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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   3510 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 28, 2024

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.

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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.

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.

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.

  • As I said, young earth creationism is pretty wild, but to my eyes, you pretty much have to believe it, according to my fundamentalist relative, due to Jesus quoting something in the Septuagint regarding it; it is also the basis of the faith (why would we need saving from original sin if there was no Adam and we are no more than slightly more intelligent monkeys). If not, then there's all kinds of questions we can get into: why is the perception of God something that changes with the more we know about the world, instead of something eternal? Why did God write the scripture like that, so that a great portion of believers feel forced to stamp their feet about the world being 6000 years old? Why does my mother insist that the Tower of Babel story is literally true?
  • Much of the Old Testament deals with God proving himself to be better than other gods; a good example of this is probably the Book of Job, where God goes along with "The Adversary" to test Job. Christians seem to rethink these verses of being false idols and Satan in all cases, but it seems pretty obvious to me that it's about directly combating competing gods in the old world. There are so many points in the Old Testament where it basically says "sweet, my god is better than yours, that's why he lets me kill you and all your male heirs, and then breed your young girls after you're gone".
  • From what I've read, there are so many different words used for hell in the books of the Bible that there isn't any consistent view of them, but the mainstream Christian view is that nonbelievers are thrown into an eternal lake of fire to be tormented forever. But believers in Christ get into heaven. I don't know how far right people can get into the weeds on Septuagint vs Masoretic words for "Hebrew", but never even examine this idea at all. Or maybe they have and I don't know it. But what I have heard is that you have to believe all of the Bible, young earth creationism, not permitting women to teach men or get divorced or other things, laying with men gets you stoned, and crucially, Christ's resurrection, or you go to hell. Knowing my relative's issues with the Catholic Church, it amazes me that God would let the Catholics twist the Bible so hard for so long with no resistance whatsoever. They literally could not read the Bible for centuries and discover what it really said. Wouldn't most of them be damned for their degeneration of the Word?
  • It is staggering to me how unfair the requirement that you must believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ to not be damned. People on the ground witnessing the miracles would have had such a huge leg up in their redemption. Atheists killing themselves by jumping from a plane can save themselves mid-flight, whereas someone pulling the trigger of a gun gets no such chance. Because Jesus incarnated in a little spot in the Middle East, huge swathes of the populace have never even heard the name of the creator of the universe. Entire continents of people would be damned due to not even having a chance at receiving the message. Or, alternatively, they are saved due to their ignorance, but then once missionaries come and give them a chance to hear the message, then they're damned. Or maybe you're more like C.S. Lewis and think that being saved or damned comes from after death, whether you can accept Christ then or not. Okay. That doesn't seem very true to the message of the Bible to me, but that would be a little more fair. But even the concept of hell is crazy to me. What kind of justice is this? Infinite pain for a life with finite sin? Even the biggest assholes I know of in real life wouldn't go for that. And if you take the classical view of what gets you damned (disbelief in the redemption), how can you really hold it against someone? They were provided with no direct evidence of such a resurrection, in a world where pain and suffering are quite arbitrary, and any relief comes from men, usually atheist men.

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

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.

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.

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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