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Also prevents 30 Years' Wars. You know how they say "every safety rule has a corpse behind it" and suchlike? Freedom of religion is the peace treaty to end a war that depopulated most of Central Europe.
Yeah, it's annoying that I have to explain that we don't need to kill or forcefully convert each other until everyone agrees, but apparently the memory of westphalia is fading.
It is, and that is the problem that prompts this whole thread. Your position is that Christian attitudes are bad, but it's okay to be bad. I don't think this position is stable in the long term, because people are always going to want to punish the bad and reward the good. "bad but tolerated" just begs the question "why are we tolerating it, exactly?" ...And as you say, the memory of why fades, especially when 80-90% of Americans have never heard of Westphalia or the Thirty Years War, because their moral history consists entirely of Slavery, the Holocaust, and the Civil Rights movement.
To the actual point, I maintain that "thinking of others as lesser" is, in fact, quite different from Christians thinking some people are going to Hell, because the two ideas lead to very, very different conclusions. Christians have proven that they can coexist with non-believers long-term, and are capable of playing the pluralism game so long as it's actually pluralism, because at the end of the day we don't believe that you can actually eradicate sin or force people to repent at gunpoint, so wielding power is of limited and strictly contingent value. People who believe that others are lesser, though, sooner or later are going to act on that belief, and then a lot of people are going to have to die resolving the situation.
It didn’t come naturally to christians, they learned the hard way, and late. But their children, children’s children, children’s children’s children etc, modern christians and me, learned it the easy, less bloody way. Our children can learn it the same, and keep reaping its fruits.
Or do you think we’ve reached the 15-generation expiration date (sidenote: what's long term for you, eternity?) where the lesson has to be jettisoned so we can have another pseudo-religious civil war, thereby resetting the counter? What’s the point? This is just the FC standard error, as if some terrible outcome being likely to happen was a reason to precipitate it.
Next, your position is incoherent. You insist only christians can grant freedom of conscience (obviously false, but whatever), then you argue against freedom of conscience. Some christians definitely believe that other denominations of christians are ‘lesser than’. No tolerance for these guys then? And if that is your red line, you run into the other problem I alluded to, who determines which beliefs constitute this ‘lesser than’ thoughtcrime? The believer, or his ‘victim’?
Because I have a pretty good idea how that discussion would go : “he believes our denomination errs/isn’t saved/sits further away from Christ! Unequal! Crush him” “What are you talking about? All you need to do is recognize the true doctrine and you can sit just as close as me, god knows I believe we are perfectly equal in principle”.
Hard compared to who? Late compared to who? I'm comfortable comparing our record to that of any other major civilization.
You claim the lesson was learned in the past and can be taught in the future. Let's start there. What exactly is the lesson, and when was it "learned"? 1995? 1965? 1776? 1648? I ask, because I'm trying to nail down what actual principles I'm being accused of defecting from. Every date I've listed had significantly more social controls than we currently employ, many of them explicitly shaped by Christian faith, but you're claiming that somewhere in that date range, Christians were adopting a lesson that I'm advocating the abandonment of, and I have no idea why.
At no point in the history of Western Civilization, or any other civilization I'm aware of, have social controls not been a basic part of everyday life. The apogee of social permissiveness/social complexity is probably somewhere around 1990-2010, and it seems obvious to me that the norms attempted then were not stable, and have since collapsed.
In any case, I'm all for teaching our children to be as tolerant as possible without causing broad social collapse. I doubt you and I even disagree all that strongly on how tolerant that would be, and it's entirely possible that my level is more tolerant than yours relative to our actual society as it exists, as opposed to hypothetical populations in the future. Unfortunately, I observe that increasing theoretical tolerance seems to inevitably decrease practical tolerance, and I think this is resulting in our society's children failing to learn the actual lessons of the past, leading to serious danger of, as you say, resetting the clock.
I do not think unlimited tolerance is possible, and so limits to tolerance are inevitable. Given that such limits are inevitable, I put forward that our society should set those limits to cover the actual people who are here now, to the greatest extent possible, rather than optimizing for abstract definitions of "tolerance" that justify abuse of large portions of the population, to better people on the other side of the planet and vanishing fringe populations. Further, our society should not import people from the other side of the planet with values and customs very different than our own, and it should not encourage the creation and spread of lifestyles and communities extremely variant from the general mass of the population.
