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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17162 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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I'm still pretty doubtful that if one examines the continental->critical philosophy pipeline that developed into wokeism, one would find a pool of Christian theologians doing Christian stuff, even if heretical.

Scoop out the Holy trinity

There are still plenty of non-trinitarians, and they aren't the ones who created wokeism, either. You have to go full atheism first. At every step of the development of wokeism, it's people who went full atheism first. As The Rightful Caliph observed later in the process:

Most movement atheists weren’t in it for the religion. They were in it for the hamartiology [the study of sin, in particular, how sin enters the universe]. Once they got the message that the culture-at-large had settled on a different, better hamartiology, there was no psychological impediment to switching over. We woke up one morning and the atheist bloggers had all quietly became social justice bloggers. Nothing else had changed because nothing else had to; the underlying itch being scratched was the same. They just had to CTRL+F and replace a couple of keywords.

I suppose one could try to argue that it's impossible for an atheist sect to have a hamartiology, but I think it would require argument for why Scott is wrong.

Do you really think that if one scratches the likes of Marx, Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse, Derrida, Foucault, etc., one primarily finds a bunch of Christians doing Christian stuff? Nah, they thoroughly rejected any sort of god-based anything, went full atheism, and then built an atheism-based epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and politics. They weren't Christians doing Christian stuff and deciding to just scoop out the trinity and keep what remains. It's incredibly different on almost every level, down to the base. It seems that there's maybe one kinda similarity if you squint really really hard, but even that has a totally different basis and totally different implications.

There are still plenty of non-trinitarian

The better phrase I should have used was "scoop out Christian Metaphysics"

I think in order for you to make the argument that none of the people in that list were ever influenced at their core by any Christian morality, Christian Theology or Christian hamartiology, you'd have to put forth the idea that tabula rasa exists into adulthood. That your mind, your beliefs, your values are entirely your own. You tread un-walked ground and nothing of the culture that you developed, grew, learned in steeped into your core. I guess it's basically a soft cultural determinism view. Your beliefs are downstream of your societies culture, your societies culture is downstream of the theology. Thus your entire core moral system operates from a distinctly Christian lens. Rejection, acceptance, mutation, convergence, how ever you change, doesn't really matter, your base subset is the core theology of your society. In the west that is overridingly Christian.

I'd be curious to see if atheism that developed from a non-western society has similar moral systems as that of a western-developed atheism. However I'm not sure one exists. Christianity is such a universalist religion, while at the same time it suffers apostates, meaning you can stop believing and go hard in that, and still be allowed to live. I'd postulate that non-universalist religions don't inspire such aggressive rejection, and the other universalists like Islam don't suffer apostates.

I think in order for you to make the argument that none of the people in that list were ever influenced

I don't think that was the matter in question. The way you had originally put it was, "what base theology did Wokeism form from"? This is quite the shift of goalposts.

you'd have to put forth the idea that tabula rasa exists into adulthood. That your mind, your beliefs, your values are entirely your own. You tread un-walked ground and nothing of the culture that you developed, grew, learned in steeped into your core.

If this is the test for the original question, then don't we have to conclude that your own particular sect of atheism also formed from the base theology of Christianity? Or did you uniquely possess tabula rasa into adulthood in a world otherwise full of mere mortals? It's making the question meaningless. Certainly not about theological development.

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