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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1602 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 13, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Do the religious people on here actually believe in Christianity? Like do you actually believe that Christ rose from the dead, Garden of Eden, Jesus is the son of God, the Trinity, virgin birth, etc? Or is more Deism and you like the community from going to church? I have a hard time believing most adult converts i.e. JD Vance actually believe these things, but I'm curious if I'm wrong here.

Yes. "Christ rose from the dead" is a very believable claim, just on the historical evidence - the rest of the core claims of Christianity are not particularly hard to believe if you believe that (e.g. if Christ rose from the dead then He certainly was not an ordinary human; thus believing that He is the Son of God, was born of a virgin, and are coming back again as He claimed aren't very difficult to swallow).

The one exception would be that while I tend to believe in a ~literal Garden of Eden, it's not really skin off of my nose if the Genesis account(s), not being written for 21st century scientists, was not intended to be interpreted as 21st century scientists would prefer to interpret them. (Notwithstanding this I toy with ideas that harmonize the Eden account with what 21st century scientists have deduced about the nature of early man, but that's more because I find it interesting than that I need to understand everything written in Scripture to believe in it.)

I'm starting to think that if "Christ rose from the dead" is something that historical evidence supports, despite all the other evidence to the contrary of such things being possible, then it is not that I should believe in the return of Christ more, but that I should believe in historical evidence less - including other areas of history.

I think what you end up finding if you adopt this approach is that all of reality becomes, to varying degrees, less comprehensible. It also makes the cherry-picking problem much worse.

People who generally evaluate historical writings as more-or-less accurate +/- the usual human margin of error and bias and then put their finger on the scale when anything supernatural happens are arguably cherry-picking what they want to read, but at least they have a methodology to it and you can agree on a certain level of ground truth (e.g. most non-Christian historians don't deny that Christ or Paul existed, for instance).

Whereas if you just insist that all historical evidence is downright bad, any pretense of methodological criteria can quickly go out the window and people can just cherry-pick what they like. You might think that the end result here is merely being more reserved about making historical claims, but in real life I think it ends up in weird places like believing in Great Tartaria.

I wouldn't insist that all historical evidence is bad. But from what I have read, an average layman does believe popular history more than they should. There's this "historical evidence on Sparta was largely written down by Sparta's political opponents" factoid that I recall of note.

There's this "historical evidence on Sparta was largely written down by Sparta's political opponents" factoid that I recall of note.

Sure, I think careful scholars are cognizant of that sort of thing.

Early writings on Christ are interesting because we both have early writings from Christians (who mostly didn't profit much by believing in Christ as per their own writings) and writings from neutral or hostile third parties.

I haven't read as much of the early writings from and on Christians as I would like, but from what I can tell the pro- and anti- Christian writings often read exactly as you would expect, e.g. the Christians are writing about church discipline, doctrine, and defending their beliefs as intellectually legitimate and their opponents are calling them gullible retards from first principles.

I get the impression that the main difference between second century theological debates about Christianity and Reddit today is that a lot of Christian arguments have remained the same (sans the ones aimed at the pagan gods), whereas "Christ was not the Son of God, merely a magician" or "Christ was not the Son of God since God would never come to Earth as a peasant" have fallen out of favor. "Christianity will destroy our way of life because they are opposed to infanticide and licentiousness" still has some traction though.

There's this "historical evidence on Sparta was largely written down by Sparta's political opponents" factoid that I recall of note.

I would disagree with this, personally. The historical evidence we have on Sparta was largely written by foreigners in opposing or post-Spartan states, yes, but very often by foreigners who sympathized with Sparta for domestic political or philosophic reasons - as sympathizers of the aristocratic elite, Spartan 'virtuous oligarchy' appealed to them as contrast to Athenian democracy. Xenophon, who wrote The Constitution of the Lacedemonians, even defected to Sparta rather than return to Athens. A more accurate parallel would be somewhere between Tacitus' Germania and the tendency of Enlightenment-influenced writers to idealize Chinese government (I recall Bertrand Russell still gushing over China's rational and virtuous political system in the 1920s...).

I recall Bertrand Russell still gushing over China's rational and virtuous political system in the 1920s...

Historical political organisation with the imperial examinations, which he compares favourably with other premodern political systems -- it isn't unreasonable to see some merit in the qualified Mandate of Heaven compared to the less-qualified divine right of kings, and even a flawed meritocracy compared to none at all. In comparison to earlier sinophiles, his support appears to be more muted.

[...] no doubt, as a modern system, the "Eight Legs" deserve all the hard things that he says about them. But in the fourteenth century, when one considers the practicable alternatives, one can see that there was probably much to be said for such a plan. At any rate, for good or evil, the examination system profoundly affected the civilization of China. Among its good effects were: A widely-diffused respect for learning; the possibility of doing without a hereditary aristocracy; the selection of administrators who must at least have been capable of industry; and the preservation of Chinese civilization in spite of barbarian conquest. But, like so much else in traditional China, it has had to be swept away to meet modern needs...

He also recognised the terrible corruption in Chinese politics in the 1920s, though he uses this kind of as a mirror to criticise European imperialism and some parts of modernisation. In any case, I don't think he was under the impression that the anarchy in the late-Qing and Republican eras was good for Chinese society.

I find that in his writings on China he tends to be more generous (arguably excessively so) towards Chinese society rather than its political systems, though; and in his private letters you can see some of his frustrations while living and teaching in China.

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