urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8mo ago
And then of course there are Anglicans (and, of course, continental Lutherans), who are very insistent that they have a chain of apostolic succession, even if the Vatican disagrees and the Orthodox... don't really care either way, apostolic succesion is tied to Church communion for them.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8mo ago
The commoners long for a ritual weight to legitimize the rulers, even if it isn't their rulers, unchanging tradition which says 'it's ok, we're still here, the world goes on'.
While I'm no monarchist, this is the principle that undergirds my belief in ordered worship, and especially structured, traditional weddings and funerals. The exact last thing I want when I'm choosing to make a lifelong commitment of love and sacrifice, or when I'm mourning someone who has died, is someone getting creative or trying to break the mould. When I get married, I don't want to have an ersatz commitment to someone, maybe, according to whatever private assumptions of relationship we have -- I want to get married according to a known mould with known obligations, duties, rights, and privileges.
And this is even more true with funerals -- when I'm grieving, I want to be upheld in a shared worldview that gives meaning to my grief and reassures that, despite the intensity of the loss, the world is still moving, and life will go on. And not only go on, but go on normally, that this death is not unique, that it does not shatter everything, that others have been here before, felt the very feelings, heard the very words, and listened to the very songs, that I'm hearing. I want to be carried along by a funeral, not pandered to; reassured by the very banality and normality of it that life will, some day, go back to being banal and normal, which is the cry of every mourner.
If I were to make a defense of liturgical religion and sacred ceremony on sociological and psychological grounds, it would be that.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8mo ago
The soteriological approach also allows Protestants having it to reach a truce with Catholics, Orthodox, confessional Protestants, etc- the internal spiritual relationship with Jesus is more important than having a particular theological belief.
Yes, I have heard the common refrain from people of evangelical upbringing that "it's okay, as long as you love Jesus." As you said, this is almost certainly a huge part of why American evangelicals are much more open to good relations with Catholics than confessional Protestants: for the evangelicals I know, the tension with Rome is less "they believe doctrines I believe to be heretical," and more "I do not believe that Catholics love Jesus Christ."
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8mo ago
Yes, I was not much older than a child when Minecraft burst onto the scene, and despite that, it still was astonishing to me when Minecraft started to be treated as “kids stuff.” When I got into it it had an all-ages appeal and the YouTube Minecraft community was full of adults who played it because they enjoyed it, not because they wanted ad dollars from companies wanting to advertise to children. I remember when the focal point of Minecraft content switched from normal gaming YouTubers to people like StampyLongHead, who always came across to me as kinda creepy in his obvious attempt to appeal directly to children over the internet.
Real OPs remember when paulsoaresjr tutorials were the premier way to learn about Minecraft. Even realer OP’s remember X’s adventures in Minecraft.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8mo ago
To add to the points already made: the rules of the Church being subordinate to the needs or present situation of the Church (excepting certain claims of absolute moral right and wrong) is a pretty firm principle of Christianity going back to Jesus.
Or, to put it more bluntly, "Universi Dominici Gregis was made for the Cardinals, not the Cardinals for Universi Dominici Gregis."
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8mo ago
And this is the logic they use to justify it. Not "here's evidence of it" but "maybe it could be true."
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8mo ago
Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”
"My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many."
For context, I am a cradle Coptic Orthodox in Canada.
This is the disconnect. I’m talking about the Eastern Orthodox communion, not the Oriental Orthodox communion. They have very different tenors and cultures, and the Eastern Orthodox church in the United States is having a bit of a moment right now where it’s expanding massively due to conversions from Protestantism, and more rarely Roman Catholicism. For what it’s worth, I’ve always found the Coptic Orthodox to be pious, humble, and friendly, both online and in person. (And St. Mark Coptic Orthodox church in Toronto is one of the most beautiful churches I've ever seen photos of!)
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8mo ago
The holy spirit is in all of us, so is it really wrong for trump to call himself god?
- The Holy Spirit only indwells within Christians; in Catholicism this is mediated by being in a state of grace, which by all appearances Trump is not.
- Yes.
Yes, this is very true. I personally know people like this. Typically there's the belief that he was a philanderer and a cheat, but had a conversion experience.