All of the above is easy to misconstrue, so let me give a concrete example: male circumcision is a generally-accepted custom for a fair portion of the population. Female circumcision is not. We should not try to ban male circumcision, or drive out those who practice it, and we should not attempt to legalize female circumcision, or import those who practice it. We should refuse to care if someone engages in a complicated word-game that appears to demonstrate that the two are somehow identical, so treating them differently is in some sense "unfair" or "unjust"; we have coexisted quite well with the one practice, and have never tolerated the other, and derived good results thereby, and so should continue in this fashion.
When I engage with this example, the common reply I get is that this position is stupid and incoherent, because either practice is nonconsensual genital mutilation and therefore evil, and should be banned. When I point out that such a ban would constitute a de-facto ban on Judaism, I've been repeatedly told that "they've changed their religion before, they'll change it again, and if they don't they deserve what they get for being evil".
That right there is your "lesson" failing in transmission. It's isomorphic to the sorts of pre-Westphalian views you condemn, and it is, by all appearances, endemic throughout our culture. I have every confidence that I can teach my kids to avoid this disastrous error in values and worldview, but that won't fix the fact that the rest of you are fucking it up for all of us in a way unlikely to be workable long-term.
My position on precipitating terrible outcomes is that one should not do it, because it is evil. I admit that I have only reached that conclusion relatively recently and very grudgingly, but I have reached it and do not intend to abandon it in the future.
I have never claimed this, and agree that it would be an obviously stupid thing to claim. I do claim that we Christians have the longest, best track record of maximizing tolerance of any major civilization, and I think the historical record backs me up. Given that a significant level of social enforcement is probably inevitable, you are better off having it enforced by Christians than by Progressives. We are much less likely to kill, imprison, enslave or immiserate you in pursuit of some insane utopian ideal. As noted above, "the lesson" you yourself point to was formed and enforced in societies that were supermajority Christian, and its breakdown has coincided with the breakdown of Christian norms in those societies. I argue that this is not a coincidence.
I argue that freedom of conscience, speech, or religion are not unlimited or even fully generalizable. I want the people in my society who are making a good-faith effort to exercise faith to be left in peace to the greatest extent possible, but am not interested either in the revival of Aztec blood sacrifice, nor in banning Jews. I do not delude myself into thinking that there is an objective, meaningful rule available that can nail down what is or isn't a "real religion" or "genuine practice"; there is no substitute for prudence and charity.
Name some? Preferably prominent, widespread, relevant examples?
I'm not sure where tolerance comes into it. You should probably be very wary of them. If they're fringe, that's probably all that's needed. If they start taking over, you should probably plan for bad times ahead. You definately should not allow them to co-opt major institutions, allow them significant access to the public purse, or pass laws that encourage major segments of society to conform to their diktats. If you fail to prevent such things, you are very likely to have serious problems on your hands.
What you are describing is a values conflict, and values conflicts are unsolvable. What we actually do in practice is to have whoever is in power hammer out a set of rules to try to keep everyone in their lane as much as possible. As a matter of historical fact, people who believe you are going to hell are much, much easier to keep in their lane than people who believe you are a class enemy or a sub-human or a traitor by birth.
Christians observably do not suffer from this problem to any great degree now, and arguably have not suffered it to any unusual degree relative to non-christians before. Christian societies full of Christians fought a lot of wars, which were commonly justified by appeals to Christian ideals or principles. The question, though, is whether they fought more and worse wars than non-Christian nations or civilizations. If you entwine Christianity into your politics, it is easy for normal political phenomena like succession crises, border disputes, and regional rivalries to be justified using Christian language; but is the concern what people said about the wars, or is it the scale, frequency and conduct of the wars themselves? I have no doubt that the Christian West fought almost all the wars involving an appeal to Christianity. I note that non-Christian nations had their own reasons for large-scale organized destruction.
Mormons.
I’m better because I’m more equal than you; saw that one coming from a mile away.
I’m sure that, like this guy says, the others are much the same.
Right. You, FC, claim that nonbelievers going to hell is somehow compatible with inclusiveness, ie not believing oneself to be superior. Literally anyone else can see this is not true.
