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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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A couple centuries ago, give or take, human beings began interrogating the universe in an organized fashion we call "science" and in the process unlocked incredible powers beyond the wildest dreams of their ancestors. Now we can travel places by flight, cure terrible diseases, speak and view across vast distances, rain unfathomable destruction on our enemies, etc. etc. etc.

How far am I supposed to bend over backwards extending charity to all the sorcery that turned out to not actually work? Magical beliefs have been with us since we climbed down from the trees, and after thousands of years we have what? What have you brought us? A handful of anecdotes and some just-so rationalizations for why no one can find any decent evidence when they go looking for it.

To be honest, I'm not sure what non-materialists even want from us materialists. They aren't bringing any experimental insights, they aren't bringing any testable theories, and they don't have any magic that works. Do they just want to get snorted at less when they relate their ESP anecdotes at a party or on an internet forum? I don't know what they expect me to do with what they've given me other than shrug.

Personally I think that if human beings had evolved with the ability to read minds, summon ghosts, teleport, whatever, there would be a bunch of boring guys getting degrees in it by now, explaining how it all works. There would also be a bunch of fantasists griping that whatever specific Harry Potter thing didn't make the cut was actually real too, and those damn scientists with their genetics and neurobiology and ghost summoning were just too pigheaded to see it.

they don't have any magic that works

Pretty much this.

I have some sympathy for the Traditionalist position of people like Rene Guenon and Julius Evola that the world was less material in the past and has "solidified" over time such that now, in the depths of the Kali Yuga, it is pretty much entirely solid, and only the occasional ephemeral anomaly like the sort mentioned in the OP comes through the cracks. You can take a text like Plutarch's "On the Silence of Oracles" (which Scott has mentioned a few times) or old maps with strange beasts on the fringes possibly as expected evidence for this position (though of course they are also expected evidence for a contemporary worldview biased toward believing in such things as well).

But I can't really ask anyone to believe any of this, or even not to sneer at it, because I don't have magic that works. Perhaps that's why the whole "postrationalist" project adjacent of one of our community's predecessors never really got off the ground.

there would be a bunch of boring guys getting degrees in it by now, explaining how it all works.

It's called parapsychology, and they have a Journal and various research groups in various Universities including the University of Virginia and UC Santa Barabara.

Materialists reject it out of hand.

Many materialists also seem to reject regular psychology, too. Whether trying to prove natural or supernatural phenomena, looking inside the minds of people is at most a very inexact science at the moment.

I do think we've ruled out walking on water and multiplying breads.

Hah I haven’t read that one in too long. Man, I love Scott’s writing but the mental gymnastics in this quote are astounding:

The results are pretty dismal. Parapsychologists are able to produce experimental evidence for psychic phenomena about as easily as normal scientists are able to produce such evidence for normal, non-psychic phenomena. This suggests the existence of a very large “placebo effect” in science – ie with enough energy focused on a subject, you can always produce “experimental evidence” for it that meets the usual scientific standards

You have claimed psychical phenomena only appear under extreme trauma, and not under the conditions of, normal, austere scientific studies.

Which do you believe? That these studies are really false, or that psychical phenomena can appear, in a detectable way, even in mundane circumstances?

I don't know what's true, I'm just curious to find out. I think it's a question worth exploring more.

I don't think that's mental gymnastics, I think he's making a joke.

The foundations that made western civilization able to innovate into building a nice society to live in, one in which we can enjoy the fruits of science, come from having spent 1,000 years under a catholic theocracy. Before the Middle Ages learning was a hobby for rich idiots with no day job in their parents’ basements; by the end universities were a thing as a more or less organic development from cathedral schools intended to teach boys how to sing religious hymns(and in fact a Gregorian chant choir is still to this day called a schola). The use of the church calendar brought Europeans to more punctuality and allowed waged labor to take a bigger role in the economy by allowing it to be tracked and measured against a trusted third party. More or less free marriage to non relatives broke the power of clans and improved treatment for women(and societies with powerful clans are still like that)- a direct result of the dictates of the Catholic Church. I could go on and on, but non western societies that have built nice, livable communities for the majority of their population have done so by copying western habits, although usually not the original worldview.

Sure, and you can argue that alchemy deserves more credit for being the primitive precursor to chemistry, but I'm still not going to be terribly sympathetic when someone tells me I'm being close-minded about the existence of the philosopher's stone.

