Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Maybe better suited to the culture war thread, but I just had a long phone call with my friend from college, let's call her Caroline. Very atheistic, but fairly middle of the road politically. Went to Catholic School growing up, but was raised in a Jewish family (something to do with the school system in Phoenix. Recently has been getting more and more into Christianity both because she's dating a quite Christian man, and because she feels like we need God (and implicitly the Christian God is the only thing that works). I have a lot sympathy for this position, as I am a Catholic convert myself, although I haven't been to mass recently, as I no longer believe in many aspects of the faith. However this line of thinking, which is also espoused by many RETVRN posters on this forum, seems rather... myopic, both historically and just in general. Not only does 2/3 of the world's current population live without the Christian God, historically we have very successful nearly atheistic civil societies (Rome and Confucian China off the top of my head, although perhaps calling Republican Rome atheistic is a stretch). Perhaps you could argue that Christianity is better suited to the Western temperament, as it is the religion of our forefathers. This is what initially drew me into Catholicism, as Buddhism, despite being more intellectually appealing, couldn't connect with me on a cultural/spiritual level. Yet as @Hoffmeister25 has argued before, so is Germanic and Hellenic paganism, and those were violently destroyed nearly 1500 years ago.
So my question for all the RETVRN posters on this form (and also for those who agree more closely with myself) is thus. What is your best argument for why we need God as a society, and why the Christian God in particular? What were/are the flaws in previous/current societies that had at least surface level success (outside of the Modern West) that could be remedied with Christianity? For those of you who aren't Christian, I'd like to hear more about what your own spiritual/moral system looks like, and what your own vision of the future of society going forward is.
We are social creatures who pursue social things; that is 99% of our existence and joy, we are fish in social waters. God is a kind of social perfection which allows for optimal human flourishing (or the pursuit thereof) via social cognition. God is conceived in such a way that He supercedes all other social pulls and pressures. Functional descriptions of God, in which He is heard and obeyed because of His social force, are both prior to any philosophical speculation about divinity, and primary in the theistic world religions. Functionally, God is that which demands full attention and allegiance. If you have a community which has full attention and allegiance to God — the Blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see, to Him be honor and eternal dominion — and that God is good, even Love, then you have a good community. Everything else is implementation detail or distraction.
The Christian God is especially good. The will and interest of God is shown in Jesus, who is widely considered to be one of the goodest persons ever, even by anti-theists. Christians have been at the forefront of relieving social and moral ills for centuries. There are 2000 years of odes and elaboration upon Christ which can be read by Christians (though some of this is theological, meaning it is worthless). There are 3800 years if you assume that Christ was foreshadowed in Genesis and Job, and if you subscribe to the ancient idea that every culture has a shadow of Christ, then you can see Him in every world myth. Even more importantly, Christians have the best and most reverent music.
The competitor to Christianity is just Islam, which has serious problems in terms of effecting wellbeing. Its liturgy is required to be in Arabic; its music (they don’t call it music) is set in stone; the figure of Muhammad is not as pristine as the figure of Jesus; its emphasis on Hadith makes it too legalistic and ritualistic to be truly utilitarian; some of the Surahs are no longer relevant; etc. This God is not your Father, but the Christian God is (ideal in an evolutionary sense).
Buddhism is irrelevant. Something like compassion meditation is awesome, and I’m sure there are some good stories. But this really isn’t good enough. Its not prosocial enough, its not dramatic enough, it doesn’t test us enough. If Christians wanted, they could steal all the good parts of Buddhism, but the opposite could not happen.
I’m not sure precisely what you mean. Outside of the West, I can see Koreans enjoying better communities through Christianity, by inducing more sharing and fewer conspicuous status purchases. It could probably induce family formation. More selflessness means more philanthropy and less waste. That kind of thing. The current feminism hysteria could be cured by (1) revering the Mother of God, (2) revering Christ as the Saving Victim.
