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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35460 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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I’ve been reading the debate downthread about how Christianity and a more tradcon approach (defined I think largely as a ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, ‘turn the other cheek’, and ‘focus on improving your community rather than enacting political change’) stack up in a globalised, highly urban environment. I find the conversation very interesting but short on concrete detail. For example, ‘people do not enjoy being told to sit up straight and eat their vegetables’, and ‘You need to innovate and find a way to square your religion with the updated understanding we now have of the natural world.’. I have considerable sympathy for both of these statements! But they strike me as being a bit too abstract to tease out real-life disagreement, so I thought I would post an example of what seems to me to be a concrete, modernist/globalist adjacent problem that’s been troubling me for some time and get peoples’ thoughts on it.

I grew up in central London, and my parents still live there, on a fairly busy street. There is approximately one beggar every ten metres. It is strongly suspected locally that these positions are managed by organised crime - they are almost all foreign, burly, and articulate, to the extent that it makes you very suspicious as to why they can’t get a real job if they wish to. Each of these people expects at least a pound from you as you pass by, which means that even a trip to the grocery will cost you £5-£10, about as much as the groceries.

What is the appropriate, Christian, response to this situation? Off the top of my head:

  1. Pay them. However, if you are giving money to every beggar you see in central London, you had better have a really stupendous salary. Moreover, because the beggars are now highly mobile, both nationally and internationally, the number of beggars is fully capable of expanding to the limits of your collective generosity. (This is the modernism/globalism angle.)

  2. Don’t pay them. This feels straightforwardly unChristian. If memory serves, Jesus pretty much said, ‘take the coat off your back and give it to the coatless man over there.’ You can square it to yourself by pointing out that they’re probably predators, which they are, but they’re still more desperate than you are.

  3. Don’t pay them, but feel guilty about it / donate to charity / tithe. I think these are basically 2 with extra steps. I sympathise with Scott’s view that tithing is basically a down payment on the limitless stuff you actually owe, but it still seems to fall short of genuinely Christlike behaviour.

In short, how does Christian charity hold up when the modern world is capable of delivering infinite suffering to your door? (This mirrors our immigration debate to some extent.) Apologies if people don’t find this helpful but I was interested to get your opinions.

Christians are called upon to love their neighbors, and to treat everyone as their neighbor. The Christian thing to do is to try to figure out the best way to love those beggars on the streets. Maybe you'll make the wrong decision, but if it was made out of love then God will accept it.

What would Jesus do? Jesus would probably sit down and talk to them. Get to know them, understand them, befriend them. Go to their house, meet their family. And then help them out of whatever situation they are in that led them to where they are on the street. It doesn't matter whether they're genuinely homeless or a con artist or part of a gang: Jesus hung out with criminals and con-artist tax collectors all the time. If they are con artists, then maybe they need more psychological and moral help than financial help, but they still need help. In some sense Jesus was an effective altruist, meaning actually help people at the root cause of their issues, not just superficial symptoms.

I don't think most Christians are up to this task. I'm probably not, though I'm not a very good Christian in practice. It would take significant time out of your life, especially as building a relationship with people takes many repeated interactions, which would wreak havoc on your busy schedule, probably put you at personal safety risk getting close to dangerous people, and probably require you to spend a decent amount of cash too. But it's probably the actually correct Christian thing to do.

But I think any weaker more realistically implementable Christian responses should be approximations of this. Fix the root cause of the issue, help these people effectively, however they actually need to be helped to get them out of a position where they feel like they need to beg. And if you think they're con men who don't really need financial assistance then figure out how to help them in a way that doesn't enable their behavior.

And if you think they're con men who don't really need financial assistance then figure out how to help them in a way that doesn't enable their behavior.

One way I genuinely think would help them is reinstiuting whipping as a punishment for vagrancy (which is a crime in the UK, but not punished). Many of these beggars (street beggars in London aren't particularly bad, it's the ones on the tube where you can't even get away from them that grind my gears) can definitely find real jobs, especially with our current job market, and those who are so far gone they can't do that almost certainly qualify for a bunch of government help programs that they just have to ask for. The threat of getting lashed works as a very effective method to concentrate the mind on getting out of such a situation.