The romans, greeks, indians and chinese did not try to control thought to the same degree as christians. Polytheism has inherently more freedom of conscience. Christianity’s predecessors and successors outclass it in peacefulness and prosperity. The 30 years war was deadlier per capita than any modern mountains of skulls. It rivals them even in absolute death toll. If Christianity is relatively well adapted to peaceful and prosperous living today, it has only become so because of relentless criticism and the memory of its glaring failures. Should I thank the nazis for their valuable lesson on what not to do?
There were always wars, but christianity gave Man one more reason to kill his neighbour, hidden within the other man’s mind. When Constantine drew a chirho on his shield and a fish on his sword, he turned a secular battle into a merciless spiritual one (Insert CS Lewis quote about a robber baron’s comparatively mild cruelty). Granted, other religions and ideologies also went down this path, independently. It is easier to ask "why are we tolerating it [badness in thought], exactly?"than to answer it, but it has been answered correctly before and after christianity. Your inability to answer it makes you more similar to Pol Pot than me.
Your two examples are not about freedom of conscience. Circumcision: An act damaging to others, not a belief. I consider it a barbaric practice, but it can be tolerated in a mild form under parental authority rules. Immigration: I see nothing wrong with filtering immigrants on any criteria, including belief, education, IQ, expected outcomes, age, hair color, etc.
The ‘tolerance is not a moral precept’ article you are so fond of (though you come at it from the opposite direction) misses the distinction between belief(or speech) and actions. It uses the ‘conduct of others’ interchangeably with ‘prejudice towards others’. It creates its own terrifying monster, when the correct lesson was for both sides to act as if there was no monster (which christians have managed to do). The author reluctantly recognizes that a westphalian peace is possible, even when interests, beliefs and values are incompatible. Yet bizarrely you and him still want to fight over immaterial, unknowable things, monster against monster.
The original claim I was responding to, now edited out, was that peaceful coexistence with chabad jews was impossible. I defended all bad thoughts against that accusation, including christianity. Yours and Hlynka’s automatic response (“Christianity is good”) naturally looks like a negation, ie, peaceful coexistence with wrong/badthinkers is impossible, and they should be forcefully converted or worse. I just wanted a clear credo from the both of you. Perhaps our gruff friend can be more forthcoming.
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That is certainly not how I read your initial comment, but it explains much about how this exchange has gone.
I can try, but part of the problem is that I am trying to convince you that "clear credos" relating to this subject, including your own, are inherently deceptive. But eh, let's give it a try.
Peaceful coexistence with wrong/badthinkers is usually both practical and the obviously superior option. If it isn't possible, it's because the wrong/badthink predictably leads to wrong and bad actions of an especially immediate and disastrous nature. In this later case, the response should be defensive (muster counterarguments, quarantine, separate) not offensive (forcible conversion or extermination). Put less clinically, there are sets of beliefs that are not going to get along with you, and the best remedy for this fact is distance and good borders, not attempting to stamp them out through force.
...but even this is deceptive, for a number of reasons.
First, it is at least difficult and arguably impossible to draw a rigorous line between "speech" and "action", much less get everyone to agree with where the line goes. Is prayer speech? Prayer in public? Prayer at a public event? At a ceremony? What about the decision to bake a wedding cake? What about public protest? what about starting a church ...And so on and on and on.
Second, the entire system we live in and have to work around has already cemented the concept that some speech doesn't get protection. Libel, slander, hate speech, child porn, obscenity generally, treason, sedition, and so on and on and on. None of these social and legal realities are going anywhere, a supermajority of the population supports most of them and always has, so if your scheme ignores them, it's an exercise in fantasy, not an engagement with the world as it exists.
Third, all of this is going to be operated according to human judgement, which is... not the best. It's obvious that speech can be a threat, and equally obvious that speech can be intentionally framed as a threat when it is not. There is no reliable, generalizable way to demonstrate to third parties which is really happening in any given case, and abusing these ambiguities is profitable in either direction.
These objections are not raised in an attempt to smuggle in my personal biases. They are raised because they are, in fact, how biases, or more properly subjective value judgements, get smuggled into every system I've ever seen or heard of. "Speech is speech, actions are actions" is not a stable rule, and it never will be. "Free Speech" in practice never actually means "free speech", it means "free speech as long as too many people don't find it too objectionable." I think it's very, very important to really grok this reality, first so one does not lean too hard on a principle that won't bear much weight, and second because it is better to be honest and admit that I, too, am not much better. I like free speech because I think it currently leads to good outcomes, and in circumstances where I don't think it's going to lead to good outcomes I'm not going to support it.
