The most troublesome arguments to try to make are those that are both very specific and limited (and are by nature of that more or less non-controversial) but are roommates with much bigger and more contentious targets.
I usually don't argue about religion on the Internet, but you seem really nice, so I'll give it a try.
First, sometimes it's a good idea to adopt relativist debate norms even if you think the thing you're debating is real. For example, music is real, and so are musical preferences -- if I go to a Jonathan Coulton concert, I will have a lousy time, and if my housemate goes to a Shostakovich concert, he will have a lousy time, but if you flip it around, then we'll both leave our concerts feeling inspired, refreshed, and satisfied. Neither of us thinks the other is mistaken -- it's just that we're wired differently, so what works for one of us doesn't work for the other. Why? It's hard to explain, even though we both know plenty of music theory and plenty of sociology. We try to trend gently on each other's feelings while talking about it, not because we think the other person's enjoyment of their music is somehow imaginary, but precisely because it's real, and because we know that most of our thoughts about music are inherently private or personal, i.e., they're quite difficult to effectively share.
If I tried to insist that my way of appreciating music was objectively better, I'd just hurt my housemate's feelings without accomplishing anything useful -- because even though the music is very real, its goodness is relative, not objective. If I observe the position of Uranus, I can tell you in precise mathematical terms exactly where Uranus is and you can confirm it with your telescope and make the exact same observation, but if I observe a Shostakovich concert then even if I tell you where the symphony is playing, you still can't reliably have the same Shostakovich experience that I did. I think religion is a lot more like music than astronomy.
Second, mainstream Christianity usually presents itself as a sort of self-protecting chain of arguments. The Bible is supposed to be literally true, and one of the things the Bible tells us is that we should obey God, and one of God's commandments is to believe in the literal authority of the Bible. If you begin by agreeing with any one of those statements, then you often end by feeling compelled to agree with all of them, and after that it feels silly and disingenuous to talk (as David Friedman does) about editing bits and pieces of your religion to better suit your ethical feelings. If you're used to thinking of God and religion as "aspects of that self-reinforcing loop of arguments that dictate an entire worldview," then anyone who blithely suggests that you just unilaterally change part of your worldview looks like they're not taking "God" or "religion" seriously.
However, speaking from personal experience, it's very possible to take God and religion very seriously indeed and yet not subscribe to that self-reinforcing loop. I don't think there's anything imaginary about God -- and yet, like Galileo, I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. I think the Bible was divinely inspired -- but what happens when you apply divine inspiration to a bunch of cantankerous, illiterate Bronze Age shepherds is that you get a real mixed bag. Parts of the Bible are timeless enough to still be worth studying and meditating on today; other parts are trivial, cruel, or incorrect.
So, if I suggest that you might not need to call 911 about the fire in your apartment, it's not because I think you're hallucinating the fire -- it's because, in my experience, most kitchen fires can be safely put out with an ordinary fire extinguisher. And, if you strenuously disagree with me and say, no, no, I definitely need to call 911 about *this* fire that's in my home right now -- I will cheerfully nod and say, "OK, go ahead and call them, then." Not because I think there's no right answer about the danger posed by the fire, but because I acknowledge that fires can be different from each other, and it would be unrealistic to expect you to pause and send me a video of the fire. Any such video would naturally be obscured by smoke, and fires are urgent and scary enough that it usually makes more sense to get on with the business of dealing with them as best we can instead of endlessly arguing about their size with friends. After all, the fire is in *your* home -- by the time I could get over there and help you with it, it would usually be too late. Since you're the one who inevitably has to deal with the fire, and you're the one with the best view of your fire, I'm willing to trust your judgment about your fire even if your claims about that fire seem a priori unlikely to me.
My big question with assertions in this general range is always "OK, so what's the principle that makes this substantially different all of the following:
1. An atheist saying "I determine 100% of my moral beliefs from reason - I am the arbitor of them"
2. An agnostic saying "well, it's all unknowable - I'm not saying there isn't a god, but we certainly don't know enough about it to know substantially who he or she is or what they want, I'm withholding my judgment
3. A person who says "I have imagined a religion based on what I prefer, and it became true based on that"
Because if it's substantially the same as 1-2, I'm looking to see why I'd do the extra work of then saying "but, no, I still have real belief, I treat it like a real thing with real implications" when in practical reality I don't. And if it's substantially the same as 3., it's a combination of sort of the same effect and me basically knowing it's not real. I sense you think it IS different than those, but I don't know how right now - you say you reason it out in such a way that it's still serious and powerful, but not how that works mechanically.
On the fire metaphor bit:
I think this metaphor has gotten pretty misunderstood in terms of what I was trying to do with it, so to clarify the work it's supposed to do:
1. The fire just represents something real, with real implications. It could have been a pitbull or a pancake that's being left on the griddle too long, it doesn't matter. Fire was chosen because it has certain common, clear implications - if your house is on fire, you can react a number of ways but those ways have expected consequences.
2. When the person in the metaphor says "Why didn't you just imagine that the fire was safe, and then it would have been?" he's treating fire as an un-real thing; he might be showing that he doesn't understand how fire works, or that he doesn't believe yours is real, or any of number of things - but what he's not asking you to do is what's logical based on a real fire in your house.
3. Importantly, in the metaphor (as applied here) he's saying "I know you have a certain concept of housefires as something dangerous that consumes houses and people inside them, and I respect that. But without changing your mind on those characteristics or convincing you the fire didn't exist, I'm asking why you didn't just lay there, completely safe".
So in a practical sense, the metaphor doesn't apply to your argument here. You are saying something like "listen, fire doesn't work like you think it does; your beliefs on fire are wrong in some way.". That's a standard argument that's common enough that you don't write an article about it - it's the atheist saying there isn't a god, and you are wrong to think there is one and things like that.
So when you say something that boils down to "Listen, the bible and your concepts of god are both unreliable" we have an argument about that, and it's pretty straightforward; there's no issues. And the metaphor doesn't apply, because you aren't trying to convince me you totally believe thatt I believe. my house was on fire while then telling me to do things that don't make sense if it is.
David says "Oh, your house was on fire? That's terrible - I understand you think that has certain implications. Why didn't you just make a grilled cheese?". And in doing so he skips a bunch of steps that you don't, here. Basically he tries to get the benefits of convincing me that the religion isn't real/reliable (I.E. shifting me to a "it has no power or authority I don't grant it in my imagination model) without actually convincing me of that.
I think later in the metaphor, you describe something like agnosticism - like, there's no way for me to say your concept of fire is wrong, there's too much smoke for that. And when someone tries to explicitly convert me to something-like-agnosticism, I don't DO IT, but I don't have the same problems as when they say "Hey, I know you aren't agnostic, and I respect that, but could you just agree you should act like one anyway?". That's sort of what's going on here.
TLDR: In your post you say something like "Your concept of religion is false, I think. And given that, you should consider a set of implications in line with some other belief". I don't have problems with that. In David's post (and in other arguments like that) he says something like "Without convincing you that your religion is false, could you act as if it is?" and I have problems with that.
Yeah, we're probably talking about different situations! If David is trying to get you to behave in a certain way without doing the work of believing the things that would prompt you to behave that way, then I don't care to defend David. As you say, I at least acknowledge that we have different beliefs and that those beliefs matter.
When I first read your post I thought maybe there was just some confusion between you and David about the size of the fire, but after reading all the comments that seems much less likely.
On the reinforcing loop thing, I would say that my religion has elements of 1, 2, and 3 -- but that it's not entirely defined by any or all of them. Right, like, for #1, of course some of my moral beliefs come from what I think is reasonable; no formal moral system specifies every single decision point in advance, so some on-the-spot reasoning will always be required. The scope over which that reasoning is encouraged varies from one religion to the next -- some religions want you to consult your clergy over very small matters, and some religions want you to try to reason even large problems out for yourself, but reason is always involved.
For #2, yeah, I don't claim to know God's will perfectly, and so sometimes I'm left to candidly admit that I'm not sure what God would want and so I have to withhold judgment. Again, I like to think this is true of almost everyone; some religions claim a broader swath of divine revelation than others, but all of us are at least sometimes unsure of the divine will. Hence quotables like Micah 6:8, "“Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.” Or Deuteronomy 34:10, for that matter.
For #3, of course some of my religious beliefs are based on my preferences about how the Universe should work, because another way of phrasing "my preferences about how the Universe should work" is "what I think is elegant and beautiful and sensible," and another way of phrasing "what I think is elegant and beautiful and sensible" is "what convinces me that it is in fact true." Right, like, Occam's razor suggests that the simplest explanation is usually the best one, and thereby convinces me that oxygen combustion is a better theory than phlogiston. In the same way, some theologies strike me as more elegant and therefore convince me that they are true. To take the Hell example, I find it easier to believe in a God who loves us all and who does not express that love by condemning most of us to eternal torment than to believe in a God who loves us all but does condemn most of us to eternal torment. The former seems simple and convincing; the latter seems convoluted and confusing. In believing the former, am I following my "preferences?" Yes, in the sense that I prefer to believe things that make sense to me. No, in the sense that I'm not just picking whatever belief would be maximally convenient for carrying on with my secular goals.
I pray, I conduct rituals, I attend events, I read the Bible, I make career choices, I steer conversations in a particular way, I make financial choices, etc. based in part on the norms and standards and ideas and needs of my religious community. My life is steered in large part by what I see as reasonable and morally attractive, but it's not steered *only* by that -- I also take some input from personal religious experiences (i.e., moments when it seems to me that I've heard an external heavenly voice offering me guidance), and from communal religious standards (moments when the people around me who share my religion disagree with me about what I should do and I follow their advice instead of my own preferences).
This is a complicated and messy way to live, and I can understand why people find it more attractive to just be atheist or just be fundamentalist. However, for me, the mess is outweighed by the sense of balance it gives me. I don't worry that I'm biting off more than I can chew (because my religion is there for me to rely on when I'm not sure what to do or how to cope), and I don't worry that I'm submerging too much of my individuality (because if something about my religion strikes me as *wrong* enough, then I chart my own course). It works for me.
It sounds like your approach to religion also works really well for you! I appreciate you sharing and discussing all this; it's been helpful to put these thoughts into words.
"When I first read your post I thought maybe there was just some confusion between you and David about the size of the fire"
Yeah, it's less about that than how you decide *if* there's a fire, and what the fire is like. David proposes that the fire is a problem, and says "Well, just decide God is lying about it" without considering the downstream differences of transitioning to A. Some god you can just decide things about and B. An unreliable god who lies to suit his purposes. It's a solution to a problem, but also a proposed conversion to a broadly different set of religious beliefs.
"Right, like, for #1, of course some of my moral beliefs come from what I think is reasonable; no formal moral system specifies every single decision point in advance, so some on-the-spot reasoning will always be required."
Agreed here. Christianity of the flavor I'm in tends to have guidelines for these situations as opposed to hard rules, but I don't think most reasonable people claim that the bible has a lot of thoughts on, say, 401k vesting policy or things like that. All that to say I'm not proposing that reason doesn't have a place.
"#2, yeah, I don't claim to know God's will perfectly,"
And ditto here. This is actually tricky, though, because there's for sure some ranges of "how much do you think you can know" that contain significant differences. "None" is a lot different from "some, fuzzily" to "some, clearly" to "some, clearly and with clear authority" to "all, absolutely".
I posit in a lot of places that "some, fuzzily" and below boil down to atheism with curtains - like you can't walk up to that guy and say "The god we both worship says to stop behavior X", because he doesn't think you do or could know that.
But I think our biggest difference is here:
"To take the Hell example, I find it easier to believe in a God who loves us all and who does not express that love by condemning most of us to eternal torment than to believe in a God who loves us all but does condemn most of us to eternal torment. The former seems simple and convincing; the latter seems convoluted and confusing. In believing the former, am I following my "preferences?" Yes, in the sense that I prefer to believe things that make sense to me. No, in the sense that I'm not just picking whatever belief would be maximally convenient for carrying on with my secular goals."
First, I'd like to be clear/nice about something, which is that most people (me included) tend to talk about other belief systems in ways that people of that belief system wouldn't. But when I say "you determine your own religion" I don't have a mental image of, like, you want to club babies to death or something so you just adopt whatever belief on the fly.
It's more about basically believing that god can disagree with us in a way where we might know the disagreement and might have to adjust to what he is, instead of him adjusting to us. So to use the hell example, understand that I'm not instinctually thrilled about it. Like I don't sit around thinking hell exists and that I'm super glad people go there, and that I perfectly understand why it's a good idea to the point where I'd do the same thing if I was in charge.
But where our disconnect is the biggest is that I don't think it has much of an effect what I think about it or find intuitively appealing, ect. The sort of "mean, frank" way to talk about the way I view this is that I generally map anything that *isn't* this on to 1 Tim 3-5; that it looks like religion, but stands at serious risk of losing all it's authority.
The nicer way of saying it is something like, I'm not sure why one NEEDS religion, like what the value-add is at that point. You can get normative guidance from a lot of communities (I grant that Church is better at it than a lot of places) and support a lot of places (therapy, friends, family). But it seems like something important is lost when it stops being "real enough" that god might carry a characteristic we don't like, or that a rule might exist that actually needs to exist (in that we wouldn't follow it naturally), etc.
Note that I grant that I'm sort of (necessarily) arguing with a strawman you here - not all of this might map onto you perfectly.
One question I do have (if you are already overdrawn on time in this conversation, don't worry about it):
1. Say you and I both belong to a theoretical religion, and we are going through some of the deeper texts one day and find "Though shalt not genetically modify organisms in such and such ways", where it's sort of banning modern gene-splicing stuff. In that situation, say you love GMO's - that's how you get vitamin A into all the third world kids and end starvation - and that it sort of matters what we think about this (like, maybe we work in that field, or distribute food to charities, etc.).
Assuming the text is pretty clear on the subject (like, you are reasonably confident it actually does say "no GMOs" and it's not just a misunderstanding) - what do you do? I'm curious as to what that looks like in your system.
“Morality and any associated ideal is rooted entirely in a presupposition some higher power defines what is correct for human behavior . . .
The Frankfurt School adapted Marx’s theories on revolution to include Freud’s theory of the subconscious. The Cultural Marxists’ main focus was to reshape the subconscious of Western men and women and thus create new type of person: one who would react passively to provocations of all kinds . . . https://nordicresistancemovement.org/what-is-cultural-marxism/
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“They are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blonde hair, I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not become deadly to the human race. They have surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct and in barbarism. They deserve to be punished, for this is their destiny. The Jewish nation dares to display an irreconcilable hatred towards all nations, and revolts against all masters; always superstitious, always greedy for the well-being enjoyed by others, always barbarous; cringing in misfortune and insolent in prosperity.” — François-Marie Voltaire
>> "None" is a lot different from "some, fuzzily" to "some, clearly" to "some, clearly and with clear authority" to "all, absolutely". I posit in a lot of places that "some, fuzzily" and below boil down to atheism with curtains - like you can't walk up to that guy and say "The god we both worship says to stop behavior X", because he doesn't think you do or could know that.
This is a very interesting spectrum! I think my personal answer is between "some, fuzzily" and "some, clearly." Maybe just "some," without an adverb. I think people absolutely can (and should!) come up to me and say "the God we both worship says to stop doing X," because that's a useful kind of claim to make, but then it would typically lead to a (hopefully productive) debate or discussion, rather than an open-and-shut case where once God's opinion has been pointed out there is nothing more to say about the matter.
>>It's more about basically believing that god can disagree with us in a way where we might know the disagreement and might have to adjust to what he is, instead of him adjusting to us. Assuming the text is pretty clear on the subject (like, you are reasonably confident it actually does say "no GMOs" and it's not just a misunderstanding) - what do you do? I'm curious as to what that looks like in your system.
Yeah, this is tricky! On the one hand, I aspire to be in what Martin Buber would call an I/Thou relationship to God. Part of authentic relationship is being willing to be changed by an encounter with the other and to compromise and sacrifice based on their needs and interests. Part of being in a healthy relationship with other mortals requires this kind of sacrifice; how much the more so for a healthy relationship with God! If I can't pray and wind up with a different set of plans than the ones I started with, then why bother praying? So I am in favor of adjusting myself when I sense that I am out of accord with God's will.
On the other hand, I also believe that God can only want things if they are good -- I think it's logically impossible for God to desire ultimately bad things. Sometimes people say this to mean "whatever God wants *becomes* good by definition," but I mean it in the opposite sense -- I mean that if you think that God wants X, and you think that X is bad, then you must be mistaken about one or the other belief. Crucially, I think it's not obvious in advance which belief is mistaken.
Right, so if you point out to me that the Bible appears to have a strict ban on GMOs, and my detailed study of the how GMOs work leads me to believe that GMOs are good, then either we're misinterpreting the Bible, or the Bible isn't accurately reflecting the will of God on this point, or I'm wrong about whether GMOs are good. It could be any of the three! I don't have a magic way of resolving this kind of tension. I study the relevant passage, including what you might call its legislative history -- I try to understand what the relevant Biblical characters were thinking and feeling at the time and why they were opposed to GMOs and what GMOs meant to them in their historical context. I try to re-examine my beliefs to see if I could have missed some downside of GMOs, especially any downsides that are hinted at by the context of the Biblical ban. I try to re-examine the Bible to see if there's something important that's changed about the historical context between when it was written and today -- the Bible's wisdom may be timeless, but the world isn't, so if the world has changed then it's possible that the laws will also need to change. If the question is important and relevant to my behavior (as it would be in your hypothetical scenario), then I would consult with friends and clergy and pray and meditate and ask for guidance.
In the end I just have to figure out (to the best of my limited ability) what I think is good to do, and then try my best to do that. God's will on the matter, to the extent that I can know it, is decisive evidence of what is good, but the Bible (in my opinion) doesn't provide decisive evidence of God's will, even when the Bible speaks clearly.
>>I'm not sure why one NEEDS religion, like what the value-add is at that point. You can get normative guidance from a lot of communities (I grant that Church is better at it than a lot of places) and support a lot of places (therapy, friends, family).
I haven't wound up in my modestly religious state by doing a cost-benefit analysis and concluding that it will be good for me -- I got here by trying to be open to the evidence and concluding that this is really how the Universe works. As far as I can tell, the Universe has a God in it, that God is kind and occasionally active, that God is illustratively and usefully described in parts by many of the world's major religions, but none of these religions have accurately and reliably gotten the whole picture, and neither have I; much of God's nature is currently unknown by humans. These are all sincere beliefs on my part. I couldn't choose to abandon them in favor of pure atheism any more than I could choose to abandon them in favor of fundamentalism or choose to stop believing in the theory of gravity or the theory of natural selection or the theory of supply and demand. I *could* be wrong about any of those, but unless and until someone shows me how and where I've made a mistake, I can't consciously choose to have a different opinion.
Anyway, thanks for the conversation so far; it's been very interesting to try to put this stuff into words.
AIDS is a hybrid of bovine leukemia and Visna-maedi virus from sheep... like Ebola, it was developed in Uganda during the reign of Idi Amin... by a company that was also manufacturing hepatitis B vaccines for the World Health Organization and still maintains a facility at Ft. Detrick . . . Gives a new wrinkle to the infamous "Raid on Entebbe" by the Israelis rescuing their weapon makers?
[On the History tab of the Zika virus product page, it states . . . Source: "Blood from experimental forest sentinel Rhesus monkey, Uganda, 1947." Name of Depositer: J Casals, Rockefeller Foundation]
Search . . . Eli Hvastkovs . . . Monsanto (Bayer)... Search... Biochemical applications of ultrathin films of enzymes, polyions and DNA... Genetically modified organisms and the weaponization of agriculture? I retort , you deride.
Jewish messianism has been spreading its poisonous message among us for nearly two thousand years. Democratic and communist universalisms are more recent, but they have only come to reinforce the old Jewish narrative. These are the same ideals.
The transnational, transracial, transsexual, transcultural ideals that these ideologies preach to us (beyond race, people, culture) and that are the daily sustenance of our schools, in the media, in our pop-culture, at our universities, and on our streets have our biosymbolic identity and our ethnic pride reduced to their minimal expression.
"even though the music is very real, its goodness is relative, not objective. . . . I think religion is a lot more like music than astronomy."
Applying this analogy back to the idea of religion, it sounds like your viewpoint is something like "Even though God is very real, His attributes / how you interpret His existence / what effect you think that has on you are relative, not objective."
If that's a fair statement of your view, then I think this is exactly the disagreement that RC is highlighting in the article. Christianity has as a Very Core Principle that the nature of God is absolutely, objectively, determinately true without any reference to the believer whatsoever. If there were no human beings left in the entire cosmos, that wouldn't do one whit to change the existence of God or any of His attributes (all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing etc.) In the Christian view, the nature of God is about as relative as the nature of gravity. It pulls on you regardless of what you think, and you'll be much better off if you live your life with an awareness of that fact.
So the key difference here is less the raw existence of God as such, and more the specific nature of that existence and what consequences that has on how we should live our lives. If you think that the specifics about God beyond "he's up there somewhere" are fundamentally unknowable with any kind of certainty, then you might be more inclined to slap a "coexist" bumper sticker on your car and get annoyed with people who tell you How To Religion. But if you think the other way, then the bumper sticker is laughable, because each of those religions is either right or it isn't, and there can only be one.
My core argument is epistemological, not ontological.
Suppose the Christian God really does objectively exist exactly like it says in the Bible. As humans, we would nevertheless be doomed to gather only subjective information about that God.
Right, like we both read the Bible and look at archaeological digs and study sociology and go to church and pray and so on. You have a personal religious experience that convinces you that mainstream Christianity is definitely true, and I do not. What are we to say about our differing conclusions? We both looked at the same data, but we made different observations. This occasionally happens to scientists for a decade or two, but eventually they settle their disagreements and get on the same page. By contrast, theologians have been arguing with each other for all of recorded history, and they show no signs of coming to a consensus.
That's what I mean when I say that knowledge about God is subjective -- it's not that there's no objective truth about God; it's just that such truth cannot be reliably obtained and shared from person to person.
I realize that it's a core part of some fundamentalist religions to assert that the truth *can* be reliably shared, but I just think they're wrong about that. The only people I know who insist that religious truth can be reliably shared are either very sheltered, or confused about what words mean, or using words in bad faith. To me it seems obvious that religious experience is unavoidably personal -- I can't go visit Noah's Ark or watch a video of the Resurrection the way I can go visit a dinosaur skeleton or watch a video of Uranus. The only way you can experience religious events is in the privacy of your own mind and heart -- you can tell me about them, but you can't share them with me the way you can share a fossil or a video.
"We both looked at the same data, but we made different observations. This occasionally happens to scientists for a decade or two, but eventually they settle their disagreements and get on the same page. By contrast, theologians have been arguing with each other for all of recorded history, and they show no signs of coming to a consensus."
Surely the fact that people argue about something doesn't imply that none of them are truly correct, right? Take the scientists: if they eventually come to a conclusion about some debated question, it doesn't start to be true only once they agree on it. Rather, one of the sides was always right, and they just were eventually able to prove the rightness of their view.
Yes, people have been arguing about theological questions for forever, but that isn't proof that none of them have a single objective right answer. It just shows that it's (often) more difficult to prove theological points than material ones.
