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Good morning! Hope your week is off to a good start fellow Mottizens. I was tickled pink to find that the Motte just went through it's fourth birthday, apparently, and I strongly agree with nara that this place is one of the best, if not the best, places to find genuinely open political discourse on the internet.
Anyway, I want to talk about religion & modernity. The so-called 'RETVRN traditionalists' and neo-reactionaries, and how some insights from them play into the broader culture war. I was reading a post from a friend of mine on Substack, and he makes a great point with regard to religious folks trying to turn back the clock, so to speak:
I strongly agree that we live in a liberal time, and have deeply liberal instincts. We can't just pretend that we don't live our lives in a liberal way, and I suspect most people talking about a return to traditionalism are, as @2rafa has (perhaps uncharitably) opined on before, simply LARPers.
This relates to the culture war for the simply fact that I think just like the religious piece, most conservatives that ostensibly want to tear down the liberal establishment, actually don't want to give up their liberal freedom and personal autonomy. It's all well and good to make arguments about tradition and the importance of paternal authority etc in the abstract, but personally submitting yourself to someone else's rule (in a very direct way, I understand that we are ruled indirectly now anyway) would, I suspect, be a bridge too far.
In addition though, I simply think that modern liberty is good. I'm a sort of reluctant conservative I'll admit, but even in the traditional conservative picture of the world, I think that personal freedoms from the state and even to a certain extent within traditional communities are great. To me, the project of the conservative in the modern world is not to sort of force us via governmental apparatus back into some halycon pre-modernity days. Instead, the conservative impulse should be focused towards explaining and convincing people in a deep and genuine way that living in a more traditional way is better for society, and better for people in particular.
Going off that last bit - once you get some years under your belt, it becomes clear from a personal standpoint that a more controlled lifestyle is just better. That saying that you have no head if you aren't a conservative in your 30s rings true in large part, in my humble opinion, because of this personal understanding. If you drink all the time, eat unhealthy food, smoke constantly, etc, you will very quickly find that your 'personal freedom' isn't worth much when you constantly feel terrible.
While convincing people may be much harder, I am convinced (heh) that it's the best way forward. As someone who changed my mind on the more traditional lifestyle largely through argumentation and personal experience, I am living proof that changing hearts and minds is possible on this front. Ultimately if conservatives try to force a return to pre-modern times, not only may we lose technological advances, we also don't even have the living traditional to fall back to anymore.
I won't deny that modern liberalism has a lot of flaws, especially when it comes to the religious context. However, as I've argued, going back seems foolish and not that desirable even if we could. I'll end this with a further quote from the article I quoted above, as I think it ends better than I could:
Edit: ended up writing this into a more full Substack post, if anyone is interested.
I very much don't feel like a LARPer. I don't think Feser - one of the staunchest modern defenders of Scholastic Metaphysics - is a LARPer.
I also wouldn't describe myself as a Trad, because that means something very specific in my religious tradition. I attend a normal mass at a normal parish.
But I also 100% believe in all of it. Heaven, Hell, the way of Illumination, Theosis, Divine Simplicity, Trinity of Lover, Beloved, and the Love that Unites, submission to local bishop, souls that are the form of the body, demons, etc. These things are more real to me than the Declaration of Independence and I have had as much personal experience with the governance of the Church as the governance of my civil authorities.
I believe true freedom is the freedom that comes from discipline and learning how to work within a system outside of my experiences. The freedom of playing a piano well is not the same as pressing keys as the whim takes me. Enlightenment conceptions of freedom seem to me more like a toddler banging on a keyboard "freely."
I'm sure there are some LARPers somewhere, but there are still many people who were born into these traditions. If both mother and father or just father attended church weekly, their kids have a 1/3 likelihood of attending church weekly as well. Converts are a small group compared with those who are hereditary Christians.
Those who are Amish are already Amish. I don't know where the idea comes from that we will lose technological advances if we start having a more pre-modern outlook on usury, for instance. The rate of acquiring new advances might decrease, but some total collapse back to the bronze age isn't necessary or desired by anyone I'm aware of.
I agree with all this, and agree that we must believe in it to be seriously Christian. I suppose I'm more talking about forcing people to believe via authority - that is right out.
