OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
13d ago
Is Christ himself a follower of Christ? It seems like a bad case to build your definition on.
The point of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, at any rate, is to clarify and define the apostolic faith, particularly in order to draw clear lines that include the orthodox and exclude heretics. Obviously Jesus himself didn't know the Nicene Creed in its exact terms, but considering that the Creed is defined in particular reference to Jesus' life, words, and death, I think it's reasonable to say there's some relationship between him and the Creed?
In any case, as regards Mormonism specifically, the point is that when we talk about 'historical' or 'orthodox' Christianity, we talk about a large community or set of communities which has defined its belief in particular ways. Creeds are among the various tools that the church has used to do this. It is, I think, objectively the case that Mormonism exists outside of these historical definitions. Mormons themselves would accept this - Mormons believe that there was a great apostasy that led to pretty much the entire Christian world falling into error and unbelief.
When I say "Mormons aren't Christians", what I mean is that Mormon beliefs are outside of and contradictory to historical definitions of orthodoxy. We can dispute the exact words appropriate to describe that situation - non-Christian, heretic, unorthodox, heck if you ask a Mormon they might prefer 'restoration' or something - but I think the words point to a real fact about the world.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
This makes Donald Trump's commentary interesting; the President immediately declared that this was a "targeted attack on Christians" and was met with an Evangelical chorus of "Mormons aren't Christians" (which to me seems a little tone deaf, under the circumstances, but times being what they are...).
This is... tricky, I think, in terms of sensitivity.
On the one hand, Mormons aren't Christians. Or at least, they do not fall within any historical confession of Christian orthodoxy. They're probably best understood as a type of heretic; personally I put them in a category that I think of as 'Jesusists', that is, religions that take Jesus as their central figure, but which are too different from historical Christianity to be understood as the same thing. The point is that "Mormons aren't Christians", as a statement, is substantially true.
On the other, it is obviously breathtakingly insensitive to bring that up at this time. Mormons believe that they are Christians, even if they are, in my judgement, in error. (I realise that technically definitions can't be wrong; even so I can and do believe that they draw the line between Christianity and non-Christianity in an indefensible place.) More importantly, whether Mormonism is a form of Christianity or not is irrelevant to this particular issue. Murdering a group of Mormons at worship is obviously very, very bad. Christians ought to respond to that by condemning the crime while offering empathy, support, and compassion to those grieving. It is not the appropriate time to engage in a confessional dispute.
But to return to the first hand - a major public figure, the president of the United States, just responded to this by asserting that Mormons are Christians, and that this shooting is an attack on Christianity qua Christianity. Now I judge both of those statements to be untrue, and though many might argue the former, the latter seems pretty hard to dispute. It is not factually true that this shooting was "a targeted attack on Christians". If nothing else, ranting about the anti-Christ suggests that the shooter himself is a Christian, albeit a very delusional one. So it seems like there is value in clarifying in this moment that Trump's interpretation of the shooting is wrong.
I suppose this is just another situation where Trump really needed to keep his mouth shut, because all his comments have done is make a tragic situation worse for everyone.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
Pardon me if you've answered this question before somewhere else, but just for my own satisfaction:
What is the point of the euphemisms and fictionalised names? You're not writing a detailed fantasy story with its own history or anything. It is pretty clear what you're talking about - why not skip the fig leaves of Tidus, Hajnalis, and Tropicals, and just say Earth, whites, and blacks? I understand that there's dramatic utility sometimes in using different language and context to sneak past the prejudices of an audience, and invite us to consider an issue without all the baggage we currently attach to those terms, but you aren't being subtle enough for that to work. It is too blatant. All you have done is replace a handful of nouns. Why bother?
OliveTapenade
14d ago
It's a crime that no one has made Sick, Sad World yet.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
I think it's because the United States already uses imperial, switching over carries a cost, the United States is large enough that there is no pressure to switch for the sake of standardisation with neighbours, and the United States is historically quite bad at top-down standardisation and national reform. There are fifty states, some might embrace metric and some would resist it, and the federal government would struggle to make it compulsory - it would incur both state resistance and widespread popular resistance. Whichever government tries to make the switch is going to face a lot of complaints, and the other party is inevitably going to seize the issue and portray themselves as soming to save your measurements. Lastly, Americans hate being made to conform with the rest of the world - there is a very strong sense of national exceptionalism and defiance. The ingrained sense of "but we're different" wins out - from everything from climate agreements to conventions on landmines, the US has a tradition of being the exception. Telling the rest of the world to piss off usually goes down well domestically. It's a bit like the British attitude to EU regulations, or the Japanese attitude to whaling. Maybe on its own it wasn't a big issue, but the moment it becomes an issue of pushy, arrogant foreigners telling us what we ought to do, the US goes, "You know what? I'm gonna start doing it even harder."
