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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.
I agree with basically all of this up until the end. I don’t think Christianity’s predictions have been correct, otherwise it wouldn’t have failed so badly to grapple with the changes in reality science showed us.
What I’m essentially saying is that Christianity needs a new prophet. Jesus himself built on a prior religion. Mohammad, I think, took that in a poor direction. We need another prophet or at least good Church leaders who can square Christianity’s answers with modernity.
You may be convinced Christianity has done that - but I’m not, and neither are the majority of people on the planet.
Please name a change in reality that science has shown us. I appreciate that the popular narrative holds that science smashed the superstition and ignorance of the Christian era like an egg, ushering in a new world of reason and rationality. If that narrative is correct, you should actually be able to point to the particular superstitions and ignorance thus smashed, and make some defense of the modern era. I have not actually seen anyone do this, and having spent some time acquainting myself with the historical facts, the picture I draw is the exact opposite. Our society got less rational, not more, when it began centering itself on the power of human reason.
Predictions don't fail when people don't believe them. They fail when they are falsified by outcomes. Christianity has a much, much better record on predicted outcomes than Modernism does. It predicted that Communism and Fascism were extremely bad ideas, at a time when societies across the western world viewed them as the only path forward. It took the opposite side of the bet on the sexual revolution, and predicted decades in advance all the ills that have resulted. It catalyzed and heavily motivated the fight against slavery. It maintains high fertility, improves social outcomes for its participants, and does an excellent job of gatekeeping grifters and sociopaths. It remains one of the few pillars actually supporting a pluralistic society, for impartial rule of law, for the various dreary, unglamorous jobs necessary to maintain our civilization.
I appreciate that this may seem like going around in circles, but I think you need to actually offer evidence for your statements here. I can point to specific, highly significant predictions Christianity made, which turned out to be right. I can point to innumerable specific, highly significant predictions Modernism made, which turned out to be dead wrong. All ideologies impose costs. Christianity's costs are up-front, while the benefits come after. Modernism offers the benefits immediately, and only later do the costs become apparent. The latter is always going to be more attractive than the former.
You say Christianity needs a new prophet. Okay. What does this new prophet need to say? What's the actual part of Christianity that's in the way, in your view? What needs to be sanded down, and what needs to be added? Do you have concrete suggestions?
If I knew I would be the prophet!!!
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I don't understand why you don't seem to recognize the obvious problem: that Christianity makes specific claims about reality that we either know aren't true (e.g., creationism) or have insufficiently compelling evidence are true (e.g., miracles, the existence of the Christian God, an afterlife, etc.). How can you expect to convince people to be a member of an ideology that they cannot reason themselves into believing?
You keep mentioning Christianity predicting the dreadful outcomes of Communism, Naziism, the sexual revolution, etc. But there's nothing about Christianity that is required to make those predictions. Nothing would stop an atheist from making those same predictions based on, say, an understanding of human nature.
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You play fast and loose with causation. There were plenty of moderns against fascism and communism. There were plenty of christians in favour of slavery.
What we can say with certainty is that christianity coexisted with slavery, ignorance, and abject misery for 1800 years, and when the enlightenment came onto the scene, somehow slavery disappeared, science grew by leaps and bounds, and individual outcomes shot through the roof. What a coincidence. Correlation may not be causation, but I’m positive anti-correlation is not causation.
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