Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Given the (pretty good, IMHO) case Michael Lind lays out in this Tablet piece about how demographic trends still strongly favor utter dominance by the Democratic Party, what can people on the right do, then? Note, I'm not asking what the Republican party does, which is move left to capture moderate voters so to remain electorally viable (per the median voter theorem and Duverger's law); I'm asking what voters who care about the policies that would thus be abandoned, as opposed to the "politics as sports" folks who are happy just so long as "their team" beats the other guy.
The only realistic move is to organize into a tight religious in-group, because: religion is the best way to train the young’s’ spiritual/mental immune system against political propaganda, religion is the best way to transmit cultural/philosophical concerns, and (most of all) America offers strong religious protections which would allow you to live sequestered away from normal life in America. Note that (while I think Western Christianity is the best) your religion need not be fantastical or even really theistic. Unitarian Universalism for instance is simply the progressive worldview codified into religious dogma and adorned in tax protections. There’s nothing stopping a conservative from establishing a religion that believes in Spinoza’s God, believes that the Western classics were divinely inspired, or even believes that certain developed populations are God’s chosen people. Now your community’s resources can be pooled together without taxes, you can establish schools with a religious and conduct requirement, etc
Following on from this, I recently read this essay by N.S. Lyons, arguing that what the Right has to do is to, effectively, create a parallel society. Many of the commenters inferred that the most obvious way to do this is to use the church networks that already exist, albeit in many places weakened by years of people falling away.
I had that same realization some time ago, presumably like many other people. So I finally became an actual member of a local church within the last year, and have been getting more and more involved in its affairs. The idea is that, in addition to our religious practice, this will be our mutual support network: in a world where the state is against us, and nearly all large organizations are against us, we will at least have our little local group of people that are for us and for each other. Obviously, you can blackpill your way into finding this to be hopeless as well; but I can already confirm that at least right now, so far, it's a lot better than trying to face everything alone.
Were you already religious?
Because that strategy begs the question of why people have been falling away for decades. Otherwise you’re betting on a losing horse. Fine for getting a local support network, but I don’t see it scaling like the more ethnonationalist examples in that essay.
These days, you have to decide what to break: the Word, or the laws of reality. The blue tribers break the former and the conservatives break the latter, as you see with young earth creationists and various other sects of the right wing. I've seen some people on here go to religion lately, specifically Christianity; I'd like to poll them sometime and ask them how they did it. There is just too much of the Bible that is objectively false at this point that I don't know how a Mottizen would go about gaining faith. Unless they went a deist route or threw in with Blue Tribe. But at that point, you might as well not be basing your religion off the Bible at all.
I think it should go without saying, but obviously people do not share your opinion that many parts of the Bible are objectively false. But without knowing what your specific points are it's hard to really say more.
I was raised with a fundamentalist view of the Bible. One relative of mine went on to grow even more fundamentalist, veering into hatred of the Jews (a severe misreading, if you ask me, and I thought downright heretical until I looked at the lines he was fixated on), but here's some of my grievances. I don't know my Bible very well, and I frankly hold little regard for it, so I will not read more.
If you take issue with these grievances, let me know, but like I said, the Word of God should probably be more eternal than to vary completely based on cultural attitudes and scientific research. I don't really see much room to wiggle away from these while still staying true to scripture. And God has let humanity's Christians splinter further and further over 2000 years without any further clarification. @FCfromSSC
First of all, thanks for writing all this out. I'm going to try to address all this as best I can, though I need to stress I'm very much not a theologian, or an apologist, or even a teacher in the church. I'm just a guy. My goal is to at least try to give you my view of these issues, so that even if you're not personally convinced (I'm not that good at rhetoric, I won't take it too hard lol) you at least will hopefully feel that what I've said is something a reasonable person can believe. I'm Catholic, so that's the perspective I'm bringing to this. Also @TheDag, @urquan and @FarNearEverywhere, please chime in if there is something I've missed or something I get wrong. I'm probably going to have more bullet points than you, as this is my third time writing this post (stupid website keeps eating it when I click on links) and I found that a lot of your points have sub-points. I don't really know how to order all that nicely within the constraints of the site, so bear with me.
