@TitaniumButterfly comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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.

sockpuppet2 23d ago

John Psmith reviewed "Believe, by Ross Douthat"

Imagine a prophet who tells you he has a special understanding of the universe and can predict a far-future eschatological event with certainty. This might be one of the many apocalyptic preachers of a conventionally religious sort, or it could be a different sort of prophecy like the believer in scientific Marxism who has deduced the laws of history, or the charismatic business leader explaining to investors why he will inevitably conquer the world of B2B SaaS.

...

I am speaking, of course, of the wrongest and worst prophets who ever lived: the last few centuries of atheists.

People really don’t like it when you point this out, but past generations of atheists made specific and detailed predictions about what would happen as religion loosened its grip on the mind, or what science would reveal about the nature of the universe. Those predictions have been uniformly awful. For example: Enlightenment-era skeptics acknowledged that there were a vast number of purported miracles, apparitions, and self-reported mystical experiences. They conjectured, reasonably enough, that some of the supposed miracles were “pious frauds,” and the rest were delusions brought on by religious superstition. They predicted that as the proportion of religious people waned, both sources of miracles would dry up. Naturally, nothing of the sort has happened (even when normalizing to total population).

The fact that the atheists centuries ago were wrong about…approximately everything doesn’t actually have much bearing on whether God exists. Atheism has adapted. Today, instead of telling you that reports of miracles will inevitably decline, they will tell you (with equal confidence) that they will continue at the same rate forever because of…something to do with fMRI machines.2 And the eternal and unchanging universe is back, baby: it’s just the multiverse cosmology of eternal inflation now (which even takes care of the fine-tuning problem).3 There are about as many ways to be an atheist as there are to be religious, so why should we care that one particular set of guys from the 17th through early 20th centuries got repeatedly owned by events? It didn’t happen, but they deserve credit for making a specific prediction.

Ross Douthat cares, because he thinks that much of the intellectual and cultural power of modern secularism comes from a widespread but undeserved sense that the God-deniers have been proven right about stuff. Another way of putting it is that the default position for the intellectually serious has shifted from belief to unbelief. Among the educated class, at least, it used to be only the brave weirdos who were atheists, and now it’s only the brave weirdos who aren’t. Douthat quotes a Tom Stoppard play where a philosopher muses: “It is a tide which has turned only once in human history… there is presumably a calendar date — a moment — when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, the noes had it.” And Douthat thinks that this shift of the default, this sense that maybe at one point in the past it was reasonable to believe, but that today it is not, is completely 100% made up and unearned, founded on a self-congratulatory retconning of history.

The middle section has examples of atheist scholars being wrong... but are examples of atheists scholars being wrong evidence against atheism? We know they were wrong, because atheistic scholarship has deeply-flawed-but-integral self-correction mechanisms. What self-correction have religions done, in the last 100 years? Or is this an isolated demand for rigor, because the pro-belief case is simply that some religion is inerrant, even if we don't know which (if any!) presently-practiced religion is inerrant, therefore, no religion needs to self-correct?

There's also a section on miricles, which includes:

In the Middle Ages, many miracles had the official sanction of the state, the universities, and all the other epistemic organs of society. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many miracles were recorded. And as I said at the start of this review, secularists like David Hume assumed that as soon as the miraculous lost official sanction and encouragement, the flood of stories would dry up as people stopped claiming or pretending to experience them. But what actually happened was that disenchantment didn’t really happen on the ground. People still report miraculous healings, experiences of contact with a sublime Other, mystical visions, even really crazy stuff like levitation or bilocation. In this respect our society is a bit like a communist one, where the entire ruling class adheres strictly to a certain dogma and everybody else quietly pretends to believe it while actually disbelieving it, because it clashes profoundly with their direct experience of the world. Disenchantment is official but virtual. The official encouragement and recognition of miracles stopped, but the miracles kept pouring in. Douthat discusses many of them, some quite hard to dismiss as an individual’s hallucination or forgery because they were seen by many witnesses, others reported by committed materialists who recount them the way a religious believer might shamefully discuss almost losing their faith. Or as Chesterton once put it:

The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them… it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed.

But isn’t the very torrent of miracles itself a problem for believers? After all, one of the most noteworthy things about wondrous or uncanny or miraculous events is that they seem to happen worldwide, to people of every imaginable creed or culture, at roughly the same rate. Shouldn’t this count as evidence against most religions, which claim that their own doctrine is true and all others are false?9 Curiously enough, no. If you actually go and look at how even the most jealous and narrowminded faiths in history interpreted the miracles reported by heathens, you find that basically none of them deny their reality. Frequently they will interpret the miracles bestowed upon followers of rival religions as acts of diabolical rather than divine power, but only very rarely do you see them claiming that they are fake. Chesterton again:

No religion that thinks itself true bothers about the miracles of another religion. It denies the doctrines of the religion; it denies its morals; but it never thinks it worth while to deny its signs and wonders.