I guess it's just the vain hope that someone, anyone, will stand up for their belief system in the public square. I believe Trump's views on Israel have also influenced this -- it's hard to overstate how much a large segment of American evangelicals are passionate about the state of Israel and believe defending it to be essential for the fulfillment of Biblical prophesy. The only way I can explain it to non-evangelicals is to say that they view Israel with the same quasi-cultic fervor as many Catholics view Fatima: this is the revelation of the end-times!!!!!
So when Trump moves the embassy to Jerusalem, it's seen as a statement of affiliation with Biblical prophesy.
If anything, joking about becoming the Pope is, in my mind, a positive in that it places the papacy as a position of value.
Yeah, this is exactly how I felt about what Trump meant by it -- "Man, wouldn't it be great if I were Pope! Look how cool the Pope looks!"
It's less about Eastern Orthodoxy as a set of beliefs, and more about the practices and people of Eastern Orthodoxy. And we're not talking about secular women here, I suppose they'd just go running in the opposite direction for reasons that you well understand, but conservative-to-moderate, vaguely religious women, in the United States. And it isn't an active hate, it's not that these ladies are obsessed with Orthodoxy and want to cast hexes at it or something, they just have no interest in it and find it a little odd that anyone would.
As I understand it, the median Orthodox convert in the United States is an intellectual, introverted, evangelical, college-educated man, who discovered Orthodoxy through the mysterious workings of the Holy Spirit, also known as Wikipedia. From what I've heard, and seen, the women in this man's life get dragged to the divine liturgy ("St. Nathaniel says 'come and see!'"), and most often do not hear the angels singing the way the man did the first time he witnessed the liturgy.
At my local Orthodox parish, there was a young guy who dragged his entire family to Orthodoxy, and while his parents and siblings were committed, it's obvious he was the one who orchestrated the whole thing. They'd never have stepped foot in an Orthodox church if he hadn't pushed them.
Frederica Mathewes-Green, who as I understand it is kind of the "influencer mom" of American Orthodoxy, said in one of her videos that she just didn't like the divine liturgy the first time she went to an Orthodox church. She grew to like it, but that initial revulsion, or indifference, is what I've generally seen and heard from women who've had experience with Orthodoxy.
Participating in the honored tradition, I dragged both my mother and my girlfriend to liturgy a few times -- neither liked it. Both of them liked going to mass, though. (Definitely not the latin mass -- they can't understand what anyone's saying.)
I think a lot of it has to do with the people. Your framing says a lot, actually -- the intellectual content of faith is the thing that brings our evangelical man to become interested in Orthodoxy, but the women he drags don't know or care about any of that. She's interested in what's actually going on around her: what songs are they singing? What is this strange artwork on the walls? What's the content of the sermon? What do the candles mean? What are the people like? Are they a bear normal, or strange? Are people happy here? Does this seem like a community where I fit in?
And if we're talking about somewhat conservative American women, the sort of women who might be interested in a conservative religious tradition, we're talking about women who are generally very interested in social convention, unobtrusiveness, familiarity. They're very socially-oriented, they want a community that feels familiar, friendly, and safe, not strange, alienating, and unpredictable.
As our female draggee looks around, she sees these weird Byzantine paintings on the walls where people look odd, with strange proportions and almost alien-like ridges and folds in the depictions of their skin (in some icons, St. Paul genuinely just looks like a space alien to me with his giant head). The church bells ring out, and instead of the sweet ding donging of Western church bells, she hears them clanging like a hailstorm. ("Was that an accident?") She hears odd music she's never heard before, no familiar hymns, no familiar cadence -- if the chant is Byzantine-style, it genuinely sounds, to Western ears, like something from the Muslim and not the Christian world -- and she smells weird smells of strange incense, as some guy in an elaborate robe starts swinging it at her. And the worst part? She's not supposed to sit down! "It's for the old ladies," our evangelical man helpfully told her. Well, she's not an old lady, but this just doesn't seem right. She feels like she's put on the spot and has to stand where everyone can watch her, in a situation where she already feels out of place. And now she can't even get comfortable by sitting down and just watching!
The service ends, and, though she's shy, evangelical man starts dragging her around to talk to people, and she can't help but feel like they're just... a little off. There's the man who's wearing a kilt as his Sunday best in the middle of Kansas. There's the guy who wears a bowtie. There's the dude who seems prone to leering, like he's been on a naval vessel for six months and hasn't seen the sight of a woman in that time. There's the guy she can overhear talking about the upcoming Holy Friday service, who's telling his friends, "I just can't wait to stick it to those Jews." (A real anecdote I heard from an Orthodox friend of mine about someone he knew.) And a bunch of the men, including the priest, have a thick, untrimmed beard -- can't they trim them?
