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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28140 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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Disincentivizing low-level antisocial behavior

There's a recent reddit post about someone, who contextually sounds like a woman in her 20s or 30s, living in an apartment complex and paying for a reserved parking spot. According to her, some guy has repeated parked his car in her spot, and she finally wrote a polite note and tucked under the wipers asking him to not park in the reserved spot. Minutes later, when she's inside her unit, the guy comes to her door and beats and kicks on it, and then leaves a note that says don't touch his car.

I'm sure billions such peccadillos take place every day around the world. I'd guess 95+% of these don't amount to anything consequential, and only result in hurt feelings, and that in turn explains to a large extent why they keep on happening, because it's unserious enough to amount to any consequences. People respond to incentives, and if you don't disincentivize peccadillos, well, they keep multiplying.

In this specific case, the reddit thread mostly has people suggesting she call the apartment complex to tow the car next time this happens, and to file a complaint so there is a record of potential violence and intimidation. Another upvoted comment says to put up a camera near her car so she'd know if he retaliates, maybe by keying her car or something.

Here's the thing, all this sounds like a major headache for the poor woman. It sounds like a major headache for a man who has a life he values, too. Most apartment complex reserved spots merely mean convenience, and if yours is stolen, you can just park in an unreserved spot and walk a few more feet. Inconvenient, and perhaps infuriating, but if the alternative is stressing over an angry man beating on your door or keying your car, I mean, is it really rational to stand your ground? If she were my daughter, I think my system-level advice would be to try to escape that environment entirely, which might mean moving to a safer city/town, or paying more to go to a higher end apartment complex, etc.

There was a post high up on reddit featuring a clip from Jack Reacher season 2's opening, where a man deduces that a woman in front of him at the ATM is being held hostage by a carjacker. For extra morality simplification in case the audience is thinking too hard, her kid is in the car too. The hero then walks over, smashes the window, and beats the shit out of the carjacker. Very cathartic, and the reddit post is titled as something like this is every guy's fantasy.

Well, this is very dramatic, but I'd rather wish more lower-level heroics took place. Instead of beating up a carjacker to save a child, can we have a hero who beats on the door of the reserved parking spot thief and leave a note that says to never intimidate the poor woman ever again?

My point is this: society has systems in place to disincentivize felonies, and to a lesser extent, misdemeanors. We don't end up with too many serial killers because it's so egregious. We suffer misdemeanors, especially in blue cities, because it's tolerable. We breathe in peccadillos because no one can be bothered to do anything about it. And that seems incredibly inefficient and unjust.

Because it's almost never worth it to be the hero to enforce low level rule breakers. Ah, some "teens" are acting obnoxious on public transit? What are you gonna do, speak up? What if they stab you? What if some activist records you, edits the video to make you seem suspect, and gets you fired? In what universe can the rational incentives ever be right for an individual who's not a superhero to intervene? The problem is that once everyone acts rationally, the low level rule breakers take over public spaces, and everyone is worse off. And the victims won't be the upper class or middle class intellectuals, but working class women, children, seniors, and any man who doesn't want to escalate at every turn, and also can't afford to pay to leave the failed environment.

The formal legal system is useless here. The guy's sticky note on the poor woman doesn't directly threaten violence. But she's now strongly disincentivized to escalate because there is an implication of retaliation. All the guy has to do is to come across as a little unhinged, and a little willing to throw his life away, and every rational man or woman backs off, and rightly so. This strategy works brilliantly in a society that's just safe enough--if the apartment is known to have multiple unhinged individuals, each unhinged individual may think twice about beating on the wrong door. But if everyone else is a law abiding citizen, well, it's free real estate!

How are you supposed to prosecute this? Cops and DAs have bigger fish to fry, and most apartment complexes aren't typically managed by brilliant problem solvers who go out of their way to attend to residents' needs. All I can do is to send thoughts and prayers to the poor lady.

I can think of three divergent environments that manage this problem.

  1. Chinese surveillance / social credit state. Use technology and broad public support to directly manage against low level offenses.
  2. Japanese homogeneity. Stop outsiders and troublemakers from entering society. Then in this cohesive society, everyone pitches in to punish low level offenses without the additional complication of being accused of discrimination.
  3. Semi-failed state where the stakes are high for low level offenders themselves. Some guy parks in your spot? Shoot up his car windows. No legal consequence will come because that's considered a misdemeanor here. Perhaps things escalate, but perhaps not, but at least he won't park in your spot again.

Surely a rich society has a fourth option?

Society already offers a solution if the woman lives in a castle doctrine state to the problem of someone trying to beat down a door - she simply has to exercise it.

I think there's a difference between kicking a door out of anger to get someone's attention - what this guy did - and actually trying to break it down? I don't think the former is a situation allowing for self-defense shootings today, and it probably isn't something you want escalating to homicide, especially since some of the people evaluating when to shoot under the new standard will be the kind of person who would kick that door in the first place.

I might be wrong, but as I recall the castle doctrine doesn't typically apply beyond the threshold A man in the common hallway might be beyond it.

YMMV, IANAL, please don't take legal advice from the internet.

if the woman lives in a castle doctrine state

Sounds like a big if. An lot of people don't live in castle doctrine states. And while on a societal level this could be fixed by adding this to more states, that's not super realistic for an individual person in this situation. An individual solution would be to move to a castle doctrine state, but that has some pretty high costs depending on how their social circles, family, and careers are structured.

Another valid solution is state sanctioned "beating the shit out of bad human beings until there is no more shitty behaviour left in them". This is surprisingly effective at getting those who are immune to reason to see sense. Operant conditioning works just as well on humans as it does on lower animals.

Six lashes for his rude behaviour followed by a solemn promise that he's going to get another sixty lashes if anything untoward was to happen to the woman afterwards would set him straight very quickly.

sixty lashes

You wanna kill him or what? You know the lashes are in the range of like 5-12 ish.

You don't give the sixty lashes all in one row. Six lashes every Friday until the sentence is discharged, and he is kept in prison until that happens.

I can see this working against most offenses. But sure are we that the bottom deciles of undesirables won't just take the beatings as a badge of honor?

Also, this still requires the state to know about the offenses, necessitating cameras everywhere, even if privacy-respecting like scott's raikoth. OP's "Chinese surveillance / social credit state. Use technology and broad public support to directly manage against low level offenses.". And when you have that technology, it seems easier to manage said offenses with 'denial of access to services', rather than direct punishment, and I'm not sure punishment is even more effective for most cases.

Besides the lashing part, this solution requires fairly significant efforts at distinguishing (at reasonable accuracy) who is the bad human being in each instance. Given that the rules are not very complicated, it becomes a lot of factual investigation into tiresome details. Did he really park there? Is she just made he dumped her friend harshly? Did he really "bang and yell" or did he politely explain that he was in a rush.

Easy to adjudicate in a single instance, but really banal at scale. And even worse, whoever you empower to do this dumb job will themselves be tempted (or at the very least, power attracts the corrupt). Who's gonna enforce against them.

I guess this just slides down to solution (1) and just make it easy and legible for all by pulling the cameras of all the parking lots and hallways.

Unironically normalize beating up thieves and pickpockets. In India (and your corner of this shitty subcontinent), the cops won't give a shit if you turn in a robber with a few broken bones. Saves them the trouble. Ensures justice is swiftly and efficiently delivered. It's fun for the whole neighborhood.

Hence why, despite being so goddamn poor, we don't have the same level of flagrant antisocial or low level criminal behavior as some more colorful parts of the West.

Corporal punishment should be brought back anyway. I'd rather take a dozen lashes than a month in jail, and it dissuades criminals with low time preferences better, while being less expensive for the taxpayer.

Remind me, how common are acid attacks in that corner? Because that type of antisocial assault is something the subcontinent is infamous for. Not interested in starting the "if I'm getting beat up by the townies anyway, let's give them a real reason for it" ball rolling.

how common are acid attacks in that corner

Extremely rare. Just becuase the west points to them whenever they happen and uses them as a sign of how they are "oh so much better and safer" than us doesn't mean they happen with any regular frequency.

Would it surprise you if I were to say my home city is safer for women to walk around alone at night than London?

I do not know anyone who has been acid attacked, or anyone who knows anyone who has been acid attacked.

It's not that they don't happen, but it's a rarity and found more in honor-cultureish parts of the country than something you need to wear alkaline sunscreen to guard against.

In other words, a non-issue to the average Indian, no matter how it might get signal boosted.

Hence why, despite being so goddamn poor, we don't have the same level of flagrant antisocial or low level criminal behavior as some more colorful parts of the West.

Reddit could have fooled me. The way they portray it, it's like an episode of Star Trek and the gang is visiting that world with the rape gangs.

India is a normal country. Like it's obviously Third World, but it's not like middle class and UMC people get chased down by rape gangs and gored by cattle.

I wouldn't even call it unsafe. The rate of violent crime is probably nothing to worry about, and the troubles faced by Western visitors are the same kind as anyone considered an easy mark by poor and avaricious locals.

The country has problems, but Jesus Christ it's not that bad haha. The primary problems are poverty, corruption, a conservative society, and general dirtiness, but it's not unsafe by any sensible standard, even for women.

I guess I'm kinda shocked -- won't people with a grudge (for whatever other reason) beat people up and accuse them of theft? After all, anyone can take their victim to the cops and say whatever.

Hasn't happened where I've seen it.

There's certainly a bit of common sense and due diligence involved, hopefully there are witnesses, the stolen item is found on the thief's person, they're caught red handed and so on.

The stolen item is just ... an item. Anyone can produce a backpack and say that guy stole it and my friend here saw them.

Maybe let me ask the other Popperian question -- if it happened, how would you tell? Surely if most of the time it's truly a miscreant (undoubtedly so) then you'd be (correctly) far less likely to believe it when someone says they were mistakenly or maliciously accused.

That is to say, you may have seen it and not noticed.

The stolen item is just ... an item. Anyone can produce a backpack and say that guy stole it and my friend here saw them.

A backpack seems like an almost uniquely bad example. You just separate the parties and ask each a few questions about its contents and it's easy to figure out which one it belongs to.

One person is gonna know everything in and say the other guy stole it. He is going to say this whether or not the other guy actually did steal it.

The other guy said he's never seen the backpack before in his life and never stole it. Of course, he is going to say this whether or not he actually stole it.

I was envisioning a scenario where one person has it and the other says they stole it. But even in a scenario where there isn't a clear current possessor like this, in any such situation I've been even tangentially involved in, laying blame is a distant third on the priority list, behind getting it to the rightful owner and keeping the overall peace.

Frankly you're also overestimating the intelligence and planning of most people who do stuff like stealing backpacks. In my area, frankly, you're more likely to get drug-addled confusion about what's wrong with walking off with someone's backpack and why the fact that they don't own it is even relevant.

More comments

We have strong social networks where reputation matters a lot. If you with minimal proof accuse someone of theft that everyone knows to be a good upstanding citizen who wouldn't do such a thing then you'll be ignored completely, and if you already beat them up and they can make a convincing case they weren't in the wrong you run the risk of getting beat up even harder by those who have an interest in maintaining these social networks (basically everyone, because these networks are all we have protecting us against anarchy). And you get ostracised from polite society too and lose a ton of social standing, which you can argue matters more than losing your entire net worth in a society like ours.

Plus there's the usual social standing differences that have to be taken into account. You can never get away with beating up someone at a higher (or even the same, most of the time) social station than you, even if you really dislike them and they deserve it. E.g. if you are a low level factory worker you'd never be able to beat up a manager at a respectable company on your own, even if they were in the wrong (though why such a manager would be stealing from the house of a factory worker I have no idea, which again gives the manager an alibi and makes me more inclined to take his side if he was so accused). You'd have to build a case against them by banding together with other low level factory workers and getting someone even higher than the manager to notice the injustice and take action.

This does run the risk of the higher classes being able to tyrannize the lower classes willy nilly, which can sometimes be a problem. However on net in a completely free society the lower classes tyrannize the higher classes a lot more than the reverse (by virtue of their greater numbers and generally being shittier human beings) so this state of affairs is good for you even if you are at a middling station: the small additional risk that someone high up with unjustly bring the boot down on you is well worth the very real reduction in the probability you'll have a bad encounter with a low level scumbag, or at least it's worth it to give you the tools to deel with the scumbag. The only people who really lose out in this situation are the true lowlifes (and the very unlucky) but they deserve everything coming to them anyways.

This sounds like the perfect anarcho-tyranny.

Sub-state organization. Possibly sub-legal. Vigilance committees, neighborhood watch but tooled up. You saw this a lot in Hispanic neighborhoods during BLM. The Roof Koreans during the RK riots. You have to organize and strategize to defeat both retaliation and arrest.

The current failure is only of social pride and excessive legalism. People near the edge of the law cling to it all the more. Get realistic, look at your sub-legal options.

Go the other way. Find a group you won't snitch on. Teach each other, train each other, police each other. Street crims ain't shit to three guys who know what they're doing.

You know what? I might have a story for this.

People near the edge of the law cling to it all the more.

Because once you've crossed that edge you can't cross back. You can be a white-collar professional, allowed into the good jobs and (maybe) the good clubs and parties, but to do so you have to scrupulously follow the laws which count (which include those against vigilantism). Break one of them and get caught and you're done -- your professional licenses go up in smoke, you're legally barred from various industries and (for many crimes) any jobs dealing with kids, and where you're not legally barred most companies will bar you anyway. At that point, you'll likely realize that you lack the skills to survive either in the part of the working class which accepts these things, or the precariat. So perhaps some of your former friends will cluck their tongues about the tragedy when they hear about your suicide... but most likely not even that.

The state is typically far more dangerous to those it protects than the rioters. (and I mean that in both senses).

professional licenses

Shouldn't be a thing. You should be prevented from doing a profesion only if you commit a crime to harm a customer directly.

They are a thing though; they're part of how the government keeps control of the professional classes.

And this is why people live in gater communities where they can outsource the "beat up shitty human beings" to security who stop shitty human being from entering inside in the first place, mostly made up of hardened members of the lower classes who're never going to get professional licences etc., so the security guards are fine if they beat up shit tier human beings.

Win win for free trade if you ask me.

I wrote a Dethklok-style song during the pandemic about that trend. It was cathartic to fantasize about burning those kinds of HOAs (and their contracts) to rubble.

The existence of keycard-locked and gated neighborhoods is a strong signal that most of the Americans that can afford them believe their surrounding society deserves low-trust interactions. This, in turn, earns a disgust response from me and others who cannot afford the security you buy.

strong signal that most of the Americans that can afford them believe their surrounding society deserves low-trust interactions

How does this at all possibly follow? The cart is before the horse here. People have bought into these communities because the surrounding communities are already so low-trust enough to force them into protective enclaves.

When was the last time you've heard of people making real decisions based on fiction they've read or seen? Or based on news articles from only one color of the spectrum?

If kids see a cartoon about bullies targeting people with glasses, they're less likely to wear glasses. Adults are nowhere near immune from that kind of false-positive threat modeling. They're just a lot more effective at overreacting. See: post-9/11 reactions to Arabs & Muslims, Japanese internment camps, Pizzagate, parental advisory stickers.

People can and do put the cart before the horse when making decisions on which neighborhoods to move into. It's common, and no amount of 'rational threat analysis' will change that.

People can and do put the cart before the horse when making decisions on which neighborhoods to move into. It's common, and no amount of 'rational threat analysis' will change that.

Can you elaborate on what "putting the cart before the horse" means specifically, in this context? It seems you're claiming that crime and general social dysfunction isn't that big of a deal, and so organized efforts to exclude these things from one's immediate community are misguided, apparently because they only solve the problem for themselves rather than for everyone. Is that the general idea?

...But then here you seem to be claiming that the people doing this are mistaken about how low-trust and dysfunctional the surrounding communities actually are, that they've been propagandized into a fear response that is not warranted by the situation. Is this also accurate?

...But it seems these two points contradict each other. If the security they obtain is illusory, because it's really not that bad, then why does paying more and restricting oneself to gain this illusory "security" earn "a disgust response from me and others who cannot afford the security you buy." If they don't need the security, then you and the others who can't afford it don't need it either, right?

Straightforwardly, and from direct personal experience as well as observed experience of those close to me, low-trust areas are in fact absolutely awful, and the crime and dysfunction they engender makes living a decent life far, far harder than a reasonable person should or will tolerate. The people who take positive action to exclude such crime and dysfunction from their communities are doing what they can with what they have where they are. Those who cannot enjoy such coordination could, if they wished, get the same effect through the powers of the state; not doing so is a decision that a majority of them have made and continue to make, because they consider the steps necessary unacceptable. I see no reason to consider your disgust toward the people who wall themselves off from such dysfunction legitimate in any way.

And reading your comment just makes me even more convinced about the goodness and necessity of having a gated community to live in, far away from those with fantasies like yours. First the lower classes take away the surplus we generate through taxation and spend it on themselves, showing precisely zero gratitude for what we are giving them and then they fantasize about hurting us for using what portion of the fruits of our labour we have left over to create a healthy, functioning society for ourselves.

Nothing we do inside our gated communities precludes you from creating a similar thing for yourself on the outside. It is the bad behaviour of the lower classes which led to the necessity of gated communities in the first place, and now you hate us for doing exactly what you would have probably done were you in our situation... Gated communities don't create low trust societies but rather low trust societies create the need for gated communities in the first place.

We are the ones paying for your continued existence and in return you treat us like this? I've always felt that the higher classes are fundamentally better human beings than the lower classes (and therefore if you were to turn the tables and give the current lower classes stewardship over the resources of society the world would get much worse very quickly because every single vice the common man accuses us of is present in even greater quantities amongst the lower class) but I guess it's good to get some vindication for my belief.

Are we LARPing, or just throwing speeches at each other? 🤣

Consider the following:

  1. The benefit cliffs from tax subsidies are real, and most technician jobs pay in the shadow of them. Competent contributors without a strong social network seem to get the worst of both worlds. Especially if the work is structured to have compulsory overtime to meet legal deadlines, and face-to-face socializing is rarely possible during work hours.

  2. Everyone fantasizes about violence. Some people sublimate it better than others. I appreciate your honest distaste. It's less exhausting to communicate with masks off.

You're welcome to believe we deserve our hell, as I believe you've invented one for us by relying on Internet art and thirdhand stories.

Now, this might not be the thread for it. But are you ready for some productive conversation after we've puffed our chests at each other?

Well, this is very dramatic, but I'd rather wish more lower-level heroics took place. Instead of beating up a carjacker to save a child, can we have a hero who beats on the door of the reserved parking spot thief and leave a note that says to never intimidate the poor woman ever again?

For this to happen, you'd have to stop punishing heroes when they arise. I'm reminded of that case of the guy restraining the addict on the subway who was making everyone uncomfortable. Or the numerous cases of people being prosecuted for self defence against criminals.

Point is, it's not worth it for most people to step in when chances are they'll get a harsher punishment than the criminal they apprehend.

I'm reminded of that case of the guy restraining the addict on the subway who was making everyone uncomfortable.

He killed the homeless guy. I'm sympathetic to the issue of nuisances on subways, but the right solution isn't literally killing them. From the Wikipedia page, it seems like he didn't choke the guy for less than 5 minutes. Depriving the brain of oxygen will start causing permanent damage after 1 minute, and will just about always be lethal by 5 minutes.

This could have been prevented by making it fine and legal to beat the shit out of the nuisance instead of having to restrain him. The guy would still be alive today (well unless he overdosed later, which is a very real possibility) had he gotten the shit beat out of him in that encounter rather than being restrained.

If beating the shit out of nuisances was legal, I'd be rather concerned about the amount of "Oh Officer you don't understand, he was being slightly annoying in a public space, that's why I broke two of his bones and gave him internal bleeding". Sure it's a step up from literal murder, but still very far from any ideal outcome.

I would support police having the option to whip people who commit minor crimes, like Singapore does. But only by a well trained and disciplined police force who can actually determine who deserves it, not any rando who doesn't like the look of a hobo.

As others have touched upon it's not homogeneity that drives Japan's relatively low levels of criminality, it's culture, customs, and habits.

Both the guy and the girl in the described story could be the most Ashkenazi of Jews and the guy would still be an asshole in need of an ass-whooping.

Likewise surveillance doesn't mean shit if it isn't backed by the will to do something about it, see the current state of the UK.

The missing fourth option on your list is "reject modernity and embrace tradition" not in the silly RETVRN sense peddled by gay-presenting euro-poors who self-identify as perverts on twitter, but in the understanding that maybe grandpa knew something you don't. Maybe all those backwards seeming customs that you chafed at because you're a good little liberal who believes in self-actualization and fighting the power actually serve a critical role. Maybe life is better when you make a conscious effort to say what you mean and mean what you say and refuse to tolerate anything less from those around you. Maybe "suiting up" to leave the house isn't just for you and contra liberal sensibilities, the old man (or woman) who tells the kids to "knock it off", wear a belt, watch thier language, etc... is serving a vital social function.

What if George S Patton was right about everything?

Could you make your comment a little more concrete?

Are you conjecturing the man in this story didn't respect his parents enough, and that that is the fault of liberal policy? Or that his parents didn't teach him self-control, and that is the fault of liberal policy? That this kind of aggravation happened less often in the 1950s because people went to church, and liberal policy is driving people away from Christianity?

Right now the your fourth option is vague, and it is appropriately supported with a vague appeal to some idealized past.

The fourth option is what relatively secular Asian countries have. A strong shame culture with a very explicit and detailed set of expectations on their behavior. You can have that without religion and with a fairly liberal government. They have strong social norms enforced through shaming.

If she were my daughter, I think my system-level advice would be to try to escape that environment entirely, which might mean moving to a safer city/town, or paying more to go to a higher end apartment complex, etc.

That is probably correct individual level advice, but my gut reaction is to let my Cajun side come out and show up in numbers and intimidate him right back.

And that's the thing, obviously- our society strongly disincentivizes honor-culture retaliation moreso than it does the initial offense, which benefits bad actors. If we really wanted we could set a different equilibrium where the law considers provocation a sufficient mitigating factor to reverse the equilibrium. We don't, though. It probably comes at the cost of much higher levels of assault and murder and the like. We could also set a different equilibrium where our society has a much laxer attitude towards police brutality as long as he had it coming, and gentlemen like this(who, after all, didn't commit a serious crime) could get a beating from police instead of getting arrested to be released later with no charges. The black community's collective neuroticism about police brutality probably takes this option off the table, however.

Now obviously you can't try and prosecute every asshole in the world. You have to pick a set of tradeoffs, and the tradeoff our society picked is one where assholes get a lot of leash. In places like much of Africa assholes don't get much protection from the law, because the law gives only minimal protections to anybody. In East Asia the law cracks down on assholes at the expense of the rights of the accused and general privacy rights. I don't see much of a fourth option. Maybe ancaps have a nice theoretical framework, but every time it's been tried organized crime and/or powerful clans brought us back to "places like much of Africa". I guess in theory you can have a very nice clan-based society where the state prevents actual feuds, but it seems like it's A) not very compatible with liberal individualism and B) prone to the same failure modes as that nice theoretical framework.

our society strongly disincentivizes honor-culture retaliation moreso than it does the initial offense, which benefits bad actors

This is by design. The initial offense here just isn't that bad. It can coexist with a society that has OpenAI. The problem with honor culture retaliation is it escalates and it's indifferent / symmetric with respect to who was actually "in the right" from the perspective of society's interest in preserving large-scale systems from interference. Allowing such retaliation if a court later judges you're in the right ... well, everyone thinks they're in the right in the moment.

If we really wanted we could set a different equilibrium where the law considers provocation a sufficient mitigating factor to reverse the equilibrium

The current equilibrium poorly with "you can't punish the underclass for being violent or antisocial because that's bigoted (not just racist, it's more general than that)", but everything mixes badly with that.

Part of the problem is that things in between 'honor-culture retaliation' and 'shutting up and taking it' are highly discouraged both legally and culturally.

I've often thought we should bring back the idea of an outlaw. Literally a person with no legal protections that can be dealt with as the citizenry sees fit. There should be crimes that grant you that status, like rolling coal on a pedestrian in a modded diesel truck, or listening to loud music on public transport on a boombox instead of headphones. If you choose to act outside the law for no reason other than to antagonize your fellow man, the law should not protect you.

Because it's almost never worth it to be the hero to enforce low level rule breakers. Ah, some "teens" are acting obnoxious on public transit? What are you gonna do, speak up? What if they stab you? What if some activist records you, edits the video to make you seem suspect, and gets you fired? In what universe can the rational incentives ever be right for an individual who's not a superhero to intervene? The problem is that once everyone acts rationally, the low level rule breakers take over public spaces, and everyone is worse off.

You touch on the answer just below this, but it's a cousin phenomenon to Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs: social policies that are harmless in high-IQ high-SES bubbles but disastrous when broadcast to wider society. Our elite-set public morality frowns on small rule enforcement. For those with six figure incomes and degrees from top forty universities, chances are you do antisocial things so rarely, and your peers do antisocial things so rarely, that whenever someone confronts someone about a small rule, the confronter is a petty tyrant looking for an excuse to hurt others. The enforcer of small rules becomes a much hated figure — a Mrs. Dubose yelling at children for saying 'hey' rather than 'good afternoon' or a Mr. Neck pulling rank on free-thinking kids he doesn't like, bigot that he is. To the high-IQ high-SES bubble theatre kid who grows up to write popular media, such small-minded harassment is what 'rule enforcement' is.

Shuttled from private school to Harvard to cushy marketing gigs, they never experience the zoo that unregulated low-IQ low-SES spaces become. A few might donate a year to Teach For America, and then tell horror stories to their friends, only to shut up when they sense their 'friends' don't approve of this line of thinking.

A year or two ago there was an execrable ad on TV about a black young woman paying for college by running a beauty salon in a library. She clacks nails on a desk, and the furious, nasty-looking (and, of course, white) librarian hisses SHHHH at her. A reaction shot, if I recall, shows library patrons recoiling in disapproval at this fascist imposition on a girlboss running her business. The librarian is depicted as pure villain.

Break this down. The ad takes place in a library, a space specifically delineated for quiet study. Distraction-free is the rule. The librarian is an authority figure; she has prerogative to enforce rules, and is enforcing one that benefits every library patron except our young entrepreneur. And she's "bad" because... why, exactly? Because she's enforcing small rules. That's it.

High-IQ high-SES bubbles, where members have been filtered for agreeability and conscientiousness since birth, function without the librarian. Other spaces cannot. But the people in those bubbles set the tone at the top, and they teach proper (read: destructive) values of permissiveness to the lower orders. Thus the world we see around us.

High conscientiousness bubbles don't need a low level bossman. Highly religious communities and certain firearms-centered communities do quite well with minimal lower management, despite being broadly average in IQ and SES, because they're high in conscientiousness.

The trouble is we have a major ideological tendency which objects to the concept of conscientiousness and labels it as "whiteness", and other ideological tendencies which think that's ridiculous but do nothing to promote conscientiousness per se.

I think the problem with tolerate the bad behavior is that it pretty much normalizes that behavior. And this guy has been emboldened to act like a bully and intimidate this woman because it has worked numerous time for him in the past and will likely continue to do so in the future. So my answer is that the bad behaviors are stopped by either the apartment complex owners, or the cops enforcing a fine for parking in a reserved spot.

I’m firmly in favor of broken windows approaches to social norms — if you tolerate low level breaking of norms, you’ll eventually get higher levels of norm breaking. And ideally starting young. Don’t let your kids or anyone else’s kids be rude to you, or to be rude to other people. Insist on not only minimal expectations but higher ones. Teach your kids to call adults sir, ma’am, and Mr/Mrs Last Name, and insist on being called that yourself. Don’t let them go out looking sloppy. This is what happened in the high societies of the past. People respected themselves and others because it was something that was drilled into people with a high degree of formality. You can read the etiquette books from privous eras, and while some of it is probably outdated (like having house uniforms for your servants) a lot of it would create the social norms we actually want. A society where it’s drilled into your head to not be late to the movie and not climb over people during the show is likely one where people will respect others enough to not have conversations, chew loudly, or pull out their phones. And a child who learns at five to not touch other people’s stuff and faces a couple of groundings for doing so isn’t going to take people’s stuff or park in their spaces without permission.

What we’ve done instead is create a slovenly slacker culture in which expectations are basically in the toilet. There’s no insistence on any social norms. In 1950, informal was clean blue jeans. In 2024, it’s pajama bottoms. In 1950, no kid would be allowed to talk back to an adult, in 2024, it’s normal to argue with them. And it doesn’t actually shock me that a culture that has very few social norms around showing respect for other people somehow is creating a culture of entitlement in which if you can get it or intimidate others into giving it to you, then you get yours and screw everyone else.

There was a post high up on reddit featuring a clip from Jack Reacher season 2's opening, where a man deduces that a woman in front of him at the ATM is being held hostage by a carjacker. For extra morality simplification in case the audience is thinking too hard, her kid is in the car too. The hero then walks over, smashes the window, and beats the shit out of the carjacker. Very cathartic, and the reddit post is titled as something like this is every guy's fantasy.

My fantasy is keeping myself out of trouble and to avoid injecting myself in such situations so that I can live to die another day. I rather enjoy living and having my body bereft of stab wounds and bullet holes. A random woman certainly wouldn’t reciprocate to provide free protection services if the situations were reversed.

Well, this is very dramatic, but I'd rather wish more lower-level heroics took place. Instead of beating up a carjacker to save a child, can we have a hero who beats on the door of the reserved parking spot thief and leave a note that says to never intimidate the poor woman ever again?

I’m more than down with normalizing vigilantism against antisocial behavior in the spirit of a general “fuck around and find out”edness. It should be open season for motorists to provide mostly peaceful love-taps to groups of “teens” riding their bicycles dangerously in the streets, for storeowners or third-parties to Rooftop Korean-away looting flash mobs like the compound outbreak scene in 28 Weeks Later. In the current state of affairs, this is largely restricted by Who? Whom? concerns, as a certain NYC subway marine found out the hard way.

However, I don’t like the gender-biased nature of it. Women already feel entitled to random men serving as their white-knights, meat-shields, and bodyguards; I’d prefer not to exacerbate that. If women are to be regarded as Strong Independent #GirlBosses with the rights and status of men, they can solve their own problems and fight their own battles. Fists, knives, and bullets hurt men too. I’m not a fan of Schrodinger’s feminism, where women are #GirlBosses one moment and damsels in distress the next, depending on what’s more beneficial and emotionally convenient for them.