Shouldn't we question which miracles are "diabolical" and which are "divine? And why deny another religion's morals, if you don't deny its signs and wonders of other religions? And doesn't this "prove too much," inasmuch as it's also true of conspiracy theories, cryptids (fun fact: Scotland's national animal isn't the unicorn, because someone thought it'd be funny - the Scots genuinely believed unicorns existed, at the time they chose it), and UFO sightings?

The review ends by making a strange argument promoting Christianity:

All of this sound and fury and debate over who wrote the story has a way of distracting us from the story itself, and I’d like to end this review by encouraging you to read it even if you don’t believe it. The narrative of the Gospel has been the single biggest influence on the millennia-old civilization that you (probably) are a child of. But it isn’t just the story of that civilization, because it’s also somehow had an electrifying effect on just about every other culture that’s ever come into contact with it. Forget all your beliefs or disbeliefs or presuppositions, doesn’t that sound interesting? Isn’t that the sort of thing that an educated person in the year 2025 should have direct experience with?

So pick a Gospel, any Gospel (yes, they have some important disagreements on the details,12 but the overall story is the same), and try just reading it through from start to finish. Maybe next week would be an auspicious time. And as you read, try to forget all the associations you have with Christianity, positive or negative, and read the words. If you want, you can imagine yourself in the cultural frame of the first people to encounter the story, and who were much more shocked by it than you will be. But even you, who have spent your whole life subtly marinating in the moral and cultural world that this story built, will be a little bit shocked if you read the words. Because just taken at face value, it’s a really weird story.

It begins, like countless Indo-European myths, with the miraculous birth of a great hero, and a succession of dangers that befall him in childhood. This is classic perennialist stuff, maybe the biggest cliché ever, repeated in myths and legends all over the world. Maybe that should bother Christians, because it means our story is one myth among many others. Or maybe it shouldn’t, because if our story is true, then it is in a sense the story, and we should expect to find echoes of it in all times and places, like refractions in a funhouse mirror. The one thing that’s already strange about this story, though, is how insistent it is on its own specific historicity. All the other myths and legends of demigods and heroes tend to begin with something like: “long ago when the earth was young,” or “once upon in a strange and faraway land.” But this one has dates, and at the time it was written those dates were recent! It cites names of witnesses, and mentions specific people and places. That doesn’t make it true, of course, maybe they all made it up in a conspiracy of lies, but it does make it different from most legends of a great hero sent by the gods.

Anyway, the hero is born, survives his childhood trials, is officially recognized and charged with a mission by the gods, and then begins roaming the countryside: recruiting a fellowship, righting wrongs, and lifting up the sorrowful. Once again, we’re solidly in monomyth territory, this is the plot of like every adventure story ever. But wait a minute…look more closely and the details are all subtly wrong. Like, the “meeting the mentor” stage of the hero’s journey isn’t supposed to have the mentor immediately proclaiming the young hero as Lord. And then there’s the wandering part — most of it just seems to involve upsetting or confusing people. Zero monsters are slain. Zero Roman legionnaires are ambushed or waylaid by this supposed revolutionary folk hero. His only really heroic acts are miracles of healing, but whoever heard of a legend of a Great Physician? And the people who get the healings tend to be ones who, in the view of this society, don’t deserve it — heretics, prostitutes, lepers, the possessed — all of them “unclean.” Some of the healings even deliberately violate the law. Is he the first ever anarchist, come to overthrow not only the Roman occupation but also the rules of the Jewish religion? Is he a prophet of just using common sense and being nice to each other?

The last two paragraphs I quoted use opposing arguments to come to the same conclusion: Similarities to the "monomyth" are evidence of Truth and differences from the "monomyth" are also evidence of Truth.

Has anyone read this book? If so, does this review do a bad job relaying the book's thesis? Am I wrong to think that the thesis, as presented in the review, is unpersuasive? If I am wrong, how am I wrong?

