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Notes -
What happens when Groypers start attending your church?
I've seen (in real life even!) blue-tribe immersed evangelical leaders bemoan the lack of religious interest in the side of America they see. Our churches have largely pandered to the "wider culture" (typically center-left leaning) without realizing that there is a burgeoning counter-culture that signals great interest in traditional religion. When they do realize there is such a counter-culture, they condemn it.
The most recent example is the the much-ballyhooed Fuentes-Carlson interview. The David Frenchs of the world signaled their great distaste. The very-online dissident right was mostly pleased. As I have never heard Fuentes speak before, I decided to listen to the entire interview. What surprised me most was how much both Carlson and Fuentes talked about Christianity. I had not known Fuentes claimed to be religious. (As an aside, the interview did nothing to convince me that Fuentes holds any deep convictions, much less genuine Christian faith). (As another aside, it turns out I am more "extreme" in my religious views than Fuentes: conditioned on him being religious I would have expected him to be to my right [insert "that awkward moment" meme]). If Fuentes continues to treat Christianity as a key part of his identity, his followers will start showing interest in the Church.
I'm not the only one who has noticed. There are other (near-dissident) leaders in the evangelical world who are looking to engage with the wayward, but seeking, young right. The pastor Michael Clary has written several posts either arguing for reaching the right or directly appealing to the dissident right. While less than eloquent (and with some boomer-like mannerisms), Mark Marshall explicitly recommends engaging with Groypers. Even conservative stalwart Kevin DeYoung has started to use language that appeals to the dissident right without outright condemning it (though he has engaged with dissident right ideas in the past).
But, by and large, our churches have been conditioned to be "salt and light" to a left-leaning world. We know how to deal with a blue-haired lesbian. Even conservative/orthodox churches can show the love of Christ to the wayward left. Be winsome, win them for Christ, and let sanctification come later (if it happens at all!). But our churches are not at all prepared for a young, irreverent to cultural norms, Christian Nationalist man who is interested in tradition and yearning for something more meaningful than a Ted-talk and a rock-concert on a Sunday.
And come they will, especially if the church is little-o orthodox, especially if it is traditional, and especially if proscribes female leadership. We shall soon see how tolerant our churches actually are. We are told we must show love to the sinners to our left. Let us see whether we show the same love to sinners on our right.
For the first time in decades Christianity has the aesthetics of cool. Rather than try and stuff progressivism into the skinsuit of the Church, why not embrace it?
Sure, their faith is superficial, but I came into my faith for similarly superificial reasons. I wish to be strong, I wish to be valiant: I wish to be a knight in the service of God to slay dragons. That same motivation that converted the warrior pagans of the Franks, Germans and Visigoths is born again. Is that so wrong?
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You don't need to look at Groypers for this.
I'm going to blatantly shill for a youtube channel I'm rather fond of; Effective Purpose, whom if I had to describe to other people, I'd say he was a Married, Christian Hoe Math.
I'm not joking.
The thing I find most interesting about him is that, despite his professed Christianity(and he certainly comes across as spiritual, though I suppose that could be my bias in action), he does not spare the rod nor spoil the child when it comes to criticism of things he finds need to be criticized; From the Church itself, to Church leadership, to women, and even Christian Women as a whole, noting that the entire 'TradCath' path toward acquiring a woman is just another pig and poke due to various reasons(which he then goes into).
He's done a video about what you talk about; How other things in the past(and in the current day), men will flock to the church in times of trouble and promptly leave for various reasons(see above).
So. Perhaps I'm a bit of a pessimist, but I don't see any influx of Groypers to have any long-term influence. If anything, the real danger will be excactly that; they move into the church, find the above, and then promptly move onto something that will satisfy thier need without any sense of restraint or stricture.
Pig in the poke (poke == sack)
Wiki:
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I don't disagree that societies expectations of women are low, or that society is explicitly and institutionally biased towards women. What does he advocate for beyond preaching from the pulpit that women should lower their standards?
You could look at his videos he's done on this topic, if you care to.
I don't think he's advocating any single golden ticket solution(wise, as I belive there is none), but I think he does a valuable service of pointing out where male leadership is failing at leading men.
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As a general retort, directed against no one in particular concerning the gatekeeping rhetoric I usually see around this topic:
There's a historically consistent delusion of Christians believing they are always at the center of Christianity, which always happens to be right here, right now, exactly where they are, leaning towards exactly what they happen to think. Which lends them the power to feel justified to gatekeep many matters of moral and philosophical significance, including Christianity and the church, from outgroup outsiders.