Half the people in the church are speaking in foreign languages she can't understand, and are sticking to themselves, avoiding eye contact. She feels like a foreigner in her own country. People are talking about the lenten fast, and are speaking about cheese like they've been on the naval vessel with the leerer with only bread and water -- wait, these people can't eat cheese for months out of the year? The priest is friendly, but seems strange, overly intellectual, and his beard looks greasy. She strikes up a conversation with another convert's wife, and she tells her, "yeah, I didn't like the orthodox church either at first -- it grows on you."
And the overwhelming feeling our dragged-along woman feels to all this is an unadulterated, grade A:
ICK!
My mom told me once, after I'd stopped exploring Orthodoxy, that the Orthodox parishioners "seemed like hippies." My girlfriend was less expressive, but said she thought they "felt like strange people." Neither would have attended the divine liturgy if I hadn't dragged them, and neither had any interest in continuing to attend after I stopped being interested. They just found it overwhelmingly weird.
This obviously doesn't apply to cradle Orthodox -- it is their tradition and they're quite familiar with it. It's western Christianity that seems weird to them. And there are, of course, women who choose to convert to Orthodoxy on their own, but I've never talked to any of them so I can't offer a take.
Sometimes I share my views on Eastern Orthodoxy and people seem surprised by them -- I don't know, maybe I've just seen a tiny sliver of what Orthodoxy in America looks like and it's different elsewhere. I owe a lot to my time exploring Orthodoxy, including a strengthening of my love for the Mother of God, an appreciation for the iconographic tradition (looks over at my icon of Christ Pantokrator), a more reserved approach to the procession of the Holy Spirit, a grounding and softening of my Western 'hard edges' -- without abandoning the juridical lens on Christianity as some Orthodox seem to call for -- and even a belief in the essence-energies distinction, which, interestingly, resolved a struggle I'd had with Western Mariology. And I sincerely and deeply respect the Orthodox tradition as a pathway to communion with God.
But despite all that, my own feeling after sincerely exploring Orthodoxy is that, for all the missionary zeal it's developed in America through conversion, it still feels like it's someone else's church, and I'm just living in barbarian lands an ethnic diaspora of ethnicities I simply am not a part of. And where even the native converts are, respectfully, not always the most 'normal' or conventional people, even if I bear no ill will towards them.
I had a convert friend in the Orthodox church who was quite interesting, obviously very intelligent. But he also had a passion for Orthodoxy and Eastern Europe that bordered on obsessive; he would talk about and cook Russian cuisine for people, despite being as English-German as the rest of us American white people. He had a two-bedroom condo, and one entire bedroom had been converted into what can only be described as a chapel, with icons covering every wall and liturgical books overflowing bookcases. He wanted to be a priest, but had no interest in marriage (which would make him the perfect Catholic seminarian, but obviously led to some stern pastoral advice from his spiritual father). He honestly struck me as the kind of guy who just needed to get laid.
While I respect other cultures and I'm even open to trying their cuisine, I simply have no interest in becoming Greek or Bulgarian or Russian. At times, it felt to me like fitting in the Orthodox church required a cultural self-emptying, not merely a spiritual one. As though to become Orthodox I had to renounce the profound insights of the Western philosophical tradition or the honor due to my ancestors and embrace a worldview that sees them as something between "deeply mistaken" and "the Great Satan of the whole world." I get enough hatred of the West from the secular world, and I just don't care to receive it from my fellow Christians.
And I guess that's what I see in Dreher. He's a Western man, born in Louisiana, and restoring his relationship with his parents was important to him. But he has so self-emptied himself of his culture that he's literally fled the West to go to Hungary, despite writing a book about how Westerners can create pockets of grace within the West after the model of the great founder of Western monasticism.
If I mean anything by this long post, I mean to say that Orthodoxy feels foreign, alien, even converts often feel somewhat odd or unusual, and very often its prescription to Westerners is "reject your people, RETVRN to ours." And that this is picked up by non-Orthodox women more than non-Orthodox men, because of their strong attunement to social signals and preference for the conventional.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8mo ago
More of a joke, I guess -- I wrote it, but I intentionally added the contrasting statements.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8mo ago
Dreher has always struck me as the kind of guy who desperately needs to stop reading the news, but can't help himself. There's something very tragic about a guy who wrote a book about setting up islands of peace away from the mess of the world, but whose output is mostly hot takes on current events.