First, it's important to note that the fundamentalist Protestant interpretation of Christianity is not something all denominations share. From a Catholic perspective, those people are in pretty serious error in fact. So a lot of things I noticed you said like "why does the Bible say factually untrue thing x" are just not an issue for other traditions. Specifically, the Catholics (and others tbf) believe that the Bible is divinely inspired, not that it was directly written by God. That means that the core message about God and our salvation is infallible, but plenty of other things are fallible. For example, if the Bible says "King Bigwig was succeeded by his son Mightyface" in one book, and "King Bigwig was succeeded by his son Weaksauce" in another, the Catholic take on that is "maybe one of those authors got it wrong, shit happens". We're OK with that, because the detail of which king succeeded whom isn't really central to God's message to us (and so on for other minor details of course).
Furthermore, it's important to note that the Bible is not one cohesive book. The men who wrote it down were working in various literary styles and speaking to different social contexts. There are books of history yes, but also books of poetry, and books of raw moral teaching, and books of myths. So not only is it possible that each author is fallible, you have to interpret their words through the lens of cultural context and intended style. All of which makes it pretty challenging to interpret the Bible, but means that we very much do not believe that each and every sentence of the Bible is an eternal truth directly handed to us by God. Fundamentalists believe that yes, but by no means all Christians (or even most Christians, really).
I also wanted to note that it seemed like more than one of your arguments basically boiled down to "I think you can get around this, but then that's not consistent with the Bible". I think that yes, some of the hypothetical counterarguments you mentioned aren't consistent with the fundamentalist Protestant interpretation of the Bible. But that is very much not the only interpretation (or the main interpretation) among Christians! You can't really expect people to hold to an interpretation of the Bible that they never professed to begin with, after all. So I think that significantly weakens your arguments in this area, since they are colored so much by a particular interpretation of the Bible that most Christians don't hold.
With those important overarching points out of the way, it's time for ye olde bulleted list.
Genesis (written by Moses iirc) is fundamentally a mythological book. Catholics don't generally believe it's meant to be taken literally, but that the author was using the myths of the ancient near East to try to teach those people about the origins of the world in terms they would understand (which of course doesn't remotely come close to our modern understanding of biology, geology and so on). The important takeaway from the creation story isn't "God made the world in seven days just like we understand days" (which wouldn't make sense in various ways), but "God is the supreme being who created everything, not like your gods who are either glorified mortals or forces of nature". Similarly, the story of Adam isn't generally understood as "there was a literal serpent who got Adam and Eve to eat a literal apple", but as a myth which seeks to illustrate how sin has perverted God's design for the world and placed us all in dire need of a savior.
The perception of God isn't eternal because we ourselves are not eternal. How could we have perfect knowledge of God in this life, imperfect as we are? It's like Paul says: "For now we see in a mirror, dimly...". It's not really fair to expect our understanding of God to not change over time. God himself doesn't change, of course, but human ideas of him do.
Why does God allow different interpretations of the Bible (at least some of which must be wrong)? Good question and I don't have an answer. I think you should be pretty skeptical of anyone who does. I'm content with the "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" verse on this one, but I can't fault you if you aren't. It's just not something that is an impediment to my faith because I trust God knows what he's doing.
It is true that a lot of the Old Testament comes down to divine dick measuring. But to me, this makes perfect sense in light of the "human authors are writing to the context they live in" interpretation. God revealed truths about himself to these writers, and they communicated those truths in the way they thought would make the most sense to their contemporary audience. For example, the book of Job. I think that this book is best understood as poetry, and meant in the same way good art is made today: it uses the imagery of the story to reveal something true to us. Specifically, that if we trust God then we will ultimately be rewarded (note that it may not be in this life, but we will still be rewarded). I don't know whether or not there was an actual man that Job was based on, but if there was I doubt that his life went exactly as depicted in the book. But that's OK, because the message of "trust God" is the important part.
I would not say that there is a consistent Christian view of hell. Even among Catholics there isn't unity as far as I know. That's primarily because the Bible just doesn't talk that much about hell to the best of my knowledge. As far as I'm aware Catholic doctrine on hell is that a) it exists, b) some people will end up there, c) it's an awful place to be. It's important to note here that the reason hell is awful isn't because God designed it as a punishment. It's because God is the source of everything good, and hell is separation from God. Therefore, there can be nothing good in hell (not even the sinful pleasures we can experience in this life), because the source of all goodness is not there. To the best of my knowledge, the imagery of a lake of fire where you get tormented by demons as a punishment is not something the Church teaches. Nor would I say it's something that there's broad agreement on.