Unfortunately much of Christendom seems to want to return to the era when ecclesiastical authority was the rule, and to cross it was to risk death. I disagree that Christ would've wanted such a setup.
I'd like to push back on the idea that crossing ecclesiastical authority risked death. I feel like that's a model of the Middle Ages that is more conceived on 18th century propaganda instead of the actual historical record. Even when the Papal States had an executioner, he was part of the civil courts, not the ecclesiastical courts. He executed thieves and assassins, not heretics. Ecclesiastical courts were not allowed to kill anyone at all, and there is good reason for that. That's not to say they were infallible bastions of perfect goodness and mercy, but they aren't the opposite either. They were courts.
People accused by civil authorities of crimes begged to be tried by the Inquisition because the Inquisition had a higher standard of evidence. And so on and so forth.
What you might object to most strongly crosses over into the other aspect of your comment - forcing people to believe via authority. So I will touch on that first before a deeper discussion on persecuting heretics.
In the Middle Ages, people were not forced to believe via authority. Forced baptisms are illicit, and pagans converted in droves without threat of force. Rather, people believed because it was the air they breathed. Not being a Christian would be like being a Flat Earther today.
Taking the analogy further, lots of people today believe the Earth is round because that is how it is depicted in art. Maybe they were lucky enough to be exposed to a globe as a child. They heard stories and have seen relics of people going to space and seeing the round Earth. They are not forced to believe the Earth is round under threat of torture. It'd be frankly bizarre for them to think the Earth was Flat.
Any American today had the opportunity to take high-school level Trigonometry and be able to prove that the Earth is round based on measuring shadows and traveling 100 miles, a trivial feat compared to how difficult it would be to prove to oneself in the past. But why would they? Who is suspicious enough to do so?
And moreover, basic facts about the world, like the shape of the Earth, shouldn't be accessible only to those with above-average intelligence and a car. It would be bizarre to make a society that is agnostic about the shape of the Earth because we wouldn't want to unduly influence belief.
The Medieval mind was as convinced about the truth of Christianity as we are about the roundness of the Earth. Those with the intelligence to prove it made sure that this important knowledge was accessible to all. And I believe they did prove the existence of God and that there is more proof today than there was in the past. And that anyone smart enough who goes through 4-6 years of specialized education and spiritual formation (that is very hard to get these days) will agree, if we could just get them to take the opportunity cost to get there.
Here is where the analogy is inadequate - the problem of heretics. Because it doesn't really matter to a functioning society if there is a group of people who think the Earth is flat. We pity them, we ignore them, even if one of our own children became a flat Earther we would still harbor a vague hope that they could still life a good life, even if you stop trusting their judgement on other things.
But in the case of Christianity, there is a huge emphasis on Orthodoxy (right belief) and Orthopraxy (right practice.) And if you tip the balance so that the ignorant masses are now divided in belief, they are going to believe all sorts of things, very few of which are results of a systematic fact-finding methodology. And if you have midwits choosing beliefs randomly, you have disagreement and dissension and civil wars and that is why the CIVIL authorities executed heretics and waged crusades against them.
Because the Cathars had beliefs that were society-ending and spread them at an alarming rate to people who didn't know better. Because if you're a Protestant Lord and some of your subjects are Catholics then they have an obligation to defy your authority at times, and you can't have that.
The problem the Medieval were trying to solve wasn't that everyone is by default agnostic and they needed to be forced at knifepoint to be Catholic. The problem they were trying to solve is that people all too easily believe whatever their slightly-smarter neighbor tells them is a good idea and this can upend society. Like "marriage and sex are evil" and "men and women are interchangable."
But wait, didn't we enlightened Americans figure out a way for multiple people with a plurality of different ideologies and religions to live together in peace and harmony without society collapsing?
...I certainly hope so. But I think only time can tell.
This is disingenuous. Yes, the church generally didn't execute heretics however heresy was also a secular crime everywhere. This is like saying that judges never imprison anyone because they don't personally run prisons.
The standards of "truthness" in a manuscript society, pre-enlightenment society were just very different from our own, it was underpinned by authority. When books were very expensive you had to believe that if something was copied by everyone it was good and that the objection that you found had been addressed by someone somewhere, you had to be the one that was equivocated but you had no way to verify it.