If the Reddit woman in her 20s or 30s were instead a small man in his 20s or 30s, hardly would anyone call for a “hero” to step-up on his behalf. Beating on some hot-head’s door may result in it opening for a fist or knife fight. Who knows what might happen to your defeated body if you lose the fight. If you win, it may result in protracted legal, social, and professional troubles, especially if the hot-head is a member of a favored class. It’s also a great way to get yourself shot right through the door. You’d deserve it too for white-knighting, fucking around and finding out, when you’re not a peak human with borderline supernatural powers like Jack Reacher.

If she were my daughter, I think my system-level advice would be to try to escape that environment entirely, which might mean moving to a safer city/town, or paying more to go to a higher end apartment complex, etc.

Yes. To paraphrase Steve Sailer, the tough part of being poor in Western countries is not for lack of essentials or material goods, but rather having to live next to other poor people. And violent, low impulse control, and generally antisocial behavior is far more common among the poor.

In this specific case, the reddit thread mostly has people suggesting she call the apartment complex to tow the car next time this happens, and to file a complaint so there is a record of potential violence and intimidation. Another upvoted comment says to put up a camera near her car so she'd know if he retaliates, maybe by keying her car or something.

If moving is not an option, these are reasonable solutions for a woman (or a man, for that matter).

Chinese surveillance / social credit state. Use technology and broad public support to directly manage against low level offenses.

The cure might be worse than the disease here. The surveillance and social credit system could be readily turned against you in anarcho-tyrannic fashion.

Japanese homogeneity. Stop outsiders and troublemakers from entering society. Then in this cohesive society, everyone pitches in to punish low level offenses without the additional complication of being accused of discrimination.

Without mass deportations (or something more... drastic), the ship has already set sail on this front in the United States and Europe. Eugenics would work, but might take too long depending on what degree of eugenics is deployed, even if it somehow could be.

Semi-failed state where the stakes are high for low level offenders themselves. Some guy parks in your spot? Shoot up his car windows. No legal consequence will come because that's considered a misdemeanor here. Perhaps things escalate, but perhaps not, but at least he won't park in your spot again.

Tempting, but escalating when you’re less crazy and have more to lose than your opponent is a risky venture, to say the least.

Surely a rich society has a fourth option?

Calling for and voting in a manner for politicians, DAs, and the police to just do their jobs. For a Reddit woman in her 20s or 30s, chances are this is a leopard-eating-her-face situation.

I don’t think you need anything that dramatic. You just need to coordinate society such that people who are rude and do disrespectful things are shunned. If he’d lost friends for doing that he wouldn’t be doing it. And as long as it’s tolerated it continues to get worse. My guess is, based on observation, that this isn’t the first time he’s done that. More than likely he’s been pushing on social norms for a long time and not getting any negative results. And if we stop tolerating it, it stops.

You just need to coordinate society such that

"Just"? Pardon me, but you might as well say that to lift mount Everest you just need to push up very hard.

Hmm? My suggestion was to call for and vote for politicans, DAs, and the police to just do their jobs. Hopefully that's not considered that dramatic in ${CurrentYear}, but Cthulhu swims left...

I don’t think anything he did amounts to a crime in most jurisdictions. The DA can’t do anything if it’s not illegal to bang on a door.

Banging on a door for the purpose of threatening the occupant is absolutely a crime in most jurisdictions. (In England and Wales, it is legally an assault).

But even that isn't necessary. The point of banging on the door is to claim escalation dominance by sending a credible signal that if she escalates to calling for a tow he can counter-escalate to a beatdown. The appropriate response by the authorities is to send a cop to the guy's house to politely inform illegal parking guy that actually the Westphalian State has escalation dominance round here and that if he escalates to a beatdown the cops will counter-escalate to a jail term, felony record etc. If that threat is credible, then it doesn't need to be followed up. And if the cops tell the unfortunate lady what they have done, then she now has escalation dominance in the original dispute. This is easy police work that a rookie cop could handle.

In a place with minimally effective policing (which, for example, included 95% of the UK in the nineties and 99% of the UK in the noughties, and in the present non-ghetto neighbourhoods of most Continental European or Australian cities, and all of 1st-world Asia) a threat of a beatdown by one adult neighbour against another is empty. I haven't seen the Reddit post that the OP is referring to, so it isn't clear to me if this was a case of a place where there is no effective policing (far too much of the US because the US is, for reasons that are not clear to me as a Brit, shockingly bad at basic police work) or whether this was a case of a woman scared into submission by an empty threat (in which case someone who knew the local situation should have told her to call the cops).

Who is we?

Japanese homogeneity

It's not homogeneity that keeps the japanese in line. It's carryover from the days of samurai, when peasants would be killed on the spot for minor transgressions. Just look at singapore.

This is, if I may insert my view here, a facile read on the social structure of Japan. Violence of any sort here (outside, say, some type of budo or martial art) is simply not tolerated. Even police are trained to subdue potentially violent citizens with a minimum of physical contact. There are no samurai-type authority figures stalking the streets, and no one is alive who would have witnessed anything like what is described here.

I would suggest the relative peacefulness of Japan is a two-edged sword (and thus quite unlike the single-edged katana, if we're extending the metaphor.) You are not to be violent even when provoked, and there are very specific limits within the law when violence is acceptable (i.e. you must be in imminent physical danger, unable to flee, etc.)

Last year I assured a good friend of mine from the US who was visiting that Japan was pretty clean and that there was nearly never public violence. The first afternoon we walked out I saw a used condom in the street, and a few nights later in town a guy grabbed another dude by his shirt collar and threatened him. (Threatening guy was the usual punk, guy being threatened was a tout who had approached what I assume was punk's girlfriend, who was wearing what looked like a very frilly maid outfit with big clompy shoes.)

As for reasons for Japanese peacefulness I'd say a lot is, indeed, homogeneity of upbringing and socialization, on which I could write volumes. But won't.

As for reasons for Japanese peacefulness I'd say a lot is, indeed, homogeneity of upbringing and socialization, on which I could write volumes. But won't.

I wish people would. I find Japan and Japanese culture fascinating.

My point was disproportionate punishment for minor transgressions results in a pro-social society, not specifically violence, not homogeneity. Like recently there was that principal that lost his 130k pension because he stole $5 worth of coffee in Japan. I brought up Singapore because it is also an engineered rule-obeying society despite its obvious heterogeneity, and they mete out all sorts of "draconian" punishments. And another example is 1600s Taiwan, where the locals were observed by the Qing to be extremely Japan-like despite the mix of chinese settlers and aboriginals because it had been previously ruled for decades by a Ming warlord who would do stuff like cut peoples arms off if they chopped down certain bamboo.

That's a fair point. I will say that although legal repercussions are by no means scoffed at (That principal's dismissal surprised everyone. Notably, he immediately admitted his action) still one of the main driving forces in Japan toward making people adopt civil behavior is the normative social influence of Japanese culture itself outside any institutional order. This is instilled from childhood. There are quite a few different social fields at play here (the wider field of polite society, but also norms of teenage baseball players, cheerleaders, hiphop dancers, even goth lolis. Every group has a set of rules to which members must conform. The weight of this can be difficult to bear, of course. Typing on phone, excuse possible typos.

Sounds like you need a long-term eugenic environment to cost-efficiently correct this. The social matrix that enables this behavior is itself founded on genetics. To fix a country you must fix its people.

I don't believe this. Go to any parking lot no matter how crowded and there will be handicapped parking spots open. You don't need to purge the genepool to fix parking violations. You just need to make the problem legible to the authorities.

A panopticon society might fix the problem everywhere, but if you're talking about just a single implementation of the legibility fix then you're only resolving the surface aspect of the problem. If you simply wish for parking spaces to not get stolen, sure, it would work. If you're viewing the problem as 'bad actors use intimidation and bullying to create unfair, anti-utilitarian outcomes', then implementing the fix in one place will simply squeeze the problem out elsewhere.

Problem here is you can't blame genes as such, not if you mean "low level criminality means poor people who are poor because their genes are bad". The guy with the car is living in the same apartment complex and owns a car, so presumably he's getting the same kind of income in the same general level of job the woman has. He's not an underclass thug, he's someone who has no sense of community or the unwritten rules of society because of - well, what? I think we can take it that the traditional methods of discipline and social ostracization have gone by the board. 'Question authority' means that teachers, pastors, cops, you name it, including now parents, are no longer unquestioningly accepted.

Now it's "if the parking space is open, I take it, I don't care someone else is paying for it, this is me being smart and taking advantage of the rule-following fools. If someone touches my property, I am offended and retaliate, but I have no problem taking other people's things, including their parking spaces".

I honestly don't know the solution, it does seem to me that there's a huge gap between the assumptions under which I (early Gen X) was raised, and the way Millennials/Zoomers were raised. There's a ton of "of course this thing is bad and should not be done" assumptions that are just not in common anymore. Things like "well you don't take someone else's parking space even if it's free" is one such example.

I'd say the eugenics would be more about promoting pro-sociality. I don't think East Asia has as much trouble as the West, let alone other parts of the world, with these kinds of perennial bad actors. The OP specified two approaches that only East Asian countries have so far achieved, Japan's acceptance of insularity and its attendant low immigration and economic stagnation, and China's social credit authoritarian system. Both are quintessentially East Asian systems. You need an East Asian-style populace to even get to the point where such approaches are plausible, as otherwise you are dealing with whacky Westerners and their preferences.

In America there's plenty of underclass thugs who own cars, and he might be sharing that apartment with eg a more functional girlfriend or something. There's also plenty of normal working class people living in shittier apartments than they could technically afford.

The guy with the car is living in the same apartment complex and owns a car, so presumably he's getting the same kind of income in the same general level of job the woman has. He's not an underclass thug, he's someone who has no sense of community or the unwritten rules of society because of - well, what?

It’s not uncommon for the PMC-adjacent, or the PMC to-be, to live alongside the working class (or even the underclass), especially temporarily when they’re young. For example, graduate students with little income or net-worth, or those who work low-paying PMC jobs such as at a non-profit (more common among women than men).

As has been discussed quite a bit here, many working class men can out-earn members of the middle-class or even the lower rungs of the PMC—plumbers, policemen, electricians can very well match or out-earn teachers, librarians, back-office workers in corporations. It’s also not uncommon for working class men to have… spirited… modes of self-expression, albeit at lesser rates and severity than the underclass.

The guy, whether under or working class could also be living with a girlfriend/wife, which might mean greater household income and reduced per capita housing costs relative to the presumably solo-living Reddit woman in her 20s or 30s. He could also be living paycheck to paycheck, while she's able to save money net of living expenses.

Society has a straightforward solution for her - contact your apartment complex, they'll contact a tow company, and the tow company will happily haul the vehicle away and charge him for it. The initial warning was a kindness, his response was aggression, so the appropriate escalation is just following policy and procedure. If she genuinely thinks that the guy in question might beat or murder her, yeah, the intimidation portion of things is going to be a problem that there isn't a straightforward solution to; anti-social lunatics that are willing to throw their lives away over parking spots are indeed a difficult problem. If (and I think this is much more likely) his approach would be lower-level threats, one must bring law enforcement in on it. If something fails to work here, it's simply a lack of enforcement of existing rules. There isn't any need for a new surveillance society, just recording the lunatic banging on your door and threatening you is covered by the existing legal system.

If someone is too intimidated to take the recourse that is available, well, that certainly does suck, but there's only so much society as a whole can do for someone that isn't even willing to outsource their conflict resolution to a third-party.

But the problem is it shouldn't get to the level of "we need a third party to intervene", under a civilised world we should be "oops sorry didn't know it was your space" when he got a polite note (and the initial note should be polite, not aggressive or spouting insults), not "fuck you bitch" unless penalties are imposed.

Good God, the older I get, the more I understand original Obi-Wan Kenobi. And this clip is all that is wrong with current mores. Civility is not pretentiousness, it's living like we are not chimpanzees flinging shit at rival troupes.

If you want to keep your civilized world, you need to at least occasionally deal with those acting in an uncivilized manner. Having them is inevitable, because assholes are everywhere. Whether dealing with them is the modal experience depends on incentives -- if there are strong incentives against acting uncivilized, the assholes will either cool it or get forced out. If instead the "civilized people" decide "don't sweat the small stuff and it's all small stuff" is the proper way to act, the assholes will run roughshod over them.

To have a civilized world, however sanctions must be enforced. Sub-criminal behaviour should be matched by sub-judicial sanctions. Put a video up of how scared you were, use the camera footage of him keying your car or pounding aggressively on your door, put it on Twitter and tik-tok and the like. In the old days, he would have been sanctioned by the village giving him the cold shoulder, now in a more atomized society social media shaming is the go to. In other words, he should be cancelled. Maybe the management company will evict him when the story goes viral, or he will lose his job. Therefore disincentivizing his behaviour.

Depends if the perpetrator is a member of a left favoured group or not. If he is I think you run an even greater risk that you will be the one who ends up cancelled instead for "perpetuating oppressor dynamics/punching down" etc. etc.

Sure, there are other social dynamics as well, but the idea is still sound. And indeed as Jonathan Majors showed a woman making an accusation against a man can still bear fruit.

Of course we shouldn't, but expecting everyone to be courteous all the time is ridiculous. I also shouldn't have to lock my car, or remove valuables from plain sight, or any number of other things that I do because they are unfortunately necessary. The question here is one of remedy, the implication being that receiving justice is so involved that it's often not worth it for relatively minor inconveniences. Which can be true, since this isn't one of those cases. It's a shame that she has to call the property management company to get somebody to do something about it, but it's a phone call. The initial concern wasn't that the thing was happening but that it was too minor for the police to get involved.

The old Hobbesian/Trad-Right take would be that the sort of people who believe that "expecting everyone to be courteous all the time is ridiculous" create the environment where you need to remove valuables from plain sight because how you approach the little things informs how you approach the big things.

expecting everyone to be courteous all the time is ridiculous

Why? I was born in a house without running water, and my mother taught me not to eat in the streets as that was common and bad manners. Then something changed in society, we dumped all the old rules, and today this is what we've got: 'please don't park in my space' engenders a guy trying to kick your door down.

And all the assumptions that he must be a working-class/underclass thug? Not warranted. Middle-class people can be mannerless sons of bitches too. Don't put it all on the poor, the college boys and girls who grew up to make the new rules are the ones who brought this situation about.

If we lower our expectations to "of course asking people to behave with common courtesy in public all the time is ridiculous", then this is what we get.

I think we might be talking past each other here. I don't mean ridiculous in the sense that it's unreasonable on an individual level, I mean ridiculous in the sense that, on a societal level, expecting a world where there are no assholes is hopelessly naive. It's like the whole defund the police thing; I personally don't like the idea that it's necessary to dedicate so many of my tax dollars to funding an apparatus to protect society from the very worst possible sort of person. But I don't think that defunding the police is a reasonable position on the basis that it's not ridiculous to expect people to behave all the time. Or like the idea during MeToo that instead of teaching women basic precautions we should just teach men no to rape. A nice sentiment, but easier said than done. As a practical matter, it isn't realistic for me to live my life with the expectation that everyone will always be acting courteous and in good faith, because no matter what we try to do, there are always going to be assholes out there.

I certainly don't expect a society with no assholes, but right now I think we've slid all the way into "how dare you accuse me of being an asshole, I'm a minority/a victim/rules are for suckers/other stupid reason for why I shouldn't have to abide by social norms" acceptance of bad behaviour.

We have just had our two referenda, voting on International Women's Day, and the counting was finished yesterday. Once again, the people have let down the government by our backward ignorance. They're ashamed of us before the neighbours, so they are.

(1) Turnout was pretty low, running around 44% for both referenda. Gosh, who could possibly have guessed that the burning issue of the day in the minds of the public was not "outdated sexist language in the Constitution must be replaced by gender-neutral inclusive language?"

(2) The complaining already started about "far-right" and "ultra-conservative" voices, with The Guardian newspaper taking the tone on the backwards priest-ridden Irish. Though I can't blame the Brits for it this time, as it's their Ireland correspondent(s) who are doing it, and they're likely the liberal chattering class types that want oh so desperately to be cosmopolitan and fit in with the peers in London and New York.

Ireland’s referendums: what went wrong, and what happens now?

What went wrong, Rory-boo, is that the people exercised their democratic right of self-determination. Sorry if this embarrasses you at an Islington dinner party, or even a D4 one, but the "right" result does not always mean "the way I wanted it to happen".

Have conservative values reconquered Ireland? No. The liberal tide that swept in the 2015 same-sex referendum and 2018 abortion referendum endures. Surveys showed widespread support for tweaking the constitution. But the yes side botched the campaign, leaving voters confused, uncertain and uninspired. The amendments were difficult to explain and understand. Some liberal lawyers and scholars warned that courts would have to decide what constituted “durable relationships”, creating potential unintended consequences for taxation, citizenship and other issues.

I fucking wish, but no. You can sleep safe in your beds, The Handmaid's Tale is not about to come true (not for want of the liberals/progressives and their fever dreams about it).

(3) But aren't there ultra-right far-conservatives or whatever hopping on this issue?

Yes, and that's down to Leo Varadkar being a smug prick. Sorry for the harsh language, but let me explain.

Andy Heasman, a member of the newly formed Irish People party, which takes a hard-right stance on issues such as immigration, was among the No-No campaigners celebrating at the Castle.

He loudly interrupted Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald’s interview with the media by repeatedly shouting that she was a “traitor to the Irish people”. He later tried to ask Ms McDonald to define “what a woman is”.

Speaking to the Sunday Independent, Heasman, who was a prominent anti-­vaccine conspiracist during the pandemic, explained how his party organised for six volunteers to travel around 100 towns handing out 25,000 leaflets advocating for a No vote in both referendums.

He said their campaign emphasised the need to “protect mothers in the ­Constitution” and ensure there are “only two genders”.

Where did the likes of these, who are not - let me emphasise - as yet representative of the conservative views in Ireland, get this notion about two genders? Well, good old Leo (our first openly out and gay politician and Taoiseach) couldn't keep his yap shut and run a sensible campaign. He couldn't stick to the line about "sexist outdated language", he had to drop in "non-binary and transgender" as well. Now, I can't find the specific article where that quote was, so feel free to think I'm a mistaken fool. But he kept hammering on about "gender equality" which allowed a crack in the presentation for people to work at.

(4) The government's campaign was stupid, patronising, and didn't deal with the questions being asked. Just vote Yes/Yes like good obedient little puppets, your betters know what you need and want. The two referenda were (a) Family (redefining the definition of the family as more than based on marriage) and (b) Care (also "women's labour in the home", the old language. Now everybody is a carer, regardless of gender, marital status, or wotsit, ain't that grand?

So the government proposed to protect marriage by... removing language about marriage and stretching the definition of what constitutes a family. It's "durable relationships", you see. What's a durable relationship? Ah, um, well - you'll know it when you see it. Do you send out Christmas cards together? Did you go to a wedding as a couple? That's a durable relationship! While Leo (who did most of the talking) tried to include "grandparents taking care of kids, etc." as examples of "the family not based on marriage", most people would have considered those to be recognised as family members anyway. So it's about cohabiting couples, and the big question there is - what is stopping them from getting married? We have divorce, we have same-sex marriage. If you're just living together and have kids, you pretty much have a lot of legal protections and rights anyway. You can see why some jumped on this as anti-immigrant because suppose someone is legally married to two wives abroad and comes here, that's a 'durable relationship' and now that's a family, even if polygamy is still illegal in Ireland. If there's no definition on what is a "durable relationship", then "we've been dating for three weeks" is as good as "we're living together for twelve years".

The second one was on care, and purported to remove the sexist language about the support women in the home give to the common good. Well, the 1937 Constitution may be sexist, but it recognises the reality: the vast majority of caretakers/caregivers are women. Women who go out to work are now doing two jobs, in 'paid' work and at home when taking care of elderly/sick parents, children with needs, etc. The new wording was very inclusive, but it did strongly seem to be shoving responsibility for caretaking onto 'the family' (read: mothers/sisters/daughters/wives) and stepping back from any duty of the State to provide services.

A lot of people voted 'no' on this one because they didn't believe the airy promises that the State would "strive" to support carers.

(5) So what was the result?

As I said, a low turnout, but a thrashing for the government/Yes side. Between both referenda, 29% voted Yes and 71% voted No. To break that down, for the Family referendum, 67.7% voted No, for the Care referendum, 73.9% voted No.

I have to say, I am both surprised (I thought it would go the other way, with the whole liberal feel-good modernisation vibe of the past few years) and gratified. No, people aren't stupid and they don't believe you and they won't be bullied by "but you don't want to be right-wing conservatives, now do you?" type of propaganda.

EDIT: (6) And already the blame game is going on, with fingers being pointed and fault allotted to leakers:

The unpublished advice from Attorney General Rossa Fanning, which was first published by The Ditch website, said proposals which would see the State "strive" to support the provision of care within families would have "real effects" that could be enforced by the courts.

However, it also said there was legal uncertainty over whether the word "strive" would be more forceful than the word currently in the Constitution - "endeavour."

Mr Rossa also advised that it is "difficult to predict with certainty" how the Irish courts would interpret the concept of "durable relationships".

No, really? Changing the wording would mean legal repercussions? See, the government was promising that no no no, courts never involved, family was still based on marriage, everything was tickety-boo. Of course the courts are gonna get involved, the first time somebody wants to claim inheritance rights or maintenance or palimony based on "we were never married, but we were a durable relationship and the Constitution now recognises this as the same as a married couple, gimme my money!"

What people were most concerned over, though, was the whole notion of the role of carers and State support for same. If now the State is only going to "strive" to support people who need help, what does that mean, exactly? Can they claim that they've done their duty but no, sorry, no help for you? Again, courts are going to get involved here.

The Yes campaign by the government really did treat people as being stupid, and now they're trying to blame far-right and ultra-nationalists and bad old religious conservatives for this defeat. Well, they cut the rod for their own backs on this one.

Of course the courts are gonna get involved, the first time somebody wants to claim inheritance rights or maintenance or palimony based on "we were never married, but we were a durable relationship and the Constitution now recognises this as the same as a married couple, gimme my money!

"I don't have a wife girlfriend *durable partner, just a girl who would be very upset if she heard me say that"

and now they're trying to blame far-right and ultra-nationalists and bad old religious conservatives for this defeat. Well, they cut the rod for their own backs on this one.

I suppose it's ultimately better for Ireland to scapegoat them than if the government decides it needs to put more effort into pushing progressivism.

Oh, they've already decided the problem was they didn't push hard enough on the progressive angle. "Wait, is it possible we were fucking idiots about this? No, impossible, it's the stupid electorate who let us down!"

Midway through the campaign, Social Democrats leader Holly Cairns told the Dáil: “The Social Democrats have opted to support both constitutional amendments because we have ultimately been left with a choice between leaving misogynistic language in the Constitution and replacing it with language that is an improvement, but should have gone much further. I acknowledge that there are people who disagree and are hurt by our decision. I wish to tell those people that I am listening.”

Seems like, if the post-mortems are to be believed, Leo was the one pushing for this on International Women's Day so he could have a big symbolic vote validating the progressive agenda. Well he got the results, but not what he wanted.

The usual opinion formers are losing their lives about this, but they can insult the No voters all they want, the fact remains is that their arrogance was unjustified.

The Irish goverment is ridiculously ideological in a left wing direction. Including its reaction to migration issue and the stabbing in Ireland, and its support of hate speech laws, which are hyped to be some of the most extreme and one sided in europe. I doubt it advertised what it was before it got elected. Apparently it is the liberal conservative party of the progressive center. And wiki has it as a center right party!

These kind of "center right" parties end up more culturally leftist than the left. Or at least there isn't any sizable, difference, you are getting the same cultural far left. Nice to see them lose this referendum, but is there any alternative in Ireland which would be a substantial change from this? My impression from my very short "research" is that all major Irish parties are pretty interchangeable, unfortunately.

On another note, I think one of the problems of current democracy is that voters are too inflexible and avoid stopping voting for major parties if they push bad policies, or ones they disagree with. Or go to different parties with similiar agendas, scared of voting outside of what they are used to, or for parties branded as far right.

More referendums and direct democracy would be one way to get better policies which avoid the agency problems between ideological left wing extremists acting an an authoritarian manner where the people's are too party loyalist for their own good, to kick all of them out. The result wouldn't be always in line with the cultural right, but mass migration for example has been quite unpopular in most countries. The same people running a system that demonizes the alternative views, passes hate speech laws, and does as it pleases is not going to allow enough of that, of course. I do sincerely believe it would lead to something closer to a country run by the people, for the people, and better governance than that of ideological far leftist extremists who see opposition to their agenda as completely illegitimate. Even if it is not the ideal governance, it would be an important improvement.

The Irish government seems to care much less about the opinion of its constituants than the median European government, but still, 71% has gotta hurt.

Losing a referendum is always a humiliation because only a fool would call for one they couldn't confidently win, but losing it by that margin? You can't even handwave it away as a fluke like Brexit, this is more than a supermajority of people telling you to go fuck yourself.

You'd think a loss like that would fall the government. Any inkling of that?

You'd think a loss like that would fall the government. Any inkling of that?

There’s a problem in that nearly all of the opposition parties were also campaigning for a Yes vote. Besides a few independents and Aontú (a party with 1 seat) there’s no one in opposition ready to capitalise on this.

Yeah. Similar to the one in Australia recently on the Indigenous voice where the opposition were campaigning around the lines of 'This is not the appropriate way to recognize the Indigenous and may be an overreach' instead of 'Ha! This is an absurdity' direct refutation. Which makes it a bit harder to capitalize on the failure.

The referendum didn't fail because of some ultra catholic silent majority - it comes on the heels of large wins for abortion and gay marriage in referenda. Most people are still good liberals. The fact is that these amendments were half baked from the start.

Next general election scheduled for a year from now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Irish_general_election

I don't think so. People don't want to pull down the government over this because, frankly, nobody cared about "sexist language in the Constitution" except for the usual activist types. And nobody wants an election with uncertainty when the economy is doing marvellously!/people can't afford rent or buying a house.

But it should be a slap in the face to the government as to the mood of the country. Nobody believes them about "this is for the carers" because with our health service and social support services, we see the reality: there's no money, there's understaffing, there's waiting lists out the door. A fancy amendment that commits them to 'more of the same' is not worth voting 'yes' for.

'Cause life is a game that no one wins

But you deserve a head start the way your life's goin'

So throw in the towel, 'cause your life ain't shit

No take that towel and hang yourself with it

Life's short and hard like a body-building elf

So save the planet and kill yourself

If you're feeling down-and-out with what your life's all about

Lift your head up high and blow your brains out

(Lift your head up high and blow your brains out)

Lift your head up high and blow your brains out

(Lift your head up high and blow your brains out)

Lift your head up high and blow your brains out

Suicide rates and murder among teens and the power of memes.

For those old enough to remember, these will be familiar times. Let me ask the '90s teenagers in the room, what was the dominant feeling of the age?

I would say that it was mostly a decade in which the youth aesthetic was of depression, sullen expressions, heroin chic, and underpinning it all, suicide. Suicide was in the air from the minute Cobain suck-started a shotgun. The music had song titles like “Hey man, nice shot” and “Lift your head up high and blow your brains out”. Subtle stuff. On the black side of the culture, gangsta rap was big. Drugs, murder, drugs, murder, booty. Still lighter than the white side.

Would it surprise anyone if I told you that the '90s were the only improvement in the teen suicide rate since the Depression? Murder rates peaked in '92 and dropped for twenty years.

Let's consider more recent history. The teen culture from 2010 to 2020. I'm not sure how those in it would classify that era, but to me it seemed like a decade of social media, politicization and gender. The Z discovered a giant pool of suicides (the lowest rate in decades) that they could save with hormones and surgery. They were the first generation to tackle racism and really make black lives matter. The aesthetic of the age is chipper, smug, vague, androgynous. Black culture has moved from the ghetto to the antiracism seminar. The result?

Suicide rates rose swiftly throughout the decade among teens, bringing them back into line with the already high rate before the '90s reversed course for twenty years. Murder rates started rising in 2013 and shot up in 2020. Mostly among young black men.

Death has a way of clarifying things, as it's tough to fake.

One cannot go back to the past, but we would do well to consider what sociopolitical norms and policies might have contributed to that massive achievement, and we absolutely must be extremely clear about which ones lead to the reversal. And no, I'm not talking about Lupus and Jimmy Pop.

The 90s were an interesting transitional period and personally I feel like a lot of what we see there was both reactionary and sort of shallow. Falling crime and the end of the Cold War, the End of History, created a world without struggle or conflict (at least for someone living in a western democracy). At the same times the last vestiges of religion in education were being defeated, and there was a clear, but also very boring future lining up before us. We just use science to improve everything and make everything better for forever and all the major problems have been solved or are solvable and we are on the path to solve them.

A brief aside, my best friend in high school would go out in the middle of the night, sneak around in the employees only sections of buildings, try to get onto roofs and such, smoked, did harder drugs, and stole stuff. While he was lower-class SES, he had a 'stable' home life and didn't steal out of 'necessity'. He did it because he was afflicted with a profound sense of ennui. He could see the future laid out before him, and he could not see any purpose or meaning in any of it. The supreme banality of a modern existence.

We were the kids who got asked in 3rd grade what we would do when we were president. We were the kids told to be astronauts and scientists and change the world, and we had finally gotten old enough to realize what a great lie all that was. Of course grunge was popular, and gansta rap spread like wildfire through suburbia. It was the wild desperate thrashing of an animal slowly suffocating under the crushing weight of distributed nihilism. Office Space, to use the modern parlance, was a mood.

Eventually you get to generation Z, enough time on the experiential treadmill and their solution was to just reinterpret what it means to be in danger, what it means to hurt, so they could struggle again, so they could fight against something 'real'.

Another film from 1999 expressed the sentiment well,

But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from

I wasn't a teenager in the 90s but my memory is that it was sunny. The 80s grimdark/power breakfast power shoulders greed is good era was over, now it was Captain Planet, colour-blindness, and we can fix things. Economic issues were generally good, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Cold War was over, things can only get better. I have a mental image of Hawaiian shirts and bright colours.

Grunge might have been there, but so was rave and the aftermath of late 80s acid house. Dance music took off. Speed and E (the love drug) are the era's drugs of choice.

I'd say that the 1990s were a confusing era since there was a combination of general belief in optimism and progress and "all the big questions have been solved" coupled with a pop culture characterized by Twin Peaks/X-Files/Matrix style ide that this is all just a fake exterior and below it dark and evil things were happening. Musically you had grunge, NiN, Marilyn Manson, nu metal etc. - and the idea that all these were just fake rebellion for suburban kids whose lives were so good they had to create imaginary angst for themselves. Even the rave/dance stuff seemed to attempt to go for the "partying in the face of the apocalypse" vibes, even if it was, in the end, partying for the standard reasons of partying.

