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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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Either that what they do is that tradition or is in fact the truer fulfillment of the essence of the faith even if it does violence to a lot of the claims the tradition they're attacking stands by.

The New Atheist claim is that you can have all of the good things about God without God

I don't think this satisfies either prong, accepting the second prong for the moment arguendo.

Sam Harris came up with a hypothetical "worst possible misery for everyone"...

...when a Western atheist basically reinvents hell

I don't think this satisfies basically any of the of the possible prongs. It's more of a superficial resemblance. (Putting aside other quibbles about hell in the Christian tradition.) Consider Roko's Basilisk; is all AI-doomerism somehow just Christian heresy? I sort of doubt so. Plenty of jokes have been made about the people who try to identify different ideologies that have some form of utopia and say that they must, therefore, be actually the same thing. Here, you seem to be doing the same, but swapping dystopia for utopia. I think the reasoning is equally fallacious.

But he ends up in the same place. This isn't ethics as such. It's a particular form of ethics.

I mean, Sam Harris's attempt at ethics has always been laughable, for a variety of reasons. But I would still find it laughable to observe that he's worked hard to try to make it palatable to the modern liberal Westerner, so therefore, he and all other atheists are just Christian heretics.