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I’m a convinced Christian but rather skeptical of “retvrners” mostly because I don’t see a living faith per say (granted this isn’t everyone and im an outsider on a lot of it) I don’t see talk of praying or charity in the name of God, or attempts to live out the faith. It’s got rather a zombie feel to it, as though the person is going through motions and pep talking themselves into it and into doing the trappings but without the faith behind it.
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I honestly, earnestly, really believe in God and Jesus Christ and the Sacraments. It's not much deeper than that. To me, your question is almost, "Why should we enter into a relationship with the Creator who has a plan for us all to live in happiness and perfect fulfillment, instead of trying to find a connection with Him through less certain methods or worshiping demons instead?"
I don't know why anyone would convert to Christianity except for the reason that they think it's true. Yes, society will suffer the further we get away from God. Pretty much every successful society had some sort of ritualistic belief in God, a higher order, and some kind of cosmic punishment for wrongs committed. This is a relevant statement:
But committing to a religious belief that you don't actually respect is not going to magically create that integrity either. Much the opposite, if I had to guess.
Accepting a religious belief you don't actually hold may lead to embracing it, though.
People are constantly trying to change their own beliefs, usually with little success.
I am pretty much constantly in a state of procrastination-fueled stress. I have learned, hundreds of times over, that work is not only the way out of that stress, but is also in the moment more enjoyable than continuing to procrastinate. Yet I still don't believe it. I would pay virtually any amount of money just to convince myself of something I already know for a fact is true.
The same goes for my religious beliefs. I've seen prayer and fasting lead to big results over and over yet still don't truly believe they work.
Really I think what's happening is that it's easy for reason to come around to emotional beliefs, and very difficult to do the reverse. When people "fake it until they make it," converting to religions they say are strictly speaking false, they're recognizing on some deep level the good that comes from those religions.
I've had some success with making contracts with my own subconsciousness.
It's simply not possible to run away. You either decide that you're going to do something, or that you're not. You decide once, do you actually want to do X, or do you not want to do X? If you decide to do X, then simply do it. Figure out how you'd do that task in concrete steps, if there's a step you don't know, list the steps to figure it out (force applied in the direction of a vague thing simply doesn't feel good, and pushing any harder doesn't automatically turn a goal into a plan if your system 1 cannot do this without the help of system 2) As for the things you've decided to do, you might need to do them more densely (that is, don't waste too much time between them) until your pace is fast enough that your future dreams are archived fast enough for your liking.
In return, you get to feel no stress (perhaps you need to catch up on what you neglected before this happens). Also, the more you control your own life, the more you get things in order, the more decision-power your subconsciousness should give you in return (since you can be trusted with said power). What else can you demand in return? Confidence, peace of mind, energy, whatever you want.
Unhappiness is simply an a contract that people make with themselves without realizing it. It's called "I will be unhappy until I achieve what I want, because I can't trust myself to work hard if I don't feel unhappy". Keep in mind that this doesn't have to be true - some people might be more productive when they're in a good mood. Negative emotions are simply a signal that something is wrong, kind of like a fire alarm. If your brain does not think that something is wrong, the signal does not get triggered.
By the way, a thing you might have accidentally done to yourself, is attempted to break out this loop - and then interpreted the attempt negatively. For instance, if you had limited success, then rather celebrating it as a small victory, you might have considered it a small failure, but punishing your attempts at improvement is dangerous, it's conditioning yourself into believing that change isn't worth it. Some even say that chronic depression is this kind of meta-level learned-helplessness.
By the way, you might want to try energy-drinks / coffee. If these calm you down and help you get stuff done, you might have ADHD.
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To some extent - like if someone starts a prayer life they might receive signal graces and start to have the "proof" they need to believe for real. But if those signal graces don't come, or if they do but they do not lead to a deeper intellectual understanding, then doubt and distrust will quickly set in.
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It's not a stretch, its just entirely wrong. It would be wrong for Imperial Rome as well. Like, there are many, many dissertations written about the importance and universality of religious ritual in Rome, but if you really want to experience it first hand, just go there and tour any of the hundreds of temples they built. They didnt do it for aesthetics.