...The two examples I gave were male and female circumcision, not male circumcision and immigration. If you don't recognize the practice of male and female circumcision as pertaining to freedom of conscience, then I don't think we share an understanding of what "freedom of conscience means". Could you give a definition or some examples of the definition you're applying?
For me, it seems obvious that freedom of conscience is about right and wrong action, not merely thought. Conscience is a belief in which actions are good and which are evil. If you allow people to hold such beliefs so long as they never, ever act on them, how is that "freedom of conscience" in any meaningful sense? Refusing to fight in a war, accept specific medical treatments, eat certain foods, work on certain days, or participate in specific rituals, all of these are classic examples of freedom of conscience problems, and all involve actions, not merely thoughts.
I bring up male and female circumcision because they are clearly at least somewhat similar on an objective level, both are currently live policy issues, and the consensus currently treats the two very, very differently. This makes them useful for examining where and how we draw the line between tolerable and intolerable, which for me is the entire point of this and many previous conversations.
You say:
Certainly it is an act, but it is an act driven by belief. If you ban it, you are requiring people to either abandon their beliefs/conscience, or be punished by the power of the state. When you say that it is "barbaric" but "can be tolerated", you are demonstrating a belief that some belief-driven actions should be tolerated even if they seem objectionable, while others are unacceptable and should be punished. The question is, how does one make this determination? When you claim circumcision is "an act damaging to others", it seems to me that you are appealing to an objective standard, some sort of scale of harm, perhaps kept in a closet somewhere next to the standard meter.
My objection is that no such scale exists as a natural fact of the material universe, which is our usual standard for calling something "Objective". Whether circumcision is "barbaric" and whether it "can be tolerated" are value judgements, not material facts. You arrive at those beliefs by appeal to a balancing test against axiomatic values, not by grinding out the answer through scientific testing or a mathematical equation. The problem, as I see it, is that our intellectual tradition assumes falsely that the set of values it's based on is the only set available, and so has no answer to the problem of incompatible values. Further, values change, and can be changed, either through persuasion or coercion, and in fact speech is excellent at both persuasion and coercion.
So there's always going to be a line, and that line can shift, and speech is a really effective way of shifting it. This is not a problem, if you're willing to go with whatever the consensus happens to be at the moment. If, on the other hand, you choose to pledge yourself to live and die by a particular set of axiomatic values, and to resist to the utmost any attempt by others to shift you from them, it is entirely possible for the society around you to modify itself into a form you cannot live in peace with. If this be the case, and if it were possible, it would be worth trading off some level of toleration of bad/wrongthink for a greater likelihood of not allowing values drift to undermine the peace. This is not a power that anyone can actually be trusted with, but it's not a power that can actually be locked up or thrown away either. If you have power, you can use it or not use it as you please, and whichever you choose has little to no effect on what your successors will do when it's their turn in power. And in fact, this is exactly what happens in every observable case resulting in favorable outcomes.
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"More inclusive" isn't "better" at any specific job, and it does not appear to me that you've shown that Mormons believe that others are "lesser than" them in any meaningful sense. Someone who gets better returns than me on the stock market is not thereby a better type of person than me.
Suppose we are in school together, and we take a test. You ace it, I flunk. You tell me I should have studied harder. some other dude claims that I shouldn't bother studying, because I'm too stupid to learn. Do you see these two statements as functionally identical? That is to say, are you able to recognize the difference between saying someone is making a bad choice and should make a better one, and saying that someone is incapable of making good choices?
If believing that other people are going to go to Hell is incompatible with "inclusiveness", then inclusiveness is not in fact very inclusive. On the other hand, believing that other people are not really people is to exclude them from important considerations in the present, not merely an indeterminate and hypothetical afterlife contingent on their own free decisions.
I see no evidence that this is the case. The Romans made a solid effort to exterminate Christianity as an explicit denial of freedom of conscience, and they exterminated a number of other people as well on a variety of other pretexts. Japan actually did exterminate (local) Christianity in the 1600s. The Greeks killed Socrates over a philosophical dispute, and were not fond of Christians either. My knowledge of Chinese and Indian history is spotty, but the former includes an incident titled "the burning of books and burying of scholars", and I'm comfortably certain that the latter has similar incidents.