I certainly don't think it's true that you have to believe in young earth creationism, or any of that other stuff, in order to avoid hell. There are a lot of ideas about hell, but I'm most convinced by CS Lewis' thoughts on this topic. The people in hell are there not because God sends them to eternal soul prison, but because they chose to be there. As Lewis said, the gates of hell are barred from the inside. I do not know if the Church has specific teaching on whether people could theoretically change their mind, so perhaps hell isn't eternal for those who wind up there. I don't know, and again I don't think there's any sort of broad Christian consensus on this topic.
I don't imagine that this will surprise you, but I don't think that God allowed the Catholics to twist the Bible for centuries. I think that is nonsense born more of hate than anything else. There's still a lot of bad blood between some Protestants and some Catholics, and it's horrible. But I think that the idea that God let the Catholic Church essentially damn people to hell for centuries through bad readings of scripture is just plain false.
So far as I'm aware, the Church does not teach that you must believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ to be saved. It simply teaches that all salvation is through him. For example, the Church teaches that all the Israelites who lived before Jesus' incarnation were saved by his sacrifice, even though it happened (from a mortal timeline's POV) after they lived. The Church also teaches that while its teachings and sacraments are a sure path to heaven, God isn't limited by such things and can save anyone he wants through any means he wants. Some believe that for those who die never having heard the message of Jesus Christ, God still gives them the grace to choose to follow the morals they were taught (and that by accepting that grace, they can still go to heaven through the power of Jesus' sacrifice even if they never knew about him in those terms). The Church very deliberately does not teach that any given person is in hell, because we simply cannot know this side of the grave. It does teach that certain people are in heaven, but that's another topic.
I know what you mean about people on the ground witnessing miracles having a leg up, but at the same time I'm not sure that's true. The Bible records that a lot of people who witnessed miracles chose to not persist in faith in God. The Old Testament is full of this (Exodus has the memorable examples where the people just watched God save them from Pharaoh's armies and then say "God has abandoned us" time and time again as they journey). The New Testament has it too. Judas personally saw Jesus, was one of his closest followers, and would have witnessed him do many miracles personally. He still chose to sell Jesus out. Not only that but he despaired at God's forgiveness even after all he saw (which is what many say was his true sin, not the selling out of Jesus). On this very forum, I've seen people say that if they saw a miracle they would think that they were having a hallucination or that there was a scientific explanation. I think that at some level, no matter what miracles you have seen or not, you have to make the choice to believe.
I don't think it's true that someone who pulls the trigger on a gun (I think you mean suicide here?) can't save themselves. I believe that God is not limited by time, and that he can even work in the past from our perspective. I think that it's possible (though we can't know until we get to heaven) that God gave people who committed suicide the chance to repent in the last instant of their life, and that some chose to accept his grace. Again, the Church doesn't say that this is necessarily true, but it is pretty consistent that the stuff the Bible says is a lifeline for our benefit, not a limitation of God. I choose to believe that he reaches even those people who us mortals think are beyond hope.
I think that addresses most of your points (hopefully all, but I might have missed something). Not necessarily in order of course, because some of your arguments are interconnected (for example I kind of touched on the "how is hell just" line of thinking while trying to address your third bullet point, even though it was part of your fourth bullet point). But again, just for emphasis: I'm not saying all of these things are arguments you will necessarily believe. My only goal is to highlight that one does not have to choose between the message of the Bible and the objective truth of the world.
It's taken me a long time to write all of this and it's late enough that I don't have time to do editing passes, but I hope that at least it gives you some food for thought. Again, thank you for the earnest and respectful discussion!
This post is good! Yes, that all makes sense. It doesn't really convince me to believe, but it's not totally at odds with reality, like how fundamentalists see it. I may have just talked to too many fundamentalists, but to be fair, that was my only perspective on the bible for pretty much all of my youth.
Catholics don't believe that scripture is infallible? Infallibility is a strong statement to make, and admitting that men wrote it is kind of conceding a lot of ground. I guess I don't know what you're supposed to base your belief on here, if men wrote it and it may not be accurate to what God actually wanted us to know. How would inspired word look any different from some random jackwagon writing whatever he wants?