Murder rates are now below 90s levels since 2023: https://www.axios.com/2023/12/28/us-murder-violent-crime-rates-drop

Which sociopolitical norms and policies contributed to this massive achievement?

Lead free fuel?

We've had lead free fuel since what, the 80s? That won't explain a drop over the past few years.

Since 2023? You mean the last two months? I stand corrected.

Or did you mean that the recent rise in homicide rates has only taken us back to '97 so far, and we have room to grow before we hit the full '92 again?

It's all in the graph I posted.

2020-2022 had elevated homicide rates and 2023 was practically a normal year. If we're going to talk about the massive failures that led to the 2020-2022 spike then it's only fair to talk about the massive successes that led to 2023.

If we're going to talk about the massive failures that led to the 2020-2022 spike then it's only fair to talk about the massive successes that led to 2023.

That seems reasonable to me. What's your read on the causes of the 2020-2022 spike, and what do you think is bringing the numbers down again?

I think there has been a secular decline in violence since the 90s as OP mentioned. 2020-2022 were crazy years with a lot of unusual factors. I'd primarily blame covid lockdowns for driving people insane. The George Floyd riots played a big role too, but I think the reason they were so much worse than previous protests over similar killings is because of the lockdowns. Now, lockdowns are lifted and I think we are back to the secular decline.

I don't know exactly what factors are driving the secular decline, but I suspect they haven't gone anywhere.

I'd say improved medical care is a big part of it. A gunshot that would have killed you in the 80s now merely leaves you paraplegic.

Then we should consider that as the explanation for the 90s-era decline too.

Aging of the population alone should have resulted in a massive decline in murder rates. Then consider that, unlike the 1990s, everyone has a phone in their pocket to call 9/11 immediately after a shooting. Now add ubiquitous video games, porn, and other entertainment which keeps young men off the streets entirety.

With all that, murder rates should have plummeted to all-time lows.

But they haven't.

To me this, is proof that society is becoming more violent, mostly because the justice system no longer enforces the law as strictly as it used to.

"Society" isn't becoming more violent. You aren't pwning noobs /playing DnD and partaking in the ol' ultraviolence with your mates after recess. It's a specific group of people who are doing the murdering and raping disproportionately.

More violent over what time frame?

This is Britain, not the US, yet we can see a certain effect, crime went up despite all the CCTV, increased wealth and forensics now available to police: https://twitter.com/XiaoVilin99/status/1575943515460468736

https://twitter.com/XiaoVilin99/status/1576248677550940160

Or in the US, it's gone up since 1960 per capita, despite all the wealth, technology, aging and de-leading: https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

Or in the US, it's gone up since 1960 per capita, despite all the wealth, technology, aging and de-leading: https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

According to your source, violent crime per capita peaked in 1991 and has since fallen by 50%.

Yes but it's still gone up from 160 to 379. That it peaked at 759 is small consolation. That's from 2019, before the 2020 crime increase too.

If my portfolio goes from 100K to 220K, I'm still fairly happy, even if I peaked at 500K.

Yes but it's still gone up from 160 to 379. That it peaked at 759 is small consolation.

Consolation doesn't enter into it. It's a question of explanation.

That's from 2019, before the 2020 crime increase too.

And before the 2023 crime decrease.

Which sociopolitical norms and policies contributed to this massive achievement?

The return of policing.

I'm not aware of any return of policing. The guy above you also hasn't heard of it.

Death has a way of clarifying things, as it's tough to fake.

This is why I believe that modern psychiatry is fundamentally broken to a much greater degree than even most critics of it are willing to acknowledge. The United States just absolutely pours money into psychiatric "medicine", with spending now soaring into the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. More people are treated, more people are drugged, more people are involved with this system than ever before. When we do this with cancer, we get interminably slow progress, but progress nonetheless. When we do this with psychiatric "medicine" we get more bodies than we've ever had before, because their treatments consistently fail to beat having parents that will say, "go outside and run around till you're tired".

I think the problem is that society in general no longer teaches people how to self regulate. In 1990, there were problems, and there were sad people. But I think the message of the era was much more Stoic, learn to deal with and manage your feelings, fix your own problems, and get on with it. Feelings being front and center strike me as a luxury belief, and one that really only works if you don’t have many problems other than your feelings.

For almost all people outside o& the elite throughout human history, life was hard and was understood to be hard. These were and still are realistic expectations for life for all but the elite. What has trickled down since 1990 are two things. First the idea that you are supposed to be in a state of happy bliss for any sustained amount of time. You are supposed to be fulfilled and happy doing everything. Struggle isn’t a part of the plan. Boredom isn’t a part of the plan. Having things suck wasn’t part of the plan. And second that you should be able to do what you like doing for a living. If you’re born to be an artist, a singer, or a writer, then you should be able to do that instead of a normal job. You should be able to go on vacation when you want or need one. This, unless you’re pretty well off and have a spouse making a substantial amount of money simply isn’t reality. Reality is working even when tired or burned out, perhaps a a difficult job you might not even like, then coming home to kids and chores and cooking. If you’re in the mindset of “I don’t like this, and it’s a great tragedy that I’m not living a thrilling life,” then your expectations are so far above reality that you’re going to be miserable. If you’re then taught by therapy-culture that you should focus on negative feelings, and self-care over those feelings, you’re going to spend you life suffering. This was known all the way back to Epictetus in the West and Buddha in the east. Focusing on things you don’t have and thus suffering for the lack and then focusing on how bad the suffering makes you feel is a good way to make yourself miserable and probably depressed.

[SOCRATES] “Why, when a democratic city athirst for liberty gets bad cupbearers for its leaders and is intoxicated by drinking too deep of that unmixed wine, and then, if its so-called governors are not extremely mild and gentle with it and do not dispense the liberty unstintedly, it chastises them and accuses them of being accursed oligarchs.
“But those who obey the rulers it reviles as willing slaves and men of naught, but it commends and honors in public and private rulers who resemble subjects and subjects who are like rulers. Is it not inevitable that in such a state the spirit of liberty should go to all lengths?
“And this anarchical temper, my friend, must penetrate into private homes and finally enter into the very animals.
“Why, the father habitually tries to resemble the child and is afraid of his sons, and the son likens himself to the father and feels no awe or fear of his parents, so that he may be forsooth a free man. And the resident alien feels himself equal to the citizen and the citizen to him, and the foreigner likewise."
[ADEIMANTUS] “Yes, these things do happen.” [S] “They do, and such other trifles as these. The teacher in such case fears and fawns upon the pupils, and the pupils pay no heed to the teacher or to their overseers either. And in general the young ape their elders and vie with them in speech and action, while the old, accommodating themselves to the young, are full of pleasantry and graciousness, imitating the young for fear they may be thought disagreeable and authoritative.
“And the climax of popular liberty, my friend, is attained in such a city when the purchased slaves, male and female, are no less free than the owners who paid for them. And I almost forgot to mention the spirit of freedom and equal rights in the relation of men to women and women to men.”
[A] “Shall we not, then, in Aeschylean phrase, say 'whatever rises to our lips’?”
[S] “Certainly, so I will. Without experience of it no one would believe how much freer the very beasts subject to men are in such a city than elsewhere. The dogs literally verify the adage and ‘like their mistresses become.’ And likewise the horses and asses are wont to hold on their way with the utmost freedom and dignity, bumping into everyone who meets them and who does not step aside. And so all things everywhere are just bursting with the spirit of liberty.
“And do you note that the sum total of all these items when footed up is that they render the souls of the citizens so sensitive that they chafe at the slightest suggestion of servitude and will not endure it? For you are aware that they finally pay no heed even to the laws written or unwritten, so that forsooth they may have no master anywhere over them."

Here we have Plato, writing around 375 BC, expounding a rather familiar theory. Irreverent youth, doting parents, equality with slaves and foreigners--he presents such entitlement as the failure mode of democracy. When the people grow too accustomed to liberty, he says, they will become soft and rebel at the lightest of impositions.

Do you think 90s America was the first time and place that we plebs got that much liberty?

Not the first time, obviously, but the pattern is quite similar to the decadent pattern that goes along with the decline of other civilizations in the past. The combination of lísiense and luxury create a chaotic weak people who can no longer maintain the high civilization that produced them.

If that were true, the Boomers should have been absolutely demolished. Same for the Victorian English, the Renaissance Italians, the actual Stoics. They all presided over temporary surges of wealth unimaginable to Plato’s generation, and they all held on to power anyway.

I’m saying that pattern is hindsight bias. Elders always have and always will insist that their successors are entitled, irreverent, and possibly effeminate. That doesn’t mean they’re right.

For those old enough to remember, these will be familiar times. Let me ask the '90s teenagers in the room, what was the dominant feeling of the age?

Absurd optimism. Eurodance ruled the airwaves, computers were bringing the future, every economy was growing, the financial crisis of 1997 was but a bump, racism was on the way out, anal sex became mandatory act in porn, blowjobs became mandatory acts in private, pubic hair was gone, gaming was entering its golden age. The worst thing that happened in the 90s was literally Limp Bizkit.

Honestly for the rest of the post - I think that the newly released Bad Therapy - Abigail Shrier answers what is going on. Too much feelings too little real world. Also - from my observations there is an absurd disheartening and nihilism ( and not the fun kind) that moves trough western society youth. Learned helplessness is the norm. And it is combined with so easy going attitude towards deviance that in a way we are living in an anarchy - like people that glue themselves to the roads or defacing art face no consequence.

The worst thing that happened in the 90s was literally Limp Bizkit.

Alright, I get it, you won't be following my Limp/Creed/Nickelback playlist on Spotify. Whatever, that's just like, your opinion, man.

blowjobs became mandatory acts in private,

(nervous Catholic laughter)

Also - from my observations there is an absurd disheartening and nihilism ( and not the fun kind) that moves trough western society youth.

Hard agree - and this is where alarm bells go off for me. Every generation gets to a point in their 30s where they start uttering their first "kids these days!" I saw it when the Gen Z slang began to pop up in mainstream adds. There were literally sentences I could not follow. No cap. Okay, I guess I'm no longer "with it" (cure Grandpa Simpson meme).

Then I started listening to some SuicideBoys and BONES. The messages there are beyond dark. This isn't hardcore gangster rap that glorified ultra violence. As terrible as the values implicit to that are, at least there's some message of group solidarity, competition but possible victory with rivals, and a celebration of demonstrated capability ("me and my homies will murder all of the people who don't like us and then drink alcoholic beverages and consume schedule 1 substances while discussing those incidents of homicide in jovial terms. Also, copulation with curvaceous women is probable") Gen Z dark/emo rap is screaming into the void while simultaneously accepting the inevitability of it all. It isn't learned helplessness, it is unshakable faith in a tangible helplessness [^1]. The description of drug use is worth highlighting; across many genres of music since Rock 'n Roll in the 1960s, drug / alcohol use and abuse has been shorthand for "look at my amazing crazy life." You do have songs here and there about the dangers of that kind of life etc. Grunge takes it to talking about the horrible feedback loop of addiction but also, sometimes, recovery. Gen Z talks about substance abuse a desperate sprint to oblivion. Far from "I love to party!" or "Damn, I wish I could shed this ball and chain" it's pretty much "Get fucked up in a big way as often as possible. Just fucking do it." Suicide by another name.

All of this is set against the backdrop of a society where material conditions have never been better, yet there is constant cultural strife.

It reminds me of some of the documentaries on Norwegian Black Metal in the 90s. There's a couple of former artists and journalists from that scene who said some version of, "Living in Norway in the 90s was so fucking easy that it became meaningless." You can point to secularism, you can point to the removal of the Russian threat, you can point to the start of pan-Europeanism and the homogenization of already incredibly homogeneous societies. The cause is irrelevant, the outcomes are more stark; brief and constrained as it was, Norwegian black metal resulted in real damage, death, and murder (look up the Church Burnings and Varg vs Euronymous).

Panning back to American Gen Z, the elevated suicide rate is component 1 of their brand of nihilism. I wonder if we aren't already seeing component 2: nihilistic murder. The Parkland High School shooter was Gen Z and had a grocery list of nihilistic / degenerate / isolated life circumstances. More culture-war-y, the Covenant School shooter was a Trans Gen Z'er. I think it's undeniable that some portion of the hardcore Trans Cult is essentially nihilist in that they relish denying basic biology as well as using conversation as a panacea for any and all mental health issues.

So, while I am confident that a lot of the Millenial / Gen X anguish over Gen Z is simply "Kids-These-Days"-ism, there is some level of nihilism that will not be assuaged by Hot Topic stickers and baggy jeans. It will express itself through an ultraviolence directed both internally and externally. I'm not sure how to solve that, and I'm not sure there's been a post-WW2 generation anywhere that is this predisposed to lack of respect for human life.

WPATH Files

Hey guys have you heard about the WPATH Files? Well, you did, they were already brought up earlier this week, but unlike our resident doomers, I think they're worthy of a top level thread.

No, this isn't about the Eunuch Archive story breaking containment (although Genevieve Gluck is striking the iron while it's hot). Long story short someone on the inside of WPATH contancted Micheal Schelenberger and released some of their internal discussions. So what's all the hubbub about? At a cursory glance might even look like the WPATH members are urging additional caution. Well, let's take a step back.

To avoid going full-Putin, I'll start at Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage. A lot of the arguments presented in the book aren't new, but it's a convenient compilation - transition is serious shit with huge health implications, kids don't know what they hell they're talking about and shouldn't be taken at face value with regards to such a serious decision, past research shows most of would-be trans youth desist after puberty, new research indicates there might be a social contagion component to the recent increase in trans kids, puberty blockers themselves might be pushing kids further down the trans rabbit hole, etc., therefore we should hit the breaks on the whole thing.

A lot of the counter-arguments are also conveniently compiled in critical reviews of the book, or critical responses to positive reviews, for instance:

Within medicine, gender-affirming care for transgender and gender diverse youth is not controversial, outside of a few fringe groups like The American College of Pediatricians (an anti-LGBTQ group that is not to be confused with The American Academy of Pediatrics). There is broad consensus from The American Psychiatric Association, The American Academy of Pediatrics, The Endocrine Society, The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, and The World Professional Association for Transgender Health that gender-affirming medical care is appropriate for transgender youth so long as clinicians follow guidelines set forth by these major medical organizations (e.g., The Endocrine Society Guidelines).

(...)

Furthermore, those studies were of very young prepubertal children. Under the current medical consensus, gender-affirming medical interventions are not offered to prepubertal youth. They are only offered after youth have reached adolescence. Once youth reach adolescence, it’s rare for transgender youth to later decide they are cisgender.

(...)

She notes that only 1.9 percent of adolescents who started pubertal suppression in a large study in The Netherlands did not proceed to gender-affirming hormones (i.e., estrogen or testosterone). This is not because pubertal suppression made them identify more strongly as transgender. Rather, it is a result of the strict guidelines followed in the Netherlands before an adolescent is considered eligible for pubertal suppression: six months of attending a specialized gender clinic and undergoing rigorous assessment.

(...)

Though Shrier is quick to provide anecdotes from teenagers like "Riley" and stories from estranged parents as evidence, she is relatively less interested in the peer-reviewed scientific research that shows the benefits of gender-affirming medical care for transgender adolescents. I've listed several in the references for those interested in reading more.

The message is clear: We know what we're doing. We have strict standards that filter out those that might not benefit from transition. We have scientific consensus and studies, all you have is speculation and anecdotes. It is the departure from this deadpan, "we know what we're doing" discourse, delivered with iron confidence that I commented on earlier this year, and which is a useful lens to look at the WPATH Files through, given that it's one of the explicitly named organizations responsible for setting these supposedly strict standards.

Part of the Files is a video of the "Identity Evolution Workshop" held on Zoom by the WPATH, a significant portion of it is devoted to the question of informed consent:

Dianne Berg: Yeah, I just wanted to piggyback on all of the importance that comes up with the informed consent.

I often see people who, because there's such a backlog of therapists to do some of the mental health therapeutic support, I often see people who have already engaged in some sort of, and this is again with youth, some sort of medical intervention. And so one of the things I do is sitting with the youth and their parents and I say "so tell me more about what you know about that medical intervention", and kind of like what Dan was saying, children and young adolescents... we wouldn't really expect them... It's kind of out of their developmental range sometimes, to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them. And so I think I, I try to do whatever I can to help them understand, as best I can. But what really disturbs me is when the parents can't tell me what they need to know about a medical intervention that apparently they signed off for. And so I think informed consent has to happen very differently for parents.

(these are slightly edited for the removal of awkward speech patterns)

So there's a few ways to look at it charitably. One that comes to mind is "they aren't talking about issues with the current state of gender affirming care, they're describing the sort of problems a clinician will run into, and how to handle them". The problem with that is that they themselves would disagree with that interpretation:

Dianne Berg: I worked in an intersex, or disorders of sex development clinic for a number of years as the psychologist. And I would come in to the session with the parents and usually these were very young kids. (...) and the pediatric endocrinologist came out and said "yeah, they totally get it, they're on board, I don't have any concerns about their understanding". I would go in and I would say "okay, so tell me what you learned from him", and they'd just be like, "we have no idea what he was talking about." Because they, they feel deferential.

(...) And so I think the more we can normalize that it is okay to not get this right away, it is okay to have questions, the more we're going to actually do a real informed consent process. Then what I think has been currently happening and that I think is frankly, not what we need to be doing ethically.

One of the reasons for this state of affairs that they brought up is a simple lack of resources - "backlog of therapists", "20 minute medical appointments" - which is consistent with info that got out of the Tavistock or through whistleblowers like Jaime Reed. The other way to look at it is @gattsuru's "urging additional caution", which they are indeed doing throughout various excerpts of the Files, but if additional caution needs to be urged, because patients, or even their parents, don't understand what they're signing up for, that paints a very different picture than the one that Jack Turban painted in his review. This is a lot less "we know what we're doing" and a lot more "this is all new, and we're still figuring it out", the difference is portrayed in this analogy:

I don't know if other people do, but I really struggle with it, because I kind of want the kids that I work with, whether they're 9 to 13 and looking at puberty suppression or hormones in some ways to be a little pediatric endocrinologist. Like I want them to understand it at that level in an age appropriate way. And I struggle with that on one level because, well, when a kid takes diabetic medication, do they have to understand?

The reason for the discrepancy in the level of understanding that is expected, is acutally later explained by Jamison Green:

Jamison Green: They may be able to get their hormones prescribed through their primary care provider who doesn't really know necessarily everything about trans care. They're basically trying to be supportive and, you know, our health care system leaves us in the lurch all the time. I agree that we don't necessarily need to be able to have... If you have a known condition, like diabetes, you don't have to understand every nuance about what the insulin is going to do to you, in order to give informed consent, because there's so much experience with that. But in this field, this is all new, this is all contentious, and that's where we run into problems, because everyone's afraid.

And I know for a fact, people, even adults, even well educated, older adults, accessing care for the first time, sit down with the person who's going to prescribe their hormones, and they look at an informed consent form that says your hormones are going to do this, this, and this. They don't take any of that in yet because they're so scared that they're not going to get what they need. They're just.. "so show me where to sign".

The issue brought up in the second part of the quote, that patients might not want to read, talk about, or ask questions about their treatment because they're afraid this will result in them not getting it, is brought up later in the conversation, but this is where things go from bad to worse:

Dianne Berg: At least with the kid that I worked with, where we kind of got to, was not wanting to talk about things, because they were at that kind of [non-binary] place. But also that they really thought that if they said anything about this, and really delved into it, it would mean that their options for any of that medical transition that they had always thought they were going to do, would be off the table. And so they were like, I can't, I don't want to explore that the non-binary shift, because if I explore that, that means that I'm never going to be able to get estrogen, and it was kind of like having some education around - no, it doesn't mean that. What it means is we are trying to meet your embodiment goals.

(...)

It's a growing edge for me, so I certainly don't want to misspeak, but my understanding and what I'm trying to kind of incorporate in my clinical practice is, in some ways, moving away from what is your identity and therefore because you have this identity, you're going to want to do these particular medical interventions to change your body. Not having it be as identity driven, because I think that's been the historical basis of how things have operated.

(...)

At least I have had many clients tell me "I did not tell you the truth about a lot of things about my sexuality, because I figured if I told you that, you would gatekeep and assume it was a fetish" , or, you know, some of the terms that we no longer are using. And so I think there is a huge historical context to sexuality being seen as a way that creates barriers to access to care. And I think it's very important that we acknowledge that historical context, and that we work against that historical context, by talking more about positive sexuality and pleasure and that that they can go together and that it's okay, and not create barriers to care, because people have that belief that that's what we're going to do.

Ok, simply put: you can't tell me how you have it all figured out, how you have strict standards that filter out people who might change their mind later, and how rare it is for trans youth to change their identity, and how all the concerns raised are invalid precisely because you have it all figured out so much, only to turn around to talk about patients' shifting identitties, how they were hiding their motivations, or didn't want to ask questions because they were afraid tripping that filter stemming from those supposedly strict standards, and then for your response to be "don't worry about it, we'll give you the treatment no matter what".

This already got quite long, and I already got one or two other angles to approach this topic from, so I think this will become a series*. My general conclusion is: contrary to Jack Turban, and the general pre-2022-ish pro-trans discourse, gender affirming care, especially it's pediatric variant, is not uncontroversial within medicine, it's not The Science, it's an experiment. There is, of course, room for those within medicine, psychiatry and/or psychology, but rule #1 of ethical experimantation is that you tell people they're participating in an experiment. You don't tell them things like "would you rather have a happy daughter, or a dead son", you don't dismiss critics because you don't like their politics, and you don't try to push through bizarre social reforms on the back of The Science that just isn't there.

As always, time will tell if my conclusion is correct, I'm not going to pretend I'm not biased, and it's only natural for someone biased in the other way to come to a different conclusion, especially that a lot of people in these WPATH Files comments and transcripts come off as quite sympathetic. But before signing off, I'll allow myself a bit of speculation: this is either the tip of the iceberg, and/or WPATH members themselves think the organization is no longer credible, as WPATH membership dropped from 4119 to 1590 from January 2023 to 2024. This is after the Files were announced, but way before they were released, but it's hard not to get a "fleeing a sinking ship" impression from it, and in fact such a sudden departure of so many members might even be the cause of the Files being leaked (out of many disgruntled people, some decided to leak stuff), and the effect is yet to come.

*) Hey mods, are we still doing the "Culture War goes into the Culture War Thread" thing? I would really rather have these as standalone posts.

Yup, CW in the CW thread.

We do appreciate the level of effort you’ve put into this breakdown.

I suppose it might be relevant to bring up my own n=1 anecdotal experience with a voluntary surgical procedure. About a year, maybe a year and a half ago, an acquaintance-of-an-acquaintance posted on twitter that they were seeking a kidney, as they had begun to enter renal failure and while thanks to modern medicine they were stable, their lifespan had changed from an easy seventy or eighty years to about forty without a transplant. So I figured hey, this guy needs a kidney, and whadya know I've got this spare lying around not really doing anything. Let's see about getting rid of it.

First I had to figure out if I was compatible. I was. What followed was a surprisingly rigorous battery of examinations, questionnaires, interviews, pre-recorded educational modules, and re-interviews. Was I absolutely sure I wanted to give this guy a kidney? Did I know the potential surgical side-effects? Was I absolutely sure I wanted to give this guy a kidney? What about the possibility of complications? Was I absolutely sure I wanted to give this guy a kidney? What was my support structure? Was I absolutely sure I wanted to give this guy a kidney? Did I live in a building with an elevator? Was I absolutely sure I wanted to give this guy a kidney? Could I get groceries without physically lifting more than 20lbs? Was I absolutely sure I wanted to give this guy a kidney? You get the gist. Once I had managed to convince my donor liaison (appointed by the hospital as my advocate) that I knew the risks, that I knew I could withdraw consent right up until they gassed me (my words not theirs), that I was of sound mental health, then came the actual tests.

I am something of a connoisseur of hospital blood draws - for whatever reason the vagaries of life have resulted in my giving a significant percentage of my blood to various medical apparatchiks - and let me tell you the blood tests they ran on me were exhaustive. I think they filled about twenty of those little blood vials in one sitting. Then were more tests. Looking back at my records about thirty in all, from an EKG to a full metabolic panel. Then after all these tests were done, I sat down with a nephrologist (kidney doctor). The nephrologist, a very nice woman, looked at all my tests, and politely told me that she was declining to move forward with my donation. She thought that (1) at 26 I was too young, and (2) one of my kidney function tests was not perfectly centered in the "normal" function range. She was very clear that it was mostly a function of age, and that had I come to her when I was 30 she probably would have given me the green light, or at least been willing to take a closer look at what was causing the slight abnormality in that one test.

And that was that.

I can't help but contrast this, a potentially life-saving surgery with very minimal long-term knock on effects (kidney donors do not have a decreased life span or at most lose half a year to a year, various foundations and the recipient's insurance cover all medical and associated bills including transportation and recovery fees, the total hospital stay is one to two days, with full recovery in 3-4 months) with what are ultimately cosmetic surgeries with largely unknown long-term effects, and the difference in treatment a transitioning teenager receives (full endorsement and full surgery at 18) versus my own. I'm not upset with my treatment mind you, if the kidney doctor says no then the kidney doctor says no, and she probably knows best. It's just... an odd juxtaposition.

In the interests of stirring the pot, I'll link to this person's attempt at a fisking of the WPATH files, pointing out examples of factual inaccuracies, things taken out of context or similar. Without having read the WPATH files I can't speak as to whether their characterisation is accurate.

Still gets me that the word "fisking" - a word invented by online warbloggers for their supposed eviscerations of Robert Fisk articles and which, insofar as I remember it, often devolved to just laying the article out sentence by sentence and replying to individual sentences with "Oh come on!" and "Surely no-one can believe this!" -style fare - continues to live, even though most people would in fact probably agree that Fisk was more correct about whether Iraq War was a proper decision or not than the warbloggers.

I saw that scrolling by recently, though haven't read the whole thing. I'll add it to the reading list, and say what I think when I'm through it, but I'm putting high odds on it being cope. For one, the argument I made in the post doesn't rest on anything being taken out of context. The other files are comments on some sort of internal discussion platform they're using, I didn't see anything there being taken out of context or misrepresented either.

I think the only take away from that is to ignore all the editorializing and only look at the actual pictures. I agree that the people who wrote the files are pushing an agenda and playing fast and loose with the facts, but the stuff in the actual WPATH communications is just as crazy.

This mostly seems like an attempt by the author to get people to avoid looking at the actually damning stuff.

and playing fast and loose with the facts

I can understand the agenda bit, though I'm not sure how much agree (worst case scenario they're about as ideologically biased as WPATH itself), but what made you think they're playing fast and loose with the facts?

because you have it all figured out so much, only to turn around to talk about patients' shifting identitties, how they were hiding their motivations, or didn't want to ask questions because they were afraid tripping that filter stemming from those supposedly strict standards, and then for your response to be "don't worry about it, we'll give you the treatment no matter what".

1: Why should people who don't understand the different sexes and how they're supposed to work together ever come up with the best course of action for legitimately transgender individuals (i.e. not just men with a terminal case of "it's ma'am")?

The flipside of not being able to have a proper answer to the question of what a woman is means that you don't have a good answer for what a man is. Which I believe is a pretty scorching indictment for an organization, an entire "scientific" field, and to a point the Tribe backing it that claims to have an answer to whether a man should become a woman- if the distinction between genders is meaningless, then dysphoria shouldn't exist (and thus shouldn't even be acknowledged), right?

An organization that's supposed to support transgender health first and foremost needs to understand, and understand properly (as in, the good-faith scientific distinction and not the common definitions), what gender even is in the first place (and communicate that definition coherently). If they don't understand it, or have definitions that are first and foremost self-serving (perhaps if their salaries depends on them intentionally misunderstanding it), then they have no business telling men when and when not to become women and vice versa.

I'd argue that rejecting the bimodal distribution of gendered behaviors, or trying to push men further and further into being women (for various reasons, ranging from a simple failure of preventing the male biological niche from getting destroyed by market forces to the actively malicious gender supremacy movements) is one of the reasons we even have an explosion of ex-men in the first place. The collapse of a positive, approachable masculinity also creates ex-women, since the tolerance of tomboyishness as a subgenre of "woman" collapsed with it (and without a positive, approachable masculinity, femininity had nothing to constrain it from becoming toxic).

the Eunuch Archive story breaking containment

2: Why should people who don't have a healthy sense of pro-social adult sexuality be able to come up with a solid answer for when trans is and isn't a fetish (or to have any hope of understanding what productive development/expressions of child sexuality should be)?

"I spend a bunch of time writing online about how great it would be if basically every boy on the planet was castrated" is not the mark of someone who has a well-rounded view of what co-operative/productive sexual expression looks like. The elephant in the room on the Blue side is that this way of thinking, and everything they do to express power, is itself some shade of castration; men with a healthier (as in, less internalized androphobia) understanding of how the sexes interact have quite accurately noticed this tendency, it's why the memes specify a ball-busting bitch.

The problem is squaring the circle between "patholotical androphobia" and "children are sexual beings". How are we supposed to expect that an answer that depends specifically on getting the latter right is going to be correct when the minds of everyone working on that answer are utterly consumed by the former? I'm pretty sure Boku no Pico is a healthier and more productive treatise on male sexuality than anything high-ranking WPATH personnel will ever come up with.

(As an aside, it's probably worth noting that the main difference between adult sexuality and child sexuality seems to have something to do with the presence/absence of biological impulse to play power games with sex- so expecting someone whose entire sexuality is nothing but explicitly malicious power games to try and make things better for people who inherently lack the understanding/biological drive to do them is so, so much worse. "It's ma'am" is the model transperson to people like this, and it is those power games that lend themselves to the bad faith consequences: suppressing de-transitioner literature, placing ex-men in women's prisons, and so on.)

only to turn around to talk about patients' shifting identitties (lol), how they were hiding their motivations, or didn't want to ask questions because they were afraid tripping that filter stemming from those supposedly strict standards

3: Given the above, why would a movement whose entire motivation is some abstract form of "fuck you, Dad" ever be able to ask the "are you doing this out of spite?" question and be able to engage productively with the fact that the response is sometimes 'yes'?

First, this is utterly predictable. Patients won't read 10 pages of medspeak, especially when they've already made up their minds.

I want to zero in on that last bit; I'm pretty sure everyone who shows up at a gender clinic in 2024 AD knows what they want, when they want it. Parents who aren't sure about transitioning their kid won't take them to a gender clinic. Everyone knows the outcome of stepping into that building. And doctors know it too, and they also know that saying "no" just means the patient gets hormones anyways, just from an abortion doctor instead because planned parenthood can't resist jumping into something left coded for any reason, ever. I'm not sure what exactly that means here; I'm 100% sure that trans isn't real and the medical treatment these people need is for mental illness, but the idea that the medical system can self-regulate in a culture war heavy topic is also risible.

