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Last week, @ShariaHeap brought up some interesting points on the evolution of religion under the discussion of Bronze Age history that went under-discussed, in my humble opinion.
Specifically they ask:
To me, this question can be boiled down to - are all religions equally good, or are some better than others?
Of course we have to get into the 'objective morality versus subjective/post-modern plurality' debate here, which can be it's own morass. But I am curious about how, if you do take religions as potentially better or worse comparatively, how would they stack up?
I've been writing and thinking about an idea that many religions which are popular today are essentially negative when it comes to divine beings - as in, the popular Vitalism that talks about Mother Earth and the interconnectedness of the universe basically deny any explicit 'being' such as God. Typically the ultimate experience of divinity can be revealed in a sort of non-dualistic merging with the universe, or dissolution of the ego.
Buddhism and Hinduism in some strains, as well as Taoism, have heavily influenced this line of mystical thinking.
On the other end you have the more 'positive' versions of religion or mystical experience, that posit the existence of a God or pantheon of gods. While the two can coexist to some degree, like in Hinduism with Brahman etc, they do seem to have very fundamentally different structures at their core.
In his book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton takes a stab at more negative conceptions of the divine, fiercely stating:
In this view, the more Eastern or pessimistic or cyclical religions are fundamentally destructive on a larger scale - they argue that nothing means anything, that all will end the same as it began, reality is ultimately an illusion, et cetera.
By contrast, Christianity and other monotheistic religions push us forward to some sort of Progress, which as we have seen... can have its own issues.
I'm curious if this specific topic has been discussed before, and if other folks here have anything to add?
It has, but it has also been a while. One of these days I should probably try to dig up my old arguments with E. Harding and Jim from the SSC days and do a proper summary plus follow-up *@hlynkaCG quietly adds yet another line to the list of things he intends to write should he ever get around to it*.
In the meantime, I'll bring up a thought that I feel is relevant to both this post and our recent conversations about Tolkien and Bronze Age Morality. When you're openly Christian in a rationalist-adjacent space, you get bombarded with comments about how Christianity is either dead or irrelevant and how you (the Christian) need to adopt a more worldly, "rational", outlook if you don't want to be seen as stupid and/or avoid being left behind. When you ask "are some [religions] better than others"
I've always found these sorts of comments annoying because they've always struck me as an obvious attempt at proselytization/conversion, but when this is pointed out it gets dismissed out of hand. Our religion is different you see because we are very clever and you are not. This attitude is problematic when it comes to discussing the evolution of religion it means that the vast majority of liberals and academics are functionally unable to discuss religion or evolution for that matter.
When discussing the evolution of anything the first thing you need to ask is; What does the "ancestral environment" look like? What is it that is being selected for? Both the dissident/alt-right and Atheism+ crowd will go on for pages about how Christianity is a "Slave's morality" for children that denies fundamental realities, but these assertions only heighten the contradiction. If this is true, how was it so successful, and how did it survive for so long. Why do the Americas speak English, Spanish, and Portuguese instead of Chinese?
The answer I believe is in what we do select for. The trad right does not select for mass appeal, what it selects for is fostering trust and cooperation in dangerous low-trust environments. By extension it has also proven to be particularly prickly and hard to eradicate, because the more dangerous and low-trust the environment the better adapted it is relative to its competition.
Very well put. Once you realize that rationalist, atheist materialism is a belief system in its own right that is at the least on a level playing field with other religions, a lot of the social behavior you see makes far more sense. Ironically I see so much more of the bad behaviors usually ascribed to Christians (shaming, denying reality, trying to build consensus, rallying around unfalsifiable beliefs) coming from the materialists now that I have changed my viewpoint a bit.
And yes if you bring this up it gets handwaved away into "Well actually my position is correct so shut up." Basically the equivalent of a Christian saying "too bad, Jesus is the Son of God, that's it discussion closed." It's a bit infuriating, but I'm working on turning the other cheek.
And yes, exactly. Many people try to take a Nietzchean 'Vitalist' tack against Christianity, arguing that it's not good for the flourishing of strong life or whatever. Which my response at this point is just to facepalm and move on, because as you point out here Christianity has built and maintained societies which are so powerful as to make any other belief system look like infants compared to the adults of Western Christendom.
