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Notes -
I find it interesting that The Motte tends to treat Christianity with kid gloves that are not reserved for other belief systems. For example, the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans is widely called out here as being simply wrong. Which it almost certainly is, in my opinion. But consider the idea that a man 2000 years ago was god incarnate and rose from the dead and we should believe this because a few people who lived decades later wrote that this was true and because some other people have had some visions and powerful feelings. This idea is, I think, even less likely to be true than the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans. But Christianity on The Motte is usually not met with accusations that it is as absurd, indeed perhaps more absurd, as any flavor of wokism. Wokeism gets often and in my opinion properly pilloried on here for being nonsensical on the level of correspondence to objective reality, but Christianity typically gets a free pass. Even the atheists on here mostly refuse to really call it out as being absurd when the topic comes up.
Does this happen because Christianity is largely not viewed as a threat and because since wokeism is this community's main out-group and Christianity is vaguely right-aligned in the modern West, people here tend to follow the principle of "the enemy of an enemy is my friend"? Or, to be more charitable, maybe it is because wokism can fairly easily be criticized on the level of normal scientific investigation, whereas the claims that Christianity makes go so far beyond typical materialism that one makes an exception for it because its claims are fundamentally viewed as being orthogonal to scientific investigation?
Now you bring it up, I do think Christianity is incredibly dumb and of the same essence as wokeism. By this I mean Christianity as it's practiced, which is something that has some level of correspondence with the Bible but is not necessarily the same. Most people don't take fundamentalists as mainstream Christians. Anyway:
Both defy verification of their physical claims
Both are universalist, seeking to convert everyone
Both take human moral/economic/intellectual equality as an axiom that must be imposed on the world
Both have a heavy emphasis on the underdog, upon liberation
It's the WEIRD countries who came up with wokeism, all of whom were Christian to some extent. Based on their own distinct philosophical traditions, India would never have come up with it. China and Japan would never have come up with it. The Arabs would never have invented it.
For example - the British Empire went to enormous efforts to eliminate the slave trade, spending something like 5% of GDP on buying slaves back from their owners (a huge sum back in the 1830s considering the small size of the state). Nobody else ever did something like this, not the Arabs or the Chinese or anyone. Nobody else ever apologizes for their imperial history, teaches in their schoolbooks that they were wrong to go out and conquer others. Mostly they maintain that they were totally in the right whatever they did (it didn't happen and if it did the other guy deserved it anyway). The Turks don't apologize for their slave-raiding of Slavs, same with the Algerians and Tunisians who couldn't care less about their history of actually raiding the coast of Europe for slaves.
Only Christians feel guilty and apologize - that is the essence of wokeness. Apologizing for inequality, apologizing for discrimination and so on. We talk about white guilt but I think it's the legacy of Christianity.
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