This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Here we go:
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of April 3, 2023
Recognition Diplomacy
Contributions for the week of April 10, 2023
Transitive Reasoning
Contributions for the week of April 17, 2023
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of April 24, 2023
- "What is going in Sudan is a practical demonstration that being a global power does not mean that everything going on in the world is secretly about you."
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Notes -
Concerning the @Esperanza post:
I've been seeing the question lately in a few places, most recently when Bryan Caplan did a podcast with Richard Hanania: how much "power" do people "in power" actually have? In the podcast, they talked about university presidents, but I've heard it discussed for all sorts of positions. The idea is that, to become a university president, you have to do so many things to please certain people, who have certain interests. To what extent do you need to continue pleasing them to remain university president? Even if you can't be formally kicked out of your role for a particular action, to what extent does your role require cooperation/acquiescence from a variety of stakeholders? If you spend all of your political capital accomplishing one thing that is incredibly controversial among your stakeholders, they may proceed to do everything they can to neuter every last shred of remaining power that you have until they can actually kick you out.
I imagine these constraints vary significantly across different positions of power, but as a non-Catholic, I would argue that the pope does not have the power to "decide to make homosexual actions not a sin", even within the Catholic church. The bulk of the power centers within the Catholic church are committed enough to the position that the bible means something, that one of the somethings that they can easily interpret the bible as meaning is that homosexual actions are sinful, and that this is supported by so great a weight of history and tradition that it would be near inconceivable for a mere pope to, on his own, without a long careful process of arguing for and convincing many stakeholders of his position, suddenly reverse course. They would feel as though a "foreigner" has somehow invaded their group, a spy, a saboteur, an enemy operative. They would view it as illegitimate, do all that they can to remove the invader or at least neutralize his further power until he can be removed. Then, they would go about reversing the decision to whatever extent their history and tradition allows them to. They will declare that it was not "conformable with Sacred Scripture and Apostolic Traditions" (to just copy the words from wikipedia).
In a different time, maybe the pope will gain such power. If the cultural memeplex continues propagating among enough of the rest of the leadership of the Catholic church, perhaps enough will get on board with whatever new argument arises to shift around their traditional position. Different levels of support (or even just apathy) across the leadership will require different expenditures of political capital by a hypothetical future pope, but I think that right now, it's not reasonably "within his power".
This is more of an aside, but there’s a complexity to the Christian position on homosexuality. Homosexuality refers to both actions and an inclination of the flesh. The Pope is not saying that it’s okay for priests to engage in any homosexual behavior — because it’s not even okay for them to engage in heterosexual behavior! — instead he is saying that he does not judge the proclivities of the flesh, which come from an essentially unconscious part of a human. Hunger happens whether we will it or not, and the sin of gluttony is to always obey our hunger. Similarly, the sin of lust according to Christianity comes from the act (as well as when we consciously look with desire upon a woman, which is a conscious act), and not what “the flesh” wants. What the flesh wants at any moment has nothing to do with our Will, though it is influenced by past behavior. The Pope is saying that if the “flesh” of a Priest is homosexual, that is, if it desires men rather than women, the priest is not to be judged, because a man is only responsive for what he wills (does and thinks and intends and attends and so forth).
The Pope’s position has additional complexity because he is morally prevented from revising anything that Christ would have believed. The Pope does not replace Christ, he is bound (by fear of hell) to obey Christ. So while Jesus said little on homosexuality (I think perhaps one or two opaque references), the Jewish and early Christian sources are clear.
There is one final level of complexity, which is that platonic male physical affection was historically normal and now is not. This means that a homosexual of Jesus’ era up until the era of Wilde could have as much physical affection with a male to his heart’s content, just not to his flesh’s content. Loving, living with, and forever enjoying his company? Yes. The whole spectrum of friendship and love and physical affection which are elements of today’s construct of homosexuality were entirely permissible, if not promoted in stories like David and Jonathon. You just can’t whip your dick out. Anything involving a dick would be a sin. This is important, because much of the harm seen in anti-homosexuality is the loss of the romantic/love sphere, yet in the past, the only thing lost would be handjobs/oral/anal. Incidentally, heterosexuals also lost these upon joining Christianity, because sex was established as a solely pro-procreative act (they lacked the scientific understanding that the ubiquity of oral sex among animals promotes safe copulation for the female for microbiotic reasons).
It's worth noting that one of the differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics in the Reformation was over whether concupiscence was sin, so, at least originally, Protestants would probably consider homosexual desires sinful. (not uniquely to homosexual desire, looking after a woman lustfully in your heart, as Jesus put it, would be sinful as well, as well as plenty of nonsexual desires)
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