This is an excellent reply if you take the view of religion as a social technology. But it says nothing about the epistemological and empirical claims of said religions. Yes, Catholicism had a (debatable) pro-social effect on European, but the question remains: "Is it true?". The fact that this questions is even being posed means that the materialist point of view won: materialism is the new standard against which any other claim must be measured to. The reason that it won is, in my opinion, that it just works: since the Scientific Revolution we need less and less epicycles. What we can condemn and criticize is the modern institutional Science(TM): sociology, psychology, anything gender and race, certain parts of genetics, anything slightly political. But this is a failure that is not imputable to materialism or science as a method since these "soft sciences" (a.k.a. pseudo-sciences at worst, proto-sciences at best) are more akin to theology than science: they often work backwards from acceptable result (Revelations), their claims are often metaphysical - the dualist concepts of sex/gender are basically gnostic -, they have heresies and schisms (different psychotherapeutical schools) that generally result in the same outcomes: none. The hard sciences, the materialistic ones, somehow do not have the same problem, or better, they do not have it to the same degree, the metaphysical claims are generally done at the fringe: Loop Quantum Gravity, Big Bang, Quantum Determinism and so on, and these are the branches that more divert from materialism and empiricism into mathematical metaphysical amusements.

Yes, Catholicism had a (debatable) pro-social effect on European, but the question remains: "Is it true?". The fact that this questions is even being posed means that the materialist point of view won: materialism is the new standard against which any other claim must be measured to.

And the Catholic Church does have an answer to that question, and reasons for why, and those reasons and that position predate materialism. Hardly evidence that materialism won so much as evidence that the Catholic Church believes its own claims.

Thanks for articulating the point I was trying to make more coherently.

I’d even add that our entire system of logic and philosophy comes directly from the Church Fathers, notably Augustine and Aquinas. While I think the Catholics were flawed in their approach to understanding divinity, you can’t deny that the Catholic Church was an extremely crucial part of the foundation of the scientific worldview - if not THE most central piece the rest of the world missed.

Do you mean from Plato, Aristotle, and their successors?

I saw it put once as- the weird thing about the collapse of the Roman Empire isn’t that Rome collapsed and there was a dark age. The weird thing is how big a corpus of classical literature survived.

That survival is largely down to medieval monks.

That survival is largely down to medieval monks.

If you ignore the Eastern Roman Empire and the Arabs who cannibalized most of it.

China also preserved it's classical corpus despite similar collapses. India the same.

It isn't something unique.

Even the Parsis preserved most of the Avesta, despite their small number. The Samaritans number in the triple digits; and, still, preserved their version of the Torah.

That survival is largely down to medieval monks.

If you ignore the Eastern Roman Empire

...that would be one of the institutions having medieval monks who maintained the information, yes.

The had monks, yes, but they also had secular scholars who preserved these things. I assumed you were talking about monks like those in Irish monasteries and other monasteries throughout the Western Europe who preserved some of the ancient corpus despite being assaulted by pagan Germans.

That survival is largely down to medieval monks.

I always find this argument interesting because it is a just-so-story. Did medieval monks save classical literature because they were a scholastic order associated with Christianity or because they were a scholastic order and scholastic orders like to write things down and record literature. How much of the "Christian" element is important in their operation and why did Christianity in particular lead to the creation of these scholastic orders in a way that Greco-Roman paganism did not?

This led to a following thought. If these were Hindu brahmins/Buddhist monks would they too have recorded the literature, transcribing it so that it could be passed on? What about an Egyptian Pagan order dedicated to Thoth?

How far am I supposed to bend over backwards extending charity to all the sorcery that turned out to not actually work? Magical beliefs have been with us since we climbed down from the trees, and after thousands of years we have what? What have you brought us?

All of civilization and the foundation that allowed science to be developed and flourish, perhaps?

Yes materialist science is powerful. It's also flawed, and from my perspective has essentially been burning down our cultural myths and the built up social capital of millenia in order to fuel it's relentless search for reductionist physical truths. That store of fuel is almost gone, and if we don't realize and pay attention to the societal structures which undergird science, it won't matter how much scientific knowledge or power we've accrued. We'll kill ourselves anyway.

To be honest, I'm not sure what non-materialists even want from us materialists. They aren't bringing any experimental insights, they aren't bringing any testable theories, and they don't have any magic that works. Do they just want to get snorted at less when they relate their ESP anecdotes at a party or on an internet forum? I don't know what they expect me to do with what they've given me other than shrug.

Generally I want a revival of religion, I want atheism to be a thing of the past and I want materialists to acknowledge arguments and admit they don't know instead of sneering. It seems that's too much to ask, however.

Atheists do admit we don’t know. The sneer is towards people who give asinine claims that they do and demand we submit to them politically.

