coffee_enjoyer
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coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
It is impossible for Christianity to have “won” by only being attractive to the poor and the servants. For one, they have no rights or military training, so it would be impossible for them to ever exert influence on the middle or upper classes, who controlled everything and made up the military leadership. But it’s also impossible given the wealth of early Christian writings we have — it’s expensive to have dedicated theologians who copy and write thousands of pages. There’s also no reason that a pagan mystery cult couldn’t have defeated Christianity, if the only thing of importance was the promise of an afterlife (there were lots, including Mithras for the soldiers!). And if the poorest members were being converted on the promise of an afterlife, they would pose zero political threat and the powerful Pagans would be happy about this as it would reduce the problem of slave rebellions. (Is Christianity the opium of the people, or is Christianity its own “slave revolt” against the powerful? It cannot be both, so please make up your mind, 19th century.) Lastly, we know as early as the Apostles that they had issues with how to treat wealthy Christians, and they were writing rules on how to subsidize poor widows — things that wouldn’t be worth writing about if it was just a religion of the poor.
I don’t think you can ascribe Belief A causation to Outcome C when there’s a huge expanse of Phenomena B between them. In the case of 2024’s progressive politics, there are clearer phenomena that caused it, and we can imagine 1776-like norms which inspire a different sort of progress than the one we ostensibly have now. For universalism, it explains more if you look to the French Revolution, which was no more influenced by Christianity than the counter-revolutionaries (who were arguably more influenced by Christianity, or at least Christian heritage). If Christianity can equally inspire both Divine Right nobilities and universalism, it’s more clear to ignore it altogether and look for more direct and salient causes.
I mean, would we ever say that Confucius inspired Mao’s revolution? No, there was an interjecting element in between. Did the Talmud inspire the Soviet Union? No, elements in between. The distances are way too large to clearly ascribe causal attributes, and other causes make more sense.
I suppose we can say, that Christianity causes universalism in the same way Christopher Columbus caused millions of Indians to die from disease. It’s simply that exploring a new thing comes with completely “random”, unknowable, unforeseen problems down the road. But we can imagine a discovery of America that does not accidentally induce a smallpox epidemic, so it’s not like there’s any wisdom in connecting discovery to smallpox in our minds.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
But he is not saying “they don’t matter” socially or politically, because then he would advocate for freeing slaves and treating women like men. But nobody was advocating for these things. So whatever Paul is saying here, it can’t have anything to do with actions related to the polis (the social, the political). The “in Christ” isn’t some stand-in for “now that Christ has come, we treat everyone the same”, because we know from the text and from history that they had rules regarding women and rules regarding slaves. It makes the most sense to understand “in Christ” in its spiritual dimension. Consider:
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[a few sentences above our passage] If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
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[a few sentences down from our passage] Wives, submit to your husbands. Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters.
Paul could very well have advocated that women be treated like men and the slaves be freed by their masters. It’s all on the same page of the letter. But given Paul didn’t even sense the possibility of a contradiction, I find it most reasonable to conclude that we are talking about things “not on Earth”.
We have to be careful not to misinterpret a spiritual ruling for a worldly ruling. “No longer barbarian or Scythian” also includes the line “no longer slave or free”; a different verse with the same intention specifies “no male or female in Christ”. Now, we know that early Christians comprised both slave and free men, and we know there was no call to free these Christian slaves. And we also know that there were strict rules regarding how women ought to behave, always submitted to either the husband or the male church leader. So we can’t take “no barbarian or Scythian” to mean the eradication of cultural units or allegiances, because there were binding cultural rules for women and allegiances of slaves to masters. IMO these verses are “simply” saying that within the spirit of Christ our worldly identities are enveloped toward spiritual ends (heavenly rewards and judgments). Christ has primacy, and is the whole spiritual “bloodline” if you will, but its relevant category is spirit and not world. So I may be a worldly slave, yet freed in Christ, or free in the world yet a slave to Christ (too lazy google this passage). I may be wealthy in the world, but it would be a mistake for the church to give me extra attention and place me in the front because of worldly wealth.