This feels totally AI to me. And not just AI, this is ChatGPT. Especially the contrasting statements -- ChatGPT loves those. It's not a style. It's a fingerprint.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8mo ago
Yes, I’ve been to orthodox services.
And if we’re going to pedantically pick apart metaphors, most Latin churches these days don’t have an altar rail either.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8mo ago
I also heard he seems to have noped off to Hungary, but yeah, last time I checked in with him he said he was getting a divorce. I believe there was an argument about "whether the cross can be co-opted." But that's the last I heard of him.
While I really respect his struggles with Catholicism, and I know they were very personal for him (he said that a priest he was personally close with was credibly accused of sex abuse, which broke his trust in the whole institution), I also get the sense that they went full-steam-ahead into Orthodoxy as kind of a second option, the second-most attractive girl at the bar altar rail, and so there's a lot of trauma, conversion, and ideological flip-flopping involved in his personal journey, which reads to me more like desperation than divine ascent. I wonder if that just got to be too much for his wife, especially considering how famously repulsive Orthodoxy is to non-Orthodox women, something I've observed personally. He also just strikes me as quite a depressive, just a very moody and somber person whose view of life and the future is almost perfectly apocalyptic, and I can't imagine that makes a marriage easy to manage. When I think about Dreher, the overwhelming feeling is "sad." He doesn't feel like he's chasing the divine, he feels like he's running away from brokenness. Which is not a bad starting point, but far from anything that measures up to holy Benedict.
I read it as: it's one spouse's duty to release the other's demons.
You should read it like this: It’s one spouse’s duty to help the other fulfill their sexual needs, so that they aren’t tempted to have sex outside the marriage. Millions of dead bedrooms, affairs, resentments, and divorces speak to the wisdom of this provision. If you hate the idea of a sexless marriage, like most people do, St. Paul is simply agreeing with you!
It’s true that Christianity places a high premium on celibacy. But the married have their calling and their vocation, which Paul, though he advises celibacy to those who will accept it, also praises in the highest terms, as an image of Christlike love. And the superiority of celibacy over marriage is also a provision confirmed by experience: not all wish for marriage, not all wish for the responsibility of a relationship. And where the celibate are not celebrated, they are vilified, rejected: see hatred directed towards spinsters, incels, communities not knowing what to do with single people with no interest in marriage, etc.
You can view the Christian approach to sex, particularly historically, as repression. You can view it that way, and even twist yourself into knots interpreting the holy text through the most uncharitable angle, rather than trying to grasp, with sincerity, what was meant and what is understood by it. You’re free to do so. But given what has happened — the conflicts, social upheaval, bitter divorces, mass loneliness, party culture, hookup culture that has resulted from unrestrained sexual norms — I would rather advise looking at Christian sexual norms as a bulwark against grave danger.
You can disagree, or you can even offer a more refined ethic that prizes sexual restraint without restricting sex to marriage, but what I often see is people criticizing Christian moderationism towards sex and offering as its alternative the spirit of the 60s, which is facing mass rejection because it holds up a carrot of free love and sexual pleasure, but gives few people what they actually want. St. Paul, by contrast, says: “you should love one another as yourself, and you should make it an important part of your life — even a duty! — to aid your spouse in fulfilling their sexual needs.” In what sense is this not wisdom?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8mo ago
Far be it from me to be so unrealistic as to expect all relationships or even marriages to be founded on love - but I do find it disturbing that your thorough analysis of the costs and benefits of pursuing a girl completely omits love from the list. Across history and fiction, what leads men to risk life, limb, and reputation in pursuit of a woman - the 1000 gold pieces reward - is love.
Sure! But love is very rarely 'at first sight' and even more rarely 'at first sight' in a way that is totally requited. You have to have a base of initial attraction, interest, and liking for love to blossom. Seeing romance as something that just falls out of the sky and immediately demands passion from both sides is actually a big part of the problem -- it usually doesn't!
I'm as big an advocate for romantic love as can possibly be conceived, but I'm also a realist. Young people aren't falling in love not because they're "lecherous, materialistic creeps," but because they learn to silence the impulse based on frequent rejection or messaging that, as you do, tells them that "the worst thing she can say" isn't "no thanks," but "you're a creep!" As it turns out, people are responsive to operant conditioning and social messaging.
