shamgar
1d ago
While there is some truth to your claims, some of those creeds were recited at mass every week, so I would certainly think even Mediaeval peasants would have at least heard about them.
The context of this thread also seems to be more about the institutional level, rather than what individual church members believe or practise, which indeed can often be in tension with official teachings both in modern and premodern times. And looking at the institutional level, the Nicene Creed or opposition to abortion or whatever have been shared close to universally among all Christian churches for more than a thousand years.
shamgar
1d ago
In terms of what I think the correct message ought to be (although I am also not American, so I am not speaking for that context specifically), I think people elsewhere in this thread have pointed out there are plenty of historical creeds that Christians of various denomination have adhered to for more than a thousand years. Even on some issues that are currently contentious in the culture war, like a lot of issues pertaining to medical ethical stuff or sexual ethics there are clear Christian positions adhered to by official Roman-Catholic, Eastern Orthodox teachings and also by conservative Protestants. I don't want to overstate the case here, of course there are also plenty of meaningful differences and all of these groups have changed in various ways throughout the centuries and have in some ways been influenced by the surrounding culture, but things like the Nicean creed, or general pro-life medical ethical positions, or the idea that sex should be within marriage, are believed by the vast majority of Christians always and everywhere. I really am convinced that there is a consistent core of historical Christian teachings which a lot of Christians around the world have preserved.
Now the Lutheran churches in Scandinavia which I presume you are referring to have indeed in the past 150 years or so abandoned a lot of these beliefs. But that is my point, if Christian churches want to have anything relevant to say, they should retain core Christian beliefs. Otherwise, what is the point? What reason to exist do Christian churches have, if they don't even believe in stuff that pretty much all Christians have believed historically? What even is Christianity then?
I come from a Protestant background in the Netherlands myself. In the past years I've lived in a few different towns and been a member of the local mainline Protestant Church of the Netherlands. The majority of this denomination is pretty liberal theologically and ethically, just like the mainline churches in the USA or other European countries. It does however have a pretty significant conservative wing. In all of those towns I can see the same pattern reoccurring; the various congregations in the different boroughs of the towns which have become liberal are dwindling in numbers, they have to merge with each other to keep going and are mostly visited by elderly people. But all of those towns have one or two congregations of the conservative wing of this denomination, which explicitly affirm historical creeds and have conservative views of things like abortion and sexual ethics, and every time those congregations don't have issues with dwindling attendance and you can find plenty people of all ages on Sunday mornings. In all those conservative churches I've even come across a few converts who were brought up without any religious background whatsoever and anecdotally the number of converts have been going up in recent years (although we're still talking about small numbers to be sure, I'm not claiming some sort of revival is going on the Netherlands just yet).
So from my perspective, churches that stick with historical Christian teachings, seem to be doing relatively fine and I'm always put off a little bit by the "ohh we have to change x, otherwise the kids will never go to church" rhetoric, because in the past 150 years or so, the churches that have tried very hard to stay in touch with currently societal trends are exactly the ones that have become irrelevant are closing their doors or are only being visited by a handful of elderly people.
shamgar
2d ago
It seems to me the mainline Protestant churches are currently dying out exactly because what is taught there bears little resemblance to what churches taught a century or two ago, whereas the churches that stuck with traditional Christian theology seem to be doing a lot better. I am fully expecting churches that will now start pandering to the dissident right or whatever will achieve similar results as to those who pandered to progressive sensibilities. The way forward for the Church always has been to stick to its own message rather than to pander to cultural fads.
shamgar
9d ago
Aren't religious conservatives generally anti-AI? I feel like there is a pretty big distinction here between the religious right and the right wing tech bro accelerationists. While the conservative religious people might not have the influence in the Republican party that they used to have, it's still a pretty sizeable group in America, so I think the Rightist and anti-AI quadrant still has plenty of people in it. My feeling is that this also isn't particularly novel, but rather it's indicative of a general distinction between religious conservatives who tend to have at least mildly Luddite gut feelings and the gay space fascists techbro accelerationists, like Thiel and Musk. They might work together in the Republican party because they both hate woke stuff, but I feel like they have fundamentally opposed goals and are going to get into a conflict sooner or later.
shamgar
1mo ago
I agree. Having listened to the Ross Douthat interview, I don't understand why these leaks are presented as a shocking revelation. It is well known that Thiel has these sorts of ideas. I remember listening years ago to some sort of discussion between Thiel and N.T. Wright (a prominent Anglican bishop and New Testament scholar) where he already had some weird idiosyncratic takes mixing Christianity and transhumanism.
shamgar
1mo ago
Indeed, but the quotes in OP are not that far off from what he sounds like in this hour long interview with Ross Douthat. My pattern matching him to the demon possessed Weston from Lewis' novel is more of a rough vibe based thing, rather than a precise analogue, so the claim of similarity should not be taken too seriously. I am just rereading the novels in question and noticing similarities with somebody like Thiel who merges some sort of scientism and techno-optimism with religious or spiritual language. Lewis himself was of course a bit of a luddite (as am I, I must confess), so it should be no surprise that the syncretism between transhumanism and spirituality is evaluated rather negatively.
