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So the obvious response here is 'God of the margins' stuff (What the church believes/does now is nothing like what it believed/did 1000 years ago, it has always moved with the times to reflect popular understanding and preferences), real politik stuff (The church's #1 job is to keep member roles and coffers high, which means giving the audience what they want), etc. I think that's all relevant but also pretty played out as a topic of discussion for anyone who was online in the last few decades.
The more interesting question I want to ask of anyone who knows anything about how church theology works - which I don't really - is whether empirical evidence ever plays a role in determining the will of God in cases like this, and when/how it does so.
Like... we've had gay marriage for decades now, no one got turned into pillars of salt or anything, seems like empirically it works about as well as straight marriage for families and for raising kids, and even for church membership at accepting churches.
Before gay marriage was legal a Christian could speculate about all kinds of consequences of allowing such unholy unions, but they didn't really happen, so... does that weigh against those people's predictions on how God feels on the matter? Is that evidence that this was mostly people misinterpreting Him, and He's not too worried about this, since otherwise we'd expect to see some type of mortal consequence?
I feel like in practice this must be how the church works... whether it's accepting the heliocentric model or admitting that it's ok for laymen to read the bible directly, religious beliefs do eventually bow to evidence and social norms. I'm just wondering if there's a principled model for how empirical evidence like that is weighed in those cases, or if it's just real politik without rationalization.
Marriage has been hit by a quadruple whammy over the last 150+ years:
All of these things happened gradually and culture often lagged legal changes, so it is difficult to correlate the damage done with the change in policy. However, overall marriage has been completely hollowed out, and as a result we have seen a dramatic rise in broken families and mental illness. "Gay marriage" was more the final nail in the coffin than it was the decisive blow.
The biggest thing I've noticed about the post-Obergefell world is that it now seems political incorrect/taboo to say that "man-woman" marriage is better or the norm. Children are not born knowing that man-woman marriage is better than other arrangements, they must be taught that. But the post-Obergefell world, or official institutions like schools or children's TV programming cannot teach man-woman as the norm. And we see in surveys things like 50% of young women identifying as non-straight, or under 40% of young people responding in surveys that marriage and kids are important life goals, and we also see very high rates of mental illness among young liberal women. We have lost our ability in as a society to model what a default good life should be, and kids are making poor choices and ending up with mental health problems. And yes, the absysmally low (and highly dysgenic) fertility rates will result in an end of civilization if nothing changes.
Were I that dude in the black sweaterThe Truman Show guy, not Steve Jobs , I would want to create a double-blind study of 1,200 babies, half raised in a world where man-woman marriage is the unquestioned norm and half raised in a world where guy-guy stuff has social capital: then come back 50 years later and see which one had better outcomes. Because clearly being raised in world that's conflicted about it is worse than either one of those.
Do we have the compute to run an experiment like that on AI babies?
Are we in a simulation hypothesis computer as a control group for an experiment like that?
Will becoming aware of that be an error that whatever is running the experiment writes "tainted - discard from study" on the universe and throws it in a biohazard bag?
deep crumple sound of something just 1/4th inch wider than the universe being skooshed
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With the caveat that you probably do not understand what the vow means or implies, yes. If you have questions, ask away.
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It was literally the standard common book of prayer up until 1928. And "wife has a duty to obey" was the standard Christian, Hewbrew, and Roman teaching, so that is a span from 700BC to AD 1928. So which viewpoint is bizarre? OK, but we have cool modern technology now! We have indoor toilets now! Why should we take the norms of the past seriously? On the other hand ... technology was progressing from 700BC to AD 1928. Are things progressing now? At the same rate? The same second derivative?
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They were absolutely right it was a slippery slope. Maybe they didn't hit the nail on the head with their predictions, but in fairness "we will start sending male rapists to female prisons" and "top academics won't even be able to tell what a woman is" would have seemed like too much of a non-sequitur compared to "they'll legalize polygamy or bestiality next".
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That argument is called ‘by their fruits you shall know them’ and it has some, albeit limited, amount of play.
Thanks, I will look into it
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It seems that you're arguing against the Pat Robertsons of the world who say things like Hurricane Katrina was God's wrath for homosexuality.
Does anyone on the Motte actually believe things like that? No, I don't think so.
A more common Motte argument is that gay marriage is part of a word view that has led to many negative changes including declining fertility, declining religious belief, increased alienation of the individual, and increased mental illness including, especially, the trans epidemic.
Can we have societal acceptance of gays without all the other stuff? Maybe. I don't know. It's never been tried before. But we don't need any belief in the supernatural to see that gay marriage is deeply knit into other, mostly negative, societal changes.
All of these problems exist, and in fact are even worse, in countries like South Korea, Japan, and Russia that are more socially conservative than the US and western Europe on every metric.
I’ll note that Japan and Russia have above-average for their regions fertility rates. Japan in particular has like a 25% higher TFR than its neighbors while being a lot more conservative and traditional.
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Malarkey. All of these countries are extremely feminist by historical American standards, and by some metrics are more feminist than contemporary America. For example, South Korea ranked 10th in the world in the UN's Gender Inequality Index, which is far higher than where America ranked. I wrote a long effort post on this last year and part 2 and part 3
They’re progressive, but many don’t have legal gay marriage, which is the point.
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Whether they're extremely feminist by historical standards doesn't matter. If feminism (or social liberalism in general) is what causes worse social outcomes, then more feminist/liberal countries should do worse than less feminist/liberal countries now. What are the metrics by which ROK is more feminist than the US or western Europe? Quick googling shows lower female representation in parliament, significantly lower representation in corporate boardrooms and leadership, about equivalent divorce, labor force participation, and college education rates (ROK's are a little lower for all). Abortion was illegal until two years ago.
Your post where you propose to cherry-pick a counter-narrative which makes ROK out to be a feminist hellhole is sourced entirely from reddit comments.
Also ranked below multiple western European countries, none of which have any of these problems in nearly the same degree as ROK does.
In any case, the OP is about gay marriage, not feminism. Homosexuality remains much less socially accepted in ROK than in the west, and there is no gay marriage.
Russia is a particularly good example since, as you note in this post, Putin's government has made a big show of retvrning to tradition, revitalizing the Orthodox Church, and opposing the degenerate west, and yet he can't keep the fertility rate from continuing to crash or the kids from becoming atheist.
No, because of range restriction. Height matters for basketball, but if you do a correlation between NBA statistical success and height, there is no correlation. That is because everyone has already been selected based on height. Every country today is hyper-feminist, the actual differences between them in amount of feminism is small, so when comparing metrics like fertility rate or mental illness, other factors will matter more.
Compared to the US, the UN Gender Inequality Index and ROK has actually had a woman president and the US has not. Compared to Western Europe, I suspect that ROK women, particularly single women, work far more hours in the office than American women. I suspect ROK has more of a princess culture, but I don't know how I would prove this to your satisfaction, it's not something that anyone reputable tracks and quantifies. There are many forms of feminism, "princess culture" is one form, Russian style gold-digging is another, girl-boss, strong bad-ass woman type is another. Countries are feminist in different ways.
He made a show but he did not actually do much of anything. Russia went full communist in 1918, and had 70 years during which it was way to the left on religious and feminist issues than the USA. It never actually recovered from that.
If there's no correlation between outcomes and degrees of feminism today on the international scale, then there's no reason anyone should take seriously the argument that feminism is responsible for worsening social conditions, because you won't admit to any control. The only control is the world 100+ years ago, and life back then was worse on every metric I can think of.
What is your definition of feminism?
This is like marxists who insist the reason USSR/China/Cuba/etc. failed to create a communist utopia is because they just didn't do communism hard enough. Maybe. But since there appears to be no correlation between communist policy and improved outcomes, there's no reason to believe that. Same here.
Yes, that is what I said very clearly my original post that I linked to. There is no control group.
1950s America was massively less feminist than any white or east asian country today, and was a pretty nice place to live, a better place by many metrics. And to the extent things are better in 2023, it is mostly because of technological development, but the pace of technological development was greater in the 1950s, the nice things we have in 2023 are built on the groundwork of things discovered in earlier times, I do not think you can give feminism any credit for the nicer technological things we have in 2023 than we had in 1950.
AFACIT, Putin did not substantially change policy at all. Did he enact something like the Hayes code for all TV and movies in Russia? Did he restrict women from going to college? Did he ban no fault divorce? Did he restrict single women from living alone? Did he add "honor and obey" to all legal marriage vows? How much money did he actually allocate toward pro-traditional Christian values media? Did he make being a member of a church in good standing a prerequisite for elite positions? Did he ban abortion? Did he ban birth control? These are things that were the norm in America 70-120 years ago, such policy changes are what it would actually mean to roll-back feminism.
Putin has passed laws restricting the promotion of "non-traditional family arrangements", down-graded criminal penalties for domestic abuse, and allocated money to the rebuilding and refurbishing of Orthodox churches and cathedrals. He may not have put through every trad dream policy, but he is obviously making more of an effort to restore traditional arrangements than any western leader.
So why should anyone take seriously the thesis that feminism is responsible for X bad thing in modern society, if there's no way to test it? Even if I granted that society is worse on net today than it was in the 1950s, Feminism is far from the only thing that's changed since then.
120 years ago, in 1900, the American birthrate had already been halved since 1800. Was that also feminism's fault?
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This seems a case of categories being too vague to properly describe what is happening. It seems very weird to characterize what is happening in Japan and the US under the same term when they're opposite ends of the spectrum described by Durkheim with Japan and fatalism on one side and the US and anomie on the other.
Japanese alienation expresses itself with very rigid social institutions with no way to chose one's path in life which crushes individual will. American alienation looks more like loose to nonexistent social institutions that provide no life path at all which renders individual will meaningless.
These are both bad and have bad consequences, but they are very much not the same phenomenon.
"Social alienation" is harder to pin down and define, but crashing fertility and growing irreligiosity are a lot more clear-cut. But in any case, the Japanese "loneliness epidemic" seems comparable to the similar decline in community in the west.
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Someone in the same comment thread does: https://www.themotte.org/post/695/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/144411?context=8#context
That's more the "slippery slope" argument than "Katrina was god's punishment".
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Declining religious belief does not seem like a negative to me.
Increased alienation of the individual is compensated for by the fact that humans are now more free from having their lives dominated by the small communities in which they grew up.
I am not sure that mental illness actually has increased, especially if you classify at least some forms of religiosity as forms of mental illness. Stuff like the Children's Crusade and the Salem Witch Trials do not seem to me like signs of a mentally healthy culture. Pre-Enlightenment Europe had horrific things like the 30 Years War happening, it was not some bastion of mental health.
Declining fertility might actually be a real problem going forward, I do agree with that, but it seems to me that most current cultures that have high levels of fertility have their own very real problems.
Is our society actually less religious? Or has religious energy been shunted toward more destructive political religions?
I think that conservation of religiosity is a thing, and I'd rather have people believe in something with a track record of success than.. what we have now.
Well, I have no interest in any of the organized religions because I disagree with too many of their claims about reality. And I am also not a fan of any of the various political dogmas that I have encountered, such as is progressivism, communism, fascism, "free market will solve everything" libertarianism, etc. So I am simply not satisfied with either of those two and I would rather have some kind of third option.
Well unfortunately one of the main points of a religion is that to be successful, it has to be broadly appealing, both to the masses and to the more intellectual class. So you're not going to be able to have your third option that ticks all of your boxes unless the rest of the populace suddenly starts having a deep rationalist understanding of the world, or whatever you care about.
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That's small comfort when that dominance was just replaced with being dominated by people who know nothing about me, and have values completely alien to mine.
There are tradeoffs. Being dominated by a feudal lord or emperor 1000 years ago would have sucked if you happened to have a nasty kind of feudal lord or emperor rather than a nice one. Sure, there was Christianity and certain notions of social propriety in common between the peasants and the aristocrats, but there were also numerous brutally suppressed peasant revolts.
I don't think religious belief necessarily implies feudalism, or that lack of religious belief implies non-feudalism. I also thought you meant having to socially conform to your local community, not literal serfdom.
To be fair, I'm kind of an extreme case in how much I hate having to conform to any community.
But yes, of course just having to socially conform to a community is much less bad than literal serfdom. But by the same token, isn't you saying "being dominated by people who know nothing about me, and have values completely alien to mine" also a pretty strong exaggeration of what modernity is actually like? The reality, it seems to me, is that the average social conservative of today probably shares like 80% of values in common with the average elite of today. It's just that we focus on the differences.
Honestly it seems like an understatement. Rather it's being dominated by people who actively hate one's culture and openly boast about being the best at exterminating it.
I'm no Religious man, but I certainly feel more free to live a normal human life in an Islamic theocracy than in the modern managerial state. And I say this having experienced the downsides of both. At least with the theocrats the rules are not constantly changing and there is a defined limiting principle you can invoke to keep the peace.
I’d be interested in reading about your Islamic experience, if you’ve written it up anywhere.
Last year, I had a fascinating conversation with a woman who spent the early 80s in Riyadh. It really made me think.
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I'm not much of social conformist either, in fact my distaste for modernity stems directly from that. The issue is that it seems the only choice is who to conform to, and in hindsight conforming to your family and community seems strictly superior.
Not really. My point was that it's comparable in it's intensity to the pressure your local community would put on you. I don't think that's an exaggeration.
Now this is where I hold some extreme views.
Could you elaborate?
What I meant by the 80% is that most Westerners, elite or not, socially conservative or not, largely agree about things like:
"murdering is bad" (unless war, self-defense, justified revolution, etc, etc, or whatever other supposedly justified reasons are given, but at least most people do agree that walking up and killing someone for no reason is bad)
"books should not be literally banned by law" (there are censorious progressives and various hate speech laws here and there, but almost no-one calls for widespread banning of texts, and even the ones who do feel that it needs to be justified by appeals to security, which means that they still hold free speech on some level as a value)
"women should be able to vote just like men can" (the number of people who disagree with this is very small)
Etc.
I guess maybe you personally disagree with the elites on values more than the average social conservative does, but I might be misunderstanding.
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Wrong order. The argument against gay marriage failed because it was being made by people who had already accepted most of the other stuff. The schwerpunkt of the culture wars was no-fault divorce, something which most conservative evangelicals in the US ended up supporting (Dalrock has the receipts) and which the US Catholic hierarchy de facto tolerated by running an annulment mill. Francis went squishy on that in Amoris Laetitia.
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You don't think that legalizing gay marriage flowing directly into elective mastectomies for teenage girls and castration for teenage boys, in less than ten years since Obergefell, counts as punishment from God for our sins?
And out-of-wedlock births are continually setting record highs, at the same time that overall fertility is at record lows. I don't think you need a literal pillar of salt to conclude that it's not actually working well.
I'm an atheist, obviously I don't believe anything is punishment from God.
That said, trans rights, fuck the haters, etc. etc. As long as we're all just referencing the topic with slogans for now.
Anyway, I'm getting a lot of responses that are just 'bad things exist in the world, they happened after gay marriage, post hoc ergo propter hoc'.
I'll just here that 1. I like half those things or think they're being misrepresented 2. I don't see a necessary connection between gay marriage and the other things, someone has to actually draw that line and 3. I was asking for knowledge about how the Vatican does religious scholarship, not trying to get into an argument about whether bad things exist in the modern world.
I can point out the connection actually: it resides in the activist network designed to make the former happen and its ideological justification for existing which is based on gnostic individualist morality.
Such an apparatus would never be dissolved without defeat and would always eventually lead to ever greater perceived liberation of the mind from the body, and it had already allied itself with then transsexualism among other things.
Victory for gay rights leading to mastectomies was, in retrospect, entirely predictable. Even as I refused to believe it at the time.
Now if we want to argue about the possibility of a gay rights movement that doesn't lead here that's another thing entirely, but I'm unfortunately pessimist about the possibility thereof given history.
Seems to me homosexuality is best treated with the benign indifference of a minor vice or oddity. Other paths don't look like they lead to good places for any of the parties. Pride most of all.
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If God exists and that's His punishment then I can only assume He doesn't mind that much really. He has (we are told) previously flooded the earth, destroyed entire cities, cast people out of paradise, given crippling labor pains to all women for all time, incinerated people alive and entombed whole families in the earth, sent explicit plagues and death for tens of thousands, so allowing people to do perhaps unwise things to themselves is not exactly on the same level of Godly punishments we are told He previously indulged in.
It's so underwhelming as to suggest it probably isn't actually a punishment from God at all. Either because God doesn't care, or doesn't act on the mortal plane in that way anymore, or more likely because God doesn't actually exist.
I don't really see how these are of a different level of involvement. Or even of degree.
We're talking about pretty fucking metaphysical types of horrors here. I'd like you to acknowledge that, transhumanism in both this specific and the general sense is as consequential as getting thrown out of heaven. We're talking about changes to the nature of man, sex and identity here. This is no picnic.
God, properly understood, is the name for the intentional nature of reality. So it seems to me that consequences of hubris tautologically fall under the category of punishment.
I shall acknowledge no such thing, as I don't think they ARE comparable. Making changes to yourself and your own identity is something everyone should be free to do. I would in fact say that is the core aspect of being human. That whole pesky free will thing. It might turn out to be a bad decision, perhaps they will hate what they become. But that is their choice. Far from being a horror, being constrained from that free will would be the horror.
There is also a difference between a punishment and a consequence. A punishment requires intentionality on behalf of the punisher. A consequence does not. The outcome for a trans person may well be bad, but I highly doubt it is bad because God is punishing them directly. Reality has no intentionality in my view. God doesn't punish you for not looking where you are going and getting hit by a lump of metal going 60 mph. Reality does that without any such divine interventions required. So it is with transhumanism. And that is the true black pill. God is not responsible for our outcomes, only the vast uncaring universe is. There is no intention, there is no design. You pays your money and you takes your chances.
You are missing the point.
What you're saying in both of these paragraphs reduces to the same two things.
Either we accept Abrahamic metaphysical axioms and your statements are obvious contradictions (God created the universe with intention, consequences and all, therefore arguing there is no intent behind it doesn't make sense on the face of it).
Or this is a statement of rejection of such metaphysical principles and the assertion of a different metaphysic that simply does not apply at all to this discussion. You can be a nihilist all you want, it doesn't really enter into Catholicism.
And if you want to say that it does because nihilism is true then you have to prove that it is, which is something no metaphysical doctrine, including yours, can ever do. Inherently.
Now aside from that, I still think it's completely ridiculous to deny that making oneself and one's own identity isn't an important and grandiose topic and in the same breath admitting that it has large consequence. If your only argument is that it doesn't matter because nothing matters, I question both your understanding of importance as a concept and the relevance of nihilist perspectives to any discussion.
Even constraining our situation to one where the Christian God exists however my point is that His punishments are clear and direct. He doesn't give you mildly bad outcomes as a punishment. He smites your city. He floods the world. He lets you see the promised land then exiles you from it. He forces you to choose to kill 70,000 of your followers.
KMC's point was that the bad outcomes WERE God's punishment. But this is not consistent with this version of God. It could be consistent with YOUR version* of the universe's intentionality as God, but that isn't the God we were discussing. And since Jesus died for our sins, even those direct punishments ceased, with the idea that anyone can be forgiven and find God, through Jesus Christ. Trans people could be punished after death if their actions are sinful, but God's punishments are no longer during life. And even when they were, they were very direct.
*It could also be consistent with no God, a blind watchmaker style God and so on of course.
It's not true that in the Jewish and Christian traditions the consequences of sin only take the form of massive spectacles, even if we look only to the Bible.
Cain killed his brother and was cursed to wander the earth and have bad crops.
King David raped the wife of one his most loyal men and then had that man killed to keep it covered up. His punishment was that the child produced by that rape would die.
Abraham violated his marriage by laying with Hagar, and the consequence was strife between Hagar and Sarah that eventually led to Abraham being separated from his and Hagar's son.
Jonah was reticent to convey God's prophecy and was punished by a storm at sea and a short stay in a whale.
Judas Iscariot betrayed God and committed suicide.
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Setting aside for a moment the mechanics of punishment and that particular theological argument, surely we must agree that most Christians in the sense we mean here (and Catholics in particular) do, in fact, believe in divine intervention and miracles to this day.
As for punishment, quoting official catholic catechism should help us clarify things here:
So no, I'm afraid the nature of sin still makes the punishment we're talking about extant in this life, Christ's forgiveness doesn't remand all judgement to one's death.
This would indicate that the poor outcomes for trans people after surgery are NOT temporal punishment from God (because even if they fervently convert and repent it cannot be undone and thus punishment would remain), however.
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