"I realize that it's a core part of some fundamentalist religions to assert that the truth *can* be reliably shared, but I just think they're wrong about that."
Right, and naturally the people asserting that think they're correct. RC wasn't writing this article to resolve that difference, I don't think. He just wanted to point out that it IS a difference in viewpoints, and it's one that people (especially non-religious people) often don't take into consideration. That's where you get Coexist bumper stickers and people telling Christians that it's arrogant to try to convert others to Christianity. Whereas, if you acknowledge that Christians really do believe there is objective truth about God and that it can be known, then you can't expect them to be ok with statements like "all religions are equally valid."
Also please note that I'm not saying you here are guilty of doing that - obviously your viewpoint is a lot closer to "all religions are equally valid" than mine, but you aren't expecting that I express the same view. But there are people out there who think that you can a) adhere to Christianity, and b) accept that other religions are valid, and those are the people RC is talking about in the article.
Sure, that's fair -- and for what it's worth, I do appreciate RC's central point here! Some people really do promote generic coexistence too casually, without considering how a coexistence argument might come off as condescending. I think RC is correct to complain about that.
My main goal in writing my comment was to suggest one reason why some people might promote coexistence even when they're *not* being condescending about theology: they might believe, like me, that religious truths exist, but are very difficult to share. If reasonable people can't reasonably expect to converge on a single religious truth, then we might promote coexistence behaviors as a way of acknowledging that epistemological difficulty. Even if you are completely sure that there's only one right way of doing things, you might agree in practice to cheerfully tolerate many ways of doing things if you correctly foresee that (a) you won't be able to convince others that you're right, and (b) they will be justified in not being convinced that you're right, in the sense that you will not be able to show them evidence that ought to change their mind.
Prickgressives, Libertardians, and Cuckservatives all want a theocracy with its own “epistemology,” from either London Jew Karl Marx or from Russian Jew Ayn Rand, both were progenitors of the godless open borders multiculturalism plaguing the West today.
They all believe the same thing... they all believe their weenies come from heaven and that this gives them some sanctified right to be a divine prick playing god over the lives of others.
Mammonism and Bolshevism are Jewish stepsisters.
“Morality” and any associated ideal is rooted entirely in a presupposition some higher power defines what is correct for human behavior. And since you are a moral, religious person, you are supposed to “spread the other cheek” and do what the rabbi, priest or imam says.
People sometimes ask why it is that the European Left gets on so well with Muslims. Why does a movement that has often been overtly anti-religious take the side of a fierce religiosity that seems opposed to almost everything the Left has ever claimed to represent? Part of the explanation is that both Islam and Marxism have a common ideological root: Judaism.
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“Why are the Jews hated? It is the inevitable result of their laws. They either have to conquer everybody or be hated by the whole human race.” — François-Marie Voltaire
Right, that makes sense - and for what it's worth, I am definitely not of the brand of Christian that believes You Must Always Be Proselytizing Everyone You Meet Or You Are Failing As A Christian. Obviously I do believe that everyone would be better off as a believing Christian, but in practice that's just not something you can ram down people's throats. In fact, if you do that you'll likely just make them even less receptive to Christianity in the future.
So to the extent that qualifies as "coexisting", then I guess I am in favor. :)
Jewish messianism has been spreading its poisonous message among us for nearly two thousand years. Democratic and communist universalisms are more recent, but they have only come to reinforce the old Jewish narrative. These are the same ideals.
The transnational, transracial, transsexual, transcultural ideals that these ideologies preach to us (beyond race, people, culture) and that are the daily sustenance of our schools, in the media, in our pop-culture, at our universities, and on our streets have our biosymbolic identity and our ethnic pride reduced to their minimal expression.
I need to reread this a few times to make sure I grasp everything, but a post that has David Friedman (I didn't know he had a 'Stack!) AND CS Lewis (yay Great Divorce!) in the first bits has me too excited to not toss out some thoughts.
1: I think that, in a bit of a sideways manner, Friedman is actually defending Christianity a bit. He is essentially saying "This apparently contradiction need not actually be one." I don't know the status of Lewis' argument in Christian circles, or of "Hell is created by people, not so much God" arguments in general, but the descriptions of Hell in canon are pretty vague, so it doesn't seem inconsistent so much as just looking at it from another angle.
2: With the housefire example, I think there is a big gap in the analogy that makes it not work. You mention your friend saying "Why not just disbelieve the fire exists?" But housefires are observable without your metaphorical telescope. If you friend is standing outside your house, which is now a smoking ruin, saying "why didn't you just disbelieve?" is crazy. If your friend is standing outside your house, which is perfectly intact, saying "why didn't you disbelieve" is pretty sensible, as he sees no evidence that your house was actually on fire.
The latter case seems more accurate with the conception of religion: believers always seem wrong to non-believers. Even related religions have believers that think the followers of the other religion are crazy and wrong. If there was clear objective evidence ("Uhm, your house is fine, man, and the fire department seems really mad you called them out") on religion it would be less of an issue, but almost by definition religions are the bits that can't be proven.
3: I think the value of saying "I believe what I believe, and they believe what they believe, and we will find out who is right later I guess" with regards to religion has to do with the implied actions of that belief, the immediacy of the reactions, relative to the testability of the belief. In short, dark matter and God are (to most people) about equally testable: you and I can argue about which is "true" but we can't prove it. Further, beliefs about the existence of dark matter will change almost no one's behavior in anyway. Belief in religion might, up to and including killing people who don't share the beliefs. The combination of low testability and high imperatives of action is a very dangerous one, as most of recorded human history has born out. Saying something along the lines of "Look, I think I am right, you think you are right, but we aren't going to find out who is actually right until after we die, so let's just shut up about it since we have to live near each other and don't want to find out who is right any faster than we have to" is a pretty good plan. Hence the old etiquette doctrine that one doesn't discuss religion at social functions.
Now, I note that my formulation is a bit different from the one you use in the article. I think saying "I can't PROVE I am right, and neither can you" is better than saying "I might be wrong, and maybe you are", but in terms of behavior towards the other they are pretty similar. I would stand behind someone arguing that the "You don't know you are right" version should stop being used in favor of the "We can't settle this now" formulation, however.
So forgive me because I'm dashing this off early in the day so it's going to be a semantic mess:
1. I wasn't lying when I said I thought David approaches this from a place of good faith. I don't think I agree with him on most of where he goes from there, but I've never known David to be tricky/intentionally a dick about things, etc. He's a good guy, I like him, he has had a lot of patience with me in the past.
1a. I think if this was an argument that, say, my conception of hell as based on scripture was wrong (something like "hey, you are full to the brim with dante bullshit, the scriptures don't actually go that far or say what you think they say") I'd be a lot more open to it - like this article certainly wouldn't exist in that case.
But there's something subtly different going on here - In David's argument, he takes biblical assertions of the existence of a hell as a given (or else there's not a conflict) and doesn't resolve them by saying "but it doesn't say that, it's a metaphor" but instead by saying "It does say that, but god is an unreliable narrator - he says things when it suits him to optimize particular goals he has without regard for truth".
The first argument (the one that wasn't made) says "there's a truth, and you can know it, but you don't - let's move towards truth" and I'm completly fine with that kind of argument. I don't always end up agreeing, but like I have those a lot.
The second argument says "The bible says this, but you can just decide stuff the bible says is omittable; God might say certain things, but those things might also be whole-cloth lies". In doing so it sort of destroys any foundation by which one might (if they went with it) assert the bible is reliable and they are reasonable to rely on it.
2. So this is the tricky semantics thing. Here's what I don't have a problem with, at all:
*Bob shows up at my house, which I told him was burned in the housefire. He sees a completely intact house, and says "Why did you lie? There's clearly been no fire. I don't believe there was a fire, and of course you could have just kept sleeping - stop pretending fires exist when they don't.*
That's I think a pretty standard atheist argument against religion - you said this thing, I find the evidence unconvincing, and I'm saying you are wrong. That sort of argument isn't what this article is about - it's a different thing.
What I'm talking about is someone who says:
*I totally believe that you think there was a fire. I get you are saying it is real, and I'm not saying you should stop thinking it's real. But when a real fire disturbs your sleep, one convenient thing is to just keep sleeping - why didn't you do that?*
And what I'm saying is, a person who says this not only doesn't believe the fire was real (which is fine) and not only doesn't believe you believe it (which is fine), but is in addition to those things CLAIMING he believes that you believe it, that you think it's real, but is asking you (while saying he understands you think it's real) to treat it as if it's false.
I have a problem with that because it's first a little dishonest - if he really thinks you believe it, he knows "just lay in a fire and don't burn to death, it's easy" doesn't parse for you; bob saying things that would only make sense to you if you were lying about your belief, but won't come out and say that he thinks you are.
I have a problem with it second because it's paternalistic/condescending. If Bob said "you know, I don't believe there was a fire." he'd be respecting you enough to disagree with you in the way adults disagree with each other when they think they are wrong. But Bob is instead doing something like saying "Oof, my friend is so dumb and deceived and weird about this - I think deep down he knows I'm right, so I'll give him some outs where he can still do the song-and-dance but otherwise live and believe in the right way - the Bob way."
And that assumption grates - it's "I'm so clearly right that he secretly knows it, I'm sure. But he's so dumb I have to trick him; I'll let him keep his little wine-and-crackers stuff but otherwise act as a good atheist does", and I sort of hate it.
3. I think I'm fine with everything here, in the sense that if I came up to you and yelled "accept the truth of Christianity, right now!" I wouldn't expect you to convert based on just that one thing, and if you eventually said "I remain unconvinced" I couldn't say "well, I proved it to him out-and-out; he's just being unreasonable".
That's sort of the backwards way of saying, like, I don't hate atheists, I don't hate agnostics. I don't think an atheist who says "I don't agree with you" is doing something so particularly bad or novel I'd write an argument about it, or that an agnostic who says "you know, I don't exactly think you are proved wrong but I don't think you are proved right" is particularly bad either.
I certainly don't think I should try to convert you at the point of a knife, if that wasn't clear.
But at the same time I don't go to the atheist and say "listen, I know you don't believe in this stuff, totally get it, but certainly we agree you should adopt the entirety of Christian morality and philosophy, because it's clear to both of us I'm secretly right and your filthy atheist morality is sending you straight to hell". If I did, I'd be skipping a step - first converting him to the *reasons* Christian morality might be thought to be worthwhile.
RE 1: I am sure I do not know the entirety of the Biblical description of hell, but does it give specifics of what it is like? My memory is that it is pretty vague. Lewis was pretty comfortable describing it with remarkably little fire or brimstone, and he's always struck me as a careful fellow. It seems to me an argument could be made along the lines of "Look, I know the pit of fire with a bottom of ice like in The Inferno is the popular view, but that isn't strictly in the Bible. It is quite possible that it isn't God deciding that you need to be punished, but rather you are punishing yourself by rejecting God and staying there." It seems to me that Friedman directly citing Lewis is his way of saying that he doesn't think scripture defines Hell the way it is in popular imagination.
Granted, that argument can be totally ruined by biblical descriptions of hell I am unaware of :D In that case, Friedman either wants you to ignore what the Bible says, or is unaware the Bible says that, I guess.
2: I think you are operating from a slightly different perspective here than I am. You wake up thinking your room is on fire, and act accordingly. I come by the next morning and see your totally intact house while you tell me your room was on fire. I can understand your BELIEVED your house was on fire, although since it clearly was not I would (personally) be inclined to ask why you believed it was on fire. Potentially I might point to the giant red neon sign across the street that always casts a red glow in your house, or the fact your thermostat was set to like 95 degrees by accident, or your fake fire nightlight you have for some reason, and suggest that maybe that was why you believed your room was on fire, and suggest that maybe you should take a beat to consider if your room is really on fire next time.
That is why the house fire analogy is a bad choice for this topic: it is too easily objectively confirmed. If you can really easily check whether the room was or was not actually on fire, arguing about the belief is silly. You need something that is impossible to objectively confirm for the argument to make sense. Maybe like "You believe your wife is cheating on you. Simply not believing that is true anymore is not a solution" or the like?
3: I have definitely had someone make that last paragraph's argument to me, almost verbatim. :D It is very hard for people to really grasp that other people don't believe the same things they believe. That's why almost all political discourse is a matter of "The other side is EVIL" and not just "The other side is mistaken, or cares about things I don't." The possibility that we just don't agree on the facts, interpret the facts differently, or even have facts to disagree about, rarely enters people's minds.
(Of course, sometimes the other side is, in fact, evil.)
So I think we are sort of circling two different venn-overlap arguments here, I'm gonna try to break out of that but if I'm repeating myself I'm sorry, not trying to be douchey:
1. Imagine a version of the story where David comes forth and says "You know, I think the bible says there's a hell, but I think you probably have the wrong image of it. Here's an argument from the BIble that says, like, it might be different than you think. I understand the bible ends up being a big source of truth for you, and I don't want to contradict it's power as you understand it, but I think you might be reading it wrong.
I think this is sort of what Lewis argues (and it's been a while, so grain of salt) and I think that's sort of what you are saying you read David as saying. But I think in fact David says this:
2. Let's assume that the bible has hell as a *pretty bad place of afterlife suffering that god sends people too under some situations*. I don't find that to be productive, and I don't like it, and I don't think you should like it either. But we are moving forward under the assumption that the bible says it. Let's further assume that the bible says that because God wanted it to - that this is messaging from God.
I think that's a defensible framing of what david says - he doesn't bring up mis-reads, or that hell is a place people choose to go rather than being sent there. The framing is "Hell is a place god sends people to, and this is inconsistent with a benevolent god, and yet god has said there's a hell - how do we bring these things together?" And that's supported by:
3. David then says that the logical thing is to conclude that the words of the bible are wrong, despite being words from god, because god is both a ends-means utilitarian and a liar.
So I sort of left the "is there a hell, is it like david says, is that inconsistent with a benevolent god" arguments hanging, because they are all pretty big topics (and this isn't explicitely an apologetics blog, in a lot of ways). But I brought up one element of what I do have a problem with - that David's framing says "I know you believe this is real, but certainly you can just start believing it says something it doesn't, right?". Like that's the scope - how it treats things like "truth" and "belief" as valid words you can apply to something you are simultaniously saying "well, any part of this could be a lie, as could anything god is saying, so pick and choose as suits you.".
On the housefire stuff:
I think the perspective difference we are running into is that you are framing it as something like:
1. I tell you there's a housefire, you verify to your satisfaction there wasn't, or just disbelieve me (not being tricky, but it's irrelevant to my argument which)
2. You then openly take the time to convince me there wasn't a housefire
3. If successful, you then convince me that since there wasn't a housefire (which we now agree on) that I can ignore the non-existant implications of the housefire.
In real terms, this might look like:
1. You are an atheist who is aware I'm religious
2. You convince that I'm wrong and you are right - my religion is false
3. Since we both agree on that, we both agree the religion doesn't have any real binding power over what I think about anything.
Because you did the work in 1 and 2, you easily justify 3. When you propose 3, it makes sense to both of us.
But the metaphor is seeming weird there for you *specifically because* you are assuming 1-2 happen, and my whole complaint is that they don't. So in the actual metaphor, what happens is:
1. I say there's a housefire
2. You say "yes, OK"
3. You say "you know, why didn't you just sleep through the housefire?"
And I get whiplash.
The difference is that the metaphor isn't about observability - it's about your understanding of my beliefs as I hold them, *independent of whether or not you would believe in the same thing*. If you understand that I think there's a real god who is real in the same way a REAL housefire is, (regardless of whether or not you yourself believe it), then saying "Just sleep through the housefire" doesn't parse.
If someone does those 1-2 steps, none of this complaint actually applies to them. It's people who say "I know you belive there was a housefire, and I'm not trying to convince you there wasn't, but housefires are safe and have zero implications to your health" that this rails against.
Again, hoping I'm not coming off as weird here - trying to clarify is hard. The takeaway is that none of this is an argument for Christianity being real and thus you having to pretend it is. I'm actually saying you don't have to and shouldn't pretend - that you should feel comfortable saying "This isn't real, so it has no implications" instead of "Even if this is real, it has no implications".
RE: Housefire: I think we are kind of on the same page, except where we end up. I just think the housefire is a bad metaphor because the intuition is too different. I can easily see whether there was a fire or not. We should not get stuck on the question of whether you SHOULD believe there was a house fire or not, because it should be easily verifiable whether or not it happened, and upon doing that, the should of believing is solved as well.
The real issue is that we can't verify whether you are wrong or not on the matter of Hell of whatever, so the question of whether you should believe it or not cannot be answered. (At best we can quibble about inconsistencies, but the plan is ineffable, so we aren't going to figure it out enough to convince someone else.) The question stops at "Do you believe this to be true?" If the answer is Yes, then the only thing left is to see you act accordingly, because I can't really argue that you should believe it to be true or not. Not like I can with the fire.
That's why I thought maybe the infidelity thing might be a better metaphor. If you think your wife is cheating on you, chances are really slim I am going to prove that one way or the other. All that is left is "Given you believe it, what should you do?" not "Should you believe it." Asking you to act as though you don't believe it is not likely to help anything, as you say. Arguably, once you start to believe it, the damage is done unless it can be proven false.
I will take some time to reread Friedman's post and yours before I comment more on that. I still feel like I don't quite get why there is as much contention there as there is.
But the thing is, God does not exist in the same way as a falling piano or a house fire. If He did, science would have detected Him by now. He still exists, but His existence does not work like those things. It works like this:
And I would be wary about leaning too hard on words when it comes to God. The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. Christianity really needs to get a shot of the Eastern religions, and viceversa: the Eastern religions are too light on Good Works.
You say you want to convert others to Christianity, but your take on Christianity seems to be fundamentalist, which is a very hard sell. At least as of right now, I don't know what is the difference between you and a fundamentalist, and this is a particular thing you need to address if you are indeed not a fundamentalist.
As to Good Works, a good Christian has an obligation to sign the Giving What We Can Pledge (https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge). Jesus did say you are going to Hell if you don't help others (what you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me), so I think this is much more important than the things most Christians spend most of their time on.
Is there a Hell? Maybe. I don't dwell too much on it, because if there truly is a Hell, it seems like it's a dicey business avoiding it. According to the Orthodox, the closer you get to God, the more you become aware of the depth of your sin, such that the saints, who are closest to God than anyone, would never say they are close to God.
I focus more on Earthly suffering, and trust that God will smile on me for that.
Also, as to knowing God, I think you need to engage with other scriptures to get to know Him better, as per our previous discussion. They're all touching the same elephant. The Bhagavad Gita is a great start.
I think there's a couple things in here that are sort of illustrative of what I'm talking about. So there's an idea first that like, OK, god doesn't exist - he's just sort of an amorphous cloud of unknowability if anything. Which is sort of vaguely what I think of as the "spiritualist" view, and I didn't get into real heavily here.
So when you go from that, you end up saying things like "fundamentalist Christianity is a very hard sell". Which, yes, sure, it is - it makes a lot of demands, it has things in it that disagree with people, it says that authority exists, and you should follow it, etc.
And in amorphous-cloud-god religion, why would you do that? He's fairly unknowable, so you take the good-vibes stuff and you are set. But if any of this is *real and knowable* - i.e. if god has any characteristics you can pin down - it doesn't matter if it's a hard sell, because the bigger question is "is it true".
And I think that's the big question for the average atheist as well - like not "does it feel nice", because there's lots of ways to feel nice and it's not like the Atheist doesn't know about community reruns and Hao Miyazaki's Ponyo. The atheist thinks it's not real, but he thinks it's important that it's not real - that the truth of whether or not there's a piano with real characteristics matters.
From there it gets a little confusing, because your claim here and elsewhere is, listen, there's a god. But you can't know what he is to any super granular degree, it's all distorted through human lenses and you can't tell anyone they are wrong or right.
This is confusing because you sometimes (here and elsewhere, like in the plugpost) will then turn around and say "But, listen, you HAVE to do this, here's a characteristic of god I know IS true, and I'm sure about it, and I'm commanding you to do it, and there IS a solid truth to be had".
I'm not sure how to get those two things to work together. Because on the one hand, you give me "All religions are true, even where they conflict, they all reflect the same light, but that light is vague and distorted" but then go to "But you must do this, this is true in a piano way" when it's something you like. And those seem in conflict to me - like at once demanding that my book has no power and real authority.
Yeah. There's a whole Christian book called The Cloud of Unknowing for a reason.
I don't understand what is so confusing about the noisy signal model. There actually is signal in there, that's why one can command certain things. Or you might prefer Guenon's model, that the religions are all basically like different languages: they sound and look wildly different, but they're getting at the same thing regardless, which is the inexpressible metaphysical truth. The proverbial finger pointing at the moon.
So you're a fundamentalist? For which Christianity? I guess all I can say to that is that if there is an upside to modernity knocking the wind out of the sails of religion, is that fundamentalism is a powerless fringe. The world ill needs more wars of religion. But talking someone out of fundamentalism is like talking someone out of QAnon, so I don't really know how to do that. This is a real bummer you just told me.
We can't afford healthcare for American children because we have to bomb everybody else's for the love of Jesus and Israel . . . The American Israeli Political Action Committee has become the new official religion of the United States government . . .
Jewish messianism has been spreading its poisonous message among us for nearly two thousand years. Democratic and communist universalisms are more recent, but they have only come to reinforce the old Jewish narrative. These are the same ideals.
The transnational, transracial, transsexual, transcultural ideals that these ideologies preach to us (beyond race, people, culture) and that are the daily sustenance of our schools, in the media, in our pop-culture, at our universities, and on our streets have our biosymbolic identity and our ethnic pride reduced to their minimal expression.
The Frankfurt School adapted Marx’s theories on revolution to include Freud’s theory of the subconscious. The Cultural Marxists’ main focus was to reshape the subconscious of Western men and women and thus create new type of person: one who would react passively to provocations of all kinds.
//Jesus did say you are going to Hell if you don't help others (what you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me)//
I don't think this is what that verse means at all. Do you think this is a common interpretation? (It seems radical to me, as someone very familiar with it.
//if there truly is a Hell, it seems like it's a dicey business avoiding it.//
Per Christianity, it's not "easy" but very straight-forward as to how to avoid it. Being close to God is necessary; in fact it's impossible and widely preached to be so. All of human life is a process of sanctification, striving towards yet never achieving.
//I think you need to engage with other scriptures to get to know Him better//
I personally think there is much value to be found in scriptures of other religions, but why would a Christian seek to engage with non-Inspired, human words to get closer to God rather than engaging with the specific Word directly from Him in the first place? Seems counterintuitive on it's face.
//Jesus did say you are going to Hell if you don't help others (what you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me)//
Matthew 25:31-46 says this pretty explicitly, including, "Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison and you did not care for me.'" (Then the people ask, "When did all that happen?" and he explains that anything you did not do for anyone, you did not do for him.)
I get that, but to then take that verse as evidence that you need to go to a particular website and sign up for an arbitrary pledge seems laughable at best, no?
It's not an arbitrary pledge, it's a commitment to give 10% of your income to effective charities. Which might not be enough to spare you Jesus' wrath, since there sure are a lot of brethren suffering, but it's definitely way more than nearly everyone is doing.
