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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   31816 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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What did you think 'sinful' meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?

Yes, and trivially. The problem with 'sinful' is the same problem 'misogynistic' or 'hateful' has in that it's thought-terminating and usually invoked as "fuck you, stop doing what I don't like".

I am happy that the traditionalists have figured out they actually have to make the argument without the short-circuit. Which should be easy, because they're unimpeachably correct, which is why they were right to pick up the thought-terminating argument from aesthetics in the first place and it didn't take them 60 years to come up with a workable counterargument.

Yes, and trivially. The problem with 'sinful' is the same problem 'misogynistic' or 'hateful' has in that it's thought-terminating and usually invoked as "fuck you, stop doing what I don't like".

This reminds me of the guy I met who couldn't believe that I described something as heretical. "'Heresy' is, like, something fundamentalists scream while losing their minds!" His only experience with the concept was from media hostile to Christianity. Had no idea that within the tradition we use the word matter of factly; dispassionately.

Sin has only ever meant one thing and at least in my experience it's been used consistently. Via (hostile) media portrayals I have a vague caricature in my head of an ignorant Southern woman throwing the word around to suit her biases, but all such types I've met in real life have instead been progressives.

I am happy that the traditionalists have figured out they actually have to make the argument without the short-circuit. Which should be easy, because they're unimpeachably correct, which is why they were right to pick up the thought-terminating argument from aesthetics in the first place and it didn't take them 60 years to come up with a workable counterargument.

Where's that CS Lewis poaster when you need him?

There has never been a shortage of Christian intellectual tradition for those willing to engage with it. Except, I guess, in Protestant backwaters isolated from that tradition. But even they generally had access to Lewis.

As someone who came from a Protestant backwater (evangelical non-denominational, essentially) I can attest to that! We didn't have Acquinas or Augustine or Calvin (and we didn't want them either!) but we had Lewis. We adored Lewis!

Why here's a potentially appropriate bit of Lewis now, on how non-Christians often view the idea of sin:

Apart from this linguistic difficulty, the greatest barrier I have met is the almost total absence from the minds of my audience of any sense of sin. This has struck me more forcibly when I spoke to the R.A.F. than when I spoke to students: whether (as I believe) the proletariat is more self-righteous than other classes, or whether educated people are cleverer at concealing their pride, this creates for us a new situation. The early Christian preachers could assume in their hearers, whether Jews, Metuentes, or Pagans, a sense of guilt. (That this was common among Pagans is shown by the fact that both Epicureanism and the mystery religions both claimed, though in different ways, to assuage it.) Thus the Christian message was in those days unmistakably the Evangelium, the Good News. It promised healing to those who knew they were sick. We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy.

The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God in the dock.

It is generally useless to try to combat this attitude, as older preachers did, by dwelling on sins like drunkenness and un-chastity. The modern proletariat is not drunken. As for fornication, contraceptives have made a profound difference. As long as this sin might socially ruin a girl by making her the mother of a bastard, most men recognized the sin against charity which it involved, and their consciences were often troubled by it. Now that it need have no such consequences, it is not, I think, generally felt to be a sin at all. My own experience suggests that if we can awake the conscience of our hearers at all, we must do so in quite different directions. We must talk of Conceit, spite, jealousy, cowardice, meanness, etc. But I am very far from believing that I have found the solution of this problem.

I suppose that hasn't been the solution, no. I do on occasion feel guilty about being spiteful, jealous, cowardly or mean. But I do not seek to fix those flaws so that I might not be judged as harshly by God. The closest thing to it is that I would not feel just in judging God, as Lewis describes, for allowing war, poverty and disease, if I myself allow it in my small ways.

There's also the entire thing about framing sin as sickness - if I am sick, I might seek remedy for my own good, but why in the world would I feel guilty about it? Least of all before God, who is often described as the one who sends sicknesses down on people to test them, humble them etc.

Maybe all that compulsive society-scale guilt tripping is good for society in the long term, but I do not see why I should willingly submit to it where my own conscientousness suffices.

As far as the judgment thing goes, Lewis had some more to say! First, the idea of sin isn't that you avoid sin because God will punish you for it, but because sin is bad in and of itself:

People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, "If you keep a lot of rules I'll reward you, and if you don't I'll do the other thing." I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself.