shamgar
1mo ago
The Thiel quotes in OP are giving me professor Weston from the C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy, specifically in Perelandra where Weston mixes his previous scientism with "spiritualism" in obfuscatory vaguely religious monologues trying to appeal to Christians (and turns out to have been possessed by a demon).
shamgar
2mo ago
Thanks, it certainly seems like the book deals with precisely the sorts of things I'm interested in.
shamgar
2mo ago
I have very little background in it currently. I've dabbled a little bit in some analytic philosophy which uses it and after I got a degree in a humanities field I learned to code and got a job which exposes me to a little bit of CS every now and then. Basically, both in philosophy and CS I've come across use of formal logic a bit, but I've never actually had to do anything with it myself. It did however produce a lingering interest in the topic which is why I'm now intending to get a proper understanding of it. So I reckon I'm probably better off starting with an introductory book, but I'll take note of your recommendation in case I am motivated to delve deeper after working through an introductory book. Thanks for the recommendation!
shamgar
2mo ago
This is not how you win political victories, which makes me think that the goal isn't actually political victory, but some kind of LARP/ in-group signaling game.
It might be something darker than that. Consider this book review of "Demons" by Dostoevsky. The book review aspect isn't important for the present discussion, but the discussion of political radicalism, which is the main theme of the book being reviewed, is. (Dostoevsky books are all character development and philosophy anyway and no plot, so nobody has to be scared of spoilers either). The situation in America is obviously not as dark as the Dostoevsky novel nor the period leading up to the Russian revolution discussed in the book review. As somebody who is not from the USA it is hard to get a clear view of the situation on the ground. I'm probably getting an overly pessimistic view from experiencing the situation pretty much exclusively through the internet, but the hatred and bitterness in American political discourse of recent years, which only seems to be getting worse with every passing year, genuinely has me worried sometimes.
shamgar
2mo ago
Does the Motte have any recommendations if I want to educate myself on formal logic?
I'm considering getting this textbook, but just because some random youtube video recommended it, I don't really know what else there is on the market.
shamgar
3mo ago
I think came across SSC when somebody mentioned it somewhere in a podcast in 2019. I was pretty hooked on the list of most reads blogs at the time and kept reading the new blogs from Scott for a bit and slowly made my way to the SSC subreddit en then to the Motte, it's been years since I actually frequently read the blog itself by now. I know a fair bit about rationalism through osmosis by reading a bit of SSC and lurking on the Motte for years, but I've never identified with the movement. To be honest, I never found any rationalist except Scott himself to be an interesting read. I checked out stuff like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Lesswrong, Gwern, etc. a couple of times when it was mentioned on SSC but I never understood the appeal.
shamgar
3mo ago
I think there is probably a correlation, but I reckon the causality might run the other way. Countries that are more inclined towards government overreach will see more tangible effects of wokeism, whereas in countries with less of a tendency towards government overreach even if wokeism becomes popular among the PMC or whatever, it will be more difficult to implement woke stuff in government policy.
shamgar
7mo ago
Houston seems to be quite successful with the housing first policy indeed, although providing housing for homeless people isn't quite the same as deregulating housing. Deregulating housing probably does make it cheaper to provide housing for homeless people, so fair enough. Houston isn't the only place with liberal gun laws, so I'm not convinced gun laws have anything to do with it though.
I tried looking up some statistics for a bit to check my intuitions in homelessness overall, but the statistics seem to be not very straightforward. For instance, the list on wikipedia for countries by rate of homelessness has the USA at 19.5 per 10.000 people and France at 48.7, however the table also a column called 'unsheltered per 10.000' and there USA scores 12, whereas France scores 4.5. So I have no clue whether France or the USA has more people living on the street now based on these statistics. I've never been in the USA personally, but I have been to lots of places in Europe, including non-touristy bits and not so nice parts of various towns and I've never seen a fent zombie or anything like that and I've never been harassed by a homeless person beyond obnoxious begging and I do know various Europeans who were shocked at the amount of (visible) homelessness when traveling to the USA. Whether there are more or less of them I do not know, but homeless people anecdotally sure seem to cause more problems and be more visible in the USA, despite the USA's liberal gun laws. I don't know that much about housing regulation in the USA, but I certainly would not describe housing in my own country of the Netherlands as deregulated.
shamgar
7mo ago
Europe seems to be the opposite of what you suggest as a solution, but as far as I can tell it's also way more successful in dealing with homelessness and the problems it can cause than the USA or apparently Canada.
shamgar
8mo ago
The anti immigration right wing populist parties have won elections in various European countries like Italy, the Netherlands, Austria and Poland.
