This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
There Are No Amendments In Islam
Sarah Haider writes a compelling analysis of the odd political re/alignment you see playing out today between Christians and Muslims on social issues:
There's really nothing surprising about this alliance at the object-level. What religious Christians and Muslims believe about how society should be structured in regards to promiscuity, sexual modesty, and traditional family structures have long been near-impossible to tell apart. The overlap also bleeds into superficial similarities about isolated rural ranchers defending their traditional way of life from outside influences, while openly carrying their firearms to their places of worship (am I talking about the Taliban or...?).
Sarah is correct that the modern alliance between liberal progressives and Muslims was a marriage of convenience that took advantage of some unusual culture war circumstances, but it's a tryst that was bound to fray apart given the fundamental policy disagreements. One of the efforts to keep the bandwagon held together comes from what Sarah terms Muslims in Name Only (MINOs):
I was raised Muslim but abandoned it as an atheist a long time ago, and this passage is particularly painful for how real it is. The discordant discourse above has largely been operating in parallel and disconnected tracks. On one side you get a bevy of purportedly "Muslim" activists announcing that Islam can mean whatever you want it to mean, and actual Muslim religious scholars responding with The Fuck?:
As an atheist I have all sorts of complaints about all religions, but the attempts to rehabilitate Islam's image to better fit liberal sensibilities are pernicious for their particular dishonesty. Because one of the few good things I'll say about Islam is to praise its unusual commitment towards scriptural fidelity.
In case you didn't know, Islam was founded around 600 AD explicitly as the final entry in the Abrahamic religion trilogy. Islam was not presented as an alternative to Judaism and Christianity, rather it was heralded as the true and uncorrupted version of those creeds. According to Islamic lore, Allah (literally just the Arabic word for God) created the world and everything in it and then spent the next however many millennia trying — and implicitly failing — to convey his divine message to humans through a long succession of prophets. First man Adam was also the first prophet, and he was followed by well-known Biblical heavy-hitters like Ayyub (Job), Musa (Moses), and of course 'Isa (Jesus). The full list is unknown and unknowable but Islam assures us that every community throughout history received at least one of Allah's Verified™ messengers.
The reason Muhammad of Mecca is special in Islam is because he's Allah's final message delivery attempt. Adam was the first, and Muhammad is heralded as the "Seal of the Prophets" to underscore the finality. I won't get into exactly why god needed so many attempts to convey his message, but a common point of criticism from Muslims about past attempts (such as Christianity) is that god's message was corrupted and lost through misguided translation attempts. I say this as a Muslim apostate with no stake in the debate but the concern over the Bible's reliability seems uncontroversially true to me given the inherent limitations of translation, and the resulting myriad of competing versions. After centuries of debating whether the in John 1:1 was intended to be a definite or indefinite article from the original Greek, I can see why someone would be too traumatized by the prospect of any translation attempt.
To their credit, early Muslim scholars appear to have taken this mistranslation concern very seriously. All of Muhammad's revelations were collected over time by his followers and, after his death in 632 AD, were compiled into a single book known as the Quran. Islamic theology insists that the Quran is the literal word of Allah which means it has never been modified. Given the religious motivations at play, it's natural to be skeptical of such a claim but it does appear to be solidly supported by the archeological evidence available, with the oldest Quranic manuscripts radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 AD and matching what we have available. The commitment to the divine inviolability of the Quran is also reflected in the expectation that, everywhere from America to Indonesia, all practicing Muslims are required to learn and recite passages in the original Arabic. Translations of the Quran exist of course, but reluctantly so and intended solely as a study aid.
The Quran is the central commanding text, but below it are hadiths — a sporadic collection of stories, speeches, and anecdotes attributed to Muhammad and a significant source for how to live the Good Muslim Life (covering topics such as when to assalamualaikum your bros, whether cats are cool, or how to wash oneself before praying). Unlike the Quran, hadiths are not seen as direct guidance from Allah. Instead, their reliability as a guiding lodestar is obsessively assessed in proportion to their authenticity. So some hadiths will be accepted as controlling authorities because they're heavily corroborated by reliable narrators, while others get dismissed because they're fourth-hand accounts on a weird topic and with a dodgy chain of transmission.
The point is, given the obsession over the lineage of the Quran and *hadiths, *it's no surprise that Muslims today come across as especially zealous about following their deen. There's no leeway to fall back on mealy-mouthed "Living Quran" rationalizations for why only some aspects of Islam should be obeyed but not others.
Islam's etymology is about unquestioning submission to authority, purportedly only to god's authority but that's a hard demarcation to keep in mind when political and religious power is near-impossible to disentangle within Muslim countries. Its focus on the eternal afterlife for doling out rewards for devotion endowed me with a fatalistic perspective about my temporary earthly existence at a formative time where I was still grappling with immigrating to the US. My depressed ass then couldn't wait to hurry up and die — an overwhelming desire to to get it over with already so that can experience the promised happiness at last. I left Islam because it's a regressive and stifling bundle of superstitions, ill-suited to living out a fulfilling existence. In consideration of the billions today living under its penumbra, I wish it wasn't so, but that sentiment is not enough to change reality.
