This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Some Guy writes a riveting blog which often includes extended anecdotes purportedly from his childhood and youth. Most of these mix horror, humor, pathos, and sentimentality into a compelling brew. One of his stories ends with his Dad telling him "I don’t fucking care if you’re a faggot or anything. You’re still my son and I still love you". Another is titled "My Micronesian Stepfather was a White Supremacist Amateur Elvis Impersonator". It seems unlikely that all the stories could possibly be true; if they are his is truly one of the more unlucky childhoods of anyone in the United States, and his ability to transcend it to become (what seems to be) an upstanding citizen is miraculous. But in another sense, it doesn't really matter if these stories are true: even as fiction they lose none of their power. Each of these stories could happen, and they contain a core of truth about large swaths of our society.
Some Guy seems to (cautiously and mildly) align with Jordan Peterson on the topic of Cultural Christianity: that is, the concept that even if you don't believe in God, or the Incarnation, or the Resurrection, you should still go to church and perform the outward rituals and ceremonies of the Christian religion. Christianity has, as a meme, proved itself to be pro-social, pro-growth, and pro-peace and we don't have a better replacement. Better to treat Christianity as a Chesterton Fence and embrace it even against your reason than to cast it aside and be left in a Nietzschean void.
Some Guy recently published an article in favor of Cultural Christianity. His main goal in the essay seems to be to convince sympathetic atheists to attend religious services. He calls the "obvious" objections distractions, and seems to think that many of these objections will be naturally addressed through interactions with the religious community. If he is holds orthodox Christian views (I believe he is Roman Catholic), then such questions could only be addressed truthfully in the Church; but he asks these atheists to attend synagogues and mosques as well. Perhaps he considers any religious exposure a positive step in an atheist's journey towards Christ.
In his next section of the essay on Dawkins, he reveals another glimpse into the way he thinks of Christianity. Given the question "Do you believe Jesus died for our sins?", he answers "Yes, but you have to begin from the position that Jesus wasn’t just some guy who arbitrarily claimed a particular title. It was as if morality itself became a person. I find the moral innovations of Jesus to be something close to the mechanical equivalent of finding a functioning F-35 jet plane in ancient Egypt. Do you know what people were like before that guy got nailed to a cross? Crack open a history book.". What an astonishing thing to say! "Jesus died for our sins" is "real" because after Jesus died, we literally sinned less! We went from barbaric and cruel to civilized and moral*.
I'm guessing that the following is a fair summary of Some Guy's theology: Some Guy believes in God. He believes God reveals himself in various ways. Humanity, in its own way, tries to comprehend the transcendent Truth, and does so imperfectly. Over time, humanity gains more and more knowledge of God. Judaism may have been the best human effort to understand God until Christianity came along; and still holds much wisdom and truth. But both Judaism and Christianity merely scratch the surface of what we can possibly understand about God and should not be treated as the final or only word on the matter. The Gospel narrative was humanity's closest interaction with the divine (even if there wasn't a literal incarnation) and the resulting Testament gives us an opaque glimpse into that divine, using the only means that imperfect and distinctly sub-divine humanity could use. "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."
I disagree with this argument, but I also find it difficult to counter. It is a much more compelling line (though superficially similar) to the "all religions contain truth" platitude that many Gen Xers felt was the best way to end uncomfortable conversations in the 90s and early 00s. I do hold that humanity can never know everything about God (mathematically, this is a certainty: He is infinite, we are finite). And much like I enjoy Some Guy's writing even if his stories are fiction, I accept that there is much wisdom and truth in parables and fiction. As Jordan Peterson might say, "there is more truth in Dostoyevsky than in a newspaper". People will fight and die for an idea much more readily than they will fight and die for a fact. Someone who "believes" in Christianity in such a way could even say the Nicene Creed with a clear conscience: while the words may not be literally true they come the closest that we can come today in capturing our understanding of God.
And yet, the Bible makes many assertions that do not countenance ambiguity. "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.". "Today you will be with me in paradise". And "For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! .... If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable." These are not the words of apostles that are struggling to describe the transcendent: these are definitive statements made by those who believed they were writing factual accounts. Without the literal Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, we truly do not have hope and are among all the most to be pitied.
*Empirically, I do not find this argument compelling...humanity even in "Christian" Europe remained quite "cruel" (at least by modern sensibilities). Yes, Christianity elevated the status of children, women, and the downtrodden; but wars and violence continued (and continue) to be the norm.
I find this an especially bizarre position to take because, quite apart from the question of whether or not Jesus is actually the messiah, the Son of God, on which everything turns... this doesn't seem particularly true to Jesus' own self-presentation?
If we trust the gospels, Jesus does not present himself as overturning or revolutionising all prior moral thought. On the contrary, when Jesus is challenged on moral questions, he typically returns to what has been written before him, and enjoins loyalty to already-revealed principles. Jesus criticises other people for their inconsistency with past morality (e.g. Mt 15:1-9), and demands others be consistent with it (e.g. Mt 19:16-22, Mt 22:34-40). Jesus consistently presents his moral teaching as a return to the origins (e.g. Mt:19:3-9). (I've only cited Matthew here for convenience, but this passages are attested in the other synoptics as well.)