Second, this is utterly predictable. "The experts" tm being firmly on the left of the culture war for anything controversial and willing to misrepresent their theoretical area of expertise if not outright lie about it shouldn't be a shock to anyone who lived through Covid. Trans is pretty central to the culture war.

Third, and going for variety here, this shouldn't be a shock to anyone. Everything we know about trans people should point to them being difficult patients at the best of times; they disproportionately have additional mental illnesses, lots of them don't trust non-trans people, high percentages of them are unemployed/underemployed people who get on poorly with their families and thus have insurance difficulties which make everything more complicated, and most of them are literal teenagers who probably have a higher rate of lying to begin with. In that environment of course it's going to cause this type of problem.

WPATH is confirming things we already knew. It's a valuable confirmation, but there's not a lot of new information there other than that WPATH knew about the obvious problems and was choosing not to say anything, which was already my assumption- they're ideologically motivated, not stupid.

I'm 100% sure that trans isn't real and the medical treatment these people need is for mental illness

What's the working definition of real here? Do you believe that mental illness is real?

I think that the median case of, at the very least, depression, ADHD, and most anxiety disorders are just med-seeking or munchausens, yes, and I think all three of those things have a closer correspondence to reality than the claims trans adherents make about themselves.

I want to zero in on that last bit; I'm pretty sure everyone who shows up at a gender clinic in 2024 AD knows what they want, when they want it.

This may be an exercise in throwing stones in glass houses, but you need to log off. Plenty of people know next to nothing on the issue, and when their kid says they're trans they just go "welp, better make an appointment with the psych / doctor". Funnier still, even psychologists and family doctors tend to know next to nothing on the issue, and just refer.

WPATH is confirming things we already knew. It's a valuable confirmation, but there's not a lot of new information there other than that WPATH knew about the obvious problems and was choosing not to say anything, which was already my assumption- they're ideologically motivated, not stupid.

It was also my assumption, but I wouldn't describe it as "what we already knew". "Suspected", yes, and only for a given value of "we". And other than the confirmation being valuable, it also shows that, like I keep insisting, the vibe has shifted on this issue.

Plenty of people no next to nothing on the issue, and when their kids says they're trans they're just go "welp, better make an appointment with the psych / doctor".

Or they are pushed to go by the kid's school.

Plenty of people no next to nothing on the issue, and when their kids says they're trans they're just go "welp, better make an appointment with the psych / doctor". Funnier still, even psychologists and family doctors tend to know next to nothing on the issue, and just refer.

Trans is a hot topic. Everyone in America in the 2020’s has an idea of what it is which at least rounds to trans.

There are people who don’t think they know how to respond to it, sure, but those types know full well that the medical system will respond with transition, everyone knows that. Maybe not the finer details, but once you add on that ‘trans kids’ pretty much all come from well off blue tribe families- ‘non-affirming’ parents or parents who have a willingness to be skeptical of the official narrative do not seek medical treatment for their trans kid, they pull the kid’s pants down and say ‘look at how God made you and get used to it’.

There are people who don’t think they know how to respond to it, sure, but those types know full well that the medical system will respond with transition, everyone knows that.

+1 to Jiro's "no they don't". I'll add that even in the event they actually have an opinion on trans care, paradoxically it's the "allies" that may be to most vulnerable here, because they will tend to assume that the talk of lack of guardrails is a right-wing moral panic. But the majority simply have not followed any of the back and forth.

those types know full well that the medical system will respond with transition, everyone knows that.

No they don't. They may think "well, I don't know if trans is correct for my kid, I'm sure the doctor can figure it out". They'll assume that the doctor would act like a professional and diagnose based on objective standards that might say yes, but might say no.

I think you may be typical-minding. Countless people on Maury have denied fathering a child for absurd reasons like “we only had sex one time.”

There’s plenty of people sleepwalking through life seemingly without ever making an informed decision. “I didn’t know I couldn’t orgasm after removing my penis” sounds absurd but I would be more surprised if it didn’t happen.

This has been a general problem with mental health disorders in general and especially ones that you get a prescription for. The difference between someone who’s sad and someone who’s depressed is ten minutes with a psychiatrist. And adhd tends to work this way as well. If you’re seeking help for something that doesn’t leave physical evidence, the way to get what you want is to insist that it be given.

I'm 100% sure that trans isn't real and the medical treatment these people need is for mental illness

I'd be more careful with absolutes.

My burning hatred for presentism and general displeasure towards technocrats and their solutions to human problems can't be overstated; but they do all have a point in that the phenomenon behind "trans" is a real thing that has existed for pretty much all of history in some form or another.

The present obsession with it and its political implications helps nobody, but let's not pretend the problem doesn't exist. It's not just a symptom of other mental illnesses.

Call it its own type of mental illness if you will, we certainly used to, but it's real and we don't really understand the cause of it.

It is this ignorance that's the fertile ground for would be experts to push convenient solutions they swear have no drawbacks. The way out isn't more willfull ignorance. The flawed frame of understanding that is leading to the present problems must be replaced with the truth, whatever that may be. Not a different sort of convenient lie.

FWIW I agree with both @hydroacetylene and you here, and I expect that he'd agree with you too. What I would mean, and what I expect he means, by "trans isn't real" is that none of the people being classified as "trans" are "born into the wrong body" or "assigned" the wrong gender, nor are they "really" (in some sense) the opposite sex -- that it's not just a matter of overdiagnosis and a classification of some people as "trans" who aren't, while there is still some smaller subset who are "really trans" and where that the most appropriate treatment is the constellation of "gender-affirming" (what a euphemism!) treatments of hormones/surgery/social transition/etc.

I do agree that there is a separate mental illness (probably more than one) which correspond to "trans" -- that it's not just depression or anxiety or whatever that causes boys/men to want to be girls/women (or vice-versa), or to be unhappy because they aren't, or to (at times) convince themselves that they "really are" what they want to be. And I get that there are some people who don't believe that and think that the entirety of "trans" is just some current-day-cultural nonsense. But I do think that there is a meaningful and important sense in which "trans isn't real" is true, and I think that's what he's getting at.

Yes I doubt we all disagree very much, but some things deserve to be stated at least inasmuch as it allows us to map things out.

The story we've all been told (i.e.: there are people born with brains that correspond to the other sex and bringing their bodies in line with their brain heals them) has many problems, not least of which the fact that it has incredibly little to no evidence supporting it. In this at least, "trans isn't real". But the problem is the alternatives, like Blanchardism, are really no better on that front.

There's a deep irony in the fact that learning more would require pretty wild experimentation that would and has been suppressed by a political movement that is hell bent on large scale experimentation but only of a very specific kind.

If there's one thing we ought to learn from this it is that building identities around specific medical treatments is a terrible idea. And it's a mistake we keep making. See the weirder parts of the deaf community for another example.

My own personal experience is that scientists and people with genuine expertise in a subject are way more softly spoken and uncertain about the topics they hold expertise in, particularly in friendly company and in private, than political activism would like. From personal experience, to keep things vague since the topic is niche, I actually had to tone down a claim that I already thought was already very modest about whether [some human activity] would increase levels of [some dust], even if it was the best way to link research to real-world impacts. Climate change is the obvious one, where IPCC reports are incredibly modest compared to claims made by activists, to the point they might as well be speaking different languages. And to bang my usual drum, claims about "The Science" for covid restrictions often didn't exist at all in literature, or were contradicted by it. Even something like lab leaks will see surveys reported as Virologists and epidemiologists back natural origin for COVID-19 when actually the survey findings was that said experts averaged 77% probability of zoonosis and 23% of lab leak, and only 25% of scientists reporting to be near certain that it was zoonosis, hardly a consensus.

As for this topic in particular, doctors who are inclined to cooperate and not "gatekeep" due to political pressure, and patients who are told to defect by lying to "gatekeepers" and get the drugs faster, is going to lead to disaster. Even if you're trying to implement standards in good faith here, they're just going to get instantly eroded.

There are definetly plenty of those with more mixed feelings. Experience shows that whenever there is an opportunity for scientific authoritarianism that gives scientists special status, whether with covid, climate change, or scientific marxism, plenty of them are willing to jump along. And they don't need to be all of them or even a majority, to be highly influential.

Calling something a science, and censor opposition as unscientific, are strong elements of modernity's fundamentalism. In a way that is convincing of plenty of scientists. Another possibility is those in charge to say that certain views are scientific truth and exclude from journals those who aren't going along.

Trained in a culture of peer science and trusting authority of the scientific clique, many are going to go along with it. Especially if they already have pro left wing biases.

This means that being a good scientist and doing science effectively is different and can in fact be opposite with the class of scientists and people called scientists, and their prejudices and preferences, which can show group think, and unwillingness to examine their conclusions.

It is the courtier phenomenon. Where power goes, there are always some people who go along with it. Another aspect of this can be that the media and people who belong in factions promoting group think have a benefit in associating science/scientists with particular views, and fostering a divide between them and then those who raise objections or oppose certain policies. Another facet of this are some edgier and more fantastical objections to claims on political charged issues that are focused upon over more substantive disagreements. For example

microchips

vs

Origin of covid. Lockdowns. Vaccine effectiveness.

Add to that censorship of dissent, and it would be a mistake to expect the people we have given the title scientists, or rational, to succeed in opposing this, any more an ideology given the title scientific will succeed at being scientific, just because it claims to be that, or to aspire to that.

My own personal experience is that scientists and people with genuine expertise in a subject are way more softly spoken and uncertain about the topics they hold expertise in, particularly in friendly company and in private, than political activism would like.

Jack Turban, Steven Novella, and David Gorsky - the authors of the two reviews I linked - are all doctors and scientists. Turban specializes in trans care, Novella and Gorsky don't, but their entire claim to fame (such as it is) is being part of the Skeptic movement, and the entire point of their blog is to inform the public of the actual state of evidence, not to repeat the activist line. If they talk differently in friendly company and in private, that means they're deliberately misleading the public.

Maybe none of this should be surprising, but the system that exists today wouldn't survive, if any significant number of people internalized that.

I really don't understand any of the lines you're drawing between excerpts here.

On the one hand, we have statistical data about low desistance and high satisfaction. On the other hand, we have anecdotes about patients trusting their doctors and not being medical experts themselves (scandal!) and anecdotes about patients angling for the care they want instead of giving the doctor extra information because they are correctly scared of political manipulations interfering with their care.

And your claim is that the latter somehow disputes the former? How so?

If you think Turban's citation is valid statistical data, it's your funeral, but before we continue this line of debate I would like you to comlnfirm that you looked into the argument and this is, in fact, what you are saying.

And your claim is that the latter somehow disputes the former? How so?

Have you...have you read my post? I really don't know how else to respond other than to repeat what I said there. These doctors are explicitly saying they aren't putting barriers to entry to treatment, saying this is all new and not a known problem like diabetes, and that the patients are not informed enough to give informed consent, and that they are currently falling short of ethical standards. It's explicitly contradicting several of Turban's claims.

Are you saying this is all fine? Can you elaborate on why? Do you think we know enough on gender affirming care that doctors can confidently prescribe treatment knowing it will improve the condition the patients were diagnosed with, like they do with diabetes? Why do you think they themselves disagree with that?

patients trusting their doctors and not being medical experts themselves (scandal!)

I mean, yes, abuse of trust is pretty scandalous. Doctors shouldn't fake confidence in front of the public, and talk about how they're winging it behind closed doors.

patients angling for the care they want instead of giving the doctor extra information because they are correctly scared of political manipulations interfering with their care.

Well, if you want to say "there are no rigorous guardrails on the process, and that's a good thing", say it with your chest. The problem is that if you claim guardrails do exist when responding to critics, you are showing yourself to be deceptive.

anecdotes

This is a category error. It's like dismissing a confession to murder because it's just an anecdote.

Great post, thanks.

Can anyone give some context on where WPATH fits into the broader ecosystem of such organizations? I assume there are other organizations that give guidelines or do research - is WPATH bigger/smaller, newer/older, more/less funded, etc?

I haven't heard of anyone trying to map it out this way. My guess is that WPATH is probably the biggest and oldest one focused on the subject. Their closest competitors would be Genspect, and SEGM, but they are just now finding their footing, and they've been mostly founded simply as a reaction to the current state of affairs. Other than that you're going have organizations devoted to wider branches of medicine / psychology, like the ones listed by Turban at the beginning of my post. Each country has their own, and not all of them are pro gender affirming care (and I don't mean something predictable like Saudi Arabia being against - Europe seems to be leaning anti-trans-care, at least for kids).

Christian Nationalism

Within my own circles this is rather a hot topic, but I've yet to see it discussed in this forum. Christian evangelicalism has had its own version of the culture war; to whit, how involved and in what manner should Christians (both individually and the Church) be engaged in society and politics. There are factions of "Big Eva" who seem to be moving more Left (see the recent "He gets us" commercial in the Super Bowl). There are those who think that the "third-way"ism of Tim Keller (taking a high road that transcends politics and culture war) is still relevant in these days (from my perspective, with echos of Martin Niemoller). And there are those who are actively seeking a more aggressive and explicitly Christian approach to governance and policy. For those interested, a useful taxonomy provided by the Gospel Coalition describes to a reasonable first approximation the different approaches that Christians have to our current moment.

I have had my own journey in the direction of Christian Nationalism (though I wouldn't...yet...apply that label to myself). While in college I was a pro-life Ron Paul libertarian, over the years I've become less individualistic as I've grown in my faith. I used to think of religion as a private exercise. I know recognize the centrality of community. I even have begun to entertain the idea that there may be salvific consequences for those who are under the authority of a Christian leader. If the unbelieving spouse can be sanctified by his or her believing counterpart, and an entire house can be baptized when the head of the house believes, could there not be salvation extended to a nation whose head of state is an orthodox Christian and whose government practices the precepts of the Word? (If you are interested in more of my ramblings on this topic, https://pyotrverkhovensky.substack.com/p/what-is-christianitys-role-in-culture and https://pyotrverkhovensky.substack.com/p/on-theocracy-and-redemption)

Christianity in America has enjoyed centuries of being a dominant culture. Many Christians, having grown up in a culture that was at least outwardly compatible with Christianity, have slipped into casual acceptance of cultural norms. They are in the world, and of the world. In many cases self-proclaimed Christians are functionally agnostic, with no significant lifestyle differences from Atheists. Do we really believe Christ is Lord or do we not? Do we not believe in divine judgement and divine mercy? Is Church a weekly therapeutic exercise or is it a place where we meet the transcendent and drink of the body and the blood? Christian Nationalism, at its core, recognizes the reality and consequence of a world in which Christ is Lord. There is no "third way", there is only God's way. (For a somewhat related essay on the reality of God, see https://pyotrverkhovensky.substack.com/p/christianity-and-culture-continued).

There is a common assumption among Christians that all sin is equally damning. Man can never follow the Law, and Jesus even makes it clear that the Law didn't go far enough (the Law allows divorce, and does not explicitly proscribe lust). At the individual level, this assumption is correct. Outside the atonement found in Jesus, we all stand condemned. Yet at the societal level, there are varying levels of alignment with God's will. Every single person in Nazi Germany was a sinner. Every single person in 1941 USA was a sinner. Yet it would be an unusual Christian who would argue that 1941 USA was not more aligned with God's will than Nazi Germany. Not all societies are created equal, and there are varying degrees of misalignment. If I look at a woman in lust, I am clearly sinning and am condemned; but at least my desires are in alignment with God's ideal. It is only the object of my desires that is inappropriate, as being attracted to my wife is not only not a sin, but is a key part of a relationship that is a representation of Christ's love for the Church. Same-sex attraction is more disordered as both the object and the desire itself are misaligned. Transgenderism is completely disordered: the object, desire, and self are all misaligned. Societies that venerate increasingly disordered behavior will inevitably sink into corruption and decay. Christian Nationalism, perhaps alone among contemporary strands of Christian thought, fully acknowledges these implications.

The question is whether you'd be behind such a project if this Christian Nationalism were actually Catholic Nationalism (or Methodist Nationalism, or Presbyterian Nationalism, or whichever major denomination you find most distasteful). Roman Catholicism is the largest individual denomination in the United States, has a clearly defined doctrine, and an Episcopal structure. The current president is a practicing Catholic. If we go in that direction, Catholicism would be the obvious choice. This would have some added advantages — along with combating social degeneracy, we could also use this to combat spiritual degeneracy. Since the First Amendment is no longer in play, we can use the power of the state to marginalize non-Catholic religions. Mainline Protestants whom we've had good relations with would be okay. Their numbers are declining anyway. Evangelicals and anyone outside of a long-standing denomination? Well, they're getting slayed. Any denomination not on the approved list is getting taxed at corporate rates. And you'd better be Catholic if you expect to be able to hold office and preference will be given in all public employment.

All the public schools will be Catholic and named after saints and kids will be required to take religion and attend church every day. Those who aren't Catholic will obviously be singled out by their inability to receive communion. We'll get to work on making sure that the it's the official position of the government that doctrines like justification on faith alone and sola scriptura are bunk and that veneration of Mary and the saints are where it's at. And we'll obviously take our cues from the Pope, regardless of whether he's viewed as liberal, conservative,m or otherwise. I'm obviously not being serious here, but when I hear people talking about Christian Nationalism it's pretty clear that they're assuming that their idea of Christianity is the one that will become predominant. When you suggest that some other group might be the ones with all the power, then it no longer seems like such a good idea.

along with combating social degeneracy

It makes me smile when someone talk about Catholicism combating social degeneracy. I live in one of the most religious area of Southern Europe[1]. The amount of social deviancy, disfunction, filth (both physical and moral) observed while people keep professing their Catholic faith makes me think that when "studies prove" that religion is "actually good for you" are talking about American society. American culture is generally more optimistic and extroverted and American religious people bring this to their relationship to God. Here the Church is interwoven with scandals and organized crime. Yes, I am talking about Sicily.

[1]Many of my acquaintances are even scared to say to their parents that they are atheist and I've witnessed a 36 years old woman being scolded by her mother for not attending service while being sick.

I think you're giving the Americans a bit too much credit; the population of the Bible Belt isn't exactly a paragon of moral virtue, at least if you believe the statistics. Anyway, if you couldn't tell, I wasn't being serious. The reason I used that as an example is because I'm Catholic and most of the hardcore Christians in this country make it pretty clear that they don't consider us to be real Christians, which is ridiculous. Obviously, a Catholic state would be pretty distasteful to them. Socially compelled religious displays don't do anything except create the illusion of virtue. IT reminds me of the NFL kneeling scandal, where some people acted as though someone standing for the anthem because they were compelled to was akin to genuine patriotism.

where some people acted as though someone standing for the anthem because they were compelled to was akin to genuine patriotism.

Standing up to a national anthem of any country, let alone one's own, is basic human decency and doesn't indicate a particularly high degree of loyalty for the country the anthem of which is played. But refusing to do so for one's own does show a high degree of contempt due to rare it is to sit during anthems of even other countries.

You're making my point for me. However you want to couch it, you can't use the fact that someone stands for the anthem, or the pledge, or whatever, as evidence of their patriotism, because it has been culturally ingrained to the point where not doing it becomes a conspicuous sign of disrespect among certain people. If church attendance and public religious displays ever reached the same level of ubiquity in our society, they would lose whatever virtue-signalling power they have now.

You know how one can tell that someone is subscribed to Journolist? because there have been a bunch of "Christian Nationalist" posts all of a sudden. Tu quoque

‘Christian nationalism’ has been an occasional interest topic for the left since the Bush days, arguably before too. It’s not a new subject, it was just temporarily overtaken by dissident rightists calling Christians cucks.

The woke left has been have been calling us cucks since the Reagan years, how has that worked out for you?

Not all societies are created equal, and there are varying degrees of misalignment. If I look at a woman in lust, I am clearly sinning and am condemned; but at least my desires are in alignment with God's ideal. It is only the object of my desires that is inappropriate, as being attracted to my wife is not only not a sin, but is a key part of a relationship that is a representation of Christ's love for the Church. Same-sex attraction is more disordered as both the object and the desire itself are misaligned. Transgenderism is completely disordered: the object, desire, and self are all misaligned.

This sounds like ranking sins, which is commonsensical and popular in e.g. Catholicism, but hard to reconcile with ideas like the Divine Command Theory of ethics. If what's wrong with sinning is disobeying God, then committing adultery in your heart is bad in exactly the same way as raping and murdering a baby. There's no moral sense in which you are better or worse than the cruellest, most perverted person you can imagine; the only possible difference of moral significance between you and a baby-raper-killer is that God may have chosen (and I stress "chosen") to save you from what you morally deserve. Focusing on e.g. the difference in harms is swapping the DCT for something like consequentialism or care ethics.

(I leave aside https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagianism and non-DCT metaethics as interesting but very widely condemned by Christians.)

If Jesus or the Bible had provided a comprehensive ranking of sins with varying degrees of sinfulness, then it's obvious consistent with a Christian DCT, but as you know that's not the case.

Societies that venerate increasingly disordered behavior will inevitably sink into corruption and decay.

I think that this is the better option for what you want to say. Even if all sins are equally sinful, you can still coherently argue that different societies have different propensities to sin vs. redemption. A hardline Christian DCT fan can still reason in a consequentialist way about maximising the probability of redemption and minimising the probability of sins.

Every sin, no matter how "small", condemns us. However, at a societal level there is a clear distinction between a population that occasionally looks on someone with lust, and a population that murders and rapes babies.

Yes, I noted that a Christian can say that there are differences. It's just debatable whether Christianity gives one a basis to say that there is a difference of moral superiority, rather than e.g. a difference of predisposition towards sinful behaviour; of course, that's not an insignificant difference from a Christian perspective!

This sounds like ranking sins, which is commonsensical and popular in e.g. Catholicism, but hard to reconcile with ideas like the Divine Command Theory of ethics. If what's wrong with sinning is disobeying God, then committing adultery in your heart is bad in exactly the same way as raping and murdering a baby. There's no moral sense in which you are better or worse than the cruellest, most perverted person you can imagine; the only possible difference of moral significance between you and a baby-raper-killer is that God may have chosen (and I stress "chosen") to save you from what you morally deserve. Focusing on e.g. the difference in harms is swapping the DCT for something like consequentialism or care ethics.

I'm definitely not a fan of the Divine Command Theory, but I think you're being unfair here. Why not posit a difference in degree of disobedience? Surely murdering someone is more disobedient than committing adultery in your heart.

If Jesus or the Bible had provided a comprehensive ranking of sins with varying degrees of sinfulness, then it's obvious consistent with a Christian DCT, but as you know that's not the case.

Sure he didn't provide a comprehensive list but he did on many occasions outright define a hierarchy of sins.

Matt. 22:36-40:

36 Master, which is the great commandment in the law?

37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy bheart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

38 This is the first and great commandment.

39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Matt. 23:23

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and canise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

I think the better question is why you'd give your own interpretation of Divine Command Theory any time at all, given the many times in the Bible when it's explicitly contradicted.

I'm definitely not a fan of the Divine Command Theory, but I think you're being unfair here. Why not posit a difference in degree of disobedience? Surely murdering someone is more disobedient than committing adultery in your heart.

What's more disobedient about it? Both are breaking God's commandments.

On Matthew 22, the key term here is magos (μεγας) which is used in the New Testament to mean largest or highest in rank, just as "greatest" is ambiguous in English. One clever thing about the commandment Jesus gives is that it is both largest in scope (every violation of every other commandment is an instance of it) and rank. If humans truly had complete faith and love for God, then they would neither commit adultery in their hearts, nor murder.

Note I'm not saying that this is common sense, but just a natural implication of an unranked DCT.

I think the better question is why you'd give your own interpretation of Divine Command Theory any time at all, given the many times in the Bible when it's explicitly contradicted.

Oh, that's just teasing! Don't be so coquettish, show the goods.

What's more disobedient about it? Both are breaking God's commandments.

  1. Some actions break more commandments than others
  2. Some actions break commandments to a greater extent than others
  3. Some actions break more important commandments than others
  4. Some actions more deliberately break commandments than others

All of these are quite clear examples of more disobedience.

One clever thing about the commandment Jesus gives is that it is both largest in scope (every violation of every other commandment is an instance of it) and rank.

You conveniently ignore the second part of that, which is loving thy neighbor. I agree that all sins violate the first commandment, but not all sins violate the second, so why, according to Divine Command Theory, is it explicitly placed above all other commandments?

Oh, that's just teasing! Don't be so coquettish, show the goods.

You should at least address both of my examples before accusing me of not providing enough. Jesus explicitly says that judgment, mercy, and faith are "weightier" than small tithes; a strong implication that obeying such commandments is straightforwardly more important.

There is plenty of direct evidence contradicting your interpretation of Divine Command Theory and very little actually supporting it. I can't think of a single passage anywhere in the Bible which comes close to saying "all instances of sin are equal" whereas I came up with two off the top of my head which contradict that. The closest I can think of is James 2:10:

For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.

This might sound bad for my position, but read the very next verse:

For he that said, Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill. Now if thou commit no adultery, yet if thou kill, thou art become a transgressor of the law.

and I think it becomes clear that he's more referring to whether someone has transgressed the law or not. In this sense, yes, one sin does make you a sinner, but it doesn't mean that that sin is exactly perfectly equal to any other sin.

I'm interested in why you think DCT holds any weight at all. What evidence is there for it?

All of these are quite clear examples of more disobedience.

But all of them are punished in exactly the same way, according to traditional Christianity. So while there is more disobedience, it doesn't seem to make a moral difference: someone who commits one sin is treated by God exactly the same as if they've committed them all.

You conveniently ignore the second part of that, which is loving thy neighbor. I agree that all sins violate the first commandment, but not all sins violate the second, so why, according to Divine Command Theory, is it explicitly placed above all other commandments?

If all other sins (breaking of God's commands) are implicit in the first commandment, then it isn't.

You should at least address both of my examples before accusing me of not providing enough. Jesus explicitly says that judgment, mercy, and faith are "weightier" than small tithes; a strong implication that obeying such commandments is straightforwardly more important.

That's one possible interpretation of the text. However, the text itself is not a contradiction, since it's not clear that Jesus is saying that these are more morally important, as opposed to e.g. important for spiritual development (the context is condemning the religious practices of scribes and Pharisees.

I'm interested in why you think DCT holds any weight at all. What evidence is there for it?

Biblically? One advantage is that it (allegedly) explains why a benevolent Father would punish his children in a lake of fire for the slightest infraction of his will, excepting grace. More generally, it neatly answers the Problem of Evil which otherwise perplexes the Bible (Job in particular; the Jews' efforts to explain their suffering in spite of being God's people; Jesus's partial revelation to humanity) as there is no separate standard of morality by which God can be judged. On a DCT view, God being anything other than perfectly good is a category mistake. This is not so much grasping one of the Euthyphro Dilemma's horns as try to ride it off into the sunset.

But all of them are punished in exactly the same way, according to traditional Christianity.

Maybe "traditional christianity" is doing some work here that I'm unaware of, but I'm going to assume that the text of the bible is still in play.

The bible does absolutely give us at least two classes of sin, with different punishments. For most sinners, once they have committed a sin, they are given a chance to repent and be forgiven. But for those that blaspheme against the holy spirit, this option is cut off (Matthew 12:31). It would seem to be a reasonable interpretation of the words of Christ here that at least 1 sin is viewed more harshly by the divine.

Those are different conditions of forgiveness/non-forgiveness (given grace) not different punishments.

But all of them are punished in exactly the same way, according to traditional Christianity. So while there is more disobedience, it doesn't seem to make a moral difference: someone who commits one sin is treated by God exactly the same as if they've committed them all.

Well I'm not a believer in "traditional" Christianity i.e. medieval Christianity. That said I don't think this is an accurate framing. It's not that all sins are equal, it's that without grace, one sin of any magnitude is sufficient to send you to hell. This doesn't imply that all sins are exactly the same in magnitude.

If all other sins (breaking of God's commands) are implicit in the first commandment, then it isn't.

Well why was it named as the second commandment then, the one which in addition to the first supports the rest of the law and prophets? Clearly it has some sort of exalted position over the other commandments. There's no way Jesus was just referring to chronological order when he called it the second commandment.

Biblically? One advantage is that it (allegedly) explains why a benevolent Father would punish his children in a lake of fire for the slightest infraction of his will, excepting grace. More generally, it neatly answers the Problem of Evil which otherwise perplexes the Bible (Job in particular; the Jews' efforts to explain their suffering in spite of being God's people; Jesus's partial revelation to humanity) as there is no separate standard of morality by which God can be judged. On a DCT view, God being anything other than perfectly good is a category mistake. This is not so much grasping one of the Euthyphro Dilemma's horns as try to ride it off into the sunset.

I was more looking for verses that say this directly, the way I've been finding verses which directly contradict this. There are many explanations for theodicy, and this one seems to have a lot of contradictory evidence.

Many Christians do believe that God can say what's good and what's bad, but I'd argue that most of this is a practical belief rather than a theoretical one. It's not that God is defining good and bad, it's that he's right about what good and bad are, and if you disagree with him you'll always be wrong. However to describe it as I have--God as a perfect, omnipotent being, but not one who actually invented the concept of morality--is to "limit" God and so was seen as increasingly unpopular and heretical by the medieval Church.

So I won't argue that DCT isn't popular but I don't think the Bible supports it at all.

It's not that all sins are equal, it's that without grace, one sin of any magnitude is sufficient to send you to hell. This doesn't imply that all sins are exactly the same in magnitude.

It's not the only explanation, but if God doesn't treat them as morally different, it indicates that they are morally equal. If there was a moral distinction, wouldn't that (a) be made clear in the Bible and (b) factor into punishments?

Well why was it named as the second commandment then, the one which in addition to the first supports the rest of the law and prophets? Clearly it has some sort of exalted position over the other commandments. There's no way Jesus was just referring to chronological order when he called it the second commandment.

Some sort, maybe, but it doesn't follow that this distinction is a moral one. For example, it could be more important as a test of faith than some other commandments, which is not the same as being more morally significant.

I was more looking for verses that say this directly

I think that the Bible was created by scholars and outlaws in a largely illiterate and philosophically alien time, with no more or less divine inspiration than any of the other thousands of bewildering religious texts that have emerged from human minds, so it doesn't surprise me that this sort of issue is not made clear in the Bible, any more than it doesn't surprise me that the Bible doesn't actually give a clear answer to the Problem of Evil (for instance, the Book of Job raises more questions than answers, e.g. what is God doing chatting with Satan and playing tricks on mortals like some Olympian or Norse deity?) or to avoid about 1500 years of debate on whether the Holy Spirit processes from the Father or from the Father and the Son.