It really does baffle my mind how otherwise intelligent people can seriously look at Christianity and act as if it's a pacifying, weak social force. I suppose narrative really does trump facts much of the time.
Interesting. Personally I've found that I had to reach quite a low place before Christianity appealed to me personally - it felt like I had to be humbled before I could hear God trying to reach me. And I find that's one of the core strengths of Christianity compared to something like Buddhism.
Especially in the modern world, high on our intellectual hubris as we all are, I'd argue that Christianity's case becomes far stronger the more we fall in love with our own intellect and pride. Anyway, a similar theme I suppose.
I appreciate you being openly Christian on this forum. Not even evangelizing, just stating you're a Christian and holding your ground is difficult as you've pointed out. As a recent convert, I'm working on growing my faith but I hope to join you in the trenches down the road. We'll see.
I sympathize.
I can certainly see how that would be the case. I feel like ought to say something about path-dependence here. I wandered away from the church in my late teens/early twenties but found myself gravitating back as i got older and gained a new perspective on (and appreciation for) a lot of the old stories and lessons that my parents, grandparents, teachers, Et Al had been trying to impart.
As I've joked in the past, Moby Dick is wasted on high-schoolers because you kind of need to have gone through a bad break-up and had a brush with death to truly appreciate it's themes.
Similar deal here. I remember a turning point, a conscious decision to do the upright thing even though it wasn't the "smart" or "personally advantageous" thing to do (just the opposite in fact), and to let the cards fall where they may, and in that moment feeling both a presence and a sense of inner peace that i hadn't felt in years and hadn't realized that I had been missing.
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Yes, that's the kind of idea I was pointing at. What cognitive, cultural impact do religious ideas have, on culture broadly, and can we make the sort of suggestive claims about their relative strengths/weaknesses, as you have here.
I'm conscious that religions seem to have adopted aspects of other religions, so this seems a case for some kind of evolution. This is naturally a somewhat speculative exercise, and is hampered by the vastness of history and diversity of theology within even s single tradition. Also there's the valid question of how much impact high theological ideas have on the culture. Perhaps all along it is culture that drives, and religion reflects?
If we accept some kind of weak teleology, progress in human development, does this imply there's a meta-religion that can take the best of a plurality. Would this be, by definition, secular?
Of course the main function of religion is the framework and community basis, so perhaps that's the key step and the other bits somewhat incidental.
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I don’t understand how this interpretation can exist. Christianity is life-denying to the core: man is fallen, the world profane and corrupt, and the only refuge is the kingdom of heaven which only God can bring about. Accumulating wealth is frowned upon (you are supposed to give it to the Jews instead), celibacy is strongly encouraged (demanded in Luke, a Marcionite text), authority is not to be questioned. The Jewish God leads his people out of slavery, the Christian one tells them to be obedient and promises to rescue their souls after they work themselves to death. There is simply no way you can square this with the idea of progress, unless progress simply means converting people to Christianity, which is supposed to be the only thing that matters, and even then we are heading towards the Great Apostasy.
Accordingly, the traditional Christian view of history is that of decline, perhaps interspersed with divine interventions here and there. Muslims, likewise, are obligated to believe that each generation of mankind is worse than the previous one: the notion that one can know better than the Prophet is unthinkable.
A genealogical continuity between certain ideas in no way implies a logical connection, because logical consequence is not what they were selected for. Liberalism has shown itself to be self-sufficient, it doesn’t rely on dusky old religions to penetrate foreign populations. If you want a memeplex centered around progress, you should be completely satisfied with it.
Like, maybe your Christianity, but I feel like there are tons of others out there. The ones where man is made in God's image, told to be fruitful and multiply to fill the earth with little beings that are meant to "graduate" by resurrection into basically being God. Where the God man came to let himself be killed, apparently "so that you can have life more abundantly". As KnotGodel points out, many of your intermediate claims are pretty debatable (and debated by different groups of Christians), which likely means that your personal view is not necessarily that authoritative concerning Christianity's "core", at least not to the point that one should fail to understand how other interpretations could exist.
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[Warning: Bible nerding]
Giving Wealth
Well, or the government or the poor. [ Unrelated, but afaict, no one in the New Testament ever encourages donating to a church. ]
Celibacy
This is debatable.
