This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Separation from God has always struck me as a cheat too. You never give informed consent to separation from God; you are just told "doing X automatically separates you from God, but since it's your own action, you don't get to blame anyone for it".
As the wokesters and anti-wokesters like to say (in different contexts), God doesn't owe you his presence.
If being separated from God is eternal torture, and if he created you it is equivalent to the abortion issue except you are undeniably a person. In which case yes, he does owe you his presence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Alternatively, "informed consent" doesn't work the way you appear to be arguing it does. Does a 3-pack-a-day smoker give informed consent to the consequences of smoking three packs a day? Obviously not, since they didn't know for certain what the consequences would be or what the subjective experience would actually be like, right?
We've got a variety of fairly reliable evidence that smoking causes cancer. The evidence that unrepentant sin sends you to hell is, let's say, more on the hearsay side of things. If the best evidence for smoking causing cancer is that somebody said it totally does, it would be a different story.
@sun_the_second also.
Sure. But you don't know you in particular are going to get cancer, or that by abstaining from smoking you won't get cancer anyway. You don't know how having cancer will feel in a subjective sense. You don't know what else might happen that might obviate all downsides of cancer; maybe you're destined to die before any negative health effects would arrive and smoking would be a pure net-positive for you. All of these can "support" the absurd claim that one's decision to smoke three packs a day was not sufficiently "informed", if one's reasoning is motivated. And as I've argued a number of times before, all reason is motivated.
Do you recognize that Good and Evil exist, that the difference between them is comprehendible by humans, and that they have important consequences for humans engaging in them?
Sure. But we can pretty confidently say that smoking increases your chances of getting cancer versus the counterfactual. Putting your life savings on black doesn't guarantee that you'll lose them, but I'm pretty comfortable saying that you're informed that it's a possibility. Arguing against this feels like sophistry.
Probably.
Based on the number of societies in human history doing absolutely heinous shit and considering it to be normal or even moral, I'm not sure about this. In fact I suspect there's very few societies that don't involve something I consider horrifically evil until fairly recently. And even then I'm not sure.
Unclear. I'm pretty confident that good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. Perhaps there is a settling of accounts in the hereafter, but that's the whole question, isn't it?
Why would you expect a human society to not feature heinous evil? Why would humans frequently engaging in heinous evil reduce your confidence that Evil exists as a useful concept and is recognizable by humans?
Obviously.
Can we confidently say that evil leads to misery, and good leads to happiness, even if this is not the case in every microscopic section of the causal chain that we can directly observe, yes?
@Jiro
I am asking for a recognition that some kinds of things are in fact evil, not an agreement of any particular religion's listing of what those things are.
For the things you recognize as evil, what makes them evil? What does it mean for a thing to be evil?
The point is that saying you've "chosen" to "separate from God" is a cheat, since you can't meaningfully "choose" something you don't know about. If some things are recognizeable as evil, but others aren't, that doesn't help the argument unless only the recognizeable things are said to be "choices". No version of Christianity that claims you "chose" to go to Hell limits it to things that I can actually recognize are evil.
More options
Context Copy link
People doing heinous stuff and considering it morally acceptable pretty directly implies that people have difficulty recognizing good and evil. Either that, or they are right and I'm having difficulty. Not looking good either way for this argument.
I think doing evil to those who can retaliate or doing evil that others recognize as evil (thus leading to some kind of retaliation) can result in misery. You can do all the evil you want to everyone else with no obvious result in misery as far as I can tell, at least as long as you don't see what you do as evil yourself.
I don't have a totally complete moral framework, but I sort of operate off a mishmash of utilitarianism and virtue ethics. So an evil act is one that is not virtuous or leads to an overall decrease in welfare.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No, I don't recognize this. You are conflating different kinds of things with the same name. I recognize that some kinds of things are evil, but religion calls many things evil that I don't recognize as such. The difference between some of them is comprehensible by humans, but I don't "comprehend" why homosexuality is evil, and I can't comprehend things like the trinity or transsubstantiation at all, let alone comprehend why it is evil not to believe in them. And some things called evil have important consequences, but some don't have important consequences that are not just people hating you for it. And I can't recognize that any form of evil has "separation from God" consequences--it's completely invisible until you die!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If I only got told about lung cancer patients, but could never see one even theoretically because the only way you can look inside a cancer ward is to become a patient, I might think "smoking kills" was bullshit, too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link