Many Christians do believe that God can say what's good and what's bad, but I'd argue that most of this is a practical belief rather than a theoretical one. It's not that God is defining good and bad, it's that he's right about what good and bad are, and if you disagree with him you'll always be wrong. However to describe it as I have--God as a perfect, omnipotent being, but not one who actually invented the concept of morality--is to "limit" God and so was seen as increasingly unpopular and heretical by the medieval Church.

I'm not too sure about the exact history, but I do know that Augustine was a divine command theorist. I wouldn't be surprised if the question is anachronistic in the context of early Christianity, so if you asked Paul or Jesus, they'd say something that unsettled you further. Perhaps Paul would say something about miasma or the Word being the Good, while Jesus might throw you off by saying that your conceptual framing is wrong: there is intentional sin and rebellion... and unintentional sin.

So I won't argue that DCT isn't popular but I don't think the Bible supports it at all.

That may well be true.

if God doesn't treat them as morally different, it indicates that they are morally equal.

I don't believe that any sin will land you in hell, but again, even if one did, that doesn't mean they're punished equally, or that equal punishments are the full extent of God's treatment of them on a moral level. Many Christians believe in different levels of hell. Also, God could punish all sins equally but still consider some worse than others.

If there was a moral distinction, wouldn't that (a) be made clear in the Bible and (b) factor into punishments?

It is made clear in the Bible. I can keep finding verses, I bet there are at least a few dozen on this level, but Luke 12:47-48, Ezekiel 8:13, and John 19:11 all clearly indicate the existence of greater and lesser sins.

Proverbs 6:16-19 directly mentions a few sins which God hates more than other sins.

It certainly factors punishments too, both divine and temporal. The Law of Moses punishes different sins differently, and Jesus on many occasions implies that the punishment for some sins is worse than others.

For example Matthew 18:6 says:

but whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

Again, I'm sure I can find plenty more, but there are quite explicit verses talking about different punishments for different sins. At this point we've established:

  1. Some sins have different punishments than others
  2. Some commandments are more important in the eyes of God than others
  3. God hates some sins more than others

What exactly is left in the meaning of one sin being more "morally" important than another? To me it sounds like you're relying on that word when we've already extracted all meaning from it. I'm not aware of any verse where someone explicitly says "X commandment is morally more important than Y commandment" but again all of the relevant meanings of the word moral that I can think of are covered in pretty much exactly that way.

I think that the Bible was created by scholars and outlaws in a largely illiterate and philosophically alien time, with no more or less divine inspiration than any of the other thousands of bewildering religious texts that have emerged from human minds, so it doesn't surprise me that this sort of issue is not made clear in the Bible

So, based on conversation of expected evidence, the fact that the Bible is clear about the opposite, and clearly mentions multiple times the existence of greater and lesser sins, the greater punishment assigned to greater sins, and the increased importance which God puts upon those greater sins, should surprise you at least a little. Such an incoherent and illiterate book should not have been so clear about such an esoteric issue.

I can just keep finding verses that directly back me up, whereas your point is so much more indirect and relies on weird, esoteric, indirect readings of verses whose plain meaning is fairly obvious.

I'm not too sure about the exact history, but I do know that Augustine was a divine command theorist.

Augustine is a lot later than my church (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) believes the early Christian church fell into apostasy. At the latest it happened with the Nicene Creed which happened decades before Augustine was born.

As far as the other two, "maybe you're wrong!" is really not a strong argument or worth mentioning at all.

If your point is that DCT is wrong, and therefore early Christianity is wrong, well, I agree with you there. But to claim the Bible preaches DCT, and then fall back on "well the Bible is incoherent so it's no surprise it's not very clear about supporting DCT" after I've found multiple clear passages opposing DCT, is too far. It sounds less like you have an actual opinion regarding what the Bible teaches, and more like you've discovered an obviously-wrong interpretation of the Bible and are trying to use it to prove that the Bible is also obviously wrong.

More comments

Matthew 12:31 even states that blasphemy against God the Father is forgiven whereas blasphemy against the Spirit is not, which is a blow to DCT because you would expect the opposite given that the Spirit proceeds from the Father according to Trinitarians. Then 12:37 specifies the two greatest commandments on which the whole of the law rests. But you can probably make DCT compatible with some kind of ranked utilitarian ethical formulation given that the underlying meaning of “feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, visiting the poor and imprisoned” is clearly signaling that we have an obligation toward another’s Ultimate Happiness, using particularly salient examples, rather than being an exhaustive list of ethical obligations. God, perhaps, commands that we see ethics as a means of promoting the greatest feasible sum happiness in a community.

Historical Christian theology has tended towards an eccentric form of virtue ethics, which doesn’t completely exclude divine command theory.

I've thought recently on this topic and I'll approach your comment from a different perspective than others. If we truly believe Jesus is God and man we can look to his life in the gospels and see how he lived his life. He never set up a national state or created an enduring political edifice, which if we believe he is omnipotent would have been within his power to do so. This is strengthened by viewing the Old Testament through the lenses of salvation history. God offered a holy kingdom and wholly enmeshed religious political state, and it did not save humanity. Jesus' message, and those of his followers soon after him, was a message that was not constrained by political, ethnic or 'national' boundaries. He instead founded a church.

My thought is 'Christian Nationalism' as an idea mixes the christian idea that should be universal with something that is more parochial-nationalism and does a disservice to the Christian message. It is a current response to the loss of prestige and political power of organized religion. Instead I think Christians should focus on living lives of holiness and raising families that follow the Christian message. Let us be judged by our fruits, let them know us by our joy.

The most reactionary explanation of this, of course, is that Christianity was an original form of what we call progressivism or liberalism, and that some resistance to the use of power and hierarchy are a common theme. The many historical Christian states, by this standard, simply didn't follow Jesus's teachings as they were intended, because ideas and religions co-evolve with power. And the thing that claimed to be the Church ended up having quite a lot of political power and wealth anyway.

Nope, Christian nationalism won't amount to much. At most it could get a seat at the table at the evangelical coalition, but evangelicals are far, far less culturally relevant than they were 20 years ago. It'll be nothing more than a fringe position.

There are 3 main issues:

  1. The Christian part. It's clear a lot of people want some form of "cultural Christianity" without the actual religious superstitions, but all attempts to create something like that have been failures. A lot of Christians do genuinely believe much of what's written in Bible either literally or semi-literally. But this places them at odds with younger generations that demand some actual evidence. Despite tons of trying, nobody on this forum or anywhere else on the Internet has been able to come up with a compelling argument for a deity. At best they ramble on about goofy metaphysics that’s either unfalsifiable, or merely haranguing about definitions. None of it’s particularly persuasive.

  2. The nationalism part. A lot of Christians see their religion as more of a passive thing, not something that demands extreme fervor that a pugnacious nationalist movement would require. Again, born-agains and evangelicals might be willing to go along with it, but there's a whole bunch of less committed Christians who take part as more of a habit or because it’s just a social gathering. They're not going to want to sign up to be Soldiers of Christ.

  3. The combination of the two. Christianity is not a naturally aggressive religion. Sure, people will ignore tons of contradictions if politically convenient, e.g. the Crusades happened. That said, it comes at a cost of things being generally more difficult to be pushed in that direction. There will always be an undercurrent of people saying things like “hey the Bible tells us to Love Thy Neighbor, not Love Thy Neighbor Unless They Vote Against Trump”. There’s a reason white nationalists have long flirted with Paganism and Norse stuff, as it’s much more consistent to be aggressive when your god is Thor. On the other hand, much of Christian morality boils down to being servile, of always turning the other cheek. It’s not a natural fit to any degree.

It seems to not be true that Christianity is in some kind of tailspin, though- there’s no evidence for declining religiosity overall in younger generations, more that people who never went to church to begin with stopped calling themselves Christian.

Funny you mention church attendance since that's also been in a tailspin. The percent of people never attending church has more than doubled since 2000. Combine that with religion's increasingly irrelevant cultural position and yes, it's fair to say religiosity is definitely declining. There's no use trying to hide it with No True Scottsman of "they weren't really Christians in the first place".

There's no use trying to hide it with No True Scottsman of "they weren't really Christians in the first place".

I don't think this fully explains the decline at all, but it is at least part of it. When everyone was Christian you were Christian even if you never went to church or otherwise followed the religious teachings at all. The unexamined life would be a Christian one. Those people would have contributed very little to Christian teachings. Now the same people are "agnostic"--they always were but now it's more honest.

A lot of Christians do genuinely believe much of what's written in Bible either literally or semi-literally. But this places them at odds with younger generations that demand some actual evidence. Despite tons of trying, nobody on this forum or anywhere else on the Internet has been able to come up with a compelling argument for a deity. At best they ramble on about goofy metaphysics that’s either unfalsifiable, or merely haranguing about definitions. None of it’s particularly persuasive.

yawn

Sure, the metaphysics is very silly. Arguments like the unmoved mover are, I think, essentially just word games. That said the world is replete with evidence. Ask in faith and ye shall receive. Apply a commandment in your own life and your life will improve. Miracles will not usually benefit those who are entirely unready for them, so until then the only evidence is more general (and easily explainable) statistical evidence to do with longevity, life satisfaction, marital/family stability, etc. among practicing Christians.

To be more clear, there are already some precepts you know to be true and yet do not live by. What makes you think that more such knowledge/evidence would be helpful? Some have gotten their lives in order when faced with literal miracles, but most continue to live as they did, inventing new reasons to doubt what they saw, and deeply wounding their own souls in the process.

Apply a commandment in your own life and your life will improve. Miracles will not usually benefit those who are entirely unready for them, so until then the only evidence is more general (and easily explainable) statistical evidence to do with longevity, life satisfaction, marital/family stability, etc. among practicing Christians.

None of this is proof of a Christian deity, nor that the claims of literalists or semi-literalists are true. At best, it's proof that the Bible can teach some helpful lessons about how to live your life, but that's hardly a high bar. A fairy tale about trolls and gremlins could do the same.

Some have gotten their lives in order when faced with literal miracles, but most continue to live as they did, inventing new reasons to doubt what they saw, and deeply wounding their own souls in the process.

There is no evidence of supernatural miracles ever having occurred. If you have some evidence, then please share it, as this sounds like a fun avenue of debate.

None of this is proof of a Christian deity, nor that the claims of literalists or semi-literalists are true. At best, it's proof that the Bible can teach some helpful lessons about how to live your life, but that's hardly a high bar. A fairy tale about trolls and gremlins could do the same.

Sure, it's not proof, at least not at the beginning, but it's evidence, however weak. In the beginning the evidence is more "the Bible teaches useful lessons" but I'm confident that as you actually apply that evidence you'll get more and more evidence actually pointing to the Bible being literally true. Eventually the heap of evidence, or a singularly impressive piece of evidence, will constitute proof.

Fairy tales do often teach good moral lessons, so in this sense as you follow the lessons better you'll see increasing evidence of both those moral principles and of God. I don't really see any issue with this. The bible will generally serve you better but it doesn't have a monopoly on truth.

If you truly do zealously follow some fairy tale about honesty or whatever, you'll cultivate other virtues alongside honesty, and those other virtues will tell you when it's time to look for moral truth elsewhere.

There is no evidence of supernatural miracles ever having occurred.

I think you mean no sufficient evidence. Evidence exists for essentially all hypotheses.

If you have some evidence, then please share it, as this sounds like a fun avenue of debate.

In my own life the strongest proof is the aforementioned mechanism of increasing moral intelligence. You have your own habits which you know to be sins; I claim that the way mortality has been designed, you have the power to conquer those habits, and doing so will improve your life. No belief in God required, but if you consistently do so I do think that you, like me, will begin to feel the hand of God helping you along and giving you strength to continue in your efforts. This is easy and undeniably worthwhile to test, and has quick results.

As far as physical proof, here are some miracles I've seen. I've essentially never earnestly prayed for something without either getting it, getting a clear response along the lines of "this isn't something you should ask for," or in one case both.

I have performed bayesian analysis on my own prayers in the past. Eventually the results were clear enough that it felt disrespectful and counterproductive to continue testing, rather than putting that effort into increased praying.

As far as tangible proof available to all, I've pontificated in the past about why we probably shouldn't expect to see that. In short, greater understanding leads to greater accountability, and you don't actually need greater understanding to tackle your current sins.

Why is greater accountability undesirable, assuming greater understanding?

Sin and evil are harmful to the soul and lead to less happiness in the long run. The greater one's understanding of a choice and the ramifications of that choice, the worse the "damage" i.e. negative consequences should the choice be the wrong one.

Greater understanding is good if we're ready for it--if we're using the understanding we have reasonably well.

Wow!

"I've essentially never earnestly prayed for something without either getting it, getting a clear response along the lines of "this isn't something you should ask for," or in one case both."

That is an amazing superpower!

Guess all those parents of millions of sick and dying kids just didn't measure up. They and their parents were undeserving of God's grace. You must be one of God's true Chosen!

I'm really happy to break this to you--all kids go to heaven. They all get God's grace, and in fact everyone does.

As far as superpowers, getting everything I asked for would be one thing, but all I claim is to know beforehand when one of my requests is inappropriate. This has more to do with a correct understanding of God than any spiritual sensitivity or righteousness on my part.

Lucky you, to know the true mind of God...This is really trending towards the absurd, even for religious nonsense.

Exactly what is your claim? I've been recording these things for years and have advance predictions written down.

They all get God's grace, and in fact everyone does.

There are a whole bunch of Christians who disagree with you on this. Some have even posted here.

"Grace" is a broad term which refers to more than just salvation. I think pretty much all Christians would agree that everyone has access to God's grace.

But more importantly, it's not like I'm claiming that all Christians are correct about everything.

I think your miracle evidence is confused, but in lieu of that I'll point somewhere else - many intelligent Muslims and members of other faiths have similarly seen personal miracles from their god(s) and used them as evidence for their faith. Their arguments are very similar to yours. Which is weird, right?

No. Why would God ignore their prayers? I'd expect people of other faiths to have somewhat fewer prayers answered because they have less understanding of what to ask for, but that's all--they're God's children too.

The other types of claims give me more pause. It's clear that some people believe (to some extent) that they've genuinely been visited by angels or dreamt of a message from their god, etc. When I hear the actual account though, it's generally fairly easy to dismiss it as a hallucination, a fabrication, or simply a normal dream.

Right, but then your miracles are evidence for 'any entity or process that intervenes in the world to help humans', not 'God specifically', because by that logic it isn't evidence for the Muslims when "Allah" appears to do it.

When I hear the actual account though, it's generally fairly easy to dismiss it as a hallucination, a fabrication, or simply a normal dream.

I think there are some rather sophisticated claims of Buddhist, Hindu, and Islam miracles, and many unsophisticated and obviously false Christian miracle claims. This means the distribution of miracle claims on plausibility is as far as I know similar for different religions, so if you're arguing that this is evidence for Christian God over others I don't think that's true, although I'm not sure if that's the argument you're making or not.

The thing is Christianity, I think, claims that a significant number of instances of angels visiting people / God speaking to people / observable divine intervention happened. It's weird that it just stopped, and all we get now isn't easily falsifiable.

Also, I think you're just getting lucky generally. You pray a lot, sometimes something like it happens, you count the few pieces of strong evidence that prayer works and discount the larger number of weak evidence that it doesn't.

Right, but then your miracles are evidence for 'any entity or process that intervenes in the world to help humans', not 'God specifically', because by that logic it isn't evidence for the Muslims when "Allah" appears to do it.

Yes, I know this. Put another way, my miracles are evidence concerning the existence and nature of God. They're not sufficient to prove God's existence, let alone nature, but they are indications of both.

I think there are some rather sophisticated claims of Buddhist, Hindu, and Islam miracles, and many unsophisticated and obviously false Christian miracle claims. This means the distribution of miracle claims on plausibility is as far as I know similar for different religions, so if you're arguing that this is evidence for Christian God over others I don't think that's true, although I'm not sure if that's the argument you're making or not.

I think it's very weak evidence of the Christian God over others, and fairly strong evidence (at least for me) of some kind of God.

To be clear I am extremely skeptical in general, and entirely discount pretty much all claims of miracles both in and out of my own religion. This is just my natural impulse and if I hadn't seen such things as I describe myself I would also discount them as made-up or exaggerated. I think this impulse is essentially correct but I cannot deny my own experience.

The thing is Christianity, I think, claims that a significant number of instances of angels visiting people / God speaking to people / observable divine intervention happened. It's weird that it just stopped, and all we get now isn't easily falsifiable.

It's not all that weird given what I was saying about agency and accountability. Given that, you'd expect such obvious miracles to grow much rarer. That said I'm also highly skeptical of essentially all such accounts.

Also, I think you're just getting lucky generally. You pray a lot, sometimes something like it happens, you count the few pieces of strong evidence that prayer works and discount the larger number of weak evidence that it doesn't.

I worried the same and conducted tests to try and determine whether this was happening. I wrote down a list of things I wanted, randomized which I prayed for, attempted to determine the likelihood of each happening on its own (e.g. without prayer) and then attempted to evaluate the results. It was the closest I could get to a randomized controlled trial.

This worked fine, and produced extremely strong evidence in God's favor, but I didn't really find it all that convincing, due to the possibility that my own bias seeped into the experiment. Since then I've conducted plenty of other tests. The most relevant to this discussion is that I always write down when I seriously pray for something. Since I started doing so no serious prayer has gone unanswered in one way or another.

I had to break the news to maybe 200 people over the past 6 months that their cancer was fatal. Including maybe a dozen children.

I had to clean out the suppurating wound in a patient who had a mandibulectomy for a orofacial carcinoma. When I removed the bandages, coated in pus, he could have played a flute both ways. I suppose his incoherent prayers and moaning were of no avail because they ended up directed simultaneously to heaven and hell. Then again, that ward has poor cellular reception.

I have heard earnest praying and fevered pleas for divine aid. It was never forthcoming.

What facile excuses for miracles you recite. If that's the standard of evidence you deem acceptable for the sweeping claims of Christianity..

What sin did a two year old child with ALL commit, such that she wasn't worthy of a miracle while your remission from UC was? Wrong deity I presume? The post-office does a better job directing mislabeled mail. Do you think a "fast" done by your family outweighs the RCTs showing that prayer, both direct and directed, is useless?

Thankfully I have not had too many cases of people thanking the Lord/Allah/Ram for their cures, or I'd have gone to jail for strangling them. Most of them are far more genuinely grateful for the actual miracle that is modern medicine, and by God we've got more to show for it.

What sin did I commit, getting ulcerative colitis and spending months in agony? What sin did anyone commit to experience any amount of suffering at all?

You stand upon others' graves and claim that their suffering was for naught. I stand upon my own experience and disagree in the strongest terms possible. Each moment of life, even when experiencing some of the worst pain imaginable, is still better than even. In our very worst, most agonized moments, God has seen fit to grant us greater and more meaningful pleasures than the pain which we experience. It's simply a matter of being able to recognize it. I have spent hundreds of hours in physical agony, but relative safety and calm, so I've had time to think about this and know it better than most.

The true tragedy is not the dead children, who have been taken to heaven and will be reunited with their family eventually, but the parents and siblings forced to cope with their absence for decades afterwards, lacking any knowledge that their child is okay. I promise you that that kid is okay, though, and that all of this will eventually work out to everyone's benefit. There are greater joys meant for humanity which we must be prepared to receive.

To be clear, I have seen miracles far greater than the ones I've shared. The greatest, to me, is the miracle of my own conversion and moral growth, but there have been plenty of others. I'm glad I didn't share them--you would probably be calling me a liar directly, rather than just insinuating it. I've already told you that I don't think I deserved any cure for my UC, but that the timing of it does indicate its miraculous nature. And I've already told you that even such miracles don't outweigh RCTs for me, but that they did give me confidence enough to continue investigating, including by conducting my own trials.

Given that we've already discussed all of this, and that I've already addressed each of your points in detail, I'll choose to interpret the substance of your comment as a result of your anger at the problem of suffering rather than as deliberate bad faith argumentation. I understand--it's certainly a problem I grappled with as well. Next time you do experience serious pain, I encourage you to slow down and experience just one instant of the pain at a time. It soon becomes clear that no matter the severity of the pain, a single instant of it is really quite tolerable, easily outweighed by the simple joy of other sensory inputs. The real trouble comes when our brains run ahead and try to experience all of the suffering at once, both feeling the pain of the instant and dreading the countless instants to come.

The same is true of all suffering. It may feel unjust, it may feel like God has unjustly condemned us to suffer agony for nothing, but the pain teaches us, and God has also unjustly granted us countless joys to pad life out and outweigh even the worst of our pains.

but the pain teaches us, and God has also unjustly granted us countless joys to pad life out and outweigh even the worst of our pains.

Who is “us” here exactly?

Countless humans and sentient creatures have not been granted “countless joys” to outweigh their suffering. Your theology deals with this moral inequity by saying god will make up for it in the afterlife.

Only problem there is the lack of evidence for said afterlife.

As I said, the simple pleasures of existence, rational thought, and physical sensation outweigh physical pain.

There are plenty of other joys, but just one or two of those are sufficient to outweigh pain.

"us" is everyone and virtually everyone has been granted such gifts or has died very quickly after birth.

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What sin did I commit, getting ulcerative colitis and spending months in agony? What sin did anyone commit to experience any amount of suffering at all?

The answer to this question becomes mu when you recognize that the Universe has no particular regard or disdain for you, it simply is.

You did not commit any "sin" in order to come down with ulcerative colitis. It boils down entirely to mechanistic interactions between your genes and the environment, and the way it moulded your body/immune system in a defective manner. While genes and environs are certainly components in what can be considered one's moral predilections, being Mother Teresa herself is no recourse from an agonizing death.

The only place where sin approaches a meaningful concept is when it comes to things that are the outcome of behaviors that are (nominally) amenable to intervention. A thief has sinned and loses his hand for it. A child with a Philadelphia chromosome has probably cried a little too often, but I wouldn't call that warranting a death sentence or the misery of chemotherapy.

All efforts to reconcile the stochastic distribution of boons and curses dished upon us with a belief in an Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnibenevolent Creator are, well, rather moot when you recognize that there's no reason (or grossly insufficient reason) to assume one exists.

And taken at face value, a Creator who knows with omniscience everything a conscious being will go through, including that it will inevitably sin and be punished for it (infinitely so, depending on which doctrine of Hell you adhere to), is prima facie disgusting to me. It certainly conflicts with any reasonable definition of benevolence, though attempts to torture them into reconciliation have been a pastime for theologists for aeons.

It would be akin to me "torturing" a sorting algorithm for putting 1 before 3 in an array, when I know with ~100% confidence it will make that decision every single time.

That is the relationship between a 3-O God and every poor bastard down here.

To be clear, I have seen miracles far greater than the ones I've shared. The greatest, to me, is the miracle of my own conversion and moral growth, but there have been plenty of others. I'm glad I didn't share them--you would probably be calling me a liar directly, rather than just insinuating it. I've already told you that I don't think I deserved any cure for my UC, but that the timing of it does indicate its miraculous nature. And I've already told you that even such miracles don't outweigh RCTs for me, but that they did give me confidence enough to continue investigating, including by conducting my own trials.

I would call you deluded, rather than a liar. It is a common enough delusion, but there is no more polite way of phrasing it.

You do not recognize the sheer magnitude of the empirical, physical, metaphysical and ontological claims you make if you think any amount of "moral growth" should sway your opinion one jot.

Given that we've already discussed all of this, and that I've already addressed each of your points in detail, I'll choose to interpret the substance of your comment as a result of your anger at the problem of suffering rather than as deliberate bad faith argumentation. I understand--it's certainly a problem I grappled with as well. Next time you do experience serious pain, I encourage you to slow down and experience just one instant of the pain at a time. It soon becomes clear that no matter the severity of the pain, a single instant of it is really quite tolerable, easily outweighed by the simple joy of other sensory inputs. The real trouble comes when our brains run ahead and try to experience all of the suffering at once, both feeling the pain of the instant and dreading the countless instants to come.

I have suffered plenty of pain. I put more stock in painkillers than your approach, not that I am calling it useless. Meditation and other techniques do help. They just don't help as much as fentanyl when you've broken your hip or are choking on your own secretions.

Religion is the opiate of the masses. I can't ding it too much on those grounds, I prescribe plenty of opioids myself. But what it also happens to be is a sheer refusal to take the universe as it is and a distraction from efforts at making it better.

No deity has pulled Mankind out of Malthusian Hell, we've dug up the rendered corpeses of our primordial ancestors and burned them, smelted steel and split atoms till we are in spitting distance of a Heaven on Earth, of our own making. Or we could all die after we build a Molochian monstrosity trained, in part, on this very conversation. But we live and die by our own, human hands, and God certainly hasn't been swiping in often enough for me to give him any credit.

The same is true of all suffering. It may feel unjust, it may feel like God has unjustly condemned us to suffer agony for nothing, but the pain teaches us, and God has also unjustly granted us countless joys to pad life out and outweigh even the worst of our pains.

Taken to its logical conclusion, any attempts at alleviating it is cheating God and his ward out of a valuable life lesson, though what that might entail to a child with appendicitis is questionable.

Not all suffering is bad. But I have seen far too much needless suffering to remotely privilege that claim. And when it has come to mitigating it, I assure you that even Jesuit clinics will hand out medication instead of just thoughts and prayers. When a child with ichthyosis vulgaris comes out of the womb and lives a short, yet excruciatingly painful existence before inevitable death (which can only be drawn out for a while, not remedied till the normal age at which we're supposed to die), I struggle to think of any mitigating factors that might make their short time on this Earth a net positive.

You do not know pain. Pray that you never have to.

Please talk to me directly, or create a blog somewhere rather than pretending you're actually responding to me.

The answer to this question becomes mu when you recognize that the Universe has no particular regard or disdain for you, it simply is.

I wasn't actually asking you, and you know this. You have no privileged position as a doctor and the bearer of bad news to accuse others of ignoring people's suffering. The problem of suffering is the same no matter the degree of suffering.

I put more stock in painkillers than your approach

My approach isn't a way to deal with pain, it's a way to understand it. It's a test you can perform yourself which will grant you evidence one way or another regarding the veracity of the rest of my claims. If you think I'm right or wrong, say so, but don't pretend that I was giving you pain management tips.

I don't have anything against painkillers, but the fact that God didn't grant us the ability to dull our own pain at a whim means that pain-without-painkillers is a problem which must be addressed.

And taken at face value, a Creator who knows with omniscience everything a conscious being will go through, including that it will inevitably sin and be punished for it (infinitely so, depending on which doctrine of Hell you adhere to), is prima facie disgusting to me. It certainly conflicts with any reasonable definition of benevolence, though attempts to torture them into reconciliation have been a pastime for theologists for aeons.

We've already been over this, but, like you, I suppose I'll have to pretend to be talking about this for the first time and pretend to have never heard any counterarguments from you.

Agency is extremely important. If one cannot choose then they lack agency. If one's choices lack consequences, then they cannot choose. I prefer being free to choose, even when that means making harmful mistakes, to being locked in to a life of unwilling righteousness. I prefer being created, even if that means occasionally being punished for sin, to not being created.

Whether sin should be punished at all is its own question. I find punishments for sin to be quite merciful so it's easy for me to understand them as corrective rather than punitive. They provide immediate consequences to actions which might otherwise become habit and lead to a greatly diminished capacity for joy in the long run.

Taken to its logical conclusion, any attempts at alleviating it is cheating God and his ward out of a valuable life lesson, though what that might entail to a child with appendicitis is questionable.

Only if you're also assuming that no other principles exist. "Pain teaches us lessons" doesn't preclude things like "helping others teaches us lessons," "pain-lessons have diminishing returns," etc.

Taken to its logical conclusion, I don't think it's ethical to prevent literally all of the suffering of any single person--at least unless some other method is discovered for teaching the same lessons. That's all.

You do not know pain. Pray that you never have to.

lol

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Damn dude. If you want to move to the US I'll make it happen for you.

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The true tragedy is not the dead children, who have been taken to heaven and will be reunited with their family eventually,

Isn't that very much disputed within Christianity? In addition the kids he speaks of are almost certainly Hindu and/or Muslim. I am guessing almost none of them are baptized. And then even if the kids get in because they were too young to actively choose, will the parents who are also most likely Hindu and Muslim be reunited with them?

Catholics:

"Likewise, whosoever says that those children who depart out of this life without partaking of that sacrament shall be made alive in Christ, certainly contradicts the apostolic declaration, and condemns the universal Church, in which it is the practice to lose no time and run in haste to administer baptism to infant children, because it is believed, as an indubitable truth, that otherwise they cannot be made alive in Christ. Now he that is not made alive in Christ must necessarily remain under the condemnation, of which the apostle says, that "by the offense of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation." That infants are born under the guilt of this offense is believed by the whole Church."

"The Roman Catholic view is that baptism is necessary for salvation and that it frees the recipient from original sin. Roman Catholic tradition teaches that unbaptized infants, not being freed from original sin, go to Limbo (Latin: limbus infantium), which is an afterlife condition distinct from Hell. This is not, however, official church dogma."

The Orthodox:

"And forasmuch as infants are men, and as such need salvation; needing salvation, they need also Baptism. And those that are not regenerated, since they have not received the remission of hereditary sin, are, of necessity, subject to eternal punishment, and consequently cannot without Baptism be saved; so that even infants ought, of necessity, to be baptised."

or the Protestants:

"Since we must make judgments about God’s will from his Word, which testifies that the children of believers are holy, not by nature but by virtue of the gracious covenant in which they together with their parents are included, godly parents ought not to doubt the election and salvation of their children whom God calls out of this life in infancy. "

The Baptists would back you up however:

"We do believe, that all little Children dying in their Infancy, before they are capable to choose either Good or Evil, whether born of Believing Parents, or Unbelieving Parents, shall be saved by the Grace of God, and Merit of Christ their Redeemer, and Work of the Holy Ghost, and so being made Members of the Invisible Church, shall enjoy Life everlasting; for our Lord Jesus saith, of such belongs the Kingdom of Heaven. Ergo, We conclude, that that opinion is false, which saith, That those little Infants dying before Baptism, are damned."

In other words aren't you assuming the best possible case for your argument here? What if you are right about God existing, but that those kids will never be reunited with their families, either because they will go to Limbo/Heaven as they were too young to choose Christ and their parents are Damned, through not being Christian? Would you still maintain that pain is worth it? Or that you are correct but that they will be reunited with their parents in Gehenna being as neither was saved, and suffer even more torment?

Your argument could be true for Christian baptized kids born to Christian parents and false for everyone else.