Fix the root cause of the issue

What if the root cause of the issue is the fact that people are generous/feel guilty and hence easily preyed upon by opportunists?

I struggle to intuit the tone of this comment, but even if it is facetious, I see it as a pithy portal to profundity. I believe in long term social dynamics and think that the world works something like this parable:

One day there is a religious revival and the Church of Universal Love grows big. Young people flock to its message of unconditional kindness and charity. They marry and have children. Thirty years on those children are the new crop of adults. They are unconditionally kind and full of charity; it was how they were brought up. And thirty years on a new grift culture emerges to take advantage of them.

Sixty years on from the religious revival sees another new crop of adults. They look at their parents with dismay: how can intelligent people so lack street smarts? Why do they fall for every scam and grift? I picture @RococoBasilica as one of this second generation, looking back on sixty years of history and noticing the earlier parts of the causal chain leading to the rise of grift culture.

If they are con artists, then maybe they need more psychological and moral help than financial help, but they still need help.

This is true because it has the word "maybe" in there. Without the "maybe" it's not necessarily true.

Aside from that, it sounds very familiar. You're basically saying "The correct action is to do all you can to help beggars, even at great cost to your life, but nobody's going to do that, so help as many as you can".

It's familiar because it's exactly the same thing that the EA people are saying. You really should help a whole bunch of people who need malaria nets or whatever--as many as possible, even at great cost to your life. But everyone's going to fall short of that requirement, so at least help a lot of them. The only real difference is that your Christianity is demanding that they help the ones they run across, while EA demands that they help the ones that let you maximize what help you can do.

I'm neither a Christian nor an EA, and my response is "'Help the people in front of you' is a heuristic that's good most of the time, but sometimes it can be gamed, either deliberately or by accident. I don't really have an obligation to help people just because they are in front of me. I also don't have an obligation to ignore the possibility of con artists."

(I would also try to figure out if my tax dollars help, or attempt to help, enough people that I no longer have an obligation anyway.)

I don't think the Christian response necessarily demands helping people in front of you more than distant people. Part of the whole point of missionaries is that people farther away are easier to help with greater magnitude per effort, so go out there and help them.

In many ways, Christianity and EA are highly compatible. Both believe that you should do things that actually help people, not just meaningless platitudes or virtue signalling.

The main distinction is that Christians believe in souls, and that everyone is doomed to hell unless they are saved by Jesus, and therefore convincing someone to accept Jesus and thus saving their soul is the ultimate good that you can do for them, and all of the material assistance pales in comparison except in so far as it helps convince people that Jesus is good.

Partially stemming from this but independently of metaphysical souls, Christianity also has more of an emphasis on internal change as a form of good. Sort of a teach a man to fish versus give a man a fish sort of thing. If you build schools and teach people better farming techniques, then they can feed themselves. If you teach people to love each other and cooperate instead of hating each other, crime rates will go down. If you love an alcoholic homeless person and teach them to love themselves, you might convince them to turn their life around, give up alcohol and seek stable employment. No amount of mere financial assistance is going to make someone mentally and spiritually healthy, or prevent them from physically destroying their own health, it requires human interactions, which you can only do in person.

Which EA is generally aware of and takes into account as well. It's just a matter of emphasis.

I don't think the Christian response necessarily demands helping people in front of you more than distant people.

But this entire scenario is "there are so many beggars in front of you that you can't hlp them all without seriously harming yourself; what do you do?" To which the answer is "you really should be seriously harming yourself, but if you can't, help as many of the beggars as you can.".

I think this implies having to help people in front of you. The answer certainly wasn't "you have to help as many people as you can, but you might end up giving no help to these particular beggars at all since the world is so big"

Not exactly. The true authentic Christian response would be to help all the people at any cost to yourself, in which case physical proximity is not really relevant. The pragmatic response to having a selfish human brain is to help people when you can convince yourself to do so, which will tend to be when there is a high help to cost ratio, or when the direct feedback is strong enough that it actually feels meaningful. People near you are more physically accessible, and more psychologically responsive, so will be easier to directly help than people far away, so physical proximity is relevant.

But physical proximity can change. If someone lives in LA and, rather than stay and dedicate their life to helping the beggars who live there, decides to become a missionary in African and help poor people there, then they are in some sense choosing not to help the LA beggars. Or at least, choosing not to help them as much as they otherwise could.

