I found this really interesting - I'm from the UK and so from a different Christian culture, but a lot of this resonated with me so I guess we're not too different. I've attended a variety of different churches (from Catholic school to Charismatic Evangelical), and the compassion within the church is definitely something that consistently stands out.
I suspect we may simply have different theologies on the merit of doing good, and it's probably a bad idea to argue over it since I'm sure we could both quote scripture and verse at each other to prove that we're right. My thinking is more along the lines that all good deeds glorify God, even if done with non-religious motivations. That's not to say I'm a universalist, I do believe that my specific brand of Christianity is the correct one (I'm not saying I'm 100% certain of all theological minutia, just that by definition my beliefs are the ones I find most plausible), but I think even an atheist draws closer to God whenever they act out of love for other people. I think all people have some understanding of the divine (the perfect being, and hence the perfect standard to which our actions are held against), but just don't have the right relationship to it without Christianity.
How do you account for when "acting out of love for other people" (for example) occurs in other, non-Christian religions? What if, say, a Hindu or Buddhist acts out of love for another person? Their actions in many trying circumstances could end up being similar or possibly identical to a Christian in the same position. That makes it seem that the choice of Christianity is arbitrary rather than fundamental. How do you know that Christianity is the right choice, when you could have made another religious choice and still ended up behaving as a "good person"?
Worse, what if God is just an illusion and that the truth is breaking out of the cycles of your own samsakara/karma etc (I don't know the minutiae of this - just an example)? In which case you could go through life making all the correct moral decisions apart from the Big One which ended up being wrong. In which case you find yourself expiring as a good person but one whose choice to devote their deeds to God was completely flawed.
I would argue that doesn't make it "all for nothing" - it should be the moral choices you make that are important regardless of whether you are atheist, Buddhist, Hindu etc. There is a lot of common moral ground across all religions - maybe this is the real important stuff and that the huge end goal is incorrect window dressing.
Not sure what Jerden will end up saying here, but a lot of what you are asking is "What if all religions are true?". I've always found this to be sophistry - if all of them are true, then none of them that make concrete claims are. And most of them do make concrete claims.
As an immediate reaction, doing good is not what gets you into the heaven in Christianity - it's explicitely a system in which you are saved through a specific sacrifice, accessed through your own faith, which allows you to route around the standard you can't fulfill (more or less, I'm condensing a great deal for efficiency's sake.
If that's not true, it's not true. But you can't have an explicit claim of "there's no way to the father except through me" and "pretty much all roads lead to god, man" on the same table. One of the two is definitionally wrong.
In your last paragraph you argue that, essentially, moral choices should be the thing - make the right ones, and get into heaven. And that's not something you can't believe, but it's *different* than what Christians believe. Not only different, but in direct conflict.
That makes questions like this almost always boil down to something like "Why isn't the thing you believe the thing I believe?" which gets tricky - I can just as easily pull the uno reverse card on you and demand you explain why you don't adhere to my belief system.
True - I don't really expect anything other than what's in your final paragraph because most likely nothing else is possible. I just wonder if we stumble upon our religious choices through exposure/culture or whether because they really are the correct choice for us. It's not as if all religions get to pitch to us, on a level footing, sort of Dragon's Den style, and then we make our choice. In a lot of respects we end up railroaded into our choice.
I don't believe that "all religions are true". I believe (if we considered all their claims in totality) either one is or none are. And I wouldn't know how to choose the one. If as much is truly at stake as many religions claim, then it's an awful choice to have to make.
You're right - I do believe that moral choices are the thing. And I do realise that's not really what Christianity believes. I believe it's possible that Christianity is a useful vehicle to make these moral choices, but also that several other religions could do the same thing. That doesn't mean I believe they are "all true" because I would only look at a certain "common ground" set of morality across them, not whether, for example we need to accept Jesus as our saviour or whether in fact we need to scrub out our samskaras by ritual chanting (or whatever). I think a lot of the concrete claims are neither here nor there - they could be right or they could be wrong but they are not provable either way (hi, Godel?) but that doesn't mean that aspects of their morality can't be true and useful.
Thanks for the post by the way. If you are getting a whole lot of extra surprise late traction it's because the article ended up on thebrowser.com
Thanks for letting me know about the traffic source - it's hard for me to find them sometimes. Dan Luu linked this one out on twitter yesterday, and I think it just overall put it in front of some people who hadn't seen it before (thebrowser included, I think).
If you reread my comment I think we actually do agree on this - my point about an atheist applies just as much to a follower of any religion other than Christianity. I'm humble enough to admit that I could be wrong about the nature of God, if that's the case then I hope that my attempts at virtue still reflect well on me.
If Christianity is true then I would hope that it helps me to make the correct moral decisions, but it's observably true that people can do virtuous things even without it. Clearly, the intellectual decision about the correct theology is distinct from the moral question about the right way to live. Personally, I find Christian theology compelling because it argues that these good deeds, while admirable, are ultimately inadequate to earn our way to God, and we must rely on God's mercy and forgiveness rather than our own righteousness. However, the fact that it would be awkward for me if another religion turned out to be true doesn't seem like a good argument for rejecting all specific religious claims. Maybe I'm too much of a scientist, but the correct theory is not found by averaging all of the hypotheses out - ultimately, you have to pick one and test whether it seems to be true.
(I find Islam the most challenging to me as a Christian, the moral claims are very similar but the theological claims have key differences. I'm not too worried if Buddhism turns out to be true, I can just try again next time)
My impression of most major religions is that they argue that doing good is instrumental to the real purpose of life, which is drawing closer to some kind of higher purpose, which may or may not be a god or gods. Framing that as window dressing misses the whole point of religion - if you think the morality is what's truly important, just be an atheist and spend your time on moral philosophy instead. "Religion is a trick to get apes to behave well" is not exactly a bold new claim, but it only makes sense if you assume a priori that the transcendent is illusory.
I loved your insight about Christians avoiding explicit movies! I often wonder if the Netflix finance department will figure out that several million Christian subscribers gave up on finding the one-in-a-hundred video that doesn’t conflict with my Christian faith and traditional values.
Maybe their programming is just following the younger, woker audience, but I honestly feel like I’m being indoctrinated into a world that I don’t want to live in.
I heard a comment from a blacklisted conservative person in the movie industry who wondered why they only make films critical of the US military. Not saying it’s not corrupt, like every organization becomes, but wouldn’t some large number of conservative consumers pay to see those?
I've often thought that it's weird that they don't have "cable edit" versions as an option on Netflix movies - those tapes have to exist still, right? I want to show my kids Revenge of the Nerds as much as the next guy, but the version without tons of nudity/rape isn't available to me, and there doesn't seem to be a good reason why.
The cable edits probably exist only on Betamax in abysmally low quality. I suspect the demand is perceived to be low enough that Netflix doesn't expect the cost to result in enough additional subscriptions to be profitable... Not to mention that I think most film creators are not in favor of their works being censored in this way especially given that Netflix has no FCC obligation to do so.
Re: Mormons and the Trinity. Here are some possible factors, ordered by descending significance IMO (I'm LDS):
1. For many, missions are the first time they've had meaningful discussions about their beliefs with non-Mormons, so in general they'll be likely to fumble instead of giving a clear answer.
2. Perhaps in your area, the Trinity is a common objection, and the local missionaries prefer to avoid the topic ("we just spent an hour arguing about the Trinity with the last guy!"). (I served my mission in Malaysia/Singapore, and it wasn't a big deal there--but I've heard of this kind of thing from people who served in the US).
3. To a Mormon (drawing on my own experience), the topic of "Are Mormons really Christian?" feels somewhat exasperating ("Duh, it's literally called 'The Church of *Jesus Christ* ...'!"). Until you've been exposed to it enough (see #1), it's surprising that the Trinity is such an important belief for many Christians that not believing in it would make them think of you as being in an entirely different religion. This might cause missionaries to not take your questions fully seriously, making them more likely to go for #2 ("look, we're both Christians, can we please just move on to Joseph Smith instead...").
Thanks for the thoughtful answer and the kindness - it's appreciated.
I think as to 1. that's understandable - I'm pretty sure I was probably similar in terms of trying to talk about things when I was 18-20 (that's correct, right? for the age range of the mission?). And realistically that's most of the LDS folks I've talked to about religion are missionaries - the others I would have talked to about... like, just stuff. Where good pizza restaurants are, that kind of thing.
As to 2. and 3., I think there's an unavoidable conflict with me-type Christians that's going to make it hard to get past, because we are talking about a fairly big difference in the fundamental nature of the dude we are worshipping. Sometimes you get enough difference piled up that it becomes clear you aren't worshipping the same guy - for instance, both you and I would be suspicious of someone who came from the Church of Jesus Christ The Guy From The Bible but who, like, believed he was a reincarnation of the Buddha. Details probably matter here, and this is a pretty big one.
I think part of why it looks different from our different vantages is because (from what I can tell) LDS people are raised on a dogma that, ultra-condensed, is something like "Listen, the Christians are Christians - but they don't have our full gospel, so we need to get that to them". If my impression there is right, that's a lot different from our "this is a new religion; you need to check it out and see how it lines up before you go accepting it willy-nilly" general stance. And then you run into a pretty big difference in who Jesus is, and it matters, because it reinforces the "different religion" bit.
re: 2 and 3, I agree, and hopefully not everyone gets through their entire mission before realizing that. One of the main difficulties for missionaries is that by the time you kinda-sorta figure out what you're doing, it's time to go home :).
That being said--another potential factor is that most people who actually end up converting (in my anecdotal experience, which is an exceptionally small sample) tend to come somewhat easily ("golden investigators" -- my wife was one of these), whereas there are lots of people who will happily meet with you and talk about doctrine but who have a very low probability of converting. Missionaries' priors perhaps get optimized for the former, causing them to neglect people who might convert if their doctrinal concerns were addressed.
This is largely speculation, and again I'm guessing the dominant factor is just #1/lack of general competence. I should ask my brother what he thinks; he served in Florida.
> I think part of why it looks different from our different vantages is because ...
We have a pretty similar concept in terms of people getting prepped for hearing a message from above. The Calvinists do this the hardest, as far as I know - to the extent where (to my understanding) a person who wasn't prepped couldn't actually accept Christ in their system. It doesn't make a practical difference as far as I know, since everyone who accepts Christ was self-evidently prepped.