You point to Luke 20:34-36, but, lets look at the surrounding context. Here is Luke 20:28-36:
So, Jesus is given an obscure thought experiment and his response can be interpreted to mean either
It's not obvious, and (for example) Martin Luther denounced the policy of celibacy and, afaict, it is not really encouraged in most Protestant denominations. While Paul is a big fan, Jesus only directly spoke on the matter once that I know of (beyond your Luke citation): in Matthew 19:8-12:
This does certainly sound like celibacy being encouraged, but note that this encouragement is not what I would call "strong". First, Jesus says only those who can accept this should. This is literally odd, since everyone literally has the ability to not have sex, so the reasonable interpretation is that this is qualified encouragement. Also contrast this to some other passages, where Jesus is actually strongly encouraging his followers:
Mark 11:25:
Matthew 19:23-24:
Heck even Matthew 5:21-22
To my eyes, this is what Jesus looks like when saying something is crucially important. His denunciation of sex seems extremely tame by comparison.
Progress
Well, one might define moral progress as moral circle expansion, which is pretty inline with Christian morality of loving thy neighbor and even thy enemy.
I don't think most Christians up to and including Pope Francis himself would agree that converting people to Christianity is the only thing that matters.
I'm genuinely curious: why do you think this? Is there some reading I can do on the topic?
Matthew 17:24-27 shows it as a regular thing and Mark 12:41-44 seems to portray it as a laudable thing.
Ironically, this seems to indicate the opposite: that the church shouldn't expect money from its members, but Jesus does simply to "not cause offense."
Hmm. I always interpreted this as Jesus condoning generosity as a virtue , but I can see why you'd interpret this as encouraging people to donate to churches specifically.
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I for one categorically deny there is even such a thing as "moral progress", let alone by endless expansion of one's circle of concern.
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Religions are not “equally good” and this is partly because they have different pursuits and points of emphasis. Religious practices involve focusing on and expanding specific elements of human cognition. The old Pagan practice of placating a flippant God or contractually offering your sacrifice according to the terms of your petition are not increasing “prosocial love for others”, which is what modern Westerners consider to be the chief Good (which grew out of Christianity). Those Pagan practices are instead increasing one’s aptitude for fulfilling promises — highly important, but not quite good. Certain Buddhist sects that promote mindfulness and dispassionate will increase a person’s attention and equanimity. But again, this isn’t sufficient to make a person good. Judaism’s focus on following hundreds of little rules and engaging in festivals that increase ethnic love will definitely create a tight-knit bloodline, but not necessarily a good community. (Judaism’s emphasis on analyzing and discussing texts, however, is definitely good, because it leads to logical adherent, yet I don’t think this is sufficient.) Islam’s abundant emphasis on obedience and pleasures of the afterlife creates a lot of excellent and violent martyrs, but not a lot of little selfless loving martyrs in everyday affairs.
It’s important we don’t get bogged down in speculative theology when evaluating religion. For 90% of adherents, they are engaging in a particular practice with a few dozen stories and expectations. This is what decides the expansion of a religion and the morality of a society. Highbrow theology is interesting (I think it will find its completion in psychology) but it’s not actually that relevant for changing the behaviors of humans. For a religion to be good, it needs to make the behaviors of most of its adherents good. A religion that only makes its theologians good would be a very poor religion indeed.
I don’t think that Christianity is some God-ordained perfect religion — that would be superstitious — but I think it’s approximately the optimal religion, and all other close contenders would look a lot like it.
I see Religious Language as a hack that creates civilization. The hack works on our innate instincts, and it sublimates our instincts toward some intended behavior. For some given civilizational goal, there is probably one or a few symbols that are “optimized”, but I don’t think it’s the kind of thing where humanity is born altogether with ideal symbolism that they need to understand. One great symbol is “heaven above”. The clouds and the movements of the stars dictate weather and seasons, and thus crops and safety; it is immense; we are innately attracted to them; it is always above us. So, a celestial realm where Gods live always above us, always controlling affairs — this is an obvious choice for where God reside. This is better than the pagan’s mountains.
Well first of all I think the question of which religions are better or worse than other religions is heavily dependent on the context of that religion— in technology, in social development, in environment, and in the cognitive development of the species.
