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This touches on the first question I was planning to ask - how should it contribute to it's enforcement? I would imagine that with a name like "creedal citizenship" it would at a minimum mean disenfranchisement of anyone who doesn't follow the creed. If that's how it is to work, I agree that a coherent nation can be formed this way, but you go on to say that over-exclusion is worse than over-inclusion. This makes it sound rather wishy-washy, and I don't know that a creedal nation can stay coherent, if you can participate without following the creed it's based on.
I think I disagree. If you have a nation that's 98% Catholic, facing the importation of a sizeable population of Muslims, with some Middle-Eastern Christians sprinkled in, that seems like a clear example of excluding people who share your creed being to your benefit.
If you're this optimistic about your ideas winning, I suppose that makes sense, but I think it's far from guaranteed. It's particularly strange to hear it from a Catholic.
Even if you're right, it's not clear it's worth the costs. For example, Communism may be destined to lose to capitalism (or whatever economic system you prefer), that doesn't mean there's any benefit in giving political power to communists.
How many grains of sand does it take to form a heap?
"Coherent" is, ironically, an incoherent target. Rather than create a few hard rules, it makes more sense to define a number of overton windows and accept that they're going to shift over time... but within a self-correcting framework that advantages particular kinds of evolution.
Assuming I had a creedal nation like I wanted, there would be particular mechanisms in place to enforce that creed, which people against that creed would likely be unable to tolerate. but if muslims really want to come to a country where you have to attend church on sundays to be able to vote, then I'll take the win with grace, and welcome all the soon-to-be-converts.
(apply this to your capitalist/communist objection too.)
???
I think God is willing to personally intervene on behalf of my religious community... and you think it's strange that I'm confident? I think it would be stranger if I wasn't! The truth is an asymmetric weapon. If I'm right, then I should be confident that I'll win. Not in the short term, maybe, but in a general, cosmic sense. And if I'm wrong... then I should have no fear of being set right!
How's that relevant to anything I said?
Well, I think that's a recipe for having your creed undermined and completely subverted over time, but that's beside the point. I'd like to know some specifics. What happens to people who stray outside these overton windows? What specific self-correcting mechanisms are you talking about?
That's great, I think it would work as well. However, you said that even though you disagree with leftists and liberals on matters of creed, you "think by far the bigger threat is a government that excludes people who indisputably share my creed, versus a government that would try and promote another creed" and went on to say how you're confident truth will win out in the end. This would imply that you'd be fine with importing a sizable Muslim minority even if you didn't have the ability to force them to go to church, and that the costs of excluding the tiny amount of Christians would outweigh the costs of excluding the Muslims, even under those circumstances.
Have I misunderstood something?
Correct. Catholics aren't known for just letting it go, because they're confident the truth will win out in the end. They are known for a highly organized church, a highly formalized dogma, and putting significant resources into their maintenance, and proselytization. It's like that quip from Star Control "peaceful missions through the cosmos rarely require weapons large enough to punch holes through a small moon".
Yes. It's not the only one though, and the other ones might have the advantage depending on the situation. You wouldn't be considering forcing people to go to church otherwise.
Huh? If you're wrong about the truth winning out in the general cosmic sense, you should have no fear of being set right? Wouldn't that be your absolute worst case scenario? If you actually had the truth, but it lost, because you refused to fight for it?
Reference to the sororitas paradox. "Coherent" isn't a well-defined idea. You can come up with a definition to make anything coherent or incoherent. I'd rather speak in terms of degrees-- accepting that any social target is going to have to be fuzzy, and working to keep it useful over trying to define hard boundaries.
The same thing that currently happens. Escalating levels of social sanctions followed by criminal punishments.
That's accurate.
Being confident in God isn't incompatible with working hard toward virtuous ends. "Faith without works..." etcetera etcetera.
It's not about being afraid of muslims, it's about, it's that going to (a proper) church is a strictly good thing, for both the individual and the community. Rather than impose it because I'm afraid of an enemy group, I'd impose it because "getting people to do good things" is one of the main purposes of a community. And yes, as a consequence, it would keep out bad people and bring in good people. My beliefs are the best; that's exactly what I'd expect them to do.
If I'm wrong about having the best (most beneficial) beliefs, then I have no fear of adopting better beliefs. You're missing the point by focusing on "truth" here. Of course, I also believe that my beliefs are true, but that's noncentral.
Fuziness does not imply incoherence, my approach is pretty much identical to yours, and you're just arguing over semantics. What I said was that with "over-exclusion is worse then over-inclusion" approach, you will turn the category of the nation useless.
Well... do you mind providing some details? General rules as to what kind of transgressions would meet with what kind of sanctions? Examples?
You're really not making this easy... What is? My description of your views, or the statement that I misunderstood something? If the latter, could you put some effort into bridging the inferential gap? Where do you think I've gone wrong?
I'm not sure how else I'm suppose to interpret it. If the main contingent pushing the idea of a creedal nation are the liberals / the left, you strongly disagree with their creed and how it should be enforced, but "think by far the bigger threat is a government that excludes people who indisputably share my creed, versus a government that would try and promote another creed", how specifically would you prevent the importation of a sizable Muslim minority if that idea gained traction? This isn't much of a hypothetical, by the way, actually existing 90+% Catholic countries ended up going the "mass migration with no creed enforcement" route because they drank the liberal Kool-Aid.