In reality the modal church of 100-200 years ago is so far removed from the modern modal church that there is no real reason to comparatively consider anyone Christian today. Which speaks to the fact that the church is not Christianity, it's the people. Insofar as there will be an influx of church going young men, they will change the church. Insofar as there are groups of people claiming to represent Christianity in the defense of their church and the inevitable change that is coming, they have no firm ground in proclaiming they are doing so as a Christian.
To that extent I'd wish for church leaders and gatekeepers to recognize that this has nothing to do with Christianity. Church politics are people politics. And the people are in a proxy ethnic culture war. There's nothing a pastor can say to a young man that will faze or enlighten him. They've been hooked up to technology far superior to an echo-y sermon. The church is a platform for organization. The church is at war for its life because of a culture war. Take these people and facilitate them and their beliefs towards something useful. It's a conflict the church needs to fight, and it's a fight these people want to join.
On a sidenote, how far removed are the groypers in opinion from Father Coughlin? Will anyone claim to be more Christian than him? Well, you have a few like those coming in. Less intelligent and erudite, but their heart seems to find the same place. To that extent it's hard to gatekeep those who are more similar in spirit to those who came before you than you are. Lamenting that they are not like the Christian church goers of today is hypocritical to say the least.
I honestly don't understand what you mean by this. There are creeds from more than a thousand years ago that Christians today still hold to - those are what have traditionally been used to gatekeep Christianity, and churches today still hold to them.
Obviously a lot of cultural things have changed (for instance, we speak English now and dress funny) but (to pick a random culture war issue) one of the earliest Christian texts (the Didache) specifies that Christians are not to commit abortion: this is a stance the largest church in the world (the Catholic church) still agrees with, and the largest Protestant denomination, at least in the United States, also agrees with it!
To maybe bring it home just a bit: [as per Wikipedia, I don't think this is controversial] the big fight between the fundamentalists and the modernists in American Protestantism started in the mid-1800s when higher criticism crossed over from Europe and really blew up in the 1920s (so: 100 years ago). By the way, whenever you see people talk about mainstream Protestantism versus evangelical or fundamentalist Protestantism, this is essentially what they are nodding at: the mainstream Protestant denominations (that are currently in decline) were the ones were the modernists won - a fight so important that 100 years later it is still referenced in e.g. Pew's polling. This clash of worldviews prompted a guy named Bob Jones to found a university (Bob Jones University); established in 1927. A guy named Billy Graham (b. 1918; d. 2018) attended Bob Jones (before transferring). And as it happens, so did the pastor of the church I went to last Sunday.
At least in the United States, then, not only would Christian time-travelers moving backwards and forwards in time 100 - 200 years be able to understand each other and have theological conversations from shared texts such as the creeds and Scripture, and not only would they largely find that people in their denominations agreed with them on important matters such as what constituted a Christian, what was necessary for salvation, what was and was not sin, etc., but the time-travelers from 100 years ago would find that people today are studying the writings of their contemporaries and they would find that the institutions that they had created were absolutely instrumental in shaping the landscape of 21st century America. They would find that the pastors and preachers went to the institutions that they created because they shared their theological convictions. And if they went to those institutions, they would probably find people they knew teaching there, or if not, people who had learned from those they had taught.
I don't recall if you're American; maybe you aren't and your experience is different. But where I am, the church politics of 100 - 200 years ago are still very much alive, and the doctrines and creeds that are taught go back much further.
It is not hard to understand. "Modal Christians" of pre modern trad age were not theologians, but illiterate peasants who never heard about any "creeds" and practiced their faith mixed with various village traditions and superstitions (often extremely unchristian).
Unless you are descended from unbroken line of scholars (it there ever was such thing in the West), your ancestors were not studying works of Saint Thomas, your ancestors were doing rituals to protect themselves from elves, goblins and leprechauns and were venerating saintly dog to help their sick children.
This is how real trad life looked like, and it is irretrievably lost.
(it was more tenacious you would expect. Cult of Saint Guinefort outlived French kingdom, two empires and three republics, all efforts of church and school failed to uproot it, and succumbed only to electric power, radio and television).
See also this old twitter thread with rather downer description of East European trad village (seen then as most Christian part of the world).