I'm just making a claim without arguing every single one of my positions from first principles. Of course if I'm wrong about my religion then I'm wrong about my religion, that goes without saying, and therefore my claim that kids go to heaven wouldn't be correct. If I were wrong I'd have to rethink essentially every belief I have.

Given the quality and good faith (or lack thereof) of the comment I was responding to, spending hours crafting a full dissertation on all of my beliefs would just be a waste of time.

edit: to answer your question, though, my own experience was that very great pain was very tolerable. This doesn't make it good or mean there are endless lessons to be learned from it, or even that any amount of pain is "worth it." SOME amount is useful to learn certain lessons though.

I think I should have been more careful with how I worded my original comment, given how people seem to be interpreting it.

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What sin did a two year old child with ALL commit

What sin did Job commit?

Going for herbal and dietary remedies for pancreatic cancer, especially a variant that was amenable to evidence-based medicine.

(I'm aware.)

He's referring to Job from the Bible, not Steve Jobs.

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Please speak plainly and explain what you're aware of.

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Having read your linked thread, it seems you are a Mormon.

Tl;dr: Proper epistemology can save you 10% of your lifetime earnings (and more!) if you let it.

BLUF: Independently researching and leaving Mormonism was the hardest intellectual/emotional thing I’ve ever done. Trapped priors, anchor beliefs, upbringing and social pressure all make it very challenging, because you have been emotionally conditioned to perform confirmation bias to develop a testimony since before you could talk, and to avoid “antimormon” sources and evidence (the very opposite of an isolated demand for rigor). Try pretending you were born a Muslim or a Buddhist and consider how this version of you would be, religiously. Would you end up leaving your childhood faith and somehow finding Mormonism?

I gotta say, even by Mormon standards, those “answered prayer” stories are weak sauce.

“I was dealing with a problem, I prayed real hard for help, and so the omnipotent creator of the universe stretched forth his finger to help me find my keys” is a classic in the genre, but brings up the issue of why the power of prayer is seemingly so limited to things like not getting lost in the woods, healing from an illness, or encountering your ex, instead of solving larger-scale problems. God is so powerful, but his preference to work in mysterious ways really gets in the way of effectiveness.

“You are the easiest person to fool” and so “Bayesian” “analysis” of your prayer outcomes is just so remarkably divorced from a worldview based on keeping beliefs proportional to evidence (the antithesis of “faith”). Try running an experiment at scale on say prayer/faith healing at hospitals and then we can talk about Bayesian analysis. Or provide concrete evidence of a soul/The Spirit.

My favorite thing is that Joseph Smith claimed he possessed gold plates and other ancient artifacts, like a sword from the old world, and couldn’t just produce them as evidence. He had them, just take his word for it. He even had “witnesses” make formal claims they saw them (with their “spiritual eyes” as it turns out), and yet he wouldn’t let say outside experts examine them.

Strange way to go about establishing credibility. “I’ll let you see the relics but only if you already believe me.” It’s a level of credulity most children won’t demonstrate—Santa at least does provide presents.

Mormonism has no way to reconcile evolution, the archeology and genetics of the Americas, and the conspicuous lack of evidence of living prophetic power with its claims and doctrine—to a unique or stronger degree than trad Christianity, due to literal claims made by the Book of Mormon and early prophets. The apologists try to fit various camels through needles here, but it usually means contradicting claims and doctrine set forth by older prophets, which isn’t exactly good for establishing credibility. Early Mormon sausage making is just too well-documented for most moderns to accept, and Mormonism’s plunging conversion rate shows it.

Of course, the modem LDS church can’t settle the issue and make me look foolish because the plates and certain other artifacts were turned over to an angel. Tellingly, the one sacred relic the church does possess is a regular old seer stone, which was mostly ignored until recent times and is a point of controversy regarding exactly how it was the “translation” was done by Smith (it mostly did not involve looking at the plates, though most pictures depict it that way).

It’s a preposterous situation that would not survive scrutiny today (at any real scale), but people today—many of them very intelligent—can pretend it was a reasonable thing for a prophet of god to do in 1830 or so because they were raised believing it.

Trapped priors, anchor beliefs, upbringing and social pressure all make it very challenging, because you have been emotionally conditioned to perform confirmation bias to develop a testimony since before you could talk, and to avoid “antimormon” sources and evidence (the very opposite of an isolated demand for rigor). Try pretending you were born a Muslim or a Buddhist and consider how this version of you would be, religiously. Would you end up leaving your childhood faith and somehow finding Mormonism?

This is precisely why I took so long to eventually determine that Mormonism was true.

I never accepted anything along the lines of "you should avoid antimormon sources" and actively sought them out from a young age. Anytime someone would say something like that my respect for them would drop precipitously. Now, having read all the literature I could get my hands on, I find myself agreeing that there were better, more edifying uses of my time than deliberately studying such a vast quantity of opposing viewpoints.

I was raised by rationalists online more than by Mormons--I certainly understood rationalist doctrine better than Mormon doctrine, knew more details of rationalist doctrine, paid more attention to it, like it better, etc.

I gotta say, even by Mormon standards, those “answered prayer” stories are weak sauce.

They're not the only ones I have, as I've mentioned elsewhere, but they're the only ones I think should be shared.

“I was dealing with a problem, I prayed real hard for help, and so the omnipotent creator of the universe stretched forth his finger to help me find my keys” is a classic in the genre, but brings up the issue of why the power of prayer is seemingly so limited to things like not getting lost in the woods, healing from an illness, or encountering your ex, instead of solving larger-scale problems. God is so powerful, but his preference to work in mysterious ways really gets in the way of effectiveness.

This is pretty easy, and has to do with accountability, as I was saying. The amount of evidence we receive is pretty much exactly the amount we're morally ready for. That said, "I prayed and found my keys" was pretty much always a laughable "miracle" lol.

“You are the easiest person to fool” and so “Bayesian” “analysis” of your prayer outcomes is just so remarkably divorced from a worldview based on keeping beliefs proportional to evidence (the antithesis of “faith”).

I disagree, I think that keeping beliefs proportional to evidence is essentially the definition of faith--not the commonly-used, mangled "faith" that's been warped by centuries of apostasy, but the one described in the scriptures. There are many things I know to be true and yet do not live by because I lack the faith--my emotional strength of belief has not caught up to the evidence. This is true for all of us on a moral level, and is described by rationalists as "akrasia."

Try running an experiment at scale on say prayer/faith healing at hospitals and then we can talk about Bayesian analysis. Or provide concrete evidence of a soul/The Spirit.

I'll provide concrete evidence of a soul when you provide a concrete alternative explanation for consciousness. I don't even need evidence, just any kind of materialist explanation at all which even vaguely makes sense. I'd love to run my own prayer/faith healing RCT, and may do so if/when I get the resources, but honestly I think given how convinced I already am that money is probably better spent on healthcare for the patients in those hospitals.

My favorite thing is that Joseph Smith claimed he possessed gold plates and other ancient artifacts, like a sword from the old world, and couldn’t just produce them as evidence. He had them, just take his word for it. He even had “witnesses” make formal claims they saw them (with their “spiritual eyes” as it turns out), and yet he wouldn’t let say outside experts examine them.

Martin Harris was the only one who said anything about spiritual eyes, and he also explicitly said that he saw them with his natural eyes.

Meanwhile we have direct statements like this one from David Whitmer:

“I was not under any hallucination, nor was I deceived! I saw with these eyes and I heard with these ears! I know whereof I speak!”

as well as the plainly written language of the Testimony of Three Witnesses and the Testimony of Eight Witnesses, and the lifelong testimonies of the men involved, all of which directly contradict one maximally uncharitable interpretation of a single witness's words.

Mormonism has no way to reconcile evolution, the archeology and genetics of the Americas, and the conspicuous lack of evidence of living prophetic power with its claims and doctrine—to a unique or stronger degree than trad Christianity, due to literal claims made by the Book of Mormon and early prophets. The apologists try to fit various camels through needles here, but it usually means contradicting claims and doctrine set forth by older prophets, which isn’t exactly good for establishing credibility. Early Mormon sausage making is just too well-documented for most moderns to accept, and Mormonism’s plunging conversion rate shows it.

You should know as well as I do that there are fairly reasonable explanations for these things. I understand why one wouldn't give such explanations much attention--certainly, the null hypothesis should not be that Mormonism is true--but my own view is that the decades have steadily confirmed more and more of what were originally seen as anachronisms and other flaws.

If you want to discuss in more detail I'm happy to, but it will have to be another day, as I've been on this site way too long today already.

On the salvation question- why in the world would a loving God grant salvation to someone if their spouse or national leader was a believer, but condemn an unmarried person in an atheist country to eternal damnation?

As I understand it, the standard Christian position is that nobody deserves salvation, but God sometimes grants it. So the Christian answer is that there is no reason. Whether that is satisfying is another debate, but it's an important aspect to understand if one is going to understand them charitably: from a Christian perspective, God is not morally obliged to save anyone. In fact, from a Divine Command Theory perspective, the very notion of moral obligations for God is a category mistake, like a moral obligation for the number 11. God behaves morally not because he is obliged to e.g. keep his promises, but because that is what a supremely benevolent being does. In contrast, from a Christian perspective, a supremely benevolent being does not necessarily save anyone from the consequences of their nature which he created.

Any version of an all benevolent and all powerful God where He won't grant salvation to someone if they're an atheist in a secular country ruled be an atheist, but will if they're an atheist in a secular country ruled by a Christian, feels exceedingly unlikely to be true to me.

Sure, I'm not trying to argue that Christianity is plausible. If anything, I suppose my most point is that Christianity is far weirder than people (including many Christians) think. This can make it harder to argue against in a fair-minded way, but it doesn't help with its plausibility.

from a Christian perspective, God is not morally obliged to save anyone. In fact, from a Divine Command Theory perspective, the very notion of moral obligations for God is a category mistake, like a moral obligation for the number 11.

I'll grant that this fairly sums up Divine Command Theory and once again want to reiterate my disagreement with it. Morality does exist separate from God, and he cannot simply redefine it at a whim. He's not a simple force of nature forced into making only one choice at every possible juncture; he has agency and always chooses to be good.

He is bound by his promises more than we are.

I think that what you are describing is what the vast majority of Christians actually believe. It's not so good for Christian intellectuals trying to use morality in various ways to support their claim that God exists (because you're not an ethical deviant or impotent, are you?!).

Let me know if I've gotten this wrong, but here's my understanding of what you're trying to say:

  1. Christian intellectuals say morality can't exist without God
  2. They also say that morality does exist, therefore God does exist
  3. So claiming that morality exists apart from God bodes poorly for their position

I do have a couple disagreements with this.

  1. "Morality" refers both to abstract morality and to morality-in-practice i.e. the belief that the universe is fundamentally moral and good things happen to good people. These should not be conflated. God did not define Good, but the fact that we can look around and see a fundamentally Good universe is still evidence of God.
  2. This is similar to a cat coupling, because there's an implication that you're talking about all Christian intellectuals. They do not all rely on DCT for proofs of God's existence, and most of those who do still do not solely rely on DCT.

"Morality" refers both to abstract morality and to morality-in-practice i.e. the belief that the universe is fundamentally moral and good things happen to good people. These should not be conflated. God did not define Good, but the fact that we can look around and see a fundamentally Good universe is still evidence of God.

Right, but then the inference is hypothetico-deductive ("If God exists, then good things to good people; good things happen to good people; which is some evidence that God exists") which is different from a deductive argument ("If morality exists, God exists; morality exists; therefore, God exists"). These are very different arguments both in logic and content.

Of course, different Christian intellectuals have different arguments.

Sure, it's not a Proof.

Sorry, to clarify, I hope that I have throughout distinguished Christian intellectuals and DCT fans, e.g.

"from a Christian perspective, God is not morally obliged to save anyone. In fact, from a Divine Command Theory perspective, the very notion of moral obligations for God is a category mistake, like a moral obligation for the number 11."

The idea that grace is a gift of God, not an obligation of God, is more or less unanimous among Christians, AFAIK. The DCT is not.

But a supremely benevolent being would give all his creations at least of a chance of accepting grace. This is a chink in the armor of the theodicy, because Christians' omnipotent benevolent God did not lift a finger to give 100s AD Malaysians even a shot at accepting grace — they could not have heard Christ's ministry. Nor, indeed, does God give us moderns the benefit he was willing to extend to 20s AD Near Easterners, who saw tangible miracles to guide them to God's kingdom.

Catholics, orthodox, and Pentecostals at least all regularly claim tangible miracles. You might believe these miracles not to have happened or have mundane explanations, but many of them haven’t been disproven and are much better documented than the gospel accounts.

I absolutely agree, but the natural Christian response is that 100s AD Malaysians did not deserve a shot at accepting grace, nor do moderns deserve to see tangible miracles. The key thing about grace is that it is not what anyone fairly deserves. God is going beyond what people deserve and giving a gift.

(There are other responses, like saying that there are other ways to salvation than through Christ, but they struggle with the standard Christian interpretation of e.g. John 3:16.)

But a supremely benevolent being would give all his creations at least of a chance of accepting grace.

The Christian followup to this point is: how do you know? Then you might say, "How do you know that God isn't just playing a cruel joke on you, so that heaven is just a great big spider in front of a dark glass?" And then, arguments for God's existence aside, their answer is "Faith." And then you can say, "That is not a reliable way of knowing things."

So the theodical debates end with the epistemic debates, AFAIK, which is why I find epistemology more interesting than things like the Problem of Evil, even though the point you raise is actually the original one that made me doubt Christianity as a child. (The best explanation of God's restricted grace is not his inscrutable will of gifting, but that Jesus was a Jewish prophet living near the Red Sea who didn't have access to mass communication to reach the whole nations.)

This is a chink in the armor of the theodicy

Or in the armor of Divine Command Theory, or in the armor of your understanding of salvation.

Did something about this discussion make you like Merry from LOTR less? That's a steep handle downgrade.

Or in the armor of Divine Command Theory, or in the armor of your understanding of salvation.

Let me quote C.S. Lewis:

"When Christianity says that God loves man it means that God LOVES man: not that He has some 'disinterested'; because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the 'lord of terrible aspect', is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory, not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring"

I think it's reasonable to expect that this God, who I heard of in sermons throughout my childhood, would put in slightly more effort to save the uncontacted heathens than "none at all". If someone offers me a version of Christianity that doesn't talk about God in terms of this extreme love, then I will address that religion and their theodicies in another way.

I think it's reasonable to expect that this God, who I heard of in sermons throughout my childhood, would put in slightly more effort to save the uncontacted heathens than "none at all".

Isn't there an entire strain of christian analysis of history that chalks the rising of the roman state and later the expansion of the european powers as this?

I think it's reasonable to expect that this God, who I heard of in sermons throughout my childhood, would put in slightly more effort to save the uncontacted heathens than "none at all".

Isn't there an entire strain of christian analysis of history that chalks the rising of the roman state and later the expansion of the european powers as this?

Yes, but there were definitely people left behind in the last chopper out of 'Nam, so to speak. Christians posit an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent deity; thus, even small edge case exceptions are highly damaging to this claim. Why did God not do 100 AD Malaysians the favor he did for Saul on the road to Damascus? Or even just send a missionary or two?

That's a steep handle downgrade.

Haha, honestly I'm working on opsec. That handle has been around for too long--I'll probably switch to an entirely new account soon.

I think it's reasonable to expect that this God, which I also heard in sermons throughout my childhood, to put in slightly more effort to save the uncontacted heathens than "none at all"

The LDS belief is that there is a plan laid out for them too, through which they have full access to all the blessings of Christ's atonement and the salvation offered thereby. I certainly think that any church which doesn't posit such a plan is flat-out wrong. This is why I say, your observation could easily be a chink in the armor of DCT or your understanding of salvation, rather than in theodicy.

Certainly churches who believe that such people will go to hell must have a much harder time grappling with theodicy.

I think Christian nationalism as a terrorial project could never happen in this century, and would also not be beneficial. You would be uniting the non-zealot Christians (nearly all) with increasingly influential Hindu and Muslim lobbies, not to mention the Jewish lobby, and influential atheist donors… while the state-worshipping intelligence community would see an obvious national security threat in such a project. And the dominant strains of Christianity in America, Catholicism and mega church evangelicalism, are ineffectual at promoting moral change or preventing consumerism/etc from seeping in. Do you really want them to have their own nation? Imagine the Christian rock radio stations they would subsidize… no thank you.

A much better solution is to create a Christian Hasidim which is, in a sense, a nation within a nation. A lot of the social technology they have developed can be grafted into a Christian setting: dress codes, mandatory prayers, mandatory (Christianized) rituals, a strong national identity as Christian Israel (this is already in the New Testament yet simply ignored in today’s theology). You can even gradually introduce Latin as a new internal language. Go back to original Christian house churches and you can reduce your community’s tax burden. Create your own kashrut which must be blessed by a priest. Etc.

This idea — creating your own insular community wholecloth — is both deeply Christian and deeply American. The American history is common knowledge. For Christian history, you have the Gospel which is easily read as a practical guide to starting a church and retaining a following. Remember that orthodoxy simply did not exist in ancient Christianity, but instead a multitude of often insular competing churches. You have the archetypal story of Noah who sees a threat and reproduces an insular culture anew (hence the animals two-by-two, and the bitumen coating the ark). You have the highly influential pre-Christian Essene community which established their own communities and possibly influenced Christianity. Lastly you have the monastic traditions, with a lot of them forming their communities in the middle of nowhere with their own regulations.

If you look at the history of insular religious movements, the Amish or the Salafists or whatever, it’s easy to forget that they started with just one dude. Then the one dude found some other dudes who agreed with him after a few years. Even with Methodism, IIRC it took a decade to bring the follower count up to a dozen. Then the dudes beget more dudes, because the world does not lack dissatisfied dudes. Now there’s, like, 80,000 Amish in Ohio alone. It’s compound interest, like a seed which multiplies 30 or 60 or 100 times what was sown. This is a more practical idea than a territorial project.

I think something like this is the authentically Christian way to approach things. The state can be helpful (see imperial aid in the ecumenical councils) but can also be a hinderance -- leading to the theological indifferentism of state churches like the Church of England (even in its heyday) and the inflitration of clerical orders by political agents (see the Russian Orthodox Church for the past several hundred years). Christian nationalists speak of using the faith to change the political order, but they refuse to see that entangling the political order in the faith often does the opposite. This is a weird mistake for a movement made up of evangelical Protestants to make, since, if I know anything about them at all, many are likely to believe that consorting with Constantine fundamentally changed the Church (I disagree, but that doesn't negate the contradiction in their views).

And this is perhaps too connected to my own struggles, but if the churches of the world want to gain the respect of voluntary converts and make disciples, not brow-beaten conversos, they would do well to focus inwardly, and to "strive for that holiness without which no one will see the Lord." As someone deeply open to Christianity, but troubled by Christianity's presence in the world, emphases like Christian nationalism go in exactly the opposite direction -- trying to change the world to solve the spiritual crisis of the Church, rather than trying to actually solve the crisis. Purify the church, then we can talk about purifying the state.

A much better solution is to create a Christian Hasidim which is, in a sense, a nation within a nation. A lot of the social technology they have developed can be grafted into a Christian setting: dress codes, mandatory prayers, mandatory (Christianized) rituals, a strong national identity as Christian Israel (this is already in the New Testament yet simply ignored in today’s theology). You can even gradually introduce Latin as a new internal language. Go back to original Christian house churches and you can reduce your community’s tax burden. Create your own kashrut which must be blessed by a priest. Etc.

We already have this in the form of the Amish and Mennonite churches. They have their own German dialect, rules, and dress code. But I don’t think you could completely wall off a community unless you cut off technology.

The Hasidic use technology and live in/around NYC. They have their own “kosher phones” and they force everyone to use it

https://www.timesofisrael.com/kosher-phone-freedom-policy-changes-hard-to-swallow-for-ultra-orthodox-rabbis/

The most obvious point against this is that the Christian nationalists (or whatever you want to call them if that term displeases) don't want to be cultural secessionists (for the most part). They generally see themselves as the rightful heirs to the American legacy and to give that up in favor of being the Amish mk II is to abandon their birthright. People like Rod Dreher have advocated for separation from secular society, but somewhat tellingly, Dreher lives in Hungary now, not the United States.

Logistically, it is problematic as well. The Amish aren't very numerous and are able to isolate themselves from external influence via technological proscriptions as well as the hard division their beliefs create from everyone else. You can't really be Am-ish. By contrast, Christian nationalism encompasses potentially tens of millions of people in the US. At that scale, you can't really wander off into the wilderness to start your own society, even if you could persuade people to do so.

They may not want to do that, just like the Essenes before them preferred not to secede territory to the Pharisees, and Jesus wanted his own nation to find agreement with him, and Mary didn’t want to flee to Egypt under Herod… but their wishes don’t factor in at all, only the will of God. They had to do what was necessary. Any good Christian must ultimately capitulate to reality: “yet not as I will, but as [God] wills.”

Amish … Logistics

Not Amish. I had used Amish as an example of growth, but the subculture to copy would be Hasidim. The Hasidim can live in the middle of NYC and yet retain complete cultural sovereignty. They have their own rules, their own courts, their own ambulance service, their own local police; the politicians know they blockvote and come to their communities to make a speech every election cycle; they lobby fiercely for their own issues; they hire in-group; they have the highest birth rate in America; their schools barely teach English. Rather than technological proscription, the Hasidim simply have their own phones with only certain app permissions. And having millions would make this process much easier, not more difficult; you can spread out your centers in culturally influential places.

but the subculture to copy would be Hasidim. The Hasidim can live in the middle of NYC and yet retain complete cultural sovereignty. They have their own rules, their own courts, their own ambulance service, their own local police; the politicians know they blockvote and come to their communities to make a speech every election cycle; they lobby fiercely for their own issues; they hire in-group; they have the highest birth rate in America; their schools barely teach English.

I've actually proposed this sort of model to Christians of my acquaintance before, and have gotten three general replies:

  1. that even this much separation from the mainstream constitutes an abdication of the "Great Commission" (and that, therefore, the Amish aren't Christian at all)

  2. that they can't emulate the Hasidim, because they're not Jewish — meant in two rather different ways:

2.A. that pulling off that sort of community — particularly the "their own rules, their own courts, their own ambulance service, their own local police" stuff — requires fundamentally immoral and "scummy" tactics which they could not countenance, as only the Jews would ever stoop to such depths.

2.B. that pulling off that sort of community requires a tolerance from the broader system which is extended only to Jewish groups — to a great extent because they can accuse their critics and opponents of antisemitism — while Christians attempting the same would find no such leeway.

I’m not convinced by those replies. Re: 1, the early Christians themselves abstained from participating in normative Jewish life, and the Roman Christians abstained from the Pagan civic rituals which defined mainstream Roman life. They formed their own schools based on Christian teachings. Even if we didn’t have this historical example, an insular community may do a better job at securing and promoting Christianity than a lukewarm, mainstream Christianity. The Great Commission is time neutral — it took Lithuania 1400 years to become Christian. And a Christian has an obligation to love God, which means surely he has an obligation to develop a community which permits the most love of God.

Re 2A: we are lucky, because the original founding document of America recognizes that God provides the right to freedom of association and freedom of religion. What better way to practice these rights than to worship the one who provides it?

Re 2B: America’s lax tolerance of this is because the community is insular and skilled at politicking. When you organize 200,000 men hierarchically, who all believe the most important thing in their life is the protection of their community, they are able to accomplish great things.

Critically, it was the very abstention of the early Christians from public life that, ultimately, led to their success -- while there were certainly some failures to communicate doctrines like the eucharistic presence (leading to claims that Christians were slaughtering and eating human babies) and universal fraternity (leading to non-Christians seeing Christian spouses calling each other "brother" and "sister"), there was also a sense in which the strength and conviction of the early Christians impressed the Romans. Later on, Christians whose theology spared them from the fear of death worked in hospitals treating the sick, which astounded the Romans who abandoned the plague-ridden. It was these things that the later Christians could point to and say, "look how impressive we are, you should adopt our belief system."

This co-existed, of course, with attempts at public preaching. You've got to do both. You can't abandon the public spectacle of St. Paul, but you must, you must, embrace the cloistered enlightenment of St. John. Any form of Christianity that embraces one while rejecting the other becomes imbalanced.

And notably the much softer Gab-style parallel society is not taking off like an arrow.

What would you think of a territorial project like Utah, where a group of Christians all coordinated to have a very large influence over one state?

Alabama already exists.

Although frankly, that jibe could be applied to a lot of red states. Conservative Christianity is an extremely powerful political force in Republican-dominated states. What it isn't, that it sort of used to be, is a cultural juggernaut. The opprobrium of the religious right carries very little weight outside of the religious right. They have virtually no influence over trends in media/entertainment (outside of internally produced media that is largely considered a joke by outsiders). Increasingly, young people aren't interested in the story they tell about the world and are shedding their religious affiliations. Etcetera. A lot of recent conservative political priorities are fundamentally about trying to remediate cultural defeats with state power.

While in college I was a pro-life Ron Paul libertarian, over the years I've become less individualistic as I've grown in my faith. I used to think of religion as a private exercise. I know [sic] recognize the centrality of community.

I think there's a conflation of what 'private' necessarily entails in this domain. There is one sense that you used -- of being interior to an individual as opposed to exercise within and by a community. But there is another meaning (cf "a private club") which does not denote individual but does explain that it is non-universal and non-totalizing.

I'll probably be censured for this, because for some reason--- religion, despite ZERO proof, needs to be respected on this forum. This is pure fantasy and shouldn't even be brought up as a serious topic. It is like watching Harry Potter fans argue over what fanfic should be cannon. It is made up out of whole cloth and shouldn't be in a rational adjacent forum.

  • -18

I posted on this forum because I did want to hear a non-Christian perspective on Christian Nationalism (good, bad, and ugly), so I appreciate your response. I hope that non-Christians can find the topic interesting, in the same way that I find discussions on GamerGate interesting despite not being a gamer.

EDIT: To respond to your larger question about the appropriateness of religion in a rat-adjacent forum, I believe rationalism is an incredibly useful tool for uncovering knowledge. I believe rationalism is downstream of Truth: in the beginning was the Logos (the Word), the Word was with God, and the Word was God. If I'm understanding you correctly, you conclude that there is no God because it doesn't follow from rational principles; without God I don't think there is such a thing as rational principles. Or, to put it crudely:

Jesus is Lord -> 2+2=4 -> everything else that follows.

Starting with 2+2=4 can get you quite far, but it won't uncover all knowledge and it would be futile to ask it to prove or disprove revelation.

You literally couldn't help it. This is what I am talking about.

I largely agree. To be clear, I am not a materialist/physicalist reductionist. I think that the hard problem of consciousness is a real mystery. But at the same time, I think that all organized religions, including Christianity, are extremely unlikely to be accurate models of reality although in many ways they are fascinating as historical and psychological phenomena. I do not wish the Christians here to be censored for being Christian, but I do often feel annoyed by them when they write long posts which are based on assuming that Christianity is true. It is the same way as I would feel if the forum had a significant subset of devout communists who frequently wrote long screeds that assumed communism was both workable and a good thing but rarely bothered to try to explain why they think communism is both workable and a good thing to begin with.

Yes, I bring this up because I am getting a bit peeved at the dozens of posts on here each day that are basically proselytizing. Extolling the virtues of Faith and poo pooing anyone who pushes back by telling them to be humble and that they need provide no proof of anything, and that you sir, would understand if you just had FAITH! It is madness.

All that said, you'll see in just a few years here that consciousness is not a mystery at all and that with enough recursive compute and long enough context window you'll see software becoming self aware. It may already be happening.

https://newatlas.com/technology/anthropic-claude-3/

It's not the self-awareness itself that is the big mystery, it's the qualia of self-awareness. The light might be on, but why does someone have to be looking out the window?

Yes yes we've all read blindsight. But this is just a clever metaphor you have here. If you make a thinking system complex enough consciousness is an emergent property. All it needs to do is to be able to reflect on itself. Not a tall order really.

If you make a thinking system complex enough consciousness is an emergent property. All it needs to do is to be able to reflect on itself. Not a tall order really.

Neither you nor anyone else here can support this statement with evidence, because the necessary evidence does not exist. This despite the fact that many, many people have affirmatively claimed that it existed, that they knew exactly where to find it and how to demonstrate it, were granted vast resources and many decades to confirm their claims, and had all their predictions uniformly falsified.

You, like many before you, are confidently asserting that the evidence supports you, when in fact zero evidence actually supports you, the version of your statement that made falsifiable predictions has been falsified, the version you employ here has been meticulously selected for unfalsifiability, and even this is only maintainable by discarding the strong contrary evidence via axiomatic reason.

To the extent that "facts" can be said to exist, the above is simply a fact.

And as I point out each time this comes up, none of the above is actually a problem. The problem is that you don't seem to recognize the obvious mechanisms of your own reasoning, the mechanisms underlying all human reason. What you're doing here is what everyone does when they reason about the world. There is no other way to do it. The problem is pretending you aren't doing what you very clearly are doing: accepting or discarding evidence based on pre-rational axioms, rather than through some objective, deterministic process-based assessment of the evidence itself.

You have adopted Materialism as an axiom. You discard as inconsequential all evidence that conflicts with or contradicts that axiom, as is proper, because that is what axioms are for. But the fact that you choose the axiom over contrary evidence demonstrates that the axiom is not itself the deterministic product of evidence, but rather is chosen by you for non-evidence reasons. If you can select or discard evidence for non-evidence reasons, why should others not do likewise?

What is the contrary evidence? Humans are thinking machines that are self aware and they exist. So clearly it is something that can be constructed. Shouldn't it logically follow that more thinking self aware machines can be made? If it exists, which it does, it can be created by us given enough resources.

What is the contrary evidence?

We can make choices, every minute of every day. We can directly observe ourselves and others making those choices, and have direct insight to the apparent cause of those choices, which appears to be individual will and volition. We can observe that the behavior of others is not perfectly or even mostly predictable or manipulable, and that the degree predictability and manipulability that does exist varies widely across people and across contexts. All of our experiences conform seamlessly with the general concept of free will, none of them conform with Determinism of any sort.

All long-term-successful social technology presupposes free will and attempts to engage it on its own terms. All attempts to engineer society along deterministic principles have failed, often repeatedly and at great cost. This is not an abstract question; it has innumerable direct and obvious impacts on the real world in every facet of human organization, cooperation and activity. There is a long history of actually testing determinism in the real world, and the results have been uniformly negative.

Humans are thinking machines that are self aware and they exist.

