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What ancient Internet history can tell us about the rise of the Woke Right
A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of the Woke Right! We've discussed it before ourselves, opinion range from "it's an op" to "there might be something to it", but one way or the other, a decent chunk of the anti-woke coalition it's an issue that needs to be addressed.
Recently Douglas Murray went on Joe Rogan and had a conversation with Dave Smith about, among other things, the responsibility of influencers with huge platforms to the public. Smith and Rogan took the familiar position of "muh marketplace of ideas", while Murray believes that people with so much influence should be a bit more selective, because exposing the public to bad ideas will lead to some part of the audience uncritically adopting them.
The conversation made huge waves and sparked a massive discussion, articles by Konstantin Kisin, tweet storms by James Lindsay, follow up conversation between Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, between Peterson and Lindsay, and more recently between Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith. In short, though not all of them might put it in the same terms, some on the anti-woke side fear that following Trump's victory the right "got it's mojo back" and now some of it's more extreme ideas are entering the mainstream discourse, so the centrist liberals want to prevent the "pendulum swinging back"...
...and all I can think is "I've seen it all before"...
First as a farce...
Let me take you back to the year of our lord 2017. It wasn't that long ago, and yet the vibe of the time was so different it almost feels like it was all a dream. Back then the way to make money on big SocMeds was to clown on Social Justice, so everybody and their dog had to have a cartoon character Youtube channel deboonking Buzzfeed. The situation was so dire for SJs that any video trying to put their position forward would yield and endless stream of critical responses which, to add insult to injury, would end up filling the recommended feed of the original pro-SJ video. Trump has also just entered office for the first time, so in that atmosphere it felt like anti-woke liberalism is unstoppable. And then a few things happened:
With so much online hype in the air, a person going by the name "BasedMama" decided to take the anti-SJW phenomenon to the next level, and host an IRL event. I still unironically think this was a great idea, even now the Dissident Right regularly talks about the importance of real-world organising, and with a guest list consisting of massive influencers from Tim Pool to Sargon of Akkad, the event had the potential to be a huge success. I can't point to anything specific now, but I distinctly remember the SJWs genuinely unnerved by the prospect of it taking place...
...but luckily for them it crashed and burned at an astonishing pace. First, the invited guests started complaining about demands to sign NDA's and non-compete contracts. The smaller ones went along with it, but the bigger ones, many no strangers to the conference circuit, said they're having none of it. Tim Pool publically dropped out with a video to his fans, explaining why he's not going to be at the event. The organizers' attempts at damage control only exasperated the backlash, causing even more guests to drop out. It even turned out that the guest list announced during the crowdfunding campaign was a "fake it 'till you make it" thing and some of the big names never actually signed on.
More relevant to what I want to discuss here: the whole event was marketed as a "free speech" conference, so naturally it attracted the attention of "witches": HBDers, Alt-Righters, and others with ideas rejected by polite society, and as it turned out, by the organizers themselves, who were on record expressing sympathy for the ideas of Social Justice, just thought that their current iteration went too far. That's all perfectly valid as far as I'm concerned, no one is entitled to a slot at a conference, but the usual way to handle this sort of issue is to say "you're welcome to come, but golly gee, we ran out of time/space to host any more speakers/panels", but BasedMama et. al. decided to handle it in the worst possible way: announce the witches will have their panels to get the crowdfunding / ticket money of their audiences, and only then say "oopsie, we ran out of slots". What's worse, people quickly joined the dots and realized that it's only people with a specific kind of views that there seems to be no time for. The "free speech" event was quickly seen for a sham, and all except for the most diehard supporters dropped out. An event that could have plausibly attracted thousands ended up get 20-40 attendants, from what I recall.
Back in the online world the youtuber KrautAndTea decided it's time to balance out his usual dunking on feminists and Muslim-immigration-enjoyers with dunking on the more extreme elements on the right. He started accusing various B-List youtubers of being cryptonazis, of trying to lure people in with relatively inoffensive critiques of society, and then radicalizing them into the Alt-Right. Also, with videos like "The Alt-Right is too Dumb for Genetics (and Maths)" and "The Alt-Right is too Dumb for Genetics and Physiology", he decided to take on the Big Kahuna - HBD, or what was then going by as Race Realism.