Old pagan religions had different virtue ethics systems so it can often be easy to miss how devout these civilizations were despite all the drinking killing and whoring. Also people forget that the cynical libertine city slicker/salt of the earth rural farmer divide has existed forever, and a small strata of the urban upper class isn’t going to accurately represent the beliefs of society as a whole.
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Indeed, as Bret Devereaux (from the ACOUP blog) often points out: it's important to remember that people in the past actually believed in their religion.
This is useful reminder about people in the present as well.
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As for what I think religion is going to look like in the future, I think it’s very tough to predict what AI is going to do and how it will shape people’s religious experiences. I’m loath to make an attempt at prediction just yet.
What I’d like future religion to look like, once the hyper-advanced one-world technocracy takes over, is a paradigm that leaves room for both a High Religion and a Low Religion. The High Religion would be highly centralized, universalized, and cosmopolitan, filling a similar social role to medieval Catholicism. It’d be the religion of the State, a hierarchical and orderly religion with grand cathedrals, inspiring awe.
I’d like this to look, theologically and aesthetically, something like Zoroastrianism, or, for a fictional example, the Faith Of The Seven in A Song Of Ice And Fire. There is a central overarching godhead, but it is split into multiple personae/sub-identities which act as intermediaries between its incomprehensible hyperintelligence and mankind. Those personae don’t all share the same motivations and intentions, which can explain why so much of the world seems chaotic and not guided by some grand unified “master plan”.
The Low Religion would look more like Shinto or Proto-Indo-European religion, centered around ancestor worship and personal tutelary deities. Guardian angels, the spirits of specific locations or families, nature spirits, etc. It would allow for a far more eclectic and personalized range of worship practices rooted in specific communities, and could be theologically integrated in some way with the High Religion such that they are understood not to be in inherent tension.
As for my personal spirituality, I’m very much still trying to figure that out. Like you, I’m trying to balance the competing demands of, on the one hand, attempting to locate a worldview which intuitively seems true and meaningful, and on the other hand trying to make sure my religious practices can integrate me into a larger cultural and communal framework that isn’t a total weirdo LARP. If there was a thriving modern Hellenist community in the United States today I would probably join it in a heartbeat, but there isn’t, so I have to try and figure out what actually-existing thing works for me. I’ve been reading into Hermeticism and esotericism more generally, in the hope that it will allow me to engage in an existing religious tradition on a level beyond the literal/exoteric.
So you want Catholicism without sexual morality? You want grand cathedrals and theological dissertations and angelic hierarchies and patron saints and guardian angels. You want angry superintelligences running amok(yes, God is much more powerful than demons but is far less interventionist). You want mysteries and establishment hierarchy. You want private devotions, sodalities, archconfraternities.
I also want Catholicism without the baked-in commitments to universal human equality and open-ended duty of care to the least productive, least valuable members of the human race. (Commitments which appear to be a large factor underlying why the Catholic Church is one of the largest and most committed facilitators of mass immigration to Europe and the United States.) I’m also uncomfortable with how many of its most important saints are venerated precisely because they were persecuted by the society around them; this seems yet again to center the outcasts, the dissidents, the weirdos. Catholicism built a very impressive edifice atop a Third-Worldist-adjacent ideological chassis, but the underlying logic was inevitably going to take over and become dominant at some point, which is (in my opinion) how you get modern Catholicism.
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What my mind knows to be true at the level of rational, propositional judgement: There is no meaning. There are no morals. All value judgements are nothing more than subjective sentiments. The world described by fundamental physics is the only world there is.