There is no evidence that humans are "machines", ie deterministic chains of cause and effect. This claim is not supported by any direct, testable evidence available to us, and is in fact contradicted by our moment-to-moment experience of making choices freely. Many predictions have been made on the theory that humans are machines, and all of those predictions, to date, have been falsified. Even now, you form the claim in a way specifically designed to be untestable, because you are aware that such a machine cannot now be made. You only believe that it will be possible to be made at some indeterminate point in the future, perhaps ten years hence; ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years ago and more, your predecessors believed the same thing for the same reasons.

Materialists claim that there is no evidence for anything but materialism. Then they claim that our common, direct observation of free will can't be accurate, because it would contradict Materialism. But if our direct experience contradicts Materialism, that is evidence against Materialism.

You do not believe in Determinism because it has been directly demonstrated by evidence. You believe in Determinism because you are committed to Materialism as an axiom, and because any position other than Determinism evidently breaks that axiom. Beliefs are not generated by a deterministic accretion of evidence, but are rather chosen through the exercise of free will, by a process that is easily observed by anyone with a reasonable memory and a willingness to examine one's own thought-process dispassionately. As I said before, this is how all human reason works, how all beliefs and values are formed and adopted. The mistake is only in failing to recognize the choices being made, to allow oneself to believe that the choices are anything other than choices.

Shouldn't it logically follow that more thinking self aware machines can be made? If it exists, which it does, it can be created by us given enough resources.

It logically follows, provided one chooses to adopt Materialist axioms, and thus commits to ignoring all contrary evidence. Logical deduction from axioms is not evidence, though, and, as I mentioned previously, all attempts to actually demonstrate Determinism have failed. We do our actual engineering off free will, not determinism.

None of the above is a language game or a pointless abstraction, all of it can be directly and reliably demonstrated by universal, directly-observable experiences. None of it relies on supposition or interpretation. I reiterate that to the extent that facts exist, the above is simply factual.

More comments

If you make a thinking system complex enough consciousness is an emergent property. All it needs to do is to be able to reflect on itself.

This is a gigantic assumption that you are making. As far as I can tell, there is no good reason to believe it.

This does not answer the question. Just because you might be incurious about the experience of self-awareness and only thinking in terms of practical application, doesn't mean others aren't.

I'm very curious, I just don't find it mysterious. Like everything else in the universe it is based on real phenomena and understandable.

It might be in principle understandable, or it might not be. In any case, I think the fact of the matter is that neither you nor I understand it. And neither does anyone else, as far as I can tell. You do not know how the physical universe gives rise to consciousness, nor do I. If you did understand it, you would be able to provide an explanation. "If you make a thinking system complex enough consciousness is an emergent property. All it needs to do is to be able to reflect on itself." is not an explanation, because there is no good reason to believe that it is true. Even if it were true, that would not necessarily explain consciousness, subjective experience. It would just add one more fact to what we already know about the correlation between physical states and self-reported consciousness, such as "if a person takes sleeping pills, they self-report losing consciousness and then regaining it at some point later". None of that necessarily brings us closer to explaining what subjective experience is or how physical reality gives rise to it (if it even does at all).

All phenomena that are in the universe are real by definition, yes. But you seem to believe that we're as close to understanding subjectivity as we are to understanding self-reflection.

Ah, but something acting self-aware and something being conscious are not necessarily the same thing. I can imagine a p-zombie that acts just as self-aware as any human, but has no subjective experience.

Even if we create AI that is indistinguishable from a human in terms of how self-aware it acts and how intelligent it is, that does not necessarily mean that we will understand whether it is conscious or not, even though we have access to all of its inner workings. I think the same is true of humans. Even if we manage to completely map a brain and learn to understand every minute detail of how that brain thinks, how it deduces new insights and so on, I do not necessarily think that that would bring us any closer to understanding why that human being is conscious.

To me, assuming that eventually, mapping the brain or creating human-level artificial intelligence will explain to us how consciousness works is just as unsupported an argument as any pro-Christian argument. Intelligence and consciousness might well be orthogonal, in which case no level of understanding how intelligence works will bring us any closer to understanding consciousness.

Even if we create AI that is indistinguishable from a human in terms of how self-aware it acts and how intelligent it is, that does not necessarily mean that we will understand whether it is conscious or not, even though we have access to all of its inner workings. I think the same is true of humans. Even if we manage to completely map a brain and learn to understand every minute detail of how that brain thinks, how it deduces new insights and so on, I do not necessarily think that that would bring us any closer to understanding why that human being is conscious.

Speaking as someone who believes in the existence of a soul--if we fully mapped out a brain, then I think consciousness would by necessity have to be an emergent property of normal neuron behavior. That's not to say we'd necessarily understand consciousness, but we'd at least know that it somehow stems from neurons and physical matter.

The alternative is that consciousness has no causal effect on matter, in which case, how do you know that you're conscious? How does your brain receive the signal telling it about consciousness and the qualia of self-awareness?

I find that to be a distinction without a difference. It could be that we aren't self aware and are just next token predictors with a large context window. If it is indistinguishable then that is the same as being as self aware as we can prove we are.

It is a distinction with a huge difference. I don't need to prove that I am conscious. It is self-evident to me. I am, currently, having subjective experience. The mystery is, why? Why is this subjective experience correlated with this physical body? Does the physical body give rise to the consciousness somehow? Many people assume that it does. After all, if the physical body is given certain drugs the self-reported consciousness will go away (deep sleep). So it seems as if there is some connection. Yet all the efforts of philosophers and scientists have brought us not even one millimeter closer to understanding why the consciousness exists. I think it is possible that in principle, the hard problem of consciousness is and always will be beyond the reach of science.

Yes they have, basically if you stuff enough compute into the prefrontal cortex you get consciousness, you damage or remove it and you lose it. It is all physical stuff we can understand.

basically if you stuff enough compute into the prefrontal cortex you get consciousness

There is not one shred of evidence for this.

It is all physical stuff we can understand.

Nope, philosophy and science do not understand why consciousness exists in the least bit. There has been literally zero progress on this front despite enormous efforts.

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Yes, religion gets treated with a certain courtesy, just like communism, remote viewing, gender politics, conspiracy theories, Austrian economics, and any number of other subjects which one or more people find insane.

Calling for any of these topics to be disallowed flies counter to the classical-liberal spirit of the forum.

I don't call for them to be disallowed. People should be free to say what they think. My only point is that vociferous pushback against baseless/evidence free claims should be encouraged rather than guarded against.

The vast majority of this forum is atheist/agnostic. Some are Christian. But the numbers have to be seen to be believed

Source: Tracingwoodgrains's First Annual Survey, N = 885

Agnostic: 23%

Other Atheist 13.6%

Atheist Humanist 27.8%

Atheist Antitheist 12.7%

Making the total non-believer population round nicely to 77%. A little bit more if you include those who put down things like "catholic but lazy, not really believing" or "Taoist".

A census of what percent of the US is atheistic is difficult to pinpoint. An atheistic secular Jew may decide when asked on a polling question that his religion as ethno-religion is more important then a discreet theological claim and thus when the pollster asks "what religion are you" he answers Jewish. Even though when later asked 'do you believe in a God" he responds with a clear no. So too may the no longer believing Catholic who raises their kid in the church and keeps their thoughts to themselves because their Catholicism is too intertwined with their ethnicity to be unwoven. There is no contradiction here, just note that how big or small you want atheists to appear does depend on what precisely you are asking.

But for the simple "what religion are you" question. "Atheist" got 2% in 2007 and 4% in 2023. Source: Pew Research 2023 National Public Opinion Survey

What makes this forum so outrageously non-representative compared to the US population as a whole is not only that 4% vs 77% number, but also that the First Annual Motte survey also asked "what religion were you raised in". 30% were raised broadly non-religious. Meaning the average Motteizen isn't just non-religious, they are someone who was immersed and walked away. They say there's no zealot like a convert and I think this applies just as well to deconversion.

So if this forum has 3x as many explicitly anti-theists as the atheist population of the US as a whole and population here is more atheistic by literally 15x as much then your question transforms into something a little bit different. It's not just 'why does this forum broadly...' but rather 'why is a forum of this specific belief breakdown treating religion with such respect'

And for that I return us to perhaps the source. In favor of Niceness, Community, And Civilization, by Scott Alexander

I seek out people who signal that they want to discuss things honestly and rationally. Then I try to discuss things honestly and rationally with those people. I try to concentrate as much of my social interaction there as possible.

So far this project is going pretty well. My friends are nice, my romantic relationships are low-drama, my debates are productive and I am learning so, so much.

And people think “Hm, I could hang out at 4Chan and be called a ‘fag’. Or I could hang out at Slate Star Codex and discuss things rationally and learn a lot. And if I want to be allowed in, all I have to do is not be an intellectually dishonest jerk.”

And so our community grows. And all over the world, the mysterious divine forces favoring honest and kind equilibria gain a little bit more power over the mysterious divine forces favoring lying and malicious equilibria.

Andrew thinks I am trying to fight all the evils of the world, and doing so in a stupid way. But sometimes I just want to cultivate my garden.

Or as Our Own Tracingwoodgrains brought up iwhen trying to explain this place in On Mottes and Mythologies

It’s pretty simple. I remember the kid I was, born into and seriously committed to a set of beliefs that I would need to seriously examine and step away from later in life. I remember just how rare it was to have a candid, good-faith discussion with people on the other side. I remember just how damaging the Arthur Chus both in and against my community were, how much unnecessary pain they caused. And if there’s any chance in an increasingly polarized world to build a space that allows that kid to honestly discuss his most controversial, difficult opinions and get sincere engagement and pushback instead of being shut down or mocked?

I will drag myself across broken glass to maintain that space, and all the Arthur Chus in the world aren’t enough to convince me otherwise.

That’s The Motte for you. It’s not perfect. It doesn’t always live up to the ideals Scott Alexander and others have championed. But it comes closer to being a working discussion ground for people who hold dramatically different beliefs than anywhere else I’ve found, and that’s just not the sort of thing you give up on.

What we've all participated in constructing here is a precious little creature. I take seriously the horrific implications of why treat them with respect at all.

The Thirty Years War became the benchmark to measure all later wars. The inhabitants of eastern France interpreted each subsequent invasion int he light of stories told about the Swedes and Croats who devastated their region in the 1630s. Soldiers fighting in the trenches along the eastern front of the First World War believed they were experiencing horrors not seen in three centuries. In his radio broadcast on 4 May 1945, Hitler's architect and armaments minister, Albert Speer, announced 'the destruction that has been inflicted on Germany can only be compared to that of the Thirty Years War. The decimation of our people through hunger and deprivation must not be allowed to reach the proportion of that epoch' For this reason, he went on, Hitler's successor, Admiral Donitz, had given the order to lay down arms. Public opinion surveys carried out in the 1960's revealed that Germans placed the Thirty Years War as their country's greatest disaster ahead of both World Wars, the Holocaust, and the Black Death. - Peter Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy, pg 5-6

I find this forum to be a civilizational candle in the dark in these ircivilizational times. And that means taking the religious among us here seriously. If we are excessively demure to them then that is only a reason to expand that sensibility to others, not to deny them that environment in the first place. There is enough vitriol on every other website and in every other which side are you on boy shibboleth seeking interrogation-conversation. If you J'accuse this place of taking people who hold unsubstantiated beliefs ridiculed in greater rat-dom and engaging with them with seriousness of tone and tenderness of heart then I take your accusation in stride.

Yes. It is.

I'd definitely be interested in seeing how demographics have changed since then.

Very noble sentiments. But it is equivalent to deeply discussing bigfoot or high fantasy novels as if they were true with a capital T. It seems like a waste of time and I feel as though a lot of good conversations have been hijacked recently by zealots air dropping faith based arguments all over the place. If one more solution to the world's ills or fractious politics is proposed as "have you heard the good news about our lord an savior JC" I'm going to scream.

Shoot, 100ProofTollBooth managed to shoehorn an entire sermon on the benefits of following Christ into an entirely unrelated thread about drug use in Portland Oregon.

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This meme raises the question succinctly. The bald bipeds beasts that bestride the Earth in 2024 are really into lying, scheming, manipulating, and cheating.

They are clever, and have won great victories in the competition of Man against Nature. They are clever, and have created terrible weapons in the competition of Man against Man.

The rationalist project is that science and reason get used to build utopia. Are we actually headed towards global thermonuclear war, or towards a Lebanese style multicultural kakistocracy? The rationalist project has failed because it refused to engage with human greed, selfishness, and delusion.

The discussion moves on to the theory of second best. What is possible within the limits of human nature? If space aliens turn up and their space ship is an ant heap with monoclonal genetics, they will diagnose our problems easily enough. The scientist who values truth and refuses to sell out, is a nerd and doesn't get the girl. The scientist who monetizes "truth" and sells it to the richest corporation marries and has a mistress and propagates his anti-science-and-reason genes into the next generation. That is the diagnosis, but it offers no treatment.

One idea is bringing up children to believe in God. A God who commands scrupulous honesty and always is watching, even when all humans present are in on the scam and bought or compromised.

That probably gives the interstellar ants a good laugh. Humans have such a complicated relationship with self-awareness. What happens when the children brought up to believe in God work out that God is a pro-social myth? Some of them retain the honesty in worldly affairs that they were brought up with, and work to promote and preserve the pro-social myth. This involves an attitude adjustment from telling the truth because God commands it, to participating in the lie and the cover-up because society depends on the prosocial myth. But that is rare. Most fall into these two camps. Those who blurt out the truth in front of the children, as though the God they no longer believe in was watching, ready to punish them for telling the lie that He exists. Those who revert to instinct and seek reproductive success by lying, scheming, manipulating, and cheating, while also believing that they are choosing a variety of behaviours for themselves, not simply following their genetic programming.

Do you have an alternative idea? The rationalist project implicitly assumes that man was created by God with a divinely granted capacity for good. The rationalist project implicitly denies that man is an evolved creature, whose self-defeating duplicity is enforced and created by human genetics. The rationalist project, in as much as it ignores the true horror of being an evolved creature, is just another high fantasy. What is there left to discuss?

There was plenty of lying, scheming, manipulating, and cheating in times and places when theistic faith was most ascendant. Do you think Renaissance Italy, the Holy Roman Empire, the Abbasid Caliphate, and the Ottoman Empire had none of that? Members of the Sicilian Mafia all consider themselves scrupulous Catholics. You may say they are not, in fact, good Catholics (and I would agree, and AFAIK so does the chief of the Catholic Church), but convincing them that God is watching them would not stop their crimes, because they already believe that. People usually think their behavior is either righteous or at least justified by the circumstances; the thought does not become "I better not not burn down that store, God would punish me"; it becomes "Let's burn down that store, it's what anybody would do in my place, actually it's a pretty good idea, God will be happy I'm not a pushover".

The rationalist project has failed because it refused to engage with human greed, selfishness, and delusion

This is just not true, they have engaged a lot with human "greed" and "selfishness" (coordination failures), and "delusion" (bias, politics mind killer). Maybe they're wrong, but they're definitely engaging with it.

Opening with a forwards from grandma style meme that wouldn't look out of place in a kevin sorbo movie is not a good start to this ramble to nowhere.

"The rationalist project implicitly assumes that man was created by God with a divinely granted capacity for good. The rationalist project implicitly denies that man is an evolved creature, whose self-defeating duplicity is enforced and created by human genetics" * Citation Badly Needed*

I'm sorry you have such a low opinion of the human race. Hopefully you'll live long enough to see that we're still on the upswing. Although for many believers--- the apocalypse is always delayed, never canceled.

The rationalist project has failed because it refused to engage with human greed, selfishness, and delusion.

What on earth are you talking about? Have you even browsed the Sequences?

You can minimize threads and move on if you don’t want to talk about religion, like I do with the endless circlejerking about artificial-not-very-intelligence.

I think if an idea or ideology is put forward on a public forum, and it has no basis in reality, it should be challenged rather than ignored or accepted. This is how good theories and ideas push out the incorrect ones, since clear demonstrable practical application responsible for all of the scientific miracles of the 500 years isn't enough.

The reason people circlejerk about AI is that it is going to be the defining feature of our lives going forward. It actually exists and is getting more powerful by the day.

I share your assessment of religion, but as others have already alluded to, I come here to see views I won’t hear anywhere else. If that means reading some % of what I think is obviously on its face nonsense then so be it.

You’ve said many times that pushback is not allowed—do you have some examples in mind?

If the criterion is “don’t post in a rat-adjacent forum views you aren’t prepared to change” then I think religion is far from the sole offender.

I've personally been advised by mods and others that pointing out that religion has no proof and makes no sense is "boring and played out", and "this isn't the place for militant atheist rhetoric ", "we don't want to relitigate the new atheist wars of 20 years ago here" when I merely point out the absolute absurdity of it all.

Meanwhile people proudly declare they are Christian Orthodox and write entire screeds of facile navel gazing nonsense, presented with nothing interesting or actionable, zero proof except their own personal feelings. Great works detailing their personal journey of early indoctrination, loss of faith, and reawakening even stronger over and over again on this forum.

What do you want to happen? It seems obvious to me it can’t be easily singled out as “the bad thing you aren’t allowed to post about” so posts like that will crop up.

You want to just freely reply that religion is nonsense over and over? To me that’s as tedious as someone posting “but that’s sexist” or something every time someone on the forum is sexist. It might be true but it doesn’t really add anything to the discussion. My suspicion would be that’s what mods mean when they say “it’s tired and played out.”

If people were writing nothing more than “Jesus is Lord” then sure but what I see is people writing fairly lengthy and thought out posts. I may disagree strongly but that’s why I’m here. And I would hope someone responding has more to say than “but there’s no evidence tho.”

Curiosity goes a long way. You mention it makes no sense on a rationalist adjacent forum, but I wonder what some of these people would say if you genuinely asked if (a) they generally consider themselves rationalists and (b) if so how do they think about that in the context of religion.

If, as I think, the point of this place is to have discussions you can’t have anywhere else, that line of conversation seems more in keeping with this place than rehashing the Great War.

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If "discussing bigfoot or high fantasy novels as if they were true with a capital T" prevented a continent from being bled dry for three decades....

Well, but at the same time it's a pretty common pattern for adherents of a larger and milder ideology to be defensive of a narrower circle of extremists: you'd be hard-pressed to get Muslims to oppose Islamic extremists, FOSS adherents to denounce Stallman, normie medieval Christians to shun anchorites, or standard leftists to shun Antifa. There are many reasons for this - extremists provide an ideal to aspire to (if you were willing to dedicate everything to the idea, this is how far you could go, isn't it romantic?), show that your ideology is feasible even when taken to the extreme, make your own version of it look like a reasonable compromise (and if everyone more extreme than you is cut off, then eventually you will be the extremist), and serve as an important counterweight to the outgroup's dangerous extremists ("A monster, but our monster"). I figure that outspoken Christians can serve as this for our much larger set of secular rightists - they probably are united in thinking that the West was better off back when everyone was unified in Christian morality, and so they look up to the religious with admiration even as they lament that in their own blackened hearts they can no longer muster genuine belief.

In the scientific field, predictive power is generally taken as evidence of correctness. I think part of the reason that even some of the non-religious posters around here are so sympathetic to religion is because they recall all of the religious conservatives making directionally-accurate predictions about the results of political progressivism a decade or two ago. Perhaps they don't think it is correct, but they do see that it has insight.

I think part of the other reason (for the non-religious posters) is that they are familiar, either in their personal lives or via the field of social studies, with the fact that religion is very good for people. There's a whole host of research that shows this, and of course it is often apparent from observation as well. Does this mean religious claims are true? By itself, not necessarily – but, again, it seems to suggest insight.

And then of course there's the fact that more than a few of the posters on this board (including myself) are Christians, and there are probably some of other religious persuasions here as well, so it makes sense that they would treat religion as a serious topic, because they – like most people, including I suspect most rationalists – think that it is serious. Certainly it has serious influence.

Yeah, but this is better explained by “traditionalism” getting some key things right that we’ve moved too far away from in modern society. The religious can say “we told you so” on some current societal ill, but that’s picking winners and ignoring losers on the track record of religion overall on any given issue.

Also you have to consider that the progressivism most of us here strongly dislike is highly compatible with certain strains of religion, and indeed its worse aspects are directly comparable to those of a religion (so to with Marxism and other ideologies that seek power beyond the level of their epistemology).

Religion being so kooky while it tries to defend traditionalism is arguably making it harder for secular traditionalism to appeal to the youths. See also: the Republican Party.

The supposed pragmatic benefits of religion (typically cherry-picked to hell) are not very relevant to the epistemic status.

We respect each others' beliefs regarding the supernatural (including the beliefs "It exists" and "It doesn't exist"), even when we know Our Beliefs are Objectively Correct and Their Beliefs are Objectively Wrong, because when we don't, Bad Things tend to happen.

Well one side has literally an orgy of evidence, while the other has zero. So they aren't both equally worthy of respect.

Naive empiricism is not a privileged metaphysical position. It too is based on the arbitrary assumption of the logical coherence of the universe, which is no less evidence free than divine grace.

Do you think it's air you're breathing?

Yes I do. Because we can measure it and if you take it away we die. There is a ton less evidence of divine grace, zero in point of fact.

What makes you think you can correctly evaluate the amount or legitimacy of evidence for some metaphysical position when you make basic mistakes like stating one can measure a model?

Air does not exist, it's a concept that is linked to a specific theory and corpus of observations that could be (and indeed has previously been) falsified at any moment. You may as well say that phlogiston must exist because it's clearly released by any combustible. The map is not the territory.

In any case, making such peremptory statements about this topic without any knowledge of Kant or consideration for any criticism of positivism is futile. We can't discuss evidence if you don't even know what evidence is.

Quibbling about what “air” is and whether it exists in the same way as phlogiston, and then bringing up Kant and positivism, is almost a parody of trying to avoid the obvious point that if we suck all the air out of your lungs or put you in a room without oxygen you will die, 100% of the time. By “metaphysical” you seem to mean “made up and you can’t disprove it with your wimpy naturalism.”

In contrast, divine power resists all attempts to study it in the same way Bigfoot eludes capture and Santa avoids showing up on radar. People do try though.

It’s very brave to bring up falsifiability as a standard when religious claims almost always avoid it. Religious faith and reason cannot be reconciled because the former is explicitly based on believing things without sufficient evidence as a virtue. “We don’t have demonstrable evidence and that’s a feature, not a bug.”

Leaving aside the fact that Saint Thomas Aquinas and millions of Catholics disagree with you, the existence of mystery should humble all ontological viewpoints. Which is my point.

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Yes, I do.

Furthermore, if someone wishes to disagree, they can make an actual claim to the contrary and then defend it with something outside of their own head. Empty metaphysical non-arguments are deeply unimpressive.

Truth needn't impress.

But not to worry, I come prepared.

The only crowd I've ever known to take an interest in this sort of thing, outside of academic philosophers, are internet theists who've given up on ever winning an argument anyone else cares about. Imagine busting this out because you saw someone chortling at the idea that Star Wars lore is real, and you'll understand how it looks from the outside. The part where everyone gains so much epistemic humility that they quit snorting whenever someone brings up the will of the Force in a serious conversation just isn't coming.

I love Star Wars more than you probably suspect, but still I wonder which you think I am? Because I doubt your guess is correct.

You say this and yet most of the contemporary institutions this forum endlessly complains about are justified through philosophical frameworks that have direct lineage to that era of criticisms of logical positivism.

People say that epistemology doesn't really matter and then they go on to live in a world where they are morally beaten down on account of standpoint theory.

It's the darndest thing. People say reading Hegel doesn't matter because it's all airy nonsense and then go about their day making received assumptions that are almost totally down to his very specific view of the world being internalized by society.

In any case, I've never cared about popularity contests or ad hominems. I care about the truth and how people on every side of every argument are undeservedly certain of things they have absolutely no logical reason to believe.

Confident ignorance is objectively worse than doubtful error. Repent before Socrates.

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at risk of a low effort warning for memeing.

https://imgflip.com/i/8imni1

K-On? Sir, I see you're a man of culture as well.

Who is "we"? This is a thread about Christian nationalism.

We respect each others' beliefs regarding the supernatural (including the beliefs "It exists" and "It doesn't exist"), even when we know Our Beliefs are Objectively Correct and Their Beliefs are Objectively Wrong, because when we don't, Bad Things tend to happen.

Who is "we"? This is a thread about Christian nationalism.

Christian nationalism, which is hard to talk about because no one agrees what it means, is hardly guaranteed to impinge on Westphalian tolerance. The Peace of Westphalia enshrined cuius regio, eius religio (in other words, a state religion) but prohibited ius reformandi (the ability of the state to regulate religious observance).

In other words, the principle of Westphalian tolerance is fine with the state being overtly pastafarian and funneling tax dollars to pastafarian temples; it just can't punish people for converting to baptism, building baptist churches, or saying the church of the flying spaghetti monster is hogwash in their capacity as private citizens.

That's giving people a right to be wrong, which is different from respecting their beliefs.

Agreed. This forum's meta treatment of Christianity is very goofy. You can call trans people delusional and nothing will happen. You can call people in favor of covid lockdowns delusional and nothing will happen. You can even call people you're arguing against delusional as an ad-hominem and nothing will happen. But call religious people delusional and you should absolutely expect to get warned/banned.

Prelest describes someone experiencing religious delusions.

Trans and covid delusions are of a different nature than religious belief.

I don't think so. They are all unwilling to accept reality as it is.

What do you mean by "accept reality"? Above, you go on and on about how there's no evidence for religion and there is for science, etc., etc., but you've never told us what you're basing any of this on. Do you only accept scientific theories that you have confirmed through your own experiments? Or are you simply parroting "the truth" as you read it from people you trust, who probably also didn't conduct these experiments themselves but are merely relaying third-hand accounts via popular sources that you're simply trusting without verification.

So how do you know that trans people simply "won't accept reality"? What studies did you personally conduct on the subject? How many trans people have you actually spoken to? What PhD do you have to demonstrate that you have the kind of educational background that would allow you to even begin to understand all of this stuff? What empirical observations have you made that would allow you to contradict the various lefty doctors and psychologists who say that trans is totally a real thing and that we need to start transitioning kids at age ten? Or are you merely making assumptions about this based on pop-science combined with your own preexisting opinions?

From what I can read on Wikipedia, prelest is just referring to a person thinking they're less sinful than humans normally are. It's an interesting word to be sure, but not particularly helpful when adjudicating the truthfulness or delusional-ness of religious claims.

If I'm misinterpreting something here feel free to clarify.

It's frequently applied in the sense that the person will belive they're a saint or God has given them specifically a mission or message. Not religious faith in general.

This forum's meta treatment of Christianity is very goofy. You can call trans people delusional and nothing will happen. [...] But call religious people delusional and you should absolutely expect to get warned/banned.

Examples? I've written and seen written posts that treat Christian beliefs with the same rough treatment as "I think [X] are just delusional, and [Y] are just confused and mentally ill", and none of them ran afoul of the mods. This thread has some examples of posters (including me) saying in passing that 'yup, the factual claims of the bible are unsupported and faintly ridiculous on their face, and I think bible-thumpers are just [insert euphemism for confused simpleton'].

You haven't gotten banned for it.

...try calling atheists delusional, and see what you get. Try saying that atheists are treated with kid gloves, and see what happens.

I didn't get banned for it, sure, but I sure did get warned for it. It was back on the old site where I said something along the lines of "Biblical literalism is delusional belief in fairy tales" and I got a warning from one of the mods who told me to use the term "superstitions" instead. I can't find the exact comment unfortunately since Reddit is horrendous to search through.

...try calling atheists delusional, and see what you get. Try saying that atheists are treated with kid gloves, and see what happens.

I just hope there'd be some consistency from the moderators. Outside of the mod team, you'd obviously get flak for being wrong, especially if your implicit belief was that Christianity was the alternative, but that's to be expected.

I just hope there'd be some consistency from the moderators.

Try it and see. Try calling atheists delusional or saying that they're treated with kid gloves. You might be surprised, and then you might not make such silly claims as your original comment.

I don't get the point of your comment. I assume you're implying that you're not able to call atheists delusional, and that makes it symmetric? First off that's not true e.g. this post had almost 300 comments with no mod warnings that I could see. It uses the term "irrational" which is slightly less fighty than "delusional", but it's in the same ballpark. If you have an example of someone getting modded for decrying atheists as delusional then I'd like to see it.

Also, my point was that there should be broad consistency in using such terms across different topics, not just consistency if you're for or against religion. If someone can call trans people delusional and not get modded, they should be able to call religious people delusional as well.

I have been trying to get clarification on "slurs", but it hasn't been forthcoming. "Delusional" is an item of serious lack of clarity in the rules. Your cite really rested the entire "irrational" claim on, "The essential danger for people of any belief system is becoming dogmatic and therefore irrational." Which is pretty weaksauce and is probably ignored by most people, because it's just not really what people mean when they use the term. Here's an example that didn't even say delusional, just the weaksauce about kid gloves (c.f. unmodded).

I agree that there should be consistency, but I don't know that you actually agree. Most folks everywhere want their sacred positions protected.

Your cite about atheism and kids gloves doesn't really prove your point since the moderator clearly saw that you were flipping the script (without mentioning it in the post) to try to do a "gotcha". That and your belligerent attitude is what got you modded, not specifically the atheism and kids gloves aspect.

I sincerely do want consistency. The best policy would probably be a blanket ban on words like that for any large group of people. Calling trans people delusional might be how a lot of people genuinely feel on this site, but it doesn't add much light to the conversation.

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Many atheists are delusional.

“Atheism” is a weak label in that all it means is a lack of theistic belief. Plenty of people who lack theistic beliefs hold delusional beliefs.

Famously, Marxism was atheistic and antitheistic, and I think it is commonly believed here that Marxists were/are delusional about economics, among other things.

The atheists who supported injecting progressive politics into the movement to create “Atheism+” were delusional in my view, and many remain so in their beliefs that diverge from the actual science, say evolutionary psychology and gender differences (which is super ironic given how much we all love to criticize the religious for not accepting evolution).

Come on. We have recently had a thread about how faith healing is totally totally totally true I swear but the existence of atoms? No sir! I haven't ever seen an atom, therefore God. The leniency that religious people receive on this site is nowhere found in every other site where you would just be called a "bigoted religious nut", end of story. On one hand I'm in favor of the freedom of expressing every opinion, on the other end I see the rhetoric used by the religious and is dangerously similar to the Woke. This site keep reminding me that the Culture War is eternal and counterculture is just a temporarily embarrassed authoritarianism.

The leniency that religious people receive on this site is nowhere found in every other site where you would just be called a "bigoted religious nut

Eh, the willingness to go along with religious discussion without raising the 'uh this is fake tho' arguments is pretty common in general. I think it's in part because everyone's tired of making the same new atheism style arguments, in part because it just feels ... mean, they're enjoying their world and it makes them feel good and doesn't seem to have too many negative consequences.