What he did not take into account, however, was the possibility that the academic establishment sold him a bill of goods, and the actual science is much more on the HBDers' side than he expected... Various Alt-Right youtubers like Alt-Hype and JF Gariepy proceeded to take turns taking the piss out of him, and pointing out each and every way he was wrong. The familiar dynamic of critical responses appearing, and becoming more popular than the original "deboonking" video was now unleashed on Kraut. It did not go well for him. He ended up crashing out, got caught red-handed coordinating to flag Alt-Right videos, and coming up with some convoluted Discord schemes to humiliate his opponents. Long story short, he ended up having to take a hiatus from the internet, and to rebrand upon comeback.
Back before anyone really heard of influencer marketing, an amazing new app took the internet by storm - Candid, an online forum promising to host uncensored anonymous conversations. All your favorite youtubers were shilling it. It was the Raid, Shadow Legends of online forums... until it was all taken down by a single autistic NEET...
A youtuber going by HarmfulOpinions decided to take a deeper look at the app, and quickly found out that rather than being uncensored, Candid's moderation was powered by a woke AI. What is now accepted as a fact of life was enough to spark a massive controversy back then, not only against the company, but against the influencers that failed to do their due diligence before shilling a product. The CEO's attempts at damage control were hilariously inept, and only resulted in the hole being dug deeper, but more to the point, starved for cash in the wake of the Adpocalypse, the anti-SJW influencers decided to circle the wagons around Candid. Some realized they backed the wrong horse, and exited gracefully, but others tried using their superior numbers (both in terms of videos and their reach) to discredit HarmfulOpinions and paint him as a conspiracy theorist.
This too did not go well. Candid collapsed as a company, and the influencers involved in shilling it to the bitter end took a massive hit to their credibility.
If you want a glimpse into the past as I saw it, you can watch Mister Metokur's Tales of Trout, and the archive of Harmful Opinions' Candid series. I don't know if I actually recommend them unless you really have nothing better to do. I used to find them hilarious, but they just don't land the same way anymore. I will say they are interesting as a time capsule, and Harmful's videos in particular feels like a sign of things to come - scammy Indian CEO's, AI training to surveil and censor dissidents, conspiracy theories that are, in hindsight, naive to not believe in - that series has it all!
There was more to the story than these 3 events, of course, but those are the broad strokes of what I remember. The end result was pretty much a total collapse of the Youtube anti-SJW sphere, and gave rise to another trend called "Internet Bloodsports", aiming to center authenticity and direct confrontations over fake politeness and highschool Mean Girls games, but ended in whoring yourself out for superchats and brandishing firearms on the streets of Florida, while singing what might as well have been Kanye's latest hit.
More importantly, it was followed by the rise of BreadTube and nearly a decade of darkness, as far as internet discourse is concerned.
...then as a tragedy?
Now, it may seem like I'm putting all the blame on the left-liberal faction of the anti-woke / anti-SJW sphere, and as much as I have issues with them, I want to give them their due. Kraut was right about cryptonazis luring people in with more inoffensive stuff. We regularly see it happen right here on the Motte, with that dude that keeps nuking his accounts, so Douglas' Murray's "be careful what you're watering" argument is not wrong.
I’ve also seen enough crowds being manipulated that I can even understand his sudden turn towards trusting the experts, especially if you keep the previous argument in mind. The antidote to bad speech might be more speech, and sunlight might be the best disinfectant, but if there are crypto-authoritarians on the loose, who have no qualms about presenting themselves dishonestly, they might be able to win the crowd over long enough to take political control, and shut off all opposition. This is essentially what the woke left did, and it’s what some are afraid the woke right might pull off as well.
The problem is that the entire legitimacy of liberalism rests on the free exchange of ideas. This is especially true for the anti-woke ones, as they spent the last 8 years fending off accusation of Nazism themselves, and begging for a seat at the table. If they want to shut off the secretive and the dishonest that’s fair enough (though I will have question about Murray's quiet mumbling when his support for a new war in Iran was brought up), but they have an obligation to directly confront the open and the honest, even if they find their views disgusting.
I don’t mind being called “woke right”, if you can actually address my ideas head-on. I’ve said it before - it’s perfectly natural for liberals to attack me with all their vigor, because I oppose their fundamental values. It would be sad and disappointing if this didn’t illicit the kind of visceral reaction they are showing. However, I do mind being called “woke right” if it’s just a way to shut me out of a conversation, by slapping a scary label on me.