I'm comfortable saying that the MINOs who self-appoint themselves as the religion's modern rehabilitators are blatantly lying. If I had to guess at their motives, it probably has something to do with the fact that being a member of a religious minority is too valuable an emblem within the Progressive Stack of oppressed identities to give up completely. For Islam to be the religion least amenable to revisionism does not matter when it's put up against such an irresistible force.
I would be surprised if this is true given the experience of the Christian equivalents.
To be clear, the Christian tradition is similarly clear and firm to the Islamic tradition on many hot-button issues. It isn't particularly the case that, say, Christianity was historically ambiguous about sexual morality in a way that Islam was not. Nonetheless many churches have been hollowed out, and I am unsurprised to see the same process going on in Islam. Catholicism, if anything, is more explicit about many of these laws than Islam, and yet most Catholics defy that.
My guess is that one of the key factors here is that for most people, religious identity is something more like cultural identity or community - for most Catholics, "I'm Catholic" means "I identify as part of the Catholic community" and not "I positively assent to all the doctrinal claims of the Catholic Church". Likewise I suspect for many Muslims, "I'm a Muslim" is a statement about which community group they're part of, rather than what they actually believe. And the beliefs can be substantially revised as long as the sense of group membership remains intact.
Put bluntly - only autistic weirdos care about their religion's actual doctrines and commandments. So it has ever been, and so it will ever be. Even in religions where rule-following is a huge part of daily life, those rules are followed as something more like a cultural habit than anything else.
Pro-gay Christians aren't lying. I think the ones who argue directly that the Bible is neutral or positive about same-sex relationships are saying something obviously false, but I don't think they know that it's false. Lying involves a sort of psychic pain - people don't like do it, and if we have to lie for a very long time, we usually trade that lie for a self-delusion. Delusions are easier and more comfortable to maintain.
The few Haider-style MINOs that exist at the moment, I feel pretty confident, are not making public claims that they privately know to be false. I doubt they are very different to the Christians or Jews who went down the same path before them.
This feels ahistorical to me. See: Iconoclasm, the 30 Years War, etc... Revisionists might claim that these disputes weren't "really" about religion. But that's just cope. Before modern times, people deeply cared about religion, even the little nitpicky things, and were often willing to fight and die for it, or even spend their whole lives in a monastery praying.
Does that mean that everyone was rules adherent all the time? Of course not. But it does mean that people thought the rules mattered. Pre or extramarital sex was taboo in nearly all Christian cultures until modern times. If you were caught doing it, it could have dire consequences.
Even today, Catholics can't get remarried if they get a divorce.
And let's not get started on Judaism, which is just nitpicky rules all the way down.
Even if we accept that the thirty years’ war and all other similar conflicts back to Martin Luther were about religious doctrine, this was a time in which the great majority of lay people could not read and in which the majority of the peasantry barely even practiced (whether Protestant or Catholic) what we would today consider those forms of Christianity - until the late 18th century Christianity as practiced in rural Europe was a weird syncretic blend of Christianity and ancient folklore / paganism.
Sure, I can believe the average peasant soldier in the thirty years war believed they were fighting for God / Christ and that the enemy were infidels, but that they were well versed in the specifics of the philosophical debate? Nah, I doubt it.
Literacy was actually really high in some of these times and places. I remember seeing something—maybe a Scottpost?—about how 1600s America was remarkably literate, sometimes in Latin. Side effect of the massive Puritan influence. It’s why political philosophy was so popular. Paine et al. would get so much mileage out of pamphlets because they were part of a long tradition.
The opening shots of the Reformation largely took place through pamphlet wars. Sure, the main audience was religious or academic. But that got diffused very efficiently to congregations.
You probably read that in Scott's review of Albion's Seed. The thing is that that phenomenon was a uniquely Puritan anomaly and not shared with the other English colonies, and certainly not with continental Europe until much later.
While dependent on the printing press, It was more the fact that religous arguments were being made in the vernacular languages at all that caused the Reformation and subsequent Wars of Religion. Translations of the works of men like Luther did in the 16th century what the internet did in the 21st, bringing people face to face with value systems and beliefs sometimes fundamentally alien to their own, and causing some to embark on a century-long bloody crusade to rid Europe of all the newly-revealed heretics.
Yep, that’s it. Thanks!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this assumption might be wrong. I am not a historian of the Middle Ages, but my understanding is that common people of the time were interested in doctrinal disputes to a surprising degree.
A good analogy would be how a person today, though scientifically illiterate, still has an opinion on the correctness of the Big Bang, evolution, climate change, etc...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not a secular divorce at least. The completely legitimate and not abused annulment process however...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link