Even if this is true (and I suspect it's greatly overstated: the Christian of the past you describe, far from never hearing about any creeds, could probably recite the Nicene creed from heart because he learned it during Mass, albeit in Latin), this has no bearing on the post I was responding to. In my country even 200 years ago the majority of citizens could read.
Furthermore, there's a category error in measuring modal by time rather than population. Thanks to population growth, the modal Christian by population - which is the correct way of measuring a the most frequent number - is actually much closer to the megachurch than to the medieval mass than one would think. Exactly how close is an interesting exercise, and probably worth much more time and attention than the minimal effort I've put into it, but:
The entire population of Europe in 1600 was around 80 million, smaller than the population of Germany today. Or, to look at it another way, the world population only crossed the 1 billion mark in 1800; the Catholic Church alone reports over a billion practicing members today. It looks like (napkin math based on guestimates of population growth over time so this could be wildly off) only about 50 billion people ever lived worldwide between the time of Christ and 1950 (Novus Ordo, the current Catholic mass in the local tongue, came into effect around 1970) and the vast majority of them I think we can safely assume were not Christians, with Christianity really only taking off outside of Europe and the Middle East during the Age of Discovery (say 400 years ago).
So if you actually measure by the number of Christians then you'll find that the modal Christian is actually skewed surprisingly close to the present - with around 2 billion Christians alive today, Protestants and Eastern Orthodox holding service in the local tongue, and the Catholic Novus Ordo kicking in around fifty years ago, it's possible the majority of Christians who have ever lived received their teaching in the native tongue, and the majority of those likely read or heard (at a minimum) the Nicene Creed, which is looked up to by Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox.
Obviously you could litigate to what degree those numbers represent committed Christians. But obviously the clergy and committed Christians are going to be the ones doing the gatekeeping, and they will be more familiar with the creeds than the average layperson, not less.
I think this sort of life is alive and well, just not where you live.
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If your ancestors belonged to a church with creeds, they almost certainly knew it- they might not have understood it, but the illiterate villagers in rural France would hear 'Credo in Deum...' every Sunday morning. The ability to recite large portions of the mass from memory was very widespread and before very recent times, liturgical churches usually translated basic prayers into the common vernacular(which often wasn't the same as the prestige dialect formal liturgies might have a translation into) before the bible and had the peasants memorize them.
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Saint Guinefort is a legend. Don't you dare besmirch his holy name!
But yes very much agree that folk religion was different. I do wish we could go back, sometimes, just without all the disease.
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While there is some truth to your claims, some of those creeds were recited at mass every week, so I would certainly think even Mediaeval peasants would have at least heard about them.
The context of this thread also seems to be more about the institutional level, rather than what individual church members believe or practise, which indeed can often be in tension with official teachings both in modern and premodern times. And looking at the institutional level, the Nicene Creed or opposition to abortion or whatever have been shared close to universally among all Christian churches for more than a thousand years.
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I wonder how disconnected these really are. Stirner claims the death in belief of ghosts (but goblins/leprechauns/etc will do well enough) caused the mortal wound to the foundation of religion as a whole.
When you don't have this, the primary way normal pre-moderns interacted with the supernatural is lost, and intellectual religious writings have nothing to rest on.
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Not only is it the stance of the largest church in the world, it's also the stance of the next largest(Eastern Orthodox), and the fourth largest(oriental Orthodox), and a big chunk of the third largest(Anglican communion).
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IMO the modern modal church isn't too Christian, nor does it have any real political effect in so far as it's Christian. Christianity in the West seems mostly to be another thing that progressives have eaten.
If we look around, we see lots that's against Christian dogma. Over a billion abortions since 1980, more abortions than all those who died in every war in human history. Marriage is not really 'till death do us part' anymore, marriage has been annexed by the state. Cohabitation before marriage - very common. It's judges and lawyers who control marriage (straight or gay) and divorce, the church only provides a venue and music. Pornography is in full bloom. Pride parades are in full bloom. Greed and materialism, superabundant. Self-promotion and narcissism on social media. Sabbath breaking. Blasphemy. Gluttony and excess. Sloth. Need I go on?
My main experience with church was Catholic Jesuits, not anyone terribly based or trad. But the trad don't seem to have done much. What have they accomplished? Poland, Russia, Africa... maybe Christianity really is influencing policy and values there. In the West it seems to be old people, ritual, progressivism and a pale shadow of its former power.
