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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31918 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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I had quite the throwback culture war experience this past weekend. While at a family gathering, my dad was cornered by an in-law and quizzed about my “agnosticism”.

He was asked if he had led me to this lack of faith, and was then informed that it’s the patriarch’s responsibility to “get his family into heaven” – a neat little double-duty insult of both himself and me.

I tend to be a very laid-back guy in meatspace, but found myself livid. I’ve been in this family for close to a decade, and the sheer cowardice and arrogance of this exchange was breathtaking. To circle around to one of my direct family members instead of having the cajones to challenge me directly was ridiculous (and in hindsight, what I should have really expected from these people).

We’ve been existing in what I thought was a reasonable detente. As a victorious participant in the Atheism culture war, I’ve been kinda-sorta prepared to have these skirmishes with my wife’s catholic family for a long time. The unspoken agreement was that I go to church for holidays, let you splash water on my children, and don’t bring up anyone’s hypocrisy/the church’s corruption, rampant pedophilia/the inherent idiocy in believing in god.

In exchange, I get to stay balls deep in my excellent wife and should be left alone.

I’ll be the first to admit the excesses of Atheism’s victory laps and see how “live and let live” can slide down the slope into a children’s drag show. But this indirect exchange reminded me that when the culture war pendulum swings back, I should be prepared for the petty tyrants and fools on the religious right to reassert themselves. We’re already starting to see the tendrils of this, even if some of their forces have been replaced with rainbow-skinsuit churches across the US.

For Christian motteziens - No disrespect intended. I'm aware of the hypocrisy of my arrogance in this post, and it's intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek

This post is an interesting little mirror to this sub's CW leanings. Imagine if the positions were reversed with a left-leaning interlocutor instead of a right-leaning one. Say you told a story where they were making snide passive-aggressive remarks implying you were racist. The response you would have gotten would almost certainly be cheering alongside you. I highly doubt they would be as unanimous in their scorn, claiming this post breaks rules, that your previous compromises means you somehow deserve this, or that snide remark essentially saying "we're not your therapist, bro".

The fact that Christianity's cultural side is inextricably linked to the superstitious side is clearly causing some amount of cognitive dissonance. But instead of resolving it (either by severing the two sides, or by rejecting Christianity entirely if doing so is infeasible), this sub... tries to ignore it as much as possible. This sub pretends it doesn't exist, and then gets really conspicuously oversensitive whenever someone reminds them of it.

I think it is not the sub as a whole, rather it is a large but not majority fraction of the sub.

But yes, I do think that there is a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" thing going on with Christianity in this sub. The Christians and other Christianity-supporting participants on the sub generally do not attempt to argue that Christianity is true on the object level, even if they believe that it is. And the rest of the sub generally does not direct the same kind of object level skeptical analysis towards Christianity that it does towards woke beliefs like "disparate outcomes between men/women or whites/blacks are mainly caused by oppression".

The sub is a relatively free discussion forum that does not have any specified ideology but leans anti-woke, so there are both a bunch of anti-woke atheists and anti-woke Christians here.

Sure, I'll try my hand.

Let's start with the existence of God. What's seemed the strongest argument to me is just the question, why is there something rather than nothing?

Why does anything exist? What caused the big bang? The only answer that doesn't lead to an infinite regress, so far as I can tell, is that something must necessarily exist. The main candidates for this that I've heard of are a God of some form, or a Tegmark IV multiverse—the extreme of mathematical platonism, where everything possible exists.

(What about just things happening utterly randomly and causelessly? I'd be really worried about that breaking induction—why doesn't that happen again. To be clear, I'm not talking about the constrained randomness of quantum mechanics. What about a loop or an infinite regress? I'd think we can just collect all the terms and ask if that has a cause.)

The first hypothesis seems more likely than the second, because it seems to better explain why I'd find myself in an orderly world. There are many more ways to disorder something than to order them—e.g. there's only one world where the laws of physics continue as usual, but a much greater number where they broke down 3 seconds ago. I'd also be worried about whether things like Boltzmann brains could end up being common enough to harm our epistemology—not in itself a measure of likelihood, but one hurting pretty severely the ability to do epistemology, since again, the law of induction becomes pretty broken. I'm also unsure whether consciousness harms the ability encapsulate everything mathematically, which the Tegmark hypothesis would seem to require.

Let's say there's some a pretty good chance there's some necessarily existent thing out there. What sort of thing might it be? One perfect in every way seems like one of the relatively more likely possibilities, though it might be hard to say what's a perfection. Not sure how to do anything more exact here, but a pretty decent a priori probability is enough to matter, I'd think.

Okay, that's all towards some form of theism. What about Christianity in particular? The largest obstacle, I think, to most people is that miracles seem really unlikely. This is mitigated to a pretty substantial extent if you think that a god exists. Once there's a mechanism to account for miracles existing, that seems to raise the probability a good bit. If you will, it's no longer something beyond some unbreakable laws of physics, since it's something allowed under the true laws of physics that aren't usually in play. (If you still find it hard to believe that this sort of thing can happen, do you also treat the simulation hypothesis as absurd—at least, if it thinks that there could be intervention once in a while.) But in any case, some documentary evidence and some accompanying historical evidence seem rather sparse to believe in a resurrection from the dead. I think the accompanying teachings of the christian scriptures significantly raise the reasonableness of thinking that it took place, since it places it in a context where this is at least something not improbably, where this is the way to accomplish some aims. This is especially the case since descriptions of what took place were written hundreds of years beforehand—see Isaiah 52:13 through to the end of Isaiah 53. The gospels and epistles are also better than average for ancient historical texts in some other respects—they're written not too long after the death of Jesus, within the lifetime of those who knew him when he was alive. Paul, at one point, refers to 500 people who witnessed Christ after his death.

Let's say that all that argumentation fails. There still seem to be reasons that it might be a sensible thing to adhere to, even if you think it's relatively unlikely. Pascal's wager is formidable, for one. Ethics or purpose seem a good bit easier to come by, which, by no means necessary, do mean that those worlds might be ones that you should concern yourself with more.

  1. It is not necessarily necessary for everything to have a cause. There is nothing fundamentally illogical as far as I can tell about the notion of an uncaused phenomenon. And if you believe that everything must have a cause, then that applies just as much to God as it does to the universe, so bringing God in does not actually solve the problem.

  2. Why we find ourselves in an orderly world can be explained by the anthropic principle of "if the world was not orderly, we would not be here asking the question".

  3. Miracles actually are not something that I reject. By the very nature of some phenomena, they can be both true yet also either fundamentally or at least in practice beyond the reach of scientific investigation. For example, let us say that I remember 20 years ago seeing a rock shaped like an arrowhead on a certain trail, but I do not remember exactly where the trail was. Let us say this actually happened, the rock was real. Yet there is in practice no way to prove that it was real. More fundamentally, there is the hard problem of consciousness, which I think quite possibly will be forever beyond the reach of scientific investigation. So it is not that I think it is impossible that 2000 years ago a man multiplied loaves of bread and rose from the dead. I just think that given the available evidence for it, there is no reason to be so convinced that it happened that one fundamentally orders one's life around the belief that it happened.

And if you believe that everything must have a cause, then that applies just as much to God as it does to the universe, so bringing God in does not actually solve the problem.

This is probably the worst of the atheist arguments against a creator, because it seems to result in a failure of basic comprehension. Theists (and deists) are saying “God is, by definition, the exception to the rule that all things must have a cause. He is the Unmoved Mover, and the Uncaused Causer.” And you’re saying, “But wouldn’t an Uncaused Causer need a cause too?” No, obviously not, that’s literally what makes him the Prime Mover. You’re rejecting Christians’ conception of God out of hand, but then acting like you actually refuted their argument, whereas the reality is that you just refused to acknowledge that they made it.

But the universe itself can be a causeless phenomenon, there is no need to posit a God. You can call the universe itself God, of course, but this is not what Christians mean by God.

Okay fine, but you’ve already shifted the goalposts significantly. Your original argument was “nothing can be causeless, not even God”. Now you’ve switched to “okay, God could be causeless, but so could the universe even if it wasn’t God”. Two completely different and mutually-contradictory arguments.

I never said that nothing can be causeless. I said the opposite: "It is not necessarily necessary for everything to have a cause. There is nothing fundamentally illogical as far as I can tell about the notion of an uncaused phenomenon.".

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The two things could still be mutually excluding possibilities: If it's impossible for a thing to exist without a cause, than the Uncaused Cause is impossible too, much like a circumference-less circle is impossible; if that's not the case, then there's no reason there must be only one from which everything else is caused. You can, of course, say that everything needs a cause to exist except for a special uncaused being that is an exception to the general rule; but then the statement collapses to "assuming that one and only one Uncaused Cause exists, then one and only one Uncaused Cause exists".

It's amazing to me how much sway the aristotelian unmoved mover god has on a religion that clearly describes a moving, changing god. In genesis god has human emotions, moves around and even shows up at the door of Abraham, on earth. In other words he behaves more like Odin (or rather Baal) than like god-the-philosophical-entity. And even if you discount genesis (and much of the old testament) as analogical writing and superstitions of simple people, how can it be that Jesus is god and also that god is unmoved, unchanging, simple, etc?

For problems with cosmological arguments see Sobel, Logic and Theism, chapter 5.

God's active, doing things, but not changing, exactly. Maybe changing in relation to other things, but not in relation to himself. If you think that's unbiblical, I have a quote for you: "I, the LORD, do not change." And another: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever"

You lose a lot of the persuasive power of the argument if you admit that there are things (Jesus Christ) that appear to be moving but do not in fact count as "moving" for the argument. The observation that there are some things that move falls away, as far as I am concerned everything could be like Jesus and actually be motionless.

The problem with those biblical quotes is that there is a colloquial meaning to change and a philosophical one, cosmological arguments only work with the latter but those quotes in context point to the former.

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Right, to be clear, I am not a Christian, and my (admittedly amateurish) research into comparative religion and study of the development of early Judaism demonstrates very clearly to me that the Old Testament is in no sense whatsoever an account of an Aristotelian God-As-Pure-Logos. I’m merely pointing out that the specific argument “the Prime Mover argument is wrong because even a Prime Mover would need a mover” is a bad argument. Most of the other arguments against Judaic and Christian cosmology are still very valid and true.

I’m merely pointing out that the specific argument “the Prime Mover argument is wrong because even a Prime Mover would need a mover” is a bad argument

Yes, you are right about this. I've just been thinking about this for a while and latched on to your message to write it down since you also said: "You’re rejecting Christians’ conception of God out of hand, but then acting like you actually refuted their argument". The argument has other problems, though.

Why we find ourselves in an orderly world can be explained by the anthropic principle of "if the world was not orderly, we would not be here asking the question".

I've never liked this as a rebuttal to the point made. It definitely answers the question as you've phrased it. Why do we find ourselves in an orderly world? Because if it weren't orderly, we wouldn't find ourselves anywhere. I get the line of reasoning, but it gives no insight into why the world is orderly, which is what question is really being asked. It merely asserts that it is the case, which wasn't really up for debate.

To rephrase the point in a slightly less charged light. When discussing the question "Why does the necessary precursor to A exist?", answering "A exists, therefore the necessary precursor to A exists" doesn't answer the question. It completely ignores the "Why" part of the question.

  1. Well, I don't think God has a cause, so that's not quite the argument. It's pretty dangerous epistemically, to say that things can be arbitrary, though, unless you manage to justify restricting that. I mean, why not think this comment I'm writing is uncaused? Or that a black hole is about to causelessly appear in your house? Or that the universe will vanish in two seconds?

  2. Sort of. But you also get orderly worlds which are more bizarre (remember, think how many ways there are for unusual things to happen), and it also destroys induction, because of all the worlds where it was ordinary for the past however many billion years except for a bizarre change three seconds from now dwarfs the ones where it continues ordinarily, but anthropically look identical.

  3. It doesn't require an enormous level of credulity to require ordering one's life around it, for pascal's wager type reasons.

I've been talking about Christianity in the past few days a lot more than I have in a while but I saw your comment and it activated my old debate-bro instincts and I couldn't resist.

The actual philosophical question of whether God exists never really interested me that much. I actually don't particularly care whether God exists, unless he inspired a religion with books and prophets that dictates how I should live. Then I care. So for discussions like this, I'm usually happy to grant the existence of God for the sake of argument and move on to discussing Christianity in particular.

his is especially the case since descriptions of what took place were written hundreds of years beforehand—see Isaiah 52:13 through to the end of Isaiah 53.

Leaving aside the long debate over whether the 'suffering servant' is in fact a single messianic figure, a corporate representative, or something else Isaiah 53 is something of a double-edged sword for apologists. On the one hand, a very popular apologetic, popularized especially by NT Wright in recent years (and which I think is bad for other reasons, but I digress), goes like this: "first century Jews had no concept of a dying and rising messiah. So the story of the resurrection is not something the disciples would make up or come to believe in a million years unless they actually experienced it. Therefore, the best explanation for the disciples' belief in the resurrection is that it really took place." On the other hand, Christians want to claim that Isaiah clearly prophesied the death and resurrection of Jesus centuries earlier. But if the scriptures contained a clear and unambiguous prediction of a messiah that would die and be resurrected, then one need not posit a genuine resurrection to account for the belief of the earliest Christians that their teacher, after his brutal execution by the state, was raised from the dead. It's right there in the prophets. If Isaiah says the messiah will die and be raised, and Jesus is the messiah, then Jesus was raised from the dead. QED.

The gospels and epistles are also better than average for ancient historical texts in some other respects—they're written not too long after the death of Jesus, within the lifetime of those who knew him when he was alive.

True. But the synoptics also all plagiarize each other, so they aren't independent sources. Mark and Luke were not eyewitnesses, by tradition. The Gospel of Matthew draws heavily from the gospel of Mark, so genuine Matthean authorship can be discounted, since it makes no sense that a man who walked with Jesus and personally saw him raised from the dead would plagiarize the account of someone who did not (even the call of Matthew itself in gMatthew is cribbed from Mark!). John was also an eyewitness by tradition, but even if he doesn't know the synoptics (and some think he does), then you have at best two independent sources for the most incredible event in all of human history, and both of them from authors who would have every reason to believe this incredible claim, and who clearly have a vested interest in getting you to believe it, and only one of them even potentially from an eyewitness. It's not like there's any hostile testimony to the resurrection.

Paul, at one point, refers to 500 people who witnessed Christ after his death.

I've never understood this apologetic. The appearance to the 500 appears exactly once in the New Testament: right here, in Paul's letter to the Corinthians. There's no elaboration, we're not told who these 500 were, the circumstances of the supposed appearance, or anything at all, either here or anywhere else. It's a single throwaway reference. For all I know Paul made this up. Or the person he got it from did.

Pascal's wager is formidable, for one.

I think Pascal's Wager is defanged by the internal diversity of Christianity. While the old joke about there being tens of thousands of Christian denominations each damning all the others to Hell is an exaggeration, it's directionally correct. Getting a Catholic to admit it nowadays is like pulling teeth, but it remains dogma that there is no salvation outside the church, and while there are carveouts in some cases for invincible ignorance and things like that, few of those caveats would apply to the vast majority of modern protestants, so the teaching of the RCC remains that the great majority of modern protestants are gonna burn. Conversely, a number of Protestant confessions clearly anathematize the RCC, and a number even expressly identify the Papacy as the Antichrist. And there are plenty of low-church baptist types who think catholics are demon-worshipping idolaters. And then there are plenty of protestants that think plenty of other protestants are going to hell. And then there are protestants who don't think anybody is going to hell (either universalist or annihilationist). You could say being a Christian of some kind is still better than being a non-believer, but since there are Christians who don't think non-believers necessarily go to hell, I'm not sure it really increases your chances all that much. Then there's Islam...

My reasons for rejecting the truth of Christianity were not that I think miracles are prima facie impossible, or even necessarily impossible, but boil down mostly to three main points:

  1. The Hebrew/Christian scriptures teach empirically false things about the world.
  2. The scriptures are internally inconsistent, both on matters of plain facts and broader theological and philosophical questions.
  3. The scriptures contain clearly falsified prophesies.
  4. The scriptures are exactly the scriptures we would expect their authors, as human beings of their time and place, to produce. Positing divine inspiration is unparsimonious and unnecessary.

I can elaborate on any of these, because I do enjoy talking about this stuff, but I won't make this comment any longer.

Leaving aside the long debate over whether the 'suffering servant' is in fact a single messianic figure, a corporate representative, or something else

Yeah, I've heard the suggestion at some point that it's referring to Israel. Penal substitution seems clear enough to me in the passage that I can't see how that would make sense. Keep in mind I don't know Hebrew. And the identity might change within Isaiah, from passage to passage—I think one section probably referred to Cyrus, if I remember correctly.

