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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

It's important to put that verse in context. Paul is saying that if Christ was not raised from the dead, then we will not be either. So when he refers to misery he means that if we are toiling in the hope that we have been saved from our signs and reconciled with God and will be resurrected to eternal life, and that's not true, then we would be the most "miserable".

But Paul doesn't mean "miserable" as in "feeling the emotion of sadness or depression". The Greek word that the KJV translates as "miserable" is "eleeinoteroi". It is used one other place in the Bible: Revelation 3:17: "Because you say, ‘I am rich and have prospered; I need nothing,’ but do not realize that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked,". Now isn't it a bit odd to say that someone believes they are prosperous and need nothing but in fact are miserable in the sense of being sad or depressed? In both cases the word would be better translated as "pitiable". Their condition is miserable, not their emotions: they are in a position worthy of the pity of others. Which is how other translations, like the NIV, translate the word. And certainly it is the case that it is a pitiable position to be in if you believe that your sins are wiped clean and you will be resurrected and that's not actually true.

"If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied."

We also have to keep in mind Paul's audience: Christians were a persecuted minority in the Roman Empire at the time. Unlike modern Mormons, Paul and his audience were daily in danger of beatings, execution, and being thrown to the lions. As he writes a few verses later:

"And as for us, why do we endanger ourselves every hour? I face death every day—yes, just as surely as I boast about you in Christ Jesus our Lord. If I fought wild beasts in Ephesus with no more than human hopes, what have I gained? If the dead are not raised,

“'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.'"

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Deeply in this boat and curious how they respond. Having kids is probably the single best way to add purpose to your life, but this gets circular very very fast.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

LOL

Honestly I'm mostly here for the free one-way therapy venting dump

The fact you read it at all is gratifying, have a lovely day!

Also my Family Doctor basically said what you said to me verbatim the other day lmao. While he wasn't wrong, the fact he's a millionaire with an S-class who's last exposure to housing costs was the 1970s made it land somewhat poorly.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

One thought I've had is for alcohol or drug addicts or really anyone, is there a convincing rationalist answer for why people should quit or not use destructive drugs? Without a higher power, why not abuse substances? If you live your life in isolation and are so inclined, I don't think there is a rationalist reason not to be selfish and NEET? Some times I wonder if belief and faith has a way of finding those who need it most.

"Technological society has succeeded in multiplying the opportunities for pleasure, but it has great difficulty in generating joy." Paul VI in GAUDETE IN DOMINO.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Reduce handouts and eject cheap foreign labor (especially of the illegal sort).

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

Iran's rhetoric and actions match. There is no reason other than wishful thinking to believe they are willing to consider anything other than active enmity with the US.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

This is way more effort than my shitpost deserves. I actually agree with you, was just having some fun.

Pokémon for Unrepentant Sociopaths: A Review of Reverend Insanity

Just to be clear, you mean the umineko project port, right?

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

This is true, it's also true that poor people (both in western nations, and worldwide) crank out more kids than wealthier people. So realistically if people who work as fast food cashier's and factory laborers can afford to have kids, us, with our mid-tier white collar jobs can too.

However:

/1) that sounds miserable, and like my life would become significantly more stressful with the addition of financial concerns (something I shaped my entire life around avoiding) and a space that is already too small for 2 humans and a dog becoming 3 humans + dog. We could put the crib in the den but then we'd need to throw out a huge # of our possessions, which are currently stored in the den about as efficiently as I could pack in floor to ceiling IKEA shelving and standardized boxes.

I guess one could snarkily point to "well that's just your revealed preference you don't actually want kids" which like okay? But I'm really sad and resentful at the state of society which forces to me to choose between security and less stress or my biological imperatives. So it doesn't feel like I secretly don't want kids but think I do, it feels like I'm choosing between two shitty options that I don't like.

/2) western society pushes a very strong narrative (not explicitly, but strong nonetheless) that your kids "quality" of life should equal or exceed your own.

If born right now, my kid wouldn't have a backyard to play in. We live across the street from a park, but it's downtown so it sometimes has homeless tents in it. Checking for needles in the sand of playgrounds is almost SOP down here. Moving to a fancy neighborhood (lots of "I support my neighbors in tents" lawn signs but never tents in their parks, weird...) is obviously out of the question (see: cost). This also means we have to take what we can get with school quality as there is a nice price premium for neighborhoods with the best schools.

I guess by the time the kid is old enough to have coherent memories we'd be making enough money to take them on vacation, etc, you get a bit of runway there.

But comparing my (extremely middle class) childhood to the childhood we could provide to a hypothetical child, it does raise the uncomfortable thought of

Can I provide an equal or better childhood than I had right now? Maybe, maybe not, trending towards not. If the answer is not it feels like I've failed as a parent and as a "successful" citizen. Which is uncomfortable and unpleasant.

And as a carrot on the stick in front of me, that answer changes to "definitely yes" come out household income increases another ~$50k annually, which is hopefully only a few years and job hops away...

It's also tough because my current career (mid tier finance, better than accounting, worse than IB) is extremely cognitively and time demanding. If I want to make more and move up, these demands will increase, until you get high enough they start decreasing again as you delegate to delegators. So the next 5 years of increasing my earnings will put my kid into a zero sum fight with my job for my time and energy.

/3) there's no village anymore. We moved away from family to live downtown because this is where the good jobs are and commuting 45min-1+hr each day is a hard no, massive evidence this makes you miserable. None of our friends are having kids for all the reasons I've explained, or OP has. So we'd be soaking it solo until we met other parents at school I guess. Makes it hard to trade kids to eachother to achieve informal childcare economies of scale, and grandma/grandpa live hours away.

/4 bonus) Unrelated, and not a great reason to not have kids, but im absolutely fucking horrified at the state of the education system right now. Between the corruption/inefficiency, complete inability to teach based on best practices, DEI insanity, and insane lack of funding (these kids are the future, why aren't we pouring money into them?!?!?!?) means I now also feel like 1) we need to ensure we are near a school that is less captured/ran by retards (now we're paying a school district premium on living costs) and 2) that I will need to dedicate substantial time to ensure my kid is actually getting a good education.

This has turned into an emotionally gratifying venting session, so thanks lol

I want to have kids, but every macro trend in society right now makes having kids a painful trade off, stressful, expensive, or very time consuming.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

I guess it's just not clear to me why we need more people rather than getting our existing people to be more productive.

Do you have any ideas about how to do that?

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Sounds like the kind of thinking that got us "banning abortion will strengthen the family."

How many said that to begin with? Most arguments against abortion I've heard of boil down to "it's evil", not some utilitarian mumbo-jumbo.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

I don't think anyone was talking about either of those things, but your opinion is noted.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

As with many things I think the issue is not that it is a perfect replacement, but rather that it reaches some minimal level. So porn is not as good as sex, but it is easier, and because the gauge is getting filled up just enough it makes the effort needed to get sex feel less worth it.

It takes effort to get good things, but once you have them it is totally worth it. But access to very easy quick, but worse, substitutes crowds out the effort needed to get the good version. So porn substitutes for sex, video games substitute for real accomplishment, social media substitutes for actual community and friendship, etc.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

There is some good here. But the problem with over-prioritizing symbolism is that it weakens the power of the original meaning. For instance, making “Lord” into only an imagined presence we speak to weakens the significance of talking to your Lord. In antiquity, talking to your Lord was a big deal — the Lord controlled your entire realm, not to mention your destiny. For Christians, Lord was the established authority with maximum culturally-informed value judgments which were deeply internalized (to describe it as scientifically as possible). If the Lord is defined as a presence we imagine, and this presence is only an abstractly conceptualized ground of being, then we have lost considerable motivation to pray or act righteously. We are just playing pretend — and perhaps we always are — but the pretend isn’t even dramatic. The dramatic pull is gone. The totalizing, moralizing vibe is gone. And it risks becoming woefully subjective, and it also risks toppling like the Tower of Babel — we can’t build upon the rock of Christ if each person’s Christ is different.

I mean imagine you’re at some mystical Christian gathering, and you’re crying because the weight of your sin is too strong and you don’t want to betray your savior — how can the “mystic” answer? “Whoa, you’re taking this imagined presence thing really seriously…” Or who is going to donate their wealth over an “imagined presence”? It lacks force.

What I think is a better solution here, is not to say “Lord is imagined”, but to say that these words are the only way we can access reality — particularly a socialized, moral, emotional reality. By socialized, I mean both “discussing complex spiritual reality within a shared language and framework” and “with the cooperative presuppositions which answer myriad collective action concerns”. These words act as an interface by which we access the divine. On the human-level, then, you really do have a Lord with whom all the poetic elaborations of creation and judgment are solidly true. On the material-level, there is no Lord. Is this such a difficult leap to make? I don’t think so; after all, the Christian must believe that the bread (material) becomes the flesh and blood of the Lord (spiritual) within a shared social ecosystem designed toward moral reinforcement.

Now, a pious Christian does use imagination in prayer: perhaps they kneel, perhaps they look up, perhaps they repeat some words which cement His dominion over all things (the earth is God’s footstool). But they use imagination only to elaborate and feel the beliefs or dogmas that they hold. They are hallowing the name of God and bidding the Kingdom come. They do this because they believe the consequences are important. If everything is symbols all the way down, then what is the importance of it all? You need something which roots the urgency and significance of the quest. Otherwise you’re just satisfying your own limited ego or whim, you’re not actually involved in making the world better or anything good. Why not just play Dungeons & Dragons, or WoW? Why not just talk to ChatGPT? So any religious quest needs to be rooted in a totalizing importance. And there are actually decent ways to combine it with secular importance, but traditionally what religion does is get you into an environment where they can propagandize their root concerns to you: the wrath of God is coming, we slew God’s Son; God’s Son came to forgive us and save us from evil; there is an eternal punishment and an eternal abode for the righteous. Etc. Maybe they have the children sing about the earth burning in smoke. Maybe you are peer-evaluated by your perceived faith and banished for your doubt.

A purely symbolic religion will not get martyrdom like this:

I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ. Rather entice the wild beasts, that they may become my tomb, and may leave nothing of my body; so that when I have fallen asleep [in death], I may be no trouble to any one. Then shall I truly be a disciple of Christ, when the world shall not see so much as my body. Now I begin to be a disciple. And let no one, of things visible or invisible, envy me that I should attain to Jesus Christ. Let fire and the cross; let the crowds of wild beasts; let tearings, breakings, and dislocations of bones; let cutting off of members; let shatterings of the whole body; and let all the dreadful torments of the devil come upon me: only let me attain to Jesus Christ.

All the pleasures of the world, and all the kingdoms of this earth, shall profit me nothing. It is better for me to die on behalf of Jesus Christ, than to reign over all the ends of the earth. For what shall a man be profited, if he gain the whole world, but lose his own soul? Him I seek, who died for us: Him I desire, who rose again for our sake. This is the gain which is laid up for me. Pardon me, brethren: do not hinder me from living, do not wish to keep me in a state of death; and while I desire to belong to God, do not give me over to the world. Allow me to obtain pure light: when I have gone there, I shall indeed be a man of God. Permit me to be an imitator of the passion of my God. If any one has Him within himself, let him consider what I desire, and let him have sympathy with me, as knowing how I am straitened.

My love has been crucified, and there is no fire in me desiring to be fed; but there is within me a water that lives and speaks, saying to me inwardly, Come to the Father. I have no delight in corruptible food, nor in the pleasures of this life. I desire the bread of God, the heavenly bread, the bread of life, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who became afterwards of the seed of David and Abraham; and I desire the drink of God, namely His blood, which is incorruptible love and eternal life.

I like Jonathan Pageau but his writings suffer this same problem. A person just isn’t moved by knowing symbols, or poems, or anything clever. If you have 1000 symbols versus 1 “this man died to save the world and now waits for you”, you are going to be changed from the simple non-symbolic thing. And I enjoyed Jordan Peterson’s thoughts on the Old Testament, but again this has the same problem — JBP can’t even admit to being a Christian in an argument with a teenager. And lastly, around Christ’s time you had the Alexandrian school of Philo, and they also doubted the real body of Christ, and they wrote thousands of pages allegorizing the Old Testament with symbols. And it’s a pleasant read, but it’s worthless and doesn’t actually do anything.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

If you don't want to do your job then don't, but quitting to pick pineapples isn't going to make you any happier until you find something larger than your own ego and physical pleasure to live for.

What's your personal solution to this problem? I ask sincerely but also by way of justifying the comment I actually wanted to make, which was that I haven't seen you around for a bit and am happy you're still here.

Carrying on, one of my major frustrations in modern discourse is that there doesn't seem to be much individual reflection on what the point of life (or anything) even is, let alone widespread agreement. "Gratifying the human limbic system" seems to be what we're settling on and that puts us squarely in OP's dilemma.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

My gut says that living in dense cities is somehow injurious to the human spirit and generates a lot of sicknesses downstream. If someone lives in an entirely man-made environment, why wouldn't they believe that everything's a social construct? Whereas if they're raised in and around nature, they will also perforce have to contend with nature, which would seem to inculcate some common sense in addition to other virtues.

Sounds like the kind of thinking that got us "banning abortion will strengthen the family." None of the people who said that admitted they were wrong when the experiment was carried out. We shouldn't base government policy on "gut feelings" of these people.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Ehh, I disagree - he has a much higher success rate with women (I can say earnestly that I have never had a woman give me her number unsolicited, while I’ve seen him get a number from a waitress while out with his girlfriend).

Friday Fun Thread for June 13, 2025

I’m trying to observe the 4 big ones. I don’t do every Wednesday and Friday fast, my parish isn’t very strict about it. I try to abstain from meat mostly but again it’s more the Spirit.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

It is very validating to see so many people long for my life. For almost a decade I have worked two days a week and I have never been happier or ironically more successful. I don't really go anywhere or do anything most of the time, but I didn't before either. But it is also very alarming. I have one of the few mental illnesses we know is hereditary, there is no future for me. That ate me up for a long time, far too long. But my fate was a precondition of my birth, your fate is still within your grasp. Don't give it up without a fight. That said, if you feel you have already fought to your limit, I understand.

one cannot choose to have faith when it does not exist

One other thing - you only ever choose to have faith when it doesn't exist. Faith without choice is belief.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Assume that you are a democrat and you have progressive inclinations, and you live in a community of similarly minded individuals.

What if I told you I was going to import a lot MAGA Republicans, and not the standard Republicans, but ones who compete amongst themselves to buy Trump-labeled kitsch. Who immediately demand that the public library be replaced with a church, and the lesbian cafes with titty bars. That the buses should be sold for scrap as they take too much space on the street for their hummers to pass. And not only are they so numerous as to immediately change the demography of the town, they also vote, so that your well-meaning local representative is replaced by a used car salesman who loots the public treasury at every opportunity.

This would approximate the reaction that many people have to having the city's least desirable renting underclass moved into their neighborhood.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

You started your post with:

Why Should I Care? To provide some context, I've been in a bit of a malaise for the last few days, having had a rough week at work, and I get into a spiral of fantasizing about quitting my job when the thought hits me - why, exactly, do I even care about the job? Why do I actually care about contributing to society?

You followed up with 20 different ways society fails men, whom you depict as passive victims in your narrative. None of these actually answer the question you started with - okay, in the past men could be decidedly average and the church would still furnish them with a doe-eyed virgin and 20 acres of land on their 18th birthday. Even if you and all the NEETs lived in that world, what's the point of getting married? Of having children, raising them well, working to feed yourself? Why do you bother to call your elderly parents?

If your answers were orgasms, economic utility, economic utility, not starving and I don't talk to my parents on a regular basis then your problems run a lot deeper than dating market hard and my life is pointless because the state won't let me starve. If you don't want to do your job then don't, but quitting to pick pineapples isn't going to make you any happier until you find something larger than your own ego and physical pleasure to live for.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 15, 2025

Yes this used to be commonplace in my experience. One should always at the very least triangulate results with other sources if the stakes are high.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

I am rarely asked for my license and Hispanics can look white in the same way I look over 40.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

However, we have no fucking space.

Sir, Irish immigrants of the past would raise a dozen kids in that space. Get to it!

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Depending on your age you already need to show ID. Just make passports the only valid ID if it is latin american.