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Notes -
https://unherd.com/2023/04/is-trans-the-new-anorexia/
I’m not sure exactly how culture war-like this idea is, but I’ve never actually heard anyone else compare Anorexia with trans people before. I can see the social contagion factor in both especially for women who are much more conforming than men tend to, and because women have higher neuroticism than men. What I’m not sure about is some of the other ideas, that being trans is about self-negation and a sort of renouncing of their body.
Interesting article! Thanks for linking.
I've heard these comparisons, and as I've mentioned before I'm extremely bullish on the social contagion hypothesis for the majority of mental illness cases. It's an especially pernicious problem because once an illness becomes too 'saturated' like anorexia has been, the cultural cachet of the diagnoses plummets and the fad moves on. All that's left is hordes of people with broken lives and nothing to show for it.
I'm convinced that the modern world's turn away from religion is the main culprit here. That being said, I've been an agnostic for most of my life, so I don't think anyone is necessarily to blame when it comes to turning our backs on old religions. Unfortunately it's just extremely difficult to reconcile modern scientific knowledge with old religious worldviews. I think what many religious people, especially on this forum, miss is that for many agnostics or athiests it's not that they don't want to believe, rather that they find it practically impossible to believe in a religion which demands they lay down the rules of science and empiricism.
I think you can reconcile any religion with modern science, but I also think you are going to have some serious work to do.
For example, for christianity, the pain points would be:
Other religions would have different pain points.
Ironically I think the unmoved mover argument is very hard to reconcile with modern science, however it's more of a christian thing and even there it doesn't really matter.
Okay, I'm presuming you mean Pseudo-Dionysius here, lemme go check:
Yup, you do. It's not a forgery, it's a misattribution. We're getting into the weeds here, as the content of the work is distinct from the authorship. If someone pretended to be Isaac Newton, but the book they wrote was investigated and found to be correct in the mathematics, is that a discrediting forgery for the work? You are saying that "the guy lied about who he was, so what he wrote must be taken as wrong" but it's not that clear.
It was a convention to use recognised authorities to back up your claims, and to write "in the style of" or even outright claiming to be that authority. There was even in early times controversy over who the true author was, and whether you accepted it or not came down to did it cohere with your theology.
Now, if there is nothing in the work which contradicts established theology, then we're in the "fake Isaac Newton" realm: does the genuine work stand on its own, or do we reject it even if it is correct, because the author lied about who he is?
If it's contradictory, then regardless of who wrote it, we can reject it.
St Thomas Aquinas and others wrote on the nature of angels, and he certainly wasn't a forgery, so then it comes down to: what is our view of angels?
(If they were instead described as sufficiently advanced aliens or the Simulators as in the simulation argument, I think people would be more inclined to believe in them, even as a thought experiment, than as an explicitly religious existence).
You even get this recognised in Dante, as he describes the orders of angels where he goes with Pseudo-Dionysius rather than Pope Gregory, because it fits in better with his theological schema for the Divine Comedy:
Okay, what you can do is throw out all the theories of the angels if you decide "it's all forgery", but you cannot from that reject the existence of angels, since they are mentioned in the Scriptures. We can admit we're wrong in our ideas about them, but we cannot then go on to say "therefore angels don't exist".
I think the comparison with Newton, assuming you are referring to Newton's works in physics and optics, is unwarranted because him and Pseudo-dyonisius stand on opposite sides of an epistemological divide. Pre modern intellectual work was primarily about interpreting and finding truth within a canon of works of authors in the antiquity. We don't care who wrote Newton's Principia because they stand on the strength of their argument and of empirical evidence. You can't say the same thing about De Coelesti Hierarchia because it doesn't make any argument it just states some facts that have been revealed to the author through divine revelation.
When all of your arguments are appeals to authority, who the author is becomes extermely important. Are you really going to believe some anonymous guy that tells you they received divine revelation when they are also pretending to be a mythical character that lived 500 years earlier?
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Some? If we go even by apologists like Habermas there are only a handful of "minimal facts" about Jesus's life at all in post-enlightenment Biblical scholarship.
Think about it from the perspective of someone who is already religious: you are already prepared to believe on faith that the gospels are a historical account. Many miracles would have only a few witnesses, so it is not surprising that they would not be recorded by historians (there probably were many false accounts of miracolous healers at the time and it would get lost among the fakes). But some of them are so huge and public that they couldn't escape notice.
As far as I am concerned I only believe (1) and partially (6) of that list with any certainty. There's too much conjecture in this part of history, if this standard of proof was applied uniformly we would believe in the existence of the philosopher stone too.
Well, we're talking about reconciling with modernity so we should consider just what problems modernity is throwing up. If the claim is just that someone who refuses to believe in them through sheer force of will, fair enough I guess. I thought the point was to unify modernity and religion not just ignore the former.
And one of the problems modernity poses is precisely to the unity or reliability of Scripture. It actually strikes me as one of the bigger ones: plenty of books were entered into the canon because of their alleged authors. If we now prove the authors almost certainly didn't write it and we can glean minimal information, a Christian can say "well, God inspired us to canonize that book" anyway, but it seems way more novel and thus, a sign of special pleading.
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Given the claims in various books of the New Testament, there really should be independent historical verification of some of these events, if they happened at all.
Matthew 27:51-53 comes to mind. Astounding mass miracles seen by many according to the Bible. Strangely lacking any mention outside of that text which was written decades later by an anonymous author.
Yeah, all these so-called 'historians' claiming this guy named Julius Caesar existed and went around conquering other countries. The Chinese and South American civilisations never mention a word about him, just these "Europeans"! Fishy, that!
If Romans at the time also lacked any mention of his great acts outside of a single anonymous non-contemporaneous source then we'd be damned skeptical. Lack of ancient South American mention is obviously not relevant.
Astounding mass miracles viewed by many in the region, such as described in Matthew 27:51-53 as an off the top of my head example, should have locals mentioning it. Not the ancient Chinese of course, but the people in that region supposedly experiencing mass miracles.
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