site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26664 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Im a little drunk on thanksgiving. Can someone tell me the pope having lunch with transgenders is false.

https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1727444933207056730?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

This was low effort. I think a 7-day ban is too much. But this is still something where as a Catholic you would be like what I’m seeing has to be wrong. I will eat it. This isn’t an unworthy culture war post if it fact checks which from Hannania I assumed he did.

You probably did not notice, but there is potential schism brewing inside the Catholic Church. The theological debates are interesting, they revolve around ecumenism post Second Vatican council and it seems that current Pope takes them very far with messages like

Some theologians say it is part of God's "permissive will," allowing "this reality of many religions. Some emerge from the culture, but they always look toward heaven and God," the pope said.

As a former Catholic myself just briefly investigating this over last few months I am convinced that the pope is probably either an apostate or a heretic. The church also has to deal with day-to-day subversion from the left as with the rebellious bishops from German Catholic church that decided to bless LGBT unions. And on top of that there is some strange relationship between Pope and Davos types around wide variety of topics such as climate change or strange messages like this openly mentioning return of catholic integralism, which may be the way how some of the critics of Vatican II were placated.

It really is strange and pope Francis himself seems to have interesting enough background to generate controversies ranging with his embrace of socialist version of catholic teachings endemic to Latin America called liberation theology with openly communist figures like Hélder Câmara whom Pope calls as that holy bishop. Add in a very strange way of how Francis got elected - while previous much more conservative pope still lived and you have anther leg of the controversy.

So yes, Catholic Church is not safe from culture wars, if anything they are waged even on larger scale given that Catholic Church is a vulnerable institution. Now it is not as if there was not a problem with Catholic Church before, there were antipopes and murderous popes like Stephen VI and so forth, this time may not be different.

Relatedly: https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2023/11/pope-francis-as-public-heretic-evidence.html?m=1

It should be noted that rorate Caeli is very influential among right wing clergy and that the author is not simply a rando, but also that it’s unclear what his call would actually look like and that pope Francis is an 87 year old man with cancer and at least two previous heart attacks, while the opposition are likely very cautious because high ranking clerics in the RCC are almost definitionally old and high-IQ.

there is potential schism brewing inside the Catholic Church

Not again! You mean like 1054? or this entire list of breakaways before, during and after the Reformation?

I think this is just more rumblings on of the Spirit of Vatican II. A heavier hand should have been taken with the likes of the German bishops, but that's just my opinion. The main problem is the increasingly secular society of today, and the shockwaves of the abuse scandals - Ireland has become unrecognisable in social liberalisation during my lifetime, and that's something I've observed over a period of forty years since my late teens to today. Even those still going to Mass have a very vague notion of what the religion is about. There's a ton of cultural Catholicism, but even expressions of that like processions etc. got washed away very fast in the 90s onward.

So as far as doctrinal issues goes, there is the perennial problem of "how much accommodation to the Spirit of the Age do you do?" Benedict was my pope in a way Francis will never be, and I admired his attempts to go back to more reverent and more traditional liturgy and displays, but there is too much inertia and too much ignorance built up over the decades. We can't go back. Francis is very much imbued with the notion of pastoralism - that you go out and search for the lost sheep without worrying too much over the jots and tittles of what the rules precisely say. And he's having to deal with "how do you prevent the Church from being hollowed-out, from losing any young people continuing to remain Catholics, from becoming a museum piece where churches are just tourist attractions and not houses of worship?"

You can't go back, so how far do you go with the ways of today?

The other vision for the future of the church, that the Trads like to point out, is radical downsizing and refocusing around the core of conservative believers with a positive birthrate, instead of chasing wishy-washy modernists leaving the church for the religious experience of protesting anyway. While this would ensure slow-but-steady positive growth, it would also entail becoming a peripheral pseudo-ethnicity minority religion in many lands, like the Copts or Mormons. The only difference is their leader would still technically have an itty-bitty country to run.

This would also make the Pope less of an Important World Leader all the presidents shake hands with, and that the Church would have to sell a lot of its very nice things, a terrible fate in the minds of reformists (and many conservatives too, which is why they don't talk about those parts being necessary as much).

Charitably: the pope is trying to engage with sinners and help them return to the light.

Christ didn’t hang out with prostitutes because he thought being a prostitute was a good thing.

Mark Chapter 2:

16 When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

17 On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Some people want their Mark 2:17 without Mark 2:16. Even more people want their Mark 2:16 without Mark 2:17. They need to be taken together, but they almost never are.

Things you’ll never hear Pope Francis say: “These people are sick and should stop sinning in these specifics ways.”

What is fake? What is real? Are we living in a simulation? Or just the AI version of what is passed around as news?

As far as I know, yes, it's real. Jesuits, eh?

Don't do low effort top level posts.

7 day ban for making me deal with this on Thanksgiving

I'm having a hard time deciding what a reasonable ban duration for drunkposting on a holiday should be. I keep defaulting to 1 day, but that only functions like throwing someone in the drunktank until they're sober, and that only works if you catch them in time. OTOH, more than 3d feels excessive, unless there's an existing pattern. But in this case, 4d would keep them in the drunktank until the next thread... Ugh, it's good I'm not a mod.

The user had twelve warnings and temp bans in their mod history. I didn't even add my most recent one.

This is not a stellar user that drunk posted once on holidays. It's a crap user that also posted drunk on holidays.

My willingness to compile a list of bad posts during a holiday is low.

A 7 day ban for this is incredibly excessive. This user is clearly a good contributor, despite drunkpoasting one thing on a holiday. Banning people like this also deprives other users of good discussions. One day would be both appropriate and also funny, and not punish everyone else.

Unless this person has some history of this and bans: this is a ridiculous response.

They are not a great contributor. They have a history of low effort posting.

An improvement to these things (which seem heavy handed) would be to include this history when you take these sorts of drastic actions.

Because from the outside it seriously just looks like power tripping/petty.

Normally that is something that I would include. I'm away from my computer, right now because it's Thanksgiving, and busy hanging out with family. It is more time intensive to construct those lists on mobile.

Apparently the mods don't believe that low effort, low quality posts can prompt high effort, high quality responses despite ample evidence to the contrary.

I've been banned repeatedly, and while I surely earned some of them, the majority have been what I consider tickey tack and unreasonable curtailing of reasonable discussion. This is right according to profile from my perspective.

Apparently the mods don't believe that low effort, low quality posts can prompt high effort, high quality responses despite ample evidence to the contrary.

I think it's a reasonable case of being concerned about moral hazard. If you let low quality posts because they can lead to high quality posts then you may find yourself with a flood of low quality posts so unworthy wading through that you scare away the high quality posts. There is an experiment on this, CWR.

Yes, but the repeated requests for the bare link repository indicate that there is demand and interest in discussing more than what gets brought up, but the purposefully high barriers to entry prevent those topics from even being raised at all, and thus no responses can be prompted, regardless of quality.

I'm not convinced the repeated requests for the bare link repo aren't just the same three or so people repeatedly bringing up the same request. I'm indifferent to it's return.

I am in deep, passionate, unrelenting agreement with your indifference.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology. Believing that a certain man 2000 years ago was the son of god and rose from the dead is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as believing that a man can become a woman by calling himself a woman and doing surgeries. But many people here on The Motte give Christianity a pass because it's really old and really popular and so it seems "normal", because they like its cultural/political connotations, and probably in some cases because they were raised Christian.

But I don't give Christianity a pass. When people tell me that they are Christian, I have pretty much the same reaction as I have when people try to convince me that a trans woman is a real woman. In both cases, I think that their beliefs are ludicrous and deeply irrational.