Actually, forget about me minding anything, the argument I’m trying to make here is that it will be a disaster for the liberals, if they keep trying to win by gatekeeping. It will be like training an AI on it's own output. A reasonable concern about about the pendulum swinging too far back, will end in declaring that wanting the economy to serve the people is fascist, finding racism in ham sandwitches, and deranged theories about angel summoners. And if you position yourself as an expert and spend all this time complaining about all these clowns hiding behind comedy when confronted on their takes about serious issues, maybe come up with a better argument then "people love talking about Paul Wolfowitz because his name starts with a nasty animal, and he's Jewish".
I reversed Marx' famous quip, because it's all fun and games when the story involves cartoon avatars, and characters with names like BasedMama and KrautAndTea, but when I see Conservative Inc. playing the same "you are wrong, and dumb for believing this" game that Kraut did, the same "we're for free speech, but you shouldn't be given such a big platform" game that Killroy did, and the same whisper networks that would try to psy-op you into believing someone's an insane conspiracy theorist now coordinating to make "Woke Right" a thing, I don't really feel like laughing. I've seen how the story involving a bunch of online autists ends, so when I see these dynamics play out on the scale of Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, I get a bit nervous.
Douglas Murray spent the first, like...hour of the podcast talking about how Darryl Cooper, the noted Winston Churchill historian, had spent his career tearing down Churchill and "just asking questions" about why Darryl is devoting so much of his time to focusing on Churchill.
Except in reality: Approximately a year ago, Cooper spent about 2 minutes making a throwaway comment about how he takes a devil's advocate position about Churchill with his friend, a big Churchill fan, as a way of riling him up and playing around with him. Douglass couldn't do 10 minutes of actual research into this topic before then spending an hour talking about how only experts, people who really understand the topic, should be allowed to talk about things publicly. Darryl Cooper in reality is a podcaster who puts out 30+ hour long series about things like: The Formation of Israel, The Civil Rights Movement/The People's Temple/Jim Jones, World War 2 from the perspective of the Germans[1], The History of Slavery, and The horror of war (a standalone episode called "The anti-humans".
[1]: His whole point with this, stated explicitly, is that Germany didn't just wake up one day and decide to be the Nazis, one of the most evil institutions to ever exist, and then at the end of the war just decide to stop being the Nazis. It was a long process of humans making (bad) human decisions. The implicit point here, and with almost all of his work, is that good people can be talked into doing really bad things, and to be cautious around "movements" (like The Peoples' Temple, or a lot of the civil rights groups) because they can slowly-then-suddenly turn into a nightmare.
Douglass showed his cards, and it turns out that he's an idiot with a nice voice. The Strange Death of Europe was a good book, but it turns out the person behind it is probably a fool.
The problem for Douglas with the DR is that he spent years doing talks and debates against mass immigration and anti-western thought where he based his whole rhetoric around the fact that, ultimately, 'we killed Hitler'.
When the foundation for that is questioned and the roles of good and bad are muddled or ignored, Doug has to respond.
It's a hallmark of what I would call, in the spirit of our new term; the faux Right. Every pontification towards what is good for Europeans has to be grounded in some form of bargain of what is 'fair'. And what determines fairness is generally just progressive morality from 10-20 years ago.
I think this is a relatively substantial mischaracterization of Murray, who has mostly called himself a classical liberal, except when he decided to embark on the contrarian project of rehabilitating the by-then-already-discredited term ‘neoconservative’ in the late 2000s and early 2010s (largely since abandoned).
He’s a gay cosmopolitan man who essentially wants the cosmopolitan liberal society of the early 2000s to continue forever. He’s pretty open about that, and it is the main reason he is opposed to mass immigration from the Islamic world.
I'm not seeing the mischaracterization. He can call himself a classical liberal neoconservative and suck as many dicks as he wants, he is still haggling against progressive morality.
Why else would a gay cosmopolitan man care so much about the legacy of Winston Churchill? It's because it's a part of his foundation for why the west deserves to survive. A moral narrative of redemption. He doesn't leverage how many amazing gay bars there used to be in London.