Paul sort of demonstrates this nuance in Romans. His gentile Christian congregants are his brothers, yet he doesn’t deny that “I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin”, and he especially desired that his worldly brothers would join the spiritual brotherhood. I think this is the morally correct nuance to take regarding world concerns and religion concerns. Genetic differences in race are a world concern that concern the political aspect of a person (rules on emigration, whatever). The absolute irrelevance of genetics for spiritual life and spiritual ends is a religious truth that concerns the spiritual aspect of a person. They are different. The spiritual has supremacy but also has little bearing on the political (“give unto Caesar…”).
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
The elements of Christianity which would lead one to believe that antiracism is important to the faith were historically counterbalanced with deeper readings of the text and studies in ancient history and philosophy. The ones steering politics were exclusively men who were well-educated in these texts. The decline of Christian literacy coincides with the decline in the emphasis on ancient classics with its brutal realism (“the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must”), and the extolling of false political science (no racial differences as a matter of assumption), and the dominance of a largely non-Christian media influenced disproportionately by non-Christians. Everyone believed in unique racial characteristics before the 19th century, but science came in during the 20th century and told everyone this has been debunked actually.
Islam has a much stronger emphasis on anti racism than Christianity, see here
O people, your Lord is one and your father Adam is one. There is no virtue of an Arab over a foreigner nor a foreigner over an Arab, and neither white skin over black skin nor black skin over white skin, except by righteousness
it’s simply that only highly educated men decided things in Islamic nations. Even today, if only men decided politics, it would be difficult for democrats to win an election. If only men trained in theology and the philosophy / history of the classics decided things, who knows what things would look like? I suppose you could say that, like Adam, the West’s original sin was a combination of pride + being persuaded by womankind, which changed who decided things and then led to all sorts of issues downstream.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
Men fighting and women not fighting makes sense when the social role of women is to provide abundant healthy offspring for your culture. If the women are instead opting out of making babies, moving to other countries, and not possessing in-group preference, there is no longer any moral reason to allow them to abstain from fighting. Ukraine should institute an immediate draft where women who are not pregnant or rearing children are drafted into the frontlines, and women who are raising a soldier’s child get a stipend.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
If you had read your own link, you would have found that Meinecke settled in a protesting location and subsequently counter protestors came to his location to disrupt him. We can turn on our thinking caps and realize that in our example at Yale, the Palestinian protesters are the original protesters.
Protestors surrounded Meinecke after about an hour.
and
Eventually, PrideFest attendees noticed Meinecke's presence.
If you continued reading your link, you would have found that one of the Court’s advised remedies was to make the counter-protestor step back from the original protestor.
there were several less speech-restrictive alternatives to achieve public safety. The officers could have required the protestors to take a step back from Meinecke. They could have called for more officers — as they did after Meinecke was arrested. They could have erected a free speech barricade.
These are the same actions taken by the original protesting unit to prevent confrontation with the Jewish student: he can counter protest mere steps away from the protest, just not where the original protestors are packed like sardines protesting. They self-barricaded themelves to prevent confrontation. It is commendable, but not exactly surprising, that these intelligent Yale student performed the exact actions that a Court had recommended to a police department, while using completely non-aggressive means (holding hands chained together). As to why there weren’t police officers doing this already, that’s a significant question that the admins should answer.
Do you really think that if the police were there to ensure the safety of student both protesting and counter-protesting, that they would have allowed both protestors and counter-protestors to stand side by side in a dimly lit courtyard? I just find this totally unreasonable, as there is no benefit at all to that, unless you are neurotically obsessed with the idea of punishing protestors who don’t get their little protest stamps confirmed for not following legal minutiae.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
I had asked the OP for evidence regarding Columbia but yeah, the video in the Twitter thread is from a Yale courtyard. There is no evidence he is being blocked from entering a building (at 9pm).
about access to a building
No, it is clearly a courtyard. We would need a longer video to prove anything more than that.
It was great, for the one side able to use it, isn't the most compelling argument for neutral access to public fora.