If I understand him correctly, @RandomRanger is talking about people not even getting to the stage where love can develop. That's the problem.
People need to learn to be a bit more inconvenienced and uncomfortable.
No.
I disgree with you on veganism, but I don't go around calling you "vegan-brained."
I was giving reasons why people feel the way they do about cars, and instead of engaging with them seriously, you're name-calling. You can make the argument that cars are net-bad, but that would be a serious discussion that engages seriously with the value differences (for instance, the core of my post -- that people are more concerned about intentional than accidental violence) between you and the "car-brained" rather than calling them names. There's a serious balance to be struck, and I'm sympathetic to the needs of people who would prefer not to drive a car particularly in cities, but there are real, serious concerns people have about the security of public transit. Your post amounts to calling car drivers big babies whose concerns are entirely in their head, and totally disregarding their values and interests, and that strikes me as quite similar to the ad hominem attacks you were upset about earlier. Just because people disagree with you doesn't make them biased -- or wrong. (Doesn't make them right, either.)
I'm actually robustly pro-public-transit, and even sympathetic to the aims of ultimately reducing cars in cities. I just believe that the safety concerns about our cities are more real than you do -- we have a factual and values disagreement, and we should be able to discuss them reasonably without one side accusing the other of being insane, or stupid. I'm not pro-car -- I'm anti-crime, and pro-autonomy. Perhaps I didn't communicate that effectively enough.
On the topic of this being an AAQC -- I would agree this wasn't really one of my better posts; I actually think my response to you was a much better reflection of my values than this one, though I believe the best motte posts are those that offer a take that reveals what a worldview looks like from the inside, as I believe this one does. It's definitely true that my AAQCs have leaned towards the moments where I'm more partisan, or firmly opinionated, and less where I'm diplomatic or synthesizing, which is a fair critique of the AAQC system.
6% of Americans don't identify as Christians and yet think the Christian Bible is "the actual word of God, to be taken literally"?
This is probably just noise, lizardman's constant.
But there is a segment of evangelicals who don't identify with the "Christian" label, as silly as it may sound. When I was growing up, the cool thing to be was "a Christ follower" not "a Christian." The best steelman for the phrase is that it stresses the humility of the speaker and not their moral authority -- but a more realistic interpretation is that it served as a means of trying to escape stigma against Christianity in a world increasingly neutral, if not hostile, towards the Christian faith. "I'm not like those judgmental Christians."
In the seeker-sensitive movement, there was a big shift towards that kind of instrumental humility, where everyone's seen as -- to give you a direct sermon quote, no I'm not kidding -- "just trying to figure out this whole Jesus thing." Essentially the main source of growth for many, if not most, non-denominational megachurches is from people with some level of Christian belief but who had negative experiences in smaller churches in the past. Distancing from the "Christian" term serves as a signal of "we're not like those judgy people who gave you dirty looks for being divorced or having a shoulder tattoo." In other words -- it's memetically fit, in a certain context.
This group is also thoroughly evangelical, though unreflectively, without reference to the alternatives. If you tell them many Presbyterians don't believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God or that Episcopal bishops have openly doubted the resurrection of Christ, they struggle to believe you (I've done it). The idea that following Jesus is separable from Biblical inspiration wouldn't even strike them as possible, just like the practice of infant Baptism is a bizarre medieval Catholic innovation and not also the practice of many Protestant churches. In this culture "I'm a Christ follower not a Christian" can feel as subversive as 18th-century Deism, though my own experience is that the internet has taken a sledgehammer to that sort of monoculture and most with doubts or institutional grievances run straight for atheism.
In particular, the "Jesus was just a heckin' good guy who wanted everyone to love each other, he would have been a big fan of gay marriage" seems to be the apostatized, post-Obergefell evolution of the original concept. And many evangelicals even from traditional backgrounds are very suceptible to it, because they often have no grounding in the broader historical and theological place of their tradition and thus have no antibodies to counterarguments. Especially ones that appeal to concerns about "holier than thou" attitudes and Christian judgmentalism (because the Gospel is reduced to non-judgment instead of right-judgment).
There are also the "all the churches are money laundering fronts who spend all their money on fancy sound systems, my church is my household" prepper dad energy folks, at the very epicenter of Scots-Irish obstinance and skepticism of authority. These people feel a firm connection to Christian culture (though mostly in a reactionary way) and would affirm Biblical inspiration if you asked them, though they couldn't give you a verse any longer than a bumper sticker. Yes, this is incoherent.
