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Notes -
Recently from Slavoj Zizek: THE POPE IS DEAD, ANTI-CHRIST IS ALIVE AND KICKING
I'm curious what the actual (theistic) Christians here think of Zizek's "Christian atheism" and his conception of Christian love.
I don't expect Christians today to be lining up to join the local Communist Party. It is my view that, more often than not, actually-existing communist movements have been little more than a thin veneer of respectability over the ambitions of power-hungry sociopaths. But isn't there still a kernel of truth here? Isn't there something, as was articulated in last week's discussion, "quasi-communist" about Christianity? Is not the doctrinal communist ideal -- the universal fraternity of man, sacrifice for those who are in need, "the last shall be first" -- ultimately just an expression of universal Christian love? Should Christians not view communists as fellow travelers who are correct about certain fundamental principles, but misguided on method?
There is a certain basic paradox that presents itself when one begins to interrogate the concept of love: do you love me for who I am, substantially, in essentia, or do you love me for my qualities and properties? You say that you love me because I'm smart, because I'm funny, because I'm beautiful; but suppose that I were not smart, nor funny, nor beautiful. Would you still love me then?
Either horn of the dilemma presents an issue. If your love for your beloved is contingent on them possessing some particular quality, then you are liable to the charge that you don't really love the person: what you really love is that quality. You are a lover of intelligence, or humor, or beauty, but not of that particular person. But if you say that you would continue to love the person regardless of any qualities they possess whatsoever, even if they were stripped of all qualities and left only as a "bare particular", then it would seem that your choice is entirely arbitrary and without justification; for what could be motivating your choice if it is made in the absence of all qualities? And a baseless arbitrary choice cannot constitute love either. The conclusion we draw is that, if there is such a thing as "love" at all, it belongs to the domain of the unsayable.
Thus Zizek suggests that true love should be "cold" rather than "sentimental". Powerful sentiments suggest that one is fixated too strongly on the secondary qualities of the object, rather than the obligation of love proper. Love is seen to have an almost Kantian character: the bloom of pleasure is a stain on the perfect austerity of duty. Christ is then interpreted as the formal condition of possibility that both binds us to this duty and makes its realization conceivable; Christ must not be "made into a direct object of love who can compete with other objects", for otherwise "things can go terribly wrong". (In particular, it opens the door to transactional thinking; if He Himself told you that all of humanity was saved, but you alone were damned; would you still love him? Would you still love him even if he wasn't living up to "his end of the bargain"? An authentic conception of Christian love has to confront this possibility.)
I'm going to start with a petty nitpick:
Storge (στοργή) does not actually appear in the scriptures. A handful of words derived from it do (there's φιλόστοργος in Romans 12:10 and ἄστοργος in Romans 1:31 and 2 Timothy 3:3), but στοργή itself is not in the Bible.
Now that said...
I don't think much of any kind of Christian-inflected atheism. I understand that a religion can cast a long shadow and retain immense psychological power even among those who reject its core claims. However, what I find in cases like this is a kind of sentimental appropriation of the power of Christian rhetoric even alongside the rejection or outright destruction of Christian faith itself, and I think I would prefer honest enemies to friends like that.
What I read in Zizek's essay is a kind of substitution. He appropriates the language of Christian faith but swaps out its referent, such that the Holy Spirit can become 'an egalitarian community of comrades dedicated to a Cause'. What is there to say there but that the Holy Spirit is not, in fact, an egalitarian community of comrades dedicated to a Cause, and the substitution can only do violence to the Holy Spirit, which is, after all, not merely a linguistic flourish, but (as Christians believe) the Third Person of the Trinity.
I think this is trading one's birthright for pottage. Maybe the Christian hope is right, maybe it's a delusion, but either way it's not just the hope for a fairer world in the here and now.
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Interestingly from what I can tell the "proto-Christian-communism" was within the Christian community - and it came with rules.
Besides Acts 2 (where the holding of "all things in common" was within the church) see for instance Galatians 6:10 ("...let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.") and 1st Timothy 5, which gives these instructions for granting charity to windows: "Let a widow be enrolled if she is not less than sixty years of age, having been the wife of one husband, and having a reputation for good works: if she has brought up children, has shown hospitality, has washed the feet of the saints, has cared for the afflicted, and has devoted herself to every good work."