Unfortunately, your atheism is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as either. You are personally as irrational as the trans ideologues, but you give yourself a pass out of pure self-serving smugness. From whence comes equality between methodological constraints of science and metaphysical theory of ontology? It's nothing but really old and really popular and so it seems "normal". You probably like the cultural/political connotations, and you may have been raised to believe such irrational things. If you're going to act like anyone is "given a pass", it is you, and every time you pull this schick, it eats away at the detente that the mods claim to believe in/enforce. The result of you continuing to break down the detente is that, unless the mods continue to protect you, your irrationality will no longer be given a pass. It'll be made clear that you're no different than trans ideologues.

Unfortunately, your atheism is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as either.

That's a relatively new one in these parts eh? Leave aside arguing why my ideology is superior, let me claim that yours is just as bad. I can see this is an immensely convincing argument.

There is an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that the universe operates according to a mechanistic evolution of relatively simple laws of physics, with no external intervention at all.

To people like Goodguy, the only point is to hear himself call his ideological opponents irrational. That is the ground where the battle has been declared.

There is an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that the universe operates according to a mechanistic evolution of relatively simple laws of physics, with no external intervention at all.

What experiment have you conducted which demonstrates equality between methodological constraints of science and metaphysical theory of ontology?

EDIT:

That's a relatively new one in these parts eh? Leave aside arguing why my ideology is superior, let me claim that yours is just as bad. I can see this is an immensely convincing argument.

Also, it's telling that you didn't come to say that... to Goodguy, who, after all, did nearly nothing but say that someone's ideology is just as bad as another one. Big oof by you, but telling of the fact that you're far more critical of things you're predisposed to disagree with than things you're predisposed to agree with.

it eats away at the detente that the mods claim to believe in/enforce. The result of you continuing to break down the detente is that, unless the mods continue to protect you, your irrationality will no longer be given a pass

"Christianity is wrong and irrational" is not a moddable offense. Neither is "No it isn't." What is this "detente" that you claim is being broken and which we are not enforcing? (ETA: Okay, this one. Yes, that still pertains. You can criticize beliefs, but do it without sneering or personalizing it or trying to evangelize/recruit for a cause.) People are allowed to argue for/against religion and for/against atheism, no matter how tiresome and repetitive such arguments become (but in fairness, so is most well-trodden ground here).

@Goodguy hasn't been "protected" from anything. He can say your beliefs are irrational, and you can say his beliefs are irrational. What we would prefer is that people offer serious arguments rather than "Uh huh!" "Nuh uh!" back and forth. And what we would definitely prefer is that you refrain from trying to personalize it in the antagonistic manner you're doing here.

Any stick'll do.

I've said it before and I'll say it again...

But I don't give Christianity a pass. When people tell me that they are Christian, I have pretty much the same reaction as I have when people try to convince me that a trans woman is a real woman. In both cases, I think that their beliefs are ludicrous and deeply irrational.

What point do you think you are making? I repeat: you are allowed to say Christianity is wrong and irrational. You are allowed to say atheism is wrong and irrational. This is consistent with everything I have said in the past.

Mod hat is as mod hat does. Praise be to mod hat!

More comments

Also, it's telling that you didn't come to say that... to Goodguy, who, after all, did nearly nothing but say that someone's ideology is just as bad as another one. Big oof by you, but telling of the fact that you're far more critical of things you're predisposed to disagree with than things you're predisposed to agree with.

What exactly is it telling of? If you wish to call it hypocrisy, feel free, but I can wholeheartedly assure you that people will leap to the defense of things they care about/prefer more than those they don't.

I am on record defending particular ideologies/movements I strongly dislike from false accusations.

For a recent example, when another atheist reclaimed religion as innately irrational, I strong disagreed, there's nothing wrong with the concept of religion from the standpoint of rationality, it's the belief in it in the face of the monumental amount of evidence against the supernatural elements seen in believers that makes them irrational. Belief in the supernatural ceases to be irrational when there's net positive evidence of supernatural events.

I see nothing wrong with claiming that religion/Catholicism is as bad/unfounded as trans-ideology and Wokism, or at least comparable in terms of harm, certainly in terms of the basis of their claims where it pertains to empirical reality.

My objection to you is that you didn't submit anything more than post-modernist nonsense about how, since atheism makes metaphysical claims, it's just as unfounded as religion. That is not the stance of anyone who has more convincing examples to show me, and believe me plenty of religious people try to do that, I and many others are atheists because such evidence is utterly inadequate for the magnitude of the claims

What exactly is it telling of? If you wish to call it hypocrisy, feel free, but I can wholeheartedly assure you that people will leap to the defense of things they care about/prefer more than those they don't.

People will obviously engage more with topics that they care about than topics they don't care about. But you specifically raised a concern with what you perceived as the form of an argument. We can go back to antiquity to find good reason to think that one should consider the form of an argument apart from its particulars.

My objection to you is that you didn't submit anything more than post-modernist nonsense about how, since atheism makes metaphysical claims, it's just as unfounded as religion.

Huge ROFL. I've never said that. Just not even. Double ROFL in thinking that it's anything post-modernist. Instead, it's like, core classical philosophy. I've seen some kind of ridiculous misunderstandings/misaccusations about post-modernist philosophy, but this is a new one. Just comically off the mark.

For reference I said:

That's a relatively new one in these parts eh? Leave aside arguing why my ideology is superior, let me claim that yours is just as bad. I can see this is an immensely convincing argument.

Quoting you saying:

Unfortunately, your atheism is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as either. You are personally as irrational as the trans ideologues, but you give yourself a pass out of pure self-serving smugness.

Hmm.. Did you happen to notice that @Goodguy was claiming that trans ideo was comparably awful to Catholicism, while condemning both? And not being an adherent of either?

And that my gripe with you is that you are presumably a Christian or at least religious, and your sole argument in that specific comment was claiming atheism is just as unfounded as religion, while being religious?

In other words, "both of you suck" versus "you suck just as much as I do". The former is, well, a just a value judgement, whereas the latter is what I expect someone to jump to when they've got nothing else worth saying.

You do you, but I'm leaving, my time to pointlessly quibble here is limited since I have no expectation of an eternal afterlife, or at least one not of our own making, and it's not here yet.

I see. You seem to have just imagined me saying something about my personal beliefs. Moreover, you have some weird post-modernist idea that your perception of my beliefs/identity has some bearing on the validity of the form of my argument. Also, you struggle with "greater than or equal to".

What experiment have you conducted which demonstrates equality between methodological constraints of science and metaphysical theory of ontology?

Metaphysics is not physics, hence it's not amenable to exploration by such means. But religions are not exclusively metaphysics, almost all of them, and certainly Christianity, claim tangible effects in the real world that is tantamount to a divergence from mere mechanistic evolution of physical processes. They certainly have apologetics by the bucketload for why such interventions are beyond the ability of scientific empirism to evaluate in terms of plausibility.

A religion stripped of physical implications or supernatural influences on reality is simply a philosophy, and those can only be adopted or denied, not proved or disproved.

Phenomenal, pun intended. Where in this nomenclature does atheism fall?

The null hypothesis. To recycle a very appropriate quip, atheism is no more a religion than a TV's screen being off is a television channel.

It is inherently an aspect of any metaphysical system that doesn't have explicitly claim the existence of supernatural elements, at the very least those that imply any interference, past, present or future, with the evolution of the world.

It is inherently an aspect of any metaphysical system

So, you're saying that it's a metaphysical system? Or that it's a component of a metaphysical system? Something like that?

More comments

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology. Believing that a certain man 2000 years ago was the son of god and rose from the dead is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as believing that a man can become a woman by calling himself a woman and doing surgeries. But many people here on The Motte give Christianity a pass because it's really old and really popular and so it seems "normal", because they like its cultural/political connotations, and probably in some cases because they were raised Christian.