Disclaimer: I'm Australian, Imperial units are garbage, metric is superior.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
That's my experience, anecdotally. People sometimes measure things in feet and inches, but I take that as just because feet are a practically useful, everyday measure that there isn't a good metric equivalent for. Every now and then I hear people say 'miles', but at least in my generation, every time I hear 'mile', I need to mentally multiply by 1.6 in order to visualise what it means.
OliveTapenade
21d ago
...have you read any of the Reformers? I have no idea how you read Luther or Calvin and conclude that they "basically threw out 1500 years of philosophy" when they so enthusiastically read and cited the Church Fathers.
OliveTapenade
21d ago
My goodness even on the Motte Catholics are insufferable. I don't mean that mainly as a personal attack, that's my observation of every Catholic I encounter - an absolute arrogance and a tendency to twist things to support the required dogmas of the Roman church.
For what it's worth, this is... not wholly consistently, but I would say overwhelmingly my experience of extremely-online-Catholics.
It is, blessed be God, not even remotely my experience of Catholics in the flesh and blood.
OliveTapenade
21d ago
Stellula is, I would say, clearly not attempting any sort of good-faith or accurate account of history. It's just a generic boo light.
Frankly, as someone raised Protestant who has come right to the brink of becoming Catholic multiple times, it is the kind of graceless, vicious rhetoric that repels me from that tradition. The church is a community of grace, which should be marked by charity, gentleness, and peace. The best Catholics I have known model that, including every man or woman in holy orders I have met. I think Stellula does the Catholic Church a tremendous disservice, and ought to repent - for the Catholic Church's own sake!
OliveTapenade
21d ago
As a Protestant - obviously St. Peter was not a Protestant, but he was not Roman Catholic or Orthodox in any meaningful way either. Those distinctions did not exist in his day. He was a follower of Christ.
Now as it happens I think it's ahistorical nonsense to say that he was a pope or a bishop either, offices that did not exist in his day and which have been applied to him retroactively, but at any rate, St. Peter certainly did not think of himself in confessional terms that far postdate him. I would say that St. Peter was, in the proper sense, small-letter catholic, orthodox, and yes, protestant (that is, witnessing to the gospel), and that these denominational slapfights only embarrass those determined to engage in them.
OliveTapenade
25d ago
Well, I'm not sure what to say to "it's obvious".
My mental model, I suppose, would be by comparison to similar steppe migrations and conquests from recorded history - Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Magyars, Cumans, Pechenegs, Turks, Mongols, Xiongnu, Xianbei, Manchus, and so on. Horse people from Central Asia spreading out and conflicting with, occasionally conquering, neighbouring peoples is very far from an unknown event in wider Eurasian history. In the absence of detailed knowledge of the Yamnaya culture, my best guess is that they were probably similar to their better-known successors.
Do you take your description as applying accurately to some of the steppe peoples I've listed? Are they various sub-species of the Race of Kings?
OliveTapenade
25d ago
Ironically, by the standards of this theory, I'm an Aryan, or at least a Nordic - I'm of Northern European ancestry, tall, fair skin, wavy hair, and so on.
But to put that aside - I think you and Bartender are engaging in a kind of motte-and-bailey here.
It is mainstream academic consensus that the Kurgan hypothesis is true, and that the earliest Proto-Indo-European homeland was somewhere in Central Asia. These people either were among or were the earliest tamers of horses, and successfully migrated into places from India to Europe. I don't think you need to intimate that there's some kind of academic conspiracy to conceal this - it's sufficiently consensus that it's in Bill Wurtz.
However, in the OP you go considerably beyond this position, to the extent of speculating about very specific cultural traits and the values of these groups' elites, and go to suggest that these people constitute a distinct race of 'Nobles' (yes, I know you're just translating arya), who maintained themselves as a unique separate caste through endogamy. You speculate heavily about 'selection pressures' that produce strong, militarily capable steppe peoples who conquer weaker, more passive peoples, rule over them but become weakened over time, and are then replaced by a new wave of invaders. This is getting a pretty distant way beyond "the Yamnaya culture existed", and beyond what I think can be reliably demonstrated from archaeological and genetic evidence.
OliveTapenade
26d ago
Well, I don't think it's meritorious to confidently expound on a matter that I - and you - are ignorant of. Honest doubt is superior to confidently propounding a narrative that's not grounded in evidence. Otherwise we end up just doing this. I don't personally have a macro theory of prehistory, and I don't think I need one in order to question someone else's.
What I suggest is that macro theories like this are usually made far in excess of actual evidence, and therefore tend to reflect a combination of the ideological biases of the theorist and what audiences find narratively compelling. I interpret what you've written as a variant on the Gobineau/Grant Nordicist theory, and I think that theory has been successful because it's flattering to the people who made and received it and because it's aesthetically or narratively compelling. It's in your very title here - 'The Race of Kings'. Narratives about an ancient group of super-people have weight and heft to them. Poetry. Conan the Cimmerian has an appeal to him.