It’s because Murray is British and thinks British culture and history are the best in the world, and Churchill is by far the most beloved British political / cultural figure in history, topping almost every single poll of the greatest British people of all time. Ideology is entirely secondary, although in general Murray, as a fan of the British Empire - of which he considered neoconservatism / liberal imperialism a successor - likes Churchill’s imperialism. Churchill’s actual opinions are irrelevant on both sides (see, for example, Cooper’s insistence that Churchill’s primary motivation in prosecuting WW2 was some debts he allegedly owed to Jewish moneylenders).
So is Churchill basically the British Abraham Lincoln, in terms of domestic praise? Or is this more about foreign perceptions of praiseworthy Brits?
I wonder if the same historiographical trends and forces that have happened to some extent over Lincoln have clear parallels for Churchill, or if the trajectory is very different. For example, modern emphasis on how Lincoln was willing to end the war keeping slavery intact, or suspending habeus corpus, was a racist, or a mini-tyrant. Unfair IMO, I think he deserves top billing as one of the best presidents alongside Washington.
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An absolute tragedy. Churchill isn't even a top 3 prime minister of UK.
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Still not seeing the mischaracterization. Why would Churchill, the man whose decision making process ultimately nailed the final nail in the coffin of the British empire, be venerated by the likes of Murray? It's because Churchill opposed Hitler.
Ideology, for the likes of Murray, is central. That is why he spent 30 minutes waffling about good and evil on Joe Rogan when the topic of Darryl Cooper came up.
Not really. Murray’s ideology is the status quo as of the late 2000s / early 2010s. As polling suggests, in the UK among his generation that includes the extremely mainstream and almost universally accepted viewpoint (outside of the radical left and Indians) that Winston Churchill was one of the greatest Britons of all time because he ‘won’ the last major war that the country was involved in - and really there is no deeper complexity to that perception.
Murray’s ideology makes him a small-c conservative in some ways (he basically wants Britain as it existed in like 2007 to exist forever and for it to be filled with people who accept the major tenets of liberalism forever) and a classical liberal imperialist in others. The latter (liberal imperialism) isn’t an oxymoron, by the way, it has a long tradition in British politics going back at least 180 years.
It’s hard to hate Murray because, like Harris, he’s actually pretty open about what he believes and he openly acknowledges that this is mainly based on his perception of his own self-interest. He’s a gay man who wants to export liberal western culture, by force, onto the whole world and prevent mass immigration of people who hate him. You can disagree with him, but he is ideologically consistent.
The veneration of Churchill does not sprout from just winning 'a war' but what war, against who and for what cause. As I stated before, it makes little sense for a fan of British imperialism to idolize the man who functionally ended the empire with his decision making.
We can also see by Murrays own words and actions that he is haggling against progressive morality as he presents his own interests in terms of his sexuality.
To that end nothing I say is a mischaracterization, only a realistic clarification of where Murray is coming from and why.
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I was surprised by this as well. All he had to say was, "I'm not familiar with Cooper's work." Heaven forbid Douglas Murray not have an opinion on something. My weak-man take is Murray made an ass out of himself, but I only watched snippets and reactions. Rogan is too long and meandering for my tastes.
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World War II is basically the world’s secular creation myth now. Implying that this vastly destructive war that killed 60 million people could or should have been handled differently or, God forbid, avoided is basically heresy. It’s like saying “maybe Pontius Pilot shouldn’t have signed that one guy’s death warrant, because letting an angry mob override the fair application of law and due process is wrong”. In any other context a reasonable and good thing to say; but given the specific chain of events that came after and what they mean, unthinkable.
Saying this would, in the mainstream, be criticized as antisemitic, not anti-Christian. It is no longer allowed to believe that Pilate put Jesus to death at the urging of the crowd, because the crowd is Jewish.
The handful of fundamentalists who don't care(the bible is, in fairness, entirely clear about the role of the crowd) would agree with you.
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I do not think that saying "Hitler should not have attacked Poland" is very controversial, so you are likely not talking about what the Nazis could have done differently. In fact, the Western Allies tried to avoid the war by appeasing Hitler, because nobody was keen on repeating WW1. Now, you can argue that the UK and France should just have sat this one out, watching from the sidelines as Hitler takes Western Poland and then invades the USSR. Sure, that would have avoided the Blitz and the invasion of France -- or more accurately postponed them until Hitler was done with the East, but the immensely destructive war on the East front would still have happened. What is your recipe for avoiding that one? The USSR retreats to Siberia and lets Hitler take Moscow?