Context

FlyingLionWithABook Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that. sockpuppet2 23d ago

C. S. Lewis laid out the central "similarity to monomyth argument" in more detail in his essay "Religion Without Dogmas" He's a key quote:

"If you start from a naturalistic philosophy, then something like the view of Euhemerus or the view of Frazer is likely to result. But I am not a naturalist. I believe that in the huge mass of mythology which has come down to us a good many different sources are mixed—true history, allegory, ritual, the human delight in storytelling, etc. But among these sources I include the supernatural, both diabolical and divine. We need here concern ourselves only with the latter. If my religion is erroneous, then occurrences of similar motifs in pagan stories are, of course, instances of the same, or a similar error. But if my religion is true, then these stories may well be a preparatio evangelica, a divine hinting in poetic and ritual form at the same central truth which was later focused and (so to speak) historicized in the Incarnation. To me, who first approached Christianity from a delighted interest in, and reverence for, the best pagan imagination, who loved Balder before Christ and Plato before St. Augustine, the anthropological argument against Christianity has never been formidable. On the contrary, I could not believe Christianity if I were forced to say that there were a thousand religions in the world of which 999 were pure nonsense and the thousandth (fortunately) true. My conversion, very largely, depended on recognizing Christianity as the completion, the actualization, the entelechy, of something that had never been wholly absent from the mind of man. And I still think that the agnostic argument from similarities between Christianity and paganism works only if you know the answer. If you start by knowing on other grounds that Christianity is false, then the pagan stories may be another nail in its coffin: just as if you started by knowing that there were no such things as crocodiles, then the various stories about dragons might help to confirm your disbelief."

In his autobiography he discussed the "difference from monomyth" argument:

"I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion—those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them—was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognisable, through all that depth of time, as Plato’s Socrates or Boswell’s Johnson (ten times more so than Eckermann’s Goethe or Lockhart’s Scott), yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god—we are no longer polytheists—then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not “a religion”, nor “a philosophy”. It is the summing up and actuality of them all."

the_Culture_is_great FlyingLionWithABook 23d ago

I fail to understand why the similarity of the gospels to myth, whether for, or against, or both(?) has relevance to whether or not god exists.

Like "humans tend to tell similar sorts of stories, with some differences" is a perfectly reasonable rebuttal to these kinds of arguments.

IGI-111 God was a dream of good government. the_Culture_is_great 23d ago · Edited 23d ago

You're thinking of God's existence as an empirical question whereas Lewis is not thinking about it in those terms and considers it a spiritual question, wherein truth takes a more directional form as the nature of things is considered ineffable.

Humans tell similar stories because those stories are true. And they tend to be true insofar as they are similar.

You can't refute the virtue of heroism, that's a category error. There's no evidence that's going to come in and convince the nature of the human experience of the universe to be different from what it is fundamentally.

"God exists" really means "the universe has intentional meaning". Is it more right (in a axiological sense) to believe in this proposition or not? That's essentially what religion is about. Not whether some specific physical claim can be proven.

You can arrive at some rationalistic explanation for this through some evolutionary model and arrive at some model of values that way, but it's eventually going to become homomorphic to religion and natural law insofar as one is willing to have the humility to provide for being inside what's being modeled.

-3

Primaprimaprima ...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do. IGI-111 23d ago · Edited 23d ago

wherein truth takes a more directional form

The existence of God is one of the least “directional” questions we can consider.

What people want from God is immortality. They want a guarantee that biological death is not the end. My immortal soul will either ascend to paradise upon my death (or I will experience bodily resurrection at some point in the future etc, whatever your preferred theology is), or it won’t. That makes a big difference in terms of what I can expect to directly experience in the future. Being “directionally correct” is cold comfort if you don’t get the actual immortality along with it.

The retreat from viewing eternal life and eternal damnation as very concrete, tangible, and urgent matters is yet another symptom of religion continuing to cede ground to materialism and atheism.

TitaniumButterfly Primaprimaprima 23d ago · Edited 23d ago

I don't think so. Orthodox Christian theology indicates that God does not exist in any sense that we could comprehend as existence. To say that God exists would be considered inaccurate, as the notion of 'existence' we're (capable of) using does not apply here. But it would also be wrong to say that God does not exist, as our idea of that is wrong too. God is beyond existence and nonexistence.

How do you explain pre-Christian Judaism, in which major schools of thought denied an afterlife and most of the major ones said 'idk' at best? Personally, while I like my (wrong) notions of what eternal existence will be, I'm much more concerned about what we might call ultimate consequence. Meaning, if you will. I don't need personal eternal existence to live a meaningful life.

Or, you know, any pagan religion which doesn't posit an afterlife, or indicates that the afterlife is fairly uniformly terrible.

Being “directionally correct” is cold comfort if you don’t get the actual immortality along with it.

I'd take being sure of that in a heartbeat.