But let me compare a different narrative - say, Gimbutas' Civilisation of the Goddess, and the Great Goddess hypothesis in general. The Great Goddess narrative in some ways complements your own; the primary difference is who the protagonists or the good guys are, with the Goddess people postulating an indigenous egalitarian society rooted in feminine wisdom that was overcome by evil horse-riding militant patriarchalists. Even so, I think it's fair to be very skeptical of the Great Goddess people. The theory has a certain poetic resonance, a thrill for the soul, as is undeniable if you ever read Robert Graves, but that is insufficient to commend it for actual belief.
I take Belloc's parody as useful because, as the saying goes, you can't reason someone out of a position that they were never reasoned into. If someone was enchanted into a position, you have to enchant them out of it again.
What was prehistoric human civilisation like? I'm not entirely sure. There's some archaeological and genetic evidence, and I have some guesses, but they are not particularly confident guesses. The point I want to make here, however, is that we should resist the lure of poetry. I think what you're writing here is not a dispassionate survey of historical evidence, but rather a story. Honestly, I think it'd be more productive to respond to your narrative in literary terms, rather than historical.
OliveTapenade
27d ago
To be fair, I don't read you in the OP as making a substantive argument either.
What's in the OP is a story or a narrative. But anybody can tell a story about history. What would make it an argument is some reason to believe that it's true or useful.
HereAndGone presents Belloc's parody of that story. Belloc also does not, strictly speaking, make an argument. But I think his response is insightful, because the appeal of, for lack of a better term, the Aryan story is that it feels powerful. It fits with intuitions; it's poetic. It conjures up the image of the horse-riding, fire-guarding, sky-worshipping chain of fathers and sons that rode out of the steppes to conquer the world. Seeing the man on the horse is something difficult to unsee. Truth and evidence are beside the point if it resonates with the soul.
So what Belloc does is take that same story and make it look absurd. His doggerel is counter-poetry. Instead of seeing the great conqueror on a horse, you see the absurd pretensions of 20th century racialists, midwit eggheads concocting silly fables in defiance of what is plainly visible among the people.
It's a war of memes, and it's being argued on that level.
But if what you want is to know how the human race and human civilisation actually developed...
Go somewhere else. None of this is that.
OliveTapenade
30d ago
That seems a rather uncharitable interpretation? He said that Floyd hagiography ≥ Kirk hagiography, and that seems very hard to argue against to me.
OliveTapenade
30d ago
I do think he's in the process of being exaggerated and caricatured in absurd ways - I came across this piece earlier today and I do think it's significantly overestimating him. I don't think Kirk was the Devil or a fascist or anything like that, but I do think he was an opportunist who thrived on provoking outrage and overreaction, and whose actual views were an interesting combination of chamelonic and exaggerated. His position changed regularly depending on who it was most profitable to suck up to as a young right-wing activist.
He shouldn't have been killed. What happened to him was a tragedy. But just because a tragedy happened to someone does not provide that person with any more insight or virtue than he possessed before it happened.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I'd argue that vocal activists themselves are a tiny minority. My anecdotal experience has been that most trans people on the street find this academic language strange and alienating, and do not themselves have a very well-developed concept of gender identity. Like most people, they kludge it together out of a slurry of experiences and half-remembered concepts received from others.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Wouldn't they? Isn't that a textbook example of queering the gender binary?
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I would find it difficult to imagine a comprehensive transhumanism that doesn't implicitly include transgenderism. From some years back I remember "morphological freedom" as a transhumanist talking point, and there's no particular way to cash that out that doesn't validate transgenderism. If one of one's goals is complete personal and bodily autonomy, well, you get transgenderism thrown in for free.
I don't think I agree with this position as a normative good, but it is an intellectually consistent one, in a way that I think some of the transgenderism arguments today are not. Morphological freedom also includes, for instance, transracialism for free, even though progressive orthodoxy validates transgenderism but not transracialism.
Perhaps a transhumanist might argue that morphological freedom and individual autonomy extends to the right to make your physical body anything you desire, including everything from sexual organs to skin colour to species, but does not confer a right to be included in any particular community you desire? So an elective community of people identifying as natal-woman or natal-black or what have you might still have the right to constitute itself as such, and forbid transgender or transracial people from joining it. If I imagine a transhumanist utopia, I could imagine a group like that existing in something like the Culture; though I also suspect that in a realistic liberal-transhumanist context, that group would be a tiny minority of weird people, tolerated but largely ignored by most of society, in which transhumanism and radical morphological freedom has dissolved most such concerns or identities.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I find it helps to think of tradition as a river, rather than something static. Tradition is, inherently, a record of change. To be 'traditional', to be part of a tradition, is to be aware of and shaped by all the river's upstream flow. It is not to be exactly the same as the part of the river that was upstream, and neither is it to recreate the conditions upstream perfectly today.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Sure - I'm an Australian, party discipline is much stronger here, and in practice we all know that we're not really voting for our local MP, but rather for the party that MP represents. Even so, in this system I do believe that MPs of the party in Opposition are democratically justified in opposing the Government's policies. Labor's crushing election victory this year does not obligate the remaining Coalition MPs to cooperate with whatever Labor wants to do; neither did the Coalition's decisive 2013 win obligate Labor to refrain from acting against the Coalition Government. That would go against the whole point of having an Opposition.