What my "soul" knows to be true via perceptual, lived experience: There is such a thing as meaning, and there is such a thing as "The Good" that exists outside of us, although saying anything about it in concrete terms is virtually impossible. It is the height of arrogance to think that The Good would allow itself to be encapsulated in straightforward principles like "justice" or "fairness" or "duty". The Good is a trickster; it delights in doing strange things and keeping people on their toes. The only way to know anything of The Good is to humble yourself, be quiet, and listen closely to what each individual moment is telling you. After a lifetime of cultivating this practice, it is possible that one may obtain something that could be called "knowledge", but it will only ever be one piece of a larger whole.
It'll continue to muddle on as it always has. Different races, civilizations, forms of life are always constantly ascending or declining, this is nothing new. I do believe that it's possible for the universe as a whole to reach a "bad ending", although how likely this is to happen is anyone's guess.
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I'd point to the wealth of social science evidence showing that religious people are happier, have more friends, give more money to charity, have more trust, have more children and, my personal favourite, have more satisfying sex lives. In our atomised, lonely, anxious, childless and sexless age, all that stuff seems even more important.
Answering why Christianity is a harder question, but I guess I'd point to the alternatives. Only the Abrahamic religions seem to have a strong pronatal effect (Hindus in India have fewer children than Christians and Muslims). Of those, Judaism you really need to marry into and Islam leads to gestures wildly at the Middle East.
How do you know you’re not mistaking correlation for causation, or even getting the causation reversed? Perhaps people who are inclined toward pro-social and conservative temperaments are more likely to express religious belief to pollsters because that’s the social software into which they were raised? Meanwhile the people with the same basic temperament (and same basically successful and pro-social life patterns) who live in Japan — a country where Christianity has had very little impact, and in which most people’s engagement with religious practice is extremely sporadic and surface-level — would either express wishy-washy belief in Buddhism, or honestly report that they are not sincerely religious.
Why is “having a lot of kids” the most important thing a religion can inspire its adherents to do? African and Haitian Christians routinely have families of 6-7 children, and that certainly hasn’t made their lives or their countries better. I’d much rather those places have smaller families, but for geopolitical reasons and for their own good.
Islamic societies were the most advanced in the world for centuries. Look into the Islamic Golden Age. The civilization that built the Alhambra and founded the first universities in the world, institutions which directly inspired the Europeans who founded the oldest centers of higher learning in Europe.
Early Christian writers talked about treating their women and slaves better than the pagans- and in ancient Rome this was not an all-important value you could expect them to lie about. Anthropologists today note the effects of Christianization in the third world.
These Islamic societies were not majority Islamic- Islam degrades HBD capital over the long term by encouraging cousin marriage. As a scientific racist I'd expect you to pay attention to that.
Doesn't pass the sniff test since the great men of the Islamic golden age were, as far as I know, all Muslims. Any hard evidence for this position?
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This would be highly surprising if true; I’ve seen persuasive evidence that the elites of these societies were not majority Arab, but my understanding is that Islamization was extremely thorough and brutal — hence the flight of the Zoroastrian dissident population all the way to India, where they persist as Parsees to this day.
As for the cousin marriage thing, clearly many forms of Christianity also failed to effectively stamp out the practice (hence the discussion around the so-called Hajnal Line) so this seems far from dispositive regarding the superiority of one over the other.
Islamization was thorough, it probably wasn't quick, the middle east was highly religiously diverse within living memory- preferential immigration policies for middle eastern Christians and different fertility rates are what drove the Christian population from an actual majority in Lebanon, near parity in the rest of the levant, and large minorities in Iraq and Egypt to their current pitiful state. The Ottoman Empire had much larger Christian populations than would be expected based on present day territory.
There is also a vast difference in cousin marriage rates between Christian and Muslim Arabs, to say nothing of non-Hajnal Christian societies like Ireland, Iberia, Slavic lands etc and Islamic societies. The real effect of the Hajnal line was raising the female age at marriage very early.
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Why are the current religions the only alternatives? Rome before its days of decadence around the time of the Gracchi thru to Caesar had an extremely pronatal society that was built around civic virtue. Same with Athens during the Persian wars. I'm not familiar with the exact demographics of Confucian China, but I would imagine it's also similar.
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