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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32822 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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I find the the world's most bizzare phenomenon to be the existence of fundamentalists who can't understand the idea of religious-like devotion. All the moral commitments of their enemies must be cynical ploys or trivial aspects of their character; they could never be a driving force stronger than material concerns.

I wonder how long this has been the case. It's fascinating to realize that the descendants of crusaders were brutally crushed in an openly atheistic revolt back in 1790s France, then in 1917 Russia. Then when the threat of depravity (See Weimar's trans-mania) and communism threatened the 1930s German petit-Burgeois, these immediately understood that their only hope was not in the church but in viking Larpers who it turns out were not larping at all. Now the most ostensibly religious country in the West is the exporter of woke culture to ostensibly irreligious Europe, having previously broken records in unrestricted abortion, appalling divorce and child custody policies...

At some point, you've got to wonder what it says about Christians that the the morbidly obese gender-fluid idols of the left inspire in their followers, a greater will to power, than the rock of ages.

I'll have you know that Hitler explicitly hated Viking larpers.

"The characteristic thing about these people [modern-day followers of the early Germanic religion] is that they rave about the old Germanic heroism, about dim prehistory, stone axes, spear and shield, but in reality are the greatest cowards that can be imagined. For the same people who brandish scholarly imitations of old German tin swords, and wear a dressed bearskin with bull's horns over their heads, preach for the present nothing but struggle with spiritual weapons, and run away as fast as they can from every Communist blackjack.

It seems to me that nothing would be more foolish than to re-establish the worship of Wotan. Our old mythology ceased to be viable when Christianity implanted itself. Nothing dies unless it is moribund.

Nothing dies unless it is moribund, I agree with that. Christianity is finished, there are new ideas that inspire greater fervor.

Nothing dies unless it is moribund, I agree with that. Christianity is finished, there are new ideas that inspire greater fervor.

Christianity is alive and thriving with greater fervor than ever before.

Together, worldwide Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity numbers over 644 million adherents.[15] While the movement originally attracted mostly lower classes in the global South, there is a new appeal to middle classes.[16][17][18] Middle-class congregations tend to have fewer members.[19][20][21] Pentecostalism is believed to be the fastest-growing religious movement in the world.[22]

Note that it is Christianity explicitly devoid of intellectual content and rational thought.

True, I saw a graph of church attendance in the UK and all the traditional churches were shrinking year on year, all but one of the evangelicals were growing. But this was in the context of the Anglican church of Uganda splitting from the English church over some compromise they were doing with gay rights: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/church-of-england-crack-up/

The key thing is getting tangible results. Christianity is not pulling in its own direction, it's getting pulled in other directions. The strongest, richest and most important parts of the world aren't getting more Christian, they're getting less Christian.

Christianity is alive and thriving with greater fervor than ever before.

None of what you quoted claims that. "There are X adherents" where X is a large sounding number doesn't imply growth at all. And "Pentecostalism is believed to be the fastest-growing religious movement in the world" neither says that Christianity is growing, nor does it even say that Pentecostalism is growing fast. ("Fastest growth rate" doesn't imply "fast growth rate".)

Be very careful not to interpret Wikipedia articles as saying more than what they literally claim, because writers phrase them to imply things that they don't have evidence for while being literally truthful. (Wikipedia is similar to the media in this way.)

Do you have to wonder? Nietschze spent quite some time arguing that Christianity, as slave morality, was inconsistent in terms of will to power.

This is a strong argument but it's not exactly consistent with the behaviour of Christians before the enlightenment. I think the defining shift happened when God died in the souls of the tiny proportion of people who are capable of embracing an idea fully, and going to war for it. These, then went for other ideas that could still capture them, and everyone else was at most a trivial inconvenience in their way.

Okay, then what caused them to turn their backs on God?

Actually, who were these few people? I think it’s a mistake to read the greatest and most venerated of historical figures as categorically different from the masses. The existence of a warrior nobility was no guarantee of success, and it was specifically the transition to professional militaries which put Catholic Spain in charge of the western hemisphere for a few decades. But the Protestant nations of the 17th and 18th centuries clearly met success after the Enlightenment. It’s the incentives and the technology afforded to common men which drive history.

A traditional cycle: The older generation promote strict social mores but fails to follow them, the younger generation observes the hypocrisy of the older and is disgusted and so loosens up, the next generation observes their libertine elders and is disgusted and so tightens up, on into infinity.

I bet that gen Z (or the gen after it) will be more conservative in some ways than the millennials (although not on lgbtq stuff, that is locked in forever once the boomers stop taking up all the cultural space);

(although not on lgbtq stuff, that is locked in forever once the boomers stop taking up all the cultural space)

The TQ stuff is likely to blow up in a spectacular way once all the sterilised kids grow up and huge chunks of them decide they were failed by the system (and the rest of the probability space mostly looks like "AI killed us" or "we get fertility-restoration tech"). It's exactly the sort of thing that makes a society decide Never Again once everyone's had time to stand back and process.

There's also the issue that nuclear war is pretty likely in the near future and I think that most SJers literally dying in a fire would lead to the few who survived getting removed from power; SJ's hold on the countryside is tenuous.

And, y'know, the stats of millennials/zoomers who reproduce are immensely different from the rest along this axis.

Not obvious how fast Thermidor will come or how far it will go, but I wouldn't count it out just yet.

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