So yeah, you do have to help the people in front of you. But you do not have to prioritize them to the exclusion of people far away from you, and you do not have to refuse to move to a different location which will change who's in front of you. It's okay to send money to a distant charity even if that diminishes the amount of money you have for people nearby. But part of the helping people you do should probably be non-monetary, in which case it almost has to be for people near you.

I don't know man. What would Jesus do, or maybe more correctly: what would Jesus instruct us to do?

Sit idly while people are tricked into consuming deadly poison (fentanyl)? Offer them a coat and a few dollars while they die, but do absolutely nothing about the thing that is killing them?

Our priest this week included in his sermon some talk about this. How disgusting it is that we as a society just walk past these """"""homeless""""""" people. Believe me Father, I don't want to just walk past them, but what, seriously, can I do? These aren't "homeless" people, they're people in the middle stages of a drawn out homocide on behalf of drug cartels.

The appropriate Christian response is to ignore them because as you have noted, they are engaged in a business operation and you have no moral obligation to engage in commerce with any individual business. If they are more agressive than that you may have a moral obligation to engage in self defense or defense of others, including up to the use of lethal force.

Advance warning: I started writing a short answer, but the process of doing so dug up a bunch of things I've had rolling around in my head but haven't thought much about in 15+ years. There's no thesis here beyond the first paragraph.

I haven't considered myself Christian in a long time, but I don't think you're going to find a satisfactory answer to this line of questioning. If you're taking the words of Jesus and the general message in the New Testament seriously, you should have already given away all you possibly could and thus effectively have nothing left to give to such a beggar. If not, there's no settled doctrine I'm aware of (raised Protestant, maybe Catholics have one) that dictates how you should cut this particular knot. Church doctrine and the words of Jesus are often only loosely connected, anyway.

He didn't say "donate to every beggar you see", and he didn't say "work to give, become an EA and feed all the poor", he said to his would-be followers to give away what you have and follow him into an entirely different sort of life. He didn't tell the rich man to give away what he had because it wasn't fair he had too much, but because his material entanglements would distract him from following wholeheartedly and lead to destruction. The epistles double down on the idea that wealth and greed leads to suffering and destruction. And while the New Testament certainly contains explicit directives to take care of the destitute, those directives are not always unconditional. 1 Timothy has a long list of rules for how to give charity to widows and under what circumstances to give it, warning that although the Church should take care of those who really are sincerely destitute, there are many circumstances in which giving would be worse. It's far from the unconditional charity that commonly gets associated with the church:

Honor widows who are really widows. But if any widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn to show piety at home and to repay their parents; for this is good and acceptable before God. Now she who is really a widow, and left alone, trusts in God and continues in supplications and prayers bnight and day. But she who lives in pleasure is dead while she lives. And these things command, that they may be blameless. But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

Do not let a widow under sixty years old be taken into the number, and not unless she has been the wife of one man, well reported for good works: if she has brought up children, if she has lodged strangers, if she has washed the saints’ feet, if she has relieved the afflicted, if she has diligently followed every good work.

But refuse the younger widows; for when they have begun to grow wanton against Christ, they desire to marry, having condemnation because they have cast off their first faith. And besides they learn to be idle, wandering about from house to house, and not only idle but also gossips and busybodies, saying things which they ought not. Therefore I desire that the younger widows marry, bear children, manage the house, give no opportunity to the adversary to speak reproachfully. For some have already turned aside after Satan. If any believing man or woman has widows, let them relieve them, and do not let the church be burdened, that it may relieve those who are really widows.

What does all this mean for us today? I don't know, I guess I ought to pick that book up and try to figure it out again. It doesn't seem to suggest that we are obligated to give money to every random drunk on the street corner just because they asked though.

Instead of picking up the book again, I'd recommend looking up history of ancient Christianity videos, preferably by those not active in the faith, because I don't think reading moral lessons into the New Testament is ever going to be fully coherent without knowing who was writing the letters/gospels and what their motivation/politics was. I think Christians tend to underrate the problem of "should we be taking moral advice from people who were convinced of a looming apocalypse?" and "Should we be taking moral advice from a weirdo who never met Jesus but had visions of him alone in a cave, and didn't really talk much with the original 12 disciples, but due to the path history took had a profound influence on the gospels and most of the rest of the New Testament"?

