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I don't know what to feel about Lindsay because his position is insane, but it is insane in a way that is both directionally correct and understandable from my background.
Contrasting him with Carl Benjamin is interesting because they both come out of the same ideological substrate of classical liberalism, but ended up at radically different places through their handling of recent history.
Lindsay is a debate addict twitter shitposter extraordinaire who has read too much deconstructionist litterature and it has fried his brain to such a degree that he can now recognize mythological patterns accurately, but describes them in a way that sounds clinically insane.
Consider his claim that Macintyre and the rest of the ex-NRX right are in a cabal to manifest Archangel Michael into reality.
On the face of it this is fanciful nonsense, but if you understand the mythological implications of it and are ready to look past the evident lies he is telling about the actual people involved, there is a clear degree of truth to this. One that People like Macintyre are equipped to understand and would accept: the Right is slowly constructing a version of Christianity that is ready for violence, and isn't bound and shamed by Liberal memes like a good submissive Anglicanism.
This is unacceptable to Lindsay because he is committed dogmatically to Liberal ideals. He can't contenance that people would truly prefer "illiberal democracy" (as Orban would put it) if Liberalism can only offer the dissolution of one's nation and morals into a grey globalist sludge. And he can't face up to the fact that Liberalism is now a dead doctrine that nobody but him still believes in, because it has failed to retain legitimacy.
Contrast this with Carl, who to this day I believe genuinely attached to the sort of freedoms dear to classical liberals (seen clear in his enthusiastic support for Milei on one side and Bukele on the other). He instead has endeavoured to understand why Liberalism has failed to contain Wokism, and arrived at a set of lengthy post-liberal conclusions: that Liberalism though a fruitful doctrine, is founded on clear lies, and his series of posts on those myths is enlightening to who wants to contruct a new kind of freedom ideology that doesn't have the flaws of Liberalism but doesn't have to fall to, say, Fascism.
Lindsay would characterize this as Carl being brainwashed by the "woke right", and to a degree the claim has teeth: Carl has been moving rightward through his exposure to NRX ideas by way of his friend Parvini and his circle of reactionary analysts.
But what is really the more spirited and righteous approach: to stand on the ground of dogma and refuse any change to Liberalism in a time of strife and infiltration by enemies on all sides, or to accept that it got some things wrong and must turn into something different if its ideals are to survive?
Time will tell, but I think Lindsey is fighting a losing battle because Carl and his friends understand politics as it is, whilst he is only able to understand ideology.
It’s all le based ‘Christ is King’ memes, how many of these angry young men actually believe in Christianity? Most are no less atheist than Richard Dawkins fans in 2010, or the average /pol/ack. It’s not a genuine religious revival.
My wife and I have been having some very deep and thoughtful conversations about becoming practicing Christians, even though we weren't raised with it, and really don't believe in it. Funnily enough, both our sets of parents actively kept us away from religion due to their bonkers Baptist upbringing, which seemed to revolve around what a piece of shit they were and that every single thought they have will send them to hell.
So why would we turn to Christianity in our 40's, after a lifetime of atheism? We are desperately seeking some sort of cultural and institutional protection from liberalism run amok. Or wokeness, or neoliberalism, or whatever you call it. We're willing to traumatize our daughter with stories of burning in hell over her being taught that she can mutilate and sterilize herself to solve all her problems in Kindergarten. It's not a choice we particularly relish, but it feels like a choice forced on us and it's an easy one to make.
But we want to find a sect of Christianity that isn't pussies. We don't want a sect of Christianity that will start inviting drag queens to teach Sunday school because they don't want anyone to feel bad, or they feel like they need to appeal to "modern audiences". This has slowly lead us to maybe trying to find an Orthodox church of some sort? Everything more Western European just feels totally pozzed these days, and we don't trust it.
And I'll be perfectly honest, something about the way Trump survived that assassination attempt just, I can't get over it. It's literally enough to make me wonder if there is a god and he saved him. Turning his head at exactly the right moment, exactly the right way, to get away with nothing but a minor flesh wound is nothing short of miraculous. Has there ever been a failed assassination that failed by such a narrow margin before? I know politicians have been shot and survived before, but not like that.
I guess my point is, what is a genuine religious revival supposed to look like?
The Church of Christ has been good for me. It has its foibles, but it's decentralized so there's no way to skinsuit it from the top. Individual churches may not be immune to lady ministers and Rainbow politics, but they are generally quite resistant to them.
As for belief, it seems to me that the best approach for most atheists moving in this direction starts with interrogating what human beliefs are and how they actually work. The popular narrative is that beliefs are forced by evidence through a deterministic process; once people have adopted this belief, they note that contrary beliefs are not being forced by the subsequent evidence they encounter, and so conclude that the evidence for those contrary beliefs must not be very strong, and so can be safely discarded. This creates a system of self-reinforcing circular logic that is nearly impervious to contradiction so long as it is not examined too closely.
If you examine the process by which beliefs are formed and modified, though, you will clearly see that this narrative is very clearly false. Beliefs are not forced by evidence through a deterministic process, but rather very clearly chosen through an act of will. We reason from axioms, and axioms are necessarily chosen pre-rationally.
It seems to me that people who find genuine belief in God impossible are trying to believe in God in defiance of their own axioms, which is never going to work well. The solution is to confront the axioms themselves in particular and the nature of axioms generally, and to internalize that the consensus Rationalist Materialist narrative is not nearly as seamless as it presents itself. This ought, it seems to me, free them up to allow doubt to work for their faith rather than only against it.
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