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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   4733 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 24, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Does anyone know of any smart, young(ish) Christian thinkers with interesting perspectives? Been listening the This Cultural Moment, about being Christian in a post-Christian world. It's excellent, but I'm having trouble finding more.

How do the few motte Christians manage their faith? It's something I really struggle with. I had a religious experience where everything clicked, but my brain is not good at this sort of faith and I inevitably end up in doubt again. I hate it.

The way I manage my faith and handle creeping doubt is two-fold. Some doubts require both solutions, some only require one.

  • "I could not have come to faith without God overriding my sin nature through grace and giving me a true free will choice to be saved. It would be perverse if He then would not extend the same grace to keep me in faith. God cannot lie, is not perverse and torturous, and it cost Him too much, too dearly, to buy me in the first place, therefore He will keep me in faith, sealed by the Holy Spirit, as He promised." Taking this as axiomatic helps me primarily with doubts which sneak up and try to tell me I've accidentally logically proven to myself God can't be real. (The section of HPMOR which shows Draco the genetic origin of magic is a cognitohazard for Christians. This is my antihazard, my Helmet Of Salvation, keeping me safe from such headshots.)
  • Taking each doubt one at a time, and ignoring atheist Gish gallops because I can assume they're lists the person found somewhere instead of generating themselves through logic and research. (Yes, I notice the irony.) For example, recognizing that a specific doubt/"disproof" came from reading someone else's solution to a theological cognitive dissonance I never knew existed until I saw their solution to it. Another one: looking for what is not said and what is assumed, such as assuming God is subject to time/sequence instead of its creator.

A lot of doubts were simply and cleanly handled by J.B. Phillips in his masterwork "Your God Is Too Small" (PDF link), and it's a book I return to less often than I'd like.

I was also recommended this series of classes on Faith And Reason, taught at a church in my city, and the teacher uploaded the worksheets for each class under Resources on each video. It's 68 addictive hours of practical theology and apologetics, and then he followed it up with another 30+ hours of Influencing and Engaging The Culture. A hundred hours of the most clean and incisive binge-worthy theology I've ever heard. (The class attendees are red-tribe in their responses, but the teacher is grey-tribe.)

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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.


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