A Bronze Age paganism simply doesn’t work in the 21st century. It’s too tribal, it requires animal sacrifices, and it lacks a strong moral code. On the other hand a pacifist sect in the Bronze Age would quickly be wiped out as it refused to defend itself when its more warlike neighbors.
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If you buy that liberalism, humanism and even atheism etc. are all profoundly Christian ideas (Tom Holland's thesis in 'Dominion') then a religion which lays the groundwork for its own collapse is probably not close to an optimal religion. Secularisation, universality, equal value and such are all core concepts of Christianity, and so one may say it was inevitable that such a belief system would eventually be superseded by the current form of itself. Some may argue that these are reformation/Protestant trends, but look at the Pope!
One can imagine an Ontological argument (if a religion is optimal, it exists...) here. Would an optimal religion leave room open (nay, encourage!) doubt and lead to its own demise, or would it be in fact that which had the strongest grip on its population and cultural success over time?
This would be a far stronger argument if a different religion would take its place, rather than atheism.
My theory for the demise of religion in the west is that we've succeeded too well at reigning in chaos and spreading knowledge for religion to be seen as valuable by most people. For a substantial part, that is because we have become so good at producing a good society to live in. If this is the goal of Christianity, then it made itself obsolete.
Muslim population of England and Wales 2001: 1.6m 2011: 2.7m 2021: 3.9m
Christian population of England and Wales 2001: 47.3m 2011: 33.2m 2021: 27.5m
Somewhat tongue in cheek, so 2 caveats:
I imagine that the replacement of Christianity with a weak 'Western Humanist' religion is not a long term equilibrium. Something else will fill the gap- what that is remains to be seen.
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And such a person would be flat out wrong, because atheism exists as a long standing and accepted sect of Hinduism.
The Nastiks were around for ages, and denied the existence of deities while still having supernatural beliefs.
At any rate, we're all born atheists, even if in a vacuum prior to technological enlightenment, most people would likely end up developing superstitions.
I didn't make any effort to defend the premise, but the idea is that that the family of humanist or humanist-derivative ideas in the modern Western sense are a direct result of the Biblical inversion of the weak-strong moral paradigm (Jesus died for our sins despite God, he died for all equally, Jew or Gentile etc). It isn't to say that there can be no atheism (the narrow belief in no God) unless it is Christian, but that the liberal humanist tradition which led to new atheism IS in this Christian pedigree.
I'd be surprised if a religion which has a genealogy that traces a path from Paul the Apostle through to the rights of man, and socialism, and human rights, and freedom of speech and the whole milieu we find ourselves sitting in today could possibly be seen as optimal (as a religion). I suppose if one thinks that a religion that popularises certain mostly beneficial (from the outside view) memes, and then self destructs is optimal then fair enough. I was just expressing doubt that a religion with no defence system could be considered optimal from the internal POV.
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I think Christianity is optimal in the sense that the faithful become an optimal community (in the best variation of the religion). The community isn’t optimal because it is obedient or dogmatic, but because it’s prosocial and virtuous. This would allow it to maximize both positive emotion states and civilizational development. It’s true that modernity has posed unique problems to religions, but that’s not something that the authors of religions could really foresee.
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This is a pretty narrow take. Christianity has “laid the groundwork” for its own demise at least five times, as Chesterton points out in The Everlasting Man. The idea that Christianity is over was popular way back in antiquity with the Manichaeans, and as recently as the late 19th century with the beginning of modern science. Yet it still survives somehow.
Predicting the doom of a religion and having it actually die, despite being one of the most dominant religions on the planet, are two very different things.
There were many forms of ‘Christianity’ in antiquity which were often diametrically opposed to each other in the most fundamental respects (as in monism vs. dualism, not later pilpul over the natures of Christ). Out of this multitude only one sect survived, whose claim to being the original is in no way supported by evidence, and it was by no means necessarily what ancient critics had in mind. Islam and liberalism are both closer to orthodox Christianity than Marcionism or Valentianism was, so that even if the professing Christian faith somehow vanished, you could use them to ‘prove’ its supposed tenacity.
The fact is that most modern churches would likely be judged heretical by people from just a few centuries ago, and vice versa to some extent. So it’s a ship of Theseus kind of thing.
Most modern churches would judge most modern churches heretical. They just disagree about which ones.