You would have to argue that regarding the obvious and clear special concerns of a student-led protest movement
court case
Well, Meinecke did not engage with any counter-protesters and had his own location where he was protesting.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
norm where whatever protest group that takes a public forum first gets to exclude people who disagree with their message
This is already the norm for legally-sanctioned protests, though, right? As I mentioned in other replies, it is common for police to prevent counter protestors from intruding on the space of protestors and vice versa.
a public forum
The video looks like it is taken at a courtyard, one of a dozen around the University. They aren’t holding captive the main amphitheater at Columbia or something, where yeah there would be a concern regarding the reasonable use of university amenities. Ironically, you could even argue that the courtyard is seeing greater facility during this protest, given the population density from the looks of it. But I’m not familiar with the layout of the university and where the video is taken.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Not at all, we can ask reasonable questions like:
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does the protest movement actually represent a serious concern among a significant number of students? (Concerns like: segregation, corruption, genocide, or etc?) (Yes)
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does the protest movement occupy a small space, and are there a sufficient number of protesters to occupy that space? (Yes)
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is the space unnecessary for reasonable facility at the university? (Yes)
If you don’t want this textbook example of protesting, you are saying you only want protests when they get permission by the party in power (state and/or administrators or an institution). You would be denying, for instance, the implicit right of Jewish students to protest if (hypothetically) a university would ban their synagogues. You would be denying the utility and morality of all the protests that occurred to end segregation. Genocide is as serious as any of these concerns, and apparently a number of students — with negative financial interest and negligible social interest at play, students at our top university — want to protest about it. There are a lot of ramifications to that belief and it involves a superstitious belief in the omnibenevolence of those in power.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
desiring to record all of their faces
What do you think the devout Jewish man was attempting to do by walking into the small, dense protesting square with his phone recording? We can make rational inferences here, this isn’t an SAT problem. His compatriots online are threatening to ensure none of them get a job after graduating.
cop uniform
That’s my fault, replace that with a pro-cop outfit
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
Nonviolent protesting is historically treated as a legal grey area in American history, which the admins of Columbia are well aware of, their own university having a history of it. It’s treated that way because the alternative is non-nonviolent protesting, which is much worse. Not everything moral and immoral is codified in law
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
Ah ok. My intuition is different: in either case, the one actively attempting to enter the de facto designated area intends to harass the people in the area, whether or not it meets a legal standard of harassment. There is no plausible reason for their entrance into the area which doesn’t involve starting a confrontation. It should be discouraged because that’s how confrontations begin, and as evidence for this the police routinely separate protesting camps for this exact reason (and whether or not the protests are legally done).
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
A Muslim man in a Palestinian keffiyeh and thobe is attempting to enter the sequestered area of a vigil held by Jewish students for October 7th victims, desiring to record all of their faces on his phone. It’s 8pm and there’s no other reason for him entering the area. If Jewish students passively prevent him from entering the grounds of the protest, do you want the Jewish students charged for harassment?
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
I think what made original WoW so great is that the races/classes neatly represented the divisions of fantasy. Dwarves for LOTR-inspired fantasy, the undead for horror/grim fantasy, the medieval-themed human storyline for medieval fantasy, etc etc. This meant they by playing a new race or class, you were actually exploring a new major division of the fantasy genre, and thus a new and distinct aesthetic mode. The expansions kind of ruined this, as did “every race can play ever class!” silliness. Future MMORPGs should focus on this aspect, representing the entirety of fantasy through divisions involving race/class/region.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
The dress of that particular Orthodox Jew tells us more about his identity than merely “Jewish”. How many Chabadniks would consider themselves unaligned with the interests of the Israeli state? While they may not be religiously Zionist (maintaining that the current instantiation of the nation is the long-awaited true return from exile by G-d), it would be very rare if one of them were to protest alongside Palestinian activists. The orthodox groups who do that (like 1-2) are totally ostracized from mainstream orthodoxy, and few in rank.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
I can help you imagine. If a group of BLM protestors have sequestered themselves into a square to do their BLM chants and so forth, then someone dressed in a police uniform with his phone out to record is clearly the provocateur if he attempts to enter the zone when there is clearly no interest in the zone other than provocation. (Notice the square is densely packed and it is evening.) It is crybullying to call it harassment if the BLM people hold their arms to prevent your incursion. Of course, I’m saying this as someone who thinks BLM was the height of American stupidity. This is why it’s ubiquitous during protests to separate the two sides, and the police will often prevent a member of one side from entering the other side.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
Yes, Chabadnik hat + phenotype + context clues (smirking as recording a group of Palestinian protesters).