Nor is it very controversial that Stalin was not a nice person and it would have been better if he had behaved differently.
In the particulars, the behavior of Western allies is also substantially criticized. For example, ACOUP on strategic air power
Or take the Internment of Japanese Americans
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What? Who believes that? It's my understanding that a strong majority people across all political sides think [European] WWII was preventable, it's just that the reasons vary. I think there are, broadly speaking, about three camps that conveniently tend to align with modern political positions:
The people of Germany should have been better at fighting back and denouncing Nazism when it was rising and/or after Hitler took control (Left)
The other nations around Germany should have been better at drawing firm lines in the sand for what was allowed and what was not, it was appeasement that let Hitler get out of control (Right)
The winners of WWI shouldn't have imposed such an overly strict and emasculating treaty of Versailles which led to German resentment and decline creating an environment of radicalism and lawlessness (Center)
I mean these were all reasons, but I think historians (to the extent that they agree) roughly rank those reasons above in ascending order of importance. I guess you could add underestimating Hitler (first bin), failure of the League of nations (first bin), economic factors (second bin), criticism of the Weimar democracy (third bin) too.
The argument for non-preventability rests on what? Actions from Versailles and foreign leaders are pretty agentic and led to many of the other reasons, I guess you could call the Great Depression non-agentic, or simply say that the world hadn't yet learned these lessons because similar situations hadn't existed yet?
(edit: formatting)
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That would be a pretty anodyne statement in Christian society. Pilate is not considered a positive figure precisely because he was derelict in his duty and put Jesus to death.
The idea that it was Pilate's job to follow "due process" and that he was "derelict in his duty" is delightfully ahistorical. The laws which Pilate followed were the laws of Rome. Roman law was not very concerned with the rights of non-citizens, their brothels and salt mines were full of slaves. And Jesus was very much not a Roman citizen. As a military governor, the job ob Pontius Pilate, as far as the Senate was concerned, was to keep the peace and facilitate the extraction of wealth. How he did this was totally up to him. If one day he woke up and decided to drown a tenths of the infants in Jerusalem in boiling pig fat, Rome would only object to that as far as it lead to instability.
The fact that he even personally bothered to preside over the case is more a concession to the political touchiness of the subject than any due process. Quite frankly, the local elites were really pissed at Jesus because he had interfered with their religion by causing a ruckus with the money-changers (which ultimately threatened their business model). And Pilate decided that it would be in Rome's best interests to placate them by putting Jesus to death. Given that the followers of Jesus did not rise up in rebellion, it is hard to argue that he was wrong with his decision. (A Gibbonite would blame the fall of Rome on Christianity, but Pilate could not possibly have foreseen that.)
Quite frankly, by messing with religious institutions, Jesus was kind of asking for it, either intentionally or in a FAFO way. Most places and times did not have strong freedom of speech norms, and Jesus would have fared little better if he had criticized dominant religious practices in pretty much any culture. If he had tried his little stunt in front of the temple of Athena or Saturn or Odin or a medieval cathedral or in early Boston or in front of a mosque in contemporary Tehran or Riyadh or in front of some Buddhist temple in Myanmar, he would have fared little better. Sure, in today's Western world, he might have gotten away with just a night in a prison cell and a fine (or no penalty at all if he had opted to practice his free speech by just demonstrating with a sign "God hates money-changers"), but of all the atrocities committed in the name of Rome, the killing of Jesus likely does not even make the top million.
If we ask what most defines the bad governor the singular example is "He has an innocent man put to death." Whatever the truth of Pilate's reasoning, he was in dereliction of his greater duty to good governance. You call to cold practicality. Kill the innocent rebel, end the movement, prevent instability and possibly save many lives. Those bad but "necessary" decisions don't come from nothing, rather they come as the long consequences of earlier bad decisions and failures. How many seemed necessary at the time?
There is also a nice irony to preventing instability. Jesus, who held tremendous draw, offended the elders. They wanted him killed and they were appeased. Bar Kokhba also had draw; thus went Judea.