If you say “I think there’s a God, but I don’t have any proof,” I’m not going to badger you about it. Heck, if you say, “I saw an angel appear in my toast and it told me to stay home from work this morning, and there was a shooting at my office later that day! But I fully accept that this evidence is only compelling to me, and that to anyone who hasn’t experienced angelic toast prophecy, this isn’t persuasive”, I’d still say okay, I can live with that.

What I have no patience for is people—generally not very cognitively gifted people—demanding that I accept their angelic toast as proof that I need to submit to their social structures (masquerading under the epistemic claim of acknowledging the supernatural). This is a blatant bait-and-switch for political power, and should be treated as such. What incenses the Abrahamic religions’ adherents so much is that secularists correctly perceive this as a political claim rather than an epistemic matter, and respond with hostility rather than quokka-tier “charity.”

Atheists do admit we don’t know. The sneer is towards people who give asinine claims that they do and demand we submit to them politically.

Well... some atheists. Probably most atheists, to be fair. But definitely not all, and (just like with extremist Christians) the minority is really obnoxious disproportionately to how representative of the overall movement they are.

I think you're dangerously confused between the social and cultural edifice of science and the scientific industry, and 'science' as an abstract method for obtaining knowledge about the world.

If the cultural edifice of science is harmful to society in dangerous ways that must be stopped, that fact is true one hundred percent independently of whether or not ESP is real or the world is materialist or anything else. The damage caused by the cultural edifice has nothing to do with whether the scientific method has been or is capable of producing true and complete knowledge about the world; those are separate questions.

And vice versa, if the scientific method were proven to be incapable of arriving at true knowledge, that would say nothing about whether or not the edifice of the science industry and its cultural hangers-on were doing social damage to the foundation of our civilization. The two questions have nothing to do with each other.

The fact that you seem to be using evidence from one of these to bolster points about the other indicates to me a confusion about how these are separate entities.

If you want a revival of religion because it would be good for society, then it doesn't matter whether it's true, it doesn't matter whether science is wrong and ESP is real.

If you want a revival of religion because religion is true, then it doesn't matter whether scientists are ruining the country.

The closest you could say is 'I want a revival of religion because is is both true and good for society,' and that you are presenting arguments for it from both of those angles, I guess.

But it doesn't feel like you're presenting evidence for both of those points independently. It feels like you're just making an attack on 'science' from both angles, as if evidence against 'science' on each of those axes is cumulative towards proving the same hypothesis.

But it's not; there are two hypotheses there, the evidence towards each is independent of the other.

See my reply to you above... but basically this idea that True Science exists is a motte and bailey, and not what I'm trying to talk about. I'm talking more about Scientism.

I absolutely agree that we can have a religious society that embraces the scientific method, and I'd welcome it. I'm not a RETVRNer, I want to move forward once again toward God while keeping the fruits of modern materialist progress.

All of civilization and the foundation that allowed science to be developed and flourish, perhaps?

I'm sorry, I meant what have you brought us that is in any meaningful way distinguishable from people believing in fantasy. Human beings make shit up constantly, and even in a world where magic was real and we had a way to tell, you'd still expect there to be a lot more chaff than wheat.

Do you have any way to offer us of telling them apart? Any way to separate the "real" magic from the shit that's actually just people making things up? What are the precepts of this non-materialist brand of science, how were they arrived at, and what makes you think they're true? Or are we just supposed to sort of blandly and noncommittally nod our heads at literally everything?

Generally I want a revival of religion, I want atheism to be a thing of the past and I want materialists to acknowledge arguments and admit they don't know instead of sneering. It seems that's too much to ask, however.

It really is. If this is what non-materialists want, then their arguments are going to need to get much, much, much better. When someone like me brings up "experimental insights" and "testable theories" and such, you need to understand that what we're really asking, what those words literally mean, are "Can we create any set of circumstances where your beliefs about reality being true or false make any discernable difference?"

If the answer is no, then yeah you're going to have to go to the back of the line. Sorry, but the number of things that would fit into the space you're trying to carve out is functionally infinite, they can't all be true, and you're not offering me any decent way to tell which are supposedly which.

Generally I want a revival of religion, I want atheism to be a thing of the past and I want materialists to acknowledge arguments and admit they don't know instead of sneering. It seems that's too much to ask, however.

Then make that argument. Because the one about how many different things we might not know, does not mean the one about God being real is the one that is true. You have to make a positive argument for that one thing (rather than 40K's warp, or consensus reality, or Bigfoot) to be correct.

And your OP did not do that, you basically said, hey all these things are possibilities. But if you believe one specifically of those possibilities is true, then argue for that singular option.

I want organized religions to be a thing of the past, I want the religious to admit they don't know instead of sneering. But I am not going to get that wish either. So it goes.

