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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   35348 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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You would consider you new preferences and habits to be unambiguously superior to before, yes? If so, where is the aforementioned trade-off?

A physically-fit person exercises and eats vegetables and meat rather than ice cream by the tubful. They think that fitness is better than the pleasures of a sedentary life and a nutritionally-poor but flavor-rich diet. They sacrifice the joys of the one to gain the joys of the other, no? I sacrifice things I want, and even some things I want very, very badly, for a chance at things that are better. I sacrifice these things because I believe they are contrary to the will of God, no matter how much they please me, and no matter how much I want them. I could even argue that they are actually permitted, through this loophole or that shaky argument, but that would be rationalization and self-deception. So I have to let them go.

It would, yes. If the word of Christ really is the Way and the Truth and the Light, Christians ought to be far less complacent in their efforts to spread the gospel than they currently are. Should you not rout the disbelievers, those who lead souls astray with false idols and apathetic impiety? Should you not hate the heretics, those who twist revelation into abomination? Your predecessors certainly did, so what changed?

No Christian who has ever lived has succeeded in emulating Christ, in living without sin and in doing perfectly as Christ would do. All Christians stumble and fail, because they are human. Given that we know that all Christians fail to execute Christianity perfectly, it stands to reason that different Christians in different times fail in different ways. Some Christians fail by lacking mercy; others fail by lacking courage, some by lacking love, some by lacking faith. It behooves us to determine which failures we each are prone to and to make a special effort to guard ourselves against the failures we are weak to.

Suffice to say, my personal weaknesses do not include a deficit of hatred. The hard part for me is "Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you," and "Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us," so that is the part I must fortify. Further, Christianity cannot be spread by the sword. That doesn't mean the sword is useless, or that we are required to be pacifists; it means that we must recognize that the ends we can achieve through the tools of this mortal world are strictly limited. Evil, sin, impiety and false idols have always existed and will always exist so long as this present world remains; you cannot kill your way to a Heaven on earth, nor achieve a Heaven on earth by any other means. If we fight, we fight for the mortal aims of upholding justice, defending the innocent, and breaking the power of ascendant evil, and we do so with the understanding that our means must be as limited as our ends. If that compromises our victory or our survival, so be it; Christians have been martyred before and will be martyred again, and our God has promised to wipe every tear from our eyes.

Probably many who called themselves Christians in the past went too far, and were lacking in mercy. Certainly many who call themselves Christians now seem to have gone too far and abandoned everything but mercy, and are lacking in courage, zeal and righteousness. None have us have ever been perfect; many of us have been good enough for the challenges facing them.

I think the Christianity you practice is actually quite different to the old sort, at least in practical implementation. For one, the demons of the earth who possessed the insane, swapped babies with changelings, communed with witches, and who many good Christians thought actually, literally existed have seemingly vanished.

I am skeptical that changelings ever existed, and that witches ever actually communed with the devil. The Old Testament itself condemns empty superstitions:

He cut down cedars, or perhaps took a cypress or oak. He let it grow among the trees of the forest, or planted a pine, and the rain made it grow. It is used as fuel for burning; some of it he takes and warms himself, he kindles a fire and bakes bread. But he also fashions a god and worships it; he makes an idol and bows down to it. Half of the wood he burns in the fire; over it he prepares his meal, he roasts his meat and eats his fill. He also warms himself and says, “Ah! I am warm; I see the fire.” From the rest he makes a god, his idol; he bows down to it and worships. He prays to it and says, “Save me! You are my god!” They know nothing, they understand nothing; their eyes are plastered over so they cannot see, and their minds closed so they cannot understand. No one stops to think, no one has the knowledge or understanding to say, “Half of it I used for fuel; I even baked bread over its coals, I roasted meat and I ate. Shall I make a detestable thing from what is left? Shall I bow down to a block of wood?” Such a person feeds on ashes; a deluded heart misleads him; he cannot save himself, or say, “Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?”

...And that was thousands of years before science and the cell-phone camera. Nor is atheism a novel development; there have been atheists as far back as we have writing. Nothing about the basic questions has ever really changed. "Many Christians" believing in changelings or witches makes no difference to me; I do aim to follow "Many Christians", but rather Christ.

The relevant part of your argument seems to be that previous Christians were very much not Materialists, but then I am very much not a Materialist either. Even though the the demons are silent and the miracles have ceased, I take the reality of their respective sources as an axiom, and shape my life accordingly.

But I have a hunch that the sort of casual superstition that past Christians practiced may have been vital (or at least a factor) in avoiding the exact sort of secularization that modernity hath wrought, at least among the common folk. Us gentry might be able to satisfy ourselves with philosophies of the Good, but many don't see the point of belief when there's nothing concrete in it for them.

And this is the crux, one might say. I am not advocating a philosophy of the Good. Sin is very real in the most concrete sense, and its lethal effects can be directly observed. If you let it have its way in your life, it can and will erode your substance until little that is human remains. It was not hard to observe the process in my own life, and it is trivial to observe it doing so in the lives of others.

Nor does it seem to me that the superstitions have ever gone away. At every point through the few centuries of the modern era, superstition has remained as strong and ubiquitous a force as it ever was; only the details have changed, not the mechanism. Science is now dominant, so our superstitions tend to be built out of technobabble, rather than legends and folktales; in both cases, they are built from the available pool of loose information. Humans don't seem to change; we are as we ever have been. There is nothing "concrete" in current beliefs; there is practical knowledge kept honest by constant feedback from reality, with precision both sufficient for and equal to the tools available to implement it, and then there is superstition expanding to fill what space remains. That's the way it's always been, and my bet is that it is the way it will always be, no matter how long we last.

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