Like if I saw OP and had no context on religious discussions on the internet, I'd reply with a standard argument for atheism on the grounds of physics, the cultural history of religion, the history of the universe, and how physics is a better ground for morals anyway. But ... everyone knows about that, and nobody cares, really.

I'm at this point too. In general as soon as I read "Christian" I try to avoid commenting, because I know since my teenage years all the tiresome arguments but sometimes I just slip... and then I remember why I shouldn't.

I wrote:

Try it and see. Try calling atheists delusional or saying that they're treated with kid gloves. You might be surprised, and then you might not make such silly claims as your original comment.

I don't think you've responded to anything I wrote in the slightest. Tilting at windmills; blinded by your own rage; incapable of even reading when the topic makes you too emotional.

Alright, that’s enough. When you find yourself casting aspersions, it’s time to back off, not double down.

@bfslndr, something similar for you. You were doing fine until you started throwing accusations of trolling.

blinded by your own rage; incapable of even reading when the topic makes you too emotional.

Now I understand. You're just here to troll. Thank you for letting me know.

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It is pretty wild with the religious claims on here recently. I mean, who doesn't believe in atoms? You can see them if you want! Their arguments never make any sense, because they can't.

I just hate to see so many interesting topics hit a hard wall of "Faith" where discussion beyond it becomes so attenuated it may as well be background radiation.

Hm. There's definitively a sense in which Christians are being treated with kid gloves (due to, I'd wager, the conservative slant of the community as well as a perhaps somewhat outdated sense that such a person being willing to talk to and expound their beliefs to us is rare and precious), but the first two examples do seem to narrowly keep within our Overton window of permitted antagonism simply because they keep the assertions of delusion within the requisite "I think that..." container. (The last one might just have evaded attention as a barely-engaged-with leaf comment.)

I wouldn't feel particularly worried about saying that I think that Christians are indulging in a mass delusion as part of a larger post, though if I made that the only thing I say a modhat response would be quite justified. (Of course, I'd wish for the same in response to a COVID post saying only that.)

but the first two examples do seem to narrowly keep within our Overton window of permitted antagonism simply because they keep the assertions of delusion within the requisite "I think that..."

I haven't of this being a thing. If this is an actual rule then it's completely stupid. Subjectivity is implied through the nature of online communication. "I think that" or "In my opinion" or any variation thereof shouldn't be a shield against moderator action.

I don't think it's an explicit rule, but I get the sense that I've heard moderators speak approvingly of it as a principle before. Either way, it seems sensible to me: the goal of any rule against hostile language surely is to make sure that discussion continues being good (fewer people with different viewpoints are either made to leave, or provoked into not contributing as productively themselves), and an "I think [thing that pisses you off]" seems to usually induce less anger than [thing that pisses you off] presented as an unqualified/authoritative statement.

Just in case no one gets around to schooling you, I'd like to register that this is because your attitude is as cringeworthy as it is off-putting and most of us have learned not to bother trying to reason with someone talking the way you are now.

I will confirm that your phrasing is quite antagonistic. Please don’t do this.

The person to whom I was responding was being intentionally inflammatory while also making it clear that he is not interested in having an open discussion. How then am I to respond? I could overlook his derision (directed at me and mine) and try to explain something to him, except that he's also indicated that he won't consider what I have to say.

Meanwhile, I don't want him to confuse people refusing to cast pearls before swine with his opponents declining to respond out of fear.

Apologies for the delay.

I agree that he probably wasn’t looking for a serious discussion. Sometimes providing that is still worthwhile, on the off chance your opponent decides to break the mold. Also, it looks really good to the audience.

If the goal is to make the existence of disagreement clear, rather than the substance…well, there’s not really any nice way to dismiss someone out of hand. The best you can do is probably emphasize your reasoning.

I think you’re laughably wrong, but I don’t want to recreate the early atheist flame wars, so I’ll leave it at that.

It’s still not great. Fundamentally, you’re still announcing that he’s not worth your time, which is going to rub people the wrong way. The more politely you do so, the less pushback you’ll get.

Yeah, it’s hard to engage productively with a comment like his. The question is—what are you hoping to get out of the exchange?

Edit: just saw your edit when I posted this, will respond

Let's notice that your response made about anything else would be considered antagonistic and uncharitable. The amount of tip-toeing needed when talking about religion reminds me of the same attitude needed to talk with the woke: I need to pass every thought to a language censor to avoid their little preciousness to be offended. This, plus the obvious one-sided moderation about certain topics, plus the obious one-sided moderation in favour of certain persons, plus many posts that triggered my Gell Mann amnesia, plus the fact the we see always the same posters and many good posters stopped posting a while ago, all of these just tell me that TheMotte is past the echo-chamber point of no return. It was fun until it lasted. Let's enjoy the waning.

You gotta admit it’s a hilarious arc for a forum spun off from an atheist blog spun off from another atheist and explicitly antitheist blog to become a safe haven for the devout.

The witches have formed a quorum. It is really really tiring to see the most engaged threat in the culture war roundup being various religious people arguing menuta and trying to convert or shut down any pushback with sermons, bad math, and clumsy obfuscation.

Who even talks like this, "Schooling you"? I won't say what kind of impression of a person that leaves in my mind.

I agree, by abandoning reddit they finally can have their mask off moment.

Maybe you want a religion more like this one, Skoptsy, they had an NPR story about them a few months ago, and now it is trending on reddit.

here were two kinds of castration: the "lesser seal" and the "greater seal". For men, the "lesser seal" meant the removal of the testicles only, while the "greater seal" involved either removal of the penis or emasculation (removal of both penis and testicles). Men who underwent the "greater seal" used a cow-horn when urinating. The castrations and emasculations were originally performed with a red-hot iron, called the 'fiery baptism'. However, the skoptsy later transitioned to using knives or razors, with the iron serving only to stop the bloodflow. They also twisted the scrotum, destroying the seminal vesicles and stopping the flow of semen.

In women, the Skoptsy removed the nipples or the whole breasts. Occasionally, they simply scarred the breasts. They also often removed the labia minora and clitoris. They did not use anesthetics.[2]

The operations were generally performed by elders. During the operation, they said the phrase "Christ is risen!"

Religion has no place in the future of human thought.

  • -19

Did you know that one time an atheist did something bad? Atheism has no place in the future of human thought.

"Schooling me"?

No religion embraces reason, otherwise it would cease to exist.

  • -21

There are factions of "Big Eva" who seem to be moving more Left (see the recent "He gets us" commercial in the Super Bowl).

They went with foot washing. I would have preferred the casting out of demons, or over turning tables and driving out the money changers or hypocrisy condemning. They don't get me.

They might not, but He does. They just decided to highlight the foot washing because they personally thought it was most valuable to highlight. Even if you think it didn't deserve to be highlighted, doesn't mean it was theologically incorrect.

There are more accounts of casting out of demons that appear that appear in four books. Foot washing only appears in one. From the response of the disciples it seems like the first time.

My thoughts are that 'Big Eva' frequently presents an unbalanced view of Jesus. It's all love and footwasing, where this is only half the story. 'As yourselves', is frequently missing from 'Love your Neighbor'

Yes, help, be kind, love strangers / traveller's. Also if they're sacrificing children to Molech they should be stoned to death.

they should be stoned to death.

If we are following the teachings of Jesus then we won't be stoning anyone to death.

Does Jesus prohibit stoning as a punishment?

John 8

1 Jesus went unto the mount of Olives.

2 And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them.

3 And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst,

4 They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.

5 Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?

6 This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.

7 So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

8 And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.

9 And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.

10 When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?

11 She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

Jesus persuades a group against stoning an adultress.

Not really a prohibition against all stoning or stoning Molech worshipping child sacrificers.

The New Testament lacks the specificity to address Jesus's particular views regarding death by torture for the followers Moloc.

But it seems difficult to interpret John 8 as Jesus advocating stoning. And the only other mention of stoning in the New Testament is very negative against the stoners and sympathetic to their victim who is being stoned. It's quite a contrarian reading of the Bible to think that the followers of Jesus should be stoning people.

Edit: I scrolled through your post history wondering if you were one of the local Indian posters or something. Someone who is honestly ignorant about Christianity. But no, you only lived in America and Europe and you go (or went?) to church some amount. Why are you acting unclear regarding Jesus's advocacy about stoning people to death? This isn't some obscure point. And what church do you go to where people play the game: "Jesus never said we couldn't do this." This is Pharisees-level attempted rules lawyering.

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So what crimes do you think deserve the death penalty? Just child sacrifice or anything else?

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There are more accounts of casting out of demons that appear that appear in four books. Foot washing only appears in one. From the response of the disciples it seems like the first time.

My thoughts are that 'Big Eva' frequently presents an unbalanced view of Jesus. It's all love and footwasing, where this is only half the story. 'As yourselves', is frequently missing from 'Love your Neighbor'

I can get the argument that 'Big Eva' didn't spend their money the best way because they presented an unbalanced view of Jesus. But I don't see the argument that anything they said about Jesus was actually false.

Also if they're sacrificing children to Molech they should be stoned to death.

When does Jesus ever endorse stoning anyone to death?

Jesus the Word of God?

Lev 20:1-2 The LORD spoke to Moses: "You are to say to the Israelites, 'Any man from the Israelites or from the foreigners who reside in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech must be put to death; the people of the land must pelt him with stones.

That's the old testament. I meant Jesus' updated instructions.

The new testament is favorable towards capital punishment. "He who sheds the blood of man..."

"He who sheds the blood of man..."

That's from the old testament, but from a brief study online seems to still be applicable because it was a general law, not an Israelite law, and Jesus didn't ever say otherwise on the topic. But it's about specifically capital punishment as a punishment for murder, not for being gay or a shop lifter or whatever.

Does Jesus say not to stone child sacrificing Molech worshipers?

He speaks on divorce and food prohibitions in the new testament, he persuades a crowd not to stone an adultress, but not via a prohibition on stoning. He specifically says he's not come to abolish the law or the prophets.

Jesus seemed to push a lot more emphasis on forgiveness, redemption, and loving thy neighbor than on stoning to me. If someone literally sacrifices their children to Molech, than yeah probably they should face capital punishment, but that's really more of a legal matter than a religious matter anyway. Jesus isn't proscribing death by stoning for general degeneracy.

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My understanding is that Jesus washed the feet of the apostles (his best friends) to create the priesthood. There are no accounts of him washing anyone else's feet. There's no general call for Christians to wash the feet of randos.

No, but the symbolism in doing so was that he, literally God himself, was putting himself in a subservient position to those below him.

He might not have literally washed the feet of the underclass, but he did hang out with and help prostitutes, lepers, all sorts of undesirables of the society.

From the disciples reaction it seems like the first time.

If Jesus can wash his disciples feet, his disciples can wash the feet of the homeless and desperate.

Once? The disciples reaction points to this being the first time. Casting out demons might be more helpful to the cohort you suggest.

I've read/watched a couple of debates on this topic, and my thoughts are rather inchoate and unformed as of yet (I often thought both sides made good points), but I'll try to lay a couple of them out here:

First, I tend to agree with a couple of people out there (I don't remember which) who argued that, while they agree with the substance, "Christian nationalism" makes for a poor label.

Second, as I've said on Tumblr, I think we need more people saying what Heidi Przybyla has said, as to the defining characteristic of "Christian nationalism":

The thing that unites them as Christian nationalists — not Christians, because Christian nationalists are very different — is that they believe that our rights as Americans and as all human beings do not come from any Earthly authority. They don't come from Congress, from the Supreme Court, they come from God.

Yes, we need more people saying that Americans' rights come from Congress and the Supreme Court (except when they overturn Roe or keep Trump on the ballot), and anyone who says otherwise (such as Thomas Jefferson, or the rest of the Founding Fathers, or pretty much any American statesman up until maybe half a century ago) is a dangerous, fanatical “Christian Nationalist” theocrat.

Third, this is in many ways an extension of some debates that have been going on longer than I've been alive, particularly the "you can't legislate morality" vs "all law is 'legislating morality'" debate; and also the question of what extent the voters in our democracy are allowed, by way of their elected representatives, to enact laws that reflect their collective moral values, specifically when those values are informed by their religion and you have the 1st Amendment. I'm reminded of times in the gay marriage debate, when proponents would argue that secular arguments against gay marriage are really just religious arguments if the person making them is Christian, to a level that almost approached 'separation of church and state means only atheists get to make laws.'

I'm reminded of Sullivan's The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. That true moral neutrality of the public square is impossible, and that there will always be some sort of dominant moral framework to the law which "overrides" any religious views to the contrary; that in the early days of America, this was a generally Protestant Christian framework, with freedom of religion primarily being a truce between denominations not to use the state to settle matters of doctrinal differences; and that since that's no longer the case, we should instead "solve" the current tensions by moving toward the French, by rethinking "freedom of religion" to mean something more like "freedom of conscience," but that once you step outside your church/synagogue/mosque/temple, your moral views must become totally subordinate to a "secular" moral system.

In other words, that with the Constitution forbidding the establishment of theistic religion, the void may — and must — be filled by the unofficial establishment of a nontheistic religion-substitute.

Fourth, I don't remember where it was, but I recall one commenter on the issue of "Christian nationalism" arguing that the reason it's rising as a new boogeyman for the left is because many of them had thought, post-Obergefell, that they had indeed pretty much achieved Sullivan's solution and banished the last traces of "Christian morality" from the public square. But then Trump and Dobbs happened, and older people on the Christian right — who'd previously taken the existence of a sort of "Moral Majority" Judeo-Christian consensus in America for granted — realized just how much they'd lost in the public square and began shedding some of their passivity. That Christian-informed moral views might begin inching back into our politics, particularly with the influx of Hispanic immigrants, is thus a trend to be squashed.

In short, that this is simply a fight as to which set of values is going to have cultural dominance.

Yes, we need more people saying that Americans' rights come from Congress and the Supreme Court (except when they overturn Roe or keep Trump on the ballot), and anyone who says otherwise (such as Thomas Jefferson, or the rest of the Founding Fathers, or pretty much any American statesman up until maybe half a century ago) is a dangerous, fanatical “Christian Nationalist” theocrat.

There is a big difference between

Our rights were written into the fabric of existence by the Divine Watch-maker/Great Architect of the Universe at the beginning of time. They apply to everyone, even when it is inconvenient to the State.

and

Our rights exist at the pleasure of a glowing biped in the sky. The dis-obedient/heretics/infidels/Northern Conservative Fundamental Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912 have no rights which we are bound to respect.

I suspect people are more worried are more about the latter than the former.

this was a generally Protestant Christian framework, with freedom of religion primarily being a truce between denominations not to use the state to settle matters of doctrinal differences

Thomas Jefferson would dis-agree.

Thomas Jefferson would dis-agree.

In theory, sure. The argument is that in practice, the results tended toward a Protestant framework, and that other religions — particularly Catholicism and Judaism, but also to a lesser extent Buddhism, achieved the tolerance they did by "Protestantizing" their forms of practice to varying degrees. Indeed, it's not just Sullivan who has argued that the way Americans — particularly the courts — think of religion almost entirely in terms of beliefs about the supernatural (orthodoxy over orthopraxy) is very sola scriptura and sola fides in character.

I've seen something along these lines also raised as a criticism of modern reconstructionist neopaganism as contrasted to both (what we know of) the original, as well as surviving polytheistic practices (such as Shinto and Hinduism). Specifically, that neopagans tend to focus a lot more on belief — personal belief — in a list of deities, as opposed to centering upon the performance of rites, making of sacrificial offerings, reading of omens; that "traditional" polytheism is much more orthopractic and — for lack of a better word — transactional.

Back during the Iraq War, and still occasionally since, I encounter people online arguing that Islam "isn't a religion," but is instead a "political ideology" or similar. And when those folks bother to try to make case for this position, it usually boils down to an inability to fully squeeze the likes of fiqh into that Protestant-tinged frame of what is or isn't a religion.

For that matter, even that proposed reduction of freedom of religion to "freedom of conscience" is based on the implication that the most important part of "religion" is what you, in the privacy of your own head, do or don't think about god(s) and the supernatural. (I'd note that this is a rather unusual view historically speaking. The Romans would have found it pretty alien. Their contemporaries in China too. Probably the Aztecs and the Incas, too.)

And I'll note that contemporary American protestantism is, ironically, pretty orthopraxic. Modern day American protestants, some confessionals aside, are not very focused on believing in specific doctrines. Evangelicals care more about making a personal devotion to Jesus, a practice, and within broader Christianity many of them are not very orthodox at all. Liberal protestants, of course, well...

Catholicism is more orthodoxic, but Catholic doctrine returns to orthopraxy by the requirement of works for salvation.

How are you defining 'Christian nationalism'? There are many ways in which a Christian could or indeed should assert that Christianity should be part of public life, or should inform the principles on which a nation is built, not all of which are typically categorised as 'Christian nationalism'. When you say that you're getting more sympathetic to Christian nationalism, what practical policies or reforms do you have in mind?

A good summary can be found here: https://g3min.org/a-review-of-mere-christendom-by-doug-wilson/. For a critical perspective, see Heidi Przybyla's interview on MSNBC.

Well, Heidi Przybyla's definition was absurd on the face of it. She was the one who defined Christian nationalism as based in the common belief that rights come from God rather than the state, but that belief is more-or-less universal within historical Christianity, and to the extent that Christians doubt it today, they do so in ignorance of their own tradition. It is also, incidentally, a view that would be easily affirmed by a majority of religious Jews and Muslims - it is not even a Christian distinctive, much less a Christian nationalist distinctive!

Aniol's argument does not particularly touch on me - it reads more to me like he has an axe to grind around the baptism of children, which is certainly his right, but it has nothing much to do with Christian nationalism. It is, perhaps, an easy rhetorical line to try to dis-associate Christian nationalism from Baptists, but I don't particularly care about Baptist insecurities. He is wrong on the issue of infant baptism; nothing proceeds from that for me. So I find most of his essay irrelevant. But let's pass over Aniol, and focus on his summary of Doug Wilson's argument...

Well, Wilson wants some kind of public or legal acknowledgement of the truth of Christianity, via established churches. This seems odd to me as a definition of Christian nationalism. Aniol quotes him mentioning “a network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic acknowledgment of the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and the fundamental truth of the Apostles’ Creed”, and... well, that's kind of it. I think the question I have here is whether this already exists. Does the United Kingdom for a starting point qualify as having made such a formal, civic acknowledgement? It has an established church, that church's ceremonies and rites are part of state affairs, and the sovereign was crowned in an explicitly Christian ceremony in which he vowed to defend and maintain the church. And then for a network of churches - well, the Porvoo Communion exists, and Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland all have established churches as well. If Wilson defines Christian nationalism in those terms, it would seem that Christian nationalism already exists and has done so uncontroversially for a long time.

Yet if I look at the arguments of self-identified Christian nationalists, particularly Americans like Stephen Wolfe, I don't think I see them saying that they want the US to be more like the UK or Denmark. As such, I take 'Christian nationalism' in practice to mean something more than that minimal definition.

At any rate, I asked you the question first. You said that you're getting more sympathetic to 'Christian nationalism'. What do you mean by that? Are you getting more sympathetic to the view that rights come from God? (In which case I would happily agree that rights do come from God, but would dispute that this has anything whatsoever to do with 'Christian nationalism'.) Are you getting more sympathetic to the idea that it would be good for there to be an established church? (That also doesn't seem to be the same thing as 'Christian nationalism', but nevermind.) What is it that you find compelling?

"Christian Nationalism" is a label given by its detractors, so I agree it certainly sounds more theocratic than it actually is. I should have more carefully defined it in my original post. Here are specific parts I find compelling:

  • They believe: They recognize the totality of Scripture and supremacy of God and fully embracing its implications. One of these implications being an understanding of a just or flourishing society that is at complete odds with the Western perspective. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theonomy.
  • They fight: They meet the apostasy of our society head on. They recognize that politics is endogenous to the human state, and as Christians we cannot escape it. Christianity cannot be "above" politics, we are already in it whether we want to be or not. The question is not "if", but "how".
  • They build: They are starting to build a parallel society, with new educational and civic institutions, while not fully withdrawing from broader society (contra Rod Dreher). They truly are in the world but not of the world.

As I hinted in my original post, I'm starting to personally recognize that God has already defined what a flourishing society would look like, and it is not (purely) libertarian. While I don't favor a state Church, I would be in favor of including a statement that all orthodox Christians believe into our Constitution, such as the Nicene creed. If "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.", then we should enshrine morality and religion in the Constitution.

On the other hand, I recognize there are downsides as well:

  • The elevation of the Church to a position of political authority tends to corrupt the Church. There is a reason to render to Caesar's what is Caesar's; and to God's what is God's. A state church benefits the state far more than it benefits the church.
  • On the question of the salvific implications of a national religion, it requires the sovereign to truly believe that they are subject to the divine; otherwise they will manipulate the genuine faith of their subjects to horrible ends. Historically, the evidence is that rulers tend towards skepticism and machiavellianism rather than caretakers and redeemers of their people.
  • On a practical note, it would be difficult to implement in our increasingly post-Christian society.

Edit: clarity, formatting, spelling

I would be very wary of using Wikipedia as a source for theology, and especially for the intersection of theology with politics. Wikipedia follows the reliable sources, and the reliable sources tend to be secular mainstream media filtered through an overwhelmingly secular user base, which is to say not very reliable at all. While writing my last message I found myself looking at the wiki page on millennialism, realised that the entire thing was unsalvageable nonsense, and concluded it would take too long to dismantle and therefore I just wan't going to mention millennialism or postmillennialism at all. This is unfortunately an all-too-common experience with Wikipedia and the subject of religion.

So that said...

It is basic Christian orthodoxy that Christ is lord of the whole of life - not just Sunday, not just the sabbath, not just whenever we're feeling pious, not just some imagined secular sphere. If one is a Christian, one is a Christian all the time. So I do not particularly associate that part with Christian nationalism - indeed, I think a general American Christian response to Christian nationalism worries has been to point out that they have always been Christian in the public sphere before, that Christianity has always shaped their values and political commitments, and that the unreasonable push is actually that would demand people cordon off part of their life and identity from their public commitments.

Similarly you mention that politics are inevitable for Christians and Christians must engage in them, must even fight - this too strikes me as, well, normal and the way it has always been for Christians. So that does not strike me as a Christian nationalist distinctive.

As for parallel societies... I have to admit I'm blanking here, because I'm not aware of where self-described Christian nationalists are doing anything like that. Dreher's Benedict Option flips between being a truism and being a headlong flight for the hills depending on what's more convenient for Dreher as an internet warrior in any given moment (and he will call you names if you disagree), but the Benedict Option at least commends a type of parallel society. Sometimes the postliberals give the impression of wanting to set up a parallel society, at least when they're not fantasising about a Hungarian-style top-down programme of public reorganisation, but they haven't done anything to meaningfully create one (except insofar as they exist within the Catholic media and cultural sphere, which does have a kind of internal society, albeit one rapidly fraying). Where do you see them building such societies?

More generally...

I understand Christian nationalism to be an argument about how to be Christian in the public sphere, not whether or not to do so. If they have made you more conscious of ways to be meaningfully Christian in public, and to build Christian community within a larger polity, then that is a good thing, but I would caution against signing on with 'Christian nationalism' as a project.

This is one conservative Christian comment on Christian nationalism that strikes me as useful - it recognises that the term is sufficiently indistinct as to be confusing, and it then more clearly lays out what is poisonous in terms of nationalism, but also what is required of Christians in terms of political and social engagement.

EDIT: Oops, posted too soon. To comment on specific policies, I'm not sure how much good symbolic recognition necessarily does for the church. The US constitution does not mention God at all, whereas the Australian constitution (my own) indicates in its first sentence that Australia forms a commonwealth "humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God", and every sitting of parliament begins with a public reading of the Lord's Prayer. Yet it is not clear that these symbolic acts have made Australia a more meaningfully or piously Christian society than America - if anything we may well be less so. So I would be wary of pinning too much hope on top-down state actions. If as Adams said the constitution is only adequate for "a moral and religious people", the only way to nourish it is to ensure that the people themselves are indeed moral and religious, from the bottom up. Symbolic statements strike me as, well, just slapping a sticker with 'moral and religious' written on it on top of something that isn't.

Christianity is pretty disordered itself. So I am not sure Christianity really has much of the moral high ground here. Even setting aside the truth value of the existence of God. Why else are there 85 different sects which have had (and still do have) their own violent confrontations?

Which exact Christian sect is going to be at the head of this Christian nationalism? I suspect there will be some pretty big push back coming from inside its own house. Are you really wanting to bring back Catholic vs Protestant as a live issue?

Being from Northern Ireland, I can tell you, that might not go as well as you would like.

Why else are there 85 different sects

To get to the schism of 1054 we really need to go back at least to the Photian Schism in 863...

Christianity doesn't claim that its followers are paragons of virtue who can do no wrong. In fact, it claims the opposite.

That will i am sure be of comfort to the various victims of sectarian violence on both sides.

And if your argument was "Christianity can't provide comfort to the victims of sectarian violence", that would be a valid point. But your argument instead was "Christianity is disordered because its adherents sometimes commit sectarian violence", so your point is rather off the mark.

No my point was Christianity is disordered because it has and continues to schism. The fact those schisms sometimes trigger sectarian violence is worse, but the schisms and the bad blood they bring is disordered in and of itself.

Subsets are not necessarily disordered of course but a religion where huge groups fundamentally cannot agree on what is even required to be in God's grace, or where one subset thinks the leader of another subset is actually the anti-Christ cannot overall be described as ordered in my view.

Why else are there 85 different sects which have had (and still do have) their own violent confrontations?

Why do you assume violence is immoral?

You think violent terrorism between Catholics and Protestants who both ostensibly worship the same God, and have the same holy book is moral? I'm pretty sure that God is not very convinced murdering children is moral.

You don't believe in God and my question should be very simple to answer.

I don't believe in God either and my answer would be:

I would very much rather not get murdered, nor any of my loved ones or people I respect get murdered. I generally would like to live in a society with as little murder as possible, trading off with other considerations (e.g. the cost of law enforcement). This would also favor various things I vaue in addition to not-dying. I can also expect most people in my society to have similar preferences, but inolving different sets of individuals; it is fairly easy to collectively agree on a policy of "no murder", but not on one of "no murder of people orca-covenant likes". Every exception I carve out for myself, other people can carve for themselves. (Since people may have different preferences, the general principle is actually a policy of respecting people's preferences as much as possible, with not-being-murdered as an especially strong and stable example.)

In accordance with utilitarianism-but-not-the-dumbest-type, I also oppose murder in edge cases where it lead to short-term benefits, except in ultra-edge cases where 1) it has disproportionately large benefits (e.g. kill Hitler to end the Holocaust), 2) it's not possible to achieve the same benefits without murder, and 3) both 1) and 2) can be known with a very high degree of confidence, taking into account how often people are wrong about them (so, in practice, basically never).

Because murdering people is wrong, and its especially wrong over a minor doctrinal difference.

Why do you believe that "murdering people is wrong" eviscerates Christianity?

I don't. I am saying that because Christianity has multiple different sects which in some cases believe the adherents of basically the same religion are variously blasphemers, followers of the anti-Christ and not true Christians, and this tendency does sometimes lead to violence and strife that Christianity taken as a whole is a fractured religion and therefore when talking about Christian Nationalism taking over in the US that which sect takes over is not going to be wholly supported by all Christians.

This has nothing to do with whether one of those branches is actually correct. Catholicism could be the one true way to God and it will still be true that creating a specifically Catholic Nationalism in the US is may well lead to strife within the Christian larger community.

I don't think that eviscerates Christianity though. I think the Sunni and Shia conflict within Islam shows this is not specifically a Christian problem. If we were discussing an Islamic Nationalist project it would likely be even worse.

For some reason this comment strikes me as much more reasonable than your earlier comment, even though as I read them both back-to-back I find they're perfectly compatible. Go figure -- chalk it up to some difference between us over some intonation or phrase.

I agree that "Christian Nationalism" is basically a non-starter as a political formula to govern the United States; although, granted the caveat about "Which Christianity?," I think it's at least worth respecting as a serious position.

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In practice, Catholics don’t have the numbers and Protestants don’t have the organization, so a Christian theocracy in the US of necessity has to be generic.

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The question was why do you think it is immoral?

Because i do. Murdering people is wrong especially over minor differences in religion.

Also i'd rather not have my birthplaces culture war reignited over here for more pragmatic reasons.

"Murder" is not the same think as "killing" though, and what makes you think the differences are minor.

To echo my comments in an earlier thread, as trivial as the difference between Sunni and Shia may seem to a non-Muslim, Protestant and Catholic may seem to a non-Christian, or Stalin and Trotsky may seem to a non-leftistist that doesn't make them less real or less prone to real violence.

Right, thats my point. And I was raised Christian in Northern Ireland. I waa making the point that Christian Nationalism risks violence between Christian groups because they are not a monolith remember.

I would argue though in the grand scheme of things the differences are minor (which is not the same as unimportant to be clear!). The same God, the same Holy book, the same commandments, the same belief that Jesus died for our sins and so on.

Because i do.

Are you saying this in the vibes-based sense, or is there another reason?

I'd say that, as I am not a utilitarian, my moral intuitions are based upon my upbringing, my experiences, the social forces brought to bear upon me and are largely immune to rational change. I can't think myself into believing murder is moral.

Though I might try to reason myself into the position that I had to murder Bob Smith for the greater good (He is the second coming of Hitler, he is a kid rapist etc.), if I go ahead and murder him in cold blood, I am highly likely to experience guilt. This indicates i am judging myself immoral even though I was able to rationalize why I should kill him.

I don't know if I would quite call that vibes based.

I think @ZRslashRIFLE would call it vibes-based.

I also think that it leaves you in an unfortunate spot in a couple ways. The first is that no one else has any reason to adopt your claim that "murdering people is wrong". They don't have the same upbringing, experiences, or social forces that you do, so if they happen to think that it's totally fine, evenespecially for minor differences in religion, then there's basically no point in you having made any of the statements that you have made. Their perspective is apparently fine, simple as.

The second is that you might find yourself shifting over time, even unintentionally. See the fictional Breaking Bad. Sure, maybe the first time you murder someone in cold blood (after agonizingly convincing yourself that it's for the greater good), you'll experience guilt. But the second time? A little less agony before; a little less guilt after. Infinity starts at three, and so at that point, your upbringing, experiences, and social forces will easily leave you with zero concerns about casually offing people for minor differences in religion politics video games bird watching slights in small talk.

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