The point I'm trying, perhaps clumsily, to make is that I think it's bad faith to use a presidential 'mandate' as a reason for why members of congress should not oppose that president's policies, if they and their party think it necessary to do so.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I can see nothing in the constitution that says that states or communities are not allowed to welcome migrants. I think you're reading a kind of racial bias into it? I know you didn't mention specifically, but I think it is significant that this conversation is about Korean migrants, and not white or black migrants from elsewhere in the US.
It seems to me that you are assuming, on a highly speculative basis, that Georgians are strongly opposed to living alongside Koreans. I see no evidence of that, nor that the democratic will of Georgians is to get rid of this Korean community, Koreans in general, or Asians in even more general.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Isn't the consequence of every individual seat's election a mandate for that elected congressperson? No individual congressperson is bound by a presidential mandate. They are responsible to the constituents below them, not to a president above them.
I repeat my position that Republicans in congress have zero obligation to be acquiescent to the will of a Democratic president, and Demicrats in congress have zero obligation to be acquiescent to the will of a Republican president. Mandates, if they exist at all, do not work like that.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Are you a Georgian? I still haven't seen any evidence that Georgians hate Koreans or are opposed to their presence in the state. Why should it be the null hypothesis that Georgians want these people out? Nothing in the top level post quoting the WSJ indicated that natives have any problems with the Koreans, and the Koreans seem to contributing well to the local economy and cultural acclimatising to American ways, including by taking English names. I can find the full article by archiving it and there seems to be positivity there, including by Georgian government officials. Some local union workers have complained, but it also seems like most of these Koreans have come legally, consistent with Georgia's laws.
I mean, this mostly seems like a model minority situation to me. Koreans have mostly come to Georgia via the legal process, which Georgians themselves established via their state government, and those that have come have respected the local culture, worked hard, and tried to fit in.
Now, sure, maybe native Georgians hate them for some reason and want them to go, but you can't just assume that as your starting point. Be careful not to typical-mind here - maybe you don't think Koreans should live alongside Americans, but it is hardly clear that that is a majority opinion in Georgia.
At any rate, some Koreans coming to Georgia to live and work there, if consistent with Georgia's existing laws, cannot be said to constitute 'replacement' in any reasonable sense of the word.
Would it help to go through the Creed line by line?
It seems pretty clear that Jesus believed in one God, the father almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Did Jesus believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son of God, eternally begotten of the Father? Jesus does not offer a programmatic Christology in the gospels, unless you want to go fairly deep into John, but even in the synoptics it seems fair to say that Jesus identifies himself with the Father in a profoundly intimate way, even if he does not spell it out in these terms.
Did Jesus believe that he came down from heaven for us and for our salvation? That seems pretty clear in the gospels - he talks about the Son of Man coming to save sinners. Did he believe he was born of the virgin Mary? Well, certainly he knew who his mother was, though depending on which gospel you read some might argue about the virgin birth. If we accept the Resurrection at all, presumably Jesus believed that he was crucified and rose again and ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the father, and in the gospels Jesus mentions the future coming of the Son of Man and judgement of the nations plenty of times.
Did Jesus believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life? Jesus doesn't talk about the Spirit that explicitly outside of the gospel of John, though he does mention the Spirit a few times. I'm happy to give this one a check though I'll admit that a lot of things are a bit hazier if you don't accept John.
Did Jesus believe that the Spirit spoke through the prophets? That one's easy. In one holy catholic and apostolic church? He does talk about the church or the community of his disciples a bit in the synoptics - I think that counts. Baptism for the forgiveness of sins, absolutely, if we accept the Great Commission as historical. That was his idea to begin with. And the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come - yes, Jesus is recorded arguing in favour of those beliefs.
It seems like most of it is pretty safe. If you're interested in the quest for the historical Jesus and you're skeptical of the gospels, especially John but also to an extent Luke (for the virgin birth), you might question whether Jesus believed most of this, but if you do accept the gospels (and surely Christians do), the Nicene Creed seems quite consistent with how Jesus described himself and his Father. It is sometimes more specific or explicit than Jesus himself was, but that doesn't seem fatal to me.
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