It seems strange to praise a man for being revolutionary when in his own words he is constantly urging people to return to what is taught in the law and in the tradition. Is Jesus a radical prophet, or a conventional teacher? You can easily find both narratives around him.
It rather reminds me of Chesterton's Orthodoxy:
Likewise I often read about Jesus as being this wild moral revolutionary, or Jesus as just a simple re-presenter of what came before (this is particularly common from the de-mythologisers, who Jesus as merely one more eschatological prophet or messiah claimant in the ferment of first century Judea), and it seems strange to me that the same man be both a radical up-ender of tradition, and a staid product of tradition; or that he be both moral visionary issuing teachings that no one had heard before, and also simply reminding people of what they already knew.
Or perhaps the conclusion to draw is that he's actually the loyal one. He's the one in the balance point, at the centre, a slave of neither past nor future.
I'm no scholar but the answer may be two authors/traditions. The Q source of Jesus' teachings along with the book of James representing the Jewish Jesus' traditional arguments, and the rest coming out of Paul's more radical anti-law, platonic tradition that survived into modern Christianity while the James school died out.
But I agree that from what I've read, Jesus as super moral innovator seems a bit overboard, I have to imagine he cribbed a good amount from John the Baptist and there was a kind of apocalyptic Jewish movement he was joining and learning from.
As an atheist I just feel like when the Christians try to make any kind of historical argument I find it unconvincing because they gloss over the details. Obviously there's no perfect person, Jesus had flaws, and the fact he is so worshipped today is as much an accident as history as how much Mohammed is worshipped. The issue with Christians is they really want Jesus to be the messiah. If they dropped that then they could actually understand something about themselves, and then I would feel comfortable worshipping with them.
But we know that James and Paul were, at least after some time, not leaders of conflicting factions, if you think Acts 15 is at all historical.
I'm curious what you have in mind here.
Well, he was claiming that, and fit some prophecies.
What does worship even mean here?
I don't think they were in total conflict, I just think like I said they were different schools. I also think Acts was written by the Paul school so it's going to paper over what might have been more difficult disagreements to make it look like everyone important was okay with what Paul was doing.
Worshipping with no Jesus messiah would just be worshipping God, the sacredness of each human's existence, the mystery of consciousness, the light of love and morality in a vast dark universe, channeled through the best moral teachers we have including Jesus, yada yada. Yeah it's kind of just new-age humanism, and all the mechanisms keeping the church together would probably fall apart, but I do think if everyone could let go of the superstitions and utopian ideas while still keeping the machinery running there'd still be plenty worth worshipping in neo-Christianity.
But you said you were an atheist?
Where do you think Paul got his teachings?
I think there a few seemingly fundamental mysteries of existence that make the universe a bit more than the dark void that atheists typically characterize it as, but I would bet against those mysteries pointing to some kind of 1 identity "god" type, I don't really know what the other options are, but it's a difficult question. But if I was in a worshipping group, and some people saw it in the "god" style, and I left things more open for myself, it wouldn't be a problem for me. It becomes a problem for me when it's worshipping a human being, or some subset of humanity, as God, because that seems very unlikely to me to be true.
I think there was a lot of intellectual Jewish and Greek thought at the time that an educated Jew like Paul was drawing from, in addition to certainly being inspired by Jesus. I think he clearly responded to Jesus' death differently than original apostles, not having been part of the original group and having visionary experiences afterwards, and I think intellectually he brought in platonic ideas to make sense of them and spread them through his followers. I don't think these ideas were incorporated in the Jewish Jesus groups and I think it was probably a point of tension.
And I just think his attitude in not following Jewish law went beyond Jesus' teachings and was his own innovation. Any of the original 12 could have taken Paul's role as the gentile baptizer, you could imagine half of them or more taking that role considering how many gentiles there are compared to Jews. But it's the outsider who does it and appears to mostly do it on his own. For me that strongly points to Paul having a lot of his own ideas and following them on his own accord, rather than being a outreach plan devised by the original Jewish movement.
What do you make of Peter and unclean foods in Acts? What sorts of things do you think were peculiar to Paul? What do you make of him checking notes with the apostles in Galatians 2?
Interestingly, that bit actually has surprisingly little to do with foods. It tells you what it's on about:
More options
Context Copy link
I think Galatians 2 emphasizes the kind of separateness Paul has with the Jewish sect, you have some calling Paul's authority or teachings into question, probably because of not following the law and the other ideas of Paul, so he goes to get the blessing of the James etc. (who he says added nothing to his message), and they decide to accept what he's doing, but then that's it and he goes back off on his own. I don't think the groups were enemies or cut off from each other, just that they were different groups with differences of belief and that there was probably some tension there.
Specifically I think Paul's peculiar beliefs were in the holy spirit which I think he invented, how rapture/apocalypse works and ideas around afterlife which I think draw from Greek philosophy and Platonism, and not needing to follow Jewish law.
I don't have a ready explanation for the unclean foods thing, but I tend to think that the more visions are involved the less I'm inclined to believe it. It's one thing if Paul has his visions and I think that probably happened, since he seemed very intently motivated by whatever he experienced. I don't think all the other apostles were also getting visions from god, nor do I think they were actually healing people in miraculous ways etc. after Jesus' death. This story is also very convenient for Paul if you have Peter have a vision that confirms that you don't need to follow the law if God says so. Compare that to James 2:8.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link