An argument for a dichotomy between a resurrection being prophesied and it not being the sort of thing they'd make up.*

This is a good point. My impression, though, is that while a suffering and resurrecting Messiah is latent in the Jewish scriptures, it wasn't something that they were particularly aware of. Like, I don't think modern Jews really talk about that, even though it seems like it's in there, though of course some of that could be out of opposition to and distinguishing themselves from Christianity. They of course could have discovered it, but if it's not really in use, I think that objection loses most of its teeth.

But the synoptics also all plagiarize each other, so they aren't independent sources.

Of course. It seems likely to me that there'd be others though, in the actual history. If Paul isn't lying, then there are at least a bunch of claims that the resurrected Christ was witnessed at least somewhat publically (see 1 Corinthians 15), as well as a bunch of other apostles who were with Jesus. Since Paul actually was in Jerusalem sometimes, interacting with the apostles, even if only briefly, it seems unlikely to me that they would have deceived him only in this point—you'd have to assume an earlier conspiracy.

This was roughly what I was trying to use the 500 to support—that Paul thinks it was public. Presumably many of these people would still be alive and Christian, so there should be people he could actually point to, if he's not lying. And I see no reason why he'd lie—he seems sincere in his valuing Christ's resurrection as central, and I don't know especially why he'd feel the need to make up lies to defend that—he could just go along with those who say the resurrection in itself isn't too important if he's insincere. Others lying to him is more plausible.

It's not like there's any hostile testimony to the resurrection.

Well, of course. There is hostile testimony that the body's gone, though.

The main option in competition, to me, would seem to be the one arguing that the disciples stole the body. This doesn't make too much sense to me. Why would they all lie and do this, right after Jesus just died for his religious teaching? And then live out the rest of their lives based on this moment, preaching lies? They'd be desecrating a grave of one of their companions to die the same death, except this time knowingly based on lies. While also being theologically innovative, since it's not at all clear why stealing the body would be so important.

It also seems relatively unlikely that the gospel accounts would have women be the ones to have the lack body discovered first, if they were made up.

Pascal's wager fails because there are too many options*

You could say being a Christian of some kind is still better than being a non-believer, but since there are Christians who don't think non-believers necessarily go to hell, I'm not sure it really increases your chances all that much.

Yeah, this last bit is the only part that could get you out of Pascal's wager, I think. But you have to do better than "I'm not sure it really increases your chances all that much." It should have to be exactly 0 or negative, or the size of the reward or penalty will be enough to overcome any finite benefit or penalty. So you'd have to be committed to thinking that you'll be better off between all these worlds following none of them than any pro-Christianity course of action in any one of them. Given what the actual new testament seems to say (that no one can be saved except through Christ), I think that's less likely. Further, if anyone thinks non-believers don't necessarily go to hell, that's usually because they either think that those who didn't have a chance go to heaven (guess what, you've read this, you have a chance), or they think that good works, are sufficient, which would encourage pretty heavily some action on your part. At least, that's how that method to escape the wager seems to work to me.

Could you expand on your four main points?

*Summary put there for organizational purposes, not direct quotes

Yeah, I've heard the suggestion at some point that it's referring to Israel. Penal substitution seems clear enough to me in the passage that I can't see how that would make sense.

I've never really thought Isaiah 53 was especially evocative of crucifixion to begin with. It talks about someone being "crushed" and "pierced," but that right there encompasses just about all of the ways you could be violently killed in the ancient world. I think the passages could just as easily apply to anyone who has ever been unjustly murdered.

This is a good point. My impression, though, is that while a suffering and resurrecting Messiah is latent in the Jewish scriptures, it wasn't something that they were particularly aware of. Like, I don't think modern Jews really talk about that, even though it seems like it's in there, though of course some of that could be out of opposition to and distinguishing themselves from Christianity.

There are some early Jewish non-Christian messianic interpretations of the servant songs, so it wasn't entirely novel. To make this argument you'd have to thread the needle between "it's clear enough that we should be amazed at the prophetic powers of Isaiah" and "the prophecy is vague enough that someone like Peter or John couldn't have applied it to Jesus." I think it's extremely plausible that members of a small Jewish sect whose teacher has just been brutally executed would "search the scriptures" (the NT explicitly says they did this) and find this passage in Isaiah that talks about a righteous servant of God being unjustly killed, and decide it applies to their teacher.

Since Paul actually was in Jerusalem sometimes, interacting with the apostles, even if only briefly, it seems unlikely to me that they would have deceived him only in this point—you'd have to assume an earlier conspiracy.

The main option in competition, to me, would seem to be the one arguing that the disciples stole the body.

I don't think there was ever a conspiracy. I think Jesus was crucified, and some of his hardcore followers had visions of him after his death (hardly uncommon). Because Jesus had primed them to expect the general resurrection and the kingdom of God any day now, they interpreted these visions according to that framework, as proof that Jesus had been raised. This allowed them to maintain their belief that Jesus was the messiah (despite this having been apparently, and brutally, disconfirmed by his execution), and the kingdom and the resurrection were still coming. In fact, Jesus' resurrection was proof of the imminent general resurrection (that's why Paul calls him "first fruits"). Thus the movement's greatest failure was transmogrified into its greatest victory.

I don't think the story of Joseph of Arimathea's empty tomb is necessarily historical. Even in the gospels themselves you can see the story of the burial growing in the telling. In Mark the women get to the tomb and find the stone has already been rolled back, and an angel tells them Jesus has gone ahead to Galilee. In Matthew, they get there in time to see the action for themselves, the earthquake and the angel coming down from heaven and the terror of the guards (there are no guards in Mark). There's no reason to think the process of legendary accretion was not already going on prior to Mark's gospel. Most people who died--particularly criminals--were buried in ordinary graves in the earth, and IMO that's probably what happened to Jesus.

It should have to be exactly 0 or negative, or the size of the reward or penalty will be enough to overcome any finite benefit or penalty.

I think it's clear this breaks down somewhere. Guess what: God has decreed that if you don't paint your car pink, right now, you're going to Hell. I'm guessing you're not going to paint your car pink, probably because you know I just made it up for the sake of the argument, and you have absolutely no reason to believe it's true. Sure, it could be true. You can't 100% for sure prove it's not true. But clearly there is some minimum standard of evidence a threat of infinite torture has to meet before it is going to motivate us. So the question is whether Christianity (or Islam, or anything else) meets that standard.

Could you expand on your four main points?

  1. I gave one example here of how I think the New Testament assumes a false cosmology. I also think fundamentalists are quite right that the Bible teaches humans and all animal life were created in their present-day forms a couple thousand years ago. This was the nearly-unanimous opinion of all interpreters up until the modern period. To be a bit glib, I think theistic evolutionists and old-earth creationists are coping. IMO you can accept the Biblical account, or the theory of evolution and the old age of the universe, but not both.

  2. With regards to inconsistencies in the scriptures, there's petty gotcha stuff like "aha! Matthew says Judas hanged himself, but Luke says he burst open and his guts spilled out!" but one thing that was really jarring to me was how vastly different the worldviews of the old and new testaments are. The New Testament is entirely concerned with resurrection and everlasting life. That's the whole point of the NT. The OT not only is not concerned with these things, it doesn't even have the concepts. With the exception of a single verse in Daniel (the latest book in the OT), there is no resurrection or afterlife in the Hebrew Bible. When you're dead, you're dead. There is no everlasting life, no hellfire, no heavenly bliss. Yahweh blesses and curses in this life. Your reward, if you're faithful, will be earthly prosperity and children to carry on your name. On the Christian view the resurrection and eternal life are the entire point of God's plan of history, but you'd never know that from the OT. There was some 19th century theologian who admitted that, going off of all the minutiae on ritual purity in the OT and the complete lack of information about the afterlife, one was forced to conclude that "Jehovah was more concerned with the hind parts of the Jews than with their souls." There is also, in the OT, no hint that God has some kind of cosmic enemy who is ultimately responsible for all the evil in the world. Satan does not exist for the authors of the OT (neither the serpent in Genesis nor 'the Satan' in Job are equivalent to the evil adversary from the NT). In the OT, Yahweh is generally responsible for everything, good and evil. There aren't any demons in the OT. The few times that 'evil spirits' appear, they are servants of Yahweh, not his enemies. In fact in literature from the intertestamental period you can chart the slow development of most of these doctrines, which IMO is much more consistent with an entirely human set of ideas slowly evolving and changing in response to shifting cultural conditions than it is with divine revelation.

  3. IMO the two most egregious examples are Jesus' and the early Christians expectation that the end was imminent, within a few decades at most, something that was clearly falsified by the end of the first century, and the similar prophecies of Daniel, a few centuries earlier, who very clearly predicted that God would supernaturally destroy Antiochus Epiphanes, and this would be immediately followed by the general resurrection and the end of the age, which also obviously didn't happen.

  4. I'm running out of characters but basically, Yahweh is a thoroughly typical god of the ancient Levant, often practically indistinguishable from Ba'al or El or Chemosh. He seems to have begun as a type of the Syrian storm god, same as Ba'al Hadad, though admittedly that far back sources get sparse. Later philosophers and theologians would impose Greek philosophical concepts like aseity, immutability, immateriality, and so on on the Biblical deity, but very little of that is actually there unless you read it in. Yahweh is a thoroughly human god, with thoroughly human passions and appetites. Like the other gods, he even eats sacrifices as his "food" (see Leviticus 21:6). If we say that Ba'al and Chemosh aren't real, it seems like special pleading to say that Yahweh is real and is also the God of the whole universe, despite the fact that he looks just like all the other gods people were worshipping in that time and place.

One last thing that doesn't neatly fit into these categories but was perhaps my single most shocking discovery when I first started looking into this stuff: so much of modern Christian theology is premised on a particular reading of Genesis 2-3, but when you actually read those chapters with fresh eyes and set aside several millennia's worth of Christian and Jewish interpretation, the classic Sunday school story of "the fall" simply isn't there. In brief; there is no indication Adam and Eve were ever created immortal, the serpent is not a fallen angel but simply an ordinary, if particularly crafty, "beast of the field" (the story doubles as an etiology for why snakes have no legs), there is no hint of anything like "original sin" (nor is there anywhere else in the OT), and most strikingly to me at least, the plain reading of the story is that the serpent tells the truth about the Tree of Knowledge.

Sure, you're correct that a crucifixion isn't obviously what's depicted here. I see the similarity more in a propitiatory and substitutionary sacrifice of a messiah. But yes, that does lower the closeness of the match compared to if the text were more explicit. Your point that it could just be an after-the-fact connection is stronger. I think that's less likely of the resurrection since it's unlikely that they'd just claim that, and the scriptural evidence is less manifest.

hardly uncommon

What would be uncommon, I would certainly assume, would be a group hallucination. Paul, the synoptics, John, all testify that he appeared to the twelve (well, to the eleven). Do you think that didn't happen, and they misremembered or misconveyed?

I don't think the story of Joseph of Arimathea's empty tomb is necessarily historical.

It's supported, though, by hostile testimony—the claim in response was that the body was stolen, not that he was never buried there. The simpler option for them to say, if he was never buried there, is just that he was never buried there. (Also, I'm not sure what mechanism would cause that to originate, if you both think that early Christians, including the twelve, were sincere, and the gospels are old.)

Even in the gospels themselves you can see the story of the burial growing in the telling.

I think that's a misreading of Matthew, for the simple reason of it doesn't explain how the body vanished. Rather I read it as that they came, then Matthew realized, Oh, wait, I wanted to talk about the guards and the tomb rolled away, he describes it from the perspective of the guards, and then resumes with the women—else it doesn't give Jesus an opportunity to walk out the tomb.

But clearly there is some minimum standard of evidence a threat of infinite torture has to meet before it is going to motivate us.

I think some of the reason is just that there are other infinites in play, and so you have to worry about them—it's not improbable that there are better ways to spend your time in pursuit of the ones you think relatively more worth concerning yourself about.

  1. Accomodation seems adequate for the other one. Yeah, old earth creationism of some form seems scientifically necessary but also isn't the easiest textually—the broad semantic meaning of day helps somewhat.

  2. There's a little more than nothing, for eternal life or a resurrection. Job 19:26, Isaiah 25:8, 26:19, Psalm 49:15, Hosea 13:14.

These are all earlier than Daniel. Admittedly they aren't much, and a few are arguable. If Sheol's considered a place, there's a lot more. But you're right that it's undeniable that that's not where the emphasis is put.

For demons, I'm inclined to think that the development is because of an increase in demonic activity at the time—it's unsurprising that this would lead to them playing a greater role. Yahweh's also responsible for everything in the new testament.

  1. Not especially familiar with Daniel. As to the new testament, well, it explicitly says a thousand years is like a day, so it internally moderates.

  2. Yahweh, at the very least, is different in the claim to be God over everything. Monotheism is different. I am who am seems to be hinting at something like aseity, even if not put exactly after that manner.

Sorry, the end especially was rushed.

What would be uncommon, I would certainly assume, would be a group hallucination. Paul, the synoptics, John, all testify that he appeared to the twelve (well, to the eleven). Do you think that didn't happen, and they misremembered or misconveyed?

I don’t think there were ever any group hallucinations. I think initially probably one or two or three people had (individual) visions of the risen Jesus, and the more spectacular stories in the gospels are the result of legendary accretion and invention years later. I have a sort of pet theory about what might have happened on/after Good Friday that I can share if you want (I started to write it out here but it got too long), though of course it is just speculation.

But for now, to see how an initially not-particularly-remarkable experience can snowball in memory (even something that took place before dozens of witnesses, even in the memories of those witnesses themselves), consider the ‘transfiguration of Brigham Young.’ To be very brief, this was an event in which Brigham Young supposedly demonstrated his right to succeed Joseph Smith as LDS prophet by giving a speech before the ‘saints’ at a camp meeting. While speaking before them, he was supernaturally transfigured so that he was identical to Joseph in speech and appearance.

The problem is that the earliest accounts, from weeks or months after the event, don’t mention this wonder. They talk about Young's speech, but with regards to the supposed miracle, they at most talk about “the mantle of the prophet” falling upon Young, or say that he appeared to take on Joseph’s mannerisms.

But within a few years/decades, dozens of people claimed to have witnessed firsthand the marvelous transformation. Some claimed only that the voice of Joseph came out of Brigham’s mouth, but many claimed that he literally took on the features of Joseph, a few even that a glowing light shone out from his face.

I don’t think any of these people were lying; I think over the years, they genuinely came to believe they had seen this miracle.

It's supported, though, by hostile testimony—the claim in response was that the body was stolen, not that he was never buried there.

Well, that’s what Matthew says the claim was. Was that what people in Jerusalem the morning after Easter Sunday were actually saying? Did anyone in the early months even care enough to dispute Christian claims? Maybe. Or maybe not. There’s no actual Jewish or pagan polemic against Christianity until Census 200 years later.

(Also, I'm not sure what mechanism would cause that to originate, if you both think that early Christians, including the twelve, were sincere, and the gospels are old.)

Depends on what you mean by “old.” I think they were written after AD 60. Thirty years, even twenty or ten, is more than enough time for stories and rumors to circulate and grow. “Jesus was buried” (Paul) easily becomes, “Jesus was buried in a fancy rock-cut tomb,” (Mark) easily becomes, “Jesus was buried in a fancy rock-cut tomb and the governor even set a watch on it!” (Matthew)

else it doesn't give Jesus an opportunity to walk out the tomb.

You’re assuming he has to. Elsewhere in the gospels the risen Jesus can teleport and walk through walls. Matthew may have even believed Jesus was assumed directly from the tomb up to Heaven. The rock seems to have been rolled away as much for the benefit of the witnesses as anything (“come and see the place where he was laid”).

Accomodation seems adequate for the other one.

I disagree. You can accommodate anything, but the more accommodations you have to swallow the less convincing the whole thing becomes. After I certain point for me, it becomes easier to just say the authors were wrong about things.

There's a little more than nothing, for eternal life or a resurrection.

There are a few verses here and there that look maybe-sort of resurrection-like if you squint, but I maintain the single verse in Daniel is the only clear articulation of this doctrine in the whole OT, which I think is surprising.

Yahweh's also responsible for everything in the new testament.

Yes but also no. From the NT down to the present day there is a tension between affirming that Yahweh is sovereign over everything but that also somehow, the evil spirits are genuinely his enemies and fighting against him in some real sense. The tension doesn’t exist in the OT. See the “lying spirit” Yahweh uses to deceive Ahab in 1 Kings 22 or the “evil spirit” he sends to torment Saul in 1 Samuel 16. These spirits aren't rebellious or anything like that, they’re just members of Yahweh’s heavenly court that do his “dirty work.” In the OT (with the exception of a few vague references to the defeat of the chaos monsters in primordial history, Yahweh’s enemies are always human).