So while Christianity definitely has an idea of the "universal fraternity of man" within Scripture the brotherhood of believers is privileged. That's not to say that charitable works to nonbelievers are forbidden, but it's not the communist ideal of the Universal Brotherhood of Man (...or perhaps it is similar, in the sense that the Communist Universal Brotherhood of Man was in practice often restricted to, well, Communists.)
Don't forget 2 Thessalonians 3:10 ("He who will not work, let them also not eat").
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Christianity is, quite explicitly, not egalitarian. There’s the inequality between God and man and the angels, obviously. But then the New Testament describes an early church which is profoundly class based- there are different types of clerics, men are the head of women, and slaves are expected to obey their masters. These classes might differ in some regards from secular social classes but it isn’t the classless, property less, stateless society which is communism’s raizon detre. In fact Christian theology has from early days been very skeptical of hostility to the state.
I'd just add that the New Testament is actually very skeptical of wealth (there's a strong connection made at points between the wealthy and the oppressors) and the church is condemned for showing partiality to those who are wealthy. So it's interesting because it's not really proto-communist-egalitarian-paradise but neither does it succumb to a sort of "will-to-power" fantasy where strength or power are to be privileged. Really what's elevated is moral goodness and wisdom.
I have often conceived of Christianity as a belief system that replaces the hierarchy based on strength with a hierarchy based on moral goodness. "My status hierarchy is not of this world." But there still is a status hierarchy. (Just like there's still a kingdom -- just one that God rules personally.)
Of course, that's what Nietzsche said -- instead of badness, inferiority, Christianity criticizes evil, moral turpitude. But unlike Nietzche I believe this is both a positive development and a necessary one.
Auctoritas vs. potestas, is pre-Christian (compare Potestas/Kratos the God, supporting dictatorship and advocating for random violence) although Christianity somewhat reenvisioned them. (N.b. further concepts like imperium remeasure the semantic fields in different ways in different thinkers' works.)
Moral authority (earned by correctness, selflessness and hard-earned reputation (dignitas, not yet dignity, but social standing) vs. raw exercising of power. Without moral goodness, power is illegitimate. But moral goodness without power is also lacking - although Socrates condemned to death has the highest authority of all, if it can't work good in the world, it's a tad selfish - like a desert hermit, isolated from society for his own soul compared to those monks' kenosis, who engage with the dirt and grime of humanity and lift it up, however slowly, through holy struggle and love.
A modern systems thinker, applying EA (is this now looked down upon? Well, applying financial metrics and industrial engineering) can improve the lot of thousands instead of spending their time administering aid to individuals, one at a time. To some extent, the traditional Christian image/aesthetic looks down upon this, preferring the Pope to bathe the poor's feet, Navy Devos to teach people to read etc. I at least think overall betterment's important.
I believe Christianity is fairly "aristocratic", believing everyone can be better and flourish (overcoming their sinful urges), but forgiving them for succumbing to this fallen world. (My faith is grounded in gnostic-curious Platonism, though.) The lower classes can rise beyond that station, but if they don't, they still have their own path to God. (N.b. this is not prosperity gospel, rather just... If you don't waste your time on vices and sloth, you can trivially better yourself and the life of those around you, building, learning, teaching etc.)
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That's true, the Church is a hierarchy and has leaders and followers. However, Christianity is very explicitly egalitarian about moral worth: every human being is equally morally worthy, because we all have an immortal soul and were made in the image of God.
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“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” is the second greatest commandment. The greatest is, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The two commandments are not the same, and the order is important. You can’t just swap out the gospel for any old cause, not even one that preaches love.
If you remove the supernatural bits from Christianity, you are not left with a new kind of Christianity; you have a new movement wearing Christianity as a skin suit. There have been plenty of these. Off the top of my head, liberation theology, the social gospel movement, and the preaching of John Ball seem to be pretty straightforward parallels.
The command to love your neighbor does not imply that you are to love everyone to the same degree and in the same way. Christians disagree among ourselves about the details. I personally find the first epistle of John to be helpful here, but I also consider it one of the most difficult books of the New Testament. A lot of people read John talking about love, have fuzzy feelings, and ignore the things he says that make it complicated.
I don’t know enough Aristotelian (I assume) philosophy to speak fittingly in terms of essences, properties, and qualities. But I can point out that in Christian belief all men possess the image of God, which gives them value in itself and may resolve your dilemma.