I didn’t want to argue the whole damn thing at once. This is likely the most complex topic in existence.

This feels like an isolated demand for rigor. Why do I need to lay out every belief I have in one place?

You don't. But if you lay out 10 different options, and then say, I think this one is right, then you are probably better making an argument for the actual one you want us to believe. Otherwise it looks like you are a following the tried and true playbook of "We can't explain everything therefore Christian God".

If it is Christian God you want to argue for, just come out and do that.

Generally I want a revival of religion, I want atheism to be a thing of the past and I want materialists to acknowledge arguments and admit they don't know instead of sneering. It seems that's too much to ask, however.

Checking in as another agnostic atheist that's also pretty agnostic on materialism, I still don't know what you're actually looking for from me here. I assure you, I am not capable of selecting an arbitrary religion and actually believing in it. If society were structured differently, I could roll with the punches and pretend to be Mormon, I like their theology well enough as a story anyway, but I'm not actually going to believe it and have no real reason to prefer one religion over another from an epistemic perspective. I genuinely do try to avoid sneering and I think I generally succeed in granting people respect and saying that I don't know about things I don't know about. Nonetheless, saying that I don't know doesn't deliver any specific belief - I don't know if telepathy is possible, I don't have any strong opinion on it, but nothing that I am aware of at present seems actionable in any meaningful way.

I want you to seriously try and do some experiential religious practice and try to have an open mind as to the existence of divine entities.

I want folks like yourself to perhaps try to pray, or even meditate and give it a genuine shot. Maybe even take psychedelics and explore your mental space, once we have (hopefully) learned to incorporate those sorts of aids into mainstream religious practice.

Ultimately I want to return to a more symbolic worldview such as the ancients had, while retaining the benefits and understanding modern science has given us.

I want you to seriously try and do some experiential religious practice and try to have an open mind as to the existence of divine entities.

You realize most Western atheists were raised Christian? I had an open mind, I went to Church and Sunday school and church camp and prayed and gave it a shot. And I felt nothing. I believed with all my heart until I was old enough to start realizing there were huge holes in what I was being told and no-one had solid answers about them, but that they were still nonetheless certain they were right.

"I want the religious to seriously try and do some proper rigorous thinking, and try to have an open mind about the existence of confirmation bias, brainwashing and socialization. I want folks like yourself to perhaps even try to do experiments, or even learn advanced physics and give it a genuine shot. " - hopefully you can see why that isn't particularly a convincing argument.

We're not people who just haven't tried to believe. We've heard that same condescension for years. If you truly want to inspire people to change, you might want to try a different tack.

I don't think you can have that symbolic approach and keep the benefits of modern science. The ancients were wrong about many, many things, so why would we suppose they were right about religion? And even if they were, how do we tell which they were right about? Zeus? Ra? Yahweh? Quetzalcoatl? Morrigan? Thor? Buddha? Baal?

We're not people who just haven't tried to believe. We've heard that same condescension for years. If you truly want to inspire people to change, you might want to try a different tack.

Hey, this is a fair point. I suppose my thought is that I was raised 'Christian' yet I never really prayed, or took it seriously at all. I'm sure other people had a very different experience.

Overall I personally believe modern Christianity, especially in the West, has basically totally lost the plot. I don't have all the answers as to why there are multiple religions or anything, I'll be honest. But my personal experience has convinced me to believe in the Christian God, to answer your question.

Fair enough, but that must be equally weighed against those people whose experiences have convinced them there is not. So, wanting atheism to decrease off the back of your experience is just not justified, because your experience is not worth more (or less!) than any other persons. I think there is a chance there is something beyond the material realm, but I think the likelihood that that thing is the Christian God seems exceptionally unlikely.

It's a bit convenient in other words, that the entity you believe in, is the one that happened to be dominant in your area. If you were raised in India, do you think you would be convinced of the existence of Vishnu? That seems equally as likely as Yahweh. Perhaps more so, as for thousands of years the dominant religions were largely pantheistic.

Yeah this is a tough one to crack. Official dogma of the Orthodox Church is that the fate of non believers is a mystery, essentially. I tend to be humble on that myself. I agree that positing one God over another is murky water.

Generally I want a revival of religion, I want atheism to be a thing of the past and I want materialists to acknowledge arguments and admit they don't know instead of sneering. It seems that's too much to ask, however.

From you, sure. I'd accept at least the second point coming from God though. Which is to say that this is, indeed, too much to ask.

Have you tried praying with a humble heart? You might be surprised by Him answering, as I was.

I mean this seriously. I think the majority of materialists, like my own past self, are just fundamentally unwilling to believe in God for emotional reasons. There is plenty of evidence for His existence, but as I spent my post explaining at least partially, it’s not evidence that a scientific framework can easily accept.

Have you tried praying with a humble heart? You might be surprised by Him answering, as I was.

Can you talk some more about this experience? I've seen you mention in the past that you used to be an atheist, so I'm curious what changed your mind.

Yeah for sure. I get why people don’t talk about conversion experience in modern society, but it is helpful to read them.

Basically I was very into a sort of Westernized Buddhism for a long time, but then had some tough times in my life that led me to a crisis of faith. I slowly approached the Christian church more out of desperation than anything, if I’m being honest. As I started going my perspective on a lot of things shifted. I read the Bible for the first time, started taking Christian thinkers and themes in media more seriously and seeing a vast depth of wisdom there I had missed. Kind of unprompted I had some let’s say convincing experiences both sober and then on a psychedelic trip that made me consider seriously the whole Christ as God thing.

I also had virtuous Christians come into my life, or realized folks I already knew and respected were deeply religious.

From there I tried out the Orthodox Liturgy and had a super intense emotional reaction, I actually started crying in the service. It was quite embarrassing and a part of me hated it. I mean honestly this whole process has been difficult internally, I find materialism and atheism a difficult mindset to shed which is why part of why I write about it on here occasionally.

Anyway all this happened, I started praying and got more ‘confirmation’ so to speak. For me my experience was kind of seeing visions of the Cross or hearing the voice of God, but it’s all pretty messy and confusing when it comes to that sort of thing. I’d rather not go into the gory personal details.

It wasn’t an all at one experience it was more a collection of coincidences and shifts in mindset, combined with persistent direct experiential signs that slowly convinced me. My conversion has not been an easy or easy even willing one to be quite frank, and I’d imagine most conversions from atheism to religious belief are far more messy than typically presented.

The Buddhist to Eastern Orthodox pathway demonstrates itself yet again, hah. I personally come at things from a different angle -- I find Buddhism, even in its secularized form, off-putting, especially in its denial of the self and its total repudiation of physical pleasures. Desire certainly brings about suffering, but it also certainly brings about joy.

I do definitely wonder if there's a "intellectual faith" vs "mystic faith" personality difference, that tends to define where a convert ends up in the spectrum of Christian churches -- and the latter attracts people to Eastern Orthodoxy like flies to honey. The former, of course, pulls in people to western Christianity, especially to Thomist Catholicism and confessional forms of Protestantism. I find myself compelled by the intellectual distinctives of western Christianity, even as I agree with the Chalcedonian Orthodox on many of the historical and theological issues about which they contend.

Probably no one believes me on this, but I have a stronger emotional reaction to western liturgical services than to the Byzantine liturgy. It is undoubtedly beautiful, but also Byzantine in the fullest sense of the word. Western liturgies seem to operate in a different way, even in its most accumulative forms -- there's a more easily perceptible progression towards the Eucharist and and then down from it.

Several years ago I had my come-to-Jesus moment where I took to heart Camus's assertion that an atheist who sees the absurdity of our intelligence and spirituality within a naturalistic materialistic worldview has but three options: accept the absurdity, commit suicide (The Myth of Sisyphus begins with the eerie line that "there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide"), or commit philosophical suicide -- and accept faith. I found the absurdity intolerable. And so I thought about these options within the context of Kierkegaard's "leap into faith", and, having rejected the choice of suicide within the confines of a psychiatric ward, I took the leap.

I began with my belief in the Bible (which I never truly lost; even as an atheist I believed it was invaluable as literature in a Jordan Peterson sense) and, on that basis, I investigated the various churches, seeking what was testable and true. During this time I wrote a 10,000-word treatise on the Biblical model of baptism, demolishing arguments against baptismal regeneration and infant baptism with facts and logic (TM). I also wrote a nearly-as-long treatise in favor of the Eucharist.

During these explorations, I flitted from Calvinism to Anglicanism, and finally found a stable place in Catholicism, where I remained in worship, if not in sacrament, for years. I met some wonderful, kind, young Catholics who were, and remain, passionate about Jesus Christ and his most pure mother. This faith got me through COVID, at least, and for that I thank the Lord.

But I had all sorts of lingering doubts about the Papacy, about the Vatican councils (both of them), about The Magisterium (TM), about Mariology, about clerical celibacy -- the details of these are painful and frustrating to me, and do not bear repeating. But suffice it to say that I found myself increasingly distrusting the claims the institutional Catholic Church made about itself, despite admiring, in many ways, the theology. I have been assured a thousand times that Catholicism cannot be separated from the Pope. But I find myself admiring the shape and form of Catholicism before the time of high Papal supremacy from the 17-1900s. Where, pray tell, are the trads who reject Vatican I?

It was in that mode that I first walked into an Eastern Orthodox church. I saw it, not as the bride of Christ, but as the homely single girl in a town where everyone else was married. I saw no other option to continue believing in the Incarnate God, one person in two natures, and I seized upon the option I was given.

If I'm being honest, I see no bride of Christ within the world: I see her in the saints beloved of our God, not in the institutions who claim to wear the mantle of their holiness. If there is anything that remains Protestant about my faith, it is that the Church in her holiness is fundamentally visible only to God, who judges all hearts.

During this time I worked with a priest, a convert, a good man, though I'm not sure we ever really understood each other. But I increasingly felt out of place: worshipping with strange music in a strange church full of strangers. There were definitely young converts to which I related quite a bit. But the one I related to the most, an argumentative but faithful young man who wanted to be a priest, seemed more infatuated with the cultures of far-off Eastern Europe than his own, and I found this cosmopolitan attitude of fascination with all-things foreign as more reminiscent of blue tribers who hate my country rather than the red tribe Christians with whom I argued, like (and literally as) family about not putting the stars and stripes within the church sanctuary.

Actually, I felt like, in some ways, I fit in all too well -- a young, neurotic, book-obsessed young man brought to interest in Orthodoxy by the internet. But, in another, I fit in poorly: the model Orthodox convert very much seems to be an evangelical Protestant, spiritual-but-not-religious atheist, or Buddhist, who would never consider Catholicism with a 10-foot pole. I have heard nearly as many bad arguments against Catholicism within Orthodoxy as I did growing up Protestant, and I have never met a Catholic-to-Orthodox convert.

Although in serious terms that term also would not describe me, I would say that my mode of thinking and praying is fundamentally Roman Catholic -- I find much to identify with in the "greats" of Catholic theology, like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and I am compelled by the Catholic view of "faith seeking understanding," of reason not against faith, but in support of faith, in favor of faith. I find the rejection of this concept with Orthodoxy off-putting, like I am being asked to cut off my nose to spite my face.

If reason is not a potential part of a healthy breakfast way to communion with God, then why was it the only thing that ever got me to knock on the door of an Orthodox parish -- and for that matter, the only thing that got most converts to do so? I was frustrated when my priest, after many meetings of saying, "reason is not the way to God," then said, "you have to look at the history, how people did things," in response to my doubts about Orthodoxy. In other words, it was tolerable to use the rational analysis of historical evidence to get to Orthodoxy, but once you're in it, suddenly rationality becomes useless. This seemed to me uselessly self-serving, and it was not long after that I walked away from Eastern Orthodoxy. I did the Orthodox endorsed (TM) thing of Asking My Priest (TM), and it led me away from the Orthodox Church, not towards it.

All this co-existed with me trying hopelessly to convince my parents and my girlfriend that I wasn't insane, or about to lose my soul. Catholicism was enough of a stretch for my parents; my girlfriend admires Catholicism, though I'm not sure she has a religious bone in her body. Our fiercest argument, and the closest we've ever come to truly splitting up, was based around my own interest in Eastern Orthodoxy and desire to bring up my children in my Christian faith. I met her in a college atheist club -- where we were the two least anti-religious people there -- and up until that point I think she saw my religious beliefs as a weird phase, which, to be fair, I am wont to get into.

(I once spent some time as a teenager engaging in "floor living" like some kind of Japanese LARP, cursing the invention of the chair as an insult against the natural ability of human beings to squat and sit without furniture. She teases me about this relentlessly.)

But at that point I think it crystalized for her that I really believed in it, that my faith in God was a real part of my life that would motivate real decisions. And, in response, she made no secret of the fact that she would never baptize her children in a religious faith before they could choose it for themselves, and that she found Eastern Orthodoxy in particular to be a bizarre religion. She expressed open and profound displeasure at their weird music, and the weird parishioners, and the overly-intense fasts, and the total foreign-ness of that faith.

To be fair, I actually think she's right about this from the American perspective -- Eastern Orthodoxy is a weird religion by US standards, and its culinary rules and cultural outlook is indeed quite foreign. Not only that, but, no offense intended, the converts are kind of weird -- there is one guy at the local Orthodox parish who wears a kilt for the Liturgy. In the United States. That sort of nerdy, male oddness is normative -- so is simple "male-ness," to be blunt. And my girlfriend, though she loves ideas, hates hates hates cultural weirdness and is a very feminine person, and in that sense she is probably more conservative than I am. (I once had her take a Big Five personality test, which said she is high in the segments of Openness to Experience that relate to appreciation for intellectual thinking, but moderately low in the segments that relate to appreciation of unusual aesthetic preferences. This explained a lot about her.)

I think my we very nearly broke up then and there, during that one tense conversation. But where in God's green earth would I ever find another woman who cares for me as much as her, or agrees with me as much as her, or holds as similar a worldview to me as her (faith excepted), or shares as many beliefs about how to run a family as her?

It certainly wouldn't be in the American Orthodox Church. Much more attractive and eligible men than I struggle there; most seem to find Protestants and convert them; it seems like Rod Dreher lost his.

I think you shared at one point that your wife is Eastern Orthodox -- this surely makes that process much easier for you, as your conversion experience hopefully bonds you to her more closely. For me, it did the opposite. My partner enjoys listening to me talk about Christianity as she does all my thoughts, but I could tell that she appreciated them as ideas, almost as fiction -- in the same way that @FarNearEverywhere likes Tolkien -- rather than as a living faith that she would care to base her life on. ("I think you're taking this too seriously, urquan," she would tell me, "faith is not about ideas, it's just what people believe.") "Seeing, she did not see; and hearing, she did not hear, nor did she understand."

It was around this time that I gave up on faith, started having sex with my girlfriend, and adopted a sort of vaguely Christian agnosticism. I knew at the time -- I knew -- that this would end up in a dark place, perhaps a darker place than I had been in even during my periods of "new atheism". And, on that matter, I was right: my time as a post-Christian has been, bar none, the darkest and least functional point in my life. Angry at the world, frustrated at myself, critical towards all, charitable towards none, eager to judge, slow to mercy, I am like the prophet of a wrathful God, bent on inventing Hell for lack of Heaven. If someone told me they thought I was possessed by a demon, I would believe them. I am as disconnected from my values and my spirit as any daemoniac, and my torments are legion. "O how unlike the place from whence I fell!"

These are just disconnected thoughts. But nevertheless they are real ones, more real than any of my actual "arguments," such as they are, against Eastern Orthodoxy. But, as I said, I am at my low point, and about to the place where I'm willing once again to commit philosophical suicide for want of the alternative. I suppose I am praying that somewhere, some way, I receive some of this "confirmation" you speak of, something to push me, or pull me, kicking and screaming, towards something, anything, some new path, that I might live, and have life abundantly. I am begging for something worth living for.

Several months ago, I was PMing with @dovetailing about the Eastern Orthodox Church; he is also a convert to Orthodoxy. I dropped the thread despite wanting to reply, because I just couldn't find the right words. He sent me a very kind PM during that radio silence, which I appreciated very much. These, I suppose, are the right words, and I would ask him to take my reply to you as a reply to him.

Thank you for the kind words and the mention (I wouldn't have seen this otherwise). I'm sorry you are going through such a tough time. Feel free to PM me again if you ever want to talk.

Hey, I very much appreciate the vulnerability and opennes with which you're sharing man. It seems like for a certain type of person, you and me and a sad handful of others, these deep religious and philosophical struggles are really brutal. I get so fucking jealous of normal people who seem to be able to just kind of shrug at deep religious quandries and get on with their lives.

I've also got a huge helping of chronic pain which plagues me daily, a big part of my conversion. I can relate to feeling suicidal and feeling like Christ is the only choice I can make and keep on living. It's not a great place to be, but at least we have Him I guess. Better than having nothing.

Honestly your story kind of terrifies me. I really hope I don't end up in the post-Christian space like you are, because while I'm struggling enough at my current point I could probably see myself going to your situation and dang that sounds even worse. Hope you figure something out buddy. Maybe we should do a phone call or something if you want to PM me. We could at least commiserate.

In terms of reason in Eastern Orthodoxy versus Catholicism, man, most Christians aren't clear thinkers at all. It seems like Catholicism versus Orthodoxy versus Protestantism or whatever is all a sham from the Evil One to confuse us. I just go to the services that speak the most for me and try my best to be pious. I do think the EO has the best claim to be the true church, but hell if Catholicism speaks to you I like to think God would be more pleased if you were a practicing Catholic than a total apostate. Anyway.

This is pretty far from the CW thread lmao, but hopefully if any lurkers are in the same boat they can read our struggles and get a sense of solidarity, and realize that they aren't walking the path alone. I get the sense that a lot of young men struggling with purposelessness in a secularized world are walking alongside us. That thought gives me hope that even if we don't figure it out, we can maybe pave the way a bit and help make progress for our children, or posterity.

