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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.
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.
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.
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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