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I'm not quite sure of what my firm view on this debate is, but it is clear to me that the specifics of culture matter and that while genes are important they certainly aren't fully prescriptive in terms of the culture they lead to. People (including those from the same genetic population as those who take another route) can be destroyed by 'bad' memes and elevated by 'good' ones that are bestowed on them by other peoples, I think you really can convert a population and change their way of life considerably (and perhaps ultimately reflected genetically over many generations) through ideology.
Regarding 'Eastern' vs 'Western' (or Christian, as Chesterton suggests) religion, I think this is a relatively classic 19th century argument for the supremacy of a kind of Christian missionary imperialism, or at least missionary movements in general (which reminds me there was a great comment recently that argued that descendants of American missionaries to China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries played a highly outsized role in US foreign policy, particularly toward China, over the 20th century). More generally, it's the idea that polytheistic religions that involve elements typically common to European, pre-Columbian American and Asian pagan religions have an inherently lower respect for human life, and are willing to sacrifice it or end it or abandon it or make it suffer more willingly or with fewer qualms than Christians are, or at least do so less reluctantly than Christians do.
I am skeptical that this is the truth.
Best extant example of this is North vs South Korea, same people, same genetics, same language even, but one has the meme of capitalism and the other the meme of communism. See the massive difference it makes to living standards.
This is my go to example of the importance on environment on a person's/society's living standards, but the people who generally argue in favour of environment/against genes having a large impact don't seem to like it very much for some reason or the other...
Or shtetl/non-shtetl Ashkenazi, Sakoku/Meiji restoration Japan, etc.
It doesn't matter how intelligent you are if all you're trying to do is figure out more elaborate ways to stare up your own asshole.
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Yeah I have yet to see a facts-based, evidence filled argument that this disregard for life is the case. Typically there's a more high-level argument about symbols and big ideas going on, which is what I do find compelling.
One of the more interesting and perhaps derivative things Chesterton mentions in The Everlasting Man is that the Ouroborous is a circle, a negation that is always fixed in size (or something) whereas the Cross can be extended infinitely, and posits a battle of two lines going on forever. (presumably Good versus Evil)
While this type of symbology isn't an exact science, I do find it quite thought provoking. There's also something to be said for the typically Buddhist idea that 'Enlightenment' is a concrete stage that can be reached, versus the traditional Christian idea of 'theosis' or the Sisyphean struggle to become like God, while knowing you will never even come close to the ideal.
I agree with you that the 19th century arguments likely haven't told the full story, but I do think there's something to all these religious differences. Unfortunately even having this discussion in most mainstream places nowadays is impossible, because the mere mention of one religion potentially being better than another immediately shuts down the conversation.
People who don’t believe in any religious cosmology want religions to have the legibility of apartments: each religion has identical features even if they’re decorated differently.
(To be fair, when I was growing up Christian, I heard all non-Abrahamic religions legibly classed as “pagan”.)
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I agree, it’s hard to have these arguments today. At the same time I think that to many (say) Americans writing in 1910, there was the obvious underlying reality that all the prosperous countries in the world were Western and Christian nations. Even Japan, which was by far the most industrialized Asian nation, apparently had a GDP/capita that was maybe one third of the US/UK/Australia/industrialized NW Europe. It was more self-evident, maybe, that there appeared to be some cultural factor holding back progress in the Far East.
I think relevantly that incorporation of memes from Christianity in Asian cultures was part of the recipe for those place’s prosperity, and that these western memes are distinctively Christian and not Islamic or Jewish or pagan or Zoroastrian.
I’d point to certain Christian marriage laws which tend to be part of modernization packages as meaningfully affecting time preference on reasonable time scales, for one example. Mass literacy is also in practice pretty strongly associated with Christian missionary activity(and unlike the Arabic abjad, both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets can be used to represent any language more or less phonetically, even if say English or French don’t do so in practice), although less uniquely so.
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It’s true, although I think you can still make a strong argument that modern Western nations are not Christian in any real sense, and that the East has mostly copied the things that worked from the West rather than find their own unique ways of managing growth.
Then again, I’m skeptical of economic growth and material power as a true measure of goodness or value anyway, so the point is kind of moot imo. At least on moral grounds.
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