I'm not sure the "looking for people who will listen as-is" tactic is that bad from a pure numbers perspective - my guess is that precious few of the people who Knew enough about LDS to ask those questions would like the answers - some might, but most who asked them would be trying to see if they "matched up" and they don't. That's of course not taking into account the latter category in your post.
Really salient points re: the salutary effects of committed religious belief on personal behavior, and why. One more point: religious people reproduce at 2x the rate of the non-religious (essentially the difference between replacement value and serious population decline), which will absolutely lead to a reversal of the present secularizing trend in the mid-term future.
Quick fact check, data I could find shows Christians do have a higher birth rate (varying by denomination) than agnostics or atheists, but it's nowhere near double. Outside of Mormons, it's somewhere between 20-60% higher, not 100% AND per RC's link below, ~20% of those fall out and deconvert. Christians were having more kids 15-20 years ago. Atheists about the same so their advantage was greater, yet Christianity has been plummeting. Really really fast. If that theory had any weight, why hasn't it played out at all for 20+ years?
Only if all those kids actually stay religious, which often does not turn out to be the case. It would be an interesting exercise to model how a population changes based on conversion at various rates and ages.
I hope you continue to write more pieces like this. I'm an atheist, but have become much more interested in religion lately. Maybe I'll end up in the Thomas Jefferson Category.
One thing I've started appreciating is that there are definitely different levels of sophistication of religious belief. Fundamentalist Christian types have this idea that the Biblical corpus has the same ontological and epistemological status as a scientific theory. I'm not sure what to make of that. It's obviously not correct. Why is that belief still so prevalent? Contrast that with someone like Mircea Eliade. Maybe this hierarchy of religious sophistication is demeaning to many people, but it seems correct.
But I also believe that Atheists don't take religion seriously enough at all. We've done very little to study and understand religion from a biological perspective, a phenomenological perspective, a literary perspective and a metaphorical perspective, just for starters. There is so much going on and we seem so eager to throw it away without understanding it first.
Sometimes I think religion is like math. It is an extremely important part of our society, and almost everyone is embarrassingly bad at it. Those who dismiss it offhand are like the kid in grade 8 learning algebra and complaining that he'll never use it. Maybe he's right. But I'm glad mathematicians still exist.
What you are asking parses out to something like "Why do people who believe a thing think it's true?". If they didn't believe it, they wouldn't be Christians; they'd be religious studies majors with a focus on the Bible. That's not a bad thing to be, but it's not the same thing as religious. When you spread it out to Mircea Eliade, it's similar and becomes something like "Why can't these people believe in Christianity like this this guy that doesn't believe in anything?
I bring this up not to "prove" religion to you but to point out that being religious and being interested in religion aren't the same thing. What you are asking is why a bunch of people won't suddenly abandon their beliefs as clearly untrue. The answer to that should be obvious - they believe they are true.
The flip side of this is the idea that atheists should study religion, since there's clearly so much going on with it and how people interact with it. I'm always suspicious that they'd get much out of it - most of the effects religion seems to have for people are tied to an at least somewhat sincere belief in it. I think it's hard to go "everything spiritual is fake, but act like it isn't" no matter how well you understand religion.
Of all people, I think religious ones are the most open to the idea of different types of truth. So I am not asking why they believe something, but why they insist it has the same type of truth claims as Science. Most of the stories of the Bible far predate the first scientists. Whatever these stories are, they are not scientific claims. I think the story of Cain and Abel is true, but in a very different way than evolution is true. Does a religious person lose anything by making this distinction? Some very prevalent religious figures do make this distinction, so what I'm wondering is why so many don't?
Because once you make the decision that the Bible is a book of lies, it's then a book of lies no matter how you phrase it.
Let's put it a different way: you want me to, say, discount something like the parting of the red sea. You convince me it's ridiculous and couldn't be right - and I believe you in this scenario, and now I don't believe that. But the crux of the whole religion is there's an actual God who actually exists, and he sent his son who then died, took a trip to hell, defeated the abstract concept of sin and who then came back to life. If you strip away any of these, the religion breaks; there's nothing more central to the religion than those things. But they are no less magical and no more believable than the red sea.
I've met some people who can maintain a firewall by deciding that most of it is lies but some of it is truth, but they are basically aware that they drew an arbitrary line somewhere; I've watched several people of this type take the next step from that into explicit non-belief. It's not impossible to, say, discount the entire creation story as metaphor because it's silly and dumb while still believing in the equally silly and dumb blood-sacrifice-and-resurrection-story, but it's hard; most people who try it don't end up maintaining the effort for long in my experience.
The problem you run into - the one you can't avoid forever - is that when you start declaring the magic parts of the bible to be false because they are magic, you basically reduce it to a book of philosophy. And philosophy is nice, but it's not religion.
Resident Contrarian, I think you’re being culpably uncharitable here. (Where I’m coming from: I am a Christian who believes that miracles can and do happen and have no patience with namby-pamby Christianity-and-water churches that relativize clear moral commands and allegorize the historical claims of the faith, and yet I deny the six-day Creation, and I’m agnostic about the historical accuracy of some other stories in early Genesis and books like Job.)
You seem to assume that the line between some biblical texts literally and others non-literally is simply arbitrary and decided based on the interpreter’s personal sense of how likely the events described are, which is clearly a terrible heuristic for evaluating religious claims. There is, however, a non-arbitrary, non-terrible heuristic, and it is genre. Parts of the Bible that are written in different genres are clearly intended to be read in different ways, and loving attention to the text will notice and respect those generic differences.
The clearest example: Jesus characteristically spoke in parables, that is, non-literal stories that convey moral and spiritual truths. You would never say that parables are “lies” or even just a cover-up for philosophy in different clothes; they are our Lord’s preferred method of teaching our religion. Parabolic form is central to Jesus’s teaching ministry and his whole style of thinking. In fact this indirect style one of the strongest impressions I have of the “personality” of God in both the Old and New Testaments: he never answers a question straight but loves to answer with another question (“Whose picture is on this coin?” “Where were you when I laid the world’s foundation?”), and he is constantly presenting enigmatic pictures instead of clear messages (visions about almond branches, instructions to cut off one’s beard and scatter it to the winds, the withering of the fig tree).
Everybody knows (more or less) how to read a parable, and we’re perfectly capable of believing that Jesus really, literally multiplied loaves of bread to feed five thousand people and also that, in the very next chapter, he invented the figure of the Good Samaritan to make a theological point. Why? Clues in the text itself tell us to read those two passages in different ways. The question is: are there other parts of the Bible where generic markers signal to us that they were not written, and need not be read, as literal assertions about historical fact?
Once the issue is framed this way, Christians can certainly still disagree about how to read specific passages, but we can discuss those decisions in terms of consistent interpretative principles and textual evidence. The Gospels and Acts obviously claim to be close historical accounts based on eyewitness evidence; there is no wiggle room for allegorizing or mythologizing them. Biblical stories about miracles, like those in Exodus, are clearly asserting that supernatural events happened in historical time, and Bible-believing Christians must believe them. The opening chapters of Genesis, on the other hand, are poetic and highly stylized, quite different even from the story of Abraham that follows in the same book, and it’s hard to know how to read them; interpretations that treat the passage non-literally while affirming the kinds of underlying truths it clearly does assert (e.g. that God made everything from nothing by the power of his Word, that humankind has disobeyed God and are therefore doomed to suffer toil, pain, and death) are being offered in good faith.
Believe it or not, I'm a short-day-agnostic of sorts; I allow for long-day interpretations, a couple other things.
There's a couple things that are happening here that I feel like need to be expanded:
1. Remember that this chain starts out with someone asking why Christians can't be like Mircea Eliade, a person who pretty well lumps all religion of all types into a sort of amorphous mythos; he doesn't believe any of it is true in any sense of the word beyond "has some level of significance, however small and indistinct".
The post you are responding to responded directly to someone who said he believes "I think the story of Cain and Abel is true, but in a very different way than evolution is true."; evolution, by context, seeming to be true to the author as a "this actually happened in a no-BS way where when I say "happened" I mean in the conventional sense as opposed to other stuff that didn't happen".
So I'm responding in that context - someone asking me why Christians don't abandon all belief in the Bible as anything besides light metaphor, and another person who reaffirming the same question to an extent, using Cain and Abel as an example.
2. You say something that boils down to "but there's other Heuristics we can reasonable use to determine these things that don't have to do with belief - we aren't rejecting them for disbelief reasons, but for other reasons".
I think I have reasonably hard time balancing 1 and 2, and often figuring out what I'm dealing with. I have a friend who believes Job is a parable; he doesn't think it literally happened. Based on only that I can project three possible situations:
1. That my friend doesn't think Job happened because of the style it was written, or something else like that - he thinks it's an important part of the Bible, has lessons none-the-less important and binding to us. But he doesn't think it was meant to be taken literally.
2. He doesn't think Job happened because he doesn't think things like Job happen - i.e. he doesn't think supernatural stuff like that happens.
3. He doesn't think Job happened because he doesn't like/doesn't accept the story of Job; he thinks it's too mean in the typical way people criticize job.
In the case of my friend it's #1, or seems to be near as I can tell. And I think you are right that it's not the case that every heuristic that would make someone consider that the seven days weren't literal days or that Job was meant to be taken as metaphor is wrong. It's also not necessarily the case that even if I thought a particular heuristic was wrong/flawed that it would necessarily be "salvation-threatening" for lack of a more precise term, or my business to bring up.
But on the same token there are a lot of heuristics that ARE dangerous. Does somebody categorically not think a red sea *can* be parted? Because if he does, that doesn't exist in isolation to his beliefs in things like resurrections. Does he not allow for God to be right and him to be wrong re: the handling of Job? That has implications.
All that to say it's complex. Here I was being asked something in the vein of "why do Christians believe all that silly stuff?" and answered in that vein. But it's not a uniform monolith.
I guess I understand that. But this gets very confusing for me. A friend of mine will be ordained as a Rabbi pretty soon. He does not think Genesis is a literal and historical description of the creation of earth and man. He views it as the key to understanding the fundamental moral, psychological, narrative, etc, truths about human reality. I can't do his position justice, but It's certainly more than just a philosophy to him. As far as I can tell he has elevated the Torah, not reduced it. It's awe inspiring to hear him talk about neuroscience and the Garden of Eden at once. Sorry for moving away from Christianity with this example.
Isn't there a lot of room between silly lies and literal truth? Maybe even a category of description above that? Human experience is at least partly played out in a symbolic, metaphorical, narrative structure. Some would call this the domain of religion. So I'm not sure if there needs to be a line drawn somewhere between true and not.
Anyways this is all beyond my knowledge, hence why I appreciate smart people like you writing about it.
"Isn't there a lot of room between silly lies and literal truth?"
Understand that when you ask me this, I'm answering this as Me, as opposed to every religious person.
I think there's less room than we like to think there is, because of what we are representing the source of the "silly lies/literal truth" to be. So say I write a novel; it's filled with clever metaphor. It's nice, and it teaches a lot of perhaps interesting lessons. In it, the main character reveals the path to heaven is eating a lot of leafy greens, and praying a special poem while you eat them.
You might read that book; you might like some of the philosophy in it and it might affect your behavior. But where you found a place where the philosophy disagreed with that seemed to be "local optimum" behavior(the best apparent choice for a specific situation) you wouldn't and I wouldn't expect you to still follow it; it might be smart and even generally true in its philosophy, but it's just a book, written by a man. You probably already do this - you might have read Plato and might have liked it, but you don't consider it authoritative in that way; it's just a nice book of nice philosophy.
Even if that's not true, you certainly don't expect the vegetables prayer to work.
Now imagine you have a different book; you think a literal omniscient and omnipotent god wrote it. You think this god is authoritative; like he actually knows what's right or wrong. You would treat the commands in the book differently in that case, if you actually thought those things; it's a different kind of book.
Now, I don't know your friend. But making a strawmanned version of it, let's say he does the same thing for the story of Job as Genesis; it's just a myth, it's not true. Ditto Noah. Ditto the 40 years in the desert and parting of the Red Sea; Ditto Gideon and the Wall. Eventually we'd start to realize something - he doesn't think the book is reliable; he does not in fact think it's true. He might think it *contains truth*, but that's not the same thing. And if that's his pattern, we'd expect he *probably* doesn't believe in God in a literal sense, either. He's been rejecting all the magic-sounding stuff, and God's the most magic-sounding thing in there..
Regardless of how strawman-version of your friend then lives his life and acts, he's not actually religious at this point - he's indistinguishable in belief from someone who just really, really likes my really nice fictional book. Because that's what he's doing - he has this fictional book, nothing in it true in a "this is what actually happened" sense, that he really likes. But he's a philosopher, not religious - he has rejected the spiritual and the supernatural.
There's another thing in play here that matters, and that's *why* strawmanned-version-of-your-friend rejected those things. If he read his religious texts and honestly interpreted them to be metaphors absent anything else, that's one thing. But we can imagine another version of this where he at one point had a book he thought was true and that a deity wrote, and then the world told him "no, don't believe that" and he sided with the world. Both those stances have implications, but the implications of the second one(if true) are that whatever else he might be, he's not someone to whom religion is the actual important bit.
None of this means your actual friend is bad by non-christian-morality standards! Even if he believed exactly like I just described, he might behave spectacularly and treat a lot of people well. But strawmanned-version of your friend isn't actually religious in any way that's different from a philosophy class except where he teaches his philosophy class and what kind of clothes he wears when he does it.
As I understand it, Jews take the Torah to be precisely the word of God as he dictated it to Moses. They absolutely believe every word of the the Torah to be true. They do not, necessarily, believe that humans are capable of understanding the precise ways in which it is true. Just because God dictated a true story does mean that the story is a necessarily a historical account. Jews do not presume to understand what God meant by the story, and assuming that the story is a literal, historical document is presumptuous.
Many Christians, on the other hand, seemed to have missed out on this and, instead, have interpreted the same text in their own ways. They intentionally disregard the exclusive ways in which it was read and understood for the first thousand years. (Rabbinic Judaism also holds that Moses was given an oral law with the written law which is necessary to understand the written law. Early Christians dismissed this and modern Christians are completely unaware of how badly they misread the text they consider to be holy!)
Lots to think about here. I'll need to pose these questions to him. Though I wonder how many people would actually pass your criteria. Wouldn't Pope Francis and many other religious leaders fail? I guess some people would think so.
Here's how I see religious stories. Take one book (or for most of human history, an oral story) which many people enjoy the philosophy in, and helps them live better lives. Then another and another. Then start extracting out common elements. Continue the process for thousands and thousands of years. You get myths, fables, legends. Continue this filtering and extraction process across many generations, maybe add in some shared spiritual experiences along the way, and you eventually get religious stories. People live and die by these stories. Cultures form around and are shaped by them. They become integrated into the evolutionary path of humans. We seem to have evolved some sort of religious instinct to incorporate them deep into our psyches. Our language, music, art, architecture, law etc is all shaped by them. Whether you have read them or not, they are integrated into your being.
At this point I think we are far beyond studying Plato. I'm not sure "this happened, or didn't" is a meaningful question anymore. Of course the type of Christian you describe probably wouldn't agree with the above. But I think the study of these stories, and the question of what happens when a human actually lives up to the ideals within, is at least approaching the domain of religion.
A few things I have lots of thoughts about but can't find the language to convey accurately: You separate belief and action. I'm hesitant to think you should do that so easily. I do think we should separate the spiritual and the supernatural. Through years of meditation I've developed a sense of spirituality. Maybe I'm way off, but it seems very different than any supernatural beliefs. Likewise, my friend seems very spiritual still.
I'm not sure what, if anything, changes meangingfully if Cain and Abel goes from literal, two specific historical figures truth to parable truth. Why do you think this would matter?
I think that's partly my point. I'm not sure how much it does matter, and therefor am not sure why people are so resistant to take that position.
But from a different perspective, as RC pointed out in response, it's the fundamental difference between religion and philosophy. I think this is too black and white though, and there is a lot of room to play around with these ideas in a religious context without accepting them literally.
For instance, here's the current official Catholic position on the scientific accuracy of Genesis:
"Because Genesis is not making scientific assertions, it is wrong to charge Genesis with scientific error. If someone draws erroneous scientific conclusions from a misreading of Genesis, the error belongs not to Genesis but to the person who has misread it.
Therefore we should not say that Genesis does not have “full scientific accuracy”—a statement that is bound to disturb the faithful and undermine their confidence in Scripture. Instead we should say that Genesis is not making scientific assertions and that we will draw erroneous conclusions if we treat the text as though it were.
The same applies to statements such as “We should not expect total accuracy from the Bible.” In fact we should, for everything asserted in Sacred Scripture is asserted by the Holy Spirit, and he does not make mistakes.
The burden is on us to recognize what the Spirit is and is not asserting, and we may stumble into error if we make a mistake in doing this."
I suspect that RC considers this to be some sort of strange weasel maneuver, but the majority of religious people do not.
I don't know how RC feels, but I don't think it's weaselly. It's not even in the same ballpark as Mircea Eliade or KC's rabbi friend, either, though. If there is a spectrum between "silly lies" and "literal truth,"* the Catholic Church is much closer to the "literal truth" side. It's also a very sensible position, but being Catholic I suppose I would say that.
And it does, by the way, matter the extent to which you accept Christianity's historical, metaphysical, etc. claims. See e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:
"12 But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is worthless, and so is your faith."
That is, Christianity itself resists any temptation to reduce it to mere metaphor, or to evacuate the historicity of Jesus or his status as Savior.
*this is a dumb framing, though, for the record, because reading Genesis like some kind of scientific treatise is silly
Like I said, I don't think religious people are hesitant to take that position. I think that a certain subsect of modern protestants fall into the category of people for whom the bible is only meaningful if it is taken to be a literal, historical document. Jews do not read it that way, Catholics do not currently read it that way, and many protestants don't either. There is nothing that says a book can't be true without it being an accurate historical document, but this is a sticking point for many current Christian sects.
The Bible is more than a few sentences, and saying whether it is or isn't intended to be read literal is a bit too simplistic. Some parts are clearly and explicitly meant to be metaphor, and some parts are clearly and explicitly supposed to be historical.
Some aren't so clear.
Someone who holds the New Testament to be largely metaphorical is simply in no way a Christian. Full stop.
Now, someone who does the reverse, and reads too much literal-ness into metaphor is not necessarily heretical... they may simply be unsophisticated. And on the unclear parts, we need to allow for differences of opinion.
I'd be willing to get into the weeds, but there's too much nesting here and everyone else has probably moved on from the conversation!
That was interesting, and large chunks of it seem to be realistic, based on my observations of what I'd call "committed Christians in the US".
I'm not part of that demographic; realistically, many evangelicals would probably class me among their collective enemies.
I'm not going to unsubscribe because you are "one of them," or even because you talk about it but I'm afraid this puts your immediately previous article - where we did clash - in a kind of perspective. Of course the needs and desires of men, young or otherwise, are more important to you than the needs and desires of women; in fact, the archetypal person is male for you. The former is arguably supported by the Bible, and consistent with the subculture; the latter seems so prevalent in US Christian culture and literature as to be unarguable, except among the groups you tend to exclude from your definition of Christianity.
No real point to this comment, except that I'm glad I'm not your daughter. (Your daughters, if any, may well be perfectly happy - but probably not if they were born with my personality and talents.) Also, I'll probably have less to say next time I disagree with you about gender relations.
At any rate, I'm happy to see you explaining your background. It gives me a much rounder picture than I generally get of anyone who sets out to be a pundit, even in a small way.
I do think this is really profoundly weird; I've never, even once, said the needs of women are inferior to the needs of men. You've certainly tried to paint that target on my back a lot. In the case of incels you did it by saying, essentially, that I didn't care about women and wanted to somehow subjugate them to the needs of the incels - but I never said this! I asked you to acknowledge that the incels had a real problem; I asked this in the context of saying their behavior as a reaction to that problem was unacceptable and gross.
I certainly can't prove that I don't hate women like you seem to want me to, but "Oh, he's a christian; that means I can write him off as filled with hatred he's never expressed so I don't have to grapple with anything he says" is... it's something, but it's not actually responding to anything I ever said.
I don't think you hate women. And I agree, you never said that the needs of women are inferior to those of men.
You and your supporters merely agreed on the importance of the need for young men to have heterosexual partners of their own age, and the importance of sympathizing with their plight - with no discussion whatsoever of the plight of young women who don't appear to want to be partners for those young men, or for that matter of older women who may find themselves unable to find heterosexual partners due to lack of interest from those same young men.
That's not hate. That's regarding women as tools and servants to be used by real people.
There's a lot going on here; I want to break it down.
1. I'm not sure I have supporters - I have a very small blog and occasionally now have an article popular enough that people comment on it. Some of those people agreed with me, some of those people thought they agreed with me but misunderstood what I was trying to say, and some disagreed. I'm not sure that makes me a cult leader quite yet.
2. You bring up both the plight of young women and of older women who might be lonely. But you brought this up in my last article as well(at least as it relates to you) and I said this:
"In terms of the rest of it, very briefly: I do have sympathy for you about the things you went through, both those caused by specific people and just because of how the world is built. That sympathy costs me nothing - I just have to genuinely care about some level of the pain you feel or felt and agree I wish it didn't happen."
I've been pretty consistent on this point - I don't want anyone to suffer, especially unnecessarily. And the conversations with you keep getting awkward because you keep coming in and saying "you hate women, you don't care about women, you consider women tools and sex slaves". But I've never said any of this! I don't think any of this! You are fully accusing me of a bunch of hate I never indicated I had!
The best support I think you could muster for me hating women is that I haven't actually written an article going through their struggles. But that's explainable a bunch of ways besides me hating women and thinking they exist merely to be slaves to men - for one, I haven't written a lot of articles, and like half of them have been about fringe science stuff.
More importantly, though, it would be really, really hard for me to write a meaningful article about women in a lot of ways - I've been a lonely man before, so I get some of what that feels like. But I've never been a lonely woman or a woman who is getting cat-called or any of that stuff. I'll probably never write an article about what it's like to be black or an astronaut, either, simply because I don't understand those experiences as well. Even talking about incels was pretty close to an over-reach, because I was lonely but not really all that close to being what they are culturally.
3. Taking 1 and 2 together, I think you are being pretty spectacularly unfair to me - you've accused me of an awful lot of shit. It seems like your justification for this is I asked for a very limited, conditional sympathy for a group you don't like. I'm not going to stop doing things like that; getting people to make a minimum effort to treat their enemies like humans is something I want. But asking for sympathy for a group *is not the same thing* as expressing animus for every group that doesn't like them.
I'm not even asking you to stop doing this - I'm just pointing out, like, listen, this isn't fair. There's a lot of ways I'm not perfect. I'm sort of an asshole sometimes. It might even turn out later that someone unmasks me and it turns out that you were right the whole time and I'm this horrible woman-hating mysogynist who would try his very hardest to muzzle his own daughters and prevent them from being successful out of sheer spite, like a literal monster and that still wouldn't change the fact that you have no evidence that I'm like that at all, today.
I feel like you're pattern-matching RC against someone who hurt you in the past. I don't think a person without your baggage would walk away with the impression that RC thinks of women as "tools and servants to be used by real people"
Do you sincerely believe that if there was a plight of young females desiring heterosexual partners of their own age, that he would care less?
Also, "with no discussion whatsoever of the plight of young women who don't appear to want to be partners for those young men"
.... is it a plight to have decline an option? In that situation the choice is being made BY empowered women and FOR incel males. He never bemoaned that they made the wrong choice or that they shouldn't be empowered to make the choice at all, but merely the circumstances. That seems antithetical to being a tool/servant.
"Of course the needs and desires of men, young or otherwise, are more important to you than the needs and desires of women; in fact, the archetypal person is male for you."
Just a bizarre statement that is far away from RC and his beliefs and anything he has ever written on this blog. And I say this as someone who is not a literalist Christian myself.
Thanks for writing this. While I didn't learn anything new on the literal level, I found it interesting and surprising to see such self-aware descriptions of what it looks like from the outside. You've accurately described what the average Christian looks like to me, a non-Christian, and that's an impressive feat. I don't think most of us are able to describe what we look like to the outsider while still being true to what we think we are. If that makes any sense.
This bit especially:
"So to go to them and say “but none of that matters, really, without Jesus” seems like an insanely shitty thing to do." This is an extremely common interaction I've had with Christians. And it's also this bit of philosophy that I find the most repelling. I'm more likely to trust someone who has a strong ethical core that's not religiously centered. I think that if you're doing good just because of Jesus that it seems a lot more likely to me that you're not going to do good tomorrow because that's a hard motivation to stick with in the long run. And, if you're Christian, it's okay, because Jesus will forgive you for not doing good as long as you ask. So, in general, I find Christians to be less trustworthy than those with a non-religious ethical system...
"And, if you're Christian, it's okay, because Jesus will forgive you for not doing good as long as you ask."
A basic precondition to being forgiven is being sorry, and to be sorry you have to think what you did was wrong. To be sure, you can ask for forgiveness without being sorry, but then you have no expectation of being forgiven; it's not as though you can fool Jesus. In my experience as a Catholic this point is certainly hammered on, and it would take impressive amounts of rationalization to get around it.
Sure, but I'm approaching it from a point of trustworthiness. From my perspective, the fundamental Christian philosophy is that as long as you're genuinely sorry for what you did, there are no real repercussions. When compared to someone with an internal commitment to ethical behavior--how is it that I should find the Christian equally trustworthy?
If a Christian believes that what matters is some future state of mind, how is it inconsistent to act unethically today as long as I'm truly repentant tomorrow? From what I can tell, Christians (and especially Catholics) live in a constant cycle of sin/repent. I don't think this is some attempt to game the system, I think it *is* the system, and it's a fundamentally flawed way of looking at humanity.
For what it's worth, it's not the system; it's actually explicit within the system that it's not the system. Sometimes this is with soft warnings against what you describe:
6 What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? 2 By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? 3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
Or sometimes with harder warnings:
26 For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, 27 but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.
This just to say that the system itself is explicitly against the "hey, I found a loophole!" type system you are describing.
I do want to clarify that, like, nothing I'm talking about here has much to do with expectations - like I'm not really asserting that a Christian will in practice be a lot less likely to burgle or something; they aren't suddenly fundamentally more moral creatures; they just have, as you noted, different motivations now.
One quibble I'd like to make here is that the Jesus-motivation isn't necessarily a "replacement" motivation as it's representative here; it can be fully additive. It's actually explicitly so; the first rule of Christian Fight Club is "love god"; the second rule of Christian Fight Club is "Love Your Neighbor" and there's a lot of references scattered around to the idea that if you can't demonstrate that you are motivated in your actions by other people, you also can't claim to love God:
"If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother."
So here you and the Bible actually agree; someone who loves only God doesn't actually love God at all, and isn't a good dude in that sense.
My other quibble here is that you assert that something like "God wants certain things and I love God so I'll do them" is a "hard motivation to stick with in the long run", there's an implication that other forms of morality are super-easy to stick with; I'm not sure that's in evidence. I think my idea of the platonic ideal here is something like a person who has thought hard about their morality in a lot of ways - utilitarian, religiously-motivated, etc. - and also thinks there's some sort of enforcement in play.
Good point that I have no evidence for whether religious-based morality is easier to stick with or not. I guess it seems self-evident to me because that's how I react, but I suppose I have no reason to think that what's true for me is true for anyone else. I know that I have what I consider to be a strong moral compass around many issues and I follow it because it's easier to do that than not to do that. I'm not suggesting there aren't times when I engage in behavior that I think is wrong, but guilt is a sufficiently motivating corrective. I'm not at all motivated by the promise of heaven or the punishment of hell because that morality doesn't resonate with me at all.
So, I tend to assume that, exactly as you said, an ethical system based on religion is additive to whatever in-built system someone possesses. Because I don't find the additional religious ethical system to be at all motivating personally, I'm highly suspect of someone who claims to have received their entire moral code from Christianity. I interpret that as their internal compass is likely weak enough that they need to substitute what I view as a much weaker system. Furthermore it's a system that seems to work poorly for many of the people who espouse it. I don't think it's vaguely an accident or coincidence that Catholicism is ripe with priests who sexually abuse children. I think that if your own moral compass is weak enough that you'd do that sort of thing, that additionally if you recognize in yourself some sort of sexual deviance that your church tells you is wrong, that the priesthood is a likely place for you to end up because you think it's best available corrective available to you. Similar to the proliferation of religious anti-gay homsexuals (eg Ted Haggard)--I suspect he was drawn to religiosity as a direct result of what he viewed as evil within himself. And it's true that I have no evidence to back this up.
And it probably doesn't matter--that's talking about extreme outliers. It probably matters more whether Christianity has a net positive or negative impact on the average Christian, and I guess I have no data either way. My intuition, though, is that I'm less likely to trust a church-goer (possibly because of the outliers, no matter how rare), even though I know that the general American intuition is exactly the opposite and I'd kind of like to understand why. On both sides.
I think you're absolutely right that the actual philosophy of Christianity should theoretically act as an additive to make someone more moral, and that it probably does act that way in some people. I'm unconvinced that it actually does in the majority of church-going Christians. Have you come across anything that indicates that church-going Christians are, in fact, more moral than the population as a whole? Something like your divorce statistics, but applied to, say, crime? It's one thing to stipulate that church-going Christians stay married because those are exactly the sort of people who think that staying married is a virtue. But I'd like to see it applied to a more general morality...
I think we are coming from opposite ends - you seem to have an anti-christian bias(please read this "softly" - I don't mean it to be as negative sounding as it sounds) and I have an absurdly pro-christian bias. That right away is going to make things difficult. But with that said, I think you are "cheating" a bit here - I'll explain why.
So you say to me something that basically goes like this: "Here we have a Christian; he's weak of mind and morals, so he needs a system. But he's still weak of mind and morals, or else he wouldn't need the system; I don't trust him. And here we have a guy who from scratch created a complex system of morals and ethics that he reasoned out. Not only does this work for him, but because it's his he's more likely to follow it; he's a superman, and I trust him.".
But that's sort of cheating for a couple reasons:
1. You say, basically, that the Christian is shitty from the start, and that he needs Christianity for that reason. OK, cool - but that doesn't mean that Christianity doesn't work. If the guy is shitty and dumb, Christianity might leave him shitty and dumb while still having improved him and deserving some credit in the same way a really good mechanic deserves credit when they do a good repair on a 1993 Geo Metro, even though they didn't turn it into a Ferrari.
2. You say "OK, but a guy who does a lot of hard work and reasons his own working and beneficial moral system from first principles is going to be more trustworthy than those dumb Christians I described.". Well, yeah, probably - you just described a group that's by definition in the top 5-10% of everybody; that's a hell of a self-selected group.
To put it a different way, I might have a really good book for teaching PC use; it might be clear and teach a great system. But we'd expect that people who used it would still mostly suck at using PCs; they are seeking remedial methods meant for underperformers. We can then compare them to people who just love computers and voluntarily self-teach themselves, but that's a different group we'd expect to excel - we are comparing grandmas to tech enthusiasts at some point.
As I read your scenario, those things are sort of automatically going to be true no matter what Christianity is or isn't - the biggest, best known system is going to draw in the casuals and remedials; that's just part of it. And the build-your-own-morality-system-after-much-study people are going to be a different class; many of them probably don't need a system at all in the first place to be "good enough", although the system they make might improve it.
The other side of things is that you are working under an apparent assumption that Christianity doesn't get any of those 5-10% top-tier people; that's going to be hard to disprove, because I can go "Well, I know a lot of really absurdly nice and moral people within the system who would have been nice and moral anyway, but who the system has none-the-less" helped and you can still more or less dismiss that.
As to the last bit, as stated in the article, the "statistically measured behaviors of church-going Christians as a category" is pretty limited - I tried to do something with "teen pregnancy" but it's pretty hopelessly confounded by geographic area in terms of how they tried to measure it(look it up, try to find something with a map representation if you can and you will see what I mean).
I don't think you are being very fair with the "they think staying married is a virtue" bit, though - they think it's a virtue because of Christianity, mostly - if Christianity doesn't get credit for that, what could it possibly get credit for?
I'll admit an anti-christian bias. It's not malicious against any given individual (I'm married to an evangelical!), but I'm definitely biased against it.
My theory is that people exhibit some innate level of morality that's pretty hard to influence either way. You've at least convinced me that Christian theology is theoretically constructed in such a way to motivate people toward a greater Christian morality--but I remain unconvinced this actually works. I think it's much more likely that most people hover very close to some baseline determined by a combination of genetics, upbringing and environment.
So, I'm willing to step back from my original argument that Christianity is set up to provide perverse incentives if your goal is moral behavior. I still think it's likely it does this, but I don't have any evidence either way. (Bias, yes.) I can still take issue with the statement that otherwise moral behavior "doesn't matter" without God. Not that it's wrong (I think it's pretty easy to demonstrate that it's wrong), but that it's an actively harmful position. The fact that you realize it's a shitty thing to say gets me most of the way there--it's a shitty thing to believe for the same reasons. If you genuinely believe that good without God isn't, then you're at best dismissing a lot of things that make the world better. It's sort of analogous to thinking that abortion is wrong, but supporting abstinence-only sex education when we've shown that leads to greater rates of abortion. If you don't believe in an objective good, your religion is making the world a worse place by dismissing important things that are, in fact, making the world better.
I think that divorce rates are pretty meaningless in any example of whether Christianity increases morality. You admit that it only affects "church-going" Christians, which means that if it were a virtue, Christianity is only helping a very small subset of Christians. (But, of course, not only do I consider it not a virtue, I consider it harmful. The Jewish understanding of divorce where a husband is commanded to give his wife a divorce should she ask for it is far superior.) But yes, Church-going Christians stay married because they are church-going Christians. I don't think that's any evidence of conferring morality, rather merely enforcing social norms in your society. Because getting divorced is public and there's a strong prohibition against it, of course divorce is lower! There's a strong prohibition against theft as well, but since theft isn't a public act, I suspect it's far less likely that theft is committed at lower rates among church-going Christians.
This is on my list of "comments I'd like to make that are going to take more time than is appropriate while I'm at work". I will return to this tonight, probably.
From my perspective as an atheist who'd never been religious, Christian morality is basically a black box. Because I cannot perceive the (putative) desires of Jesus, and because Jesus is the main driver of Christian morality, I therefore cannot predict what a Christian might do from one moment to the next.
For example, I had a coworker who was a basically the nicest guy you'd ever meet. He would help you change the tire at 3am, no questions asked. He would never say an unkind word to you. If he thought you weren't feeling great, he would actively offer ways to help, even if it's just a sympathetic ear. But, one day, we were talking about the Bible, and he casually said, "oh yeah, the Caananites were a spiritually corrupted people, so they had to be wiped out down to the last man, woman, and child". I was so shocked that I couldn't even bring myself to ask the follow-up question, "so, do you think any modern people are spiritually corrupt ?"
Thus, from my perspective, here's a guy who's basically the nicest person in the world, but who is also willing to commit genocide at a moment's notice, for reasons that I can neither predict not fathom. From my perspective as an atheist, truly devout Christians are ticking time bombs. Yes, they're not genociding me right now, but that could change at any moment. Thus, I'd take an imperfect atheist over a perfect Christian any day; he might be a bit of a jerk, but at least I can understand his motivations -- and I can be pretty sure he's not going to murder anyone, at least.
I think I kind of understand this from a purely mechanical perspective - i.e. if you think god is the boss and defines morality, and you also think god is telling you to to kill all the French, yeah, you are going to go kill all the French. But I think you are a little bit jumpy on the whole "at any moment" bit; functionally, commands to genocide don't come down that often, individual-driven murders don't to my knowledge happen more often with Christians than other groups, and when they do church leadership pretty much never goes "welp, what do you do, God told him to".
This overlaps a bit with an uncharitable take it's possible to take as a Christian towards atheist morality. There's a take where you go "Listen, we believe good and bad exist as real things. They mostly have an arbitrary system, one based on utility - in the end of their story, everything is eventually ash. Besides punishments that might be meted out on them, there's no reason they are good at all - don't trust them". But that skips over a lot of stuff about how atheist morality works and also a lot of stuff about how "humans in general" generally work as well.
Yes, you are right in saying that "commands to genocide don't come down that often", but I think you might see how this sounds less than entirely comforting to someone like me. Christians have been pretty genocide-happy throughout recorded history, after all; perhaps not more so than other religions, but that still isn't super comforting. That said, genocide is just part of the picture; my main problem is the opacity of the Christian morality. You say:
> and when they do [murder people], church leadership pretty much never goes "welp, what do you do, God told him to".
But why not ? I understand that there are all kinds of Biblical reasons and literally millenia of scholarship devoted to answering this question; but I also understand that "God told us to" had often been presented as a perfectly valid justification for all kind of actions that I find morally wrong... and such justifications have been backed up by a similar amount of scholarship.
Furthermore, taking a seemingly random and highly destructive action is, logically speaking, exactly what I'd expect from a person who believes (correctly or not) that an inscrutable God is literally sending him direct commands. Ironically, the kinds of Christians you deplore -- the ones who just show up in church every Sunday, but lead their lives according to their own moral standards -- are a lot easier for me to understand.
I think part of the conflict you are seeing is because you are conflating a couple different things, particularly "God told us to" and "God told me to".
"God told me to, as an individual, kill an individual, so I did - not as a part of a greater political anything, but just like, let's kill my friend or a sinner on the street" isn't as common in the literature as you seem to think. There's a distinction in the moral system between "things like war" and "things like stabbing someone in an alley" - the "Thou Shalt Not Murder" commandment being pretty prominent.
The other thing you are conflating (quietly, subtly) is sanity and insanity. You don't believe in God, but you believe your friend might *hear an actual voice he believes is from God* and decide, based on nothing else, to kill you. But in your own system where God doesn't exist, hearing that voice and being at a point where he doesn't question it implies he's severely mentally ill; the conversation of "are schizophrenic Christians more dangerous" isn't the same as every Christian being a murder time bomb as was originally explicit in your argument.
So we sort of have to build out what to expect in both our systems, working with a relatively sane normal person.
In your system, sans God:
Bob, your friend, has internalized an awful lot of "love your neighbor as yourself" and "thou shalt not kill". So he ends up changing a lot of tires, being a really nice guy, showing a lot of love, and never hears from a god that doesn't exist and so never gets around to killing anyone. If he ever becomes a severely schizophrenic, things might change. But for now, there's no god to overrule "though shalt not kill", and that's basically what it takes in most or all Christian systems.
In my system, with God:
Bob, your friend, has absorbed the exact same "thou shalt nots" and "love your neighbors" as before. As before, he also probably (maybe! it's complex) thinks a direct command from God can override those, and he'd do it if he got it. Bob is still mentally sound and he might stab you to death if God told him to, but his default is "no killing".
I think both these scenarios play out in real life. For instance, your friend who you think of as a time bomb spends most of his time helping people and being a good, caring guy who technically believes that God has the authority to order people dead. The mechanism you, an atheist, think is likely to trigger him to kill people just doesn't exist outside of extreme insanity, a situation in which all bets are off anyway. But we knew this already, since the scenario you are afraid of verifiably isn't happening - christians aren't super likely to commit murder compared to other groups, and your anecdata shows that really committed christians spend an awful lot of time changing tires out and helping people as opposed to flying off the handle and dismembering them.
Again, I think this is similar to me saying atheist morality lends itself to suddenly realizing there is no right/wrong, only utility, and that if one day you decide my utility of living is lower than your utility of me dying I should die, and thus you are a time bomb that might go off at any time. Even if I'm not oversimplifying atheist morality (I am) then I'm still ignoring a lot of mechanisms that keep you from doing that kind of thing.
> The other thing you are conflating (quietly, subtly) is sanity and insanity. You don't believe in God, but you believe your friend might *hear an actual voice he believes is from God* and decide, based on nothing else, to kill you.
No, it is actually much worse than that. I mean, yes, some people sometimes hear voices from God and end up killing perfect strangers (or even their own children); but such cases are rare (and arguably Biblically justifiable, but still).
The scarier scenario, IMO, is that my friend and people like him hear perfectly ordinary voices from his pastor, his neighbours, and his community. He then goes home and, assuming he's the scholarly sort, pores over the Bible and all the related theological literature. And then, he has a feeling deep inside his heart, a glowing feeling of righteousness and goodness, a feeling that tells him that all left-handed blondes born on a Tuesday are abominations before the Lord who must be scourged from the face of the Earth.
I made my example deliberately ridiculous, but I'm sure you and I can both think of real-life examples that are sadly all too real. The problem, from my point of view, is that the communal decision-making process that goes from "God exists" to "all morality flows from Him" to "purge all sinister flaxen-haired Tuesdayites" is completely opaque to me. I literally cannot fathom any chain of thought that would lead a man who is by all appearances perfectly loving and kind (much more so than I), to cheerfully endorse genocide -- be it modern or historical.
It would be comforting to think that anti-Tuesdayite Christians are cynically (or, perhaps, subconsciously) using Christianity as a front to mask their own bigotry; but people like my IRL coworker, as well as yourself, disabuse me of this comfort. You demonstrate that, while the majority of Christians are probably just going through the motions like the rest of us, there are many who are entirely sincere in their beliefs.
Thanks for the post. Religion is very much a foreign country to me, so I like to educate myself about it.
Did you notice that all your examples of Christians are about men or "people"? Even when you refer to a hypothetical friend, you use male pronouns. I kept waiting for the part about women, but you never got there.
My perception is that a lot of conservative religions are associated with sex-segregated social groups, whether it's explicitly banning cross-sex interactions apart from family members or just viewing male-female friendships with a suspicious eye. Is that true of your religious community, and do you think it contributes to this tendency to center men?
Your previous post revealed (well, sort of—you kinda buried it) that your financial struggles were largely the result of choosing to have two kids before you were prepared to support them, plus the unemployed wife. How much of that was driven by Christian beliefs/social pressure about, e.g., birth control, abortion, natalism, or women's roles? I speculate that an atheist couple would not have this particular failure mode, because they would more likely avoid unplanned childbirth.
I definitely have a tendency to center men/think from a male perspective; it's not great, but it's more a product of me tending to write from personal experience than it is me thinking women in the church aren't important/equal.
I would say that the sex segregated group thing is definitely more common in the Church than otherwise. There's plenty of mixed services/small groups, but "Men's Bible studies" or "Women's Bible Studies" are also a thing. The mechanics there are probably more about Men being able to talk freely about their personal, a lot of which might have to do with their wives. Or younger men/women being able to talk about sex without getting tittilated.
I think male-female friendships ARE viewed with a more suspicious eye - I certainly view them so, and things like the Pence Rule indicate they are fairly widespread. This is more centered on married people; a lot of effort is put into avoiding adultery, which we tend to think of as very bad(TM). There's no explicit "don't be friends with women" rule, but there tends to be a lot of encouragement to not spend a lot of time alone with people of the opposite sex. I don't actually think this is unreasonable; I'm cool to talk more about that if you want.
Some context: Both our kids were planned, believe it or not; the wife asked me for the first and I asked her for the second. We weren't financially ready for them in the sense that we were set up/super comfortable when we had them. I was fine with the wife working, especially before we had kids, but she wanted to be a homemaker and I feel that's a meaningful, real job. We weren't pressured at all to have kids immediately (that's not common in our bubble). We don't have any problems with birth control morally (also not common in our bubble) but we would have kept any "accidents" as we both would consider an abortion to be murdering a human being (which is common in our bubble).
I would correct that a *high SES* atheist would be a lot more likely to not have that "failure mode" as opposed to a Christian. Also note we don't consider it a failure mode - it had an affect on our finances, but it was a choice we made that we still think was a good one; there's a lot to be said for being young parents, and we love both our kids. The part where I talk about my personal choices in the previous article wasn't meant to imply all those choices were wrong, but that they were choices; I wanted to limit sympathy, but that doesn't mean I regret marrying my wife when I had an opportunity to do so, for instance.
Unless you specifically object, I agree with Kayla: I'm a horrible spellchecker and generous acts of spellchecking to make me look less dumb to subsequent readers should live on in glory.
Sure. I'm a recovering prescriptivist, so I had a bit of an internal debate about whether to even point them out or not. I decided to do so since my own writing tends to be error-prone and I'm always thankful for free proofreading. As an occasional comment-reader, I love the comments of substance here and didn't want to detract, but if you want to leave it, no objections.
Thanks for this insight - extremely interesting. As someone who grew up in a Freewill Baptist household, this squares with my memories of that experience and how my family and friends that still subscribe to beliefs in that vein think about the world.
One of the main reasons I am no longer a Christian is the belief in the inherent wickedness of humans that you describe. While I agree that the community building aspects of religion are real and vital, I feel Christianity’s assumption of awfulness is a HUGE net negative for its adherents and the world around them. It makes sense from making Christianity a religion that competes effectively with other belief systems for adherents, yet the consequences of feeling and believing that the church is the only thing keeping us from evil, both on an individual and societal scale, screws up a lot of people. I don’t see a way to excise that without making the result “not Christian”.
This feels like one of those irreconcilable differences, yet perhaps I am overlooking something.
Sorry about the delay - I like my current job a lot and I'm trying very hard to justify my salary there.
So this might end up being a semantics thing, but I wanted to clarify a bit of what we are talking about here.
1. You talk a bit about an assumption of awfulness. I've found that in a lot of cases people tend to "mix terms" between earthly standards and something that for the sake of this discussion we will call heavenly standards, and that makes conversations on this a bit difficult.
Let's start out by defining earthly good as a sort of secular good; it concerns itself with what it can see, which means it's really hard for it to be anything but based on comparisons between things we can see. So over on one end we have really bad guys - your Hitlers, Stalins, Mitch Zeller; people who killed or will kill millions of people. And then on the other side we have your really good people - your Molly Pitcher, your Florence Nightingale, Aang from Avatar, whoever. So we compare those and draw a spectrum from really good to really bad, probably basing it on net utility or net effect on suffering or whatever. In a completely physical world, this makes sense - it's probably about the best we can do.
Then we move on the the spiritual standards and it gets tricky. For the sake of argument, imagine there's a god; it doesn't have to be mine, just a god. Imagine that he can have characteristics that exceed what we can easily imagine. And imagine that built around this god or stemming from the god or whatever there's some kind of moral system that exists and has rules in a similar way to systems we can easily observe, like physics.
Now, holding that in your mind, think of something like the two-slit experiment. If I asked you to guess about how particles would act in that situation and you didn't have any pre-existing knowledge of it, you'd probably say just about anything but "I bet they act like particles when you are looking to see which slot they go through, and like waves otherwise". And when people are first introduced to that concept, their first action regarding it is to often rebel against it - they go on Reddit and explain how it couldn't possibly so, and something must be wrong. But physics doesn't care; that's just how physics is.
And when you get into something really big, or infinite big, you would expect if there is an actual system of "laws of morality" that exist in a real sense like laws of physics do, you might have something like what we see in black holes - it's not cool that they eat light, and you might not expect them to eat light, but once you are dealing with some really massive stuff you find they slow down time and perhaps destroy information; that kind of thing.
So that's one thing: the relevant question here isn't so much "Do we have an unpleasant reaction to this, and that renders it untrue somehow" but instead "Is it actually true that morality is a particular way", because if morality does exist and is a particular way in the same way physics is, it probably doesn't care what you think it should be.
The second thing here that I want to go over is your idea that the church is the only thing keeping us from evil, because that doesn't really parse with most systems of Christianity. The church isn't keeping you from evil particularly; it's allowing you to approach good. It doesn't make people sinless; it redeems the sin.
In this case I'm proposing that Christianity mostly says something like this:
There's a system of morality that has as it's ideal something that's good in extreme ways - an absolutely holy being. Since that is the set-point, anything less than that is pretty bad. And the being has absolutely deserved authority; since the authority is really, really deserved things that contradict that authority are really bad.
Because the being is so very good, so very in ownership of everything, and so very authoritative, a thing's goodness is determined not only by the action (say, utilitarian good) but also the aim of the action (in this case, glorifying the very good being in the way it deserves).
Now, if you believe in the claims of Christianity, none of this is a problem at all. You are gross in comparison to God, but God makes a really high-grade soap for that and gives it away for free; after that you are thought of as clean and beautiful by the only being whose opinion particularly counts. You can't do good without doing it for God, but God lets you, for free; he also pays you for doing it at an exchange rate of finite to infinite, which is pretty good.
The problems you are raising are only problems if you don't believe any of it is true; then they are just claims made by an organization control people.
I'm sort of putting beliefs in your mouth, so to speak. But I really think that's more fundamentally the kind of conflict I'd expect here - problems with easy solutions aren't really problems; if I tell you your teeth are dumb but you honestly believe I have teeth-un-dumbifying cream I'll give you for free, I'm not being a jerk; I'm a magic dentist of kindness. It's only when I tell you your teeth are dumb and you don't believe my cream works that you view my opinions on teeth so negatively.
Thanks for diving deeper into this with me - I appreciate your thoughtfulness on this topic. I see at least two issues with the system you are proposing:
1. The characterization of the price being “free” is inaccurate. A person who truly believes in Christianity gives their life for it, whether or not it is actually true. It might still be a bargain in the finite vs infinite sense if it is true, yet just because it may be viewed as a pittance does not make it costly if it turns out to not be true, since this life is all we have in that case.
2. There is also the whole “if you don’t accept this offer, you will be punished in the worst way possible for eternity” aspect of this. If this is not something you actually believe, then this is invalid for you, yet it certainly seems to be the mainstream view. Thus, all the arguments about whether $HIGHLY_RESPECTED_PERSON will roast in hell while $AWFUL_PERSON who repented on their deathbed will spend eternity in heaven. It is difficult to see how any religion that will extremely punish nonbelievers regardless of their acts does not also view each of us as inherently wicked.
No need to reply to this, of course, yet I would be interested in how these aspects play into your thinking in future posts.
As to 2., bear in mind I'm not saying that the system doesn't see you as inherently wicked, just that the semantics of how it sees you as in inherently wicked(what wicked "means") are a specific thing - wicked is "falling short of the glory of God", which everyone does. It's distinct from how you might say "RC is a gigantic dick and should feel bad about himself all the time" - it's a different definition of the word with different standards of avoidance. In this case, it's saying "all humans are worse than god", which is just an obvious thing if Christian God exists.
That's why 1. matters so much. Even if we take as a given that salvation isn't free(I think we can skip that semantics argument) we admit it's a bargain. Not just in salvation, either - if the Christian model is true, doing good within it not only does the good thing (feeding the poor) but gives you a bonus good thing (glorifying god); you get paid twice for the same good act in a way.
But if it's not true, you probably gave up some things you wanted to do along the way; I agree that it's potentially costly if it all ends up being fake. But that's sort of what I'm saying - the belief is really the crux here. I'm not trying to hand-wave your "hell isn't fair, it's bullshit, fuck that" argument in 2. But yeah, it's absolutely going to look that way if you think the rest of it's bullshit. Belief might not resolve everything here, but it resolves enough of it that I usually come back to belief and the probable core issue, if that makes sense.
Hi Roger! I want to talk about this but I also want to spend a little bit of time on answering because I think there's some nuance in the theology that matters here. I'll be back on later today to answer this better.
Really interesting post. TBH it was boring up right until the end. But the end was all worth it. That point is first time someone clearly explained the American Christian morality . If I were to put into sentence its like that "We are morally right because we do it in the name of the God and by his Book"
I instantly thought about Jewish morale code, which is basically this "we are God's chosen, and as long as we follow his words -we are justified in what we do"
There was a point in my life when I basically turned from science nerd atheist (militant when I was younger) into a person who chooses to believe in God. And there was a period when I was looking if it was appropriate to join a religious group. I read a few books, checked a few religions, talked to people. But still to this date I dont feel rigid religious codes resonate with me. Too self righteous. Too cock sure that their way is "the way"
I think it's probably worth thinking about both sides of that coin. On the one side you have the downsides you see in rigidity. But there's another side, which is that a religious code that lacks any rigidity isn't actually anything distinct, which carries its own disadvantages.
The advantages of a rigid code are that it's basically predictable; James thinks lying is actually wrong and that this is true no matter what his personal feelings on lying might be. So we can expect James not to lie where he follows his code, and when he does we can call him on it using his own rules, which he believes to be stable whether he participates in them or not.
If James believes something like "listen, I can't be sure my way is the right way; all moral systems have something to teach, and I can't be so arrogant as to say my religion's thoughts on things are the only correct ones", he's a good deal more flexible, but we've lost all that predictability or the ability to call him on anything based on a standard he believes, because he doesn't actually believe in any standard anymore. "Everything is as true as everything else" is the same thing as "nothing is valid"; he might put in other standards like "utility is the thing" or "just make sure you don't have malice", but those change the picture of what we might expect a lot, with their own advantages and disadvantages.
Another way to say this is that people who say multiple contradictory things are both true are basically saying they don't believe in truth in the sense that something that is "true" is real and actual. The implication for James is that he either thinks his moral system is true and real (and thus out of his control) or that it's something else that's more subjective (and thus some combination of unknowable/vague and changeable by James).
This isn't to say that flexible moral systems don't have advantages (like flexibility!) but you do lose certain kinds of advantages moving away from rigid systems, mostly in terms of definition and stability.
This is the best explainer I have ever read of the Christian culture I live in. I plan on reccomending it to everybody who stares at me in shock when I say I go to church.
And also, it reminds me that those people who scoff at the acolytes of Charles Murray who suggest community support can replace welfare likely look at it like I would look at communism: they have simply never ever seen it work.
I was raised in the Lutheran Church: baptized, acolyte, confirmed, attended every Sunday and, during Lent, went to Wednesday services.
In my teenage years I decided the whole Christian thing was not just wrong, but very, very bad. I thought Christians were fools and I ridiculed them whenever possible. I got married, had kids, saw them through school and out of college. They are by all accounts good people.
As I passed through this experience, my position on Christianity gradually changed. I decided to read The Bible. I read The King James Bible cover to cover. (OK, I skimmed a lot of Jeremiah. Fifty chapters of negativity. Hence the word "jeremiad".)
After reading through the Old Testament, the book of Matthew is a shock. Jesus message is a stunning contrast. The synoptic Gospels are wonderful. Then comes John, written many many years later, and you can feel the difference. The Gospel of John begins to introduce elements of orthodoxy.
Later, the narrative is dominated by Paul. Paul takes the message of Jesus and solidifies it into an orthodox religion. The transmogrification is completed in the Revelation of John, which has far more in common with the Old Testament than the New.
From what I see, modern Christianity is the product of Paul, and has little to do with the teachings of Jesus. The message of Jesus is abundantly clear in the synoptic Gospels. A great example is Matthew 7:10: "By their fruits you shall know them." This is pure humanism. The most consistent interpretation of Jesus message is humanist, not orthodox.
I've got a lot more to say about this, and I hope, a lot more to learn. But it's getting late, and I probably should go to bed. Please keep writing, and keep trying to change mind mind. I've changed it before.
Great piece with a tone full of charity. My faith was formed by the world you describe. Over time and informed by the mystics of the Christian tradition I have come to see that we are not depraved sinners cut off from God but rather God is not separate at all. Rather God is in everyone, everywhere, equally. Jesus came to show us this and model what it looks like to bring the spark of the divine forth. I, and all creation, are evolving into Christ to the extent we allow it. Church for me becomes the place we do the hard work of practicing how to see the divine and bring it forth.
> They [other Christian denominations] are lying, but they will swear up and down anyway.
You do soften up this statement in the next sentence, but still, IMO it betrays a certain lack of self-awareness. Being an atheist, I've had many conversations with all kinds of theists, and they *all* say this. I've seen a Muslim and a Christian engage in bitter debate right in front of me, a sort of ideological battle to the death for the right to convert this particular heathen to the one true faith.
I know that it feels like you've got the answer and everyone else is a liar or, at best, an idiot; but everyone else feels that way about you. I think that, in the absence of an actual physical 120-ft tall firebreathing Jesus (or equivalent), it is uncharitable to discount their perspective out of hand.
Another Latter-day Saint here taking a crack at your view of what we believe. Jacob O’Bryant did a good job of explaining why missionaries answer the way they do but he did not go into details about what we actually believe.
First things first: your notion that we do not believe that Jesus is God is incorrect. Jesus is God. But He is also the Son of the Eternal Father, who is also God. But they are not the same God. The Bible is a much more polytheistic book than 1,800 years of Catholic teachings about the nature of God would leave you to believe. In Genesis 1:26, for example, God says “let us make man in our image.” Father is speaking to Son. They are separate beings and they are both God. In Matthew 3, Jesus is baptized and the Father speaks from heaven and the Holy Ghost descends as a dove. Three separate beings.
If you would like the most concise and accurate view of the Restored Church’s conception of the relationship between Father and Son, it can be found here:
We also reject the notion that our Jesus is a “different Jesus.” If we both knew a guy named Bill and you thought Bill’ father had passed away and I thought that Bill’s father was alive and that Bill also had a brother named Johnny, Bill would still be the same guy regardless of who we thought his father was. Our conception of Jesus differs from yours because we reject the Nicene Creed (and subsequent Creeds) that attempt to explain the nature of God. These Creeds were the product of 100+ years of Catholic argument about the nature of God. Ironically, when the debate about the nature of God began in roughly 285 A.D., the question about the Father and Jesus being one or separate beings wasn’t the thing they set out to debate. There was general consensus that Jesus was not the Father and that they were two separate beings. By the time the First Council of Nicea met in 325 A.D. the question at hand was “Is Jesus as much God as the Father? In other words, is He equally God or lesser God than the Father?” They debates this question for 100 years and came to the conclusion that God the Father and Jesus were made of the same substance, meaning that Jesus was just as much God as God the Father was. But they were still seen as two separate beings though the “same substance” conclusion led some to the idea that “if they’re the same substance then maybe they’re different manifestations of the same being.” This concept makes zero sense Biblically. Jesus teaches the people in the Sermon on the Mount to pray to the Father. He says only the Father, not Himself, is good. He says on John 17:3 that life eternal is to know both the Father and the Son. Even in John 1, the word is God and the word is with God. Jesus is God. And He is also with the Father who is also a separate God. But they, along with the Holy Ghost, are one in purpose. And to carry out the creation of our universe, the creation of mankind, and the redemption of mankind, you need the separate roles of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Each has a unique role in helping mankind to become immortal and to inherent eternal life. Therefore, they are one God. Three separate Gods but one Godhead because all three are necessary. Jesus by Himself would still be a God without the Father and the Holy Ghost. But by Himself He would lack the power to carry out the full plan of redemption.
Do we believe in a different Jesus? No. We simply believe that 1800 years of false Catholic doctrine about the nature of God has caused Catholics and Protestants, who get their understanding of God from the Catholics, has caused you to misunderstand who Jesus actually is.
Hopefully that makes sense. My analogy about the guy named Bill is a mess. I’m already sorry about it.
There's a lot here to respond to, so I want to unpack it neatly; this is going to be kind of a long post and I apologize in advance. I'll number everything and your arguments as I understand them (correct me if I'm wrong in that understanding) to try to keep it in order.
1. I am wrong that LDS people don't believe in God.
You say this:
"First things first: your notion that we do not believe that Jesus is God is incorrect."
So first I have to note that I didn't say that, exactly. I said this:
"An LDS person will say they believe that Jesus is god (note the small G) if asked; if pressed, they will admit they don’t think he was one with God-The-Father in the Trinitarian sense. I have never been able to get a straight answer from a Mormon missionary about why they try to be tricky about this instead of openly acknowledging the difference that they clearly know about..."
We can quibble about the lowercase G bit, but I'll give it to you for the sake of the argument because it's semantics and means different things to me than you (In our language, the big "G" means "The God" - literally the big, main and only one"). But dissecting everything else shows me making claims that unpack to something like this:
A. Christians in the sense that I'm a Christian are Trinitarians - they think Jesus is literally God the Father; not co-equal but separate, not "a God" but literally "The God".
B. LDS people tend to say Jesus is God knowing they mean an entirely different thing than Christians do by it; when pressed they will reveal they mean an entirely different thing by it - this is a weird, tricky thing to do from my perspective.
This isn't, mind you, an argument that I am right about God and that you are wrong. Obviously we both believe we are right (more on this later) but that's not what this argument is; I'm not saying you don't believe Jesus is God in your conception that there's more than one God; I'm saying you know you he's not God in mine, but claim he is anyway.
