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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.
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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