It is arbitrary bc The Bible doesn't require that. In fact, a tithe of 10% isn't even required in the NT at all since the old covenant was fulfilled. Who says 10% is enough? Or too much? What verse says giving to "effective charities" instead of directly to the church or to missionaries or directly to brothers and sisters in need in the community is better? (There isn't one; it's arbitrary. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea at all! Just that it's not grounded in Scripture.)
Jesus literally said that if you want to be perfect to give all you own to the poor. He also said that with God, all things are possible, such that if you fail at giving everything, you might yet be forgiven. And yet, do you really want to test the Lord? How sure are you Jesus will not say to you 'I never knew you, depart from me'?
By the standards of Jesus, 10% may not be enough, because he did ask for 100%. But 10% is much more than 0%, it's much more than most people do. Giving it to an effective charity helps the poor far more than other uses, and Jesus was all about helping the poor. It also doesn't have to be the only good work you do.
> God doesn't want our income, he wants our hearts.
It's both actually. The Eastern Orthodox have this term, prelest, which means spiritual delusion. It is possible to think, to feel, your spirituality is real, that you have a real connection to God, and yet be completely deluded.
The only true spiritual paths, of any religion, involve doing good works, and giving 10% of your income to effective altruism is some of the best work you can do. Effective altruists are mostly atheists: don't let atheists beat you at charity! Getting serious about good works is the only way to know whether your spirituality is real. Because that one is a real test, a real inconvenience, it's not something that only happens within you, where it is easy to think you are one thing and yet be another.
Is it straightforward? Then whence Calvinism? Why all the different Christian sects? How do you know you are close to God and not deluded by literally Satan?
> why would a Christian seek to engage with non-Inspired, human words
That's the thing, the other scriptures are also Inspired. They are basically God speaking in a different language.
We can get into all the other weeds you've brought up another time. Suffice it to say, Jesus did not say 'go to a website that will be created 2,000 after I die and sign a pledge by some randos lest your salvation be at stake.' That's the extent of my criticism there. I'm always leery of people saying "I have a cause and the Scripture says you have to support my cause." No. Maybe it aligns, maybe it doesn't, but it's not new Scripture.
//That's the thing, the other scriptures are also Inspired. They are basically God speaking in a different language.//
This is a radical claim and seems to be mutually exclusive with belief in the Bible as God-inspired as they're in conflict. It's a fun assertion you've made but, respectfully, nothing more than an assertion.
It's charity. Christians are known for their charity, and that particular charity is very effective. They have a calculator there which shows how many lives your money will save. It's not about the pledge, it's about giving 10% of your income to worthy charities. That may sound steep, but someone spiritually developed should be able to handle such sacrifice. You can give some other amount if 10% is too much, though you shouldn't sign the pledge if you do that.
The people who took that pledge are mostly atheists and they are outdoing Christians in charity, which seems wrong. I don't think Jesus will be pleased at such an outcome.
Let me clarify, I'm not suggesting that 10% is a lot nor that giving to charities is bad. I'm suggesting that the majority of Christians ALREADY DO THIS via other avenues and that given Christian charitable giving has been around for 2,000 years and this website has been around for..... less, signing THIS particular pledge is arbitrary. It's probably great! But it's also redundant and unnecessary for the vast majority of practicing Christians. Therefore trying to leverage Scripture to say signing THIS pledge and giving in THIS way is silly.
//The people who took that pledge are mostly atheists and they are outdoing Christians in charity//
I'll accept your stat, but also, this pledge is but one [arbitrary] area people can give. Per Pew Research, the religious are 66% more likely to volunteer their time and give >4x the annual charitable donations of those with no religious affiliations.
I'm sure you can recognize this pledge is neither the only option nor represents the comprehensive giving across the world, right?
> I'm sure you can recognize this pledge is neither the only option nor represents the comprehensive giving across the world, right?
Definitely, I agree to that. However, some charitable efforts are more effective than others, and money and time given to effective charities does more good than otherwise. Many charities have a problem where most of the money goes to the charity itself rather than helping people. It can get messy trying to figure out how to do the most good with your time and money: how do you weigh the suffering of your community against the suffering of Africa? Both should be helped, but the precise ratio is up to you.
And effective charities are very effective: $100 given to the Against Malaria Foundation gives a year of healthy life to a child. That kind of bang for your buck can't be easily got elsewhere.
Different Christians interpret the information they have about Christianity, whether from the Bible or inspiration or some other source, differently. One way of deciding which interpretation to accept is by testing the alternatives for internal consistency. If interpretation A is consistent with everything else you believe about Christianity and interpretation B is not, that is a reason to prefer A.
We do the same thing with fires. If I wake up, observe a fire in my bedroom but don't smell any smoke or feel myself being burned by the flames, I conclude that there isn't really a fire in my bedroom. Either I am dreaming or something, perhaps a prank hologram set up by my roommate, is creating the visual effect of a fire but not the other sensory effects one would expect to accompany it. I am not changing the nature of the fire by an act of my mind, I am using my mind to draw conclusions about the nature of the fire.
We do it routinely in interpreting people. If someone tells me something implausible, I interpret it as a true but surprising fact, a mistake by the person telling it, or a lie, according to which explanation is most consistent with what I know of the person and the relevant circumstances.
My post was applying that approach to religion. The standard account of Hell seems inconsistent with the rest of what Christianity teaches about the nature of God. I offered an explanation about why God might want people to believe it even if it wasn't true.
For an example of a Christian doing the same thing in a less extreme way, consider the picture of Hell that C.S. Lewis offers in _The Great Divorce_. No fire, no devils torturing anyone, just people in reasonably comfortable circumstances trapped in the imperfections of their own souls, all of them with at least the possibility of making it to Heaven eventually. Lewis doesn't say God is lying, but he pretty clearly implies that the conventional understanding of what God says is a misinterpretation, and he forms a conjecture about what is really happening based on consistency with the rest of what he believes about God.
I am not saying "if you don't believe in Hell it won't exist," which is what your fire metaphor implies. I am saying "here are reasons not to believe that Hell exists."
I responded to this post over on DSL in one way, going to do basically the same thing here:
***Different Christians interpret the information they have about Christianity, whether from the Bible or inspiration or some other source, differently.***
This is essentially part of an argument that a Christian is wrong to believe they are right that's getting repurposed here. But it's an odd fit here - note that what we are talking about is you going to someone who *believes* they are right - that they believe in a real, knowable thing. As stated several times in the article, the "A Christian is Wrong to Believe Themselves Right" isn't so much the topic here.
And to that note, if your article had started "Christians are clearly wrong, or at least have no good reason to believe what they do. Since that's the case, they shouldn't treat the words of their scriptures or perceived messages from their god as important - they can be disregarded", then this article wouldn't exist. But the conceit of your piece is that this is something that believing Christians can use to resolve an inconvenience, and I took you at your word and responded in that context.
*** One way of deciding which interpretation to accept is by testing the alternatives for internal consistency. ***
This is doing an enormous amount of sophist work. Note that you presented two and only two things that are "internal" - that to your knowledge the bible claims there's a sort of hell, and that god claims he's omnibenevolent. But your alternatives are not only not internal, but they are *far more clearly inconsistent with the text* than what you say you want to resolve.
Recall that your solution here is to say "The bible and indeed the straight faced, literal claims of your deity are unreliable". These are not only inconsistent with the claims of both the deity as represented in the book and the book itself, but in fact (if true) render both completely unreliable in every way; you say to get rid of "Hell exists" and "God is Honest", but you could have just as easily gotten rid of "God is Benevolent" and "Jesus lived".
"We do the same thing with fires. If I wake up, observe a fire in my bedroom but don't smell any smoke or feel myself being burned by the flames, I conclude that there isn't really a fire in my bedroom. Either I am dreaming or something, perhaps a prank hologram set up by my roommate, is creating the visual effect of a fire but not the other sensory effects one would expect to accompany it. I am not changing the nature of the fire by an act of my mind, I am using my mind to draw conclusions about the nature of the fire."
Yet note that you acknowledge outside sources of data here - the heat of the flames, the smell of smoke. And if those were present, at some point you'd reach a standard at which you believed there was a fire - and importantly, you'd THEN ACT AS IF THE FIRE WAS REAL.
In this case, people have come to you and said "There is a thing I think was real". And without an attempt at proving it's not, you are just asking them to continue forward as if it you have - as if they believe the sources of their belief are unreliable and false.
In a way that's really odd to me, your repeated (implied) request is that I go "oh, nope, you got me - I never was all that certain or had any real belief here. I forgot. The bible is a fabrication of a liar-god, sure, why not, it's as good as anything else.". To the point where I wonder if you've ever actually known someone who believes in any aspect of it in a way they wouldn't hand-wave away if asked nicely enough.
*** We do it routinely in interpreting people. If someone tells me something implausible, I interpret it as a true but surprising fact, a mistake by the person telling it, or a lie, according to which explanation is most consistent with what I know of the person and the relevant circumstances. ***
This is a point at which I start suspecting that you are being sort of willfully blind to certain aspects of the conversation. And I say that because your request here is that the believer switch to a view where both their scriptures and their god hold no truth value - And then say "But just do it! It's not a big deal! Like there's literally nothing to see here - just declare any foundation you might think for your faith to be thought true false or unknowable, and pretend that has no implications".
But this is a really big ask! It's saying "listen, your god can't be trusted. And the scriptures that say he can can't be trusted, obviously - once you accept the first it's tautologically true that they are false. And this leaves nothing but your personal preferences, what you like to pretend about the religion. But I'll still sort of paternalistically say you 'believe" it, no worries.".
*** Lewis doesn't say God is lying, but he pretty clearly implies that the conventional understanding of what God says is a misinterpretation, and he forms a conjecture about what is really happening based on consistency with the rest of what he believes about God.***
I'm not against arguing with Lewis, but why do you think this is relevant here? Lewis says "you may have misunderstood - here's an argument as to why you might have.". And whether or not that argument is right, it's a certain thing.
You say "Listen, neither the book nor the god are reliable - it's not just a misunderstanding, when god says something it's not trustworthy." and here you present that as if it's similar, but it's not. It comes with a different (and huge) set of implications.
There's a sense that you want me to accept that "perhaps you've misunderstood what was said in your source of truth" as equivalent to "Your source of truth is lying to you, there was nothing to misunderstand, you were misled by your deity himself", but of course I don't. They are massively different arguments. The first Christians have all the time; the second destroys the entirety of Christianity in one swoop.
RC, don't we Christians (a) usually concede we can't know the nature of God, but (b) still try to figure out what we can?
I basically posted this downstream, but I think there are four or so reasonable possibilities on this dispute.
1) Hell exists, and God is going to condemn some number of people to unimaginable torment.
2) God is not going to condemn anyone to an afterlife of eternal torment. If so,
a) This is not a problem because the Bible doesn't say He is. (I'm not sure on this point.)
b) If you're not a believer in an infallible Bible, it could be that one of the authors or translators just got it wrong.
c) The authors of the Bible did in fact accurately record the revelation of God that people are going to be condemned, but they're not going to because (i) of Jesus's sacrifice and/or (ii) God lied.
I don't think those are bad faith or unreasonable questions. If a given person is confident that God has committed to sending people to torment in the afterlife and that God never lies, even for the greater good, than that person can explain their reasoning.
I'd be interested in that discussion, although I personally resolve a lot of these by shrugging my shoulders and leaving the questions of whether God is going to send people to Hell and whether He's willing to lie up to God.
(On a similar note, in a discussion of the Problem of Evil ages ago, I suggested you could solve the problem with Berkleyian solipsism - if you are the only real person in the universe, then maybe the universe was created solely for your growth and development, and all the people who died without hearing the word of Jesus or had it better or worse than you are just NPCs, and the other people you meet in Heaven will have grown up in *their* bespoke universes. I don't believe it, but it's an interesting exploration of the philosophical problem, at least to me)
Nice job. Let me argue a little further along the lines of Neptune beliefs.
1. As far as I know, none of us religious folk have a 100% accurate model of God. Most of us, I suspect, would grant that it's *impossible* for a human to do so in this life.
2. Most of us spend some time wonder about or trying to figure out the nature of God in more detail, either out of a desire to be more like Him, to follow his guidance, or just curiousity.
3. Hell as a place of eternal torment does present some problems for my model of benevolence, and probably for most people's. Heck, even *creating* a universe where some people are going to be consigned to eternal torment strikes me as questionable. So what's going on?
a. It's possible that like the existence of evil, the certainty of eternal torment for some (maybe even most!) is a part of an incomprehensible but good plan, a logical requirement of a greater good, etc.
b. Or it's possible that no one is going to be eternally tormented after death. For example:
i. Maybe we've misunderstood the Bible.
ii. Maybe the Bible authors or translators misunderstood God.
iii. Or maybe God lied for the greater good. After all, if we grant He can consign intelligent beings to eternal torment for the greater good, maybe He can also lie? And if we don't like him lying, then where were we when He created leviathan, etc.?
David's on 3.b.iii, but I don't see it as telling someone not to believe in a burning house. It's more testing the conclusion from the premises. (E.g. "As you fled the burning house, you heard a ghostly voice telling you to go faster. One possibility is that you dreamt the fire - have you checked?")
And I think that is reasonable - the questions David's hypothesis raises are (a) how do we know that God is going to burn people in Hell, and (b) how do we know that God doesn't lie? Those are fair questions, IMHO.
(Of course, there's a separate issue, which is that if GOD decided that the greatest good is to lie to people about Hell, then it might be very harmful for us to expose that lie.)
Jewish messianism has been spreading its poisonous message among us for nearly two thousand years. Democratic and communist universalisms are more recent, but they have only come to reinforce the old Jewish narrative. These are the same ideals.
The transnational, transracial, transsexual, transcultural ideals that these ideologies preach to us (beyond race, people, culture) and that are the daily sustenance of our schools, in the media, in our pop-culture, at our universities, and on our streets have our biosymbolic identity and our ethnic pride reduced to their minimal expression.
Sorry dude, but I'm totally into Jewish messianism, and appreciate what He did for me. I'll pray for you, though, so you're a little bit covered either way.
Sounds to me like Friedman needs to read some Old Testament. God is benevolent, sure, but he is also just. One of the bible's fundamental assertions is that it is no cruelty on the part of God if he sends everyone to Hell, because we are worthy of such a punishment. Honestly, it's hammered home frequently enough that I'm not sure why he sees an issue here.
Past that, his proposed solution is also pretty off the wall. The virtue of telling the truth and dealing transparently with others is another very consistent ongoing theme in the bible. It would be really weird if the all-powerful, all-knowing deity that founded this religion which holds truth in such high regard was a rampant liar, telling his people whatever fiction would make them behave best.
Alright, got that out of my system. You take a much more interesting approach than me, this was a good read! Interesting how a mere backdrop of non-belief can fundamentally change what beliefs we encourage others to pick up, even in a non-confrontational way.
The Bible is bullshit . . . Jewish messianism has been spreading its poisonous message among us for nearly two thousand years. Democratic and communist universalisms are more recent, but they have only come to reinforce the old Jewish narrative. These are the same ideals.
The transnational, transracial, transsexual, transcultural ideals that these ideologies preach to us (beyond race, people, culture) and that are the daily sustenance of our schools, in the media, in our pop-culture, at our universities, and on our streets have our biosymbolic identity and our ethnic pride reduced to their minimal expression.
Yay! As a Christian-turned-atheist, I can’t tell you how much I’ve been hoping you’d write something in this vein, and I hope you write more. While I am leaning pretty heavily anti-Theist these days, I would love to be able to believe there is someone/something making sure everything will turn out alright in the end.
I’m not sure if I’ve been especially fortunate, or you’ve been especially unfortunate, but I’ve never encountered an atheist arguing like they do in your article. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, atheism, etc can’t all be true; at most, one accurately reflects reality. My journey to atheism was founded on that premise. The more I investigated, the more I found Christianity didn’t line up with reality. And that foundation lines up with all the other atheists I’ve encountered, especially the ex-Christian ones. The only way I’d ever argue “you should be comfortable admitting that ALL religions are real and true, and equally valid” would be to point out that you find all other religions unbelievable; why not Christianity too?
I’m very familiar with the problem of reconciling a perfectly good god with hell, but solving it by claiming god is lying - that’s new to me. I don’t think it’s fair to generalize his argument though - its strength is dependent on how serious the goodness/hell dichotomy is. Generalized, the argument is of course rather ridiculous - if there’s something about my religion I don’t like, simply throw it out. But as Han Solo says, “That’s not how the Force works!” However, I think this is a special case, like so: “My religion teaches X. X is fundamentally incompatible with my values, and/or logically inconsistent. Now what?” The approach I took, and many other ex-Christians take, is to say “Huh, maybe my religion is wrong. Let’s look into that.” Another approach is to change your values to line up with your beliefs. That’s the approach I used to take regarding homosexuality - I didn’t see anything wrong with it, but the Bible seemed to, so I grudgingly accepted I must be wrong. David Friedman’s takes another approach here, which is to posit something unsupported by (and in fact counter to) his religious texts. I see that as a simple effort to save his beliefs. He’d rather see God as a benevolent liar rather than give up his belief in God entirely. Or from a more rational perspective, he finds a lying god more probable than a non-existent one.
A minor aside that I find interesting is that he posits something completely untestable. There is absolutely no way we can distinguish a lying god from a truthful one in these matters. If god says “your head will explode if you travel faster than 100mph,” that’s something we can test out for ourselves. But if god says “if you don’t follow me in life, I will punish you after death,” we have absolutely nothing to go on except for his word. We will never, and can never, know if David Friedman’s theory is correct. It’s completely untestable.
On the Neptune beliefs, I’d like to dig into this more, but my thoughts aren’t complete yet and this comment is already pretty long. My short thoughts are, I’d say what religion does is tell you you aren’t allowed to use a telescope, but instead have to rely on a special Neptune-detector. But it only works when detecting Neptune, gives ambiguous data, and disagrees with alternative Neptune-dectors that claim to do the same thing. That’s where apologetics comes in, to explain why a particular Neptune-dector is the right one. Atheism posits that maybe the reason why there’s so many competing detectors, and why telescopes can’t seem to find Neptune, is that there isn’t a Neptune at all. Instead maybe what we’re seeing is like the case of the weird orbit of Mercury. That was explained not by finding another planet, but by discovering that our concept of gravity was incomplete. In the same way, maybe evolution, culture, psychology, etc can better explain why religions exist than anything supernatural can.
Anyway, those are my thoughts after reading the article. Biggest takeaway I’d like to give is that most of the atheists I’ve encountered, myself included, believe in truth and reality. The idea that they view truth as relative is something I heard that they did when I was a Christian, but haven’t actually seen in real life. Also, apologies if any of this is a rehash of other comments; I wanted to respond directly to the article before reading any of them.
So a couple thoughts on this, sort of out of order:
On atheists accepting truth and reality:
I think atheists broadly DO have a standard for truth and reality, oddly. Like if I go to an atheist and say "the world is flat" I don't expect them to go "whatever, brother, it's all just impressions - if I have a different impression, what's the problem?". I expect them to tell me it's round, and most would.
It's just in this weird pocket situation that it deviates from that.
On Neptune beliefs:
I think this metaphor is sort of nice in the sense that it does a certain thing well - it sort of illustrates where some people are coming from, in that they are trying to a very specific thing they do with math, like sort of fermi estimates for fun and profit, which works well there.
Where the metaphor falters a bit is when I try to stretch it to transition to the next section. Because I think it implies that what I'm trying to get at is that YOU should accept the use of my telescope (say in this case the Bible) as good evidence. Which isn't really what I'm going for - it was more an attempt to say something like "Listen, these are the things we use to derive information about the god we worship. And if you sort of take those away, what you are left with is purely internal sources - whatever a given individual imagines. And that's not much to leave". If that makes sense.
On the Han Solo Section:
David is an agnostic AFAIK and he states in places. I think there might still be sort of semi-beliefs about gods that he prefers, or something - he might be defending those still. But aside from that, I accept that the greater the disparity/problem a person sees, the more motivated they might be to figure it out.
In a weird way, there's a point at which if someone was saying "hey, I've thought of this great solution - I'll just get rid of the parts I don't much like", I'd probably (assuming I couldn't salvage things entirely, so to speak) actually just recommend they went the atheism or agnostic route; it's actually closer to Christianity in some sense, in that it still thinks "is this real" is an important question, as opposed to some "this might be good enough" middle ground.
On Neptune - You’re right, I may have been stretching the metaphor a bit.
On Han Solo - if he’s agnostic that changes my reading a bit. I had assumed he was Christian, that’s my error.
Your last paragraph - fully agree! Truth is paramount, wherever that leads. Only minor quibble is that I don’t think a person can completely “choose” to become atheist or agnostic. You can choose to behave as if you are, and choose to admit it to yourself or not, but I’m not convinced we choose our beliefs per se. But I can see saying to someone, “Hey, if you’re just going to throw out the parts you don’t like, why bother saying you believe? Aren’t you just forming a group of things you like rather than things you think are true?”
And finally, back to atheists accepting truth and reality (ignoring agnostics for now, they may be completely different in this case). In my experience, religion is one of the _only_ places I’m sure atheists will take a hard stance on truth and reality. They may be moral relativists, they may admit the benefits of religion regardless whether or not they are true, but on the truth claims of religions themselves they’ll have definite views. Maybe we just have encountered different circles of atheists (mine is primarily ex-Christian), but at least within my circle truth reigns supreme. I know that's how I became an atheist. I struggled to find reasons to believe, wanted to believe, but in the end wasn't convinced. It's about what's really there or not. Reality doesn't care what I, or anyone else, wants.
In order not to mislead people, I should make it clear that I was not talking about my beliefs. I'm an atheist sympathetic to religious beliefs — several of my favorite authors were serious Christians — but not sharing them. I was simply pointing out one way in which a Christian could resolve an apparent inconsistency in Christian doctrines.
I second this, in the sense that David isn't unclear about this anywhere, and in the sense that he's not someone I think of as hostile to Christianity.
I agree with what you're saying here and I think you highlight a HUGE chasm between people arguing about things from the religious or non religious perspective.
It's always felt to me that there is a certain blindness on the non-believer side. Many of them seem to be running a "they cannot possibly REALLY (truly, really, the way we both believe in rocks) believe in this stuff" theme in their heads. This often leads to a vilification of believers. Non believers attribute malicious, manipulative or predatory intent to believers because the idea that someone could possibly believe that, idk, someone could go to hell for eternity if they reject Jesus just doesn't compute for them on some very basic emotional level.
You can apply this to pretty much every contentious social and ethical issue: sexual behaviour, abortion, religious observance, blasphemy, proselytising, other religions, afterlife you name it. Nonbelievers just ignore that telescope.
I'm writing all this as a lifetime atheist leaning occasionally agnostic, who grew up in a non-believer family in a extremely Christian culture. And it STILL tooke into my late 40s and it took a death of a very close person to get this. I was talking to someone highly religious after my bereavement, and she was kind and not pushy or evangelising, and it struck me then, like a true revelation: she REALLY believes death is not the end. She's not just saying it. She's not suspending disbelief. She's not using this notion as a symbol for memory. Or comfort. Or anything like that. She's sad because the person who died isn't here and because I'm sad, but she ABSOLUTELY believes they still REALLY exist and probably also that she will meet them again. And that blew my mind. Because it meant that communication and connection was impossible between us. Despite her empathy and kindness. We differed in such a fundamental way in our perception of reality, we'd always run into the elephant of "he's dead -- not REALLY".