I agree, and I find it galling that most Western Christians are just fine with the complete surrender of society to hedonism and licentiousness...and often partaking in it. The early Christians would be torn apart by wild beasts rather than bow to a statue of Caesar. Modern Christians pay homage to the gods of this age without even thinking twice.
What are the gods of our age?
Conceptually the same gods as in any age: anything we place above God or are more key to our identity than God.
I think some specific gods of this age are "comfort", "tolerance", political affiliation, sexual orientation, "reason", educational achievement, careers. Not all these are bad in and of themselves, but they become gods when we place our faith or find our identity in them.
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If this isn't a straight line begging for a Kipling Reference, then I don't know what is.
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Yeah very much agree, sadly. I wish we were better.
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I recall a line from a Jonathan Edwards sermon to the effect that one of the greatest pleasures saved souls enjoy in Heaven is watching the sufferings of the damned in Hell.
This was the same era when a popular middle-class pastime was going to the insane asylum to laugh at the antics of the lunatics.
What?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethlem_Royal_Hospital#Public_visiting
It was a big thing during the early- and mid-eighteenth century.
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Asylum Tourism. The degree to which this was a "popular middle-class pastime" has been a little exaggerated, but it was certainly a thing.
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It seems to me the mainline Protestant churches are currently dying out exactly because what is taught there bears little resemblance to what churches taught a century or two ago, whereas the churches that stuck with traditional Christian theology seem to be doing a lot better. I am fully expecting churches that will now start pandering to the dissident right or whatever will achieve similar results as to those who pandered to progressive sensibilities. The way forward for the Church always has been to stick to its own message rather than to pander to cultural fads.
I feel like the story of progressivism emptying the pews is a little bit too convenient and self serving to be true. Not saying it is entirely incorrect. But I'd also wager that the churches that were first to fall to 'progress' were also in a weak state to begin with, and therefor felt the need to do something. Couple that with the idea that more devout believers are more likely to congregate around a more traditional message, I'm more inclined to think traditional churches are herding devout believers rather than recruiting new ones. And that they persist by dint of the temperament of the radical that seeks them out. But there are only so many of those to go around.
I could be sympathetic to this point of view but from my experience observing Christian theology politics, 'every denomination that is not mine is a fad' seems like a common viewpoint when discussing the topic of what the church's message actually is or should be.
I can only plead ignorance and ask if there is some average form or consensus on what the general message of a Church is and whether or not it has changed over time. In my local Protestant Scandinavian church it is generally vague humanist platitudes. Or maybe the humanists just got to me first... In either case I saw no relevant distinction between the two. What is the churches correct message in America?
In terms of what I think the correct message ought to be (although I am also not American, so I am not speaking for that context specifically), I think people elsewhere in this thread have pointed out there are plenty of historical creeds that Christians of various denomination have adhered to for more than a thousand years. Even on some issues that are currently contentious in the culture war, like a lot of issues pertaining to medical ethical stuff or sexual ethics there are clear Christian positions adhered to by official Roman-Catholic, Eastern Orthodox teachings and also by conservative Protestants. I don't want to overstate the case here, of course there are also plenty of meaningful differences and all of these groups have changed in various ways throughout the centuries and have in some ways been influenced by the surrounding culture, but things like the Nicean creed, or general pro-life medical ethical positions, or the idea that sex should be within marriage, are believed by the vast majority of Christians always and everywhere. I really am convinced that there is a consistent core of historical Christian teachings which a lot of Christians around the world have preserved.
Now the Lutheran churches in Scandinavia which I presume you are referring to have indeed in the past 150 years or so abandoned a lot of these beliefs. But that is my point, if Christian churches want to have anything relevant to say, they should retain core Christian beliefs. Otherwise, what is the point? What reason to exist do Christian churches have, if they don't even believe in stuff that pretty much all Christians have believed historically? What even is Christianity then?
I come from a Protestant background in the Netherlands myself. In the past years I've lived in a few different towns and been a member of the local mainline Protestant Church of the Netherlands. The majority of this denomination is pretty liberal theologically and ethically, just like the mainline churches in the USA or other European countries. It does however have a pretty significant conservative wing. In all of those towns I can see the same pattern reoccurring; the various congregations in the different boroughs of the towns which have become liberal are dwindling in numbers, they have to merge with each other to keep going and are mostly visited by elderly people. But all of those towns have one or two congregations of the conservative wing of this denomination, which explicitly affirm historical creeds and have conservative views of things like abortion and sexual ethics, and every time those congregations don't have issues with dwindling attendance and you can find plenty people of all ages on Sunday mornings. In all those conservative churches I've even come across a few converts who were brought up without any religious background whatsoever and anecdotally the number of converts have been going up in recent years (although we're still talking about small numbers to be sure, I'm not claiming some sort of revival is going on the Netherlands just yet).