To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.

As for why you should feel guilty, well, do you think a bad character is something to feel proud about? I'm a coward: I have learned that about myself. I feel shame about it. I'm trying not to be one any longer! I don't think feeling guilty about our flaws is that strange a thing to feel. When we think about God as the ultimate Judge it might be better to focus less on the potential punishment for our crimes, so to speak, then for the fact that who we are will be judged, and judged perfectly. Lewis writes a bit on this as well in his essay "The World's Last Night":

We have all encountered judgments or verdicts on ourselves in this life. Every now and then we discover what our fellow creatures really think of us. I don’t of course mean what they tell us to our faces: that we usually have to discount. I am thinking of what we sometimes overhear by accident or of the opinions about us which our neighbours or employees or subordinates unknowingly reveal in their actions: and of the terrible, or lovely, judgments artlessly betrayed by children or even animals. Such discoveries can be the bitterest or sweetest experiences we have. But of course both the bitter and the sweet are limited by our doubt as to the wisdom of those who judge. We always hope that those who so clearly think us cowards or bullies are ignorant and malicious; we always fear that those who trust us or admire us are misled by partiality. I suppose the experience of the Final Judgment (which may break in upon us at any moment) will be like these little experiences, but magnified to the Nth.

For it will be infallible judgment. If it is favorable we shall have no fear, if unfavorable, no hope, that it is wrong. We shall not only believe, we shall know, know beyond doubt in every fibre of our appalled or delighted being, that as the Judge has said, so we are: neither more nor less nor other. We shall perhaps even realise that in some dim fashion we could have known it all along. We shall know and all creation will know too: our ancestors, our parents, our wives or husbands, our children. The unanswerable and (by then) self-evident truth about each will be known to all.

First, the idea of sin isn't that you avoid sin because God will punish you for it, but because sin is bad in and of itself:

Well - yes, that's mostly what I said. I avoid [bad thing], because [bad thing] is bad in and of itself, when you dig down to the root of it. And I understand that in the Christian tradition, doing good things and not doing bad things is also thought to bring man closer to the state of Heaven.

The issues begin when people's intuition of what is good [joyful, peaceful, knowledgeable and powerful] starts coming in conflict with what the Good Book tells us is good [mostly focusing on what God said is good], and somewhere in the middle the church muddles things further. I as an atheist do not grok "sin" because "sin" to me is specifically something that a Higher Power has ontologically, fundamentally deemed to be Bad and which is separate from what a human might deem bad for their own purposes and with their own frame of seeing things. Because I do not believe into a Higher Power, or that even if a small-h higher power exists it does not hold fundamental authority over morals, I am not moved by condemnations of sin. As I said elsewhere, if a thing is harmful you don't need the S word to justify its harmfulness.

@FlyingLionWithABook

Speak my name, and after a week or so I'll probably appear!

Where's that CS Lewis guy when you need him?

never been a shortage of Christian intellectual tradition

You're making my point for me: there has been a serious lack of meaningful addition to Christian intellectual tradition over the last 60 years, and that tradition ran into a sort of... replication crisis of its social science (from the standpoint of those on the ground at that time).

I'm a bit confused as to your thesis. My intent here was to demonstrate that the argument was made over 60 years ago and hasn't required updating. And even Lewis was only riffing on much older material that also still stands to this day.

To be sure in that time period people have massively fallen away from God and lost fluency with the language in which the arguments are made. I think the disconnect you're talking about has more to do with ignorant moderns needing lots of extra hand holding to be able to understand what we're even talking about, after generations of educational bankruptcy and training by hostile media.

But re: the rest, your words do not match my experience. The Western tradition has been very active in that time (though mostly in the wrong direction imo) and the Eastern tradition has been exploding in both vigor and popularity. Surely Solzhenitsyn made a mark? And a lot else has been going on. Only, few are listening.

This sort of thing would seem to be cyclical for mankind. People honor God, prosper, become prideful, turn away, suffer terribly, and only once the same old lessons have been relearned the hard way do the survivors pick up the pieces and start the process again.

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