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I’m glad to hear this worldview works for you, but part of the point @Hoffmeister25 is making in my view is that this can’t and won’t work for most people. At least not in and urban modern context.
To repeat my response down thread, Christianity has clearly failed to adapt to the modern, secular worldview. This has been going on since at least the 18th century if not well before then, but the cracks in the religion of the day have been growing. There’s a reason less people are religious than ever.
And I agree that’s a bad thing! Religion is great for people! But if tradcons just sit in their villages and talk about how great their life is and try to push their outdated worldview nothing will change. You need to innovate and find a way to square your religion with the updated understanding we now have of the natural world.
Honestly, I’m rooting for y’all. I’d like to see a return to spirituality, but it has to be a new spirituality that’s true to our circumstance, not one from two thousand years ago.
@FarNearEverywhere this may be a more put together response than my other one downthread.
If religion is great for people, how is it outdated? Wouldn’t the thing which is great for people be evergreen in its greatness?
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If you want a philosophy for encouraging moral behavior in an urbanized, low-trust, secular society, might I suggest Confucianism? I think you're asking something of Christianity that it just wasn't made for. Even Islam might be more theologically amenable to this sort of compromise, having never undergone a separation of church and state.
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...and I disagree.
I don't think the issue is that it "can’t or won’t work" I think the issue is that it is difficult and that it's rewards are often deferred.
"Stand up straight, eat your vegetables, and stop thinking that you are any more deserving than the people around you" might not be a message people want but (as @urquan observes) it is often the message they need to hear. Mine is the radical notion that being healthy and being happy requires putting in effort and taking responsibility. It's one thing for a guy to say that he wants to look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club and entirely another for him to want it enough that he changes his diet and starts doing push-ups.
There's a meme floating around that goes "Hard times breed hard men, hard men bring good times, good times breed weak men, weak men bring hard times". If I had to posit a mechanism, it would be that as society becomes more affluent (or "complex" as @Hoffmeister25 puts it) the selection pressure for healthy/pro-social behavior decreases. It becomes easier to get away with being a parasite or becoming a soulless hedonist because you don't know everybody in your neighborhood, and why would anyone want to eat veggies when they can have ice cream? Problem is that if enough people start going down that road shit will eventually hit the fan and when it does it will be those that maintained those healthy/pro-social behaviors that tend to come out alive/ahead.
Where are the hard men bringing good times to africa and all the other god-forsaken places? They've had hard times for millenia. The west has had good times and weak, decadent, civilized men for centuries. Hard men bring hard times, which breeds more hard men.
It's a reactionary, pro-hardness meme, I'm surprised you take it at face value. Christianity is soft. I could see the meme being used by a roman aristocrat decrying this new age stuff, a knight when the church was pushing for the truce of god half the week, or right-wing critics of christianity like gibbon and nietzsche.
They are bringing good times, OFC for themselves only. What would be otherwise the point of being "hard man"?
Luxury Homes in a Gated Community in Hargeisa, Somaliland
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That is indeed a good question. One possible theory is that they GTFO the moment they get the opportunity. Another is that hard times don't actually breed hard men (or that hardmen do not actually bring good times) and that there is some other mechanism at work. A third is that the reactionary "pro-hardness" crowd doesn't actually understand what real "hardness" entails on a societal and civilizational level. That would certainly mesh with thier accusations of Christians being "soft".
For my part I'm not neccesarily endorsing the reactionary view, just positing mechanisms.
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I dunno, I think there's a there there, even if it's just a Dissident Right meme. Hard times suck, but they create obvious opportunity to improve. One of the last truly "hard times" faced by the human race was World War II, and the period after that saw the birth of technological revolutions that changed the very fabric of civilization. Consequently, abundance leads to slack, and while we should praise slack, our comfort and abundance leaves us with a hell of a lot to lose--and we may have to eventually lose.
In addition, it's not even necessarily that the men of these times are weak, but perhaps they are just insufficiently-vigilant, and the good times are always at risk of being exploited by a few bad actors. Or perhaps the shine of a glorious new era simply fades eventually and the slack cannot last very long.
I keep thinking of that quote from Akira: "the passion to build has cooled, and the joy of reconstruction has been lost." This was from a Japanese story where Tokyo had been rebuilt after WWIII, obviously echoing what was likely the then-contemporary mood of 1980's Japan, where the economic bubble was at its peak while the Japanese identity was somewhat lost in the post-WWII boom. The movie's climax and conclusion features an explosion much like the one seen at its beginning.