I'm always baffled when this accusation comes up. We understand that there are Christians among us and we don't poke that sore spot unprovoked. But it's absolutely not the case that we let reasoning from religious conviction go without critique. There are trans people here, when they argue topics that aren't about transness I don't, or at least attempt not to, let the fact that I have some disagreements on one topic come up in the other unless it's invoked.

Can you actually point to instances where someone used their belief that Jesus was the literal son of god when arguing for some policy without brooking opposition?

We live in a society that has figured out, long ago, that we should have religious pluralism where Christians can worship as they please, but can't enforce their religion on society. So I don't care how irrational they are.

We have not figured this out for trans people.

That's an interesting comparison. While the historicity of Jesus is debated downthread, the Gospel accounts IMO have a very valid purpose: they can teach the reader how to be a charismatic psychopath who motivates his followers! devout leader of a church: (1) Gather some small number of people who worship the predecessor religion, which contains some prophesies. (2) Find an interpretation of the predecessor religion or religious text in which the prophesies refer to things that happened to you and your group. (3) Act and teach as Jesus did in the Gospels, with a focus on the corruption of and persecution by The World (4) Die according to your prophesies and (5) be rememebered forever!

Experimentally, we have evidence this works for many groups. Most of them don't make it to (5) because they don't make new prophesies of their own, but some do.

So the natural place to go here from gender ideology is to ask whether gender ideology provides a sufficient set of social tools to build a movement, or whether the ideology sources those externally.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology.

As @Cirrus explains below, there is plenty of evidence. Thousands and thousands of eyewitness accounts, prophecy, et cetera.

Not to mention the very cultural/political connotations, history and tradition are themselves evidence compared to transgenderism. Just evidence that points to a conclusion you really don't like or can believe is true.

I'm not trying to be antagonistic here, but your strong claims against Christianity show a clear bias and lack of clear eyed, Bayesian priors. I think you need to reassess your own 'objectivity' before you start claiming a high horse.

I don't think this is a fair comparison.

One is an empirical claim about the actual literal nature of reality, the other is a normative semantic claim about how we should draw category boundaries on a word (and cultural/legal/etc category boundaries as a society).

Even if they were both equally silly, one is a mistake about the actual physical nature of reality, the other is just a request to do language and culture differently.

The latter can be dumb but it can't be wrong in the same way.

Trans people make an impossible empirical claim as well. The claim that undergirds their requests are that they are actually able to tell that they are the opposite sex. That is to say they are claiming to be able to distinguish between the experience of "being a male who correctly thinks they have the internal experience of a female" and "being a male who mistakenly thinks they have the internal experience of being female". This is epistemically impossible as we each only have one experience and cannot triangulate reality.

Trans people make an impossible empirical claim as well. The claim that undergirds their requests are that they are actually able to tell that they are the opposite sex.

To use an analogy: Richard Hanania has written about how civil rights law is the origins of what is called "wokeness." I've seen others talk about how American colleges and universities only started valuing "diversity" after the Supreme Court struck down one form of affirmative action, while signposting other forms of affirmative action that would be acceptable.

All of that to say, is it possible that the "empirical claim" that trans people make are more motivated by "what actually works" legally and culturally in our society? That they're falsifying their preferences, in an attempt to justify the way they want to live their lives to the gatekeepers and the masses?

Obviously, their efforts don't work for you and other trans skeptical posters on this forum, but imagine you found yourself in the following life situation:

You are a man, and you want to be a woman. It doesn't matter if that desire is caused by an intersex brain, or a paraphilia or is a whimsy you picked up as a result of your life experiences. You have this desire, and it is strong enough to make you want to do something about it. Maybe it has become what Scott Alexander calls a trapped prior - a nearly unchangable belief that doesn't respond to new evidence, like a phobia or an OCD obsession. You know that you can't become exactly like a typical woman, but you believe that with hormones, surgery and vocal training you can get close enough for your own purposes, at least physically. Heck, maybe you'll even get lucky and pass so well that for the vast majority of the people you interact with, you will be indistinguishable from a typical woman and you'll be able to live your life.

Either way, you need to convince society that they should allow you to get the hormones and surgeries, and that they should treat you in all ways like a woman, despite whatever doubts members of society might otherwise have about your claim.

I put forward that the "typical trans narrative" is like water filling the shape of the society it is arising from. All of the philosophical and metaphysical arguments are a smoke screen. They don't exist to get cis people closer to the truth of understanding what it is like to be trans - they exist to get enough important gate keepers in society to let the trans person live the life they want to live. Maybe parts of the "typical trans narrative" are close enough to being true for many trans people. Maybe they were gender non-conforming as a kid, or didn't fit in with other kids of their natal sex, or they couldn't cut it as an adult of their natal sex, but it is also the end-point of a long process of memetic evolution, where trans people collectively discovered the set of secret words and shibboleths they had to say to get what they wanted.

I think the modal trans person wants to look like, live as and be treated socially and legally as a member of the opposite sex. Whether that is a result of nature or nurture, or whether we realistically have any way of talking a person out of this once it has become a trapped prior for them, all other aspects of the "typical trans narrative" grow out of this simple truth. Because they want to live as and be treated as the opposite sex in all ways, it behooves them in the current cultural environment to make certain impossible-to-verify empirical claims about their internal experiences, about "feeling like a woman" or "knowing they were a woman."

That's how they get doctors and lawmakers on board with their desires, and after that it is a matter of keeping their heads down (if they pass), or cultivating cultural norms that minimize the friction of the way they're living their lives (if they don't pass.)

Long story short, while I'm sure many trans people actually do believe empirically unverifiable things about themselves, I think that in most cases those things matter much less than the simple pragmatism of saying whatever reduces the friction between them and the things they want out of life.

Sure, I think and have long thought this is the truth. But the commons they burn with the lies they live doom children. They are trapping the priors of others.

Why do you think that there's such a thing as a unitary 'internal experience of a female', or that trans women think they have it?

Obviously every human has a different experience, I'm not really sure what your claim would mean.

Anyway, it sounds to me like you are adding circumlocutions to the whole thing. The claim is just 'trans women are women, trans men are men.' I'm not familiar with the specific extended claim you're making here being a common one, aside from in the again semantic sense of 'my experiences are a woman's experiences because I'm a woman'.

There being such as thing as being a woman separate from biology is foundational to trans people being a coherent concept. If there is no such "woman" qualia how can you actually explain dysphoria? A miss match implies a correct match which implies some category.

'Money' is a thing separate from the pieces of green paper and yet it's not a unique qualia.

This is what a 'social construct' is. Social constructs are very real and important, they basically make up the majority of our thoughts about and interactions with society, culture, language, and each other.

There's a social construct of 'woman', it is applied to some people and not others, trans women would like it applied to them. They experience dysphoria when their own self-image or self-understanding is not reflected either in their own form and appearance or in how society treats and interacts with them.

Unique qualia are not needed for any of this. The experience can be and is built from a complex structure of normal qualia, just like most experiences.

We didn't socially construct the female sex. Females do not have higher estrogen, wombs, larger breasts ect because society decided they should. The gender "woman" is built up around the reality of a sexually dimorphic species which must deal with the reality that half of the population has meaningfully different abilities and reproductive role. The qualia of womanness is the internal female experience.

There is a claim that tran women have this qualia and not the compliment male internal experience. The mismatch in these qualia is what causes dysphoria.

Maybe you have some other justification for the existence of trans people but it is tiresome to have the same behavior explained by dozens of different just so stories that all seem to fall apart immediately upon examination.

The gender "woman" is built up around the reality of a sexually dimorphic species which must deal with the reality that half of the population has meaningfully different abilities and reproductive role.

Yup, and many many people who do not meet some or many of those criteria would be called women by you.

And by me.

There is a claim that tran women have this qualia and not the compliment male internal experience.

I think maybe you are just using the words 'qualia' and 'experience' interchangeably, which they very much are not.

But if you just mean 'experience', sure, the vast and imprecise and fuzzy-bordered and non-exclusionary category of 'woman' includes some things about thoughts and experiences. No two women will have the exact same woman-related thoughts and experiences, and woman who don't have central ones aren't excluded from being women, and etc etc. But whatever, sure, lets stipulate something like that vaguely exists.

You seem to be saying that we can't know what experiences other people have (and therefore can't meaningfully claim to have similar experiences to another person) because we're not psychic.

But we are psychic.

I'm taking thoughts in my head, and using an external signal to put those thoughts into your head. Right now.

Our modern forms of telepathy do not have infinite bandwidth or fidelity, sure. But we use them to share information about what we are thinking and feeling and experiencing all the goddamn time, that's like a huge part of what art and culture and just talking to people is. And in other categories we do not question or reject claims like 'yeah I've felt that way before' or 'I agree with you' or 'oh yeah I recognize that feeling' or etc.

These are normal kinds of conclusions to draw about similarities in experience between people based on them just describing their experiences, and rejecting that method only here is an isolated demand for rigor.

More comments

Hmm? I disagree that self-assessment is the be-all and end-all in gender, you have to pass as the opposite sex, but your analogy doesn't make sense to me.

Consider someone with phantom limb syndrome, say it's present since birth despite them lacking an arm (I know that's not how it works, bear with me). Are they allowed to claim that they are correct in having the sensation of a missing limb? They never had one in the first place. Or more prosaically, someone left-handed and raised right-handed who always felt that something was off, until they learned about dexterity or learned that in many places, it's a benign quirk that is easily accommodated instead of squashed.

I have also heard accounts of children who were raised as the opposite of their phenotypical/genetic sex, be it by an insane mother who wanted a daughter and made one out of her son, or a child with ambiguous genitalia or who had their penis botched around birth and were reshuffled off as female. Quite a few of such cases had the kids rebel against the perceived gender roles they were made to follow, even if that's how they'd been raised.

That's not to say that trans people are all like that, I think autogynephilia and a delusional memetic contagion account for most of it, so I'm arguing with the given reason for your conclusion even if I agree with the conclusion itself, mostly.

If I reduced transness to desire to undertake hormone therapy with no justification needed or given with no further implications what percentage of the trans activist community(or trans community writ large) do you think would sign onto it? What percent do you think would call me a transphobe?

... if you actually intended to allow that and grant legal recognition and full rights and no persecution or mockery? I think most would be fine about it.

The reason for all the more complicated narratives is to try to come up with something that will convince conservatives to give them rights and leave them alone. The gay rights movement went through the same thing with Ellen and 'born that way' and etc., it's all politics.

Legal recognition of what? Which rights are people missing? To go with the gay rights metaphor I was in favor of taking the state out of marriage and building out civil unions to be the state equivalent with no reference to gender. I'm deeply suspicious that what you're implying is you want to use the state to enforce some views you have on gender and sexuality and not just as a meditating body for letting people live peacefully with those who disagree with them.

Which rights are people missing?

I'm not talking the modern real world, I'm responding to the hypothetical you're proposing.

Yes, trans people do have most relevant rights today in real-world USA, the world in which they used the tactics I'm outlining (and which I think you're objecting to? Kind of hard to parse) to get them.

More comments

That's entirely orthogonal to my point, I'm saying that the standard you're using invalidates far more than just claims of gender dysphoria. I don't deny that what you describe wouldn't be palatable to most trans activists.

One can attempt use of both the left and right hand. One has other limbs to compare the feeling of missing a limb to, or if a quadraplegic at least a plausible biological explanation for the sensation. The Reimer story you reference is packed with alternative explanations besides internally felt 'gender' being real.

I was trying to avoid getting bogged down in the weeds of examples because I think your understanding of this, while I also think is wrong, is not representative of the trans movement at all. It's the rickety motte inhabited by you and two other people surrounded by a kerosene soaked Bailey filled with people who make claims like "we can tell a 2 year old is trans if they don't like wearing a certain type of dress."

Attempting to use one's right hand isn't the same as being right-handed! A person who is left handed can very well claim that they're so, without anyone asking how they're quite so confident in that fact, since they've never experienced the internal qualia of being right handed so they can claim that they somehow know that's not what they're feeling in the first place.

It's not news to me that this isn't the stance or primary concern of trans ideologues, I oppose them myself after all, it's my specific objection to your use of the fundamental inability for us to inhabit many counterfactual mental states as the primary criterion for denying the existence of innate senses of gender, regardless of whether that's a real thing. It has far too much collateral damage at the very least, as I've attempted to show.

More comments

I agree to some extent with this. Yes, they are two different kinds of claims. But I find them to both be irrational, just in different ways. When I say that transgender activist claims are unbacked by evidence, what I mean by this is that I think a neutral and unbiased observer (like an alien visiting earth, for example) when looking at a trans woman, even a post-transition one, would find more physiological similarity with the the male side of the gender spectrum than the female side. Perhaps also when looking at the behavioral similarity, although I am not sure about that one.

My understanding of the typical trans activist position is that to them, it is not that trans women are women by a new definition of "women", it is that they are actually women by the old definition. I could be wrong about this, though.

Re: aliens, I guess it would depend on whether they're dissecting people and judging internal organ structures, or looking at them as they interact with society and judging based on that.

An alien that only looked at physical traits and no social interactions would think that money is just meaningless scraps of fabric and that it must not be very important to human society. Such an alien doesn't actually have much insight to offer on human society and culture and isn't really a useful arbiter of anything in a thought experiment on those things.

And yeah I think an alien looking at social interactions would classify most post-transition trans people as their chosen gender, there's a lot more signifiers in agreement with that conclusion than against it.

Okay, I’ll bite the bullet here. There’s plenty of evidence to support that Jesus Christ is the son of God and that he rose from the dead. For the benefit of others here who might read this…

  1. Jesus Christ was (to my knowledge) the only founder of a major world religion who claimed to be the son of God. He was put to death not because he performed miracles but because he made this claim. Why would someone make such an outrageous lie if it meant their death? Jesus Christ was not merely a good moral teacher, he claimed to be the son of God so those who admire his virtuosity (but not his divinity) will have to answer to why they admire a liar.

  2. Jesus Christ fulfilled many prophesies written by people hundreds of years before he lived. Many of these prophesies, as well as the account of Jesus’ acts, are verifiable by eyewitness accounts (reproduced in thousands of manuscript segments carefully copied and preserved over thousands of years). There is more scripture authenticated and verified from the New Testament than texts of many Ancient Greek philosophers whose authenticity is never questioned as rigorously. The letters of the New Testament have been subjected to lexical analysis and found to be internally consistent by author and authentic. There are no contradictions in the Bible, unlike the contradictions inherent in other belief systems such as transgenderism.

  3. Jesus Christ rose from the dead—he was observed by over 500 people over a 40 day period after his resurrection. His empty tomb was first discovered by women—not the most credible source in ancient times if you wanted to fabricate a story. We know that he died because the Roman soldiers punctured his side and drew blood after the crucifixion, a mortal wound that the soldiers had believed was conclusive.

I could go into more detail, but belief in Jesus Christ as the son of God, who died and rose again has a lot of rational merit. There is ample evidence to support this belief, but it isn’t proof so ultimately you must choose whether to believe it or not.

I do love an opportunity to relive my atheist debater glory days.

He was put to death not because he performed miracles but because he made this claim.

Jesus was put to death as an insurrectionist against Rome. This is why the sign over his head said "King of the Jews" and not "son of God."

Jesus Christ fulfilled many prophesies written by people hundreds of years before he lived.

According to the books written by his followers, yes. In a lot of places you can see how the Gospel authors are working overtime to fit prophecy to reality, like Matthew's story of Jesus entering Jerusalem on both a colt and a donkey, to fit the prophecy of Zechariah. Or the two very different nativity stories in Matthew and Luke. And a lot of the supposed prophecies fulfilled by Jesus aren't even prophecies, like Psalm 22.

are verifiable by eyewitness accounts

Even by Christian tradition, neither Luke nor Mark was an eyewitness to the ministry, death, or resurrection of Jesus. Matthew was very clearly not written by the Apostle Matthew, since it plagiarizes about 90% of its content from the Gospel of Mark (a non-eyewitness), including and most inexplicably, the story of Matthew's own call to be Jesus' disciple.

Jesus Christ rose from the dead—he was observed by over 500 people over a 40 day period after his resurrection.

Paul refers, in an offhanded comment in 1 Corinthians, to an episode which is elaborated upon nowhere else in Paul's writings, nor elsewhere in the early Christian canon, in which the risen Christ was supposedly seen by 500 people at once. No details are presented, nor does any account of this appearance exist. It's no more convincing than that video from like 2010 where a crowd in Alabama believed they'd seen a leprechaun. Actually less so, because there's video evidence of the leprechaun crowd. The resurrection narratives in the gospels contradict with other on a number of points which makes their historicity doubtful at best.

His empty tomb was first discovered by women—not the most credible source in ancient times if you wanted to fabricate a story.

IMO the empty tomb story is probably a later fiction. "Translation fables" in which bodies went missing from tombs were extremely common in the Mediterranean literature of the time. It was a literary shorthand to indicate that a righteous person had been assumed to heaven and been deified. It would be special pleading to assert these other contemporary stories are false but the story in the gospels is true.

We know that he died because the Roman soldiers punctured his side and drew blood after the crucifixion

I feel like I'm back in 2012 just typing out the words, "you can't use the Bible to prove the Bible," but...it's true. Yes, this is what happened according to a story in the gospel of John, and the reliability of the gospels is the issue in question.

For a lot of these you are misrepresenting @Cirrus's points in order to rebut a weaker and less evidence-based claim than the one he actually made.

Jesus was put to death as an insurrectionist against Rome. This is why the sign over his head said "King of the Jews" and not "son of God."

Notice you said "as" rather than focusing on the actual "why", because the "why" (which was the claim in question) is a much softer and more difficult point to rebut. There were many insurrectionists; few were put to death. Jesus was betrayed by the Jewish leaders because he claimed to be the son of God, and this is why he was executed. The legal pretext is a separate matter.

Even by Christian tradition, neither Luke nor Mark was an eyewitness to the ministry, death, or resurrection of Jesus. Matthew was very clearly not written by the Apostle Matthew, since it plagiarizes about 90% of its content from the Gospel of Mark (a non-eyewitness), including and most inexplicably, the story of Matthew's own call to be Jesus' disciple.

I wouldn't say this is "very clear" at all--it seems to have been written decades after the actual events, with an eye to maintaining consistency. Also, "a few people were not eyewitnesses" is not exactly a very strong counterargument for "there were eyewitness accounts."

I find it funny that you focused on this rather than "There are no contradictions in the Bible" which is so much easier to counter.

Paul refers, in an offhanded comment in 1 Corinthians, to an episode which is elaborated upon nowhere else in Paul's writings, nor elsewhere in the early Christian canon, in which the risen Christ was supposedly seen by 500 people at once. No details are presented, nor does any account of this appearance exist. It's no more convincing than that video from like 2010 where a crowd in Alabama believed they'd seen a leprechaun.

I agree here, the only reason to trust a one-off mention like this is if you have strong prior reason to trust the author's original account, and trust that nothing has been warped/miscopied/mistranslated/deliberately altered from the original account.

There were many insurrectionists; few were put to death.

That’s not true. The Romans crucified rebels all the time. They crucified two right next to Jesus. Jesus would not have been crucified if the Romans didn’t want him dead, because the Romans were the power in Judea. The Sanhedrin were handpicked puppets.

I wouldn't say this is "very clear" at all

Huge swathes of Matthew are copied word for word from Mark.

Also, "a few people were not eyewitnesses" is not exactly a very strong counterargument for "there were eyewitness accounts."

If the gospel authors weren’t eyewitnesses, then we have no eyewitness accounts.

I find it funny that you focused on this rather than "There are no contradictions in the Bible" which is so much easier to counter.

I didn’t address this precisely because I didn’t think it was with addressing. Yes there are a lot of contradictions in the Bible, but arguing about them is usually fruitless.

That’s not true. The Romans crucified rebels all the time. They crucified two right next to Jesus. Jesus would not have been crucified if the Romans didn’t want him dead, because the Romans were the power in Judea. The Sanhedrin were handpicked puppets.

What I said was that there were many insurrectionists and few were crucified; this is compatible with the claim that they were crucified all the time. The point is that only a small proportion were crucified.

The two crucified next to Jesus were thieves according to the Bible; do you have some other source of information on that?

The Romans can obviously want him dead for many reasons, one of which being that their handpicked puppets were whining about him. It's not like those puppets are literal puppets--they were still Jews, chosen for (among other things) their ability to lead other Jews.

Huge swathes of Matthew are copied word for word from Mark.

I thought it was clear I was aware of this based on my response. You are vastly overstating scholarly consensus on this. Many think Matthew was written before Mark and Mark copied Matthew; others think they both copied some other Gospel. Given how long ago this happened, our strongest evidence either way is still pretty weak. Even if Matthew did copy Mark though, as I mentioned, it's really not too strange to just imagine Matthew, the apostle, copying Mark's account to maintain consistency about events he may not now remember in quite as much detail decades after the fact.

If the gospel authors weren’t eyewitnesses, then we have no eyewitness accounts.

John appears to be an eyewitness account, Mark and Luke are based on eyewitness accounts, and Matthew appears to be an eyewitness account.

What I said was that there were many insurrectionists and few were crucified; this is compatible with the claim that they were crucified all the time. The point is that only a small proportion were crucified.

First century Palestine is not especially well-recorded, but even so a number of rebel leaders are known (Judas the Galilean and his sons, Simon son of Giora, Theudas, “The Egyptian,”). All of them were killed by the Romans, though they weren’t all crucified.

The two crucified next to Jesus were thieves according to the Bible; do you have some other source of information on that?

I don’t read Koine Greek but my understanding is that the word usually translated as “thief” is more like “bandit,” and it has a political connotation. Crucifixion was not normally a punishment meted out for run of the mill robbery or even murder, but generally for sedition or treason. Barabbas, who is part of the same ‘batch’ of prisoners slated for crucifixion before his pardon, is explicitly identified as being one of a group of rebels arrested for having participated in “the uprising”

The Romans can obviously want him dead for many reasons, one of which being that their handpicked puppets were whining about him. It's not like those puppets are literal puppets--they were still Jews, chosen for (among other things) their ability to lead other Jews.

If Jesus’ Jewish enemies had wanted him dead for breaking some Jewish law, they could have disposed of him on their own terms, whether through stoning or just whipping up a lynch mob. There would have been no need to get the Romans involved. The fact that he was crucified at all suggests the primary instigators of his execution were the Romans, regardless of whether or not a lot of Jews also wanted him dead (I’m sure they did) and that the main reason for his death was that he was perceived as having committed some anti-Roman act. Claiming to be the son of some obscure regional deity, or even the deity himself, was not, but claiming to be a king would have been.

Many think Matthew was written before Mark and Mark copied Matthew; others think they both copied some other Gospel.

Markan priority is about as established as anything in the field. I can’t call to mind any currently active scholar, even in the most conservative institutions, who hold that Mark is dependent on Matthew. There may be two or three. I do know there are a lot of Bible-believing, Nicene affirming, “Jesus-is-the-only-way,” even inerrantist, conservative scholars who still won’t defend Matthean priority, which IMO says something in itself.

In almost every instance of a deliberate difference between Mark and Matthew, the change is one that would make a lot of sense for Matthew to add to Mark, but none the other way around. For example, it makes a lot of sense that Matthew would add birth and resurrection narratives to Mark, which lacks them, but it’s hard to see why Mark world cut them out of Matthew.

It doesn’t make any sense that Matthew, an eyewitness, would copy most of his gospel from a second-hand source (including, again, the story of Matthew’s call, surely the most important moment of his life). Cross-checking a thing or two, sure. Copying most of it wholesale? Highly unlikely.

The internal anonymity of the gospel of Matthew is also a problem. Ancient authors rarely failed to cite firsthand knowledge of the events at hand if they had it (why would you?), but nowhere in the gospel does the author even claim eyewitness status.

John appears to be an eyewitness account,

John is the only gospel for which I think one could, in principle make an argument for eyewitness testimony.

Mark and Luke are based on eyewitness accounts

I doubt it, primarily for the reason that neither bothers to cite the eyewitnesses they consulted by name, which there would be little reason not to do. There are also significant and (in my view) irreconcilable differences in the narratives, particularly in the resurrection narratives, the most important part of the story, which precludes them from being accurate and mostly reliable accounts of historical events.

Matthew appears to be an eyewitness account.

I doubt it, for the reasons above.

First century Palestine is not especially well-recorded, but even so a number of rebel leaders are known (Judas the Galilean and his sons, Simon son of Giora, Theudas, “The Egyptian,”). All of them were killed by the Romans, though they weren’t all crucified.

We know Jesus was executed for insurrection due to the Bible, which is also what tells us that this was just a legal pretext. Guessing at what you think the most likely alternate hypothesis is--it's common knowledge that Jesus was executed for insurrection, but the authors of the Bible constructed an alternate story where that was just a legal pretext? I find this highly unlikely--the Bible basically says nothing at all about independence from the Romans. I think anyone likely to know Jesus was executed for insurrection, and need an explanation for that, would also have some inkling that he actually was a rebel if that was what he was.

Also, all of those people actually ran rebellions, complete with military action. I really don't think they're in the same reference class as Jesus, barring totally baseless conjecture.

If Jesus’ Jewish enemies had wanted him dead for breaking some Jewish law, they could have disposed of him on their own terms, whether through stoning or just whipping up a lynch mob. There would have been no need to get the Romans involved. The fact that he was crucified at all suggests the primary instigators of his execution were the Romans, regardless of whether or not a lot of Jews also wanted him dead (I’m sure they did) and that the main reason for his death was that he was perceived as having committed some anti-Roman act. Claiming to be the son of some obscure regional deity, or even the deity himself, was not, but claiming to be a king would have been.

The Bible says they were worried about the response from the people. They did have to maintain power after all, which means maintaining popular support.

It also does mention a few lynch mobs which Jesus manages to escape from, such as in Luke 4:28-30. Since this actually did happen, by your logic, Jesus' Jewish enemies did want him dead.

They couldn't stone him--capital punishment was restricted to the Romans.

I doubt it, primarily for the reason that neither bothers to cite the eyewitnesses they consulted by name, which there would be little reason not to do. There are also significant and (in my view) irreconcilable differences in the narratives, particularly in the resurrection narratives, the most important part of the story, which precludes them from being accurate and mostly reliable accounts of historical events.

This is early Christianity, citing someone by name would mean threatening their life. I don't think irreconcilable differences are incompatible with eyewitness accounts--these were written possibly decades after the fact and people may simply misremember the details. Eyewitness accounts are not infallible of course, especially back when mass hysteria was more of a thing.

I strongly disagree that irreconcilable differences between the accounts "[preclude] them from being accurate and mostly reliable accounts of historical events." At worst this means they cannot both be accurate accounts.

As far as the rest, what you say sounds perfectly logical. I can't trust it though, because when you talk about stuff I know anything about it seems obviously wrong to me. Clearly I have a lot to learn though.

More comments

The two crucified next to Jesus were thieves according to the Bible; do you have some other source of information on that?

Metatron did a video about the arrest of Christ, looking at the 'original' Greek text of the bible. Very interesting look on the matter, and going by the various gospels, it's heavily implied if not out-right stated that Jesus was crucified as an insurrectionist/rebel, alongside the other two.

The Romans can obviously want him dead for many reasons, one of which being that their handpicked puppets were whining about him.

This I would disagree on. My interpretation of the trial of Jesus by Pontius Pilate is very much a case where Pilate is having to deal with politically charged Pharisees hell-bent on seeing Jesus killed due to his teachings. Going by the Gospel, Jesus literally argued his case with Pilate so well that Pilate was begging the Pharisees to allow Pilate to declare Jesus guilty, so much so that he offered them up the choice between Jesus and a man accused of murder.

And we know who they picked.

Metatron did a video about the arrest of Christ, looking at the 'original' Greek text of the bible. Very interesting look on the matter, and going by the various gospels, it's heavily implied if not out-right stated that Jesus was crucified as an insurrectionist/rebel, alongside the other two.

Right I was already aware of this, that's the legal pretext I was talking about. If you're talking about WHY he was executed, I think it makes the most sense to talk about the proximate cause, i.e. the reason he was executed when others in the same reference class were not. Many others who were about equally anti-Roman were not executed. He was executed, not for insurrectionist beliefs, but for claiming to be the Son of God, which earned him the enmity of the Jewish leaders, who created the legal pretext of insurrection in order to execute him.

Interesting that the other two were also possibly executed as insurrectionists. Honestly not the sort of thing that is very significant to me, so I won't be looking into it too much, but I wish that kind of info was easier to find.

This I would disagree on. My interpretation of the trial of Jesus by Pontius Pilate is very much a case where Pilate is having to deal with politically charged Pharisees hell-bent on seeing Jesus killed due to his teachings.

I think I'm missing something here; this sounds like you're agreeing with me. The Pharisees can exert some pressure on the Romans to execute specific people.

Going by the Gospel, Jesus literally argued his case with Pilate so well that Pilate was begging the Pharisees to allow Pilate to declare Jesus guilty, so much so that he offered them up the choice between Jesus and a man accused of murder.

And we know who they picked.

Did you miss a word? Pilate wanted to declare Jesus innocent.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology.

It has much more of a track record of encouraging adaptive behavior and institutions though.

I mean yeah old things have more track record than new things?

That said, trans ideology has gotten me a lot of good youtube content and podcasts in only about 15 years, at that age Christianity hadn't produced much more than a single carpenter in Galilee.

I'd say trans ideology has a lead in the Time Trial rules. Of course it has a long way to go.

(and, more seriously, lots of non-Christian places have had adaptive behaviors and institutions, so attributing those things to Christianity just because they happened in Christian nations is a nontrivial claim)

It’s actually extremely plausible that Christianity is the main reason western Europe and not other high-IQ regions took off. Christian ‘lifestyle rules’- monogamous, free choice exogamy in particular, but also monasticism- contribute meaningfully to modernizing behavior and you will note that East Asian societies attempting to modernize by force imposed monogamous exogamy.

How much of that came from Christianity itself and how much came from the Roman Imperial substrate it grew in? Rome is uniquely the source of a lot of Western legal traditions, democracy itself is Greek and republics are Roman. I don’t know but I doubt a place as cosmopolitan as the Roman Empire was inbred. Even after Christianity came to dominate Greek and Roman Philosophy were taught in schools. I think Christian apologists tend to overestimate the influence Christian ideas had on making society what it eventually became mostly by portraying the Romans as idiotic barbarians who were completely backwards.

Having read a lot of the philosophy they produced, the Romans were a sophisticated civilization that believed in virtue and reason and that ideally laws would serve the public good. The Stoics are halfway to being Buddhists and there was a strong sense of duty and helping your fellow man. They were nearly modern in their thinking, and very pragmatic.

The one thing Christianity brought that didn’t exist before was Missionaries. They’re the first religion that had as a major tenet to convert the world and that if you weren’t specifically a Christian (and an orthodox one at that) you were damned to eternal hellfire. The Judaism that Christianity grew from wasn’t missionary, and still isn’t. They believe that their religion is for them and that others are not expected to become Jews. Buddhism sees itself as one choice among many. Only Christianity and Islam really push the idea that if you don’t become part of the religion, you’re damned to hellfire. This gives a lot of push to recruit, and conversion of the Indians was a driver to get people to the new world. And since the west developed the mindset of “our way is correct, and everyone should adopt it” you can create more westerners by conversion to our ideas.

Sure, lots of scholasticism is based in greco-roman intellectualism. That part's true. But universities specifically grew out of church-run schools of the sort that Greece and Rome didn't have. Stoicism in particular had a few proto-enlightenment ideas but was actually suppressed by Christianity; Christian metaphysics and philosophy is mostly Aristotelian.

Now as far as marriage customs, Roman marriages(monogamous, limitations on domestic violence, exogamous) do look recognizably more Christian than other ancient marriage laws- including Ancient Greek marriages- especially in manu marriages. But there's some striking differences; the Roman concept of marriage takes for granted that divorce for a better deal was a common occurrence used by both parties, remarriage was mandatory, the bride didn't have to consent and was often betrothed years ahead of the actual marriage for physical reasons, and a married couple was part of and under the legal control of the groom's father's household rather than being legally independent. Now in some ways Christian marriages might have looked notably morally strict/reactionary with a few eccentricities to educated Romans- the harsh restriction on divorce and short betrothals, for example- a bit like how Mormons are seen today, but classical Rome was simply not a society which practiced those things even as a relic, any more than calling cards are part of courtship today.

Did Christianity have a better record after ~40 years of existence?

Honestly, does this matter? If it takes 1000 years for a belief system to mature enough to perform well, then that's even more reason to stick to established systems.

I wonder what a dozen intelligent AGPs would have been able to make out of trans ideology if bound by a common Church and actual vigorous oppression. Even stuff like this is fairly compelling, in a demonic sense. And I probably know a dozen online characters who could do better…

Well they’d probably just do what smart AGP who want to push the cause among skeptical people already do (as you’ve noted) which is to claim it explicitly as transhumanism rather than a sexual fetish. And from transhumanism, presumably, one can fashion some kind of quality millenarian religious ideology.

In 70 AD Christianity was certainly led by people trying to encourage adaptive behavior, that's basically the plot of the Pauline letters.

Pretty sure even at the beginning it was encouraging people to get married, and start families, and avoid various forms of hedonism, so yes?

I thought it was very explicitly 'leave your families and follow me' at that point?

After ~40 years of existence?

I think that was supposed to be in his mid 30s, so, pretty close? A biblical scholar might have more info.

I wasn't aware he proselytized right out of the cradle.

More comments

That's highly dependent on how people interpreted it. A fair few people castrated themselves, and more went into the desert to pursue lives of extreme asceticism. Remember that early Christians were like, a millenarian cult that believed that Jesus would be back in a few decades... Then a few centuries...

If you just take the Pauline letters as the orthodoxy in the early Church, which it was and still is, there's virtually nothing disagreeable (modern progressivism notwithstanding)

The weird apocalyptic stuff coexisted with more prosocial messages (Paul allows for marriage for those who can't be celibate, attacks the use of prostitutes).

There is a legitimate question of when they fully got it out of their systems. 40 years is...tight. The Gospels fit around that time and they have prosocial messages and hints of anti-family stuff.

By the standards of the age, it's not really prosocial at all, which is why the Romans hated it so much and tried to suppress it. I think it ended up being more prosocial and Christian Europe was in some ways morally better than the Roman Empire, but someone walking around in 100AD probably would have looked at these weirdos celebrating a guy that got horribly tortured to death, living lives of asceticism in the desert, rejecting all of the dozens of sects and cults that existed mostly harmoniously in the Roman Empire, rejecting the entirely proper worship of military power and violence in favour of humility and peace, and they probably would have reached a fairly similar conclusion to a modern conservative looking at trans people - 'these people are freaks and a threat to our society'. Tell me, when the time comes for war against the Parthians, who's going to get the job done? A bunch of flaccid cheek-turning monks, or our red-blooded Jupiter-worshippers? If we don't make our ritual sacrifices, who's going to guarantee us victory in war and calm seas in travel? If this God of Jesus is so powerful, why didn't he protect him? I'll put my faith in whoever the Senate declared a God last week, thanks.

If this God of Jesus is so powerful, why didn't he protect him? I'll put my faith in whoever the Senate declared a God last week, thanks.

The Senate deified Julius Caesar. Rome's track record of having gods powerful enough to protect themselves from their eventual killers (who would then go on to declare them gods) isn't exactly stellar.

Even contemporary pagans remarked on the exemplary sexual ethics of the early Christians.

If Christianity is not true then I don't care about what kind of record it has at encouraging adaptive behavior and institutions. I don't want to build society on a bedrock of delusions.

I don't want to build society on a bedrock of delusions.

Neither do I, yet I note that much that replaced Christianity as social bedrock has been quite explicitly delusional. Secular Materialism talked a good game, and then when people actually committed to it, they went utterly mad. Meanwhile, us Christians continue to chug along, succeeding by the Materialists' standards as well as our own.

Some variants of secular materialism went utterly mad. Stalinism, for example, or the Khmer Rouge. But Western society as a whole is not mad, at least not by the standards of the typical society throughout history, and it is chugging along just fine for the most part.

Okay, I was inclined to be snarky, but if this is your basic problem with it, then I have to respect that. I too much prefer "is it true or not?" than "is it prosocial or not, even if it's a heap of bullshit?"

An honest atheist is a more worthy opponent than all the patronising "of course it's dumb as a description of reality but if you look as it as early sociology..." rationalisations.

If Christianity is not true then I don't care about what kind of record it has at encouraging adaptive behavior and institutions.

That is a value judgment (arguably a very Christian one) you're entitled to make. It's not just a fact.

I don't want to build society on a bedrock of delusions.

I'd prefer a non-deluded, rational secular humanism where we dispense with all superstitions and life is improved in every way by it, as was promised to me by Dawkins and Harris (PBUT) at a formative point in my teens.

But I'm no longer certain that truth and value are the same (especially when it comes to an individual life). And I'm not sure that option is available. What I see in that clip are dueling "delusions", except one has a longer track record of encouraging kids and pro-social behavior.

What I see in that clip are dueling "delusions", except one has a longer track record of encouraging kids and pro-social behavior.

Humanity is not stuck in the ridiculous position of having to choose between the rock of trans-ideology and the hard place of Christianity. Choosing these two specific species of insanity is eliding the fact there are plenty of less insane alternatives.

It's true that there are lots of society-wide ideologies to choose from with staying power, but none of them are liberal rationalism.