It's a fairly small group, and the general tenor of American Christianity in recent years is toward greater traditionalism -- I know southern baptists who are endorsing structured liturgical prayer -- but if someone told me "the Bible is the literal Word of God, but I'm not like those Christians," well, this is what pops into my head.
Most of the "good" culture war topics (Dobbs, immigrants, LGBT, gun rights, free speech issues, climate change, Gaza) which are really toxic are not about "how should we divide money between interest groups?" It is always that there are conflicting underlying principles by the different participants.
I don't agree with this -- the culture war is absolutely about dividing power between interest groups. At its very core! I think you saw the reference to pensions and got sidetracked by economic theory, which currently mostly resides in the "boring policy discussions" category because opposition to liberal free trade has few major proponents among the elite.
But think about Dobbs -- like RandomRanger says, it's ultimately about power. In the feminist formulation -- what they actually say themselves -- abortion is about "a woman's power to control her own body." Stripping away the philosophy of it, the conservative viewpoint is that the state has the power to stop abortions. The interest groups are "women who don't want to bear a child" and "children who are not yet born."
Immigration? Of course that's about the division of power between interest groups! What should a native's labor be worth -- that's about relative power and status. What should the language people speak be -- that's about the power of different linguistic groups, and particularly of monolinguals vs multilinguals. Should there be a pathway to citizenship? Voting rights? That's literally about dividing power between interest groups, between constituencies!
LGBT? Again, division of power between interest groups. Should the religious baker have to bake the gay wedding cake? What are the relative powers of the LGB and the T -- should lesbians be required to accomodate transwomen?
Gun rights? Division of power between interest groups. What is the relative importance of people's desire to own a gun and people's desire not to live in a society that has many guns? How do random acts of mass gun violence -- sometimes perpetrated by people with little to no background that would impede their ability to legally buy a gun -- affect this calculation? What are the rights of mentally ill people to self defense? What are the rights of society to corral others' right to self defense for its own safety?
Freedom of speech? You mean the issue where the deciding factor for most people is "my friends can speak all they want and my enemies should keep their dirty mouths shut?" The issue where the right says "criticism of Israel is antisemitism" and the left says "criticism of immigration is racism"? Where "hate speech" is offensive and defamatory statements made against racial groups -- except white people, because they deserve it? (And don't exist, by the way: "white people have no culture." This is not hate speech.)
Climate change? The issue where a leading activist said, to a crowd of older politicians, "You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words?" Where the young activists feel energized because they believe baby boomers stole a healthy planet from them to lower gas prices? Where the rich jet-setters can fly all over the world announcing the Green Gospel but vacations for the hoi polloi are ecological sins? That's not about the division of power between interest groups?
Gaza? Really? The issue where if you support one side you're calling for Shoah 2.0, and if you support the other you want to firebomb children? The issue that's about, quite literally, two interest groups who both want to live on the same territory? The issue where both sides of the conflict engage in war crimes that endanger or hide behind civilians, but both sides of the debate plug their ears to the horror of the whole thing because My Side Is Oppressed? Isn't that the interest-group-power-struggle par excellence?
I know you're sincere in what you say. And I admire the focus on conflicting principles -- there are indeed a lot of those. But your thesis about the culture war strikes me as precisely wrong. The culture war default, and its cause, is conflict theory. Maybe it's not always about money. But it's definitely about power.
Well, not quite. They believe all human souls, including that of Jesus, were begotten of God (and the Eternal Mother, whom they try not to emphasize too much and is, to avert a misunderstanding, not Mary), and not created ex nihilo. The incarnation of Jesus, in their view, was a repeat of an event that God the Father also underwent — they believe that God the Father has a physical body. The most intense thing that can be said about them is they are not classical theists. They believe all human beings are literally brothers of Christ, in that we are all exactly like him.
Their stoteriology is that the end result of human life is the full deification of human beings, which they call exaltation — not as an interior unification with the life of God, but as apotheosis in the original meaning. They believe faithful Mormons are destined to create their own worlds, to be gods of their own universes, even to conceive their own spirit children with their eternal spouses (thus celestial marriage).
It is, not only from a Nicene Christian but a broader Abrahamic perspective, incredibly odd.
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