No background in Aristotle needed. The word "quality" is just being used in its ordinary sense. Intelligence is a quality. Beauty is a quality. Nothing fancy going on.
Sure. But then, all people would be the same in that regard. Love has to single out a particular person (or a particular thing) in contradistinction to others.
In my own view, universal love is at worst incoherent, and at best it's a particularly tepid form of love. There is no love unless you can draw a distinction between those who are loved and those who are unloved; and so universal properties shared by all people cannot be the basis of love.
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But if Man is made in the Image of God, is not 'loving our neighbor as ourself' how we 'love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our, &c., &c.'?
It means that love of neighbor follows from love of God, but the former doesn’t subsume the latter.
Let me give an example that I read a zillion years ago in the New Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. I may get the details wrong, and I haven’t confirmed the thoroughness of the book’s sources, but it works just as well as a thought experiment anyway:
A woman was in the custody of the Soviet secret police. These sometimes took a perverse joy in breaking people they weren’t going to let leave alive anyway, and they had decided to break her faith. When maiming her legs didn’t do it, they brought in her children and threatened to shoot them if she did not deny Christ. She refused, and the secret police shot her children in front of her.
If love of God is the higher good, she did the right thing. It’s not that she didn’t love her children enough; it’s that she loved God more than that.
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You're claim that liberation theology and the social gospel movement "remove the supernatural elements from Christianity" is straightforwardly wrong. These are not evangelical theologies---and it's fine to dislike them for that reason---but they obviously incorporate the supernatural.
The gulf here is much wider than that. If Jesus Christ was not raised from the dead, then confessional Lutheranism, or Roman Catholicism, or Eastern Orthodoxy falls apart. Liberation theology and the social gospel movement keep on trucking.
Only in the sense that they try to “use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop,” in Lewis’ inimitable phrase.
Where do you get the idea that these theologies deny the resurrection of Christ? La Misa Popular Salvadoreña is basically the anthem of liberation theology. It's a series of 11 songs for celebrating a post-Vatican II non-Latin mass. Here is the song they sing during communion where they explicitly acknowledge the passion and resurrection of Christ: https://youtube.com/watch?v=R8yJWvDNJWU&list=PLhCyWH9pFDuYFB8VLeObzJEABIhHlW27u&index=8.
I don't think it's about denial, it's about what the basics of faith are. For a different example, If climate change is conclusively shown to not be real, old-school greens fall apart, new greens keep on chugging on social policies.
This is nonsensical. When Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated for his liberation theology, he was still teaching that "the basics of faith" are the Catholic catechism. Liberation theology---whether you agree with it or not---was obviously an edifice built on top of that.
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When I looked into liberation theology, what I found was a group of people using gospel language but assigning the terms Marxist definitions. It wasn’t that they denied the resurrection but that they rendered it irrelevant, something one could take or leave. If that’s not representative, I’ll be pleasantly surprised; I considered reading Gutiérrez, but by that point I wasn’t particularly inspired to look deeper.
I will have to check out your link.
Edit: Do you know of a link to the words of the people’s mass you linked? My Spanish isn’t great, and I will do a better job muddling through text than audio.
That's certainly a common right-wing interpretation of liberation theology. And there's relevant critiques of liberation theology that it only became popular due to Soviet covert influence. But the major theologians/leaders are all card-carrying Catholics that buy into all of Catholic spirituality.
Sorry, I don't know any text versions of the songs for reading :( My guess is that you would still find it to be heavily Marxist, but that doesn't mean the people singing don't literally believe in the miracles they're singing about.
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Speaking just to the specific question of how one understand’s Christian love, I tend to take Brand’s stance on it.
God’s love is infinitely more than our human conception of love, and it is bundled up together with his righteousness and wrath and holiness. The same God who says “Love one another as I have loved thee,” is perfectly, rightly capable of wiping out peoples and places. Failure to grasp this is how you wind up with “Love wins” and “Hate has no home here” churches that would never tell anyone they are living in specific sin. But it is clear from Scripture that whatever else God is, he is not what is conceived of in the modern understanding of “God is love.”
I make the argument that when Christianity, taken as a whole, was most adherent to God’s commands and intentions, is also the time it was riding high in the world in terms of temporal power. It was the time when it had made itself strong enough to resist outside conquest and to, from that base of operations, eventually evangelize the world, however imperfectly. At that time it was confident in itself, assertive, and had not yet fully fallen under the sway of the “The only thing that matters is love” heresy.