Of course, maybe history is not cyclic (as reactionaries might claim), but progresses (as Christians, Reformers, Liberals, and Progressives might claim), and our current woes in a world of progress, abundance, and slack simply stem from our potentially-softer, worry-free future simply being unevenly-distributed, as per Gibson. You look around the world and you can see places where times are tough, where people are enslaved by the past.
Now that you mention it, WWII is also an example of that meme being wrong. Imperial Japanese and nazi leaders were hard men, especially compared to their western counterparts. The meme would have predicted a win for them and prosperity for their people. Stalin was about as hard as them (it's in his name), but his people did not have a good time either.
Deep down it's a vacuous statement, of the type 'after the rain, the sun' . When you try to use it predictively, it fails more often than not.
I doubt that WWII (or WWI) accelerated much of anything. We were already well on the way to our present technological society. We didn't need huge wars in the 19th century to industrialize and build planes, trains and automobiles. If we had fought such a war, people would thank the god of war for granting us such wondrous gifts. Probably because they couldn't face the fact that millions died for nothing.
...As uncharitable as this may sound, your post reminds of the claim/belief that we'd be in space right now if the Library of Alexandria didn't burn down, which is a viewpoint that has met some skepticism in recent years.
Again, as I stated above, things would be nice if we had the slack to develop, but it's also perhaps inherently unstable. The whalefall is eventually consumed, removing pressure works until things get kinda crappy [epilepsy warning?], and there will always be those who envy you.
WWII was triggered in part by the Great Depression, which was brought about by a combination of some predatory practices on top of classical coordination failures, and even at that time, people were already reeling from WWI, in which many had died for practically nothing.
I think what I'm trying to say is that things can get better, but it often takes some real bad things happening before that to get there.
I'm not saying we would be scientifically much better off. War motivates people, they work in 12-hour shifts etc, but it also destroys lots of stuff and kills people (duh) , so it's a wash or close to it.
Where in there can you use the meme to predict stuff? Decade-level analysis from the 19th century: good times > good times > good times > good times (belle epoque) > bad times (WWI) > good times (roaring 20s) > bad times (great depression) > bad times (WWII) > good times > good times > good times > good times > good times >... > present
That's what I mean with the rain stuff. After good things, there will be bad things, and vice-versa. In a binary sequence, after a 0, there will be a 1 (unspoken: at some point). It boils down to 'things will not stay static forever'.
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I think we’re on the same side? Obviously I think people should do the right thing and do what’s good and healthy for them. Religion is a way to coordinate and convince people to do that on a massive scale.
My point is that Christianity is no longer convincing for most people. It doesn’t do the job it was made for.
Possibly, but I feel like the claim that "It doesn’t do the job it was made for" is where we part ways. My core claim is that it sill does the job just fine. The contrast being that in my view the job in question is not "to be popular" or "make people feel better about themselves" the job is "to foster empathy trust and cooperation in otherwise dangerous low-trust environments". That it is how people behave in the breach that matters.
So what is your answer for those who don’t believe, or those who literally can’t make themselves believe due to cultural upbringing etc. Are they all doomed to eternal damnation?
That is not and I hope never will be a view of morality I endorse.
My answer is that I'm not sure that specific beliefs matter all that much. We were all born doomed, we are all on the hook. The test is in your response to this. Are you going to whinge about it? Or are you going to tuck your shoulder in and get to work?
I have put in plenty of work over my life, yes. The real test to me is figuring out where to put in the work and for whom.
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Christianity's job is not and has never been to "convince most people". Its job is to communicate the truth to people, and they are free to either conform to the truth or reject it. If they choose to reject it, even if they choose to reject it en masse, that is their problem, not Christianity's.
Modernity is poisoning our entire world. The solution is to stop chugging poison, not to complain that people are being unreasonable for pointing out that our society is chugging poison. Yes, this means letting go of many things one might rather keep. Yes, this means re-examining the philosophical axioms of our current society. Yes, neither are easy, but the wages of sin is death, and not in some abstract, theoretical, poetic sense, but in a million concrete horrors even now blossoming all around us.
Humans are not entitled to happiness, peace and plenty, either individually nor as a group. The idea that they are, the idea that these goods can and should always be available, is one of the core lies of the Enlightenment, and coincidentally one of the lies that convinced people to abandon Christianity. Well, now the lies are breaking down, the short-term pleasures are spent, and the consequences are arriving, and you are insisting that Christianity needs to undersign at least a few of the falsehoods so we can maybe keep them going a little longer. For Christians, that doesn't seem like a very good idea; it won't actually help, and it will actually make things worse.