So from my perspective, churches that stick with historical Christian teachings, seem to be doing relatively fine and I'm always put off a little bit by the "ohh we have to change x, otherwise the kids will never go to church" rhetoric, because in the past 150 years or so, the churches that have tried very hard to stay in touch with currently societal trends are exactly the ones that have become irrelevant are closing their doors or are only being visited by a handful of elderly people.
Wait, you live in the Dutch bible belt?
Nope. I have never lived in the bible belt myself. The church I go to is of a type that's pretty common in the bible belt, although in a proper bible belt village it might be one of the less conservative ones. There is a bunch of stereotypical stuff associated with the Dutch bible belt that you won't really find in the type of church I go to, like avoiding vaccinations and insurance, experiencing a lot of existential dread over whether you are part of the elect or not, not being allowed to drive a car on Sunday, etc. But we do adhere to historical creeds, only men can be ordained, conservative views on medical ethical issues, etc. so definitely still on the conservative side of the spectrum.
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So, the usual main example is the Episcopal church, which has always been the least devout denomination- although ACNA and the Catholic ordinariates indicate that progressivism is an explanatory factor for it doing unusually poorly. Likewise the ELCA's decline mostly tracks declining religiosity among German-Americans. But Methodists were actually a very healthy denomination before they went progressive, and the ELCA contrasts with America's other two Lutheran denominations(which are both healthy confessional churches). The Presbyterians are another example that isn't just explained by 'yeah, this church was always full of people that didn't really believe'.
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Oh dear, as an actual literal rad trad is this a dynamic I'm familiar with. Groypers like traditional Catholicism- far more than vice versa, we mostly think Nick Fuentes' brain is rotting from aids- because we are a bit antisemitic, very socially conservative, and distinctively western(and proud of it). We do not like their attitudes towards women(we think they actually hate them, rather than recognizing their different role in the order of creation). We're skeptical of their piety. Actual rad trads are often shocked by the things twitter tradcaths put their name behind(and DR twitter has a running joke about how they don't actually go to church- actual rad trad twitter is a different world) and are not happy to be associated with spicy DR takes about race or whatever. When this happens out loud in real life there can be fallouts and shunning rather than flame wars.
Who are some good people to follow in actual rad trad twitter?
Trad websites/blogs/media outlets- FSSPXnews, Fisheaters, Rorate Caeli, the Remnant.
People- Fr Dave Nix(one of the few hardliner priests you can find on twitter), Michael Matt(editor of the Remnant), Gabriel Sanchez, Edward Hapsburg(yes, one of those Hapsburgs).
Hmmm can only find the last on a cursory search? Strange. If you want to DM me your twitter I can just follow you. My name/pfp is the same over there as well.
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How rad do you want to trad?
7/10.
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From what I can tell, the dissident right’s interest in Christianity seems entirely based on the vibes of it being “based and trad” rather than actually being interested in the teachings of Christ. What Christian values do they actual have? The movement is centred on vice signaling, aka the “based ritual”, displaying abhorrent opinions, possibly ironically, to shock and troll the libs, their few female members are highly sexualised (see their embrace of Sydney Sweeney), and they are certainly more concerned with a white identity than a Christian one.
I mean the same thing can be said about progressive "Christians" and their worldview. You talk about Sidney Sweeney, but there are female protestant ministers blessing a wedding of polycules of 4 gays out there.
I think this is the point the OP wanted to make - protestant churches were infected with progressive feminism to the extent, that they are going out of their way to accept only fan whores now doing a ministry, attacking any sceptics as unchristian, you have hundreds of churches accepting LGBT lifestyles as a new normal. There are churches with "neutral" stance toward abortion, the very same churches and more are also condoning divorces.
So groypers are just pretend racist, sexist and bad Christians. Of course, but where is the same criticism for their leftist radicals, where are the calls to expel them from the body of Christ before their heretic ways bring the whole edifice down? Or are there arguments how there should be Christian love to sinners - of course except the sin of progressive racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia, those are the newly implanted 4 commandments. That is the point I think the OP makes.