Similarly, the interpretation of agape gives the pre-arranged conclusion away from the beginning. Agape isn’t just for comrades in the cause, it is meant, in varying degrees, for everyone.
In theory, I should have agape for Slavoj Zizek, just like I should for a fellow parishioner. It has nothing to do with comrades in the Communist or cause-oriented sense and I would argue demonstrates Zizek’s extremely weak understanding of or an intentional misrepresentation of the concept in order to bolster an otherwise weak argument.
At least some of those churches condemn sin, but merely disagree with you about whether certain things are sinful (e. g. whatever happens in Pete and Chasten Buttigieg's bedroom).
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Therefore Scripture is wrong, as should be expected from texts written by flawed mortal men.
or the modern understanding of "God is Love" is wrong, as should be expected from an understanding unquestionably built by flawed mortal men.
Perhaps. If God exists, it think it's more plausible for humans' moral instincts (telling them that mass murder is wrong) to have remained in tune with the truth of God and the Good, while Hebrew myths about a bloodthirsty, wrathful deity arose for the same reasons that a hundred similar ones did in many cultures; than for the moral instinct to be wrong, and those particular tales about a bloodthirsty deity happening to be correct.
This is not a human moral instinct. Humans are quite comfortable with mass murder. That's why we've done it repeatedly (that, and it's a very good strategy).
(I suppose we can argue about whether or not something is a "human moral instinct" if it's not shared by all humans. And it is true that some humans are uncomfortable with mass murder. But the fact remains that mass murder is a very typical human behavior.)
Having a moral instinct ≠ being reliably bound by it at all times. Indeed, the most common manifestation of the moral instinct is feeling guilty after doing something that one knew, deep down, to be wrong. (Case in point, I think a majority of mass murderers in human history had a conscience, it was just drowned out by other concerns and they did the wrong thing anyway.)
Seems more parsimonious to believe that humans as a general rule actually have few-to-no moral qualms about mass murder as long as it fits into what you might call a mammalian herd strategy.
This is not saying that humans have no moral instincts simply because moral taboos are sometimes violated but rather than the moral taboos about mass murder apply only weakly if at all to group enemies.
However, I probably should back up a bit here - I've been using "mass murder" very much in the context of group warfare which is very different from mass murder in a serial killer sense, but the latter is much closer to the actual meaning of the word "murder." If your position is that Genghis Khan doesn't count as a mass murderer but Hitler does, my position is at least closer to yours than I conceived.
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Motte and Bailey. Maybe Christians should hold everything in common, selling property and possessions to give to anyone in need. Is that how Zizek lives or does he need to remove something from his own eye? Nowhere does the New Testament call Christians to advocate the violent redistribution of the fruits of non-believers’ labor.
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Communism and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible because Christianity’s is individualistic. Every soul matters. Every soul is redeemable. There are no chosen people. Every person is worthy of god’s love.
These ideas are destructive to communism, which is a collectivist ideology. Christians are saying that you should love each other, and that people are all, each, valuable individuals—communism says you should love each other insofar as it serves the emergent gestalt that sits on top of it.
How to integrate this into a functioning society: hardcore individualistic ruthless capitalism is in tension with the morals of the religion. Christian ethics act as a governor which serves to prevent stuff like becoming a wage slave to Amazon, and aborting your children so you can keep working.
You need both of these things, although the “hardcore ruthless capitalism” I’m talking about is not so much a “thing” as it is the base state of human existence. You have the base individualism, free association, etc. and then are Christian morals on top of it to make it all work.
I think a communist would say that the opposite is true. To that extent the dichotomy of individualism and collectivism is just wordplay.
Every communist values the individual. That's why they want communism. More freedom. More liberty. More happiness. They see the individuals freedom impeded by capitalism and, outside of catholic communists, religion. If love for our fellow men were elevated above love for money or our preferred rendition of Abrahamic religion, then we could much sooner get together and work towards a global change for the betterment of humanity.
Instead we get Christians with proclamations of moral supremacy, because they believe in abstract logical concepts. Or capitalists with proclamations of factual supremacy, since they can allege to best predict the outcomes of society. Neglecting to mention that these outcomes are derived from material conditions born from the very system they support.
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