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Good points, but it bears pointing out that the Gospels record that Pilate repeatedly said "this man has done no wrong" and that ultimately he declared "his blood isn't on my head, it's on yours". So, our primary sources tell us that he knew damn well that it was a miscarriage of justice and that it was wrong to carry that out (otherwise he wouldn't have disclaimed the guilt). I think it's pretty fair to call that derelict of his duty, since it's apparent from the narrative that his duty was to dispense justice. At best you can say that he had two duties in conflict, but that doesn't mean he didn't neglect one of them.
From the secular perspective, sure. From the Christian perspective (which, remember is what this whole discussion has been about) nothing else can really come close to "killing God" on a list of atrocities. So I would say that depends a great deal on your stance on other things.
According to not-the-gospels Pilate however, Jesus had done wrong and his blood was gladly taken on, as befits the role and dignity of a roman magistrate.
The entirely of the Testimonium Flavium, as we have it today:
That's not "diverged greatly," that's just short.
Without the cinematic parts of washing his hands, calling jesus innocent, saying his blood’s on their heads, it’s normal roman governor behaviour. He’s there to maintain peace and render justice onto the barbarians, there’s zero dereliction of duty in that account. And I don’t appreciate those so-called “christians’“ tarring of a roman senator as a weak-willed incompetent.
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Historians of Jesus Christ run into a peculiar contradiction when it comes to trying to figure out the precise circumstances of his death. On one hand they need him to be a minor figure of the time that he wouldn't attract the attention of contemporary historians, on the other hand they need something egregious enough that it would lead to extraordinary application of the law.
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But if Jesus wasn't killed, he couldn't save everyone, right?
If He had died by very slow decay, would that have counted as a sufficient sacrifice by God Incarnate?
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Isn't it a pretty wild idea that the torture and execution of a good man "saves the world"? What's the mechanism there? Sounds a bit like human sacrifice and scapegoating doesn't it? With some magic thrown in.
"Scapegoating" itself as a word comes from Jewish tradition where the sins of the entire nation would be laid on a single literal goat who was then released into the wilderness (practically, pushed off a cliff outside town), while another 'innocent' goat would be sacrificed on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. Jesus literally and symbolically took the role of both being innocent and being sacrificed, and it's quite literal in Christianity that he took on him the sins of the world there, which sins would otherwise prevent us individually from reaching heaven. Reasons for why exactly he was capable of doing this differ across sects but usually are some variant of him being innocent or of godly nature.
In modern discourse being scapegoated is seen as a bad thing (i.e. avoiding responsibility) but Christians would agree that you need some action yourself to obtain this absolution, though it's "free" in a more general sense. Here is the key point where the various sects differ greatly, what action? Some believe that you need to follow some kind of true regret/restitution/prayer process, others that you need to confess to a priest, others that you actually don't have to do anything other than once in your whole life ask for forgiveness and that's it.
Tbh I have wondered before why atheists more militant than me don't harp on about this more. This entire concept relies on an ancient and, by most modern standards, vile concept of morality.
Forget looking at logical contradictions in the bible or the impossibility of miracles described there. The deepest core of christianity requires you to accept that offloading your guilt onto an innocent creature and then punishing that creature instead of you makes any fucking sense whatsoever. And that god accepts this bargain. I think that in any other context most modern christians would consider this an absurdly evil concept.
You mean the animal sacrifice aspect of Judaism? I agree it's definitely seen as somewhat barbaric by modern Western standards but for a good chunk of history it was pretty normal. Still practiced in parts of Hindu India and some Islamic countries, plus in Santería where that's a thing. You have to remember that part of that is because for a lot of history, animals were a major source of wealth. Judaism deliberately requiring the sacrifice of the "firstborn" or most "unblemished" of their flocks served multiple purposes - one, the fact that it was a bit of a waste was kind of the point, showing your devotion via valuable things; two, at least at some points in Jewish history, the meat would be used as a revenue and food source for the Levites, the priest tribe, who otherwise didn't have their own land; three, there's some doctrinal symbolism, both for Christians and Jews although the symbolism's exact flavor varies. I think that's relatively emblematic of the use of animal sacrifice in religion more broadly: ideas about drama, tribute, and symbolism (blood is a very obvious expression of life). I guess obviously, if you feel as a modern atheist that we are overcoming human nature or something, sure it might be
Or do you mean the moral idea of sin and guilt in general? I feel like that's pretty natural and human. People struggle with guilt in non-religious contexts all the time. Wanting someone or something to take away that guilt follows pretty logically. Even psychologists think a certain degree of guilt is healthy - it's more the shame side of things that can be harmful, or when it's excessive.
