "heretics are more hated than infidels" observation to be the same distinction.
I'm not asserting that it's easy to know the truth of Christianity. Certainly I'm not saying that it was effortless for me! Nor am I even suggesting that the only or obvious good-faith answer is yes. What I'm asserting is that it is, for better or for worse, the relevant question.
"Does Christianity produce good societies?" may be an interesting question, in an academic sense. But you cannot get from "Christianity produces good societies" to "Christianity is true". B does not follow from A. And since "is Christianity true?" is a question of, I would suggest, ultimate import, what that says to me is that we need a bit more here than a question about memetic adaptability.
Look, people become Christian for all sorts of reasons, including stupid ones, and as Alan Jacobs reminds us, what matters is not where you start, but where you finish. Someone who was only interested in Christianity at first because it seems pro-social, but who, because of this belief, came to church, encountered Christ, had a conversion of the heart, and eventually became a genuine believer has ended up in the right place, despite the poverty of the original motive. Probably most Christians are like this to some extent - they thought cathedrals looked cool, or wanted their parents to be proud of them, or enjoyed singing in a choir, or whatever else might get someone through the church door.
But what happens once they're in there is what matters, and I'd suggest that what happens inside the church is everything to do with Jesus, God, and the redemption of the sins of the world, and not very much to do with social engineering. If interest in the noble lie gets you through the door, great, but we must not content ourselves with noble lies. It matters whether or not it's true. That is, perhaps, in the end the only thing that matters.
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