You have problems with Mariology and you went to the Orthodox? I admire your nerves of steel 😇

EDIT: Okay, being sympathetic here, the problem you have is that there isn't an organic American Orthodoxy. Part of the whole Great Schism and the later Caesaropapism adopted by the Orthodox as a solution to "who is the authority with the last word?" is that each church is autocephalous and thus an ethnic church; you're Greek or Russian or Serbian etc. Orthodox.

The Latin church, after the split of the empire into its Eastern and Western halves, and the consequent fading away of the Western half, had to lean heavily on the pope as the "who is the last word authority?" instead of the emperor, and that involved (as we get to see with the Synod of Whitby, the English Reformation where claims to Caesaropapism were initially made by Henry VIII as his justification, and later tussles between Gallicianism and Ultramontanism) building up and enforcing the authority of the pope as the last word.

That meant that when Catholicism went to other lands, it was able to adapt without losing that central authority. Russian Orthodoxy might arise out of Greek Orthodoxy and become its own church, but the Japanese church or the American church or the Irish church was all under the authority of Rome, which was able to crack down on (to varying degrees) any departures from the liturgy, the rubrics and dogma.

The Orthodox churches that went to America, however, still retained their national characteristics, still catered mostly to the immigrant population of that particular ethnicity, and wasn't intelligible to Protestantism as Catholicism was - after all, the Protestant churches had fissioned away from Rome, not Constantinople and Moscow.

So the theology makes most sense and most appeals to you, but it's not as easy as "just find the local Orthodox parish and start RCIA".

I wish you good luck with your journey and hope you find harbour someday.

It was quite embarrassing and a part of me hated it. I mean honestly this whole process has been difficult internally, I find materialism and atheism a difficult mindset to shed which is why part of why I write about it on here occasionally.

I commend you on occasionally bringing up this topic because it’s really quite important at the end of the day, and obviously the scientific idea of there being something ‘beyond’ science seems to be such a taboo idea that you can even do race science and get by, but if you posit something like ‘maybe remote viewing is a thing?’ you immediately get anathematized. This is despite the fact that most humans in history have had a deeply-held belief that the material reality we experience is not all-there-is, and many many many people in the past (and today) have had direct experiences not explainable by our current models of empirical reality or even our current ideations of psychological conditioning (e.g. UFO encounters by nuke-launchers).

Also, in my opinion, once you get deeper into the idea of this non-materialized phenomenon seemingly being even intelligent, then the topic of studying this thing and utilizing it seems to be an extremely hard process compared to simply doing repeatable experiments on dumb matter — it’s most like attempting to align an AGI on the first-try without having any test-cases rather than being able to measure the acceleration of a ball dropped from a constant height, for an example that would be appreciated by this community more than others.

I also personally find the arguments for God, or at least a necessitated intelligent prime-mover, to be extremely more powerful than the arguments against such a being’s existence, so I am probably much more open to non-physical phenomena existing, as at least one thing outside of material reality exists in my mind. My own personal experiences seem to corroborate this fact, as I have also had very powerful emotional experiences & physical changes occur due to the fact of my new-found faith and also my Christian conversion from atheism. You’re definitely not alone in this, and all I can say is that you shouldn’t ever think you are.

the scientific idea of there being something ‘beyond’ science seems to be such a taboo idea that you can even do race science and get by, but if you posit something like ‘maybe remote viewing is a thing?’ you immediately get anathematized. This is despite the fact that most humans in history have had a deeply-held belief that the material reality we experience is not all-there-is, and many many many people in the past (and today) have had direct experiences not explainable by our current models of empirical reality or even our current ideations of psychological conditioning (e.g.UFO encounters by nuke-launchers).

Yep, this comes down to the fact that while moderns like to believe we are free of myths and superstitions of the past, instead we believe in scientific materialism and constant progress as our societal myths. Now many argue that these myths are fundamentally different from those of our ancestors, and they're right of course. But they're still beliefs based on social consensus and assumption rather than deep thought and 'objectivity' like the vast majority presume.

Have you tried praying with a humble heart?

What makes you think he didn't?

I'm amazed that religious believers still try to get away with this. If you told me that you didn't want to vote for some presidential candidate, and I said "well, you just aren't open-minded enough to consider that what he's saying may be true", that would be considered rude, or worse. Yet somehow religious believers get to attack nonbelievers by suggesting that they'd believe if only they were humbler. How would you react to a Muslim saying that you reject the truth of the Koran because you're not humble enough?

Hah yeah that was pretty crappy of me, I apologize. I care very deeply about the topic and it’s easy to let emotions cloud your judgment.

A scientific framework can easily accept it. It just may not update on it as far as you do.