Edit: What exactly is the vile part? The animal sacrifice (poor animals, barbaric butchery) or the guilt bit? I guess you could consider wanting other people or things to take away guilt as somewhat maladaptive. But a full absolution via zero personal action/responsibilty is not typically the connected belief, except for maybe some born-again Christians, but I think they tend to be the minority, most still feel like some steps of personal improvement or reconciliation are needed (i.e. repentence).
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Unironically yes. The Bible depicts it as a sacrifice: though those who killed Jesus didn’t intend it that way, Jesus did. And if you do a quick search, you will find a million sermons with titles like “Christ our Scapegoat,” referencing the literal scapegoat in Leviticus.
Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, offering himself as a sacrifice to God the Father on behalf of sinners is the mechanism. It’s the core of Christian belief.
Maybe I should try reading the Bible at some point. Is it good literature? :P
There's some novelty in that particular human sacrifice: instead of the victim being labeled evil, he gets labeled god. Which kinda puts a finishing touch to the whole tradition instead of having to find a new scapegoat at each turning. In theory, at least.
Edit: typo
There are (roughly) two kinds of religiously motivated murders.
One is the sacrifice, where you want to send your god a juicy piece of meat or some virgin pussy or kid as a bribe or tribute. Generally, the sacrifice is a mean to an end, the process is really a transaction between the one sponsoring the sacrifice and god. Sure, you might get extra virtue points for sacrificing your favorite daughter, but if she happens to have her period on the set date you can just sacrifice another daughter. Generally, you want your sacrifices to be pure and hale. Sacrificing a lame goat or a disobeyant child might be seen as an insult, after all.
The other type of murder is a punishment for a religious transgression, real or imagined, such as witchcraft, blasphemy, heresy. This is primarily a matter between the accused and the community, just like a secular crime.
This is well illustrated by the concept of the scapegoat. You start out with two goats. One stays pure and is sacrificed to god, the other gets the sins transferred to it and is then abandoned in the desert, for god to punish it as he wants. Full of sins, it would not make a good sacrifice for god, after all.
While punishments are widespread, pure sacrifices of humans are very much optional for religions. In the religions of the book it only appears (to my knowledge) in YHWH's fucked up little mind games he plays with Abraham, with the sacrifice being stopped. The Romans -- themselves not shy about infanticide -- likewise stamped it out where they could.
Of course, there are also mixed forms. For example, the Christian tradition of burning someone at the stake for religious transgressions is very much reminiscent of burnt sacrifices by earlier religions. I think that sometimes, it is explicitly stated that the purpose of this form of death penalty is to purify the victim so that they can get into heaven despite their crime. This is more seen as a 'favor' to the victim than as a favor to god, but parsing it as "souls for the soul lord!" does not seem entirely wrong.
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It depends on what parts of the Bible. Some, absolutely. My very-atheist hometown of Portland, OR (suburbs but still) had a "Bible as Literature" English elective class in high school! No, I didn't take it, sadly.
Not all chapters are equal, and it also depends on the translation. KJV has a pretty famous poetic style, though the NRSV keeps a good bit of the charm while updating the language somewhat. Read some famous passages in the ESV though and you might feel like a toddler, it's pretty bad. There's some of the Psalms, of course, parts of Isaiah with nice imagery, the start of Genesis is a bit of a classic. In the New Testament, it's a little more parceled out into particular chapters, though John and Luke are definitely more literary than the other Gospels.
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Afaik aztek human sacrifice tradition also held many of the victims in high regard.
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It's kind of cliched.
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Yeah basically God sacrificing his son patched out the sacrifice dependency.
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Yes. But the Christian position is that even though the outcome was good, the act was still bad. I've never heard anyone seriously try to argue that killing Jesus was good on a consequentialist basis, anyways.
There have been people who've taken that line historically. That's the line of the Gospel of Judas, for instance: that Judas was a hero because he caused the Crucifixion, which saved the world.
However, this is obviously heretical, and to my knowledge orthodox Christianity has never had any time for it. The Crucifixion may have been the means by which the world was saved, but it was still nonetheless an evil deed.
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The Gospel of Judas did.
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I've heard about some ancient Gnostics who argued exactly that. They got excommunicated as heretics.
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