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 -
In preparation for the currently ongoing papal conclave, I decided to read the official rules currently in force, UNIVERSI DOMINICI GREGIS, issued by John Paul II in 1996. The document contains this provision (emphasis added):
Seems simple enough right?
Whoops.
Here I was, a schmuck, reading the canonically promulgated apostolic constitution as if it mattered, as if the supposed men of God involved in this 2000-year-old institution might care about established procedures.
Sure, Francis could have changed the rules, as many popes have done throughout the centuries, but he didn’t. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care, and neither did anyone else with influence within the Vatican either. How am I supposed to take this seriously if the cardinals and popes don’t even take it seriously?
I wish Christianity were true. I really do. It would certainly make my dating life easier. I’d have a sense of purpose in life, defined rules of virtue to follow, but it just doesn’t make any actual sense. The inconsistency I cited above is relatively minor, but it is illustrative of what one finds everywhere when one digs into the claims of Christianity and treats them with the truth-preserving tools of logic. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus and Vatican II, Matthew 24:34, these are fundamental truth claims that can’t be handwaved away like the finer points of ecclesiastical law.
Obviously, as a Mormon (member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, whew) I think you're actually on the right track. It's so blindingly obvious that the Catholic church is bumbling along, with zero internal consistency, for centuries and centuries. It shows up all over. Even today, Catholics are very loud about a number of major issues, but very small numbers of actual Catholics actually agree with their own church's doctrine, much less practice it, and that's even before you look at any history at all. Don't get me wrong, I respect Catholics, I get along with many, I still view the religion as an overall net good, etc. but their doctrine is a mess. I genuinely extra respect the Catholics who attempt to pull the doctrine together into a coherent whole, but I just don't see the hand of God guiding them.
Now, doctrinally, to me, this all goes away quite neatly when you give up on the idea of the Catholic line of authority being unbroken. Clearly they strayed, it's self-evident, so my own faith has the nice idea of needing someone to restore and clarify things and have a modern guide/prophet. I'm not saying that people don't find any inconsistencies in Mormon doctrine, there's a people component to be sure, but it's several orders of magnitude less. I strongly reject this idea that doctrine is developed by groups of people hashing it out. Council of Nicea? Convened by Constantine, he basically says I don't care what you produce as long as it's something unifying, and once you do, we'll burn the writings of dissenters and exile anyone not with the program. All this to say you should meet with the missionaries :)
As much as the meaning of Matthew 16:18 has been stretched to assert papal primacy, let me be the first to dunk on the central conceit of faith of Mormonism: Joseph Smith and his golden plates. As a recent convert to Catholicism, I spent quite a bit of comparison-shopping between the Christian denominations. Mormonism, even in comparison to the other sects of Christianity, is too much to ask to believe in without being born into it.
Joseph Smith does not claim to be a prophet, but merely the reciever of revelation of historical apocrypha: translated to him from the original 'Reformed Egyptian' created from a Native American script. This is an article of faith of the Mormon Church: you cannot be a Mormon without accepting this. You can probably guess that I'm not a Mormon because I don't believe this for a second.
Now, you might say from a secular perspective: isn't this the narcissism of small differences? You believe in the resurrection of Christ, don't you? You believe in miracles? Surely, you can't give the benefit of the doubt - or even faith - to an American finding golden plates with the word of angels on it? Yes. Yes, actually. I'm not a midwestern subsistance farmer with less than a grade-school education. Egyptians never crossed the Atlantic, and even if they did, they certainly wouldn't have passed their script in such a way that there is no sign of the language anywhere else than the Book of Mormons attests.
Catholicism, on the other hand, has thousands of years of writings of church fathers in Greek and Latin. Is the New Testament an 'add-on' to the Old in the same way the Book of Mormon is? Perhaps. But the New Testament is the description of the life and ministry of Christ (with added prophecy.) The Book of Mormon describes events that no human being could plausibly witness the entirety of (the post-Resurrection ministry of Christ in the Americas.) The Gospels, at least, are written to be the accounts of different church fathers all witnessing the same thing. We only have Smith's word that it is relevation of God at all.
As a Christian, and as a Catholic, even if the papacy is so astray as to have broken the church of Christ, it was certainly not amended or renewed by Smith. His claims to being a prophet hinge on the legitimacy of a dubious forgery. By Nicene standards, his followers are not even Christians - being non-Trinitarian in belief and dogma. No doubt you've heard of these arguments before. You might even have been taught how to rebut them. But you can't get away from the golden plates.
If he had merely asserted that he was a prophet from the beginning, no such artifice would be necessary.
So why didn't he?
Christ, was, at some point: a living person. The Church fathers were real people who attested to him: the writings of early Christians that formed into the Catholic Church exist. Secular analysis into the Bible has even analyzed the different authorial voices and styles within it. Doctrinal discord within the Catholic Church is nothing new. But the basis of Mormonism is in an article of faith that is transparently a fraud. If the plates aren't real, then everything he teaches and every commandment he pronounced is a falsehood.
I think you should turn some of that insight on your religion as well. Christ wasn't brought back from the dead. None of the other miracles happened either. Because they can't exist. It all sounds pretty crazy to an outsider.
I want to believe in God, in defiance of the absence of evidence of his existence. Because faith is an absurd notion: but it is like love and hope. It is a necessary balm in a cruel and uncaring world. In the Kierkengaardian sense, I believe in God as the manifest nature of love: eternally abiding, unconditional, perfect. Forgiving. Merciful, to the flawed creatures that are men. In my life, I feel so sad, so forlorn. I feel that only God could love such a creature as I.
It is probably the only love I will feel in this life.
Perhaps that makes me a strange Catholic, but I arrived here strangely, in any case. You could make a secular case of Christ's nonexistence, but that wouldn't change my faith in God, because my faith isn't based in scurrilous readings of the Bible or enscribed onto plates. I don't care to prove my faith or defend it against skeptical inquiry. I base it on love: that transcendent, ethereal quality that is beyond the ability of materialism to define beyond the inadequate language of hormones and socialization.
That is the most profound miracle of all, and beyond the reach of fedora'd Redditors.
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