To that end, is there anything solidifying your belief in day-to-day life? I asked a couple Christians if there is justice in this life, or if it's only reserved for the afterlife, and both of them seemed pretty stumped by what I thought was a simple question. To me, it seems pretty obvious that life is randomly cruel to everyone, Christian or not, a world of chaos, untamed and wild except for where men have tamed it. If someone created it, they're either not paying attention to it, as if they wound up a wind up doll and walked away from the table, or they never cared much about it in the first place, an apathetic god that lets the chips fall as they may. You probably disagree with that, and if you do, I'd like to hear it.
I have so many random theological questions (does the suffering of animals mean anything?), but maybe some other day. Or some other thread.
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Maybe I misunderstand something here, but why would this be unfair? Aren't there a number of ideas that are unchanging or at least variable only in a narrow space of possibilities? Take something like the laws of logic for example, they are as far as anyone knows eternally true, and what's more they seem to be intuitively undeniable and, in a manner of speaking, to impose themselves on any rational mind and, failing that, at least the material reality of the irrational.
In other words, it does seem to be possible for God to put ideas into the minds of all humans that are relatively stable and undeniable by any serious thinker. Why did he not do that for belief in himself?
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I think you did a good job. One note:
The concept you're referring to here is Invincible Ignorance. And here's an official Church document explaining:
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Yes. And? It's all of grace anyway, a gift that we utterly don't deserve, so I don't really see the issue. See also: Romans 9.
Ah, you misunderstand. Your sin is against the infinite majesty of God.
This isn't the reason that they're damned (or at least, certainly not all of it), they're damned for their sin in general.
Under any definition of the time when the Bible was being written, "day" did not mean "actually hundreds of millions of years". Anyone saying otherwise is coping. Genesis is literally supposed to be how the world came about, and people interpreted it this way and believed it for hundreds of years until the theory of evolution and uniformitarianism came about.
Is God supposed to be a loving God, as almost every Christian I see says it, or is he supposed to be literally the most wicked thing in existence, with Satan and every other false god paling in comparison both to the magnitude of cruelty he is capable of inflicting and the willingness to see it carried out? When you pick apples, you keep the good ones and toss the bad ones. You don't take the bad apples, smash them into bits, reconstitute them, and smash them again and keep repeating this same pattern. That doesn't make any sense. You know what would make it make sense? If humans came up with it to scare you into believing it.
Edit to add: The idea that you can handwave away the unfairness of that is kind of infuriating to me. You're telling me that a kid can be born in a nowhere town with no opportunity, grow up getting abused by his parents, reach ripe adulthood somewhere after 12, lose faith in God because nothing good is happening to him, and end up shooting himself, and he goes to Hell to be tormented forever. Not only was life unfair to him, but also the afterlife was even more unfair to him, somehow. There's no way to reconcile that fate with any of the rest of the New Testament claiming God to be extremely loving. That's pretty unequivocally horrible. God created every part of this situation -- a cruel world, the rules behind entry to Heaven and Hell, the ability to sin and feel pain. What majesty would do that?
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But for all this ridiculousness, these seem to be the only way of maintaining key social technologies including fundamental prosocial memes, at least in the West.
Secular reactionaries can come up with countless legitimate reasons for many aspects of traditional morality, but it seems to mean nothing in the West without “you will go to the fire pit for eternity if you break the rules”.
“Why not have free love?”“Well, actually, you know various studies have shown that things like promiscuity can have deleterious effects on partner bonding with later partners, increasing the risk of blah blah blah…”
Secular justifications for traditional social technology just don’t work with normal people of average and below ability, and even with most above them. Yes it’s stupid, but it’s better for our children to believe it than not.
I don't really think that works in the end. Like @oats_son pointed out, sooner or later your kids are going to go "Hey Mom/Dad, you sure don't seem to believe all the stuff you taught us about God" and the whole edifice comes crumbling down. The way religion teaches us to live might be good, but I don't imagine that most people ever thought about it in terms of "which ideology teaches me the best way to live?". Rather, their way of living followed their belief in the truth claims of the religion. For people who are really good at decoupling concepts (like most people on this forum) you might be able to separate the two, but I am very skeptical that you could do so on a widespread scale.
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I don't at all disagree with the benefits of genuine belief. I feel I have been robbed of these for myself because I just thought about the issues too much. Are your children doomed to the same bitter realization decades down the line? You're just supposed to hope they're less good at critical thinking than yourself?
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