Plenty of falsehoods that could be trivially proven false proliferated. The most important textbook of the middle ages, the etymologies of st. isidor, told you that diamonds were made soft by goat blood and garlic demagnetized magnets, mathematicians studied and believed the aristotelian cosmology despite it being incompatible with the ptolemaic model which they also knew and employed day to day or, for that matter, didn't match geographical knowledge (see for example Alighieri's Questio de Aqua et Terra) or even phisicians who believed in the existence of a rete mirabilis in humans and a spermatic duct connecting the brain to the penis (as Galen said, sperm is stored in the brain) despite presiding over cadaver dissections that had no such things.
I don't think you could convince many people today with medieval arguments because they went like this:
I wonder what we believe today that those in the future will find laughable.
If you checked out of scholarship in the 80s, I can see why you would think so. That is a less defensible sentiment today. Fifty years ago, people got away with saying that King David is a myth, now we have his coins. Excavations have revealed architecture described in the New Testament that has been hidden since the 2nd century. Where it gets hazy is where you would expect it to be hazy - what archaeological evidence would you expect the Exodus to leave behind? There is some evidence, nothing conclusive, but I wouldn't expect there to be given the short time length of the event and the amount of evidence nomadic peoples typically leave behind.
But that doesn't hold many problems for the Traditional Catholic, as the traditional view has viewed the Joshua and Conquest in an allegorical sense. Joshua as a Christ figure, demonstrates the importance of eradicating evil entirely and giving it no quarter. A large part of reading the Bible is knowing what the genre is of the book you're reading.
To the Christian claims, the important thing to get historically accurate is the Gospels, and the Gospels were written in the genre of Ancient Biography. They at least tried to get it right, and there is increasing evidence that they were written early and by eyewitnesses..
All attempts to date the Gospel after AD 70 rely in the logic of, "Well, we know Jesus wasn't God, so He can't have predicted the fall of the Temple ahead of time (never mind there were other people predicting the fall of the Temple in the decade leading up to it,) and so the Gospels all had to be written after AD 70." And dating the Gospels before AD 70 is more like, "The Gospels tell their readers to do things at the Temple, and that is a weird prescription if the Temple is already destroyed. And Acts leads up the climatic trial of Paul in Rome but doesn't cover it, which would seem to indicate that it was completed before his execution. And look here, and look there, at all these weird coincidences that only make sense if they were written in the 50s and 60s."
Which proof do you think relies on actual infinity being logically contradictory? St. Thomas famously believed we couldn't prove the universe was finite through just philosophy, and his Cosmological argument does not require the universe to have had a beginning. Maybe you're most exposed to Kalam's argument, which is impossible to defend on pure philosophical grounds, though people try to defend it still with a combo of scientific evidence and philosophy.
Cute, however the world is not 6000 years old, Moses is a probably a fictional character and certainly not the author of the Deuteronomy, there was no widespread captivity in Egypt, etc etc
That where one scholar is going but not where scholarship in general is going, that would be the other direction. And no eyewitnessess, whoever wrote the cleansing of the temple probably didn't even have a passing familiarity with the temple, for example.
It doesn't matter when the prediction was made, it's that predictions only become relevant after they become true, it wouldn't have been written about. But beyond that it's how it's treated, as inevitable rather than a menace. And beyond that it's the lack of references to the gospels from other sources, consider how many times the authentic letters of Paul could have quoted Jesus from the gospels but didn't. That means they were written after.
The offering to the Temple was a big part of jewish religion, rabbis continued to debate the proper temple practices for centuries after the temple was destroyed under the assumption that it would soon be rebuilt. It is no surprise that christians, which at that point were a jewish sect, would do the same.
You should re-read the last chapter of Acts:
All versions of the cosmological argument and all of the five ways of St. Thomas.
Irrelevant.
Are you getting that from Ehrman or somewhere else?
Even with a "late" gMark date of 73ish, the author would have been in the temple as all male Jews were expected to travel to the Temple several times a year. Assuming the writer is older than 18, he would have familiarity with the Temple before its fall.