This narrative just doesn't ring true to me at all, not least for the reasons above.

To this comment I'll append some words by Fr. Thomas Hopko of blessed memory.

CommittedToTheG TitaniumButterfly 21d ago

Did not expect to see a reference to Fr. Thomas Hopko here… he baptized me as an infant.

TitaniumButterfly TitaniumButterfly 23d ago

…In the Latin, Aristotelian line, God was being, but not becoming; God was unchanging but not changing; God was simple and not multiple; God was static and not moving, not dynamic, and so on. Whereas the Bible, or how the Eastern Fathers, like Gregory and Basil and the other Gregory and Maximos and Simian and others said — especially Dionysius — they said, ‘No; God is completely different! God’s not like anything that exists. God is beyond being. He’s beyond becoming, beyond un-being. That in God, the one and the many — God isn’t one as opposed to many; God is beyond one and many. But He reveals Himself to us as being itself, as goodness itself, love itself, truth itself… but He also reveals Himself in a multiplicity, countless number of the divine actions and energies because He is the living God, and these operations or actions or energies of God, His speaking, His acting, His being angry, His revealing Himself, His hiding Himself — these are all real. God is a living God. He’s beyond anything in the created order. We can’t simply identify Him with ‘being’. In fact, Gregory of Palamas will say, ‘If God is being, I am not. If I am being, God is not. If God is, I am not. If I am, God is not.’ What he meant by that is, you can’t use the term ‘being’ for God and for creation in the same way.

Now if you say that ‘God is’, then you have to qualify that God is beyond anything. For example, if a Christian was, let’s say, walking down the street, and wearing a cross, and some person came up to him and said ‘Hey, are you a Christian, you’re a believer, you have that cross on?’ Say ‘Yeah’. And then if the person said, ‘Do you believe God exists?’ And of course the first Christian answer would be ‘Yes, of course. We believe God exists.’ But if we were really doing our duty, according to the Bible and according to the Holy Fathers — certainly according to St. Gregory of Palamas — we would say to that person, ‘You have a minute? Let’s chat.’ And then we’d say to that person, ‘You know, I just said to you “God exists.” And by that I mean, yes, there is God. Yes. It is not true that there is no God. There is God. But, if you think that God exists like I exist, or you exist, or that building or that tree exists, or even like the planet Earth exists, or like the hundred billion galaxies with the hundred billion stars in the expanding universe exist, then we would have to say God does not exist. God brings into existence creatures who can say that they exist. But God is beyond existence. He’s even beyond non-existence.’

In his summary of the patristic writings that he wrote in the Ninth Century, St. John of Damascus said, ‘God is not only beyond being, He’s beyond non-being.’ That we have to negate even the negations that we make about God. Because if we say that God does not exist like the creation exists, that concept would even be somehow contingent upon an idea of creation. But God, as Prophet Isaiah said [a] long time before Jesus, ‘God doesn’t have any comparisons.’ There’s nothing in Heaven and on Earth to compare with Him. As it was already revealed to the men and women of the old covenant, God is holy. Kadosha, holy. And ‘holy’ means not like anything else. It means completely different; completely other. Like there’s nothing you can say about God but just to contemplate His activities in silence. St. Gregory of Nyssa says, quoting Psalm 116, ‘If we dare to speak about God, then every man is a liar.’ ‘Cause whatever we say, we have to correct somehow. Even the great Englishman and great theological writer, John Henry Newman, who was a Church of England person who became a Roman Catholic, mainly because of the Church Fathers, he said that theology for a Christian is ‘saying and unsaying to a positive effect’. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware quoted that once. I loved it. He says that that’s the same thing that the Eastern Church Fathers say. Theology is saying and unsaying for a positive effect. For a good reason. Because you affirm something — in technical language, that’s called cataphatic — and then you negate it. That’s called apophatic. And so when you say anything about what God is or what God is like, you can say it! You can say ‘God exists, God is good, God is love’, but immediately you have to correct it and say, ‘not like being and not like goodness and not like love that we can capture with our mind. God is way beyond that.’

Nevertheless, He acts. He speaks. He shows Himself. As Gregory of Nyssa said way back in the Fourth Century, ‘His actions and operations,’ he said, ‘they descend even unto us.’

sun_the_second TitaniumButterfly 23d ago

This reads like modern neogender theory.

hydroacetylene sun_the_second 23d ago

Yeschad.jpg

Liberalism is rebellion incarnate, and rebellion incarnate works only by self-deification. Neogender theory is describing the self as God.

What is this place?

Why are you called The Motte?

New post guidelines

Rules

Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats