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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.
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.
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.
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