shamgar
9mo ago
This got me thinking a bit about surrogacy laws and how this plays out in the culture war. In my own country, the Netherlands, specifically commercial surrogacy is banned, but if you can find someone who wants to do it out of altruism, it is legal. This runs into some complications where people go to countries with laxer laws (usually poor third world countries) and get a commercial surrogate there. My impressions is that while this touches on a lot of culture war issues, it somehow is a rare issue that does not always follow established culture war lines. What I mean is that while conservatives are generally opposed to it, I have seen progressives both ardently in favour from a perspective of support for LGBT people but other leftists ardently opposed because they view it as something which in practice often amounts to rich white men exploiting poor brown women in third world countries. I suppose there is also probably a libertarian line where you don't care about it as long as everybody involved consents.
This leads to the strange result that when I look at a map on wikipedia concerning surrogacy laws, it appears at least commercial surrogacy is banned throughout most of the world, but it is legal in for instance California, Vermont, Texas, Florida and Russia. California and Vermont being on the same side as Texas, Florida and Russia on a controversial medical-ethical practice which touches on LGBT culture war stuff, with places e.g. Norway, Germany, Michigan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan on the other extreme, is pretty remarkable to me.
I'm afraid I won't be able to provide your steelman for you though, because as far as I'm concerned, at least if Sam Altman and his husband paid for the surrogacy they ought to be jailed for human trafficking.
But what if an upstanding and polite civil society is the very thing I want to preserve? Ratfucking the Democrats simply means joining them in tearing it down. If I want to preserve traditional Western morality and institutions, I don't see how surrendering my political movement to a libertine billionaire with autocratic tendencies is going to help me win that fight, however skilled he may be at winning elections. In the short term it might improve a few issues because he will give some political quid pro quo pandering to actual conservatives, but I find it hard to believe surrendering a political movement to a figurehead who is hostile to its very principles is the winning play to bring about those principles.
shamgar
9mo ago
What do you make of martyrdom in light of that view? It seems to me that favouring morality over survival has worked in the past at least in some instances and at least some martyrs have had quite a say in morality.
shamgar
11mo ago
My point is simply the hard problem of consciousness. The existence of a conscious AGI might further bolster the view that consciousness can arise from matter, but not how it does. Definitively demonstrating that a physical process causes consciousness would be a remarkable advancement in the study of consciousness, but I do not see how it answers the issues posed by e.g. the Mary's room thought experiment.
shamgar
11mo ago
If some LLM or other model achieves AGI, I still don't know how matter causes qualia and as far as I'm concerned consciousness remains mysterious.
shamgar
11mo ago
I think that the tendency you are describing has to go back at least to Plato, well before Christianity entered the scene. If anything, Christianity opposes that trend by making the bodily resurrection a key element of its theology and affirming that the material world was good when it was originally created. Of course many influential Christian theologians have been influenced by (neo-)Platonism, so there is plenty of Christian theology out there that is susceptible to this heresy, but I am pretty sure its origins in Western thought is Platonism rather than Christianity.
shamgar
11mo ago
I was writing a reply about my anecdata that led me to the view that Eastern Europe is less progressive about gender than Western Europe, but when I was trying to fact check some related claim I wanted to make I stumbled across the Eurobarometer about Gender Stereotypes. Quickly scanning through some of the results, it doesn't actually seem like there is a clear trend of EE being more or less sexist than WE.
I guess I remember reading about sexual harassment in Japan being more common, like women getting groped on the subway and stuff. But yeah, to be honest, I don't really know why the idea is my in head that they are less feminist now that I think about it.
This did get me thinking on how you would quantify feminism in a country. There are things like the Global Gender Gap Report and the Gender Inequality Index, but I am generally pretty sceptical of these types of reports, because they tend to oversimplify the matter at hand. For what it's worth, the Global Gender Gap Report has the East Asian countries a bit lower than Western countries but the Gender Inequality Index has Japan and South Korea right up there with Western European countries.
However, my argument might still stand with other examples. Eastern European countries tend to have low birthrates as well, if anything usually lower than Western European ones. Although it is anecdotal, I do know some people from various Eastern European countries and have discussed cultural differences with them and as best I can tell, countries like Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine all have low birthrates as well despite having generally much more conservative ideas about gender roles than say Sweden or the Netherlands.
Nope. I have never lived in the bible belt myself. The church I go to is of a type that's pretty common in the bible belt, although in a proper bible belt village it might be one of the less conservative ones. There is a bunch of stereotypical stuff associated with the Dutch bible belt that you won't really find in the type of church I go to, like avoiding vaccinations and insurance, experiencing a lot of existential dread over whether you are part of the elect or not, not being allowed to drive a car on Sunday, etc. But we do adhere to historical creeds, only men can be ordained, conservative views on medical ethical issues, etc. so definitely still on the conservative side of the spectrum.
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