Can you recommend a video or two to start out with?

This is a good intro to Paul, the weirdo I was describing: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GXJUVnlGmI8

James Tabor has a lot of his own videos on ancient Christianity and Judaism at that time, and Bart on that channel also has quite a few although I tend to prefer James. Paul and Jesus by him is also a very readable and fascinating book on the topic.

Cool, thanks

Jesus didn't say anything about giving money to con artists.

Except for that bit in the Sermon On the Mount.

And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

What is the appropriate, Christian, response to this situation? @Corvos

Jesus didn't say anything about giving money to con artists. @Lizzardspawn

Except for that bit in the Sermon On the Mount. @big-city-gay

Jesus said you should give away your surplus wealth to the poor pretty explicitly several times. However, correctly interpreting this would preclude Christianity becoming a world religion, so it's not the version of the church that came down to us.

Or that's my read anyway. The church does have slight cover because later in the Book of Mark, Jesus says:

Just then a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”

Jesus replied, “‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

“All these I have kept,” the young man said. “What do I still lack?”

Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

By this passage, the Catholic Church came up with the interpretation that poverty, chastity, and obediance are only required of the priestly class, and regular Joes can still be saved if they ignore those rules. However, he is definitely still saying that giving all your stuff away to beggars is a thing you should be doing, even if God will cut you some slack.

However, he is definitely still saying that giving all your stuff away to beggars is a thing you should be doing, even if God will cut you some slack.

It seems to me that this is a pretty popular interpretation, especially with non-Christians. On the other hand:

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short he could not see over the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.

When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.

All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”

But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

If "become a mendicant" is the actual general rule Jesus was teaching, why doesn't Jesus apply it to Zacchaeus? One possible answer is that the gospels are all made up and they're an incoherent mess, so it doesn't matter. Another possible answer is that the rich young ruler asked what he, personally needed to do, and money was his idol in a way that it was not for Zacchaeus, so it was what he, personally needed to let go of. This interpretation fits quite well with the rest of Jesus' teachings, with those of the apostles after him: Christians can acquire and use money, but they cannot let that money be their master, and they must always see it as something they are stewarding, not something they own. They must always be willing to let it go if doing so is needful.

And of course, that last description can easily be used as an excuse to cover a Christian's actual greed, but it is like that for any rule. All rules can be gamed, when they're made and enforced by other humans; a core part of the Christian faith is believing in a God who cannot be manipulated in this fashion.

If "become a mendicant" is the actual general rule Jesus was teaching, why doesn't Jesus apply it to Zacchaeus?

My interpretation is that the tax collector's generosity was an indicator of salvation (EDIT: I originally wrote "sufficient" here), but not ideal moral behavior. Ideal would be "If you have two coats, give away one" as John the Baptist said. But the tax collector's generosity does reflect awareness of god's grace, which Zacchaeus is reciprocating with good works.

I use as my touchstone Jesus saying "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God" but then "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." To me, this reads as saying Jesus thinks being rich is sinful, but also that the grace of god can still push a rich man through. Otherwise Jesus would not bother to point out richness as a possible disqualifying factor, to begin with.

Then again, using Zacchaeus, maybe the lesson is that a moderate nest egg is okay, but only "wealth" is a sin. Where "wealth" begins past not being stony broke is unclear.

I think this can be resolved by the fact that Christians are not expected to be perfect. A perfect Christian with knowledge of who needs more than they do, should probably give away everything except what they need to live and support their families. Christ being the exemplar. But God knows that people are not perfect and the struggle with selfishness and desire and temptation and comfort is an ongoing one that all people will struggle with. So Christians are not expected to be ascetic monks and give away everything but the basics, even if that is what Christ did. God is a judge but He is not a capricious and cruel one.

Depending on the denomination they might do tithing more or less as a requirement and some count charitable giving towards that.

So you are correct that it falls short of perfectly Christlike behaviour. But we are not expected to be perfectly Christlike.

And Christians don't have to naively believe every claim so if they believe x is not really a beggar or it would support sinful acts like most crime, they are surely within their rights to not feel guilt about it (though of course they might!)