Yeah, and carrying weapons large enough to punch holes through a small moon is not, strictly speaking, incompatible with a peaceful mission through the cosmos. It does say a lot about what kind of universe you believe you're living in, though.
And if it can be shown that a mosque is a proper church, with similar advantages for individuals and their communities, you'd be ok with that, and you'd enforce your rule by forcing people to go to EITHER a mosque OR a Catholic church?
What was the point of the "truth is an asymmetric weapon" thing then?
The irony of this is that the whole idea of a "nation" is an over-inclusion: an 18/19th century fabrication intended to artificially bond disparate ethnic-linguistic-cultural groups together. Before people were White they were French, German, British... they were Occitan, Cornish, Bavarian... they were loyal to their tribes, villages, clans...
Every framework to unite ingroups into outgroups makes the previous ingroup identities less powerful and useful. That's the whole point!
General rule: people have the right to allocate the use of their excludable property
Weak sanction: if some dumb kids tresspass on your land to use your fishing hold it's fine to yell at them
Strong sanction: if someone steals your TV they go to prison.
Sorry, I meant that your description of my views was accurate.
For someone to show that to me they would have to convince me that muslims have an equivalent chance of getting into heaven as catholics. If hypothetically I was ever convinced of that, then sure-- church, mosque, either is fine. Ceding that would basically require they convince me to stop being a catholic though.
If it's true that my beliefs are beneficial, then that truth is asymmetric. Also some beliefs contain the sub-belief that they're guaranteed to be beneficial if [and sometimes only if] they're true. So long as I'm confident in the meta-belief that I'm maximising personal benefit, those beliefs have an asymmetric power over me (so long as they're true.)
I'm not seeing it. "Overinclusion" was a shorthand for the latter part of the following statement:
The direct analogy to that would be a multiethnic empire promoting one ethnic group to the detriment of others, not one that attempts to merge multiple groups into a single one.
We were talking about the creedal nation, you explicitly said you would have said creed enforced by the government, why the sudden switch to basic property rights?
Lol, ok. I had a whole paragraph ready to go, in case you meant that, but somehow convinced myself it's not possible.
If you'd be ok with importing a sizeable portion of Muslims without being able to force them to attend Church, how is that not a straightforward example of excluding allies (the few Christians sprinkled in) being to the advantage of the creedal nation? We've seen the deterioration of social cohesion that results from this, what is supposed to be the upside?
More importantly, how is it even a creedal nation if you don't exclude other creeds, and abandon the mechanism of enforcing your creed that you put forward yourself?
Ok. My point was that something can be true and beneficial, and lose to the false and detrimental. Even the false/detrimental thing ultimately collapses, and you get to claim some metaphysical victory, the costs of letting it happen would be enormous, and that this kind of complecancy is not what I'd typically associate with Catholicism.
Okay, if merging multiple groups isn't overinclusion then let's just define ourselves to be part of a shared ethnic group containing everyone except the North Sentinelese islanders.
You asked me for what I would put in a creed. I interpreted a "creed" as being a legally and culturally enforced set of beliefs. I would like to enforce a belief in basic property rights.
Converting the muslims by proximity and getting more people into heaven.
I think you're getting confused on my expected timeline. I think it would look something like this:
...or basically, what happened to the roman empire. We've done it before and we can do it again.
If it lost then it must not have been so beneficial after all.
This is a major turn-off, man.
I'm not asking you all these questions to score an "own", or deboonk the idea of credal nations. Actually I like that idea a lot, I even prefer it to ethnonationalism, I just think it needs to address a few issues in order to be sustainable (I mostly agree with Southkraut on this). When center-to-leftwing people started using the term, there's a part of me that was skeptical, and a part of me that was curious. The curious part wondered if the left identified the same issues, and if they came up with the same solutions, or different ones, and is there anything I can learn from that. Hence, our conversation. But when you hit me with these redditisms I think I was right to be skeptical, and to think that the left only settled on the term cynically, because it sounds nice in opposition to ethnic identities, but it's something they haven't put a lot of thought into at all.
If you want a serious answer to this, it's: yeah, you can, if it makes sense. If we ever suffer an alien invasion something like this probably will happen. If the North Sentinelese side with the aliens something exactly like this might happen. But tell me, would handing out passports and giving full unconditional citizenship to every Chinese or Russian make a lot of sense to you in the current geopolitical situation?
That's the approach Europe took, and it now has significant portions of the population with absolutely no loyalty to the countries they're living in. Even the US, which has long been gloating about how effectively it assimilates immigrants, is starting to struggle in that area (because they were only effective at it back when they were a lot more forceful about assimilation, than just enforcing basic property rights?).
How many Muslims that moved to Europe converted to Christianity, vs. how many Christian Europeans lost their faith within the same timeline?
No, I'm not. I was asking how is it a "creedal nation" if you're not enforcing a creed. You hint that you want to, you bring up "enforcement [of Catholicism]" again, but when I asked you about it before you started talking about property rights.
No, this is another part of why I wanted to have this conversation. In theory America could be described as a creedal nation, with the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence being the creed. The issue os that not only is the creed not enforced, being actively hostile to it is allowed, and often encouraged. Some of the worst transgressors are presidents, supreme court judges, and congressmen.
There is absolutely no way that in practice America today is a creedal nation.
Is the Edict of Thessalonica happening somewhere on this timeline?
I think that's a very naive view. Is communism more beneficial in North Korea and Cuba, than other economic systems?
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