Name a less insane society organizing religion then.

We know what the cult of reason begets, we tried that one pretty thoroughly since 1789. Positivism turned out a lot more insane than Abrahamism.

You're not going to get out of the need for a metaphysics. Better men than you have tried and they all failed. Religion is, for better or worse, not optional. The very rise of the Woke is proof of it.

If you’re looking for alternatives, I’d point to Buddhism, Confucianism, and possibly Zarathustrianism. They all have decent track records of producing high civilizations.

Name a less insane society organizing religion then.

I deny the need for religion in the first place. Or if there's a "need" for it in the psyche of the average human, poor thing, it needs to be excised, not fed.

Religion is, for better or worse, not optional. The very rise of the Woke is proof of it.

I obviously disagree, even if Wokism has plenty of traits of religion.

I simply can't think of any society throughout the history of man that has lacked a religion, in the sense of a shared metaphysics.

It seems to me you're arguing for something that's categorically impossible, so please explain.

More comments

Your use of that metaphor is telling, we need hard objects to cling to, we need something to serve as an epistemological bedrock. Something is going to be unquestionable in whatever worldview we eventually settle on, and so far us/the secularists haven’t done a good job building something on top of the bedrock of rational observation.

Who's "we", white man? Jokes aside, I am personally entirely content with having my subjective goals and desires be the bedrock on which I build my existence. I don't aspire for more because it's not possible to have an "objective" morality or foundation in the first place.

What policy preferences or cultural peccadilos a society has doesn't particularly matter to me, as long as the central tenets don't violate our best understanding of the laws of physics, as Christianity does, or biology, as Wokism is guilty of.

I am personally entirely content with having my subjective goals and desires be the bedrock on which I build my existence

The problems crop up when someone else wants their subjective goals and desires to be fulfilled, and you are standing in their way. How does society's institutions satisfy you both? If they can't, who wins? That's where we get the Progressive Stack. On what do we base 'this is how we run things so that as a whole we can muddle along'? Great, we've settled the law of gravitational attraction, but how does that apply to deciding if Sparklina-formerly-Bob can now take your stuff because xe is the mostest oppressed and you owe xer, cis scum?

More comments

No, it's going to be some flavor of insanity because it's purity spirals all the way down. The so-called less insane alternatives are just stepping stones between there and here.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology. Believing that a certain man 2000 years ago was the son of god and rose from the dead is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as believing that a man can become a woman by calling himself a woman and doing surgeries.

In theory yes, in practice no. Your parents dragging you as child to church for dunking in cold water or to gender clinic for gender affirming treatment is one big difference.

But many people here on The Motte give Christianity a pass because it's really old and really popular and so it seems "normal", because they like its cultural/political connotations, and probably in some cases because they were raised Christian.

Because Christianity is no big issue here, because only arguments for Christianity usually presented here are: "it is ancient" "it is our tradition" "churches are beautiful" "church music is inspiring" "if you are lonely, you will find friends in church" "you must believe in something, why not Jesus" etc...

If poster, or group of posters tried to preach, evangelize and missionize here in noughties hardcore style, if they came and argued for literal existence of God, literal truth of the Bible and literal bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, they would not be given any "pass", they would face strong opposition and generated lots of interesting discussions full of heat and light. Anyone who does not remember the great Atheist-Christian war of the noughties, missed internet at its best.

they came and argued for literal existence of God, literal truth of the Bible and literal bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ

It might surprise you that (as far as I know, at least) there are several regular users who do believe this, largely or entirely, and discuss it regularly. They are generally pretty welcome.

Have any of us ever argued for the literal truth of the first 11 chapters of Genesis? I believe I have made posts about the theory of mind of literalist YEC's, and that we have a few posters who will point out that it doesn't hurt anyone in practice to have a large percentage of the population believe it, and that that is more or less the closest this forum has seen.

Posters do come and argue for literal existence of God.

There were those who made themselves eunuchs for Christ. Not really that popular any more, for some reason.

Okay, the context for that quote is Jesus saying "Divorce is a no-no"; Matthew 19:

10 The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” 11 But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. 12 For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

Now, who or what were the "eunuchs who have made themselves so for the sake of the kingdom"? Because this is during the ministry of Christ when He is still alive, and before Christianity became differentiated from Judaism. So does He mean literal 'guys who chopped off their balls' or 'guys who are living celibate lives without marriage or sex so they won't be distracted from the mission'?

I don't think I've ever seen exegesis of this passage, and I should go look it up. Off the top of my head, the only case of an early Christian doing literal castration was Origen, and he's considered A Bit Odd.

Though seemingly there were pro- and anti- sides on this!

Justin Martyr, First Apology, AD 155-157:

Chapter 29. Continence of Christians And again [we fear to expose children], lest some of them be not picked up, but die, and we become murderers. But whether we marry, it is only that we may bring up children; or whether we decline marriage, we live continently. And that you may understand that promiscuous intercourse is not one of our mysteries, one of our number a short time ago presented to Felix the governor in Alexandria a petition, craving that permission might be given to a surgeon to make him an eunuch. For the surgeons there said that they were forbidden to do this without the permission of the governor. And when Felix absolutely refused to sign such a permission, the youth remained single, and was satisfied with his own approving conscience, and the approval of those who thought as he did. And it is not out of place, we think, to mention here Antinous, who was alive but lately, and whom all were prompt, through fear, to worship as a god, though they knew both who he was and what was his origin.

But by the fourth century, there was a problem; seemingly an ascetical cult which practiced castration had grown up and become influential:

Two centuries later Basil of Ancyra devoted several sections of his treatise On the True Integrity of Virginity (ca. 336-58) to the same practice. Unlike Justin, however, Basil hardly considers this evidence of a man's continence: on the contrary, those who "perversely" castrate themselves "by this very deed make a declaration of their own licentiousness".

So does He mean literal 'guys who chopped off their balls' or 'guys who are living celibate lives without marriage or sex so they won't be distracted from the mission'?

My understanding is that he meant the former, since the language they were speaking definitely distinguished between the two. Indeed, in context it makes no sense. Why would he say 'eunuchs made by men' (clearly meaning castrated men) only to immediately say 'eunuchs by choice', only this time using the word metaphorically and not literally?

Well, I find the distinction interesting because if you're volunteering to have your balls chopped off, you are still being made a eunuch by men. Now, there is indeed the difference between "castrated as a child/taken as a prisoner or slave and castrated", and "volunteered to be castrated", I recognise that, but there is also some possibility of "voluntarily abstaining from sex, by choice, as if one is a eunuch".

The entire discussion is in the context of marriage, and how it's hard to abstain from sex, which is why those who do so by choice do it "for the sake of the kingdom".

You might consider that you don't have a very solid grasp on what Christianity is, if that's your definition.

a certain man 2000 years ago was the son of god and rose from the dead

This is also my understanding of Christianity. What do you understand it to be?

What is your definition? The one I am using is part of the Nicene Creed.

Old = worked for 2k years as civilization exploded.

Ancient Greece and Rome did fine without Christianity and were recognizably Western and civilized to modern observers, compared with Early Modern Europe. Trade extremely violent gladiatorial games for extremely violent religious wars, slavery for serfdom...

Astrology worked at least two millenia more, and all modern problems began when arrogant modern "science" rejected ancient wisdom of the stars. Good that modern people are RETVRNING to tradition.

Worked is not merely debatable, it is debated even among Christians to this day. It isn't very hard at all to point at times when it did not in fact work, and caused much grief to both its adherents and victims.

Islam is in dire straits and has been for a while now. So people often wish for a singular Caliph to show up and just wave a wand and bring it to some reconciliation with modernity.

On the other hand...

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!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats