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 -
Genealogies are not there to provide a timeline in the way a modern reader might try to fit in. For one, it's not required to list exact father-son dyads, but someone listed as a son of someone may actually be a grandson or great grandson.
For another, Matthew is writing David, David, David in his genealogy and you don't see it because you aren't a first century Jew. In ancient writing, numbers are represented by letters. Think Roman Numerals. The name for King David and the number 14 are represented the same way in the language gMatthew was written in.
There are ways to sync up the nativity narratives but your specific objection is weird. "But in John and Mark he's just from Nazareth." In Matthew Jesus is taken from Bethlehem when he is around the age of 2 and goes to Egypt, and then after a few years goes to Nazareth. Let's say you were born in Georgia but moved to New York City when you were four. Later on, you travel around the US and people say you are from NYC. Are they wrong or inconsistent?
You are using an intentionally gnostic translation of John instead of a more neuteral source. Lattrimore is my go-to secular translation of the New Testament. He made waves with his Odyssey translation and is generally respected and far from a Christian hack. His translation of John 8:31-47 is:
And Lattrimore is not a Christian, he's translating from the Greek according to the most natural translation.
Jesus is not saving us from the Hebrew God but from our own sin and error.
Christian theology starts with this basic truth: we are made in the image and likeness of God and this comes with responsibility, which we have failed at. We have wills and intellects and were supposed to participate in Creation by taking dominion over the material world and instantiating the good over it, not as automatons but as free beings. We chose otherwise. Because of our choices we can never be happy unless there is a way to reconcile our current miserable poor choices with the original good we were made for.
This was impossible for us to accomplish on our own but it was possible for God. Our creator sent His begotten Son on a Rescue Mission for our sake. Jesus accomplished this Rescue Mission by being a Human of infinite worth, as He was also God. This Human offered something that was His to possess - His Divine self - as a sacrifice on the behalf of the human race, of which He also was. His life, death, and resurrection is humanity's sole boast through which we have accumulated infinite merit. Because of this infinite merit our redemption is made possible.
From his Wikipedia:
Now, this does not mean that his translation is wrong or that he cannot be trusted; it is entirely possible that his knowledge of Greek somehow led to his faith, and not the other way around. However, that argument would be stronger if he had been persuaded by John and not Luke, the latter being a Gospel about which I have reservations regarding its fundamental legitimacy as a record of the original teachings of Jesus. To me it seems far too plausible that it is a radically edited version of Mark and/or some earlier document.
You argue from authority as well. I will admit, I cannot read the Greek myself; I really, really wish that I could read Classical Greek. Since AI is coming, maybe I will learn it, but it obviously takes years... I have authorities that go either way on this passage. At any rate, it is not a fundamental problem for gnosticism either way, as I noted in my post. There is also the fact that at least some scholars believe John, like all the documents in the NT canon, was subject to an arbitrary redaction process; the original might shine through in a modern version, but character by character it can be arbitrarily incorrect. IIRC the Greek that we have for every book is post-canon, unfortunately.
Omission says something, and the Catholic logical OR never was convincing to me.
This is not getting past the archaeological and geological issues with the creation of Adam and the Garden of Eden, sorry. You can easily add another 10,000 years and it's still wrong.
People back then seemed to think sin caused disease, like, directly. We now know creation causes disease. That's another mark against your theology in favor of a Marcionite/gnostic idea. You have to admit creation is corrupt, but that humans deserve it because our ancestor (?) sinned and so do we. I personally do not dismiss the idea that it is sinful to be here, so this is not entirely foreign to me.
I can accept this. I think what I advance here expresses it more clearly. Jesus is in fact the way to that reconciliation. Here's where I think we differ:
People are made more or less in the image of the higher God. Valentinus gives us three types, like Plato. Modern science aligns with this the most (although it is taboo to say). Your theology is silent on this; Calvinists keep the canon and say there is an elect, so the idea is not entirely foreign, but it's the clearest in Valentinus and his forebears.
Will and intellect: thelema and nous. I agree those are important, and this is a real point of contact between us. In the Apocryphon of John, Christ is accompanied by exactly these: Nous, Thelema, and Logos. Where we part ways is Genesis. I know you'd say the sin was disobedience, not knowledge itself, but the thing forbidden was still the tree of knowledge, and reaching for it is what brings the Fall. In gnosticism, nous is good. The demiurge, by contrast, is ignorant of what is above him; he boasts that there is no other God beside him. As I read it, he acts mostly from will without real knowledge, which is why the world is poorly made.
Who is "we," and how did he choose otherwise, other than by coming into the world?
Indeed. I think we must follow Jesus's example. I feel that hasn't been going too well. I know you'd say there is real joy in the Christian life now, but in practice the canonical theology puts the weight of happiness in the future and asks for blind faith in the meantime; in this other theology, one can gain a first happiness through coherent knowledge of Christ and then more happiness after death.
So I think that I agree with most of what you say, but I am just seeing it as too... covered up in the canon. It doesn't seem like the Old Testament should be there.
There was no intentional omission here, I misremembered a few details (I was thinking he was a more recent translation but this was from the 70s, for example.) My point that he's not a religious scholar but a linguist still stands, along with he did not start off as a Christian when doing his translation.
What genre do you think the first chapters of Genesis are? They are clearly not biography or history. As the USCCB writes:
I don't deal a lot with Gnostics so I'm not going to argue it with you. It's like diving into a Book of Mormon debate with a Mormon. Or a round Earth with a flat Earther. Someone who has spent 100s of hours on a topic is going to trounce someone who's only given it attention recently, even if the second person is correct. I am still confident in the historical record, Apostolic succession, and the vindication of present day Catholic spirituality and miracle claims.
I mean between the Gospels.
This is basically a huge mote in your eye so to speak and I just think you aren't getting rid of it properly:
The Christmas Proclamation from the 1584 Roman Martyrology was read for centuries:
After Vatican II it was changed to «when ages beyond number had run their course from the creation of the world.»
Again, you really cannot get passed this, sorry. This invites Jordan Peterson right into your home, with his it was just a metaphor theology, and he talks about Jung ... and Jung talks about Nag Hammadi ... and Nag Hammadi talks about cosmic Adam. This is a very big problem for your canon. A gigantic problem, which is why your Church (you know them by their fruits) had to persecute Galileo and the others.
The same as the Gospels? Both are men and a God doing things and talking to each other.
Not true, I think this is a coping mechanism for being wrong mostly, and besides I have not spent 100s of hours.
Well I made it clear I think the record you refer to is suspicious. Why are you so much more confident in it?
Heavily disputed. Both between churches and on the basis of textual criticism.
What vindications? If God did miracles on video in Rome once a year, or even once a lifetime, I'd convert.
Yeah it's a very baller line. I recommend everyone visit a Easter Vigil mass and a Christmas Midnight mass once in their lives at a large parish to experience it.
Doesn't mean it's required to believe those are exact dates, or otherwise the exact dates wouldn't have been debated so fiercely. Bede disagreed with Eusebius who disagreed with Julius Africanus who disagreed with a bunch of Protestant scholars all working from the same text and genealogies trying to find the exact day of creation.
Most educated Christians for most of history regarded the first 11 chapters of Genesis as myths that present theological truths about our identity as humans in relationship with God. Reading the Garden of Eden as something that has to be literally true or else all of the Bible and Christianity is false is something that developed relatively recently.
Origen:
Augustine:
Also St. Augustine:
I do not want to give the impression that I think all Christians knew about evolution and the big bang since the 1st Century. Of course St. Augustine thought the Earth was created in a spectacular way by God. If I recall correctly "science" at his time thought the Earth was created in Spring and the Genesis account didn't indicate that (or something like that I can't look it up right now), which is why he wrote what he did about following the science instead of treating the creation accounts as literal.
But it is true that the average Christian looked to the first 11 Chapters of Genesis for allegorical, theological truths primarily, and a description of the actual beginning of the Earth secondarily. Same with the book of Joshua, it was primarily seen as an allegory for the importance of excising sin from the soul, and only secondarily as an actual historical record of something that happened. And this way of reading the narratives is not a post hoc rationalization in the face of evidence that should have disproved it, but rather just the natural way it's been approached applied to our present knowledge.
The beginning of the book of Genesis provides a thought provoking, textured, allegorical recounting of the origins of man. Everyone saw that there were two, contradictory accounts of the origin of man in the first two chapters. The purpose of handing down these chapters was not to present an accurate account of history but to present a Biblical anthropology. Most commentary on these stories focus on the relationship of God and man presented in the stories as perennial spiritual truths. They were also taken as the best account they had of the beginning of the human species, but we have since learned more through other means of exploration.
You don't know your history here. The Galileo affair was due to him being bad at politicking and writing a book where he called the pope an idiot. More than that, wrote a book where a character was called Idiot and had the Idiot character speak the Pope's lines.
So confident and so wrong. The Bible is a collection of books of many genres. There is wisdom literature, proverbs, folklore, political satire. The Gospels are written in a very particular style - Ancient Biography. This was the most accurate way of recording events at the time and demonstrates a desire to stay to the truth. Genesis was not written in Ancient Biography, Ancient Biography was a style only developed in the centuries leading up to the Birth of Christ.
The textual evidence for the New Testament is by far the best we have for anything more than 500 years ago. The number of manuscripts, the spread of the manuscripts, the dating of the manuscripts eclipse everything else.
More's the pity. To try to explain with an example we would both agree with, let's say I debate a flat earther. I point to a basic trigonometric proof based on shadows. They then argue back that this effect was explained by the sun being a sphere, it does not mean the Earth is a sphere.
They were able to fire back this response in quick time because they have read a blog post or watched a video saying such. Another flat earther had already made a "Top 10 objections DEBUNKED" video. In order to refute this, now I have to break out the old waves and optics textbook, try to make a diagram, try to make it as simple as I can to someone with little knowledge of physics, and then I can maybe break it down enough to show why that objection does not hold.
The level of effort required to debate something you're not familiar with against someone who is obsessed with the topic to is not worth the effort. And gnosticism is esoteric these days.
Does it worry you that gnosticism isn't as popular as orthodox Christianity? If the truth disappeared shortly after Jesus's Ascension into Heaven, then I would doubt Jesus's power and significance. Even leaving aside all His comments that he was building a Church that would assault the gates of Hell and would be with us until the End of time, which I don't know are cannonical to you or not.
You don't have to watch this video, I just want to share it to show it's not just one or two weird things, it's a ginormous ball of miracles: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7X_HmSQ6A1A?si=iwe66674GNuWpkrV
I do recommend these two videos though:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ikdDzR-5EA8?si=zMNP1cBkcomQEuvV
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DgIduVknMnc?si=WGHRDpVVOxue89za
And these articles: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jacalyn-Duffin/publication/5764868_The_Doctor_Was_Surprised_or_How_to_Diagnose_a_Miracle/links/654a6bc3b1398a779d6e12ee/The-Doctor-Was-Surprised-or-How-to-Diagnose-a-Miracle.pdf
https://apcz.umk.pl/SetF/article/download/SetF.2021.001/28737
If you want a video of a miracle performed on command, watch a Hollywood movie. I don't know why a video is considered gold standard for evidence over sworn contemporaneous eyewitness testimony, medical imaging records, lab tests, and other evidence which seems much more convincing to me.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link