A perfect Christian with knowledge of who needs more than they do, should probably give away everything except what they need to live and support their families. Christ being the exemplar.

I mean, where is that in the Bible? I think it's pretty silent on the topic of what the carpenter did with his carpentry wages. Obviously, he sacrificed his life (thus relinquishing all possessions in death), but I don't think it ever says much concerning his interaction with material goods. He advises the rich man to give up all of his possessions, but that was for a specific purpose - to follow him.

I think it unlikely that Christ was sneakily sitting on a trove of material treasures. I think he gave freely of his special power to help others in terms of healings, multiplying food, etc. But I think it's pretty silent on Christ's actual possession or non-possession of any material goods. There is the example of the widow's two mites, but it is noticeable that this was not billed as a direct example of Christ giving up every last item. Plenty of parts about being generous, probably more generous than most anyone would like today, but I'm not sure Christ actually did set an example as an ascetic monk, and perhaps that's part of an argument against the extreme of becoming one.

Christ and his followers were gleaning from fields on the sabbath and eating from other peoples houses out of their charity. Their is plenty in the Bible about how Jesus and his apostles were broke ascetics who had given up their productive jobs to preach.

Jesus explicitly gives up his job as a carpenter and his disciples as fishermen to become fishers of men. A job that doesn’t pay outside of the charity of others.

Also when Mary annoints Jesus’ feet with ointment his disciples say they should have sold it to give to the poor.

There are countless explicit and implicit passages in the Bible that suggest Jesus and the apostles were medicants.

That there is a group of "priests" who do not have otherwise productive jobs does not imply that all Christians should live as such. Hell, even the Israelites had an entire tribe of Levites. Maybe Christ/disciples were broke, but where does it say they were ascetics? Where they specifically cast off all their material goods specifically for the purpose of casting off material goods rather than, "Yeah, preachin' don't pay so good, but we're called to preach, sooo..."

Also when Mary annoints Jesus’ feet with ointment his disciples say they should have sold it to give to the poor.

I mean... the passage actually says:

But one of His disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, who would betray Him, said, 5 “Why was this fragrant oil not sold for [b]three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” 6 This he said, not that he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and had the money box; and he used to take what was put in it.

7 But Jesus said, “Let her alone; [c]she has kept this for the day of My burial. 8 For the poor you have with you always, but Me you do not have always.”

I mean, yeah. Reallly not quite what you say it says.

This he said, not that he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and had the money box; and he used to take what was put in it

That's from John and a shorter version of the original. The synoptic gospels are very divergent from whatever the hell John is. If we go back to Mark we see an entirely different story.

"Jesus Anointed at Bethany

14 Now the Passover and the Festival of Unleavened Bread were only two days away, and the chief priests and the teachers of the law were scheming to arrest Jesus secretly and kill him. 2 “But not during the festival,” they said, “or the people may riot.”

3 While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head.

4 Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, “Why this waste of perfume? 5 It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages[a] and the money given to the poor.” And they rebuked her harshly.

6 “Leave her alone,” said Jesus. “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. 7 The poor you will always have with you,[b] and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me. 8 She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial. 9 Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

10 Then Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve, went to the chief priests to betray Jesus to them. 11 They were delighted to hear this and promised to give him money. So he watched for an opportunity to hand him over."

It is multiple disciples here not just Judas. It is what I said.

I don't think that changes the calculus much in any case. Lets say he was only "much more generous than most anyone today" that would just change the question to, does a good Christian have to match that in order to be a good Christian?, and i think the answer is still no.

So you are correct that it falls short of perfectly Christlike behaviour. But we are not expected to be perfectly Christlike.

This strikes me as a fully general excuse, couldn't you justify any action by saying you aren't perfect and God doesn't expect you to be?

Well no, God doesn't expect you to be perfect, but that isn't an excuse. God isn't from the perspective of a Christian a system that can be gamed. A Christian could try to justify anything (as can anyone else of course) but they believe God will judge them in the end. Someone who uses that logic to justify not behaving in a Christian manner might well not be a Christian at all.

Not really hard at all to answer. Don’t pay them. Tithe or give as much as you can to soup kitchens for social workers to deal with or become the social worker getting them the shelter/food they need.

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