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
Looks like they are stopping that (Zionist) student from recording the faces of the protestors, by preventing him from entering into the protest square with his phone recording. This would be evidence that Zionist students want to harass the protestors, but not evidence of protestors harassing Jewish students.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
videos circulating of protestors harassing Jewish students
Where are these videos?
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
Augustine says
For in that day the Jews—those of them, at least, who shall receive the spirit of grace and mercy [are saved]
And there’s 200 years from Melito to Augustine where there is never mention of corporate salvation
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
If I want to benefit my identity group, how can I rationally go about this without thinking in terms of ”ingroup utilitarianism” (which you dispute in your OP)? You don’t offer any alternative to rule-based utilitarianism for ensuring the mutual benefit of an identity group among the members who wish for mutual benefit. Do you believe that people should just do what their instincts tell them to do? Do you believe it is unknown? Do you ever talk about splitting the bill with friends, or ever get mad when a favor is not reciprocated?
I don’t consider “there are layered ingroups” to be a serious criticism of communal utilitarianism; it would just imply that there is not one rule but there are different rules which mediate one’s ingroups. I agree with most of your criticism of utilitarianism but not here.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
The problem is that the sequence of thought in Paul goes against your idea of remnant + corporate salvation. Paul begins the topic in Romans 9:3 introducing unsaved Israel. “I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people […] It is not as though God’s word had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel.” (1A) Occam’s razor is that when explaining why God’s promises still apply, we should provide the most inclusive reason. If corporate Israel is predestined to convert, that is the most inclusive reason for why God’s promises weren’t reneged but still apply (“Did God void his promise to Israel? No, they will one day convert as a nation, and some of us already converted”). Paul mentioning the small remnant would only be a minor part of the explanation which has nothing to do with most of God’s promise and most of Israel. But the remnant is the only thing talked about when asked “did God’s word fail?”. Again, in Romans 9:24 we have the perfect time to talk about some predestined corporate salvation, but this point is not brought up.
When Isaiah is quoted, Paul includes the words that speaks of completion and finality, which he did not need to include but which are included for a reason. “Though the number of the Israelites be like the sand by the sea, only the remnant will be saved. For the Lord will carry out his sentence on earth with speed and finality.” Those who are not of the remnant have a final sentence, being foremade as “vessels of destruction” which Paul speaks about. When Paul specifically answers the question, “did God reject his people” in Romans 11, he again speaks in terms of a remnant, rather than something like ”God will save all his people in the end”. He quotes Elijah, where God says he has kept 7000 only of Israel to save.
There has to be a preexisting tree for a branch to be grafted into, but the "Israel of faith" did not even exist prior to the birth of the Gentile church
The root is God, or even Christ who is preexistent (hence “the vine”). Ethnic Israel cannot be both roots and “broken branches” as branches cannot be a root.
children of Abraham
I recall a certain person who called the the Pharisees who believed they were children of Abraham “children of Satan”. There is indeed a predestined children of Abraham, but there are also those who claim to be but are not.
It is a very common belief among "traditional" Christians
It is not found in the church fathers. Read what Melito or Origen have to say. Hence, it is not found in traditional or historic Christianity, per my post.
Another thing that must be understood is the corporate theory relies on a passage which is predicated on a mystery. When Paul speaks about mysteries they always defy a literal understanding, for instance —
Behold, I tell you a mystery; we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet
“Mysteries” require us to think more about things. The “mystery” that Paul introduces should not be taken in its most literal, unthinking form.
Hyper realism in video games is a mistake. Dialogue scenes should be like paintings, or a series of paintings / illustrations with ambient moving parts (like in a good documentary). You can never make the human face appear hyper-realistic enough to exceed the value of a good painting or illustration. Do the characters of Miyazaki lack expression, or the faces of Caravaggio? No. And hyper realistic environments are also less memorable, filled with too much clutter.
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