Not especially familiar with Daniel.

The problem is mainly with the prophecy of the “King of the North” in Daniel 11. I didn’t want this post to be too long, but I can go into detail if you want.

well, it explicitly says a thousand years is like a day, so it internally moderates.

Jesus’ claims that “the generation” of his disciples would not pass away before the fulfillment of all things (Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21). He says some of his disciples will not “taste death” before the Son of Man comes (Matthew 16, Mark 9). In the olivet discourse he explicitly places the final judgment following the destruction of Jerusalem. Paul says that the time is so short that those who are married should live as unmarried, those who are mourning as if they were not, etc. (1 Corinthians 7). He also refers to himself and his generation as those “upon whom the ends of the ages have come” (1 Corinthians 10). The entire Book of Revelation is a promise that God is going to destroy the Roman Empire. Once you see the imminent apocalypticism in the NT IMO it’s hard to unsee it. It’s everywhere. John saying that “already the axe is at the root of the tree,” the epistles referring to their time as “the last days,” the periodic admonitions in Revelation that these are things “which must soon come to pass.”

Yes, there are apologetic answers to all of these problems, but I don’t find any of them particularly convincing, and again IMO the simplest answer with the greatest explanatory power is that Jesus and the early church expected the speedy wrap-up of history, and they were wrong. I actually think the famous “one day as a thousand years” line in 2 Peter, represents a very early example of apologetics on this precise issue. The author says that people have been mocking Christians, asking them, “where is the promise of his coming?” This of course would not have happened unless Christians were preaching the parousia as something in the imminent future, and now the author has to explain why that has not come about, hence the “thousand years” apologetic.

IMO this makes the constant promises of “soon” and “very near” and “at the door” throughout the NT meaningless. Okay, well that’s not human time, it’s God’s time. So why say it? Why this sense of urgency? Might as well have said “not very soon,” “pretty far away” and “it’s gonna be a while.” This would have been significantly less misleading to 1st century Christians, who presumably thought “soon” meant “soon.”

Monotheism is different.

More and more I think “monotheism” and “polytheism” are not especially useful categories.

In Assyria, Assur was called “God beyond gods,” “the lord of all lands” who “fashioned the vault of heaven and earth.” Enlil in Sumeria is called “the god of all the foreign lands” who “alone is exalted.” In Egypt Amun is “lord of the thrones of the earth, the oldest existence, ancient of heaven” and “the one, maker of all that is.” Even Zeus, who is often thought of as being simply a guy on a mountaintop with superpowers, was often viewed in a much more exalted way. See Cleanthes’ hymn to Zeus written 300 years before Christ, which calls him “ever omnipotent,” and says that “the whole universe” obeys him and “all the works of nature” happen by the power of his thunderbolt. “Not a single thing that is done on earth happens” without him and it is even said that man “bears his likeness.” Yet the religions of the Greeks, the Sumerians, the Assyrians, and the Egyptians, are never considered “monotheistic,” while Israelite religion is, although this is the exact same sort of language that is regularly applied to Yahweh in the Old Testament. It’s not supposed to be rigorous theology, it’s just “praise language,” a way to say “my god is great.”

“I am that I am” is a strange passage. It might be more like “I will be who I will be,” not a philosophical statement of divine self-sufficiency but a deflection; “none of your business what my name is.”

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The hardest part about Christianity is that all of the evidence points to a Pharisee who never met Jesus exploiting his death and fashionable Jewish apocalypticism onto disaffected Romans which he felt compelled to do after hallucinating that he saw the heavenly Jesus alone in a cave somewhere. Do I believe his hallucination was a secret revelation given to him by the heavenly body of Jesus himself? No.

If a miracle happens somewhere, you've piqued my interest and I'd be curious to follow up on it. If it turns out the miracle was a rumor spread by a guy who saw it in a hallucinatory vision, I move on pretty quickly.

You'll have to flesh this out. Assuming you're talking about Paul as your pharisee, this is manifestly incorrect, if you think Galatians is Pauline (which all the scholars do, not just the Christian ones)—he explicitly refers to the other, earlier, apostles, who actually interacted with Jesus. Or do you really think only Paul really mattered in getting us Christianity?

He interacted with the other apostles but only a apparently few times and mostly seemed to be doing his own thing with the gentiles, and they eventually seemed to be very conflicted with him over retaining Jewish law etc. I think a lot of that gets papered over in the bible to make Paul look more broadly accepted and integrated them. But just looking at the history, the whole Jewish movement in Christianity got wiped out with the persecution of Jews in Rome, and all that appears left from the original Jesus movement is the Q source and the book of James, neither of which back Paul's claims of the heavenly Jesus or heavenly apocalypse.

Which is to say, all that's left from the original Jesus movement is certain moral teachings and miracles. If that's all Christianity was I could actually see myself engaging with it as a way of integrating with a positive moral community. But the heavenly Christ mythology which every Christian is expected to believe all comes from the one guy (and the direct followers of his school of thought) who never met Jesus in real life, and there's no way I'll ever be able to buy that.

It's not just Paul. Neither the synoptics nor the Johannine texts look the same as Paul's style and emphases. Paul doesn't talk about the kingdom of God the way you see in Mark (note, neither Q nor James).

Also, assuming Acts 15 has some basis in history, they ultimately settled on the same thing regarding Jewish practices. And I'll note that the Judaizers described in Galatians, Corinth, etc. do not incite Paul to write about differences in Christology or devotion to Christ, which seems fairly relevant in evaluating whether a "heavenly Christ" is uniquely Pauline.

which he felt compelled to do after hallucinating that he saw the heavenly Jesus alone in a cave somewhere.

Saul the Pharisee was on the road in a group of his compatriots, on their way to go arrest some heretics, when he was (quite famously) blinded publicly by Jesus and sent to a Christian to be healed. Luke, Paul’s companion and archivist, wrote of it thrice in Acts. Now, whether it was:

  • a genuine miracle of Saul’s eyesight being stolen by Jesus (who once made a guy new eyeballs from mud and spit, according to some interpretations of the Gospels, so clearly He’s the expert on eyes),
  • some hypnotic trance he fell into on the road to Damascus which was based on cognitive dissonance and resolved by being touched by one of the men he would have arrested,
  • a migraine-based hallucination, or a seizure, or a micro-stroke, or some other medical incident he took as a sign,
  • a UFO (aliens or time travelers) showing up and hitting him with a conversion ray of some sort, or
  • a made-up incident in a made-up book,

it certainly wasn’t Saul alone in a cave somewhere getting a mystic vision from sensory deprivation, volcanic gases, or fermented elderberries.

Well he was "alone" in that he continually claims he received the vision alone, it was a direct experience with Christ that he didn't share with anyone else. I don't know why I remembered it as a cave, I may have just be confused on that.

Well he was "alone" in that he continually claims he received the vision alone, it was a direct experience with Christ that he didn't share with anyone else. I don't know why I remembered it as a cave, I may have just be confused on that.

You probably confused him with Mohammed.

Let's say that all that argumentation fails. There still seem to be reasons that it might be a sensible thing to adhere to, even if you think it's relatively unlikely. Pascal's wager is formidable, for one.

Pascal's wager is terrible because infinite rewards break game theory.

Suppose I ask you to give me $10 and in exchange I will reward you with $10000. Should you take this wager? To answer this question you could estimate the probability p that I'm telling the truth and calculate the expected value of the wager: 10000p - 10(1-p). If it is positive you should pay, if it isn't you shouldn't. It's unlikely that you will be able to prove that p=0 but it also doesn't matter, as long as you estimate it to be low enough that all you need to know.

But suppose I promise you an infinite reward for your $10. The condition is now ∞p - 10(1-p) > 0 which is always true if p > 0. So, as long as you can't call me a liar certainly you have to enter the wager. What's worse this is independent of the entry price. As long as I ask for a finite price, no matter how large, you have to pay it.

What does this mean? Either we should reject all wagers that involve infinite rewards (because otherwise we would have to take all of them) or, if we choose not to, we are lucky that there are multiple incompatible religion. Because taking one religion's wager means rejecting many other and some of the other will have infinite punishments for rejecting them all of the wagers are undecidable and we are free to choose whichever we want or reject all of them.

Also I wanted to point out how bizarre the entry about the wager in the pensées is: it ends with a note that, if this argument (the wager) isn't enough to convince you to believe you should then go to mass every day and the monotonous repetition of the liturgy will make you as stupid as a beast and then you will be able to believe. It seems unexplicably blasphemous to me.

Rejecting infinite wagers doesn't suffice, you'd still need to worry about graham's-number wagers.

The correct thing would seem to orient yourself around one of the possible infinite rewards—work out what credibly is the best, weigh competing infinite positives and negatives, etc. I'm not sure what the math would entail, but I don't see why they'd all cancel out.

But yes, I do think that there is a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" thing going on with Christianity in this sub.

Yes, a single day does not go by without someone making a sneering remark about Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and various forms of Paganism, but for some strange reason no one want to touch Christianity.

This is sarcastic right? I can't tell.

Yes, of course.

While I could understand the idea that people here have grown softer on religion in general - a process I observed in myself, and which I think I can even defend in debate - I think it's ridiculous to claim we're soft on Christianity in particular.

Shhhhh! You can't let the outsiders know about the secret Vatican agreement to fund this site in exchange for pushing Christianity on the unaware readers! Amadan is secretly a monsignor and his and my interactions are only to keep up the pretence!

But yes, I do think that there is a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" sort of thing going on with Christianity in this sub.

You can't even debate a vatnik out of their belief that Ukrainians deserve to be bombed, I've tried that. Convincing a Christian to abandon their beliefs by debating them in an even more futile exercise. Can't push them out, have to pull them in.

Keep in mind that a large fraction of this sub experienced early-2000s atheism first- or maybe secondhand. For reasons Scott has discussed it ended up incredibly uncool. The willingness to skip over familiar arguments has quite a bit to do with that.

And the rest of the sub generally does not direct the same kind of object level skeptical analysis towards Christianity that it does towards woke beliefs like "disparate outcomes between men/women or whites/blacks are mainly caused by oppression".

I think another reason for this is that if you really want to read object level sceptical analysis of Christianity you can just go look it up - there's tons of that stuff out there, and a lot of it is fairly high quality. Additionally, it isn't like you can actually test a lot of Christian claims without dying, which has the unfortunate side-effect of preventing you from confirming whether it was the Mormons, Catholics, Orthodox, Arians, Gnostics, Lutherans, Protestants, Anglicans or Baha'i who were right (and of course there are theories that you end up with whatever afterlife you're expecting to get, which if true would even make that experiment inconclusive). Woke claims on the other hand, don't require dealing with the supernatural. You can just look at the statistics, perform experiments, evaluate your own lived experience in the world etc and notice the issues with woke theories. Furthermore, the number of places you can actually criticise these theories is substantially more limited - so I'm not surprised at all by the relative amounts of object level scepticism towards Christianity/wokeness.

But yes, I do think that there is a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" thing going on with Christianity in this sub.

I think most of us don't want to restage The Wars Of Religion, Part Deux on here. If OP says "Christians are all idiots" okay, I'm not going to come back with "and you too!" because this is not worth getting into the fight over.

There are things I would fight over when it comes to religion, but Yet Another Euphoric announcing their euphoria isn't novel enough or challenging enough to ding the bell for me.

But yes, I do think that there is a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" thing going on with Christianity in this sub.

This is exactly it. It's supremely ironic that the same politeness and détente I have with my family is reflected here. But by asserting there's a limit as to how much I'll be insulted and pushed by Christians then the mask clearly falls off.

Yes I'm attacking the sacred cows, jokingly, in my post. But just say "Big Bang" and walk away, don't fly off the handle.

But instead of resolving it (either by severing the two sides, or by rejecting Christianity entirely if doing so is infeasible), this sub... tries to ignore it as much as possible. This sub pretends it doesn't exist, and then gets really conspicuously oversensitive whenever someone reminds them of it.

Well, now and then it comes up, but we have actually managed a detente here that the outside world has not: the atheists won't sneer at the Christians, and the Christians won't wag their fingers about Jesus and hell. (When that detente gets broken, as happened recently, you are likely to get modded.) Nobody wants this place to become either a platform for evangelizing or /r/atheism.

That Christianity gets treated with the kid gloves here is a blatant double-standard. The modding happens because the Christians don't even bother trying to defend their superstitions since they know they'll get trounced, so instead they fight with oversensitive interpretations of the rules (declaring anodyne statements to be "unnecessarily antagonistic", "bad faith", stuff like that).

Nobody wants this place to become either a platform for evangelizing or /r/atheism.

This forum should be open grounds to challenge any view.

When you try to claim that Christianity gets treated with kid gloves, you get bland shoulder shrugs and some upvotes. When you point out that actually, it's atheism that is treated with kid gloves, you get banned. The modding happens because atheists don't even bother trying to defend their absolute bollocks metaphysics since they know they'll get trounced, so instead they fight with oversensitive interpretations of the rules (declaring that actually responding to people's questions is "obnoxious" and "unnecessarily antagonistic").

If anything in this forum is 'sacred' in the language of Robin Hanson, it is atheism. It shall not mix with the profane things, like arguments about the culture war.

As a Very Religious Person I think you're a bit off-base here. Your parody post was much less well-written than the original, in addition to secretly being a parody. "consider the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory, or further implying that shoes are atheists."--I don't even know what this means or where this comes from.

If it had been either higher quality or more up-front about its nature you would have been fine.

My biggest mistake was overestimating both the philosophical knowledge and the Internet Atheist meme history knowledge of the community. (The former bit is from world famous philosopher Rene Girard. The latter bit came from the Internet Atheism Wars, and I suppose it would be vastly more well-recognized ten to fifteen years ago. I guess I'm getting old now.)

...but, of course, that's not the reason that was given for the modding! And perhaps even more importantly, it's completely inapplicable to this modding. What is your hypothesis for why I'm off-base this time? Was it less well-written than the original? Was it secret that it was a parody? Did I make reference to something that completely confused you and made you have no idea where it came from? What's the problem now?

Am I missing something? You're just referring to the modding where a mod called out your characterization of the previous action, right? I'd hardly called that modding at all.

Maybe I'm wrong, and @Amadan can correct me if I'm wrong. But I read:

But if you're really looking for another ban to whine about, do this again.

And I thought that the implication was that there was something wrong with this comment.

Do you think that the only problem was my "characterization" of the previous action? If so, that would be pretty incredible, in my mind, because not to put to fine a point on it, I disagree with their chosen characterization of the previous action. I have also been told that it will not be "relitigated". Point of fact is that it has actually never been "litigated" a first time! There was just a ban, and then nothing. We could just continue on having different characterizations of the past. We could have a discussion to clarify and come to a reasonably joint characterization. What I think is not really something we can do is simply to declare that any characterization I give that is not simply quoting something that I disagree with is a bannable offense because I supposedly "know perfectly well" that my own opinion has magically been declared wrong without discussion, such that even having a different opinion is "lying" about it.

I mean, it is within @Amadan's prerogative to simply declare that my perspective is bannable without discussion, but I think that should be explicitly stated as such. And it should be abundantly clear that this is what is happening, rather than that I am "lying" about something I supposedly "know perfectly well".

EDIT: In fact, it would be perfectly useful if this were declared. Because right now, I think it's apparent that there is total confusion as to what Amadan is going for. Like I said:

Was it less well-written than the original? Was it secret that it was a parody? Did I make reference to something that completely confused you and made you have no idea where it came from? What's the problem now?

It would be helpful to know that these are not the problem, if that is the case. For example, is it bannable to adjust wording in someone's argument in order to demonstrate that the form of an argument can be applied to a different set of particulars, implying a conclusion that is different from the expectation of one's interlocutor? If so, it would be extremely valuable to know this. I was under the impression that such argumentative method has been well-established since Plato's time, so if it is unacceptable here, I just want a clear statement, so that I know what to avoid in the future. Right now, I have absolutely no bloody clue what the actual problem is.

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When you try to claim that Christianity gets treated with kid gloves, you get bland shoulder shrugs and some upvotes. When you point out that actually, it's atheism that is treated with kid gloves, you get banned.

Right there in the link that you helpfully provided is the reason why you were banned, along with proof that what I accused you of doing when I banned you was correct. So you know perfectly well that the reason why you were banned is not what you're claiming.

"Pointing out that actually, it's atheism that is treated with kid gloves" is not something you get banned for. Antagonism, disingenuously rewording someone else's post without being open about what you're doing, and posting in blatant bad faith (or, not to put too fine a point on it, lying about why you were banned), on the other hand...