Our ancestors were neither sadists nor fools. There was a reason they used to burn heretics at the stake.
This got reported as low-effort and it really is, but I'm not going to mod it. It's just a dumb, low-effort argument.
Our ancestors were probably sadists and fools to the same degree we are. But they didn't burn heretics out of some deep wisdom. "Our ancestors burnt people who disgust me, we should do that again." Well, the reason they burned heretics is that killing people who were disgusting, disturbing, inconvenient, or a burden was how they did things in a society that would also have burnt half the people on this board.
I am always bemused by r3tVrn-posters who would not have survived a hot second in the societies they idolize.
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I was going to say this as well, for the most part.
Nick is more the trendy influencer type conservative who’s great for the outrage machine of social media. I don’t follow him in particular unless he’s made a splash large enough like on Tucker that I have to watch him. But I’ve seen him in other venues before. I’ve never found him informative at all. And he has been clearly misinformed on various topics.
Take one particular example of this. When Halsey English debated Nick back when Warski Live was still a thing. Nick’s a young and good looking guy who was dressed up for the discussion. Most people watching this would’ve said Nick won. And if you asked me on the optics and performative antics of how debates go, he did. But as a person that’s read extensively and pretty deeply across various topics they touched, Halsey actually had the argument correct by a good shot.
Take Nick’s remarks about the Talmud (or Dan Bilzerian’s if you want to). He’s repeating a lot of the classic tropes and accusations about anti-Christian and anti-Jesus remarks that have been around for centuries. Not knowing some of these are outright fabrications (they don’t exist), are a collection of scandals where Rabbi’s give different views about hypothetical arguments among classroom discussions, or are often refuting various claims. The Talmud is a massive religious collection of “case law” more or less. It’s not a single unified composition of discrete writings that says shit like “you can murder gentiles.”
I personally own a complete collection of the Babylonian Talmud and Christ is it a pain in the ass to read and make sense of. But if you actually read it, it fully conforms to the explanations the Rabbi’s give. Nick either doesn’t know this or knows and is lying about it. I think the former is probably true in his case.
Nick is mostly popular IMO not because he’s some kind of scholar or intellectual heavyweight making waves. He says things that are outrageous for the times that are funny and inflammatory and progressive ideology is falling more out of favor with conservatism again becoming in vogue. He’s caught a high point in the wave of things and is riding it very effectively. The real testament to how bright or successful he is, is what he ultimately does with the victories he’s stacked and the popularity he’s accumulated.
The Talmud includes many thousands of prescriptive and proscriptive rules. It also includes other stuff. But if you’re a kosher-keeping Jew, the rules from a book like mishnah chullin are absolutely binding, though modified according to sect / kosher process. It’s not accurate to say that the Talmud is only a collection of opinions and debates. If you walk through Williamsburg or imagine Ben Shapiro’s daily life, these are the most rule-following people in the world, and all of the rules are in the Talmud and accompanying literature. And you can’t just not follow them, as that would get you ostracized and banned.
The criticism against the Talmud is as follows: among the very many authoritative rules which religious Jews follow with extreme care, are also rules that appear evil. The evil rules are not currently followed, but for what reason? Is it only because they can’t get away with it? Are they just biding their time until they can? For instance, if you read chapter 10 of Maimonides’ Avodat Kochavim in the Mishneh Torah, which is a Talmud redaction (highly authoritative and taught at most Yeshiva), you’re going to find rules about being merciless to outsiders:
Hence the trouble modern churches have.
There are a few rules in the Bible that also appear evil, and opponents of the Church can thus ask an incredibly effective question- is the only reason churches outwardly compatible with classical liberalism do that so that, as soon as everyone's a member, they can do their best villain laugh and reimpose the evil-appearing rules? Obviously some churches deal with this better than others- the ones that throw themselves prostrate before the community (you can tell the ones that are like this because they have Current Thing stapled to them, usually a Pride flag) eventually scatter to the winds because throwing themselves to the floor to be trod on destroys any community- the movers and shakers give up and leave, then everyone else does. Ask the Boy Scouts about that.
And Christianity, which derives its power based on something inherently not of this world, just doesn't have a good answer to that "but will you turn evil again someday?" question- or rather, the answer they do have is not really something one can deliver in a press release[1]. Christianity is alien, and Christians forget that at their own peril (and if they are aware of that, they tend to come off like this).