And now having said all that. I'm glad you brought up that behaviour issue. And I don't think you can easily get out of it just by saying "nobody is perfect".
I imagined becoming Christian. I wanted to. I TRIED to believe (two or three times in my life, depending how you count), pretty hard. It didn't work, probably because no telescope ;) But the imagining did work and they key thing in it was this: IF Christianity is real, then becoming a Christian would mean huge and fundamental changes in my life. Not just adjusting my behaviour that would count as sin according to the scriptures. But also taking up a lot of positive moves. IF you truly believe in the "good news" then it's so big ---- so so so immense and important --- that the only logical thing to do would be to devote all possible hours after basic keeping yourself alive of your life to trying to convert as many people as possible. There's no other rational response to "Christianity is real". Everything else pales into complete insignificance.
I think it's not so obvious to people who grew up religious and surrounded by believers because possibly they cannot conceive of actual lack of belief the way we cannot truly concieve of belief.
One thing I'd say is that, yeah, there are really, really big implications to Christianity. But they are sort of different for everyone, and one thing that I think gets missed is there's, you know, getting on a plane and going to South American or wherever and doing missionary work. And that's something, someone needs to do it, it's good work. But at the same time, there's, like, being a good citizen, being good friends, being good workers, and that kind of thing.
I think at some point Christianity was more "on point" both with missionary work AND with, you know, being good members of the world so to speak. Being better people to know, the kind of people who sort of were good to live your life near.
I say that only because, like, EA has this thing where it's like "anything worth doing is worth doing with literally 100% of your time and resources at all times". And that's not nothing, and it's what draws people to EA. But Christianity differs at a least a little in that there's a not insubstantial part of the religion that's like "let people see you be fair, and good, and raise your family well, and help people who need help" - like basically doing life, but doing it better and in a way that's better for people around you. Not "go turbo mode from now until you die", but more "be intentional about how you do the things people do, and be a good example for people to think of when they try to determine if what you have is real."
Another example that just happened to me... and why this article struck home. New therapist was asking me what my faith gives me- why I need it- what is its instrumentality. I understand that as an atheist/agnostic, that’s the way to think about it. But that’s not how I view it at all! There are benefits, no question. But it’s not instrumental, it’s what I believe is the truth. So it was a weird conversation bc she thought I wasn’t answering, or avoiding something, but it’s really just that it didn’t occur to her that it is a belief. (For the record I think it was all in good faith and she was being respectful. It was just a fundamental, total disconnect.) Maybe next time, I’ll try the house fire analogy.
What you're saying about the general "respect all religions as correct" idea makes sense to me, but the David Friedman point seems a bit different. He seems to be taking what he percieves as a hard-to-resolve contradiction seriously enough that it should allow questioning strongly held beliefs.
What about the following analogy: your very reliable alarm system notifies you of a housefire while you're away, you rush to the scene together with your friend. Strangely, it seems perfectly intact. But you inspect the camera feed together and indeed see a raging fire recorded. Confusedly brainstorming, your friend suggests maybe someone hacked into the alarm system and there wasn't really a fire?
Back to the object level question of hell, perhaps to you it seems like a crappy resolution compared to other alternatives like "it's metaphorical" or something, but you don't seem to be making that point here. Lacking an alternative explanation, a contradiction does seem to justify a lot of doubt / questioning. What do you think?
I don't think I have any specific problem with "doing your best to solve a problem", or if the solution to the problem ends up being wacky, or unusual. And sometimes a proposed solution falls a little flat, or is unsatisfactory-feeling even if it's correct. So there's not really any sense in which I'm getting down on David for looking for a solution or being willing to veer into the unusual, etc. - that's all fine to me.
In this case I took exception less because of any of those reasons, and more because of the costs of the solutions proposed. For a person who believes this is all real (and particularly thinks that it's all knowable - that he or she can get at the truth, whether they have yet or not), David's solution is asking not just for an acceptance of the unusual, but also for a person to say "Where god says something, he's unreliable - he could be lying. Where the bible says something, the same things apply."
When you do that, a person transitions from having religions beliefs they think are true to something like atheism or agnosticism (none of this is true, or if it is there's no way to know), and then back to pretending they still think it's true even though they've now moved to a model that's custom built and fit by themselves - essentually only as true and powerful as they are comfortable with it being, if that makes sense.
I think this is relevant because that's so foriegn to someone who actually believes this stuff is true and really exists that it inhibits conversation. Like, if you come to me and say "Hey, my understanding is you believe in a God who wants X - why don't you just believe in the same god, but exise the X part? It's inconvenient" it ends up sounding to me like you asked for me decide that rocks were edible or that trees were made of steel. It's not that the thought isn't nice - it's that I can't change the characteristics of reality at will. So it ends up being confusing I think for all parties.
On the object question:
I'm going to (on request) write something up about the question of hell, but I can completely understand why that particular perceived conflict would spur a lot of questions. That's not wrong! Like it's better to seek that out.
One thing that I will say in advance of that is that a lot of these kind of conflicts begin in a really, really fundamental level. So I'll often talk to people who are starting from a prior that it's impossible that something that seems wrong to them but right to a deity could end up with them being wrong and the deity being right, no matter how small the disagreement, and even on a theoretical level.
So sometimes you get a version of this conversation that says "The bible says god is good, and I define good in a certain way - I am the person who defines what good is. And on top of that I get to decide if anything god does is bad. And I've decided in advance that these two things are in conflict under those stardards I set - prove me wrong".
I'm not saying that's what's happening here, but there's a lot of room on the spectrum between someone who says "It's possible god's standards supercede mine" and someone who says "god has violated my laws and has a lot of groveling to do before I'll feel comfortable accepting him", and a lot of people are at different points in that spectrum.
> We don’t do this with any other kind of belief - if someone believes that dark matter exists, and says so, they are by implication saying that anybody who believes that dark matter doesn’t exist is wrong, and believes something that’s false. Nobody has a problem with this or considers it particularly arrogant; people are generally allowed to think they are right about things, and then we argue about them.
I think I understand what your article is saying, and I suspect what I'm going to say is tangential to the thrust of it. Perhaps not. I'll let you judge.
The issue I take with this formulation of things is that, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever set another living human being on fire, or flown a jumbo jet into a skyscraper, over the question of dark matter existing or not.
So I suspect that at least some of the time, the agnostic or atheist asking the "why don't you treat other religions as potentially valid" question, is really more trying to propose a perspective of the world that avoids those sorts of things.
So to be clear just because something isn't, like, directly relevant to the article doesn't mean people can't talk about it in the comments. Anybody reading this: you could be like "what's your favorite kind of pizza?" in the comments of literally any article I write and that would be pretty much fine.
So I might be wrong here, but boiling down what you are saying to maybe less polite but clearer terms, we might rephrase it as something like this:
"There's a case to be made that religion is not only false, but counterproductive, and maybe even intensely counterproductive. In that case, it's not wrong to say "religion is bad, you should stop doing it" and to work against religion in general."
And in general that's two arguments we can have - like someone can come to me and try to convince me religion is false, which is in turn relevant to convincing me it's bad (and vice versa). Totally fine with that - like I'm not pleased as punch that people disagree with me on things, I don't pretend I am - but it's reasonable to disagree with me on things, and we talk about them.
What I'm sort of asking here is for that to be explicit, or at least for the argument they are making to be consistent. A couple of reasons why:
1. When someone comes to me and says "Why don't you treat religion X as just as true as yours?" They basically know that they are asking "Why don't you admit your religion isn't true, and in fact that no religion is or could be true, and get out of the way of my superior moral system?" and as a general rule know that they are doing it.
And I'm fine with that *goal*, in a general way. But if I take them at their word, it doesn't work - I, as a believer, then waste a lot of time going "No, wait, that's logically inconsistent for BOTH our systems, why are you being weird?" and they spend a lot of time hemming and hawing around the thing they actually want to get to, and it doesn't end up accomplishing their goal except with people who they expect to be very low risk of doing anything for religion, let alone anything they think is bad.
2. I also sort of bristle (generally and not just here) at people treating me like I'm dumb in specifically tricky ways - like if you think I'm dumb, say so; I'm a big boy and a semi-skilled combatant, I can take it sort of thing. And here the arguments are really particularly paternalistic - like literally "listen I made a carve-out definition for 'believe' I'll let you play with in the corner so long as you agree with me on everything else I think is right'.
I think there deserves to be sort of a courtesy standard around stuff like that. Not a biblical thing, just like, it seems like there should be.
Nah, I don't actually think of religion as "bad", despite being highly agnostic myself. In fact, I recognize that religion gave us some pretty awesome things, like The Enlightenment. And I certainly recognize that many, many horrors have been committed by atheists and agnostics over the years. My position is just more just about (at least I think it is) that while I recognize that you (yes, tautology ahead!) believe your beliefs, it's important to recognize that others believe their beliefs as well, and that some people don't believe any of it, and at some point either we have holy wars or we figure out a way to let people who don't share our beliefs go their own way.
Which I'm not sure is *actually* really related to the point you were trying to make, and thus my hemming, hawing, and caveats. ;)
Also, I think it was partly the use of the "dark matter" metaphor that I felt was offputting. Though I also have some occasionally very specific word usages, as in, I rarely use the word "believe" to describe my positions, because I'm not sure it's accurate to describe them as "beliefs" as much as "positions I hold due to the data I have seen". So while I don't personally have an opinion on Dark Matter since I don't know enough about the topic to justify one, putting it in the same context as spiritual beliefs -- which are almost by definition unfalsifiable -- just gets up my left nostril, I suppose. :D
I don't think you're dumb, and I did not intend to come across as paternalistic. I only feel that my moral philosophy is superior to many others insofar as I mostly want to leave other people alone, specifically *because* I don't feel like I am likely to be able to tell them what to do better than they can do for themselves. If someone isn't picking my pocket, punching me in the face, or pissing in my well, (or doing those things to others who have not consented to those activities) it's none of my business.
It may *also* be partly related to my having seen a number of people who have strong spiritual beliefs indicate that they don't think that people who don't share their beliefs even actually believe what they claim to.
I recognize that this reply is horribly organized, but I've been out apartment hunting all day and my brain is fried. :D
I'm still reading through this. I'm where you mention bad faith (heh) argumentation. I'll come back at some point and add something, but I wanted to state that I am not an atheist who doesn't believe in God.
I am an atheist who considers God's existence immaterial. I don't answer it because it's not a question for me. I wonder how this article plays out in my personal context.
Big Edit Time:
My piece on atheism is about peace. I don't try to pull people over into atheism, because it's not my job. And, I appreciate when someone of virtue asks me to go to church, or says they'll pray for me, or the like, because I know it comes from a place of concern and love. I don't remember anyone making a concerted attempt to convert me.
I've been an atheist for two decades plus (I'm in my mid-thirties, and I learned not to ask because it usually makes people uncomfortable. But, I love talking about faith, so I miss having those conversations.
Gosh, I have so much to say about this. (You might remember me as Tam, btw. Hi!)
I was an atheist most of my life, but if all goes according to plan, I'll be officially Catholic after the Easter Vigil. Some thoughts in what I hope is a logical order:
1. Part of what finally converted me was reading a book (by then-Cardinal Ratzinger, aka the recently deceased Pope Benedict) that pointed out that (a) I was no more at rest in my atheism than I would be as a wobbly Christian (going far beyond the usual and unconvincing "no atheists in a foxhole" argument), and (b) the notion of "belief" can mean "in the absence of perfect knowledge, this is the ground I choose to stand on" and not necessarily "I've examined all of the evidence and find this perspective the most rationally convincing."
2. You really can (contra DinoNerd, at least) choose to believe something. Some of the ideas of Christianity are, IMO, beautiful enough to be worth dying for, and therefore, I decided, beautiful enough to be worth the risk of being wrong, especially in light of...
3. I'm attracted to a kind of inverse version of Pascal's Wager, that goes like this: If Christianity (and everything enough like it to make being Christian a good idea even if not the BEST idea) is wrong, and we live in a purely material universe, then I'm free to be as wrong as I want (by being Christian) and it won't matter a lick as in a few million or billion years there will no longer be any evidence, no matter how tiny or indiscoverable, that I ever existed.
4. However, if I just do a "choose your own adventure" faith, of course I wouldn't believe in it, that's just stupid, like (as you say) making up a planet you think would be interesting and claiming it really exists. Even if I use my best, noblest, smartest thinking to come up with the best, noblest, most wonderful and perfectly correct God I can, well, so what?
5. So I chose Catholicism, because it exists already, outside of me, and has decent claims to being the church founded by Jesus, and it has orthodoxy. I am not comfortable with all Catholic positions (I'm still a social liberal) but I can try to live by them and hope for better understanding as time goes on. And although disagreeing with me doesn't prove that a religion represents the Truth, it's certainly the case that the Truth would differ from what I think in some respects (as I'm not likely to have worked it all out on my own correctly). This isn't the ONLY thing I like about Catholicism, but it's certainly one thing. Also it seems to be the only rigid form of Christianity that hasn't been completely captured by the political right, in America. (The American churches that agree with me on social issues are totally loosey-goosey, whatever-you-think-is-fine, don't-really-believe-in-sin types of things, and that doesn't work for me. I might as well just go back to being a secular humanist or a Unitarian as I was raised.)
Getting back to your actual points, I find a lot of secular arguments about Christianity do this thing where they assume it's just not true, and that nobody thinks it is. It's like when people talk about how obnoxious it is to try to convert someone to your religion. Like, OK, sure, it might be counterproductive to the extent that it comes across as obnoxious, and if being Christian is equivalent to just really liking Thai food, then you shouldn't be pushy about it, but if it's true then you kind of obviously should share the news? Ugh.
Tam! Always happy to see you. Glad to hear things are going well.
I think I agree with your last paragraph in large part, but I'd add that I don't think that literally everyone is doing that *consciously*. Like I don't think David is rubbing his hands together and going "oh, I know he's just faking his faith and belief". But if you've spent a large part of your life around people who don't have these kinds of beliefs (and in some parts of the country/world they are vanishingly rare) you eventually get used to the idea that it's all sort of a funny game; that it's about good vibes and ritual but nobody would really "let belief win" when it was up against actual important societal and cultural stuff.
Which I still don't like, but it's also not coming from an intentionally bad/malicious place in all cases, if that makes sense.
The choose your own adventure faith can be had, because truth is a pathless land. Not all religions work like dogmatic varieties of Christianity work, the Eastern ones basically do advocate for choose your own adventure, although the Pharisaical priests and monks try to keep that under wraps.
Oh, I kind of agree that it's possible for some people, on some topics, to choose to believe something, or at the least to choose to act in ways that will increase their chance of believing it. Some treatments for depression immediately come to mind.
Everything always turns out to be more complex, in practice, than anything we try to say about it. (Including the statement I just made, which doubtless has exceptions.)
First approximation: the idea of choosing to believe, or not, is absurd.
Second approximation: but sometimes works out in practice anyway.
Third approximation: some theory I don't have that explains when and why it's sometimes possible.
I feel like a Christian might read the above and be like "Wow, is that ever a lukewarm form of Christianity, does that even count?" And all I can say to that is, hey, if your claims are true, then I need to get on the train any way I can. I don't have some more "real" faith that I'm rejecting for this one. Also it turns out that once you get on the train, things get more real, and hopefully it doesn't matter how you boarded.
I don't know that I read it as lukewarm. I sometimes talk about your situation to people in my real life, and I think I put it something like this:
"I know this person who used to sort of sit in church and just be searching for faith, like she could see other people who appeared to have it, and believed that they had it, but just wasn't feeling it. And it wasn't an easy thing for her in the way she saw it being easy for some people. And in a way I haven't seen before she just sort of kept at it, like pursued faith and belief in a way that was real work and came at a cost and price that isn't typical for most people, and I think now has found some of that, and continues to work to get more".
And I'm not a big authority on every single thing, but to me that doesn't really read as lukewarm stuff. It feels more like, hey, here's this commitment to this that started well before any of the rewards, and sort of had to fight through thorns to bloom. I don't think of that as "lesser" at all.
I guess another reason Catholicism (mostly) works for me is that it's not one of the ones where they are like, "You have to have this specific emotional kind of experience in order to know you're in."
[26] The fairies are not to be seized on, and brought to answer for the hurt they do. So also the ecclesiastics vanish away from the tribunals of civil justice.
[27] The ecclesiastics take from young men the use of reason, by certain charms compounded of metaphysics, and miracles, and traditions, and abused Scripture, whereby they are good for nothing else but to execute what they command them. The fairies likewise are said to take young children out of their cradles, and to change them into natural fools, which common people do therefore call elves, and are apt to mischief.
[28] In what shop or operatory the fairies make their enchantment, the old wives have not determined. But the operatories of the clergy are well enough known to be the universities, that received their discipline from authority pontifical.
[29] When the fairies are displeased with anybody, they are said to send their elves to pinch them. The ecclesiastics, when they are displeased with any civil state, make also their elves, that is, superstitious, enchanted subjects, to pinch their princes, by preaching sedition; or one prince, enchanted with promises, to pinch another.
[30] The fairies marry not; but there be amongst them incubi that have copulation with flesh and blood. The priests also marry not.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668. Ed. Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994. [Leviathan: Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness... Chap. xlvii. Of the Benefit that proceedeth from such Darkness, and to Whom it Accrueth] https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/leviathan-part-iv-of-the-kingdom
A pro-Christian variant on the same theme would be Pascal's Wager. For those not familiar with it, who don't want to google it, it's the arguments that if Christianity were true, and one didn't believe/worship, one would lose out on eternal life/be subjected to eternal torture, so therefore one should *believe*. Same flaw - belief being treated as something one can choose. (Somehow the argument presented is never that one should just obey the rules and perform the rituals, without being any more than lukewarm agnostic.)
It doesn't look quite the same, because this variant expects one to believe the whole thing, presumably in whichever form (sect) the particular believer considers to be truth. But this time the believer is expecting the non-believer to do what seems plausible to them, but NOT to the non-believer.
The same things apply - only some of the believers who use this argument are engaged in proselytizing; others are trying to explain their own attitude, or engage in what if games ("what if I didn't already believe").
Pascal's wager is sort of gross, agreed. I think that for some of what you said - it's like, here's this threat I'm proposing, so you have to do a lot of stuff to mitigate it just because I can imagine it from the Atheist perspective. EA does the same thing with AI in pretty much the same way and it's always struck me as weird.
The other thing is I'm not even sure that Pascal's wager would *work* - the idea is that you don't really believe in any of it but you sort of pretend to, just in case. And in Christianity pretending to believe doesn't work. So it's a weird corner case where you can't do the thing that actually works (Belief genuine enough to motivate action), you can do the two things that don't work (just action, and pretend belief) and it doesn't help, and it's not clear what the end-game is.
Pascal believes that participating in the liturgical life of the Church is efficacious in disposing the participant to faith and, even if it fails to do so, that it encourages them to become: "faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful," virtues which similarly dispose you to a positive response to God's grace.
It's difficult for me to see how we could understand the conversion of peoples or the religious education of children as legitimate if this were not true.
Pascal's Wager also has the serious flaw that it equally applies to other religions, so how do you pick? Especially since most are mutually exclusive. At that point you get into a sort of cost minimizing game where you start to wonder "Which religion has the worst hell? I should pick that one so I minimize the chances of going there."
To say there are some serious incentive alignment issues there is an understatement :D
If only Pascal had dedicated hundreds of pages of the Pensees to a positive argument for Christianity and said that the wager should spur you to recognize the seriousness of the question at hand and investigate in detail who is in possession of the truth...
>Somehow the argument presented is never that one should just obey the rules and perform the rituals
Pascal says we should do precisely that on the same page as we find the wager *after* he grants the very criticism you lob above, that belief is not something we can simply choose. It's literally the next paragraph.
I'm begging, begging people to actually *read* arguments, particularly when they're formulated by some of the greatest minds in history, before they endeavor to critique them.
Yeah, you have a point. And this wouldn't be the only time that the originator of an idea, whose name is still attached, said something rather more nuanced than 95% of those who cite them. (Sadly, I've never read Pascal's writings. But reading Adam Smith was quite "interesting", in this kind of context.)
As you might be able to tell from my post binge, I'm a huge Pascal fan. The Pensees are, I think, brilliant, easily one of the most important Christian works of the past half century. His positive, "psychological" case for Christianity is both unique and interesting, and his analysis of diversion is incredibly incisive, particularly in the modern age.
On top of that, the Wager is a much better argument than people think, mostly because they tend not to understand what the argument is *for*. It is not, say, intended to convince the devout Muslim that they ought to become a Catholic, or even necessarily to convince the devout atheist. It's meant to shake the reader into recognizing what's at stake in this wager that we're all forced to make, to force them to recognize that whatever choice they make, they cannot afford to settle into a sort of casual, indifferent agnosticism.
Note that virtually all the objections to the Wager, even if they are made by someone who has lapsed into precisely this sort of indifference, presumes precisely what Pascal hopes the Wager makes you realize, that you cannot escape the choice and that it is an extremely (even *the most* extremely) important one.
There's a writer named David Wong who I don't much like on a lot of subjects, but he did once write something that I remember a lot that paraphrases something like this:
"Listen, there might not be a god, I get it, but you have to at least understand that even if there isn't a god there's something working in the background of human brains that very much makes it feel for most people ike *something* like a god is real.
That might be a trick of evolution or unfortunate, or whatever, but you are bashing your head against the wall if you try and approach people like it's just as easy as going "it's clear there isn't a god, stop being stupid!" because it's very much unclear for most people"
I like that for conversations like this, because it at least acknowledges that this isn't something, like, that's historically weird - if anything the whole "there isn't a god, and it's clear" thing is the position that requires training to get to, the unintuitive thing (right or wrong).
I don't usually make utilitarian arguments for Christianity because they seem sort of mealy-mouthed to me, but I think it's broadly true that getting rid of Christianity's "we are default bad in a way that justifies us being aware of and resisting our bad impulses" is a bad thing to get rid of, even from that perspective.
The American Israeli Political Action Committee has become the new official religion of the United States government . . . We can't afford healthcare for American children because we have to keep bombing someone else's for the love of Jesus and Israel . . .
.
Jewish Corruption in Ukraine . . . by Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.
❝. . . the present conflict is a huge distraction from the fact that, for decades, the biggest threat to Ukraine hasn’t been Russia, but financiers and speculators operating with impunity within Ukraine’s borders to exploit ethnic Ukrainians and plunder their resources.❞
The Frankfurt School adapted Marx’s theories on revolution to include Freud’s theory of the subconscious. The Cultural Marxists’ main focus was to reshape the subconscious of Western men and women and thus create new type of person: one who would react passively to provocations of all kinds.
I usually don't argue about religion on the Internet, but you seem really nice, so I'll give it a try.
First, sometimes it's a good idea to adopt relativist debate norms even if you think the thing you're debating is real. For example, music is real, and so are musical preferences -- if I go to a Jonathan Coulton concert, I will have a lousy time, and if my housemate goes to a Shostakovich concert, he will have a lousy time, but if you flip it around, then we'll both leave our concerts feeling inspired, refreshed, and satisfied. Neither of us thinks the other is mistaken -- it's just that we're wired differently, so what works for one of us doesn't work for the other. Why? It's hard to explain, even though we both know plenty of music theory and plenty of sociology. We try to trend gently on each other's feelings while talking about it, not because we think the other person's enjoyment of their music is somehow imaginary, but precisely because it's real, and because we know that most of our thoughts about music are inherently private or personal, i.e., they're quite difficult to effectively share.
If I tried to insist that my way of appreciating music was objectively better, I'd just hurt my housemate's feelings without accomplishing anything useful -- because even though the music is very real, its goodness is relative, not objective. If I observe the position of Uranus, I can tell you in precise mathematical terms exactly where Uranus is and you can confirm it with your telescope and make the exact same observation, but if I observe a Shostakovich concert then even if I tell you where the symphony is playing, you still can't reliably have the same Shostakovich experience that I did. I think religion is a lot more like music than astronomy.
Second, mainstream Christianity usually presents itself as a sort of self-protecting chain of arguments. The Bible is supposed to be literally true, and one of the things the Bible tells us is that we should obey God, and one of God's commandments is to believe in the literal authority of the Bible. If you begin by agreeing with any one of those statements, then you often end by feeling compelled to agree with all of them, and after that it feels silly and disingenuous to talk (as David Friedman does) about editing bits and pieces of your religion to better suit your ethical feelings. If you're used to thinking of God and religion as "aspects of that self-reinforcing loop of arguments that dictate an entire worldview," then anyone who blithely suggests that you just unilaterally change part of your worldview looks like they're not taking "God" or "religion" seriously.
However, speaking from personal experience, it's very possible to take God and religion very seriously indeed and yet not subscribe to that self-reinforcing loop. I don't think there's anything imaginary about God -- and yet, like Galileo, I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. I think the Bible was divinely inspired -- but what happens when you apply divine inspiration to a bunch of cantankerous, illiterate Bronze Age shepherds is that you get a real mixed bag. Parts of the Bible are timeless enough to still be worth studying and meditating on today; other parts are trivial, cruel, or incorrect.
So, if I suggest that you might not need to call 911 about the fire in your apartment, it's not because I think you're hallucinating the fire -- it's because, in my experience, most kitchen fires can be safely put out with an ordinary fire extinguisher. And, if you strenuously disagree with me and say, no, no, I definitely need to call 911 about *this* fire that's in my home right now -- I will cheerfully nod and say, "OK, go ahead and call them, then." Not because I think there's no right answer about the danger posed by the fire, but because I acknowledge that fires can be different from each other, and it would be unrealistic to expect you to pause and send me a video of the fire. Any such video would naturally be obscured by smoke, and fires are urgent and scary enough that it usually makes more sense to get on with the business of dealing with them as best we can instead of endlessly arguing about their size with friends. After all, the fire is in *your* home -- by the time I could get over there and help you with it, it would usually be too late. Since you're the one who inevitably has to deal with the fire, and you're the one with the best view of your fire, I'm willing to trust your judgment about your fire even if your claims about that fire seem a priori unlikely to me.
On the first reinforcing loop bit:
My big question with assertions in this general range is always "OK, so what's the principle that makes this substantially different all of the following:
1. An atheist saying "I determine 100% of my moral beliefs from reason - I am the arbitor of them"
2. An agnostic saying "well, it's all unknowable - I'm not saying there isn't a god, but we certainly don't know enough about it to know substantially who he or she is or what they want, I'm withholding my judgment
3. A person who says "I have imagined a religion based on what I prefer, and it became true based on that"
Because if it's substantially the same as 1-2, I'm looking to see why I'd do the extra work of then saying "but, no, I still have real belief, I treat it like a real thing with real implications" when in practical reality I don't. And if it's substantially the same as 3., it's a combination of sort of the same effect and me basically knowing it's not real. I sense you think it IS different than those, but I don't know how right now - you say you reason it out in such a way that it's still serious and powerful, but not how that works mechanically.
On the fire metaphor bit:
I think this metaphor has gotten pretty misunderstood in terms of what I was trying to do with it, so to clarify the work it's supposed to do:
1. The fire just represents something real, with real implications. It could have been a pitbull or a pancake that's being left on the griddle too long, it doesn't matter. Fire was chosen because it has certain common, clear implications - if your house is on fire, you can react a number of ways but those ways have expected consequences.
2. When the person in the metaphor says "Why didn't you just imagine that the fire was safe, and then it would have been?" he's treating fire as an un-real thing; he might be showing that he doesn't understand how fire works, or that he doesn't believe yours is real, or any of number of things - but what he's not asking you to do is what's logical based on a real fire in your house.
3. Importantly, in the metaphor (as applied here) he's saying "I know you have a certain concept of housefires as something dangerous that consumes houses and people inside them, and I respect that. But without changing your mind on those characteristics or convincing you the fire didn't exist, I'm asking why you didn't just lay there, completely safe".
So in a practical sense, the metaphor doesn't apply to your argument here. You are saying something like "listen, fire doesn't work like you think it does; your beliefs on fire are wrong in some way.". That's a standard argument that's common enough that you don't write an article about it - it's the atheist saying there isn't a god, and you are wrong to think there is one and things like that.
So when you say something that boils down to "Listen, the bible and your concepts of god are both unreliable" we have an argument about that, and it's pretty straightforward; there's no issues. And the metaphor doesn't apply, because you aren't trying to convince me you totally believe thatt I believe. my house was on fire while then telling me to do things that don't make sense if it is.
David says "Oh, your house was on fire? That's terrible - I understand you think that has certain implications. Why didn't you just make a grilled cheese?". And in doing so he skips a bunch of steps that you don't, here. Basically he tries to get the benefits of convincing me that the religion isn't real/reliable (I.E. shifting me to a "it has no power or authority I don't grant it in my imagination model) without actually convincing me of that.
I think later in the metaphor, you describe something like agnosticism - like, there's no way for me to say your concept of fire is wrong, there's too much smoke for that. And when someone tries to explicitly convert me to something-like-agnosticism, I don't DO IT, but I don't have the same problems as when they say "Hey, I know you aren't agnostic, and I respect that, but could you just agree you should act like one anyway?". That's sort of what's going on here.
TLDR: In your post you say something like "Your concept of religion is false, I think. And given that, you should consider a set of implications in line with some other belief". I don't have problems with that. In David's post (and in other arguments like that) he says something like "Without convincing you that your religion is false, could you act as if it is?" and I have problems with that.
Yeah, we're probably talking about different situations! If David is trying to get you to behave in a certain way without doing the work of believing the things that would prompt you to behave that way, then I don't care to defend David. As you say, I at least acknowledge that we have different beliefs and that those beliefs matter.
When I first read your post I thought maybe there was just some confusion between you and David about the size of the fire, but after reading all the comments that seems much less likely.
On the reinforcing loop thing, I would say that my religion has elements of 1, 2, and 3 -- but that it's not entirely defined by any or all of them. Right, like, for #1, of course some of my moral beliefs come from what I think is reasonable; no formal moral system specifies every single decision point in advance, so some on-the-spot reasoning will always be required. The scope over which that reasoning is encouraged varies from one religion to the next -- some religions want you to consult your clergy over very small matters, and some religions want you to try to reason even large problems out for yourself, but reason is always involved.
For #2, yeah, I don't claim to know God's will perfectly, and so sometimes I'm left to candidly admit that I'm not sure what God would want and so I have to withhold judgment. Again, I like to think this is true of almost everyone; some religions claim a broader swath of divine revelation than others, but all of us are at least sometimes unsure of the divine will. Hence quotables like Micah 6:8, "“Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.” Or Deuteronomy 34:10, for that matter.
For #3, of course some of my religious beliefs are based on my preferences about how the Universe should work, because another way of phrasing "my preferences about how the Universe should work" is "what I think is elegant and beautiful and sensible," and another way of phrasing "what I think is elegant and beautiful and sensible" is "what convinces me that it is in fact true." Right, like, Occam's razor suggests that the simplest explanation is usually the best one, and thereby convinces me that oxygen combustion is a better theory than phlogiston. In the same way, some theologies strike me as more elegant and therefore convince me that they are true. To take the Hell example, I find it easier to believe in a God who loves us all and who does not express that love by condemning most of us to eternal torment than to believe in a God who loves us all but does condemn most of us to eternal torment. The former seems simple and convincing; the latter seems convoluted and confusing. In believing the former, am I following my "preferences?" Yes, in the sense that I prefer to believe things that make sense to me. No, in the sense that I'm not just picking whatever belief would be maximally convenient for carrying on with my secular goals.
I pray, I conduct rituals, I attend events, I read the Bible, I make career choices, I steer conversations in a particular way, I make financial choices, etc. based in part on the norms and standards and ideas and needs of my religious community. My life is steered in large part by what I see as reasonable and morally attractive, but it's not steered *only* by that -- I also take some input from personal religious experiences (i.e., moments when it seems to me that I've heard an external heavenly voice offering me guidance), and from communal religious standards (moments when the people around me who share my religion disagree with me about what I should do and I follow their advice instead of my own preferences).
This is a complicated and messy way to live, and I can understand why people find it more attractive to just be atheist or just be fundamentalist. However, for me, the mess is outweighed by the sense of balance it gives me. I don't worry that I'm biting off more than I can chew (because my religion is there for me to rely on when I'm not sure what to do or how to cope), and I don't worry that I'm submerging too much of my individuality (because if something about my religion strikes me as *wrong* enough, then I chart my own course). It works for me.
It sounds like your approach to religion also works really well for you! I appreciate you sharing and discussing all this; it's been helpful to put these thoughts into words.
"When I first read your post I thought maybe there was just some confusion between you and David about the size of the fire"
Yeah, it's less about that than how you decide *if* there's a fire, and what the fire is like. David proposes that the fire is a problem, and says "Well, just decide God is lying about it" without considering the downstream differences of transitioning to A. Some god you can just decide things about and B. An unreliable god who lies to suit his purposes. It's a solution to a problem, but also a proposed conversion to a broadly different set of religious beliefs.
"Right, like, for #1, of course some of my moral beliefs come from what I think is reasonable; no formal moral system specifies every single decision point in advance, so some on-the-spot reasoning will always be required."
Agreed here. Christianity of the flavor I'm in tends to have guidelines for these situations as opposed to hard rules, but I don't think most reasonable people claim that the bible has a lot of thoughts on, say, 401k vesting policy or things like that. All that to say I'm not proposing that reason doesn't have a place.
"#2, yeah, I don't claim to know God's will perfectly,"
And ditto here. This is actually tricky, though, because there's for sure some ranges of "how much do you think you can know" that contain significant differences. "None" is a lot different from "some, fuzzily" to "some, clearly" to "some, clearly and with clear authority" to "all, absolutely".
I posit in a lot of places that "some, fuzzily" and below boil down to atheism with curtains - like you can't walk up to that guy and say "The god we both worship says to stop behavior X", because he doesn't think you do or could know that.
But I think our biggest difference is here:
"To take the Hell example, I find it easier to believe in a God who loves us all and who does not express that love by condemning most of us to eternal torment than to believe in a God who loves us all but does condemn most of us to eternal torment. The former seems simple and convincing; the latter seems convoluted and confusing. In believing the former, am I following my "preferences?" Yes, in the sense that I prefer to believe things that make sense to me. No, in the sense that I'm not just picking whatever belief would be maximally convenient for carrying on with my secular goals."
First, I'd like to be clear/nice about something, which is that most people (me included) tend to talk about other belief systems in ways that people of that belief system wouldn't. But when I say "you determine your own religion" I don't have a mental image of, like, you want to club babies to death or something so you just adopt whatever belief on the fly.
It's more about basically believing that god can disagree with us in a way where we might know the disagreement and might have to adjust to what he is, instead of him adjusting to us. So to use the hell example, understand that I'm not instinctually thrilled about it. Like I don't sit around thinking hell exists and that I'm super glad people go there, and that I perfectly understand why it's a good idea to the point where I'd do the same thing if I was in charge.
But where our disconnect is the biggest is that I don't think it has much of an effect what I think about it or find intuitively appealing, ect. The sort of "mean, frank" way to talk about the way I view this is that I generally map anything that *isn't* this on to 1 Tim 3-5; that it looks like religion, but stands at serious risk of losing all it's authority.
The nicer way of saying it is something like, I'm not sure why one NEEDS religion, like what the value-add is at that point. You can get normative guidance from a lot of communities (I grant that Church is better at it than a lot of places) and support a lot of places (therapy, friends, family). But it seems like something important is lost when it stops being "real enough" that god might carry a characteristic we don't like, or that a rule might exist that actually needs to exist (in that we wouldn't follow it naturally), etc.
Note that I grant that I'm sort of (necessarily) arguing with a strawman you here - not all of this might map onto you perfectly.
One question I do have (if you are already overdrawn on time in this conversation, don't worry about it):
1. Say you and I both belong to a theoretical religion, and we are going through some of the deeper texts one day and find "Though shalt not genetically modify organisms in such and such ways", where it's sort of banning modern gene-splicing stuff. In that situation, say you love GMO's - that's how you get vitamin A into all the third world kids and end starvation - and that it sort of matters what we think about this (like, maybe we work in that field, or distribute food to charities, etc.).
Assuming the text is pretty clear on the subject (like, you are reasonably confident it actually does say "no GMOs" and it's not just a misunderstanding) - what do you do? I'm curious as to what that looks like in your system.
“Morality and any associated ideal is rooted entirely in a presupposition some higher power defines what is correct for human behavior . . .
The Frankfurt School adapted Marx’s theories on revolution to include Freud’s theory of the subconscious. The Cultural Marxists’ main focus was to reshape the subconscious of Western men and women and thus create new type of person: one who would react passively to provocations of all kinds . . . https://nordicresistancemovement.org/what-is-cultural-marxism/
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“They are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blonde hair, I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not become deadly to the human race. They have surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct and in barbarism. They deserve to be punished, for this is their destiny. The Jewish nation dares to display an irreconcilable hatred towards all nations, and revolts against all masters; always superstitious, always greedy for the well-being enjoyed by others, always barbarous; cringing in misfortune and insolent in prosperity.” — François-Marie Voltaire
>> "None" is a lot different from "some, fuzzily" to "some, clearly" to "some, clearly and with clear authority" to "all, absolutely". I posit in a lot of places that "some, fuzzily" and below boil down to atheism with curtains - like you can't walk up to that guy and say "The god we both worship says to stop behavior X", because he doesn't think you do or could know that.
This is a very interesting spectrum! I think my personal answer is between "some, fuzzily" and "some, clearly." Maybe just "some," without an adverb. I think people absolutely can (and should!) come up to me and say "the God we both worship says to stop doing X," because that's a useful kind of claim to make, but then it would typically lead to a (hopefully productive) debate or discussion, rather than an open-and-shut case where once God's opinion has been pointed out there is nothing more to say about the matter.
>>It's more about basically believing that god can disagree with us in a way where we might know the disagreement and might have to adjust to what he is, instead of him adjusting to us. Assuming the text is pretty clear on the subject (like, you are reasonably confident it actually does say "no GMOs" and it's not just a misunderstanding) - what do you do? I'm curious as to what that looks like in your system.
Yeah, this is tricky! On the one hand, I aspire to be in what Martin Buber would call an I/Thou relationship to God. Part of authentic relationship is being willing to be changed by an encounter with the other and to compromise and sacrifice based on their needs and interests. Part of being in a healthy relationship with other mortals requires this kind of sacrifice; how much the more so for a healthy relationship with God! If I can't pray and wind up with a different set of plans than the ones I started with, then why bother praying? So I am in favor of adjusting myself when I sense that I am out of accord with God's will.
On the other hand, I also believe that God can only want things if they are good -- I think it's logically impossible for God to desire ultimately bad things. Sometimes people say this to mean "whatever God wants *becomes* good by definition," but I mean it in the opposite sense -- I mean that if you think that God wants X, and you think that X is bad, then you must be mistaken about one or the other belief. Crucially, I think it's not obvious in advance which belief is mistaken.
Right, so if you point out to me that the Bible appears to have a strict ban on GMOs, and my detailed study of the how GMOs work leads me to believe that GMOs are good, then either we're misinterpreting the Bible, or the Bible isn't accurately reflecting the will of God on this point, or I'm wrong about whether GMOs are good. It could be any of the three! I don't have a magic way of resolving this kind of tension. I study the relevant passage, including what you might call its legislative history -- I try to understand what the relevant Biblical characters were thinking and feeling at the time and why they were opposed to GMOs and what GMOs meant to them in their historical context. I try to re-examine my beliefs to see if I could have missed some downside of GMOs, especially any downsides that are hinted at by the context of the Biblical ban. I try to re-examine the Bible to see if there's something important that's changed about the historical context between when it was written and today -- the Bible's wisdom may be timeless, but the world isn't, so if the world has changed then it's possible that the laws will also need to change. If the question is important and relevant to my behavior (as it would be in your hypothetical scenario), then I would consult with friends and clergy and pray and meditate and ask for guidance.
In the end I just have to figure out (to the best of my limited ability) what I think is good to do, and then try my best to do that. God's will on the matter, to the extent that I can know it, is decisive evidence of what is good, but the Bible (in my opinion) doesn't provide decisive evidence of God's will, even when the Bible speaks clearly.
>>I'm not sure why one NEEDS religion, like what the value-add is at that point. You can get normative guidance from a lot of communities (I grant that Church is better at it than a lot of places) and support a lot of places (therapy, friends, family).
I haven't wound up in my modestly religious state by doing a cost-benefit analysis and concluding that it will be good for me -- I got here by trying to be open to the evidence and concluding that this is really how the Universe works. As far as I can tell, the Universe has a God in it, that God is kind and occasionally active, that God is illustratively and usefully described in parts by many of the world's major religions, but none of these religions have accurately and reliably gotten the whole picture, and neither have I; much of God's nature is currently unknown by humans. These are all sincere beliefs on my part. I couldn't choose to abandon them in favor of pure atheism any more than I could choose to abandon them in favor of fundamentalism or choose to stop believing in the theory of gravity or the theory of natural selection or the theory of supply and demand. I *could* be wrong about any of those, but unless and until someone shows me how and where I've made a mistake, I can't consciously choose to have a different opinion.
Anyway, thanks for the conversation so far; it's been very interesting to try to put this stuff into words.
AIDS is a hybrid of bovine leukemia and Visna-maedi virus from sheep... like Ebola, it was developed in Uganda during the reign of Idi Amin... by a company that was also manufacturing hepatitis B vaccines for the World Health Organization and still maintains a facility at Ft. Detrick . . . Gives a new wrinkle to the infamous "Raid on Entebbe" by the Israelis rescuing their weapon makers?
[On the History tab of the Zika virus product page, it states . . . Source: "Blood from experimental forest sentinel Rhesus monkey, Uganda, 1947." Name of Depositer: J Casals, Rockefeller Foundation]
Search . . . Eli Hvastkovs . . . Monsanto (Bayer)... Search... Biochemical applications of ultrathin films of enzymes, polyions and DNA... Genetically modified organisms and the weaponization of agriculture? I retort , you deride.
BTW not ignoring you, I just also have a job and I want to think about it.
Jewish messianism has been spreading its poisonous message among us for nearly two thousand years. Democratic and communist universalisms are more recent, but they have only come to reinforce the old Jewish narrative. These are the same ideals.
The transnational, transracial, transsexual, transcultural ideals that these ideologies preach to us (beyond race, people, culture) and that are the daily sustenance of our schools, in the media, in our pop-culture, at our universities, and on our streets have our biosymbolic identity and our ethnic pride reduced to their minimal expression.
"even though the music is very real, its goodness is relative, not objective. . . . I think religion is a lot more like music than astronomy."
Applying this analogy back to the idea of religion, it sounds like your viewpoint is something like "Even though God is very real, His attributes / how you interpret His existence / what effect you think that has on you are relative, not objective."
If that's a fair statement of your view, then I think this is exactly the disagreement that RC is highlighting in the article. Christianity has as a Very Core Principle that the nature of God is absolutely, objectively, determinately true without any reference to the believer whatsoever. If there were no human beings left in the entire cosmos, that wouldn't do one whit to change the existence of God or any of His attributes (all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing etc.) In the Christian view, the nature of God is about as relative as the nature of gravity. It pulls on you regardless of what you think, and you'll be much better off if you live your life with an awareness of that fact.
So the key difference here is less the raw existence of God as such, and more the specific nature of that existence and what consequences that has on how we should live our lives. If you think that the specifics about God beyond "he's up there somewhere" are fundamentally unknowable with any kind of certainty, then you might be more inclined to slap a "coexist" bumper sticker on your car and get annoyed with people who tell you How To Religion. But if you think the other way, then the bumper sticker is laughable, because each of those religions is either right or it isn't, and there can only be one.
My core argument is epistemological, not ontological.
Suppose the Christian God really does objectively exist exactly like it says in the Bible. As humans, we would nevertheless be doomed to gather only subjective information about that God.
Right, like we both read the Bible and look at archaeological digs and study sociology and go to church and pray and so on. You have a personal religious experience that convinces you that mainstream Christianity is definitely true, and I do not. What are we to say about our differing conclusions? We both looked at the same data, but we made different observations. This occasionally happens to scientists for a decade or two, but eventually they settle their disagreements and get on the same page. By contrast, theologians have been arguing with each other for all of recorded history, and they show no signs of coming to a consensus.
That's what I mean when I say that knowledge about God is subjective -- it's not that there's no objective truth about God; it's just that such truth cannot be reliably obtained and shared from person to person.
I realize that it's a core part of some fundamentalist religions to assert that the truth *can* be reliably shared, but I just think they're wrong about that. The only people I know who insist that religious truth can be reliably shared are either very sheltered, or confused about what words mean, or using words in bad faith. To me it seems obvious that religious experience is unavoidably personal -- I can't go visit Noah's Ark or watch a video of the Resurrection the way I can go visit a dinosaur skeleton or watch a video of Uranus. The only way you can experience religious events is in the privacy of your own mind and heart -- you can tell me about them, but you can't share them with me the way you can share a fossil or a video.
"We both looked at the same data, but we made different observations. This occasionally happens to scientists for a decade or two, but eventually they settle their disagreements and get on the same page. By contrast, theologians have been arguing with each other for all of recorded history, and they show no signs of coming to a consensus."
Surely the fact that people argue about something doesn't imply that none of them are truly correct, right? Take the scientists: if they eventually come to a conclusion about some debated question, it doesn't start to be true only once they agree on it. Rather, one of the sides was always right, and they just were eventually able to prove the rightness of their view.
Yes, people have been arguing about theological questions for forever, but that isn't proof that none of them have a single objective right answer. It just shows that it's (often) more difficult to prove theological points than material ones.
"I realize that it's a core part of some fundamentalist religions to assert that the truth *can* be reliably shared, but I just think they're wrong about that."
Right, and naturally the people asserting that think they're correct. RC wasn't writing this article to resolve that difference, I don't think. He just wanted to point out that it IS a difference in viewpoints, and it's one that people (especially non-religious people) often don't take into consideration. That's where you get Coexist bumper stickers and people telling Christians that it's arrogant to try to convert others to Christianity. Whereas, if you acknowledge that Christians really do believe there is objective truth about God and that it can be known, then you can't expect them to be ok with statements like "all religions are equally valid."
Also please note that I'm not saying you here are guilty of doing that - obviously your viewpoint is a lot closer to "all religions are equally valid" than mine, but you aren't expecting that I express the same view. But there are people out there who think that you can a) adhere to Christianity, and b) accept that other religions are valid, and those are the people RC is talking about in the article.
Sure, that's fair -- and for what it's worth, I do appreciate RC's central point here! Some people really do promote generic coexistence too casually, without considering how a coexistence argument might come off as condescending. I think RC is correct to complain about that.
My main goal in writing my comment was to suggest one reason why some people might promote coexistence even when they're *not* being condescending about theology: they might believe, like me, that religious truths exist, but are very difficult to share. If reasonable people can't reasonably expect to converge on a single religious truth, then we might promote coexistence behaviors as a way of acknowledging that epistemological difficulty. Even if you are completely sure that there's only one right way of doing things, you might agree in practice to cheerfully tolerate many ways of doing things if you correctly foresee that (a) you won't be able to convince others that you're right, and (b) they will be justified in not being convinced that you're right, in the sense that you will not be able to show them evidence that ought to change their mind.
Prickgressives, Libertardians, and Cuckservatives all want a theocracy with its own “epistemology,” from either London Jew Karl Marx or from Russian Jew Ayn Rand, both were progenitors of the godless open borders multiculturalism plaguing the West today.
They all believe the same thing... they all believe their weenies come from heaven and that this gives them some sanctified right to be a divine prick playing god over the lives of others.
Mammonism and Bolshevism are Jewish stepsisters.
“Morality” and any associated ideal is rooted entirely in a presupposition some higher power defines what is correct for human behavior. And since you are a moral, religious person, you are supposed to “spread the other cheek” and do what the rabbi, priest or imam says.
People sometimes ask why it is that the European Left gets on so well with Muslims. Why does a movement that has often been overtly anti-religious take the side of a fierce religiosity that seems opposed to almost everything the Left has ever claimed to represent? Part of the explanation is that both Islam and Marxism have a common ideological root: Judaism.
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“Why are the Jews hated? It is the inevitable result of their laws. They either have to conquer everybody or be hated by the whole human race.” — François-Marie Voltaire
Right, that makes sense - and for what it's worth, I am definitely not of the brand of Christian that believes You Must Always Be Proselytizing Everyone You Meet Or You Are Failing As A Christian. Obviously I do believe that everyone would be better off as a believing Christian, but in practice that's just not something you can ram down people's throats. In fact, if you do that you'll likely just make them even less receptive to Christianity in the future.
So to the extent that qualifies as "coexisting", then I guess I am in favor. :)
Jewish messianism has been spreading its poisonous message among us for nearly two thousand years. Democratic and communist universalisms are more recent, but they have only come to reinforce the old Jewish narrative. These are the same ideals.
The transnational, transracial, transsexual, transcultural ideals that these ideologies preach to us (beyond race, people, culture) and that are the daily sustenance of our schools, in the media, in our pop-culture, at our universities, and on our streets have our biosymbolic identity and our ethnic pride reduced to their minimal expression.
I need to reread this a few times to make sure I grasp everything, but a post that has David Friedman (I didn't know he had a 'Stack!) AND CS Lewis (yay Great Divorce!) in the first bits has me too excited to not toss out some thoughts.
1: I think that, in a bit of a sideways manner, Friedman is actually defending Christianity a bit. He is essentially saying "This apparently contradiction need not actually be one." I don't know the status of Lewis' argument in Christian circles, or of "Hell is created by people, not so much God" arguments in general, but the descriptions of Hell in canon are pretty vague, so it doesn't seem inconsistent so much as just looking at it from another angle.
2: With the housefire example, I think there is a big gap in the analogy that makes it not work. You mention your friend saying "Why not just disbelieve the fire exists?" But housefires are observable without your metaphorical telescope. If you friend is standing outside your house, which is now a smoking ruin, saying "why didn't you just disbelieve?" is crazy. If your friend is standing outside your house, which is perfectly intact, saying "why didn't you disbelieve" is pretty sensible, as he sees no evidence that your house was actually on fire.
The latter case seems more accurate with the conception of religion: believers always seem wrong to non-believers. Even related religions have believers that think the followers of the other religion are crazy and wrong. If there was clear objective evidence ("Uhm, your house is fine, man, and the fire department seems really mad you called them out") on religion it would be less of an issue, but almost by definition religions are the bits that can't be proven.
3: I think the value of saying "I believe what I believe, and they believe what they believe, and we will find out who is right later I guess" with regards to religion has to do with the implied actions of that belief, the immediacy of the reactions, relative to the testability of the belief. In short, dark matter and God are (to most people) about equally testable: you and I can argue about which is "true" but we can't prove it. Further, beliefs about the existence of dark matter will change almost no one's behavior in anyway. Belief in religion might, up to and including killing people who don't share the beliefs. The combination of low testability and high imperatives of action is a very dangerous one, as most of recorded human history has born out. Saying something along the lines of "Look, I think I am right, you think you are right, but we aren't going to find out who is actually right until after we die, so let's just shut up about it since we have to live near each other and don't want to find out who is right any faster than we have to" is a pretty good plan. Hence the old etiquette doctrine that one doesn't discuss religion at social functions.
Now, I note that my formulation is a bit different from the one you use in the article. I think saying "I can't PROVE I am right, and neither can you" is better than saying "I might be wrong, and maybe you are", but in terms of behavior towards the other they are pretty similar. I would stand behind someone arguing that the "You don't know you are right" version should stop being used in favor of the "We can't settle this now" formulation, however.
So forgive me because I'm dashing this off early in the day so it's going to be a semantic mess:
1. I wasn't lying when I said I thought David approaches this from a place of good faith. I don't think I agree with him on most of where he goes from there, but I've never known David to be tricky/intentionally a dick about things, etc. He's a good guy, I like him, he has had a lot of patience with me in the past.
1a. I think if this was an argument that, say, my conception of hell as based on scripture was wrong (something like "hey, you are full to the brim with dante bullshit, the scriptures don't actually go that far or say what you think they say") I'd be a lot more open to it - like this article certainly wouldn't exist in that case.
But there's something subtly different going on here - In David's argument, he takes biblical assertions of the existence of a hell as a given (or else there's not a conflict) and doesn't resolve them by saying "but it doesn't say that, it's a metaphor" but instead by saying "It does say that, but god is an unreliable narrator - he says things when it suits him to optimize particular goals he has without regard for truth".
The first argument (the one that wasn't made) says "there's a truth, and you can know it, but you don't - let's move towards truth" and I'm completly fine with that kind of argument. I don't always end up agreeing, but like I have those a lot.
The second argument says "The bible says this, but you can just decide stuff the bible says is omittable; God might say certain things, but those things might also be whole-cloth lies". In doing so it sort of destroys any foundation by which one might (if they went with it) assert the bible is reliable and they are reasonable to rely on it.
2. So this is the tricky semantics thing. Here's what I don't have a problem with, at all:
*Bob shows up at my house, which I told him was burned in the housefire. He sees a completely intact house, and says "Why did you lie? There's clearly been no fire. I don't believe there was a fire, and of course you could have just kept sleeping - stop pretending fires exist when they don't.*
That's I think a pretty standard atheist argument against religion - you said this thing, I find the evidence unconvincing, and I'm saying you are wrong. That sort of argument isn't what this article is about - it's a different thing.
What I'm talking about is someone who says:
*I totally believe that you think there was a fire. I get you are saying it is real, and I'm not saying you should stop thinking it's real. But when a real fire disturbs your sleep, one convenient thing is to just keep sleeping - why didn't you do that?*
And what I'm saying is, a person who says this not only doesn't believe the fire was real (which is fine) and not only doesn't believe you believe it (which is fine), but is in addition to those things CLAIMING he believes that you believe it, that you think it's real, but is asking you (while saying he understands you think it's real) to treat it as if it's false.
I have a problem with that because it's first a little dishonest - if he really thinks you believe it, he knows "just lay in a fire and don't burn to death, it's easy" doesn't parse for you; bob saying things that would only make sense to you if you were lying about your belief, but won't come out and say that he thinks you are.
I have a problem with it second because it's paternalistic/condescending. If Bob said "you know, I don't believe there was a fire." he'd be respecting you enough to disagree with you in the way adults disagree with each other when they think they are wrong. But Bob is instead doing something like saying "Oof, my friend is so dumb and deceived and weird about this - I think deep down he knows I'm right, so I'll give him some outs where he can still do the song-and-dance but otherwise live and believe in the right way - the Bob way."
And that assumption grates - it's "I'm so clearly right that he secretly knows it, I'm sure. But he's so dumb I have to trick him; I'll let him keep his little wine-and-crackers stuff but otherwise act as a good atheist does", and I sort of hate it.
3. I think I'm fine with everything here, in the sense that if I came up to you and yelled "accept the truth of Christianity, right now!" I wouldn't expect you to convert based on just that one thing, and if you eventually said "I remain unconvinced" I couldn't say "well, I proved it to him out-and-out; he's just being unreasonable".
That's sort of the backwards way of saying, like, I don't hate atheists, I don't hate agnostics. I don't think an atheist who says "I don't agree with you" is doing something so particularly bad or novel I'd write an argument about it, or that an agnostic who says "you know, I don't exactly think you are proved wrong but I don't think you are proved right" is particularly bad either.
I certainly don't think I should try to convert you at the point of a knife, if that wasn't clear.
But at the same time I don't go to the atheist and say "listen, I know you don't believe in this stuff, totally get it, but certainly we agree you should adopt the entirety of Christian morality and philosophy, because it's clear to both of us I'm secretly right and your filthy atheist morality is sending you straight to hell". If I did, I'd be skipping a step - first converting him to the *reasons* Christian morality might be thought to be worthwhile.
RE 1: I am sure I do not know the entirety of the Biblical description of hell, but does it give specifics of what it is like? My memory is that it is pretty vague. Lewis was pretty comfortable describing it with remarkably little fire or brimstone, and he's always struck me as a careful fellow. It seems to me an argument could be made along the lines of "Look, I know the pit of fire with a bottom of ice like in The Inferno is the popular view, but that isn't strictly in the Bible. It is quite possible that it isn't God deciding that you need to be punished, but rather you are punishing yourself by rejecting God and staying there." It seems to me that Friedman directly citing Lewis is his way of saying that he doesn't think scripture defines Hell the way it is in popular imagination.
Granted, that argument can be totally ruined by biblical descriptions of hell I am unaware of :D In that case, Friedman either wants you to ignore what the Bible says, or is unaware the Bible says that, I guess.
2: I think you are operating from a slightly different perspective here than I am. You wake up thinking your room is on fire, and act accordingly. I come by the next morning and see your totally intact house while you tell me your room was on fire. I can understand your BELIEVED your house was on fire, although since it clearly was not I would (personally) be inclined to ask why you believed it was on fire. Potentially I might point to the giant red neon sign across the street that always casts a red glow in your house, or the fact your thermostat was set to like 95 degrees by accident, or your fake fire nightlight you have for some reason, and suggest that maybe that was why you believed your room was on fire, and suggest that maybe you should take a beat to consider if your room is really on fire next time.
That is why the house fire analogy is a bad choice for this topic: it is too easily objectively confirmed. If you can really easily check whether the room was or was not actually on fire, arguing about the belief is silly. You need something that is impossible to objectively confirm for the argument to make sense. Maybe like "You believe your wife is cheating on you. Simply not believing that is true anymore is not a solution" or the like?
3: I have definitely had someone make that last paragraph's argument to me, almost verbatim. :D It is very hard for people to really grasp that other people don't believe the same things they believe. That's why almost all political discourse is a matter of "The other side is EVIL" and not just "The other side is mistaken, or cares about things I don't." The possibility that we just don't agree on the facts, interpret the facts differently, or even have facts to disagree about, rarely enters people's minds.
(Of course, sometimes the other side is, in fact, evil.)
So I think we are sort of circling two different venn-overlap arguments here, I'm gonna try to break out of that but if I'm repeating myself I'm sorry, not trying to be douchey:
1. Imagine a version of the story where David comes forth and says "You know, I think the bible says there's a hell, but I think you probably have the wrong image of it. Here's an argument from the BIble that says, like, it might be different than you think. I understand the bible ends up being a big source of truth for you, and I don't want to contradict it's power as you understand it, but I think you might be reading it wrong.
I think this is sort of what Lewis argues (and it's been a while, so grain of salt) and I think that's sort of what you are saying you read David as saying. But I think in fact David says this:
2. Let's assume that the bible has hell as a *pretty bad place of afterlife suffering that god sends people too under some situations*. I don't find that to be productive, and I don't like it, and I don't think you should like it either. But we are moving forward under the assumption that the bible says it. Let's further assume that the bible says that because God wanted it to - that this is messaging from God.
I think that's a defensible framing of what david says - he doesn't bring up mis-reads, or that hell is a place people choose to go rather than being sent there. The framing is "Hell is a place god sends people to, and this is inconsistent with a benevolent god, and yet god has said there's a hell - how do we bring these things together?" And that's supported by:
3. David then says that the logical thing is to conclude that the words of the bible are wrong, despite being words from god, because god is both a ends-means utilitarian and a liar.
So I sort of left the "is there a hell, is it like david says, is that inconsistent with a benevolent god" arguments hanging, because they are all pretty big topics (and this isn't explicitely an apologetics blog, in a lot of ways). But I brought up one element of what I do have a problem with - that David's framing says "I know you believe this is real, but certainly you can just start believing it says something it doesn't, right?". Like that's the scope - how it treats things like "truth" and "belief" as valid words you can apply to something you are simultaniously saying "well, any part of this could be a lie, as could anything god is saying, so pick and choose as suits you.".
On the housefire stuff:
I think the perspective difference we are running into is that you are framing it as something like:
1. I tell you there's a housefire, you verify to your satisfaction there wasn't, or just disbelieve me (not being tricky, but it's irrelevant to my argument which)
2. You then openly take the time to convince me there wasn't a housefire
3. If successful, you then convince me that since there wasn't a housefire (which we now agree on) that I can ignore the non-existant implications of the housefire.
In real terms, this might look like:
1. You are an atheist who is aware I'm religious
2. You convince that I'm wrong and you are right - my religion is false
3. Since we both agree on that, we both agree the religion doesn't have any real binding power over what I think about anything.
Because you did the work in 1 and 2, you easily justify 3. When you propose 3, it makes sense to both of us.
But the metaphor is seeming weird there for you *specifically because* you are assuming 1-2 happen, and my whole complaint is that they don't. So in the actual metaphor, what happens is:
1. I say there's a housefire
2. You say "yes, OK"
3. You say "you know, why didn't you just sleep through the housefire?"
And I get whiplash.
The difference is that the metaphor isn't about observability - it's about your understanding of my beliefs as I hold them, *independent of whether or not you would believe in the same thing*. If you understand that I think there's a real god who is real in the same way a REAL housefire is, (regardless of whether or not you yourself believe it), then saying "Just sleep through the housefire" doesn't parse.
If someone does those 1-2 steps, none of this complaint actually applies to them. It's people who say "I know you belive there was a housefire, and I'm not trying to convince you there wasn't, but housefires are safe and have zero implications to your health" that this rails against.
Again, hoping I'm not coming off as weird here - trying to clarify is hard. The takeaway is that none of this is an argument for Christianity being real and thus you having to pretend it is. I'm actually saying you don't have to and shouldn't pretend - that you should feel comfortable saying "This isn't real, so it has no implications" instead of "Even if this is real, it has no implications".
RE: Housefire: I think we are kind of on the same page, except where we end up. I just think the housefire is a bad metaphor because the intuition is too different. I can easily see whether there was a fire or not. We should not get stuck on the question of whether you SHOULD believe there was a house fire or not, because it should be easily verifiable whether or not it happened, and upon doing that, the should of believing is solved as well.
The real issue is that we can't verify whether you are wrong or not on the matter of Hell of whatever, so the question of whether you should believe it or not cannot be answered. (At best we can quibble about inconsistencies, but the plan is ineffable, so we aren't going to figure it out enough to convince someone else.) The question stops at "Do you believe this to be true?" If the answer is Yes, then the only thing left is to see you act accordingly, because I can't really argue that you should believe it to be true or not. Not like I can with the fire.
That's why I thought maybe the infidelity thing might be a better metaphor. If you think your wife is cheating on you, chances are really slim I am going to prove that one way or the other. All that is left is "Given you believe it, what should you do?" not "Should you believe it." Asking you to act as though you don't believe it is not likely to help anything, as you say. Arguably, once you start to believe it, the damage is done unless it can be proven false.
I will take some time to reread Friedman's post and yours before I comment more on that. I still feel like I don't quite get why there is as much contention there as there is.
But the thing is, God does not exist in the same way as a falling piano or a house fire. If He did, science would have detected Him by now. He still exists, but His existence does not work like those things. It works like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARBjh1fs2Jg
And I would be wary about leaning too hard on words when it comes to God. The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. Christianity really needs to get a shot of the Eastern religions, and viceversa: the Eastern religions are too light on Good Works.
You say you want to convert others to Christianity, but your take on Christianity seems to be fundamentalist, which is a very hard sell. At least as of right now, I don't know what is the difference between you and a fundamentalist, and this is a particular thing you need to address if you are indeed not a fundamentalist.
As to Good Works, a good Christian has an obligation to sign the Giving What We Can Pledge (https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge). Jesus did say you are going to Hell if you don't help others (what you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me), so I think this is much more important than the things most Christians spend most of their time on.
Is there a Hell? Maybe. I don't dwell too much on it, because if there truly is a Hell, it seems like it's a dicey business avoiding it. According to the Orthodox, the closer you get to God, the more you become aware of the depth of your sin, such that the saints, who are closest to God than anyone, would never say they are close to God.
I focus more on Earthly suffering, and trust that God will smile on me for that.
Also, as to knowing God, I think you need to engage with other scriptures to get to know Him better, as per our previous discussion. They're all touching the same elephant. The Bhagavad Gita is a great start.
I think there's a couple things in here that are sort of illustrative of what I'm talking about. So there's an idea first that like, OK, god doesn't exist - he's just sort of an amorphous cloud of unknowability if anything. Which is sort of vaguely what I think of as the "spiritualist" view, and I didn't get into real heavily here.
So when you go from that, you end up saying things like "fundamentalist Christianity is a very hard sell". Which, yes, sure, it is - it makes a lot of demands, it has things in it that disagree with people, it says that authority exists, and you should follow it, etc.
And in amorphous-cloud-god religion, why would you do that? He's fairly unknowable, so you take the good-vibes stuff and you are set. But if any of this is *real and knowable* - i.e. if god has any characteristics you can pin down - it doesn't matter if it's a hard sell, because the bigger question is "is it true".
And I think that's the big question for the average atheist as well - like not "does it feel nice", because there's lots of ways to feel nice and it's not like the Atheist doesn't know about community reruns and Hao Miyazaki's Ponyo. The atheist thinks it's not real, but he thinks it's important that it's not real - that the truth of whether or not there's a piano with real characteristics matters.
From there it gets a little confusing, because your claim here and elsewhere is, listen, there's a god. But you can't know what he is to any super granular degree, it's all distorted through human lenses and you can't tell anyone they are wrong or right.
This is confusing because you sometimes (here and elsewhere, like in the plugpost) will then turn around and say "But, listen, you HAVE to do this, here's a characteristic of god I know IS true, and I'm sure about it, and I'm commanding you to do it, and there IS a solid truth to be had".
I'm not sure how to get those two things to work together. Because on the one hand, you give me "All religions are true, even where they conflict, they all reflect the same light, but that light is vague and distorted" but then go to "But you must do this, this is true in a piano way" when it's something you like. And those seem in conflict to me - like at once demanding that my book has no power and real authority.
> amorphous cloud of unknowability
Yeah. There's a whole Christian book called The Cloud of Unknowing for a reason.
I don't understand what is so confusing about the noisy signal model. There actually is signal in there, that's why one can command certain things. Or you might prefer Guenon's model, that the religions are all basically like different languages: they sound and look wildly different, but they're getting at the same thing regardless, which is the inexpressible metaphysical truth. The proverbial finger pointing at the moon.
So you're a fundamentalist? For which Christianity? I guess all I can say to that is that if there is an upside to modernity knocking the wind out of the sails of religion, is that fundamentalism is a powerless fringe. The world ill needs more wars of religion. But talking someone out of fundamentalism is like talking someone out of QAnon, so I don't really know how to do that. This is a real bummer you just told me.
We can't afford healthcare for American children because we have to bomb everybody else's for the love of Jesus and Israel . . . The American Israeli Political Action Committee has become the new official religion of the United States government . . .
Jewish messianism has been spreading its poisonous message among us for nearly two thousand years. Democratic and communist universalisms are more recent, but they have only come to reinforce the old Jewish narrative. These are the same ideals.
The transnational, transracial, transsexual, transcultural ideals that these ideologies preach to us (beyond race, people, culture) and that are the daily sustenance of our schools, in the media, in our pop-culture, at our universities, and on our streets have our biosymbolic identity and our ethnic pride reduced to their minimal expression.
The Frankfurt School adapted Marx’s theories on revolution to include Freud’s theory of the subconscious. The Cultural Marxists’ main focus was to reshape the subconscious of Western men and women and thus create new type of person: one who would react passively to provocations of all kinds.
https://nordicresistancemovement.org/what-is-cultural-marxism/
-Hao Miyazaki's Ponya
I see you, too, are a man of culture.
:D
//Jesus did say you are going to Hell if you don't help others (what you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me)//
I don't think this is what that verse means at all. Do you think this is a common interpretation? (It seems radical to me, as someone very familiar with it.
//if there truly is a Hell, it seems like it's a dicey business avoiding it.//
Per Christianity, it's not "easy" but very straight-forward as to how to avoid it. Being close to God is necessary; in fact it's impossible and widely preached to be so. All of human life is a process of sanctification, striving towards yet never achieving.
//I think you need to engage with other scriptures to get to know Him better//
I personally think there is much value to be found in scriptures of other religions, but why would a Christian seek to engage with non-Inspired, human words to get closer to God rather than engaging with the specific Word directly from Him in the first place? Seems counterintuitive on it's face.
//Jesus did say you are going to Hell if you don't help others (what you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me)//
Matthew 25:31-46 says this pretty explicitly, including, "Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison and you did not care for me.'" (Then the people ask, "When did all that happen?" and he explains that anything you did not do for anyone, you did not do for him.)
I get that, but to then take that verse as evidence that you need to go to a particular website and sign up for an arbitrary pledge seems laughable at best, no?
Oh, sorry, I think I missed the context for your remark completely! That makes more sense.
It's not an arbitrary pledge, it's a commitment to give 10% of your income to effective charities. Which might not be enough to spare you Jesus' wrath, since there sure are a lot of brethren suffering, but it's definitely way more than nearly everyone is doing.
It is arbitrary bc The Bible doesn't require that. In fact, a tithe of 10% isn't even required in the NT at all since the old covenant was fulfilled. Who says 10% is enough? Or too much? What verse says giving to "effective charities" instead of directly to the church or to missionaries or directly to brothers and sisters in need in the community is better? (There isn't one; it's arbitrary. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea at all! Just that it's not grounded in Scripture.)
God doesn't want our income, he wants our hearts.
Jesus literally said that if you want to be perfect to give all you own to the poor. He also said that with God, all things are possible, such that if you fail at giving everything, you might yet be forgiven. And yet, do you really want to test the Lord? How sure are you Jesus will not say to you 'I never knew you, depart from me'?
By the standards of Jesus, 10% may not be enough, because he did ask for 100%. But 10% is much more than 0%, it's much more than most people do. Giving it to an effective charity helps the poor far more than other uses, and Jesus was all about helping the poor. It also doesn't have to be the only good work you do.
> God doesn't want our income, he wants our hearts.
It's both actually. The Eastern Orthodox have this term, prelest, which means spiritual delusion. It is possible to think, to feel, your spirituality is real, that you have a real connection to God, and yet be completely deluded.
The only true spiritual paths, of any religion, involve doing good works, and giving 10% of your income to effective altruism is some of the best work you can do. Effective altruists are mostly atheists: don't let atheists beat you at charity! Getting serious about good works is the only way to know whether your spirituality is real. Because that one is a real test, a real inconvenience, it's not something that only happens within you, where it is easy to think you are one thing and yet be another.
> very straight-forward as to how to avoid it
Is it straightforward? Then whence Calvinism? Why all the different Christian sects? How do you know you are close to God and not deluded by literally Satan?
> why would a Christian seek to engage with non-Inspired, human words
That's the thing, the other scriptures are also Inspired. They are basically God speaking in a different language.
//Is it straightforward?//
We can get into all the other weeds you've brought up another time. Suffice it to say, Jesus did not say 'go to a website that will be created 2,000 after I die and sign a pledge by some randos lest your salvation be at stake.' That's the extent of my criticism there. I'm always leery of people saying "I have a cause and the Scripture says you have to support my cause." No. Maybe it aligns, maybe it doesn't, but it's not new Scripture.
//That's the thing, the other scriptures are also Inspired. They are basically God speaking in a different language.//
This is a radical claim and seems to be mutually exclusive with belief in the Bible as God-inspired as they're in conflict. It's a fun assertion you've made but, respectfully, nothing more than an assertion.
It's charity. Christians are known for their charity, and that particular charity is very effective. They have a calculator there which shows how many lives your money will save. It's not about the pledge, it's about giving 10% of your income to worthy charities. That may sound steep, but someone spiritually developed should be able to handle such sacrifice. You can give some other amount if 10% is too much, though you shouldn't sign the pledge if you do that.
The people who took that pledge are mostly atheists and they are outdoing Christians in charity, which seems wrong. I don't think Jesus will be pleased at such an outcome.
> conflict
A different take is, you could say Christianity says 'SQUARE' and Hinduism (for example) says 'CIRCLE', and this seems like a conflict, but actually, there is no conflict. See pic: https://i0.wp.com/maryfrancesflood.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/truth-and-perspective.jpg?resize=700%2C525&ssl=1
That's basically how things really work.
Let me clarify, I'm not suggesting that 10% is a lot nor that giving to charities is bad. I'm suggesting that the majority of Christians ALREADY DO THIS via other avenues and that given Christian charitable giving has been around for 2,000 years and this website has been around for..... less, signing THIS particular pledge is arbitrary. It's probably great! But it's also redundant and unnecessary for the vast majority of practicing Christians. Therefore trying to leverage Scripture to say signing THIS pledge and giving in THIS way is silly.
//The people who took that pledge are mostly atheists and they are outdoing Christians in charity//
I'll accept your stat, but also, this pledge is but one [arbitrary] area people can give. Per Pew Research, the religious are 66% more likely to volunteer their time and give >4x the annual charitable donations of those with no religious affiliations.
I'm sure you can recognize this pledge is neither the only option nor represents the comprehensive giving across the world, right?
> I'm sure you can recognize this pledge is neither the only option nor represents the comprehensive giving across the world, right?
Definitely, I agree to that. However, some charitable efforts are more effective than others, and money and time given to effective charities does more good than otherwise. Many charities have a problem where most of the money goes to the charity itself rather than helping people. It can get messy trying to figure out how to do the most good with your time and money: how do you weigh the suffering of your community against the suffering of Africa? Both should be helped, but the precise ratio is up to you.
And effective charities are very effective: $100 given to the Against Malaria Foundation gives a year of healthy life to a child. That kind of bang for your buck can't be easily got elsewhere.
Different Christians interpret the information they have about Christianity, whether from the Bible or inspiration or some other source, differently. One way of deciding which interpretation to accept is by testing the alternatives for internal consistency. If interpretation A is consistent with everything else you believe about Christianity and interpretation B is not, that is a reason to prefer A.
We do the same thing with fires. If I wake up, observe a fire in my bedroom but don't smell any smoke or feel myself being burned by the flames, I conclude that there isn't really a fire in my bedroom. Either I am dreaming or something, perhaps a prank hologram set up by my roommate, is creating the visual effect of a fire but not the other sensory effects one would expect to accompany it. I am not changing the nature of the fire by an act of my mind, I am using my mind to draw conclusions about the nature of the fire.
We do it routinely in interpreting people. If someone tells me something implausible, I interpret it as a true but surprising fact, a mistake by the person telling it, or a lie, according to which explanation is most consistent with what I know of the person and the relevant circumstances.
My post was applying that approach to religion. The standard account of Hell seems inconsistent with the rest of what Christianity teaches about the nature of God. I offered an explanation about why God might want people to believe it even if it wasn't true.
For an example of a Christian doing the same thing in a less extreme way, consider the picture of Hell that C.S. Lewis offers in _The Great Divorce_. No fire, no devils torturing anyone, just people in reasonably comfortable circumstances trapped in the imperfections of their own souls, all of them with at least the possibility of making it to Heaven eventually. Lewis doesn't say God is lying, but he pretty clearly implies that the conventional understanding of what God says is a misinterpretation, and he forms a conjecture about what is really happening based on consistency with the rest of what he believes about God.
I am not saying "if you don't believe in Hell it won't exist," which is what your fire metaphor implies. I am saying "here are reasons not to believe that Hell exists."
I responded to this post over on DSL in one way, going to do basically the same thing here:
***Different Christians interpret the information they have about Christianity, whether from the Bible or inspiration or some other source, differently.***
This is essentially part of an argument that a Christian is wrong to believe they are right that's getting repurposed here. But it's an odd fit here - note that what we are talking about is you going to someone who *believes* they are right - that they believe in a real, knowable thing. As stated several times in the article, the "A Christian is Wrong to Believe Themselves Right" isn't so much the topic here.
And to that note, if your article had started "Christians are clearly wrong, or at least have no good reason to believe what they do. Since that's the case, they shouldn't treat the words of their scriptures or perceived messages from their god as important - they can be disregarded", then this article wouldn't exist. But the conceit of your piece is that this is something that believing Christians can use to resolve an inconvenience, and I took you at your word and responded in that context.
*** One way of deciding which interpretation to accept is by testing the alternatives for internal consistency. ***
This is doing an enormous amount of sophist work. Note that you presented two and only two things that are "internal" - that to your knowledge the bible claims there's a sort of hell, and that god claims he's omnibenevolent. But your alternatives are not only not internal, but they are *far more clearly inconsistent with the text* than what you say you want to resolve.
Recall that your solution here is to say "The bible and indeed the straight faced, literal claims of your deity are unreliable". These are not only inconsistent with the claims of both the deity as represented in the book and the book itself, but in fact (if true) render both completely unreliable in every way; you say to get rid of "Hell exists" and "God is Honest", but you could have just as easily gotten rid of "God is Benevolent" and "Jesus lived".
"We do the same thing with fires. If I wake up, observe a fire in my bedroom but don't smell any smoke or feel myself being burned by the flames, I conclude that there isn't really a fire in my bedroom. Either I am dreaming or something, perhaps a prank hologram set up by my roommate, is creating the visual effect of a fire but not the other sensory effects one would expect to accompany it. I am not changing the nature of the fire by an act of my mind, I am using my mind to draw conclusions about the nature of the fire."
Yet note that you acknowledge outside sources of data here - the heat of the flames, the smell of smoke. And if those were present, at some point you'd reach a standard at which you believed there was a fire - and importantly, you'd THEN ACT AS IF THE FIRE WAS REAL.
In this case, people have come to you and said "There is a thing I think was real". And without an attempt at proving it's not, you are just asking them to continue forward as if it you have - as if they believe the sources of their belief are unreliable and false.
In a way that's really odd to me, your repeated (implied) request is that I go "oh, nope, you got me - I never was all that certain or had any real belief here. I forgot. The bible is a fabrication of a liar-god, sure, why not, it's as good as anything else.". To the point where I wonder if you've ever actually known someone who believes in any aspect of it in a way they wouldn't hand-wave away if asked nicely enough.
*** We do it routinely in interpreting people. If someone tells me something implausible, I interpret it as a true but surprising fact, a mistake by the person telling it, or a lie, according to which explanation is most consistent with what I know of the person and the relevant circumstances. ***
This is a point at which I start suspecting that you are being sort of willfully blind to certain aspects of the conversation. And I say that because your request here is that the believer switch to a view where both their scriptures and their god hold no truth value - And then say "But just do it! It's not a big deal! Like there's literally nothing to see here - just declare any foundation you might think for your faith to be thought true false or unknowable, and pretend that has no implications".
But this is a really big ask! It's saying "listen, your god can't be trusted. And the scriptures that say he can can't be trusted, obviously - once you accept the first it's tautologically true that they are false. And this leaves nothing but your personal preferences, what you like to pretend about the religion. But I'll still sort of paternalistically say you 'believe" it, no worries.".
*** Lewis doesn't say God is lying, but he pretty clearly implies that the conventional understanding of what God says is a misinterpretation, and he forms a conjecture about what is really happening based on consistency with the rest of what he believes about God.***
I'm not against arguing with Lewis, but why do you think this is relevant here? Lewis says "you may have misunderstood - here's an argument as to why you might have.". And whether or not that argument is right, it's a certain thing.
You say "Listen, neither the book nor the god are reliable - it's not just a misunderstanding, when god says something it's not trustworthy." and here you present that as if it's similar, but it's not. It comes with a different (and huge) set of implications.
There's a sense that you want me to accept that "perhaps you've misunderstood what was said in your source of truth" as equivalent to "Your source of truth is lying to you, there was nothing to misunderstand, you were misled by your deity himself", but of course I don't. They are massively different arguments. The first Christians have all the time; the second destroys the entirety of Christianity in one swoop.
RC, don't we Christians (a) usually concede we can't know the nature of God, but (b) still try to figure out what we can?
I basically posted this downstream, but I think there are four or so reasonable possibilities on this dispute.
1) Hell exists, and God is going to condemn some number of people to unimaginable torment.
2) God is not going to condemn anyone to an afterlife of eternal torment. If so,
a) This is not a problem because the Bible doesn't say He is. (I'm not sure on this point.)
b) If you're not a believer in an infallible Bible, it could be that one of the authors or translators just got it wrong.
c) The authors of the Bible did in fact accurately record the revelation of God that people are going to be condemned, but they're not going to because (i) of Jesus's sacrifice and/or (ii) God lied.
I don't think those are bad faith or unreasonable questions. If a given person is confident that God has committed to sending people to torment in the afterlife and that God never lies, even for the greater good, than that person can explain their reasoning.
I'd be interested in that discussion, although I personally resolve a lot of these by shrugging my shoulders and leaving the questions of whether God is going to send people to Hell and whether He's willing to lie up to God.
(On a similar note, in a discussion of the Problem of Evil ages ago, I suggested you could solve the problem with Berkleyian solipsism - if you are the only real person in the universe, then maybe the universe was created solely for your growth and development, and all the people who died without hearing the word of Jesus or had it better or worse than you are just NPCs, and the other people you meet in Heaven will have grown up in *their* bespoke universes. I don't believe it, but it's an interesting exploration of the philosophical problem, at least to me)
Nice job. Let me argue a little further along the lines of Neptune beliefs.
1. As far as I know, none of us religious folk have a 100% accurate model of God. Most of us, I suspect, would grant that it's *impossible* for a human to do so in this life.
2. Most of us spend some time wonder about or trying to figure out the nature of God in more detail, either out of a desire to be more like Him, to follow his guidance, or just curiousity.
3. Hell as a place of eternal torment does present some problems for my model of benevolence, and probably for most people's. Heck, even *creating* a universe where some people are going to be consigned to eternal torment strikes me as questionable. So what's going on?
a. It's possible that like the existence of evil, the certainty of eternal torment for some (maybe even most!) is a part of an incomprehensible but good plan, a logical requirement of a greater good, etc.
b. Or it's possible that no one is going to be eternally tormented after death. For example:
i. Maybe we've misunderstood the Bible.
ii. Maybe the Bible authors or translators misunderstood God.
iii. Or maybe God lied for the greater good. After all, if we grant He can consign intelligent beings to eternal torment for the greater good, maybe He can also lie? And if we don't like him lying, then where were we when He created leviathan, etc.?
David's on 3.b.iii, but I don't see it as telling someone not to believe in a burning house. It's more testing the conclusion from the premises. (E.g. "As you fled the burning house, you heard a ghostly voice telling you to go faster. One possibility is that you dreamt the fire - have you checked?")
And I think that is reasonable - the questions David's hypothesis raises are (a) how do we know that God is going to burn people in Hell, and (b) how do we know that God doesn't lie? Those are fair questions, IMHO.
(Of course, there's a separate issue, which is that if GOD decided that the greatest good is to lie to people about Hell, then it might be very harmful for us to expose that lie.)
Jewish messianism has been spreading its poisonous message among us for nearly two thousand years. Democratic and communist universalisms are more recent, but they have only come to reinforce the old Jewish narrative. These are the same ideals.
The transnational, transracial, transsexual, transcultural ideals that these ideologies preach to us (beyond race, people, culture) and that are the daily sustenance of our schools, in the media, in our pop-culture, at our universities, and on our streets have our biosymbolic identity and our ethnic pride reduced to their minimal expression.
Sorry dude, but I'm totally into Jewish messianism, and appreciate what He did for me. I'll pray for you, though, so you're a little bit covered either way.
fuck you and your jewish god
Sounds to me like Friedman needs to read some Old Testament. God is benevolent, sure, but he is also just. One of the bible's fundamental assertions is that it is no cruelty on the part of God if he sends everyone to Hell, because we are worthy of such a punishment. Honestly, it's hammered home frequently enough that I'm not sure why he sees an issue here.
Past that, his proposed solution is also pretty off the wall. The virtue of telling the truth and dealing transparently with others is another very consistent ongoing theme in the bible. It would be really weird if the all-powerful, all-knowing deity that founded this religion which holds truth in such high regard was a rampant liar, telling his people whatever fiction would make them behave best.
Alright, got that out of my system. You take a much more interesting approach than me, this was a good read! Interesting how a mere backdrop of non-belief can fundamentally change what beliefs we encourage others to pick up, even in a non-confrontational way.
The Bible is bullshit . . . Jewish messianism has been spreading its poisonous message among us for nearly two thousand years. Democratic and communist universalisms are more recent, but they have only come to reinforce the old Jewish narrative. These are the same ideals.
The transnational, transracial, transsexual, transcultural ideals that these ideologies preach to us (beyond race, people, culture) and that are the daily sustenance of our schools, in the media, in our pop-culture, at our universities, and on our streets have our biosymbolic identity and our ethnic pride reduced to their minimal expression.
Yay! As a Christian-turned-atheist, I can’t tell you how much I’ve been hoping you’d write something in this vein, and I hope you write more. While I am leaning pretty heavily anti-Theist these days, I would love to be able to believe there is someone/something making sure everything will turn out alright in the end.
I’m not sure if I’ve been especially fortunate, or you’ve been especially unfortunate, but I’ve never encountered an atheist arguing like they do in your article. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, atheism, etc can’t all be true; at most, one accurately reflects reality. My journey to atheism was founded on that premise. The more I investigated, the more I found Christianity didn’t line up with reality. And that foundation lines up with all the other atheists I’ve encountered, especially the ex-Christian ones. The only way I’d ever argue “you should be comfortable admitting that ALL religions are real and true, and equally valid” would be to point out that you find all other religions unbelievable; why not Christianity too?
I’m very familiar with the problem of reconciling a perfectly good god with hell, but solving it by claiming god is lying - that’s new to me. I don’t think it’s fair to generalize his argument though - its strength is dependent on how serious the goodness/hell dichotomy is. Generalized, the argument is of course rather ridiculous - if there’s something about my religion I don’t like, simply throw it out. But as Han Solo says, “That’s not how the Force works!” However, I think this is a special case, like so: “My religion teaches X. X is fundamentally incompatible with my values, and/or logically inconsistent. Now what?” The approach I took, and many other ex-Christians take, is to say “Huh, maybe my religion is wrong. Let’s look into that.” Another approach is to change your values to line up with your beliefs. That’s the approach I used to take regarding homosexuality - I didn’t see anything wrong with it, but the Bible seemed to, so I grudgingly accepted I must be wrong. David Friedman’s takes another approach here, which is to posit something unsupported by (and in fact counter to) his religious texts. I see that as a simple effort to save his beliefs. He’d rather see God as a benevolent liar rather than give up his belief in God entirely. Or from a more rational perspective, he finds a lying god more probable than a non-existent one.
A minor aside that I find interesting is that he posits something completely untestable. There is absolutely no way we can distinguish a lying god from a truthful one in these matters. If god says “your head will explode if you travel faster than 100mph,” that’s something we can test out for ourselves. But if god says “if you don’t follow me in life, I will punish you after death,” we have absolutely nothing to go on except for his word. We will never, and can never, know if David Friedman’s theory is correct. It’s completely untestable.
On the Neptune beliefs, I’d like to dig into this more, but my thoughts aren’t complete yet and this comment is already pretty long. My short thoughts are, I’d say what religion does is tell you you aren’t allowed to use a telescope, but instead have to rely on a special Neptune-detector. But it only works when detecting Neptune, gives ambiguous data, and disagrees with alternative Neptune-dectors that claim to do the same thing. That’s where apologetics comes in, to explain why a particular Neptune-dector is the right one. Atheism posits that maybe the reason why there’s so many competing detectors, and why telescopes can’t seem to find Neptune, is that there isn’t a Neptune at all. Instead maybe what we’re seeing is like the case of the weird orbit of Mercury. That was explained not by finding another planet, but by discovering that our concept of gravity was incomplete. In the same way, maybe evolution, culture, psychology, etc can better explain why religions exist than anything supernatural can.
Anyway, those are my thoughts after reading the article. Biggest takeaway I’d like to give is that most of the atheists I’ve encountered, myself included, believe in truth and reality. The idea that they view truth as relative is something I heard that they did when I was a Christian, but haven’t actually seen in real life. Also, apologies if any of this is a rehash of other comments; I wanted to respond directly to the article before reading any of them.
So a couple thoughts on this, sort of out of order:
On atheists accepting truth and reality:
I think atheists broadly DO have a standard for truth and reality, oddly. Like if I go to an atheist and say "the world is flat" I don't expect them to go "whatever, brother, it's all just impressions - if I have a different impression, what's the problem?". I expect them to tell me it's round, and most would.
It's just in this weird pocket situation that it deviates from that.
On Neptune beliefs:
I think this metaphor is sort of nice in the sense that it does a certain thing well - it sort of illustrates where some people are coming from, in that they are trying to a very specific thing they do with math, like sort of fermi estimates for fun and profit, which works well there.
Where the metaphor falters a bit is when I try to stretch it to transition to the next section. Because I think it implies that what I'm trying to get at is that YOU should accept the use of my telescope (say in this case the Bible) as good evidence. Which isn't really what I'm going for - it was more an attempt to say something like "Listen, these are the things we use to derive information about the god we worship. And if you sort of take those away, what you are left with is purely internal sources - whatever a given individual imagines. And that's not much to leave". If that makes sense.
On the Han Solo Section:
David is an agnostic AFAIK and he states in places. I think there might still be sort of semi-beliefs about gods that he prefers, or something - he might be defending those still. But aside from that, I accept that the greater the disparity/problem a person sees, the more motivated they might be to figure it out.
In a weird way, there's a point at which if someone was saying "hey, I've thought of this great solution - I'll just get rid of the parts I don't much like", I'd probably (assuming I couldn't salvage things entirely, so to speak) actually just recommend they went the atheism or agnostic route; it's actually closer to Christianity in some sense, in that it still thinks "is this real" is an important question, as opposed to some "this might be good enough" middle ground.
On Neptune - You’re right, I may have been stretching the metaphor a bit.
On Han Solo - if he’s agnostic that changes my reading a bit. I had assumed he was Christian, that’s my error.
Your last paragraph - fully agree! Truth is paramount, wherever that leads. Only minor quibble is that I don’t think a person can completely “choose” to become atheist or agnostic. You can choose to behave as if you are, and choose to admit it to yourself or not, but I’m not convinced we choose our beliefs per se. But I can see saying to someone, “Hey, if you’re just going to throw out the parts you don’t like, why bother saying you believe? Aren’t you just forming a group of things you like rather than things you think are true?”
And finally, back to atheists accepting truth and reality (ignoring agnostics for now, they may be completely different in this case). In my experience, religion is one of the _only_ places I’m sure atheists will take a hard stance on truth and reality. They may be moral relativists, they may admit the benefits of religion regardless whether or not they are true, but on the truth claims of religions themselves they’ll have definite views. Maybe we just have encountered different circles of atheists (mine is primarily ex-Christian), but at least within my circle truth reigns supreme. I know that's how I became an atheist. I struggled to find reasons to believe, wanted to believe, but in the end wasn't convinced. It's about what's really there or not. Reality doesn't care what I, or anyone else, wants.
Evolution is heterosexual.
In order not to mislead people, I should make it clear that I was not talking about my beliefs. I'm an atheist sympathetic to religious beliefs — several of my favorite authors were serious Christians — but not sharing them. I was simply pointing out one way in which a Christian could resolve an apparent inconsistency in Christian doctrines.
I second this, in the sense that David isn't unclear about this anywhere, and in the sense that he's not someone I think of as hostile to Christianity.
I agree with what you're saying here and I think you highlight a HUGE chasm between people arguing about things from the religious or non religious perspective.
It's always felt to me that there is a certain blindness on the non-believer side. Many of them seem to be running a "they cannot possibly REALLY (truly, really, the way we both believe in rocks) believe in this stuff" theme in their heads. This often leads to a vilification of believers. Non believers attribute malicious, manipulative or predatory intent to believers because the idea that someone could possibly believe that, idk, someone could go to hell for eternity if they reject Jesus just doesn't compute for them on some very basic emotional level.
You can apply this to pretty much every contentious social and ethical issue: sexual behaviour, abortion, religious observance, blasphemy, proselytising, other religions, afterlife you name it. Nonbelievers just ignore that telescope.
I'm writing all this as a lifetime atheist leaning occasionally agnostic, who grew up in a non-believer family in a extremely Christian culture. And it STILL tooke into my late 40s and it took a death of a very close person to get this. I was talking to someone highly religious after my bereavement, and she was kind and not pushy or evangelising, and it struck me then, like a true revelation: she REALLY believes death is not the end. She's not just saying it. She's not suspending disbelief. She's not using this notion as a symbol for memory. Or comfort. Or anything like that. She's sad because the person who died isn't here and because I'm sad, but she ABSOLUTELY believes they still REALLY exist and probably also that she will meet them again. And that blew my mind. Because it meant that communication and connection was impossible between us. Despite her empathy and kindness. We differed in such a fundamental way in our perception of reality, we'd always run into the elephant of "he's dead -- not REALLY".
And now having said all that. I'm glad you brought up that behaviour issue. And I don't think you can easily get out of it just by saying "nobody is perfect".
I imagined becoming Christian. I wanted to. I TRIED to believe (two or three times in my life, depending how you count), pretty hard. It didn't work, probably because no telescope ;) But the imagining did work and they key thing in it was this: IF Christianity is real, then becoming a Christian would mean huge and fundamental changes in my life. Not just adjusting my behaviour that would count as sin according to the scriptures. But also taking up a lot of positive moves. IF you truly believe in the "good news" then it's so big ---- so so so immense and important --- that the only logical thing to do would be to devote all possible hours after basic keeping yourself alive of your life to trying to convert as many people as possible. There's no other rational response to "Christianity is real". Everything else pales into complete insignificance.
I think it's not so obvious to people who grew up religious and surrounded by believers because possibly they cannot conceive of actual lack of belief the way we cannot truly concieve of belief.
Thanks for this - it's appreciated.
One thing I'd say is that, yeah, there are really, really big implications to Christianity. But they are sort of different for everyone, and one thing that I think gets missed is there's, you know, getting on a plane and going to South American or wherever and doing missionary work. And that's something, someone needs to do it, it's good work. But at the same time, there's, like, being a good citizen, being good friends, being good workers, and that kind of thing.
I think at some point Christianity was more "on point" both with missionary work AND with, you know, being good members of the world so to speak. Being better people to know, the kind of people who sort of were good to live your life near.
I say that only because, like, EA has this thing where it's like "anything worth doing is worth doing with literally 100% of your time and resources at all times". And that's not nothing, and it's what draws people to EA. But Christianity differs at a least a little in that there's a not insubstantial part of the religion that's like "let people see you be fair, and good, and raise your family well, and help people who need help" - like basically doing life, but doing it better and in a way that's better for people around you. Not "go turbo mode from now until you die", but more "be intentional about how you do the things people do, and be a good example for people to think of when they try to determine if what you have is real."
Another example that just happened to me... and why this article struck home. New therapist was asking me what my faith gives me- why I need it- what is its instrumentality. I understand that as an atheist/agnostic, that’s the way to think about it. But that’s not how I view it at all! There are benefits, no question. But it’s not instrumental, it’s what I believe is the truth. So it was a weird conversation bc she thought I wasn’t answering, or avoiding something, but it’s really just that it didn’t occur to her that it is a belief. (For the record I think it was all in good faith and she was being respectful. It was just a fundamental, total disconnect.) Maybe next time, I’ll try the house fire analogy.
What you're saying about the general "respect all religions as correct" idea makes sense to me, but the David Friedman point seems a bit different. He seems to be taking what he percieves as a hard-to-resolve contradiction seriously enough that it should allow questioning strongly held beliefs.
What about the following analogy: your very reliable alarm system notifies you of a housefire while you're away, you rush to the scene together with your friend. Strangely, it seems perfectly intact. But you inspect the camera feed together and indeed see a raging fire recorded. Confusedly brainstorming, your friend suggests maybe someone hacked into the alarm system and there wasn't really a fire?
Back to the object level question of hell, perhaps to you it seems like a crappy resolution compared to other alternatives like "it's metaphorical" or something, but you don't seem to be making that point here. Lacking an alternative explanation, a contradiction does seem to justify a lot of doubt / questioning. What do you think?
I don't think I have any specific problem with "doing your best to solve a problem", or if the solution to the problem ends up being wacky, or unusual. And sometimes a proposed solution falls a little flat, or is unsatisfactory-feeling even if it's correct. So there's not really any sense in which I'm getting down on David for looking for a solution or being willing to veer into the unusual, etc. - that's all fine to me.
In this case I took exception less because of any of those reasons, and more because of the costs of the solutions proposed. For a person who believes this is all real (and particularly thinks that it's all knowable - that he or she can get at the truth, whether they have yet or not), David's solution is asking not just for an acceptance of the unusual, but also for a person to say "Where god says something, he's unreliable - he could be lying. Where the bible says something, the same things apply."
When you do that, a person transitions from having religions beliefs they think are true to something like atheism or agnosticism (none of this is true, or if it is there's no way to know), and then back to pretending they still think it's true even though they've now moved to a model that's custom built and fit by themselves - essentually only as true and powerful as they are comfortable with it being, if that makes sense.
I think this is relevant because that's so foriegn to someone who actually believes this stuff is true and really exists that it inhibits conversation. Like, if you come to me and say "Hey, my understanding is you believe in a God who wants X - why don't you just believe in the same god, but exise the X part? It's inconvenient" it ends up sounding to me like you asked for me decide that rocks were edible or that trees were made of steel. It's not that the thought isn't nice - it's that I can't change the characteristics of reality at will. So it ends up being confusing I think for all parties.
On the object question:
I'm going to (on request) write something up about the question of hell, but I can completely understand why that particular perceived conflict would spur a lot of questions. That's not wrong! Like it's better to seek that out.
One thing that I will say in advance of that is that a lot of these kind of conflicts begin in a really, really fundamental level. So I'll often talk to people who are starting from a prior that it's impossible that something that seems wrong to them but right to a deity could end up with them being wrong and the deity being right, no matter how small the disagreement, and even on a theoretical level.
So sometimes you get a version of this conversation that says "The bible says god is good, and I define good in a certain way - I am the person who defines what good is. And on top of that I get to decide if anything god does is bad. And I've decided in advance that these two things are in conflict under those stardards I set - prove me wrong".
I'm not saying that's what's happening here, but there's a lot of room on the spectrum between someone who says "It's possible god's standards supercede mine" and someone who says "god has violated my laws and has a lot of groveling to do before I'll feel comfortable accepting him", and a lot of people are at different points in that spectrum.
> We don’t do this with any other kind of belief - if someone believes that dark matter exists, and says so, they are by implication saying that anybody who believes that dark matter doesn’t exist is wrong, and believes something that’s false. Nobody has a problem with this or considers it particularly arrogant; people are generally allowed to think they are right about things, and then we argue about them.
I think I understand what your article is saying, and I suspect what I'm going to say is tangential to the thrust of it. Perhaps not. I'll let you judge.
The issue I take with this formulation of things is that, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever set another living human being on fire, or flown a jumbo jet into a skyscraper, over the question of dark matter existing or not.
So I suspect that at least some of the time, the agnostic or atheist asking the "why don't you treat other religions as potentially valid" question, is really more trying to propose a perspective of the world that avoids those sorts of things.
Apologies if I have wandered too far afield.
So to be clear just because something isn't, like, directly relevant to the article doesn't mean people can't talk about it in the comments. Anybody reading this: you could be like "what's your favorite kind of pizza?" in the comments of literally any article I write and that would be pretty much fine.
So I might be wrong here, but boiling down what you are saying to maybe less polite but clearer terms, we might rephrase it as something like this:
"There's a case to be made that religion is not only false, but counterproductive, and maybe even intensely counterproductive. In that case, it's not wrong to say "religion is bad, you should stop doing it" and to work against religion in general."
And in general that's two arguments we can have - like someone can come to me and try to convince me religion is false, which is in turn relevant to convincing me it's bad (and vice versa). Totally fine with that - like I'm not pleased as punch that people disagree with me on things, I don't pretend I am - but it's reasonable to disagree with me on things, and we talk about them.
What I'm sort of asking here is for that to be explicit, or at least for the argument they are making to be consistent. A couple of reasons why:
1. When someone comes to me and says "Why don't you treat religion X as just as true as yours?" They basically know that they are asking "Why don't you admit your religion isn't true, and in fact that no religion is or could be true, and get out of the way of my superior moral system?" and as a general rule know that they are doing it.
And I'm fine with that *goal*, in a general way. But if I take them at their word, it doesn't work - I, as a believer, then waste a lot of time going "No, wait, that's logically inconsistent for BOTH our systems, why are you being weird?" and they spend a lot of time hemming and hawing around the thing they actually want to get to, and it doesn't end up accomplishing their goal except with people who they expect to be very low risk of doing anything for religion, let alone anything they think is bad.
2. I also sort of bristle (generally and not just here) at people treating me like I'm dumb in specifically tricky ways - like if you think I'm dumb, say so; I'm a big boy and a semi-skilled combatant, I can take it sort of thing. And here the arguments are really particularly paternalistic - like literally "listen I made a carve-out definition for 'believe' I'll let you play with in the corner so long as you agree with me on everything else I think is right'.
I think there deserves to be sort of a courtesy standard around stuff like that. Not a biblical thing, just like, it seems like there should be.
Nah, I don't actually think of religion as "bad", despite being highly agnostic myself. In fact, I recognize that religion gave us some pretty awesome things, like The Enlightenment. And I certainly recognize that many, many horrors have been committed by atheists and agnostics over the years. My position is just more just about (at least I think it is) that while I recognize that you (yes, tautology ahead!) believe your beliefs, it's important to recognize that others believe their beliefs as well, and that some people don't believe any of it, and at some point either we have holy wars or we figure out a way to let people who don't share our beliefs go their own way.
Which I'm not sure is *actually* really related to the point you were trying to make, and thus my hemming, hawing, and caveats. ;)
Also, I think it was partly the use of the "dark matter" metaphor that I felt was offputting. Though I also have some occasionally very specific word usages, as in, I rarely use the word "believe" to describe my positions, because I'm not sure it's accurate to describe them as "beliefs" as much as "positions I hold due to the data I have seen". So while I don't personally have an opinion on Dark Matter since I don't know enough about the topic to justify one, putting it in the same context as spiritual beliefs -- which are almost by definition unfalsifiable -- just gets up my left nostril, I suppose. :D
I don't think you're dumb, and I did not intend to come across as paternalistic. I only feel that my moral philosophy is superior to many others insofar as I mostly want to leave other people alone, specifically *because* I don't feel like I am likely to be able to tell them what to do better than they can do for themselves. If someone isn't picking my pocket, punching me in the face, or pissing in my well, (or doing those things to others who have not consented to those activities) it's none of my business.
It may *also* be partly related to my having seen a number of people who have strong spiritual beliefs indicate that they don't think that people who don't share their beliefs even actually believe what they claim to.
I recognize that this reply is horribly organized, but I've been out apartment hunting all day and my brain is fried. :D
I'm still reading through this. I'm where you mention bad faith (heh) argumentation. I'll come back at some point and add something, but I wanted to state that I am not an atheist who doesn't believe in God.
I am an atheist who considers God's existence immaterial. I don't answer it because it's not a question for me. I wonder how this article plays out in my personal context.
Big Edit Time:
My piece on atheism is about peace. I don't try to pull people over into atheism, because it's not my job. And, I appreciate when someone of virtue asks me to go to church, or says they'll pray for me, or the like, because I know it comes from a place of concern and love. I don't remember anyone making a concerted attempt to convert me.
I've been an atheist for two decades plus (I'm in my mid-thirties, and I learned not to ask because it usually makes people uncomfortable. But, I love talking about faith, so I miss having those conversations.
Ask away, here or through email.
Do expound on it more later and we can talk about it - I just started typing something out and realized at this point I'd be bullshitting.
Will do! I'm at work, so it won't be until later.
Gosh, I have so much to say about this. (You might remember me as Tam, btw. Hi!)
I was an atheist most of my life, but if all goes according to plan, I'll be officially Catholic after the Easter Vigil. Some thoughts in what I hope is a logical order:
1. Part of what finally converted me was reading a book (by then-Cardinal Ratzinger, aka the recently deceased Pope Benedict) that pointed out that (a) I was no more at rest in my atheism than I would be as a wobbly Christian (going far beyond the usual and unconvincing "no atheists in a foxhole" argument), and (b) the notion of "belief" can mean "in the absence of perfect knowledge, this is the ground I choose to stand on" and not necessarily "I've examined all of the evidence and find this perspective the most rationally convincing."
2. You really can (contra DinoNerd, at least) choose to believe something. Some of the ideas of Christianity are, IMO, beautiful enough to be worth dying for, and therefore, I decided, beautiful enough to be worth the risk of being wrong, especially in light of...
3. I'm attracted to a kind of inverse version of Pascal's Wager, that goes like this: If Christianity (and everything enough like it to make being Christian a good idea even if not the BEST idea) is wrong, and we live in a purely material universe, then I'm free to be as wrong as I want (by being Christian) and it won't matter a lick as in a few million or billion years there will no longer be any evidence, no matter how tiny or indiscoverable, that I ever existed.
4. However, if I just do a "choose your own adventure" faith, of course I wouldn't believe in it, that's just stupid, like (as you say) making up a planet you think would be interesting and claiming it really exists. Even if I use my best, noblest, smartest thinking to come up with the best, noblest, most wonderful and perfectly correct God I can, well, so what?
5. So I chose Catholicism, because it exists already, outside of me, and has decent claims to being the church founded by Jesus, and it has orthodoxy. I am not comfortable with all Catholic positions (I'm still a social liberal) but I can try to live by them and hope for better understanding as time goes on. And although disagreeing with me doesn't prove that a religion represents the Truth, it's certainly the case that the Truth would differ from what I think in some respects (as I'm not likely to have worked it all out on my own correctly). This isn't the ONLY thing I like about Catholicism, but it's certainly one thing. Also it seems to be the only rigid form of Christianity that hasn't been completely captured by the political right, in America. (The American churches that agree with me on social issues are totally loosey-goosey, whatever-you-think-is-fine, don't-really-believe-in-sin types of things, and that doesn't work for me. I might as well just go back to being a secular humanist or a Unitarian as I was raised.)
Getting back to your actual points, I find a lot of secular arguments about Christianity do this thing where they assume it's just not true, and that nobody thinks it is. It's like when people talk about how obnoxious it is to try to convert someone to your religion. Like, OK, sure, it might be counterproductive to the extent that it comes across as obnoxious, and if being Christian is equivalent to just really liking Thai food, then you shouldn't be pushy about it, but if it's true then you kind of obviously should share the news? Ugh.
Tam! Always happy to see you. Glad to hear things are going well.
I think I agree with your last paragraph in large part, but I'd add that I don't think that literally everyone is doing that *consciously*. Like I don't think David is rubbing his hands together and going "oh, I know he's just faking his faith and belief". But if you've spent a large part of your life around people who don't have these kinds of beliefs (and in some parts of the country/world they are vanishingly rare) you eventually get used to the idea that it's all sort of a funny game; that it's about good vibes and ritual but nobody would really "let belief win" when it was up against actual important societal and cultural stuff.
Which I still don't like, but it's also not coming from an intentionally bad/malicious place in all cases, if that makes sense.
The choose your own adventure faith can be had, because truth is a pathless land. Not all religions work like dogmatic varieties of Christianity work, the Eastern ones basically do advocate for choose your own adventure, although the Pharisaical priests and monks try to keep that under wraps.
Oh, I kind of agree that it's possible for some people, on some topics, to choose to believe something, or at the least to choose to act in ways that will increase their chance of believing it. Some treatments for depression immediately come to mind.
Everything always turns out to be more complex, in practice, than anything we try to say about it. (Including the statement I just made, which doubtless has exceptions.)
First approximation: the idea of choosing to believe, or not, is absurd.
Second approximation: but sometimes works out in practice anyway.
Third approximation: some theory I don't have that explains when and why it's sometimes possible.
I feel like a Christian might read the above and be like "Wow, is that ever a lukewarm form of Christianity, does that even count?" And all I can say to that is, hey, if your claims are true, then I need to get on the train any way I can. I don't have some more "real" faith that I'm rejecting for this one. Also it turns out that once you get on the train, things get more real, and hopefully it doesn't matter how you boarded.
I don't know that I read it as lukewarm. I sometimes talk about your situation to people in my real life, and I think I put it something like this:
"I know this person who used to sort of sit in church and just be searching for faith, like she could see other people who appeared to have it, and believed that they had it, but just wasn't feeling it. And it wasn't an easy thing for her in the way she saw it being easy for some people. And in a way I haven't seen before she just sort of kept at it, like pursued faith and belief in a way that was real work and came at a cost and price that isn't typical for most people, and I think now has found some of that, and continues to work to get more".
And I'm not a big authority on every single thing, but to me that doesn't really read as lukewarm stuff. It feels more like, hey, here's this commitment to this that started well before any of the rewards, and sort of had to fight through thorns to bloom. I don't think of that as "lesser" at all.
Thank you 💙
I guess another reason Catholicism (mostly) works for me is that it's not one of the ones where they are like, "You have to have this specific emotional kind of experience in order to know you're in."
[26] The fairies are not to be seized on, and brought to answer for the hurt they do. So also the ecclesiastics vanish away from the tribunals of civil justice.
[27] The ecclesiastics take from young men the use of reason, by certain charms compounded of metaphysics, and miracles, and traditions, and abused Scripture, whereby they are good for nothing else but to execute what they command them. The fairies likewise are said to take young children out of their cradles, and to change them into natural fools, which common people do therefore call elves, and are apt to mischief.
[28] In what shop or operatory the fairies make their enchantment, the old wives have not determined. But the operatories of the clergy are well enough known to be the universities, that received their discipline from authority pontifical.
[29] When the fairies are displeased with anybody, they are said to send their elves to pinch them. The ecclesiastics, when they are displeased with any civil state, make also their elves, that is, superstitious, enchanted subjects, to pinch their princes, by preaching sedition; or one prince, enchanted with promises, to pinch another.
[30] The fairies marry not; but there be amongst them incubi that have copulation with flesh and blood. The priests also marry not.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668. Ed. Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994. [Leviathan: Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness... Chap. xlvii. Of the Benefit that proceedeth from such Darkness, and to Whom it Accrueth] https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/leviathan-part-iv-of-the-kingdom
A pro-Christian variant on the same theme would be Pascal's Wager. For those not familiar with it, who don't want to google it, it's the arguments that if Christianity were true, and one didn't believe/worship, one would lose out on eternal life/be subjected to eternal torture, so therefore one should *believe*. Same flaw - belief being treated as something one can choose. (Somehow the argument presented is never that one should just obey the rules and perform the rituals, without being any more than lukewarm agnostic.)
It doesn't look quite the same, because this variant expects one to believe the whole thing, presumably in whichever form (sect) the particular believer considers to be truth. But this time the believer is expecting the non-believer to do what seems plausible to them, but NOT to the non-believer.
The same things apply - only some of the believers who use this argument are engaged in proselytizing; others are trying to explain their own attitude, or engage in what if games ("what if I didn't already believe").
Pascal's wager is sort of gross, agreed. I think that for some of what you said - it's like, here's this threat I'm proposing, so you have to do a lot of stuff to mitigate it just because I can imagine it from the Atheist perspective. EA does the same thing with AI in pretty much the same way and it's always struck me as weird.
The other thing is I'm not even sure that Pascal's wager would *work* - the idea is that you don't really believe in any of it but you sort of pretend to, just in case. And in Christianity pretending to believe doesn't work. So it's a weird corner case where you can't do the thing that actually works (Belief genuine enough to motivate action), you can do the two things that don't work (just action, and pretend belief) and it doesn't help, and it's not clear what the end-game is.
Pascal believes that participating in the liturgical life of the Church is efficacious in disposing the participant to faith and, even if it fails to do so, that it encourages them to become: "faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful," virtues which similarly dispose you to a positive response to God's grace.
It's difficult for me to see how we could understand the conversion of peoples or the religious education of children as legitimate if this were not true.
Pascal's Wager also has the serious flaw that it equally applies to other religions, so how do you pick? Especially since most are mutually exclusive. At that point you get into a sort of cost minimizing game where you start to wonder "Which religion has the worst hell? I should pick that one so I minimize the chances of going there."
To say there are some serious incentive alignment issues there is an understatement :D
If only Pascal had dedicated hundreds of pages of the Pensees to a positive argument for Christianity and said that the wager should spur you to recognize the seriousness of the question at hand and investigate in detail who is in possession of the truth...
>Somehow the argument presented is never that one should just obey the rules and perform the rituals
Pascal says we should do precisely that on the same page as we find the wager *after* he grants the very criticism you lob above, that belief is not something we can simply choose. It's literally the next paragraph.
I'm begging, begging people to actually *read* arguments, particularly when they're formulated by some of the greatest minds in history, before they endeavor to critique them.
Yeah, you have a point. And this wouldn't be the only time that the originator of an idea, whose name is still attached, said something rather more nuanced than 95% of those who cite them. (Sadly, I've never read Pascal's writings. But reading Adam Smith was quite "interesting", in this kind of context.)
As you might be able to tell from my post binge, I'm a huge Pascal fan. The Pensees are, I think, brilliant, easily one of the most important Christian works of the past half century. His positive, "psychological" case for Christianity is both unique and interesting, and his analysis of diversion is incredibly incisive, particularly in the modern age.
On top of that, the Wager is a much better argument than people think, mostly because they tend not to understand what the argument is *for*. It is not, say, intended to convince the devout Muslim that they ought to become a Catholic, or even necessarily to convince the devout atheist. It's meant to shake the reader into recognizing what's at stake in this wager that we're all forced to make, to force them to recognize that whatever choice they make, they cannot afford to settle into a sort of casual, indifferent agnosticism.
Note that virtually all the objections to the Wager, even if they are made by someone who has lapsed into precisely this sort of indifference, presumes precisely what Pascal hopes the Wager makes you realize, that you cannot escape the choice and that it is an extremely (even *the most* extremely) important one.
There's a writer named David Wong who I don't much like on a lot of subjects, but he did once write something that I remember a lot that paraphrases something like this:
"Listen, there might not be a god, I get it, but you have to at least understand that even if there isn't a god there's something working in the background of human brains that very much makes it feel for most people ike *something* like a god is real.
That might be a trick of evolution or unfortunate, or whatever, but you are bashing your head against the wall if you try and approach people like it's just as easy as going "it's clear there isn't a god, stop being stupid!" because it's very much unclear for most people"
I like that for conversations like this, because it at least acknowledges that this isn't something, like, that's historically weird - if anything the whole "there isn't a god, and it's clear" thing is the position that requires training to get to, the unintuitive thing (right or wrong).
I don't usually make utilitarian arguments for Christianity because they seem sort of mealy-mouthed to me, but I think it's broadly true that getting rid of Christianity's "we are default bad in a way that justifies us being aware of and resisting our bad impulses" is a bad thing to get rid of, even from that perspective.
The American Israeli Political Action Committee has become the new official religion of the United States government . . . We can't afford healthcare for American children because we have to keep bombing someone else's for the love of Jesus and Israel . . .
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Jewish Corruption in Ukraine . . . by Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.
❝. . . the present conflict is a huge distraction from the fact that, for decades, the biggest threat to Ukraine hasn’t been Russia, but financiers and speculators operating with impunity within Ukraine’s borders to exploit ethnic Ukrainians and plunder their resources.❞
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2023/02/17/jewish-corruption-in-ukraine/
The Frankfurt School adapted Marx’s theories on revolution to include Freud’s theory of the subconscious. The Cultural Marxists’ main focus was to reshape the subconscious of Western men and women and thus create new type of person: one who would react passively to provocations of all kinds.
https://nordicresistancemovement.org/what-is-cultural-marxism/