Bailouts and enabling don't solve chronic problems. Sometimes people need to hit rock bottom. Sometimes even that doesn't help. In any case, we each still get to choose, and we all collectively get to live with the consequences of those choices. Why should it be any other way?
Universal human rights are just as much a ‘lie’ as Christianity. The Christian church has fractured split and broken down far more times than Enlightenment ideals, although it does have staying power.
The mythos we use to organize societies are all lies at some level, it seems you only want to use that word on things you disagree with though.
Whether God exists and whether Christianity is true are open questions. And sure, we can argue over what our priors should be, and about the efficacy of strict materialist axioms... But the Enlightenment Lies are not open questions.
Rousseau and his disciples claimed that unconstrained human reason could create a utopia. It actually created mass slaughter leading to a brutal dictator who launched some of the bloodiest wars the world had ever seen.
Marx claimed to have a foolproof, inevitable method for creating a classless utopia. It actually was a plan for mass-slaughter, misery, privation and slavery on a scale never seen in human history.
Freud claimed to have unlocked the secrets to a scientific approach to the human mind, by which all mental ills could be cured. He'd actually invented snake oil, but he sold it well enough that his descedents are still running strong, ruining lives and dooming institutions with their quackery.
Dewey and his disciples claimed to have a scientific, rational approach to education for the young. They and their descendants have effectively destroyed the American Education system.
Prison policies, the justice system, policing, the legal profession, public politics, art, philanthropy, the sexual revolution, race relations, childrearing, the economy... the list is endless. In each area, the children of the Enlightenment claimed that they knew how to fix things, used those claims to secure power, and then either failed to fix things or actively made them much, much worse. Depending on how one does the accounting, they killed well north of a hundred million people in the last century, immiserated and enslaved half the planet, and do not appear to have learned a single thing from the experience.
So no, I am not using "lie" as a synonym for "something I disagree with". I'm using it to refer to people actually lying in very obvious, immediately verifiable ways. Specifically, I'm referring to the people who built the modern world, who convinced a Christian civilization to abandon its faith on the promise of something newer and better, and then conspicuously failed to deliver. They promised a world free of Christianity's moral rules and the boring constraints of practical reality, where everyone could just do what they want and be happy and everything would be great. They've delivered horror and misery on an unimaginable scale, and they should be held to account for it.
Newton claimed to have discovered the rules of motion, Descartes claimed to have discovered graphical representation, etc etc. I notice you only picked the sociological products of the scientific revolution.
The reason these other thinkers made such sweeping predictions is because the predictions of religion and our relationship to the world shifted so dramatically.
Yes, because the sociological part wasn't science. That's the lie.
People built the framework of science, and started using it to improve the human condition in concrete ways. Other, entirely different people claimed that their novel sociological and political theories were also science, and would also improve the human condition in concrete ways. Only, they weren't scientists, their theories weren't scientific, and in fact they caused repeated, civilization-scale disasters right down to the present day. These latter people were the true core of the Enlightenment.
Meanwhile, Science itself revealed its own sharp limitations when it utterly failed to police its borders from the grifters, and in fact mostly fell in behind them.
You cannot actually show "predictions of religion" that shifted, because they did not. Actual science shifted material conditions dramatically. People saw that shift in their own lives, and it made them receptive to the idea that anything could shift, that the human condition as a whole was directly amenable to engineering and modification. And so they went over to the people promising such engineering, because of course those people were "scientists", and science has the answers! Only, science does not in fact have "the answers"; it is powerful within a narrow scope, and powerless outside it. Also, those people were not in fact scientists in any meaningful sense. Still, as long as the actual scientists kept pumping out new marvels, and so long as the grifters stood real close to them and waved their hands a lot and flattered their personal bigotries, it was an easy error to make.
Now, though, the technological pipeline is slowing down, and we have the benefit of observing modernism in its full flowering, so the grift becomes increasingly evident. Trust in institutions and in Science itself is cratering. Policy starvation drives radicalism on all sides, as people promised healing and resurrection begin noticing that their messiah hasn't actually ever delivered. And meanwhile, Christianity has a century of monotonously correct predictions to point back to, and all the arguments assembled against it are breaking down under the increasing dysfunction of the modernist system.
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Right now nothing works for most people. And it's a damn shame.
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