[1] The most recent Superman movie was about this exact thing. It didn't have a satisfying answer to that either since the dog bailed him out of everything, but then again, Christians are also supposed to trust that
DogGod will bail them out, so...https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-believe-by-ross-douthat
...
If you assume that modern Christianity is otherwise correct about him, his ideas thrived and are believed by billions of people today. That's a pretty big success, even if he personally lost his life.
Sure, but that kind of begs the question - should we continue to take him seriously, all things considered? If everyone clicked on a "one weird trick" video, that wouldn't make the weird trick good advice. Governors hate him!
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Jews, Christians, and Muslims all conveniently ignore some of the uglier stuff in their holy books that if taken literally would oblige and/or excuse them from behavior considered repellent in the modern age. And all three love to point at the ugly stuff in the other religions' scriptures as some kind of gotcha: either they are not "really" following their own religion, or they secretly practice and defend this stuff and hide it from outsiders.
I don't have time (or maybe inclination) to dispute this but for calibration purposes could you offer some examples? Or don't, if that seems too onerous a request.
The Jewish examples from the Talmud have been given above - lots of rules about how you can treat gentiles (badly). The Bible has Leviticus and Deuteronomy, with the various laws about what you can and cannot eat, and also that you should put to death adulterers or disobedient children, and exhortations to slaughter enemy tribes. There are also some ugly stories in Judges. The Quran and the hadiths, likewise have verses about taking women as sex slaves, slaughtering the Jews, and everyone's favorite story about Mohammad and Aisha.
All three religions have a large body of jurisprudence explaining how these laws or parables were very specific and contextual, or were superseded by later precedents, or by the New Testament, and so on. So no, you don't need to explain to me that the Bible does not actually require you to stone your disobedient son or prohibit you from eating shrimp. I know that. But all these apologetics require accepting that these prescriptions were, in fact, contextual and open to interpretation, and just taking one snippet all by itself and its literal meaning is basically scriptural nutpicking.
People like @coffee_enjoyer who enjoy those long lists of horrible Talmudic prescriptions as evidence of all the secret evil things Jews believe are doing exactly this (and will likewise happily take at face value the less savory Quranic verses and hadiths). But of course Deuteronomy 21 and Leviticus 20 and all the stories in Judges about enslavement, rape, and genocide, those are nuanced.
The nuance is that for Christians, what Jesus says on a topic supercedes everything to the contrary in the Old Testament. The “law” of the Old Testament is very specifically abrogated (though the word “fulfilled” is insisted). For instance,
This supersedes Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:19-20, Deuteronomy 19:21. The abrogated / fulfilled Old Testament Law is kept by Christians for reasons of historical and symbolic reference, because Christ is held to have satisfied and completed the Law. This is an important nuance to make and not at all an evasion; the “1st primary” text of Christianity is the New Testament, which specifies how parts of the Old Testament have been deprecated; the “2nd primary” text is the OT, understood only in relation to the 1st. But what Christianity lacks is the rich orthopraxic secondary literature like you find in Judaism and Islam. I say “secondary”, but really these works are orthopraxically primary.
If an Islamic “Sahih Hadith” in a given jurisprudential tradition specifies something, then it simply must be held by all adherents of that school of jurisprudence. It’s just how Islam works; the “sunnah” as clarified by the authentic transmissions of secondary literature have authority. It’s what Muslims spend most of their time reading. The Muslims who do not believe in the secondary literature are called Quranists and they are as insignificant as the “Kairites” of Judaism who only believe in the Old Testament. The only real case of orthopraxic literature in Christianity akin to Hadith or the Talmud is if you’re a priest engaging in a mass, or if you’re being advised on when to do something at a mass or which sins must be confessed.
Yes, buddy, I know about the New Covenant. And I'm also quite familiar with Islamic jurisprudence and interpretation (and disputes) over hadiths.
The problem is, the vast majority of religious practitioners of all faiths are not theologians or lawyers. This is why some Christians actually quote those Old Testament verses when it's convenient, and then fall back on "But Jesus" when the ones they'd rather not follow are quoted back at them. I don't think Christians are particularly hypocritical or unlearned about this, relative to anyone else. But by the same token, some Muslims and Jews are aware of the bad stuff in their holy books and handwave it away, and some don't. Most Muslims don't approve of marrying 9-year-olds, most Jews don't approve of taking gentile slave girls, most Christians don't approve of stoning children to death.
There is no difference, except the artificial one you create in an attempt to gotcha Jews.