I suspect you posted this message just so you could get banned and add that to your list of injustices. You've been more or less well-behaved since that last ban, and you've posted a few AAQCs, which suggests maybe I should cut you some slack, despite my reflex to just give you what you want. But if you're really looking for another ban to whine about, do this again.

I have been around long enough to know that 95% of the time, "It's holistic," means, "It's bullshit." Interestingly, I've even seen this attempted in peer review. Thankfully, the Editor in Chief didn't buy it and told the academic janny to do a better job. He needed something real, specific, and actionable.

You wrote:

No one post is terrible, but most of them are obnoxious and unnecessarily antagonistic.

Point me to one. Make it something specific. Something real. Something actionable. Something that can actually be put into practice to improve future posting. Without something, the most likely conclusion is, "Atheism is the sacred at The Motte."

Notice that last time, your complaint was that I didn't make it obvious enough that I was riffing off something. [EDIT for appropriate bold:] This time, that is exceedingly obvious. Last time, you complained about me responding to follow-on questions. This time, I have said nothing else up to this point. Give me something real. Something actual. Something actionable.

This is neither a court of law nor an academic journal, and we're not relitigating your last ban. You can conclude whatsoever you please; people claim lots of things.

I asked about this time. But just like when you mod comments, you sometimes make notes about how there is parsimony with prior comments by the offender... when we "litigate" this modding, it would be helpful if the mod comments are parsimonious with prior mod comments.

I actually remember your post. You got banned because you took someone else's post, inverted a bunch of the language without telling people, posted it as your own, and then started sneering in the replies. There was a moderator post detailing most of that among the replies.

I remember you, too.

My version brought data.

That Christianity gets treated with the kid gloves here is a blatant double-standard.

How has Christianity been treated with kid gloves here?

so instead they fight with oversensitive interpretations of the rules (declaring anodyne statements to be "unnecessarily antagonistic", "bad faith", stuff like that).

Their interpretations of the rules don't matter. The mods' do.

This forum should be open grounds to challenge any view.

You're allowed to challenge Christianity, like any other view. But "LOL Christians and their Invisible Sky Fairy" will be treated the same as low-effort sneering at any other view.

It is not a detente; it is an alliance of convenience against blue-haired HR vampires. Do note how the religion those people imagine on their side (Islam) does not nearly get so fair a shake here.

You are allowed to criticize Islam and you are allowed to criticize Christianity. If Islam has fewer defenders here, it's because there are fewer of them. That's a function of what people are willing to write about, not what we do or don't allow.

Say you told a story where they were making snide passive-aggressive remarks implying you were racist.

Except in this case, OP really is a racist. OP is not religious, thinks it's all nonsense, and only goes along with it for his wife and thinks his kids will junk it as soon as they're old enough. The in-law asking about the agnosticism may be an asshole, but they're not making a false claim. He is agnostic and indeed atheist.

In your example, we would indeed be racists and be going "why are these dumb progressives trying to get me to accept N-words are just as good as me? I'm willing to pretend I go along with their horseshit because I like fucking my wife*, why are they really trying to persuade me to stop being racist?"

*His own wording, not mine.

I'm willing to pretend I go along with their horseshit because I like fucking my wife

Is an extremely uncharitable reframing. My throwaway and silly line seems to be what many people, and you in particular, are centered on, so let's address the elephant in the room.

Did I, in fact, steal a high-quality Christian woman from her probable marriage to another Catholic? Sure - and my response to angst over that is Deal With It. The godly dating pool should have provided more men who actually help with kids, can hold a conversation / make a joke, and cook every once in a while instead of laying around in front of the TV.

The analogs to interracial marriage are plentiful. Your daughter can marry an black atheist, but only if he agrees to never bring up race submit completely to your belief system. You're not a bigot, honest, but you've seen too many horror stories of women being left as single mothers realizing that they've been lied to by hypocrites.

The godly dating pool should have provided more men who actually help with kids, can hold a conversation / make a joke, and cook every once in a while instead of laying around in front of the TV.

The gender gap is very interesting. Seems like religious women will very often need to settle for a man either much less religious, or somewhat less religious and also much less impressive than they are.

That has been my experience. Men can also be in the same position too but it's far less common. They end up becoming more religious, or at least saying they are, much later in life.

~3% of the women in my dating pool were agnostic. It was never practical for me to require that in partners.

So in my initial reading of your post, I missed that an in-law confronted your father. I though it was a member of your own family. That is pretty wild to say the least, and an unhelpful approach to any conversation of weight. You have all my sympathies there.

At the same time, if you're response to the others who disagree with your behavior is Deal With It, expect to be returned the same when seeking sympathy that others are behaving ways you don't agree with.

It was a silly line and you probably shouldn't have included it if you wanted to be taken seriously.

If you just wanted to complain about your dumb in-laws, as a humorous piece, okay but you sounded too serious for that.

You wanted to marry this particular woman, and these were the conditions. Would you be doing strikeouts if it read:

Your daughter can marry a wifebeater, but only if he agrees to never hit her. You're not a bigot, honest, but you've seen too many horror stories of women being abused within intimate partnerships.

The choice, ultimately, was up to you and her. If agreeing to the Catholic conditions was too much, you could have decided not to marry her. If she wanted to marry you but you didn't want to agree, then she could have agreed not to have the church wedding and not baptise the kids.

Both of you made compromises, and while I can't speak for her, you seem to have indeed gone into it with your fingers crossed behind your back; yeah I'm gonna say I agree but I really don't. I'm happy to lie to people in order to get what I want.

I think we're all getting caught up on that, as distinct from your larger point that you're an atheist and not going to change on that. On that point, your in-law is out of order. The rest of it, which you introduced, is about you wanting to eat your cake and have it.

This is.... precisely why I posted it. I appreciate you catching it!

Do individuals relations need to be so strongly hyphenated with the zeitgeist. With individual relations, everything is negotiable.

Just talk to them. Make your boundaries known without having an explosion. Tell them in clear words that this behavior is not acceptable. Be ready to erect boundaries if need be. Talk to your wife before you do anything. Ideally, she will take care of it for you.

get his family into heaven

That being said, I struggle to make sense of people who are logical about everything except religion. Not so much about the existence of God or the social technology that is religion. I mean religion as the arbitrary yet oddly specific rituals that can make or break your entry into heaven.

It is one thing to delude yourself for comfort or to believe in the social value of religion. But, to live in a world of Science in 2023 and to think that the specific sub-set of rules outlined by your pastor will get you into "Christian heaven" is some proper hypocrisy. By definition, if these people believe in the power of these specific rituals to get you into heaven, then don't 99% of all living humans go to not-heaven. (hell?). Even if these in-laws are right, then surely a place where 99% of people go after death, can't be THAT bad.

I know, "2005 called, they want their Christopher Hitchens rants back". But still, do these people never reflect on what they believe in ? Even for a moment ?

I find people who are unable to fathom how an intelligent person could be a Christian have often never engaged with any Christian apologetics, and often don't even really know any Christians in real life. I think Christianity is false, but I don't think you have to be stupid or willfully ignorant to believe in it.

I can agree that they're not stupid, but willful ignorance? Absolutely.

A God that doesn't do anything else except set up a clockwork universe and then fuck off and never intervenes where anyone can see it isn't an entity worth worshipping.

Cue apologetics about how if God was obvious, then there would be no need for "faith", which is absolutely howl-worthy when you consider how convenient it was that there were clear and obvious miracles right up till the point we could properly document and examine them.

That is willful ignorance, for all that they're drinking their own kool-aid. At some point a rational entity who hasn't fucked their own priors sees that an explanation without a million epicycles that reduced to God doesn't really do anything is better stated as God not existing.

A God that doesn't do anything else except set up a clockwork universe and then fuck off and never intervenes where anyone can see it isn't an entity worth worshipping.

The variant that persuaded me actually came from the Atheists, who asserted that a God who attempts to secure your love through threats of eternal torture is a monster. That seemed like a pretty good argument to me, along with the obvious-when-you-think-about-it point that if a God existed, and if he wanted us to know he existed, we'd simply have the unalterable knowledge baked in. Of course, if we knew for a certainty that he existed, then the promise of heaven and the threat of hell would be dispositive, even if Hell is the absence of God and a choice we make, etc, etc. On the other hand, if God existed, and wanted us to choose to love him of our own free will, the only way that works is if we get to choose whether or not to believe in him as well. In that case, leaving his existence plausible but ambiguous makes perfect sense, together with Hell as the absence of God and a choice we make, etc, etc. It fits even better if you presume annihilationism is correct, and the people who reject God get exactly what they're expecting: death, and then non-existence.

In any case, the chain of logic seems simple: God wants to share love with people. It's not love unless it's freely chosen. The choice is permanent, and the choice being offered is better than it not being offered. Certain knowledge of the consequences of the choice corrupt the free nature of the choice. Given those constraints, blinding the choice is the obvious way forward.

  1. What about the all the times that he made himself glaringly obvious? The whole infinite bread and fishes, walking on water type of deal. A bit rich to claim that we're supposed to live in ambiguity, while also holding that God made himself pretty clear on the matter, sadly before we had camcorders and youtube, or the Scientific Method.
  2. I bundle this line of argument into the whole epicycles upon epicycles deal. Christianity claims mutually inconsistent and contradictory attributes of a singular entity, and then does their best to reconcile the irreconcilable, whereas someone who didn't take the existence of God as axiomatic can simply look at the broader picture and conclude that it doesn't exist.
  3. An omnibenevolent entity wouldn't create a Hell, let alone one that's also omniscient and omnipotent so it knows with perfect certainty where we're going to end up.

What about the all the times that he made himself glaringly obvious? The whole infinite bread and fishes, walking on water type of deal.

Walking on water was only seen by Christ's disciples, who had already chosen to follow him. Would you consider bread and fishes glaringly obvious? I wouldn't.

More generally, Christ was very clear and intentional most of the time about keeping his miracles secret. When he raised people from the dead he generally allowed 1-2 people in to see it, if any. There are a few exceptions, but the general rule is that ambiguity is better for our moral development.

A bit rich to claim that we're supposed to live in ambiguity, while also holding that God made himself pretty clear on the matter

Pretty clear is not perfectly clear. Evidence of God is not a stepwise function. The more evidence you have, the more moral responsibility you have too. Some ambiguity is still present even when the evidence is overwhelming.

Christianity claims mutually inconsistent and contradictory attributes of a singular entity, and then does their best to reconcile the irreconcilable, whereas someone who didn't take the existence of God as axiomatic can simply look at the broader picture and conclude that it doesn't exist.

You make two arguments here:

  1. Christians holds God's existence as axiomatic, which leads them astray

  2. It is evident that God doesn't exist

2 is debatable. 1 is just dirty rhetorical tactics. Christians obviously do not hold the existence of God as axiomatic, or none would ever leave the church. If you can change your mind about an axiom based on evidence then it's not an axiom. Characterizing belief-in-God as axiomatic is just shorthand for "how dare they disagree with me even though I think they're wrong." More importantly, epicycles are a perfectly rational way of explaining a phenomenon given sufficient evidence for that phenomenon. The laws of physics as currently understood contain just as many epicycles, if not more.

An omnibenevolent entity wouldn't create a Hell, let alone one that's also omniscient and omnipotent so it knows with perfect certainty where we're going to end up.

You continue to make this claim without engaging with counterarguments. Even in this thread, @FCfromSSC directly defined hell as "the absence of God" which is quite a bit different from how you characterize it here (as a place God sends people).

It's perfectly consistent for God to value agency above all else, especially since it's agency that gives meaning to moral virtue. It's perfectly consistent to suppose that if God did create people who were incapable of evil, he would not be granting them agency at all.

More generally, Christ was very clear and intentional most of the time about keeping his miracles secret. When he raised people from the dead he generally allowed 1-2 people in to see it, if any. There are a few exceptions, but the general rule is that ambiguity is better for our moral development.

OK. Now do the whole Old Testament.

Christians obviously do not hold the existence of God as axiomatic, or none would ever leave the church.

I'm using axiomatic to include priors with a probability of both 1 and 1-epsilon. Mathematicians regularly employ axioms, yet are open to reconsidering what they consider axiomatic if the downstream consequences are conflicting or nonsensical, they consider adjusting their upstream assumptions.

Who knows how the brain actually encodes Bayesian priors (it actually does do that, as best as we can tell), it might not be possible for a prior in the brain to be literally one or zero, but observational evidence tells me some people get close, and no amount of evidence anyone can feasibly muster can move them.

Frankly speaking that you even consider point 2 to even be up for debate given most reasonable starting priors, is strong evidence of point 1. What exactly would it take to convince you that God doesn't exist?

It's perfectly consistent for God to value agency above all else, especially since it's agency that gives meaning to moral virtue. It's perfectly consistent to suppose that if God did create people who were incapable of evil, he would not be granting them agency at all.

The whole omniscience part makes the concept of "agency" rather dubious doesn't it? Ah yes, I know perfectly well in advance if you're going to take the red pill or the blue pill, sucks that you're with 100% certainty going to take the one I've laced with cyanide. On you kid, L+ratio.

I asked Bing what the general consensus about what Hell actually is is the myriad strains of Christianity. Said consensus apparent doesn't exist.

According to the web search results, there are three common views on hell in Christian theology: Traditionalism, Universalism, and Annihilationism1

Traditionalism is the view that the unredeemed dead suffer for all eternity in flames of fire. This is the most widely recognized view and is often depicted in popular culture. Some biblical texts that support this view are Matthew 25:41, Revelation 14:11, and Revelation 20:101

Universalism is the view that there is no eternal dwelling place for the unredeemed dead. Instead, all people will end up living with God for eternity. This view emphasizes God’s love and mercy and believes that everyone will eventually repent and accept God. Some biblical texts that support this view are John 3:16, Romans 5:18, and 1 Timothy 4:102

Annihilationism is the view that the unredeemed dead will ultimately cease to exist so that only the redeemed will live with God in eternity. This view holds that eternal punishment is incompatible with God’s justice and goodness and that some people will persist in rejecting God. Some biblical texts that support this view are Matthew 10:28, Romans 6:23, and 2 Thessalonians 1:92

I don't see Hell as the "absence of God" as a mainstream position, and given that it clearly seems to me that he's on an extended vacation, if this counts as Hell, then call me a happy sinner.

Besides, the number of epicycles that a theory is allowed to hold before it ought to be rejected is clearly a function of how useful said theory is at predicting experimental results and constraining expectations. The Standard Model of Physics does an awful lot better at predicting the nature and evolution of the universe than the Bible does, so we can tack on Dark Matter or Dark Energy with the clear knowledge that something must be missing in our understanding.

Now do the whole Old Testament.

All the people in the Old Testament are constantly denying God, worshipping idols, etc. even after seeing miracles. Obviously the evidence they saw was still ambiguous or they wouldn't be doing those things.

I'm using axiomatic to include priors with a probability of both 1 and 1-epsilon.

1-epsilon still doesn't address the people that leave the church, it just sounds like it does.

observational evidence tells me some people get close, and no amount of evidence anyone can feasibly muster can move them.

This is a good thing and is how evidence should work. If something is true, it should be difficult to dissuade someone. If someone has seen lots of evidence for something over the course of their life, of course counterbalancing that evidence will also require quite a lot of work, possibly more than anyone can feasibly muster. Being confident in a belief is not the same thing as adopting that belief as an axiom.

Mathematicians regularly employ axioms, yet are open to reconsidering what they consider axiomatic if the downstream consequences are conflicting or nonsensical, they consider adjusting their upstream assumptions.

Either you're wrong or they use a different definition of "axiom" than the commonly accepted one. Like I said, if your axioms depend on evidence, they're not axioms at all. Sounds like their actual axioms are something like "truth must be consistent", and the things you describe as axioms would be better characterized as useful assumptions. There is no such thing as a downstream axiom--it's either an axiom or it's not one.

I don't see Hell as the "absence of God" as a mainstream position

To be honest none of those Bing options really address that; they're more concerned with the ultimate fate of people who get sent to Hell, not the nature of what Hell is. This is obvious enough that I question why you even included that point. I asked Bing "please describe a few commonly-held beliefs regarding the nature of christian hell" and on my first try got a much better response:

Sure, I can describe some of the commonly-held beliefs regarding the nature of Christian hell. According to Wikipedia1, hell in Christianity is the place or state into which, by God’s definitive judgment, unrepentant sinners pass in the general judgment, or, as some Christians believe, immediately after death (particular judgment). Different words are used in the Bible to refer to hell, such as Sheol, Hades, Gehenna and Tartarus. These words may have different meanings and connotations depending on the context and the translation.

Some of the beliefs about hell in Christianity include:

Hell is a place of eternal torments where the wicked suffer physical and spiritual pain in fire and darkness (cf. Matthew 25:41-46; Revelation 14:9-11; 20:10-15). This is the traditional view held by most Catholics and Protestants for centuries2 Hell is a place of annihilation where the wicked cease to exist after being consumed by fire (cf. Matthew 10:28; Malachi 4:1-3). This is a view held by some Christians who reject the idea of eternal punishment as incompatible with God’s justice and love2

Hell is a place of separation from God where the wicked experience the absence of God’s presence and grace (cf. 2 Thessalonians 1:9; Luke 16:19-31). This is a view held by some Christians who emphasize the free will of human beings and their choice to reject God’s offer of salvation

Hell is a place of purification where the wicked undergo a process of cleansing and correction before they can enter heaven (cf. 1 Corinthians 3:11-15; Matthew 5:25-26). This is a view held by some Catholics who believe in a place called Purgatory where souls are purified from their sins

Hell is a state of mind where the wicked experience their own self-inflicted misery and alienation from God (cf. Luke 12:47-48; Romans 2:5-11). This is a view held by some Christians who believe that heaven and hell are not physical places but spiritual realities that depend on one’s relationship with God

These are some of the main beliefs about hell in Christianity, but there are also variations and nuances among different denominations and individuals. Some Christians may also hold more than one belief or have doubts about the nature of hell. Ultimately, Christians believe that only God knows who will go to hell and what hell is like

So, obviously "hell is the absence of God" is in fact a pretty mainstream position.

Besides, the number of epicycles that a theory is allowed to hold before it ought to be rejected is clearly a function of how useful said theory is at predicting experimental results and constraining expectations. The Standard Model of Physics does an awful lot better at predicting the nature and evolution of the universe than the Bible does, so we can tack on Dark Matter or Dark Energy with the clear knowledge that something must be missing in our understanding.

Yes I know. So now we're back to square one, as I was saying, where your claim is that there's not enough evidence for Christianity. This is a much less interesting criticism than one about epicycles, forgetting that epicycles are how we get things like the laws of physics in the first place.

The whole omniscience part makes the concept of "agency" rather dubious doesn't it? Ah yes, I know perfectly well in advance if you're going to take the red pill or the blue pill, sucks that you're with 100% certainty going to take the one I've laced with cyanide. On you kid, L+ratio.

If you don't know which of the pills is laced with cyanide, that's not exactly your choice, is it? If you do know, then it's still your choice even if the choice-offerer knows what your decision will be before you've made it.

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On the other hand, if God existed, and wanted us to choose to love him of our own free will, the only way that works is if we get to choose whether or not to believe in him as well.

It seems there are a few pages stuck together here, linking "can choose whether to believe in X" and "can choose whether to love X".

Also, at least in the variety of Christianity I was taught, God doesn't threaten people with eternal torture. He simply gives people what they want for eternity: if that's to be without him, then so be it, and so they end up in a torturous existence by their choice - hell is simply a place where humans, angels, and perhaps others exist without God or the fear of death, which is all they need to create a terrible existence by their own efforts. I'm not a Christian, but like a lot of Christianity, this seems to be to be insightful and plausible in itself. It certainly makes far more sense than an all-benevolent, all-powerful God setting up a realm of eternal torture for fallible beings, and (for some insane reason) hiring a fallen angel to run the place.

That's no God then, that's an Asshole Genie.

Not sure about that: is it being an Asshole Genie to not force someone to love you and want to be around you?

If someone makes a prideful wish, should a genie revise that wish to something smarter?

The asshole genie thing is that God should know very well that rejecting religion and not worshipping God does not actually mean you wish to be away from all that is good in the world - you simply don't believe that the good things are all absolutely reliant on him.

Going "oh so you want to be cast into the outer darkness" is a cheap gotcha rather unbecoming of any deity that claims to be all-loving. "Oh you don't want broccoli? Well I guess I won't feed you at all."

Taking it further, this idea of the nature of Hell necessitates that God either isn't all-powerful so he physically cannot embrace those who rejected him, isn't all-knowing so he doesn't realize that people don't interpret their wishes as he would, or not all-benevolent so he doesn't give a fuck and would rather cast them into Hell out of spite for being wrong about his existence.

a prideful wish

I see it as more "a sensible wish based on the information I have".

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that a God who attempts to secure your love through threats of eternal torture is a monster

This has been my general approach too. There are few universal 'goods' across all religions. Those are likely good places to start.
Don't betray, murder, rape, lie, steal or be hypocrite. I try my hardest to do all of them. the not lying and not-betraying (even unintentionally) bits are especially hard to keep up all the time.

It's one of the reasons I don't buy people's crap on religion. I have yet meet anyone who consistently does even just these 5. If it's that difficult to follow the LCM (lowest-common-multiple) of all religions together. No way anyone is able to those and all the extras that come depending on which religion you think wins the jackpot.

people who reject God get exactly what they're expecting: death, and then non-existence.

Perks of being Hindu / Buddhist. Release from the eternal cycle of life/death is exactly what Moksha/Nirvana looks like. So by following an Indian-origin religion and rejecting Christianity, a person gets both the incentive (aim for non-existence) and a guarantee of success (non-existence). Thanks Jesus ?

Win-win if you ask me.

I believe that miracles continue to happen and that the Catholic Church documents the ones with substantial evidence. It’s also on guard against hoaxes and mistakes and rarely declares an event to be a miracle.

I know it sounds hokey to a non-Catholic, but look into the Eucharistic miracles. Especially those examined by pathologists .

I looked into eucharistic miracles a while back. The chain of sources inevitably bottoms out in Catholic publications. While they are often touted as having been examined by pathologists, the only one in which I've ever seen an actual research paper detailing methods and findings (rather than simply an assurance that the miracle has been authenticated by qualified persons) was the miracle of Lanciano, and in that case all that could be confirmed was that it was an actual piece of a human heart, not that it had ever been a host. Nor was it miraculously preserved, but completely desiccated.

which is absolutely howl-worthy when you consider how convenient it was that there were clear and obvious miracles right up till the point we could properly document and examine them.

Well yes, because if they're not documentable, they don't eliminate the need for faith. If they are, then they would, so they don't happen.

I don't even necessarily disagree with you, but this is just a terrible point. It's countered by the very argument it's trying to address.

What exactly changed that anatomically modern humans living in the period 3-1k BC deserved to have glaring and obvious information doled out from the heavens and yet we moderns are so unfortunate? The seas don't part themselves anymore, it's up to us to raise them the old fashioned way by raising global temperatures.

Call me cynical, but I see a glaring decrease in the intensity and magnitude of such interventions as documentation and history keeping improved through the ages. Christians can claim that Jesus was a real person modern Israel, not that he lead an army to overthrow the Romans, because actual Roman scholars would have disagreed.

How exactly does your degree of faith matter, if your omniscient creator knew exactly how much of it you'd have well before you were even born, and whether it would sufficient or not to spare you from a Hell of their making?

What I struggle with is the idea that those who are in heaven can be in paradise with knowledge that maybe their parents, brothers, sisters, spouse, kids, etc. rot in hell. How could anyone find paradise knowing that?

Part of the joy and sorrow of Heaven I anticipate is having no illusions.

This means I will remember the full depths of the public and secret sins I’ve been saved from by Jesus’ sacrifice. I will be made aware of the kinds of sins I would have committed if I hadn’t been sealed by the Holy Spirit and motivated by love instead of spite or greed. I will be left knowing just how righteous God would have been to condemn me away from His presence for eternity.

With no illusions, I will also be able to see the righteousness of the condemnation of all who chose to reject the Way of love-for-all and the damage they willingly cause wherever they may be. If one of the dwellers in misery is a close relative or even a lover, I will mourn them, but I will be disgusted by the depths of the evil they chose and agree they deserve their fate, just as I would have.

This all assumes the particular variant of Christianity I’ve been taught is theologically and cosmologically accurate. I’d like to be pleasantly surprised that all humans throughout history have ended up accepting Jesus’ forgiveness either before or after their death, and Hell ends up holding only the demonic angels who rebelled. I pray nightly that all will have ended up saved. But having watched both Sound of Freedom and the documentary Anne Frank Remembered this month, I don’t have hopes quite that high.

I'm not clear on how this differs from "I could be happy in Heaven despite knowing there are people in Hell because my mind would be rewritten to consider this justice". A divine entity reshaping you like that could make you think of anything as justice. How would you tell the difference between this, and the Hypothetical Reverse God who condemns all Christians making you think you perfectly deserve misery?

...Also, I can't help but notice that this whole "without these specific rituals and beliefs, you suffer forever" business feels a lot more like an idea maximising pressure to spread it than the kind of thing you'd expect from the Almighty. It seems very petty, very suspiciously human, for an entity with the majesty and sheer greatness of God to hold that kind of a grudge.

Who am I to teach God mercy? Well, I don't have a torture-dimension for my enemies, so I have that going for me. I sort of feel like the Almighty should be able to outdo me here, rather than the opposite.

The only necessary belief is that God counts Jesus’ death as fulfilling my death penalty for the harm I’ve caused.

The only necessary “ritual” is that I do not “blaspheme the Holy Spirit.”

The eternal suffering comes from being imprisoned away from the source of all goodness and kindness with all the other hateful people, and malicious powerful spiritual entities imprisoned too.

Boy, all those people with the thick book and the huge churches must be really wasting their time, then.

Necessary is the bare minimum to escape condemnation. It defies belief that you can have misunderstood this when user rolfmoo was talking about the many specific rituals and beliefs he thinks one must hold to enter Heaven and escape fiery damnation. The thick book, huge buildings, many rituals, and ancillary beliefs all serve the minimums, but have additional purposes.

just as I would have

Just as you do. Christianity is not salvation by being sufficiently good enough, but is by the mercy of God in forgiving our sins.

Thanks! Clarification: …but I will be disgusted by the depths of the evil they chose and agree they deserve their fate, a fate I would have shared were it not for grace.

That idea is just alien to me. I couldn’t imagine my sweet daughters suffering in hell and me just saying “yep infinite torment is justified for being born and not choosing to believe in a particular religion with all human frailties.”

CS Lewis (along with many others) does have a solution which is that hell is proverbially locked from the inside. You seem to hint at it as well (ie maybe one can be saved after death). But are we really to believe that it is just to suffer eternally for not accepting a gift that was unclear if true, especially when there are many other religions with their own afterlife? Sorry you picked wrong eternal damnation. I can’t reconcile that with (1) a loving god and (2) a place where I could be happy. The Lewis solution seems at least palatable to me but being raised Protestant sola scriptura still has a heavy pull on me.

Even if these in-laws are right, then surely a place where 99% of people go after death, can't be THAT bad.

I can never tell if people who are saying this are just being unserious, or are actually this unfamiliar with the thing that they're trying to criticize.

Hell is the absence of good. It is unpleasant be definition, if you are imagining being in a place and it not being so bad actually then you are by definition not talking about hell. There isn't a bargain to be made here where actually things aren't bad because "that's where all the cool people are" or something.

It doesn't make sense that pretty much everyone goes there but there's no good there. Are all non-Christians evil?

Catholic doctrine isn’t so definitive as you’re likely familiar with from Protestants. While Jesus is the only savior, who is to be saved is not fully defined.

Here’s CCC 847:

Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation.

I think that's hard to fit with the supposedly infallible council of Florence damning all heretics and schismatics and jews and pagans, but I'm not Catholic so it's not a big deal to me.

Yes, according to Christianity, and all Christians too (although they're being fixed over time).

According to Christians, everyone is evil. Part of the whole salvation thing is that you give God root access, and he patches you to be capable of being incrementally less evil. One interpretation has it that without the patch, people get steadily more evil from the point at which they learn what evil actually is. Since death doesn't actually end them, this decay continues until they are completely evil, at which point they have achieved the state of Hell. There's no socializing with cool people in hell, because the part that makes people cool is one of the ones that goes away, along with the parts that allow socializing, and the parts that make one "people".

By definition, if these people believe in the power of these specific rituals to get you into heaven, then don't 99% of all living humans go to not-heaven. (hell?). Even if these in-laws are right, then surely a place where 99% of people go after death, can't be THAT bad.

If we’re broad and say Christians can be saved, it’s historically been perhaps 20-40% of world population. That’s not nothing.

Further, as Catholics we believe that Christ descended into Hell after his crucifixion and proclaimed the good news to the just dead.

That modern people have chosen to reject the Church or even the heretical sects, doesn’t speak to whether the Truth of Christ is true.

historically been perhaps 20-40% of world population

See, here is where ethnicity matters. That number drops to 0-2% when looking at the continent of Asia.

Assuming the soul is somewhat immortal, Heaven is going to look whiter than a Cape Cod frat party.

doesn’t speak to whether the Truth of Christ is true.

It is awfully convenient to have your truth be unfalsiable. "I choose to believe what I choose to believe. I have no proof it works, but all of you are going to hell. I cannot be convinced otherwise."
You do you, but you can see how that is a hard sell right ?

That number drops to 0-2% when looking at the continent of Asia.

Nope. 7% of all humans ever born are currently alive and a third of them are Christian.

It is awfully convenient to have your truth be unfalsiable.

It's awfully convenient to summarize literally any counterargument as a claim that religion is unfalsifiable. Let me remind about the conversation so far since you seem to have forgotten:

@screye:

By definition, if these people believe in the power of these specific rituals to get you into heaven, then don't 99% of all living humans go to not-heaven.

@UnterSeeBootRespecter:

That modern people have chosen to reject the Church or even the heretical sects, doesn’t speak to whether the Truth of Christ is true.

@screye:

It is awfully convenient to have your truth be unfalsiable.

@UnterSeeBootRespecter has directly addressed your arguments with the claim that Christianity actually has made its way to plenty of people who weren't Christian in this life, including in the continent of Asia. You've done a great job at sneering rather than addressing any of his actual arguments in your response.

See, here is where ethnicity matters.

Why?

That number drops to 0-2% when looking at the continent of Asia.

So? The Church holds that a non-Christian who has sincerely sought God and lived a good life, and just did not hear the Good Word may still be saved.

Adding to the fact that half of all the humans who ever were lived before Christ, and so may have been reached during the harrowing of Hell...

It is awfully convenient to have your truth be unfalsiable.

We didn't speak on unfalsifiability. Only that rejection by moderns doesn't falsify it.

Christianity's proportionally shifting from European countries toward Africa.

I mean religion as the arbitrary yet oddly specific rituals that can make or break your entry into heaven.

Such as? I don't really follow. I'll assume we're talking about Christians, in which case either they are protestants, where it's based on belief and trust in Christ, which is not arbitrary, and is justified by revelation, not the say-so of one pastor, or they're Roman Catholic, in which case it's repentance and mortal sin which ultimately determine things, which, again, doesn't seem terribly arbitrary. (Or Eastern Orthodox, which, I'm not as familiar with, but I would think would parallel Roman Catholics.)

Even if these in-laws are right, then surely a place where 99% of people go after death, can't be THAT bad.

Do you really only define the value of something in relation to other things? Or think that most people must, for some reason, do all right? Christians don't (or at least shouldn't), since we believe God literally had to die to get some of humanity out of going to hell.

I was not born in an Abrahmic culture, so forgive my ignorance, but...

At its core, each Abrahmic sect believes that they understand the words of God. I would assume that for a group that claims to understand God's words, surely you would have to be confident before making such a claim. Credit where it is due, Christians are confident. However, they are all confident in their unique truth and just as many of them are confident in the false hood of every other Pagan, Abrahmic and Christian sect.

While there are a few inclusive Christians, most Christians aren't going around saying : "My Christianity has the highest odds of heaven, while it is 50-50 with the others." Most are going around saying : "Join us and go to heaven, everyone else will rot in hell with 100% money-back guarantee." Do note, Most Christians believe that most Christians (not them) are going to hell. (It's esp neat, given that Catholics are almost exactly 50%).

So yes, the entry to heaven is gated by engaging in very localized and specific sub-groups underneath Christianity.

belief and trust in Christ

Another thing that confuses me. How do Christians square off human agency against belief in God and his plan ? If I truly believed in Jesus, why would I ever take my child to a doctor or get treated for a wound. A true believer should allow life to happen to them, because the outcomes are determined by the omni-potent God. So any person who dares to exercise personal agency is not a true believer, and ends up in hell ? (at least from a protestant stand point)

only define the value of something in relation to other things

Yes?

I'm not materialistic, but the hedonistic treadmill, lifestyle creep and trends are real things. Yes, a cute puppey and green mountains do evoke postive-emotions that seem universal and untethered to society. But, life is usually a healthy balance of emotions drawn from either source.

since we believe God literally had to die to get some of humanity out of going to hell.

The increasing lack of omni-potence of the Christian God does not inspire a lot of confidence.

A true believer should allow life to happen to them, because the outcomes are determined by the omni-potent God.

This position was historically held by quietists and you can read the general principles in the papal encyclical condemning them as heretical: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/Innoc11/i11coel.htm

How do Christians square off human agency against belief in God and his plan ? If I truly believed in Jesus, why would I ever take my child to a doctor or get treated for a wound. A true believer should allow life to happen to them, because the outcomes are determined by the omni-potent God. So any person who dares to exercise personal agency is not a true believer, and ends up in hell ? (at least from a protestant stand point)

Not sure where you're getting this from. If people have agency, God's plan includes your agency. If people do not have agency, God's plan also includes your lack of agency. Either way you can get your kid treated.

It looks like you're postulating that people do have agency, but any possible use of agency is going against God's plan. Why would this be? Choosing not to treat your son is just as much a choice as choosing to treat them would be. Setting aside how illogical that is, it's annoying when people say things like "I've formed my own conclusions based on about two seconds of thought on the implications of a hasty recollection of your doctrine. Therefore your doctrine must be wrong." No, the only thing wrong here is your idea of what the doctrine actually is.

Do note, Most Christians believe that most Christians (not them) are going to hell.

Not exactly true. Catholics have a doctrine of invincible ignorance, whereby non-Catholics can be saved (especially post-Vatican II), and protestants don't generally have a "one true denomination," rather thinking that theirs is the most faithful, and others are Christians, just ones mistaken in some respects.

Another thing that confuses me. How do Christians square off human agency against belief in God and his plan?

Well, two things. First, he tells us to do things, so… Second, God generally works through means. So you're the agent in working out God's plan.

I'm not materialistic, but the hedonistic treadmill, lifestyle creep and trends are real things.

Surely you wouldn't apply this to heaven or hell?

The increasing lack of omni-potence of the Christian God does not inspire a lot of confidence.

Self-imposed restrictions. This is only required because of other requirements God's imposed on himself as to how to treat humans. It's not a lack of power, it's that there are other requirements that have to be kept as well.

Even if these in-laws are right, then surely a place where 99% of people go after death, can't be THAT bad.

There is no logical connection between the number of people doing something and the goodness or badness of the thing they do in absolute terms. Everyone dies, and yet some atheists here are very, very afraid of death, and see its elimination as the preeminent moral imperative.

But still, do these people never reflect on what they believe in ? Even for a moment ?

Many of them doubtless do not. On the other hand, it's hard to distinguish between beliefs that are stupid and beliefs you simply don't understand very well.

So how do you want me to interact with this post other than saying "nice blog bro!"? We aren't here to be your therapist.

But yes, the detente is over and was over when the state closed churches and masses for COVID. Even when reopening occured, diktats came down as to how Churches were to administer the Eucharist, which I might remind you is the holiest and most central ritual in Christiandom.

So your father-in-law is for all intents and purposes trying to figure out if you are going to be an asset or liability in the culture war. Are you sending your children to a classical school or a public school?

Tophat, is that you?

You could make this same argument about literally any political wedge, or even tangential events. Oh, they shot Kennedy, guess the Catholic detente must be over. What’s so special about COVID lockdowns to decide that now is the time to strike?

Screwing with the Eucharist is messing with a central pillar of the religion. That is very clearly an invasion of the sacred by the state, in the way an assasination of the head of the state is not.

Why not? Murdering Christians is surely frowned upon. Yet the death of a Christian is not sufficient to end the detente, because there are other factors at play.

So why is that line drawn here, at “screwing with” the Eucharist? Why not at the death penalty? At Roe v. Wade? At every bump and scrape of a religious institution against the world’s competing secular interests?

There are plausible reasons for opinions on the death penalty or abortion that have nothing to do with religion, even if some of them may be insincere. Not allowing gatherings to take the Eucharist while allowing secular gatherings can only be because of hostility to religion.

... because of hostility to religion.

Maybe, but I think you need to show more work here for your conclusion? Eucharist involves taking off a mask and eating something that someone hands to you or places directly in your mouth. Even pre-COVID, I remember thinking this was not particularly sanitary. A secular gathering might not involve taking off a mask at all. The risk profiles are different. And while terrible, the pandemic gave people a stake in others' private sanitation habits. (Whether or not you think that stake thereby gives the general public the right to restrict behavior, the stake exists.)

There was quite a while where I could show up to a bar without a mask for a drink but couldn't sing or participate in rituals at a church.

Assuming that I am not lying, is that an injustice?

An injustice? Yeah.

Only because of hostility to religion? I don't think so. Apathy is sufficient.

Yeah, but at the time we had "No, you can't go to Mass (or a service) because singing hymns will spread infection" while at the same time "it is a human right to march in unmasked street protests of hundreds of people and racism is a bigger threat than Covid" for the BLM protests.

So, you know: here's the goose, here's the sauce, why is the gander not here too?

But Christian denominations oppose those things, sometimes quite forcefully, without ending some mythical detente. Why should this be different? Why is this the case where they are supposed to sharpen the knives and prepare for the tribulation?

I don't begrudge Christians their distaste for such a rule. I'm asking why such distaste is supposed to be unique.

Christians have always been murdered. That doesn't in itself delegitimize the state for Christians. If Christian murders were selectively under-prosecuted, perhaps it would.

Forbidding people from worship is altogether different. It proves that the free exercise clause has no weight. No one will be held accountable for violating it, and the state is free to violate it again. Already there's movement to do away with priest-penitent privilege, invading upon another critical sacrament for Catholics.

This is silly.

  1. The assasination of Kennedy was a national tragedy and the killer died before prosecution. Oswald, the 60's equivalent if a tankie, is also wildly unrepresentative of secular America.
  2. Roe v. Wade and other legal decisions Christians don't like are the state making rules for what the state wants to permit. The stated deal with seperation of church and state is that the state and church don't get a privlidged interference in the realm of the other. No established churches, no state telling the faithful how to worship. Christians don't have to get abortions, and its their civil right to protest laws they find unjust. Roe v. Wade fits nicely into the deal.
  3. Curtailing the Eucharist (in Canada, we still can't drink the sacred blood) directly violates the deal. Telling the faithful they can't do a core part of the faith on pain of legal penalty is the state privlidging itself in the realm of the spiritual. The equally unacceptable inverse would be the state establishing a church with mandatory attendence on pain if legal penalty.

the detente is over and was over when the state closed churches and masses for COVID

Covid policy ended an individual family's "détente" over Christianity? Letting national politics (and they're barely even related specifically to Christianity!) shape your personal relationships with your family seems hopelessly mind-killed.

My mom isn't a fan of Big Tech but I don't give her the silent treatment whenever the EU hands out another fine.

National? The city police were the ones fencing off churches.

If I change one word in my comment will you respond to the rest of it?

You ignored the part of mine where I stated that the most central rituals of Christianity were being interfered with and changed by government fiat, so if you fix that we can make something work.

And are your local police and politicians a bunch of atheists? I don't suppose mine are.

So how do you want me to interact with this post other than saying "nice blog bro!"? We aren't here to be your therapist.

I considered skipping posting for precisely this reason but figured it was an angle we don't tackle often. My worst fears are confirmed!

Are you sending your children to a classical school or a public school?

I don't have any good options here. The short answer is I don't know. I draw the line of our compromise at funding anything related to religion, and being the sole breadwinner provides me significant leverage. The public schools where I live now are unacceptable, and if I were to return to my hometown they'd be high-quality public (but my kids would be put through the same social shit I went through as a non-believer).

I considered skipping posting for precisely this reason but figured it was an angle we don't tackle often. My worst fears are confirmed!

I'd be kinder if it wasn't written like a channish nastygram and had some point where I could interact that wasn't quizzing someone twice removed from your in-law's mindstate about his intent and words.

Like, what would you like to talk about? Does this represent increased activity in your life? Do you want advice about how to speak to your in-law? Do you want to talk about Christianity in the public sphere? I need some guidelines on how to help you that isn't a request to sneer at your family.

I don't have any good options here. The short answer is I don't know. I draw the line of our compromise at funding anything related to religion, and being the sole breadwinner provides me significant leverage. The public schools where I live now are unacceptable, and if I were to return to my hometown they'd be high-quality public (but my kids would be put through the same social shit I went through as a non-believer).

Of the religious school models, classical schools are extremely new and attempt to be more implicit than explicit. Religious instruction is saved for the final years of schooling in the school near me and has a different approach than the usual, many do not provide it at all. If you have the opportunity I'd recommend investigating them, the people running them are far from fundamentalist baptists in the worst case, and you might have one that isn't religious at all and may actually be a charter school.

Do you want advice about how to speak to your in-law? Do you want to talk about Christianity in the public sphere? I need some guidelines on how to help you that isn't a request to sneer at your family.

I don't need any help navigating my personal relationships, and this post wasn't intended to be a celebration or validation of my personal beliefs. TheMotte needs some counter-jerk every once in a while and (to be frank) the tenor of much of this thread indicates my instincts were correct on that front! The anecdote is window dressing, no more than that.

I hadn't heard anything about a different model of religious schooling, so I appreciate the information there. I still have a few years before having to make a firm decision, and I'm also having to balance a quality education with ensuring we can comfortably afford it. My wife does the vast majority of activity and school scouting - the kids are actually in Catholic day care as we speak - but I may need to grab the reins on the K-12 front.

Part of the problem is that he made an agreement, he knew he would have to make an agreement, and he went ahead and did it while privately holding that he intended none of it (e.g. about raising the kids as Catholics, and "I may need to grab the reins on the K-12 front").

This would invalidate a civil contract, and I don't know if anyone would say that people pointing out how he broke the law were engaging in "sneering and patronising tone of comments". If I take out a bank loan, know that I have to repay it within a certain period at a certain interest rate, then go "how dare my bank manager send me three letters about how I didn't make any repayments, more fool he I never intended to pay it back even when I signed the contract", how many supporters on "I can't believe the arrogance of that guy, asking you to uphold your commitments!" would I get?

This is all separate from the behaviour of the in-law, and mixing the two is what is causing most of the disagreement. I can agree the in-law was in the wrong while still thinking OP doesn't come out of it smelling of roses, either.

Back when the US had military conscription, did any significant fraction of Christian churches in the US protest against it? WW1, WW2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War... all of these were wars of choice for the US. We can argue about the morality of the US participation in these wars and whether conscription was justified, but we can just as well argue about the morality of covid lockdowns.

Would the church protest if the US government brought back conscription for the sake of fighting some war of choice?

If Christendom does not protest against its own sons, and the sons of others, being conscripted into wars of choice, then I do not see why it would protest against the much milder infringement on freedom posed by covid lockdowns.

The US catholic bishops were pretty strongly opposed to the Iraq war and one can assume that’d be a better predictor of their future behavior than Vietnam.

That is interesting to find out about. Are Catholics in the US generally more anti-war than Protestants are?

Catholic religious leadership is typically more outspoken and less beholden to a particular party than Protestants are(see also abortion), and has a long history of being opposed to wars of choice(Vietnam opposition had a lot of priests in prominent positions).

So how do you want me to interact with this post other than saying "nice blog bro!"? We aren't here to be your therapist.

The rest of your response is...alright, I guess, but this line we could do without. His post is exactly about culture war, and at that, a part of it that is relatively rarely discussed. I found it interesting.

As an atheist I deny all responsibility for covid lockdowns.

So how do you want me to interact with this post other than saying "nice blog bro!"? We aren't here to be your therapist.

This part is needlessly antagonistic. Plenty of other people found ways to interact without sneering, including those who replied before you. Surely you could have read their responses for inspiration.

We aren't here to be your therapist.

While @yofuckreddit would probably have been better off making their post a bit less rant-y, sneering at them does not help matters. Please avoid this level of antagonism in the future.

I agree that it was sneaky to get on to your father about this, and that if they have a problem they should go directly to you.

But this neat little snippet:

don’t bring up ...the church’s ...rampant pedophilia

Too many people online reach for this as an all-purpose defence and smug way of going "nothing like this on our side, it's all on the religious nutjob right side!"

Yeah. We in the Church have been forced to acknowledge this and deal with it. Hysterically going "it's the priests who are raping kids!!!" when credible allegations of grooming and bad behaviour are shown on the nice progressive side isn't going to save you. If you are so much better than we are, what are you doing about the problem in your community? And if it's "doesn't concern me, I don't do it, I don't know anyone who does" then you're no better (or worse) than the average Catholic who never knew anyone engaging in the same thing.

The church has made genuine progress in addressing child sexual abuse, but it remains a problem and lots of that progress is being undone because the faction in control of the Vatican right now has too few qualified personnel to let them face even minor consequences for negligence or complicity. In any case the biggest child sex abuse crisis, proportionately, was the public school system and priests had a more or less statistically average rate of committing that particular crime.

but it remains a problem

The problem was blown out of proportion to an absurd extent. If you're bothered by what's going on in the Catholic church, you should be livid at what's going on in public schools.

Do the public schools have a similar history of using institutional power and processes to protect chronic abusers, conceal abuse, and lean on victims to keep silent?

Yes.

This response made me laugh so hard (in agreement).

Might we share the joke?

There's not really a joke per se, but I found the directness and bluntness of the response to your (kinda gotcha) question amusing, and felt a bit like stating the obvious.

Yes, of course public school have used their institutional power to cover up scandals that occur within their institutions.

More comments

Sort of?

Look, I'm not defending the Church here, I just think the focus this issue gets is ridiculously disproportionate.

The question was genuine, I have no idea what the correct answer is in the case of the schools, but it seems like a relevant question. Thanks for the info!

The problem was blown out of proportion to an absurd extent.

Numerically, maybe. A bigger problem is that the offending priests were moved rather than removed. The corruption went pretty high in an organization meant to be better than that.

When someone says "rampant" I tend to think of the issue is indeed numeric in nature.

That's true. I do think "rampant" also has an emotional meaning though of just "much more frequent than it should be."

I never claimed it was a bigger problem than what goes on in public schools or the BSA or whoever else.

but it remains a problem

The delta between abuse within the Catholic Church and in public schools is well documented, and supports the (in my opinion obvious[1]) conclusion that your children are less likely to be abused in a Catholic school than in a secular one.

[1]: It seems like the obvious answer that a Catholic organization, which treats the family, and especially children, as the most important part of society and worthy of the most protection, would be a safe place for children. The (false) idea that Catholic priests are somehow more likely than anybody else to abuse children (in reality they are less likely) only had staying power as a meme because of how counterintuitive it seemed. "Man bites dog" and all that.

The (false) idea that Catholic priests are somehow more likely than anybody else to abuse children (in reality they are less likely)

According your link, Catholic priests are less likely than school teachers to abuse children ... and both are orders of magnitude more likely than anybody else. Compare its stated 10K abuse allegations from 100K priests (4,392/4%) to its remaining 310K abuse allegations from 260M non-priest adults in the US and the former is about a factor of 100 higher ... but then consider that, to have the stated 5% abuser rate, the 4M teachers in the US must have 200K abusers among them, and at even 2 incidents per abuser teacher (still less than the stated rate among abuser priests) that wouldn't leave any allegations left for non-priest non-teachers.

Maybe this makes sense, at least after accounting for rounding errors, in a Willie Sutton "Why do you rob banks?" "Because that's where the money is." sense? But I have to wonder if these numbers are just inconsistent because some of them are incorrect, or at best inconsistently defined.

but it remains a problem

No it doesn't. Others have covered the fact that public schools are worse, but I'll add that sex abuse also happens to be adjacent to the "but muh mass shooting child abuse, if it saves just one life we are justified in banning our outgroup".

Hence, one should expect that the statistically inevitable sex abuse should be over-prosecuted/overreacted to in the less popular/out groups, like the Church and the Scouts, and under-prosecuted/underreacted to in the more popular/in groups, like LGBT advocacy groups and Virginia school districts.

It's worth noting, of course, that 60 years ago the two groups were on opposite sides- immunity from outrage comes and goes as political power waxes and wanes.

Too many people online reach for this as an all-purpose defence and smug way of going "nothing like this on our side, it's all on the religious nutjob right side!"

I agree with this! But I also think the Catholic church's celibacy requirement means there is and always will be a problem greater than the general population.

At best, a significant amount of the clergy is closeted gay men. At worst, the male proclivity to favor younger partners (which we see represented in the gay community) manifests itself in inappropriate behavior with children in the church.

Finally, it's much harder to fix grooming and bad behavior in general society (because the nice progressive side is everywhere). The Catholic Church has a problem it can at least start to remedy. They'd have the added bonus of fixing their seminary recruitment problem at the same time.

  1. No. I would modify this to "Organizations in which celibacy is expected will attract those who practice deception since biology suggests most men have sex drives". Catholicism is decimating its pool of potential fantastic priests for what appears to me to be no reason. It's my understanding that the scriptural basis for this rule isn't even particularly strong.
  2. I specifically worded this the way I did because I don't believe the most inflammatory version ("Gays rape little boys"). I do believe the gay population is much more tolerant of vast age differences between partners, including those that dip below the age of consent. I also remember being a teenaged boy.

I only know firsthand about one male sex drive and secondhand about a few dozen more, but I cannot fathom living without it.

Perhaps this is the intent behind the rule. It's a test to see just what sacrifices you'll make to enter the priesthood. But I don't believe that priests as a group are passing this test. I'm having trouble finding multiple surveys and sources, but this one suggest 15% aren't celibate and ~60% want the rule gone. I've seen higher numbers on the former.

I'd agree that raping your parishioners is illogical and evil. I also have seen other posters suggesting that numbers have been inflated - this is probably somewhat true, just as with any massive sexual behavior condemnation movement that has complex incentive structures (I.E. #metoo devolving into just bad sex anecdotes)

  1. gay men are more likely to sexually abuse boys than the general population.

Is this actually anathema to most secular liberals? "Men are much more likely to rape than women, boys are more likely to be raped by gay men than by straight women" is the kind of feminist articulation of that point I've seen thrown about in some liberal feminist circles. You just have to make sure that the hatred in your phrasing is directed at men in general rather than gay men specifically.

there is and always will be a problem greater than the general population.

This isn’t true, as gets mentioned downthread- the RCC’s sex abuse crisis was proportionately smaller than the sex abuse crisis in the BSA or public school systems. Statistically RCC priests are mentally healthier and less likely to commit sex abuse than Protestant clergy.

You are correct that clerical homosexuality is a major elephant in the living room for abuse cases, being that the median abuse victim was a teenaged boy. But it is not true to claim that catholic priests are some unique issue therein.

What is hilarious is when you get told it as a prot, like there wasn't millions of people killed to put to bed the idea that I had to pay fealty to Rome.

What? They way they approached it was from the angle of the father’s responsibility. Their gripe wasn’t with @yofuckreddit, it was with his father for failing to be the spiritual leader of his family. And whether either of them likes it, they’re related now. This guy took it as his responsibility to work with someone (presumably of his own generation) to help get someone of the younger generation in line rather than overstepping his bounds and going directly to @yofuckreddit.

Given that the baptism of your children requires that you ask the Church to accept them as a member and publicly state that you intend to raise them in the Catholic faith, I think your in-laws can be forgiven for bringing this up. Since at least one point you least mimed agreement. I have friends in similar circumstances and I'm also unsympathetic. If you don't want to raise your children religious why get them baptized, if you had been clear with your intentions from the start I don't think you would have this conflict (might have other conflict but not this one!).

You think condemning his kid to Hell would have caused less conflict?

Allowing his kid to be baptized was the path of least conflict, so I think it's wholly appropriate to be annoyed when the other party insists on causing more conflict, rather than returning the favor.

Whether or not your spouse is committed to raising your kids Christian is a private conversation. Your spouse mouthing some words because she knows a tradition is important to you is not a substitute for that.

I never said there would less conflict, only different conflict. If you don't want to raise your children religious then why get them baptized? I understand changing ones mind but still I think as a parent in a free-confessional state you have the absolute free choice. Your decision will have consequences and this may lead to conflict, but I think taking a firm stance at initiation would certainly have made their stance public and the future conflict would not have occurred. To stand up in public and pantomime these words, while you might have them not hold weight, I don't think its fair to discredit those who took your pantomime at face value.

Your decision will have consequences and this may lead to conflict, but I think taking a firm stance at initiation would certainly have made their stance public and the future conflict would not have occurred.

A valid theory! My personal opinion is that refusing to allow my children to be baptized would have been much worse, consequence wise. My strategy is to play the long game. I'm confident that my kids will find their own way long term, whether that's being religious and having acceptance from my in-laws or not and having my protection and support.

My strategy is to play the long game.

Yeah, I think you're digging yourself in deeper here 🤦‍♀️ "I have no problem lying, why can't they accept that I'm a liar?" and you wonder why they don't trust you?

Where are you imagining dishonesty on my part? I have made no oaths or promises to Christianity or this family about converting.

Did your parish not administer baptism properly?

http://www.ibreviary.com/m2/preghiere.php?tipo=Rito&id=103

The celebrant speaks to the parents in these or similar words:

You have asked to have your child baptized. In doing so you are accepting the responsibility of training him (her) in the practice of the faith. It will be your duty to bring him (her) up to keep God’s commandments as Christ taught us, by loving God and our neighbor. Do you clearly understand what you are undertaking?

Parents: We do.

About converting, I agree, and that is where your in-law was out of line.

The rest of it? You're telling us you knew the conditions required before going in, you said you agreed out of one side of your mouth while saying 'fuck no' out of the other, and now you want us to stroke your fevered brow about 'how dare they expect me to do what I publicly promised to do'.

"I only said it because I wanted to marry this woman" (except it was you who put it more crudely). That's still being dishonest, just as dishonest as if you promised her father you would take good care of her and any kids you had, then spent all your money on whores, booze and gambling while your family was in want, and your only response there was "oh come on, I never meant that dumb promise, I only said it because he wouldn't have let you marry me otherwise. When you married me you knew I was gonna get drunk and fuck around".

I have personally known Catholic families that used maximum pressure to coerce false statements of faith out of people and then are horrified when the obvious truth that those pledges are fake is revealed. Using hard pressure to get compliance should predictably result in false statements rather than changing their honest beliefs deep in their heart.

Maybe that's not what happened with OP. Maybe his in laws were honestly blind sided in this one instance. But this is a predictable and in my experience apparently common failure mode for Catholic families. Acting wounded when it turns out that coerced actions are not a reflection of someone's honest beliefs.

Whether or not your spouse is committed to raising your kids Christian is a private conversation.

From within the Christian worldview, it's not though and that's the disconnect. Christian ,marriage and baptism are necessarily public and community arrangements and within Catholicism, sacramental. Marriage is a living metaphor for the relationship of Jesus and the Church itself.

That doesn't mean everything is everyone's business all the time, but even if you come into the marriage as nonChristian, this is what you are getting into. Christian marraige is not a function of an atomic, private, liberal mindset even if you want it to be.

As I said in the other comment, it's true that OP didn't necessary make a vow to raise his kids Catholic, but he publically entered a union with a person who did and the other members of the Church to an extent have a right and even (in the right context) a duty to assure that commitment.

OP's whole post is "why can't Christians subject their faith to my standard of polite secular tolarance within our family the same way I expect it from our state?" Because Christianity doesn't work that way and isn't a servant of liberalism.

Interestingly, this is a post-Reformation development. Luther pioneered, and the counter-reformation embraced, the practice of requiring marriages to be publically witnessed. Prior to that, secret marriages were allowed (though I assume still privately officiated by a priest?).

(I don't have a source to back this up on hand, and I was only told this once a few months ago, so take the requisite grains of salt)

I'm entirely uncool with Catholics pressuring people into obviously false statements of faith and baptism, and then acting like that person is a betrayer violating an honest promise when that person honestly states the perfectly clear fact it was all lip service.

You can coerce people into loyalty oaths. Of course that has no bearing on their actual beliefs. It just means they gave into coercion. Some people then act performatively shocked that coerced pledges are worthless.

If you don't want to raise your children religious why get them baptized, if you had been clear with your intentions from the start I don't think you would have this conflict (might have other conflict but not this one!).

To be validly married in the Catholic Church in a mixed marriage, the Catholic party has to promise baptize and raise their children in the faith. Prior to 1970, both parties had to make the promise.

While I think mixed marriages are a very bad idea to begin with, assuming they had a valid Catholic wedding, @yofuckreddit is/was likely aware of this promise of their spouse and respects her enough to not obstruct it. If they are not validly married, I would spend my time pestering his wife about getting that fixed were I their relative, before I moved on to hassling @yofuckreddit himself.

I don't know why one marries someone who thinks their beleifs are idiotic, but love is love I guess.

I don't know why one marries someone who thinks their beleifs are idiotic, but love is love I guess.

It would be beyond rude for me to ridicule my wife in this way, and I have no plans to do so. That is intrinsically part of our "deal".

Well I assumed you don't ridicule her. But I assume she knows you don't believe and think it's 'idiocy' (if in lighter terms). I personal would advise people against marrying people with such fundamental moral epistemology mismatches It seems quite difficult for reasons you describe in your OP.

FWIW, my wife is Catholic, but her family isn't and that alone is hard enough.

Given that the baptism of your children requires that you ask the Church to accept them as a member and publicly state that you intend to raise them in the Catholic faith

My wife verbalized this at the baptism, I didn't. We planned this out before we got married - it was annoying but they'll get to make their own decisions once they're older.

I'm unsympathetic to you because you knew all this going in. "Yeah, I think it's all horseshit, my fiancée knows I think it's all horseshit, but I'll pretend and she'll go along with my pretence for the sake of peace".

Well sorry bunky, but you didn't make that bargain with the rest of the family. Now you're asking us to shake our heads at "I had no idea some of these idiots really believed this horseshit, why aren't they all tolerant and accepting that I'm lying about every single thing to do with their dumb rituals because I'm banking on my kids being influenced by my attitudes and not my go-along-to-get-along wife's attitudes?" Oh poor widdle you!

Yeah, that is what tends to happen when you encounter people who really believe things. "Can you believe it? I married into a family of doctors, even though I'm a homeopathic practitioner, and one of the in-laws had the gall to ask my father if I was going to give up pseudoscience and that he, as a consultant at a major regional hospital, should talk to me about scientific evidence!"

But this indirect exchange reminded me that when the culture war pendulum swings back, I should be prepared for the petty tyrants and fools on the religious right to reassert themselves.

I get this reminder when I head back home to the rural area that I grew up in. I think some introspection reveals to me that I'm inherently something of a contrarian and inclined to be disagreeable with what seems like unthinking enthusiasm for shibboleths. Living in a deep blue city, this means I get annoyed with rainbow flags, BLM, Ukraine flags, and so on. Then I head home and I see the crass stupidity of people that hang "Fuck Biden" flags on their houses and realize that I'm not actually a Red Triber either.

This is one of my favorite things about the Motte--that so many of us have this shared experience with being mystified by the overwhelming prevalence of unreflective dogmatism and group identity. I most strongly identified with right-wing politics when the right was preaching small government and libertarianism, but Republicans can't seem to keep sight of their own principles once they land a spot in the federal government. I most strongly identified with leftist politics when the left was using things like free speech and atheism to undermine opposition, but once the "religious right" receded sufficiently for the left to capture the White House, suddenly it was all about embracing Islam and banning "hate speech."

I've long since given up hope that intelligent people will ever be allowed to intelligently govern the United States of America. I assume this is at least in part because even the intelligent people who manage to get elected or appointed or hired into important positions seem inevitably to get captured in short order by Moloch or some other destructive egregore.

But it's nice to have others with whom to commiserate.

Don't worry to much about intelligent people controlling the levers of power; because intelligence has no correlation with values.

There are intelligent people everywhere at all times on all sides; Eg, I would bet dollars to donuts that the smartest presidents were Jefferson, FDR, and Adams, and they are all wildly different in terms of political philosophy.

Don't worry to much about intelligent people controlling the levers of power; because intelligence has no correlation with values.

This is surely true, but I do often seriously suspect that my outgroup's values, intelligently executed, would still result in a better world than my ingroup's values, foolishly executed. And I don't even get that, what I get instead is a world where almost everyone's values are totally decoupled from their actions and people just go through life giving each other powerful electrical shocks all the time but no one can afford to defect from the status quo.

Ah, the human condition! What a pain in the ass.

It's not even dogmatism as such - my experience in life is that most extremely dogmatic people are actually relatively intelligent. It takes a certain baseline level of intelligence coupled with a sense of intellectual rigour to be really dogmatic. If you've put in the effort to understand a large system of doctrine and to commit yourself to it, you need to understand lots of ideas, how those ideas inter-relate, and so on. You can't do that if you're not intelligent enough to think in an abstract way.

The true fanatics for a set of dogmas can be very frustrating, but I don't think 'stupid' is the word I would use for them.

What somehow still manages to surprise me when it comes to general stupidity is how unreflective most people are, and how unwilling they are to engage in even the most cursory checks on the consistency of their own beliefs. They just float around and believe whatever seems to be convenient or trendy, and if you try to ask for consistency, for them to relate any of their ideas to each other, they either get angry or immediately retreat to some sort of cliché about how people should just live and let live.

There comes a point where I want to shake someone and yell, "But those things you've said contradict! You can't hold all those things at once! The jigsaw doesn't fit together! You have no idea what you're saying!"

There comes a point where I want to shake someone and yell, "But those things you've said contradict! You can't hold all those things at once! The jigsaw doesn't fit together! You have no idea what you're saying!"

I actually have a half-written effort-post sitting on my desktop that I've been trying to decide whether to post. I'm reluctant in part for privacy reasons, but also because I can't decide whether there's any value to it beyond me carping about people I know.

But to describe the post as presently constituted, basically it's mostly vignettes of conversations I've had with colleagues over the past couple years. These are people with PhDs in a variety of fields--English, Biology, Math, quite a variety really--who in the space of a single conversation have expressed to me totally contradictory things without seeming to notice. And in one case when I actually took the time to point this out, I was told--as if this made any sense at all in the context of logical contradiction--"well maybe in theory, but I'm more of a practical thinker."

I'm sure there are inconsistencies in my beliefs, insofar as I have any; I have the quokka's curse of always suspecting myself to be wrong. It's not the inconsistencies that worry me. What worries me is the casual way people encounter these inconsistencies in their own speech, and seem to either not notice or not care, as if they haven't even been listening to themselves. I know there are a lot of people who find the rationalsphere's apparent obsession with "signalling" tiresome, but I can't think of a better explanation for what most people seem to be doing most of the time when I talk to them. They want to signal intellect, or group membership, or status... but they simply do not value truth or logical consistency in any discernible way. "Social signalling" is the strongest hypothesis I've encountered for vast swathes of human interaction. And I don't even mind too terribly, when it's not actively frustrating my goals--sociability is an important advantage of our species--but I do not enjoy being reminded that it is rare even for highly intelligent or highly educated individuals to be able to consistently see beyond the signals.

Intelligent people who get elected do it by saying things that unintelligent people want to hear.

Agreed! That's why I love the Motte, and rationalists more generally. Sometimes I do wish I could fall into the mindless dogmatism camp though. Being a contrarian skeptic can be quite personally difficult sometimes!

Lack of certainty is great for getting at the truth, but humans are much happier (I'd imagine) when they have certainty.

I'm inherently something of a contrarian and inclined to be disagreeable

Sometimes I fear the only reason "you have to be a contrarian and inclined to be disagreeable" isn't a Motte rule is that all us contrarians would be inclined to disagree with it.

with what seems like unthinking enthusiasm for shibboleths.

This, on the other hand, doesn't require all-out contrarianism. It's sufficient to merely recognize the Truth of the Creed of Stupidism:

The core tenet of Stupidism is that everyone is really hecking stupid.

The core values of Stupidism are

  • Caution: because we, being stupid and surrounded by stupid people, are liable to do something stupid or be subjected to the stupidity of others at any time and in any situation.
  • Compassion: because it sucks to be stupid, and we are all stupid together.
  • Curiosity: because being stupid means having a lot to learn.

Compassion dictates that you should try to be nice about your disagreement, but Caution says it's not safe to let even our strong beliefs become an identity immune to further disagreement, and Curiosity means the questioning of those beliefs should be ongoing.

At least, Stupidism seems like a pretty good core of a belief system to me. That might just be me being stupid. But if so ... Q.E.D.?

Ha, that's great. Well, it seems great to me at least.

I totally agree. But this makes me wonder, what causes either the phenomenon of unthinking enthusiasm, or the people who go against them? As a thought experiment, what if we had an entire society, or even just an entire organization made up of people like you and me who are contrarians about this sort of thing. What would happen? Would we have our utopia, because everyone's hates group think so much that we simply avoid it? Or would there be a different type of group think that crops up? Would there be a new class of contrarians that pop up, only the most contrarian of contrarians would resist the group think of contrarians?

Find a majority autistic group and see how they behave.

I think some introspection reveals to me that I'm inherently something of a contrarian

This is exactly it. In my blue city, the Christians are far more aligned to my values systems and extremely reasonable people. But when they're in a position of strength and numerical superiority, it leads to sneering and interactions like I've described.

The tendency to be a contrarian means wherever I am, I'm not 100% happy with everyone around me. C'est la vie.

the church’s corruption, rampant pedophilia

Hardly unique among organizations. Do you constantly feel yourself having to suppress your rage at the corruption and pedophilia in public schools?

I've actually wondered how public schools dodged the bullet of horrific pedo scandal that rightfully hit the Catholic church and the Boy Scouts. Based on my vague memories of reading stats, public schools are responsible for much more child molestation.

I've actually wondered how public schools dodged the bullet of horrific pedo scandal that rightfully hit the Catholic church and the Boy Scouts.

It's probably way less common on a per-capita basis. For whatever reason, males commit ~90% of child sexual abuse. The younger the students, the more overwhelmingly female the teachers. And unlike schools, The Catholic Church and Boy Scouts have structures where the highest ranking authority figure can create significant alone time with children. The Sandusky scandal was similar.

It's probably way less common on a per-capita basis.

From what I can tell it's substantially more common. That said I don't find the uproar against the priests inappropriate--we should hold them to a higher standard.

I couldn't find the link for this claim:

The U.S. Department of Education found that 5% to7% of public school teachers engage in sexual abuse of children per year.

It seems outrageous. 1:15 teachers sexually abuse kids? And only 20% are males? The a-priori likelihood is low because of the offender rate and composition of the institutions. Unless schools hire females with a 10x offending rate, AND churches (broadly) hire males with 10-100x lower offending rate (based on this averaged with this, accounting for this. Its a-priori statistically very unlikely for male dominated or 50/50 places, to have higher offending rates than 60/40+ males spaces. But its possible.

All that said, the offender rate comports well with a good article from a solid source. But definitions make everything wonky, conflating language with acts sometimes. So I don't really know with any confidence. Bayes makes me think sex abuse is always much lower the more female dominated a place is.

Now that you mention it that does seem very high. Based on my wife's accounts of male elementary school teachers though, I wouldn't be too surprised to hear that the men alone are far more likely to offend than the average man. They sound socially maladjusted. I don't think predators generally plan ahead and deliberately become schoolteachers in order to have easier access to vulnerable children, but I do think there are a lot of very weird people who think they get along much better with kids, pass the event horizon, and develop romantic/sexual feelings for children after treating them as peers for long enough.

Based on the source you provided it sounds like the outright majority of sexual abuse happens at school.

Based on the source you provided it sounds like the outright majority of sexual abuse happens at school.

It does sound that way. And it might be that most sex abuse outside of family (most common iirc) happens in schools. However, my confidence on that proposition is proposition is quite low because of some bayesian reasoning. For example, the established prior is that men commit 80-90% child sex abuse. This is a high confidence, long standing datapoint. Because it's so heavily weighted towards males, any male dominated group should have dramatically more abuse. Like, my heart says the sources we have, but my math side says just default to maleness as a proxy.

Around the time of the Sandusky scandal I recall reading that some abusers spend years inserting themselves into professions which might have the ability to provide access, acting gregarious and helpful. Its all very frightening. The sources we have indicate waaaay to much abuse.

any male dominated group should have dramatically more abuse.

Sure, but schools are far, far larger than any other institution with even 10% as much access to children. I can't think of any profession easier to get into, more respected, and with easier access to children than teacher. Therapists probably have more access, but it's much harder to become a therapist, probably harder to dodge sexual abuse claims, and there are about 20 teachers for every therapist.

Generally all of the professions with access to children are dominated by women. So I totally get your reasoning that male-dominated professions should have more abuse, but in this case there's a strong, direct counterforce, which is that male-dominated professions also have less access to kids, almost in proportion to the extent to which they're male-dominated.

In the end I can think of some reasonable factors explaining away the gender split vs. frequency of abuse issue, and the stats pretty clearly indicate that schools are where the abuse happens, so that's what I'm inclined to believe. Totally get it if you disagree though.

More comments

They are. Unfortunately they are basically a protected class at this moment by both the media and federal law enforcement.

Do your in-laws know you're very hostile to their religion an angsty interwebs atheist, a "participant" in the culture war victory over the great evil, or have you hidden that fact from them and instead gone through all the motions with catholic marriage, catholic child raising and baptism, etc.?

If that's the case, maybe they just assumed you weren't very hostile to religion weren't a fraud?

To circle around to one of my direct family members instead of having the cajones to challenge me directly was ridiculous (and in hindsight, what I should have really expected from these people).

you accuse in-laws of not have "the cajones" to challenge you directly when it appears you've lived ~10 years of your life taking the same route of "least conflict" despite a simmering angst just below the surface about this topic

edit: removed unnecessary antagonism by crossing it out

There seems to be a belief in this thread that I've been grinning and happy going to church, talking about how great catholicism is, and having my fingers surreptitiously crossed behind my back.

This is... not the case. It may be difficult to understand, but I can share most of my moral framework with a Christian while simultaneously despising organized religion as a fantastical tool of oppression.

And, this may be even more difficult to understand, but trumpeting my beliefs at every family gathering (especially those that, as we see from this thread, "hype people up") isn't very polite. I have found that routinely spitting in people's faces isn't good practice, personally or professionally. It may make me a coward, but I also don't spend my time trying to crush the idiotic progressive shit I hear from the HR team at work. My atheism-evangelizing days were left behind after 8th-grade graduation.

At the end of the day, I actually love my in-laws quite a bit. Just not this guy, so much.

But it feels like quite a stretch to claim that you share most of your moral framework with people who believe that the source and ultimate purpose of morality is something you don't even believe exists.

Our frameworks start with far different base assumptions, but branch into similar-looking structures. A few of my avowedly atheist friends could be trivially confused with a devout and un-hypocritical Christian, even down to how much they curse.

Have you not encountered anyone with different beliefs but strongly aligned values? I'm not saying that's common but I wouldn't call it exceedingly rare either...

I definitely see where you're coming from. I'm admittedly an optimist when it comes to "getting along" because I've been able to curate a vast and diverse group of friendships. When it comes to more intimate relationships though, in particular, it can be a dangerous fallacy.

Do your in-laws know you're very hostile to religion an angsty interwebs athiest or do you just avoid the topic, participate sometimes in catholic ceremonies, etc., i.e., purposefully engage in conduct which is meant to allow other people to assume that you aren't what you are in order to avoid conflict?

it's difficult to communicate an entire situation through short comments on the internet so we're left having to fill in the details; no one is having trouble understanding anything you're talking about, what they're having trouble with is getting an accurate picture of reality given your comments

edit: removed unnecessary antagonism by crossing it out

This thread is already dangerously close to doxxing me, and, even more importantly, being a fucking boring examination of my personal life. Whatever someone wants to think about me after this thread is fine, it's just a niche forum.

if you're worried about doxxing yourself on this niche forum, you could have left out the 3/4ths of your comment which is little more than you sneering at your in-law family and boo-outgrouping their religion (btw they have rampant corruption and pedophilia) and still made a post about being worried about what petty religious tyrants would do if they had power again

it appears most posts don't really have a clue what you even want to discuss and are prodding around trying to find something

That is the problem with unspoken agreements, though. What you thought you were agreeing to and what they thought they were agreeing to may be two very different things.

I think most of us agree the nosy in-law was out of line, but that may well be one time you do need to speak up and put the foot down about what you do or don't believe, are or are not willing to do, and so on.

should be left alone.

No disrespect back at you, but that's not how Christian marriage works. you knew that going in, and you're wife knows that. If either of you don't know that, your respective fathers have certainly fallen short here.

I know there's an expectation that Christians "have" to do this. But from a pragmatic, as opposed to biblical edict standpoint, I'm never going to change. It's inviting conflict with no possible upside for anyone or a fictional god.

This is where my charge of arrogance comes into play. I've spent just as much time and effort, if not more, considering my beliefs and morality. I was born and raised in a pressure cooker of Christianity and haven't budged an inch. If they assume I'm too stupid to have actually thought this true, or that I'm weak enough to fold to their bullying, they're wrong on both fronts.

Then maybe you should not have married her. Your choice.

You may consider it passe, but I personally believe in love as an actual thing.

Given the available evidence of non-believers that have converted, what makes you so confident you'll never change? I don't think you've really engaged with the faith, the objections you raise are shallow. Maybe you engaged with a hollow version of the faith.

I, too, used to be an edgy Internet atheist. I'm now on the path to Catholic baptism.

At least 3 of the men who married into this family have converted, but came from casual christianity as opposed to atheism. I've been given the hard and soft sell continuously throughout my life, and really only got respite from it after moving from home. Things would have been much easier for me if I could be religious, but I couldn't honestly make that choice.

Well I mean fallen short in advising you both not to enter a mixed marriage. Look, I don't know your family and would guess that 90+% percentage of inter-family value pressure and hostility (Christian or otherwise) is counterproductive just from a human nature perspective, so I'm not carte-blanc defending that.

But your wife, especially if she's a practicing Catholic, doesn't get to just make up the rules to force-fit her preferred marriage arrangement. Overall, by entering a Christian marriage, both of you should expect and act gracefully in the face of the Great Commission's demand's on your families, or else you shouldn't have entered into a marriage with a Christian.

This is where my charge of arrogance comes into play.

Maybe this isn't what you're saying, but it's not arrogance to act upon your convictions.

I'm pretty sure he knows that's not how Christian marriage is supposed to work, but also that formal rules are often ignored in practice for various reasons. Is his father's failure in that he didn't raise him to be a turbo-autist who can't distinguish between rules-as-written and rules-as-practiced?

So let me get this right, to ever defend practices of Christians as straightforwardly how Christianity works is turbo-autism?

the inherent idiocy in believing in god.

...

For Christian motteziens - No disrespect intended.

Is it possible to respect someone while also maintaining that they're an idiot?

I think it is possible. Although I acknowledge that it's not entirely obvious.

it's intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek

Surely, if the words didn't have any meaning for you, then you wouldn't have written them?

Is it possible to respect someone while also maintaining that they're an idiot?

I think it's entirely possible to respect someone while maintaining that they have an idiotic belief. If its one quite so central as this, offense is obviously going to be taken even if the writer means it as a much smaller remark. More generally though, I have close friends that I certainly respect who I think have utterly idiotic ideas about nutrition, spending policies, cars, sports, and more. Arguing that Kobe Bryant was a greater basketball player than Tim Duncan is an absolutely retarded view, but I can still respect someone that's a Kobe fanboi.

Someone can have an idiotic belief and not be an idiot. I don't think that's a particularly complex concept either.

I'll allow myself a little bit of exaggeration and hyperbole. I've learned quite a bit from the Christians on this forum - surely y'all can handle a poke or two now and again.

Question: did you ever really expect to be left alone, by anyone? Libertarianism is not a stable equilibrium. You must choose what petty tyrant you bow down to, or one will be chosen for you.

I'm pretty sure that even Libertarians don't claim it's a stable equilibrium, hence the whole watering the Tree of Liberty with blood deal. You maintain it by coordinating against anyone who tried to undermine it first.

Then petty tyrants are a high entropy state that we will need to continuously resist sliding into. Passively ignoring the issue will result in a disapproving schoolmarm deciding how you shall live.

But pointing this out is not a call for libertarians to give up. It is a call to not be complacent.

And this here is yet another example of strife caused by the crude mockery that Westerners have made of marriage by treating it as a contract between two individuals instead of as a bond between two families. What your future in-laws will be like makes up a big part of what your married life will be like unless you jettison those links, but even doing that has a cost on you and your spouse. Hence you need to select on this axis too when deciding on your long term life partner and your failure to do that here has meant unnecessary pain.

Now you might well say that you and your wife got married knowing about this fundamental difference and you accepted this as a negative but still believed the combined package of everything meant marriage was still worth it for you two, in which case fair enough but equally then you can hardly claim to be surprised when your in laws behave in ways concordant with the beliefs you knew they held. If you didn't take this into account and just thought that what extended family are like should have zero bearing on whether you and your wife should get married then you just got burned by having false beliefs about human relationships, no different to a dullard who entered a lion's den at the zoo getting ripped to shreds because he thought they were vegetarian.

And before you say that I have no idea about your relationship dynamic with your wife and thus am unqualified to comment about it know that I am not talking to you at all here. You are irrelevant, it is too late for you, you have already married into this household and now have to live with the consequences. My advice can do nothing for you. I am talking to the other readers here who are yet to make the plunge, they can easily save themselves from a lot of future anguish by just making sure the beliefs of their fiance's family are not too wildly divergent from their own instead of following the modern Western mantra of "you're marrying them, not their family".

For whatever it's worth, I completely understand and agree with your last paragraph.

If you didn't take this into account and just thought that what extended family are like should have zero bearing on whether you and your wife should get married then you just got burned by having false beliefs about human relationships, no different to a dullard who entered a lion's den at the zoo getting ripped to shreds because he thought they were vegetarian.

It may not seem like it, but I agree with this as well. I knew what I was getting into, and I think it would take a "dullard" to pretend otherwise.

I do find the tactic of approaching my father instead of me distasteful. I can handle myself, but putting my parents in the uncomfortable position of speaking for me is inexcusable in my book.

I do find the tactic of approaching my father instead of me distasteful. I can handle myself, but putting my parents in the uncomfortable position of speaking for me is inexcusable in my book.

Even from a Christian perspective, it's pretty damn questionable whether they can speak for you in principle. I'm not an expert on Catholic teaching, but I don't think they let you convert people against their will.

What does your wife think about Christianity and about your disagreement with her family? You have not mentioned it, but to me it seems that it might be important when it comes to figuring out the best approach going forward.

The unspoken agreement was that I go to church for holidays, let you splash water on my children

Maybe their idea of the unspoken agreement was different from yours, that is if they even thought of there being an unspoken agreement to begin with. For me, going to church for holidays and letting people splash water on my children would already have probably been too much. I really dislike most rituals. Put that dislike together with my agnosticism and it's just like, no way man. It would be very hard to force myself to go to church and I think that religious people splashing water on my children would make me feel uneasy. To be fair, I have no children so perhaps I am missing part of the picture.

It seems that you have to some extent been living a lie with these people. Well, we all live a lie to some extent, so that is not unusual. I wish you success in dealing with these relationships.

My wife and I are on the same page. We've had essentially no conflict around religion, after discussing it deeply before getting married. We're comfortable communicating about it.

I wish you success in dealing with these relationships.

I sincerely appreciate the sentiment. The good news is, I don't have a significant amount of conflict with my in-laws and this was a minor blip in a largely successful decade. As my wife put it, the host of the gathering (another catholic in-law) would probably have been mortified at this breach of etiquette.

don’t bring up anyone’s hypocrisy/the church’s corruption, rampant pedophilia/the inherent idiocy in believing in god.

Dear the motte, boy is my outgroup sure boo. They are so boo, and one time they tried to enact their boo upon me, all I wanted to do was:

stay balls deep in my excellent wife/[their daugher]

Unbelievably low effort post. Reported. Please put this type of thing in the low effort culture war thread.

yofuckreddit

Or keep it there on /r/atheism.

While @yofuckreddit would probably have been better off making their post a bit less rant-y, sneering at them does not help matters. Please avoid this level of antagonism in the future.

This is a rather uncharitable post, and certainly more antagonistic than it needs to be, and that's speaking as a fellow atheist. At the very least, by rephrasing it, you'd lose little but some visceral satisfaction from dunking on the outgroup.

You're getting a large helping of shit for this comment, but I really have no idea why. The point is well-taken, especially that last paragraph before the disclaimer. A lot of people here pine for the mild days of the 2000s detente, but that shit ain't coming back, and the problems it concealed run deep.

Too few people know the first rule of in-law relations: if something needs to be said, it should be said parent to child or spouse to spouse, never directly to the in-laws. Your in-law broke this rule: s/he could have maybe confronted your wife, if absolutely necessary, but never you or your family.

Don't break the rule back. Do not confront your in-law. If something needs to be said, have your wife say it. People are giving bad advice in this thread.

But this indirect exchange reminded me that when the culture war pendulum swings back, I should be prepared for the petty tyrants and fools on the religious right to reassert themselves.

I expect exactly that to happen. The proposition would be "you wanted freedom from us? you got trans kids and child drag shows. Make your choice - do you want your child in the welcoming embrace on Mother Church or do you want his dick to be cut off while an old ugly guy dressed as women dances almost naked before him". Not being a Christian I'm not super happy about this binary choice, but I think it's exactly how it would be presented once the inevitable pushback happens.

It sounds to me like you're resisting an obvious conclusion: you need religion. The choice is between tradition and its challenging but earnest calls to a better life and the degeneracy of rainbow churches.

You need religion because you boast about your sexual relationship with your wife online.

You need religion because instead of keeping your family business in the family, you make political hay of it to strangers.

Talk to the people you need to talk to, don't just vent helplessly.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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