This is the first intermission of đ¯, listed as season 1 episode 7 for filing purposes. In this episode, TracingWoodgrains, MasterThief, The Sultan Of Swing, XantosCell, and Unsaying discuss religious community.
This discussion was originally slated to be released as an episode of the The Bailey podcast, but eventually it was decided that it should be published elsewhere instead, and so it finds its home here, at đ¯.
The image used in the video is Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld's Pentecost woodcut for "Die Bibel in Bildern", 1860:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schnorr_von_Carolsfeld_Bibel_in_Bildern_1860_226.png
Show notes:
36:00 Unsaying's superintelligence of deity post: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/a54d99/the_compression_problem/
39:47 Despite instructions made in the moment, this tangent was not cut out, as it turned out to be relevant. Normally, any requests to cut something out would be honored, but everyone involved assented to this edit of the episode.
47:03 Xantos's snake-handling video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2dlnqRDmmds
Extended show notes:
(Discussing unsuitability for marriage and the path of monasticism) https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hkesjh/comment/fwy8ofv/
https://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/watching-spotlight-young-priest
https://babylonbee.com/news/dozens-of-bible-verses-come-forward-to-accuse-joel-osteen-of-abuse
(If people want more BG on heresies, i dunno) https://old.reddit.com/r/Catholicism/comments/4ihgog/extra_history_on_early_christian_schisms_pt_2/
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Notes -
Christians often claim "you can't get the benefits of strong communities / purpose / strong morality without honest belief in ". An atheist in the episode claimed (paraphrasing) "the community cannot be separated from the truthfulness of the religion's claims" - as if the religions morality and community depend on the truth of skypapa.
As much as it's true endorsing false claims is bad, because people (and you plausibly) will believe them, both of these aren't true - you just can have strong morals and communities without religion, you can join a religious community and believe in the morality but not the mystical part and get "the benefit", and the benefits of community morality, rituals, purpose etc were gained by all past religious communities - romans, christians, egyptians, sumerians, despite their religions being entirely false. (or, like, 95% of them being false if you hold one of them). Much of christianity, or any other religion, could be substituted wholesale for a bunch of other beliefs, and still "work" in a community that believes them. And this is clearly true, given how many times it's happened historically!
Personally I think the chain of causality works the other way around. God created a church which both preaches the truth and gives its followers the tools they need to do what God wants. Religions work to the extent that they copy this original church, i.e. the more similar they are (both in message and in method) the more effective they will be. I think these are also interrelated in the sense that a church without 1 of message or method will eventually lose the other.
I can't quite tell what you're saying here.
If you intend 'a church' to mean christianity, like, specific type of christianity is correct, religion goodness is how christian it is, old religions were 'shards of not yet known christianity': Why does islam seem to "work" so well, then? And why did greek, indian, buddhist, sumerian, etc etc etc etc religions work so well? Baptism is much more similar to anglicanism, catholicism, eastern orthodoxy than it is to islam, to say nothing about hinduism, or atheism, yet the 'effectiveness' level - conversion, strength of institutions, etc, seem comparable. Also, atheism is beating christianity. A causal, relational, non-unified, evolutionary explanation that takes various practices and beliefs as separate and related in complex ways fits much much better than 'there is one true religion and similarity to all is what matters'
If you intend this to be perennialist - there's one true church, and it's mystical and complicated and beyond understanding, and all religions are attempts at it but don't come that close, but are vaguely similar in how close they are - why is that true? Consider how religions having different niches - "god says you can't eat X berry" because X berry is poisonous, "god says we must have X social relation" because X is a socially useful (but not perfect, given different ones replace it later) social relation. This makes more sense if religions are just complex groups of beliefs and practices rather than "surviving based on similarity to the true church". And - what are the beliefs of this true church, anyway? What does perennialism actually mean, beyond "religions have some good points sometimes"?
You're right, this is a complicated subject and I didn't explain myself very well. I gestured towards two things, the "method" and "message" of religion. The message just refers to how true it is, i.e. whether the most important claims of the religion are correct. The method refers to everything else about the religion, including both its social technology (i.e. its organization, how it gains converts and followers, etc.) and its social usefulness to adherents (to simplify a lot, how psychologically healthy it is to adhere to the religion).
I am a Christian, but I believe that most atheist claims are more accurate than most Christian claims as far as how reality works. I think that nowadays staunch atheists generally will understand the world better than staunch Christians because they identify much more with scientific methods of inquiry. I'm not so sure about the methods, though--it appears that religious people are generally more psychologically healthy. It's unclear whether this is due to communal effects, selection effects, other obvious factors (such as belief in the afterlife meaning being less scared of death) or whether the principles which religion teaches truly do help people. I'm inclined to believe it's some combination of all of the above, which isn't to say that atheism has no claim to psychologically healthy principles. Atheists lay the strongest claim to psychology etc., and while I think we overestimate its efficacy nowadays, there is definitely some truth there to be learned.
I will push back a little bit though, because I think a lot of "atheism is beating Christianity" is just lukewarm people living life on autopilot without carefully considering these questions. In this sense the tide really has not shifted much--lukewarm people are generally just going from "Christian-by-default" to "Atheist-by-default" with little change in their behaviors either way.
Getting into specifics more, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints believes that Christianity actually was known and then fell away many times throughout history. This implies that old religions really are emulating an even older religion which is just Christianity.
I'm not convinced that at this point general Christian churches have much more of the truth than Islam does. Each church has spent millennia arguing and debating esoteric points of doctrine, and nowadays it seems to me that the churches are founded much more on those arguments and their scriptural interpretations than they are on the scriptures themselves. First example that comes to mind is the Nicene creed, the foundation for most Christian churches. I only bring this up to say that if your prior is "The NT church was more true than Muhammad's church" then you still have to account for millennia of doctrine on top of either beginning, which has pushed both religions in chaotic directions only somewhat correlated with their starting positions.
The vast, vast majority of non-LDS Christians that I've talked to have pretty much read exclusively from Revelations and Psalms, two books which I consider much less rich than most of the rest of the Bible. Between those 2 books and the Quran I'll bet the Quran is more useful in describing who God is, how he wants you to live, etc.
Anyways, I hope I've responded pretty well. In general it seems that a lot of these religious discussions turn into people talking past each other due to differences in how they understand religious terms, so I've tried to avoid using those at all. Given that [there was originally a church with both correct beliefs and correct methods], I think it follows that many of both the beliefs and methods would survive through the eons, and that many religions nowadays would still be benefitting from traditions passed down from the true church.
So here's a better response to OP:
I think this is only true because this is already what many "religious" people do who are measured as part of "the benefit". And yes, they still benefit, but not as much as they could. I also am unsure that you can really 100% believe in the morality without believing in God.
This is because those religions were not entirely false. While their specific claims about gods may have been mostly false, other things like philosophy were probably mostly true, and their adherents gained the benefits of a mostly true philosophy.
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