Now, you can claim that means most Muslims and Jews aren't really following their orthodox doctrines (though I don't know why we should consider a hostile outsider more qualified to interpret their scriptural fidelity). Maybe you can even make a theological argument that under the letter of their respective laws, Christians are correct to ignore their bronze age genocidal covenants while Muslims and Jews are incorrect to ignore their bronze age genocidal covenants. But that would presumably be between them and their gods. If you want to convince us that Jews don't really follow the Talmud, go argue with a rabbi. If you want to convince us that Jews are actually that evil and slimy because they secretly follow all your uncharitable Talmudic interpretations, your case is entirely scriptural nutpicking, and it's fair to ask if you've stoned any children or damned yourself with polyester lately.
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It's not hard to find examples of people (mostly not in the collective West) following through on "the ugly stuff". ISIS and friends are the obvious example, but I won't say the other two are completely guilt-free either.
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Another example I've seen is the Talmud saying it's ok to rape boys under the age of 9, apologists for the Talmud claiming it was just one rabbi's opinion and not actual Jewish law, but then you look up what Maimonides had to say about it and he agrees it is actual Jewish law
Out of context. It means that a boy has to be 9 for an act of intercourse to legally count as one for other purposes. The prohibition on rape is separate and has no minimum age.
Nope, that's a different section of the Talmud. Sanhedrin 54b is what you want:
במאי קמיפלגי רב סבר כל דאיתיה בשוכב איתיה" בנשכב וכל דליתיה בשוכב ליתיה בנשכב The Gemara asks: With regard to what principle do Rav and Shmuel disagree? The Gemara answers: Rav holds that any halakha that applies to one who engages in intercourse actively applies to one who engages in intercourse passively, and any halakha that does not apply to one who engages in intercourse actively does not apply to one who engages in intercourse passively. Therefore, just as one who engages in intercourse actively is not liable if he is less than nine years old, as the intercourse of such a child does not have the halakhic status of intercourse, so too, if a child who is less than nine years old engages in homosexual intercourse passively, the one who engages in intercourse with him is not liable."
And Maimonides, applying this part of the Torah many centuries later:
"Once a male has penetrated another male, if both are adults, they are stoned…
If one was a minor but at least nine years and a day old, the active or passive adult is stoned while the minor is exempt.
If the minor was exactly nine years old or less, they are both exempt. Still, it is fitting for the court to give lashes of insubordination to the adult for sleeping with a male, even though that male was less than nine." - Laws of Forbidden Relations 1:14
This is what I'm talking about, there are plenty of things in the Talmud that sound awful out of context but are unobjectionable in context (or the person referencing it is incorrectly summarizing what it actually says). But there are also several that are absolutely horrendous regardless of context.
That's out of context in pretty much the same way (except you quoted enough to show the context). It says they're not liable for violating the prohibition against homosexual intercourse. It doesn't say that it removes the liability for violating the prohibition against rape.
Moses Maimonides says the only punishment the rapist should face is lashings for homosexuality. And perhaps more importantly, on the previous paragraphs hes lists no punishment for women that rape 8 year old boys except thet they have lost any eligibility to marry a member of the priesthood. It seems pretty clear that Maimonides interpreted that section the same way modern normies reading it do.
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You said that "the Torah says it's ok to rape boys under the age of 9". This reads to me like autistic legalist interpretation on precisely how the laws around equal punishment for sexual offenses and minimum age for criminal culpability interact, not an endorsement of pedophilia; it's no more sinister than an Aella poll.
Semi-relatedly, here's a funny bit from Sanhedrin 55a on the halakhaic status of putting your dick in your own ass:
Lmao! What in the fuck….
I love how this thread has turned into a discussion where we’ve essentially become a group of Jews debating scriptural nuances and statements of other Rabbi’s, vindicating the stereotype that Jews love to argue with each other.
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If it is Jewish law and yet most Jews do not appear to act or express beliefs matching it, is it Jewish law?
...yes, obviously?
American law sets speed limits, despite the fact that most Americans do not appear to act or express beliefs matching them.
The laws of the state are not the same thing as the laws of a religious group, so, no, it's not obvious.
For starters, people obey the laws of the state because those are enforced, while religious law, outside of places where the church and the state are integrated, is much more of a suggestion. Then there's also the historical disconnect between religious law that was written 2000 years ago and the today, as opposed to state law which is usually updated a bit more frequently.
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