Polytheism does not actually offer superior freedom of conscience, because while a polytheist might believe in many gods, they only have the one value-set, and it is disagreements over values that cause fights.
This statement appears to be straightforwardly false. Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot killed 20-25% of the total population of the country he ruled, and that during peacetime and entirely through normal state functions. I am pretty sure the Thirty Years War did not kill 20-25% of the population of the numerous countries and territories involved, or even the countries where the war actually took place.
The Nazis were not Christian in any meaningful sense; the closest they got was ruling a Christian nation.
It also gave more than one reason not to kill one's neighbor. The question is whether Christianity made the romans and their successors more warlike than they otherwise were or would have been on net. I see no reason in the historical evidence to believe that it did so. It seems to me that religion was at least as much a part of Classical pagan wars as it was Christian wars; every war Rome and the Greek city-states ever fought was preceded by auguries to determine the disposition of the Gods, and both civilizations appear to have believed that their Gods demanded obesiance and rewarded their worshippers with victory. Do we blame all their wars on their religion too, or is this standard only applied to Christians?
In actual fact, Christian states appear to have engaged in war in much the same way non-Christian states did, and for most of the same reasons: land, wealth, and hubris, often enough. Appeals to the faith as justification for warfighting seem mainly to have served the function that appeals to patriotism do in our own time: a social technique for building consensus by framing the conflict as an extension of core values. On the other hand, appeals to faith also helped establish and maintain peace between Christian states, and to rally those states to common defense against outside aggression, both of which are positive qualities.
I have no problem answering why toleration is good, and neither does Zunger. It's good because war is hell, so you shouldn't fight if compromise is at all possible. Unfortunately, compromise is not always possible, so you need a backup plan. Zunger rejects the possability of retreat or partition, while I think both are really good ideas, and the best fallback to toleration. Zunger claims that coercion is the only real alternative to toleration. I consider coercion the last resort, and maintain that it should be used defensively or at least reactively.
Yes. The problem is that both sides need to do this, or it doesn't work. One side acting like there's a monster means that there now really is a monster for the other side, and the peace fails. Zunger and people like him appear to have self-modified themselves into an unshakable conviction that people like me are monsters who must be destroyed. I do not think they've done this because they're fundamentally evil or hate peace, but rather because they've drifted into a values-set that is mutually incompatible with mine, and are simply following their values. If they continue on their current trajectory and continue acting on their stated beliefs, they will be, from my perspective, monsters, and people like me will have to fight them. I don't think such an outcome is inevitable or unavoidable. I do think it is very likely, given long-term trends in values-drift. I'm not sure why this makes me similar in some fashion to pol pot, or what you think the alternative is supposed to be if the present sequence of escalations continues.
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If I beat you at chess, I’m a better chess player than you. And if I beat you at heaven bingo, I’m a better christian than you. Heavenly rewards are tied to the moral value of the person.
That’s not the point. I’m not inclined to give credit to an ideology for the valuable lesson it taught through the great slaughter it caused.
Of course that includes famine and disease. The Red Horseman who takes peace from the Earth seldom rides alone.
In the “it means what it says it means” sense. Don’t persecute people for what they believe, that’s all. Like the OP was suggesting, like you probably think ‘lesser than’ believers should be persecuted at some point, like zunger thinks those who harbour misogynistic and racist thoughts should be persecuted. I don’t want to delve into the free speech issue, but I obviously oppose hate speech, slander, sedition etc laws. Freedom should go belief > speech > actions, and 99.9% of societal repression should land on the latter category.
Christian actions are not tolerated because of freedom of belief. The reason christians are allowed to act on their current beliefs is because trial and error, as well as secular enlightenment-type thinking and discussions, have sheared off and polished the religious acts that contradicted peaceful and prosperous living.
You and Hlynka are left with a beautiful and shiny religious nub that fits snugly into, and matches, the structure of modern society; and you wonder why you ever needed the structure at all, you were seemingly right all along, look at those outcomes. In reality, without it you’d have nothing but a rusty piece of junk. Christian values gradually converged towards Enlightenment values.
Take the aztec religion (chrisitanity was never as bad, but bear with me). The enlightened version would take an allegorical view of ‘sacrifice hundreds of enemies on the altar every month’, as an altruistic self sacrifice to perform good deeds in the shadow of the Teocalli. The original interpretation can be believed, but it can never be allowed to be performed, that is not covered by freedom of conscience.
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