If you don't discount scholars just for being religious, arguments for early dating is becoming more acceptable. The arguments make sense. They made sense when critical historian Adolf von Harnack did the math in 1911, and they still make sense today. The historical investigation has the fatal flaw of needing to presuppose that nothing supernatural happened. If you approach without that presupposition, then the evidence points elsewhere.
I would not dispute that the letters of Paul were mostly written without the Gospels as reference. There are some parts of Paul's letters that have a certain rhyme with the Gospels, particularly in 1 Corinthians. But I think they were written separately, which isn't exactly a bad thing from an evidentiary-stand point. All that tells us is that the Gospels were not wide-spread reference material at the time Paul was writing and perhaps he did not have access to copies himself. He was an wandering preacher/tent maker. It's not the weirdest thing for him not to have had an extensive library.
Or it mattered because it was a warning to the Christians to flee Jerusalem for the hills, which they did. And not all the predictions came true by AD 80. And some things that would probably be critical details embedded in their memory, like that the Temple was melted to SLAG wasn't mentioned at all.
Yeah, and then Paul died. He died during Nero's reign, in AD 64/65. He arrived in Rome in AD 60. Acts ends saying, "He spent two years in Rome preaching." Then there is a gap of another couple years, and then Paul died. If Paul died before Acts was written, Luke would have included Paul's dramatic death. He did not, because Paul's dramatic death didn't happen for another two years.
Since gLuke is likely written before Acts, and Acts was likely written before AD 65, and gMark was written before gLuke unless you're crazy, gMark is older than AD 65. Give them each a couple years to write each book, and gMark is in the late 50s. Paul's letters were written in the 50s and the part of the 60s where he was alive, which goes to your point that he didn't have a copy of a Gospel to reference. It's all very nice and neat like the truth tends to be.
No they don't. This is just silly. If for the sake of argument we allowed that there could be an infinitely long hierarchical series— D actualized by C, which is in turn actualized by B, which is in turn actualized by A, and so on in infinity, there would still have to be a source of causal power outside the series to impart causal power to the whole. Consider a mirror which reflects the image of a face present in another mirror, which in turn reflects the image of a face present in another, and so on ad infinitum. Even if we allowed that there could be such a series of mirrors, there would still have to be something outside this infinite series— the face itself—which could impart the content of the image without having to derive it. What there could not be is only mirror images and never any actual face.
The argument does not rely on the non-existence of actual infinity.
I'm getting it from reading the thing.
The author of Mark wasn't a jew. What kind of line of argumentation is this? I'm bringing this as proof that the authors are far removed from the events and your response is "well, under the assumption that they are not far removed from the events this is impossible". You are making my point.
A prediction coming true is not supernatural, people predict things all the time. The problem is that correct predictions only become relevant after they become true. Suppose Mark was writing in the 50s, some guy said "the temple is going to be destroyed" 20+ years ago and it never happened, are you going to bring that up? And it's not just the prediction, it's how it's treated. You wouldn't write the parable of the fig tree if the destruction of the temple hadn't already happened: the jews have already failed to deliver and god has already punished them.
Or possibly because Paul dramatic death hadn't been invented yet. You are trusting sources written hundreds of years after the fact on this, farther from the facts than the most pessimistic estimates of acts. The ending of acts is truncated whichever way you look at it. Supposed it really was written while Paul was still in Rome you wouldn't say "it preached in rome for two years" you would also say "and he's still there" or "and he's now moved to spain" or "and then they arrested him again a second time".
What's causal power. Make me an example of causation. Feser makes arguments like this and I'm convinced that his idea of causation doesn't exist outside of his brain.
LIght travels at finite speed so at most there would have had to be, at some point, a face. But I don't think this is the case, I think there's actually nothing logically contradictory in an infinite series of mirrors you are tricking your brain into thinking there is because the brain thinks in aristotelian terms, with efficient and final causes, but those things don't exist. Suppose the universe was nothing but a single atom travelling forever at constant speed, is that impossible? Our brain wants to say no because everything that we experience moving is moved by something but actually there's nothing logically impossible in it. If the universe was nothing but an infinite series of mirrors reflecting a face infinitely in both directions that's just how it would be.
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