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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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think you mean no sufficient evidence. Evidence exists for essentially all hypotheses.
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.
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
Godwe'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
lol
I struggle to see how I haven't been directly responding to you.
Is rich, when it's immediately followed by:
So you are, I presume, the sole wielder of rhetoric here?
I must respectfully disagree. It is a privilege of this profession to see all the varieties of pain on offer, in enormous doses, and hence it lends additional weight to my claim that there is usually nothing ennobling or enlightening from it.
You are ignoring suffering. Much like the survivor of a tsunami thanks the Lord for answering his prayers while carelessly (and not even maliciously) forgetting that his next door neighbors were praying even harder before being swept away, you suffer from an enormous amount of survivorship bias.
I'm, thankfully, still alive, and hence technically a survivor too, but I get to see the ones who don't make it.
Have we? I genuinely don't recall.
"Agency" is a joke, in the eyes of the God as you presumably believe in.
What agency? What choice? Those are the illusions of beings without omniscience.
Now, if you notice that glaring flaw and knock it out, you're 1/3rd of the way there.
Depends on the sin in question. Maybe consumption of shellfish is a bad idea with ambient oceanic mercury levels.
You seem to think that pain and suffering are, on net, good. I disagree, even if I can recognize instances where they are adaptive. Your toddler will learn quickly not to touch hot stoves. He will not learn from many, many, other painful things.
The world as it exists aligns far more with an uncaring, mechanistic universe than one that is even slightly designed to minimize needless suffering. Your praise of a hypothetical, benevolent creator that refuses to do its job or even needs this kind of apologetics is saddening.
There exists many possible worlds where suffering exists, but the overwhelming majority of lives are worth living and no senseless suffering plagues us. A world with guardrails, so you toddlers can get an owie but not electrocute themselves. We are not remotely optimized, we do not get idealized amounts of negative feedback without verging on senseless torture.
I happen to think we can make such a world, but it'll be by our own endeavors, and if we make a god, it will grown in datacenters and trained to be actually kind. Abrahamic religion is a pernicious memeplex that while very occasionally adaptive, also dulls and drags our ability to work with the only real world we have at hand.
Is very clearly conflicting with.
It certainly is a tip, and to an extent I even endorse it. Mindfulness helps with some kinds of pain.
I don't know about your God, but the Blind Idiot God of Evolution has blessed most of us with endogenous opioid receptors and the endogenous opioids to bind to them.
There was a newborn child banging his head against his crib when I passed the paediatric ward (thankfully not the one for those with cancer). Know why? It's because it prompts the release of internal painkillers "on a whim", distracting him from a colic, though I wouldn't advocate this as recommended route for adults with our predilection towards traumatic brain injuries and reduced neuroplasticity.
Buddhist Monks can suppress the pain of self immolation. Though that whim certainly took practise, and without it there's a lot of undignified screaming and rolling about while cops draw guns at you.
Scoff as you wish, I do genuinely know more about pain and suffering than you do. It is not an apple lightly eaten.
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