I'm not arguing against your religion - I'm arguing against the multiple times I've said "Do you believe Jesus is God in the sense I do?" and the missionary I'm talking to goes "Yes, absolutely" and I go "So you are a Trinitarian?" and he says "No!" instead of "what's that?". That guy knows he's being sly and misrepresenting the differences in our beliefs to me and doesn't admit it until pushed. That's what I'm pushing back on.
2. You are argue that your Jesus isn't fundamentally any different than our Jesus, that he's the same guy, and that the LDS church rejects my notion that they are different.
If the LDS church in fact rejects the idea that our Jesus is a different guy, it necessitates that I call out the entire LDS church on this - it's not so.
You say:
"We also reject the notion that our Jesus is a “different Jesus.” If we both knew a guy named Bill and you thought Bill’ father had passed away and I thought that Bill’s father was alive and that Bill also had a brother named Johnny, Bill would still be the same guy regardless of who we thought his father was."
But we aren't arguing about who God the Father is or if John-Jesus'-brother existed; we are arguing about who Jesus is, if we mean a different guy. So it matters that you believe this:
"Jesus is God. But He is also the Son of the Eternal Father, who is also God. But they are not the same God."
Because that's not what the non-LDS Trinitarians you are talking to believe at all; they believe he is God the Father, that they aren't separate. We aren't disagreeing about what Jesus ate for lunch - we are disagreeing about fundamental and huge characteristics of who we are talking about, literally about his identity, who he is.
And note that the LDS church thinks this matters too! No LDS person is going to go unquestioned in your religion if he or she started claim Jesus was the same personage who you refer to as Eternal Father - in your religion that would be a big, blasphemous deal. And it would be that because you believe there are certain fundamental, immutable qualities about your god(s) that are important in terms of describing who he is.
To take it back to Bill, if we found that my Bill was a black 50-year-old lawyer with four kids and only one leg, and yours was an Asian 25-year-old painter with no kids and both legs, we'd understand we were talking about a different thing. I (and likely you as well) think that whether Jesus is who you refer to as Eternal Father or not is a at least as much an important, fundamental and immutable characteristic of who he is as the race, age, progeny-having-ness and limbed-ness of Bill - changing that factor fundamentally changes who we are talking about.
Again, I want to stress that this isn't an argument that my religion is right and yours is wrong (although, again, we both clearly believe our respective religions are correct). But the LDS church can't have it both ways - if the LDS church believes Jesus is God-the-Father, then we are worshipping the same guy. If they don't, we aren't, because non-LDS Trinitarians DO believe Jesus is God-the-Father, literally that this is his identity. But that brings us around to the third argument, which is important for tying all this together.
3. We believe in the same Jesus, it's just that non-LDS Trinitarians are completely wrong about who Jesus is.
So we obviously disagree on a great many theological issues. I've said this throughout the post a few times, but it bears repeating that we both obviously also think our version of things is the right one, that I think the LDS church is mistaken and that the LDS church thinks I'm mistaken.
Your argument boils down to saying that I'm wrong about who Jesus is, and you are right; since you are right about who Jesus is, we worship the same Jesus - it's just that I'm wrong about who Jesus is. Frankly, and I mean this as nicely as I can, this is a bullshit argument.
Let's say I'm talking to a Buddhist, and trying to convert him. He says, "hey, I can't convert - I worship Buddha, that's who I think God is, I think he's all the things that Buddha is." And I go "listen, it's the same God. I also believe in Buddha.". And he goes "really?" and I say "Yes, absolutely." Let's say he believes me and converts, and then later finds out that everything I believe about God and religion is different than his conception of it - that I don't believe in Buddha at all.
He questions and I explain "Listen, we both believe in god. It's just that every single thing you believe about Buddha is wrong - the real Buddha is actually the Abrahamic God; he's different in almost every way besides being a deity. But your religion is a false religion, so really actually we worship the same guy - it's just that you are wrong about literally everything. Welcome to Christianity, sucker."
That's the upshot of argument you are making here, frankly. For the reasons stated previously, our concepts of the identity of Jesus have a fundamental difference that cuts to the core of his very identity. You say that doesn't matter, but then when we actually read the small print we find out that you think it really, really does matter - it's just that your religion is clearly true and mine is clearly false, so once you clear up that MY Jesus is the wrong one I'll understand it was the your guy all along.
I want to be gentle here, but there's no gentle way to say it: To the extent anyone actually brings that philosophy to bear by telling Christians that it's the same Jesus, they are lying to and deceiving them *regardless of whether they are right about who Jesus is or not*. I know you think it's noble to get them to your point of view (and frankly, if you are right, it is) but it doesn't make the tactic honest - telling them you believe the same thing when you don't is a lie, regardless of which belief is true.
You will note that I'm not actually debating which of our beliefs is true here; part of that is because if all it took to resolve LDS/non-LDS Trinitarian disagreements was two guys battling it out on the internet, we'd all either be in identically shaped churches or not by now. But more importantly it's because that was never the argument I was making - I never argued your religion was untrue in this article, I just pointed out we believe different things about Jesus. And we do, even if my beliefs are wrong; saying we don't is fundamentally a tactic to deceive me, even if it's a deception meant to eventually get me to the truth.
(Post Script: I'm not against arguing this a bit more, but bear in mind that I have new articles to write, so I want to forewarn you that at some point I might totally ghost you in an unfair way. But as a shortcut, I do want to state that I'm pretty iron-clad on a lot of this unless it turns out that you believe Jesus is God the Father - that's a big enough difference in his fundamentally identity that if if we disagree on that, I don't think my semantics will stretch far enough to pretend our deities are the same fella.)
I found this really interesting - I'm from the UK and so from a different Christian culture, but a lot of this resonated with me so I guess we're not too different. I've attended a variety of different churches (from Catholic school to Charismatic Evangelical), and the compassion within the church is definitely something that consistently stands out.
I suspect we may simply have different theologies on the merit of doing good, and it's probably a bad idea to argue over it since I'm sure we could both quote scripture and verse at each other to prove that we're right. My thinking is more along the lines that all good deeds glorify God, even if done with non-religious motivations. That's not to say I'm a universalist, I do believe that my specific brand of Christianity is the correct one (I'm not saying I'm 100% certain of all theological minutia, just that by definition my beliefs are the ones I find most plausible), but I think even an atheist draws closer to God whenever they act out of love for other people. I think all people have some understanding of the divine (the perfect being, and hence the perfect standard to which our actions are held against), but just don't have the right relationship to it without Christianity.
How do you account for when "acting out of love for other people" (for example) occurs in other, non-Christian religions? What if, say, a Hindu or Buddhist acts out of love for another person? Their actions in many trying circumstances could end up being similar or possibly identical to a Christian in the same position. That makes it seem that the choice of Christianity is arbitrary rather than fundamental. How do you know that Christianity is the right choice, when you could have made another religious choice and still ended up behaving as a "good person"?
Worse, what if God is just an illusion and that the truth is breaking out of the cycles of your own samsakara/karma etc (I don't know the minutiae of this - just an example)? In which case you could go through life making all the correct moral decisions apart from the Big One which ended up being wrong. In which case you find yourself expiring as a good person but one whose choice to devote their deeds to God was completely flawed.
I would argue that doesn't make it "all for nothing" - it should be the moral choices you make that are important regardless of whether you are atheist, Buddhist, Hindu etc. There is a lot of common moral ground across all religions - maybe this is the real important stuff and that the huge end goal is incorrect window dressing.
Not sure what Jerden will end up saying here, but a lot of what you are asking is "What if all religions are true?". I've always found this to be sophistry - if all of them are true, then none of them that make concrete claims are. And most of them do make concrete claims.
As an immediate reaction, doing good is not what gets you into the heaven in Christianity - it's explicitely a system in which you are saved through a specific sacrifice, accessed through your own faith, which allows you to route around the standard you can't fulfill (more or less, I'm condensing a great deal for efficiency's sake.
If that's not true, it's not true. But you can't have an explicit claim of "there's no way to the father except through me" and "pretty much all roads lead to god, man" on the same table. One of the two is definitionally wrong.
In your last paragraph you argue that, essentially, moral choices should be the thing - make the right ones, and get into heaven. And that's not something you can't believe, but it's *different* than what Christians believe. Not only different, but in direct conflict.
That makes questions like this almost always boil down to something like "Why isn't the thing you believe the thing I believe?" which gets tricky - I can just as easily pull the uno reverse card on you and demand you explain why you don't adhere to my belief system.
True - I don't really expect anything other than what's in your final paragraph because most likely nothing else is possible. I just wonder if we stumble upon our religious choices through exposure/culture or whether because they really are the correct choice for us. It's not as if all religions get to pitch to us, on a level footing, sort of Dragon's Den style, and then we make our choice. In a lot of respects we end up railroaded into our choice.
I don't believe that "all religions are true". I believe (if we considered all their claims in totality) either one is or none are. And I wouldn't know how to choose the one. If as much is truly at stake as many religions claim, then it's an awful choice to have to make.
You're right - I do believe that moral choices are the thing. And I do realise that's not really what Christianity believes. I believe it's possible that Christianity is a useful vehicle to make these moral choices, but also that several other religions could do the same thing. That doesn't mean I believe they are "all true" because I would only look at a certain "common ground" set of morality across them, not whether, for example we need to accept Jesus as our saviour or whether in fact we need to scrub out our samskaras by ritual chanting (or whatever). I think a lot of the concrete claims are neither here nor there - they could be right or they could be wrong but they are not provable either way (hi, Godel?) but that doesn't mean that aspects of their morality can't be true and useful.
Thanks for the post by the way. If you are getting a whole lot of extra surprise late traction it's because the article ended up on thebrowser.com
Thanks for letting me know about the traffic source - it's hard for me to find them sometimes. Dan Luu linked this one out on twitter yesterday, and I think it just overall put it in front of some people who hadn't seen it before (thebrowser included, I think).
If you reread my comment I think we actually do agree on this - my point about an atheist applies just as much to a follower of any religion other than Christianity. I'm humble enough to admit that I could be wrong about the nature of God, if that's the case then I hope that my attempts at virtue still reflect well on me.
If Christianity is true then I would hope that it helps me to make the correct moral decisions, but it's observably true that people can do virtuous things even without it. Clearly, the intellectual decision about the correct theology is distinct from the moral question about the right way to live. Personally, I find Christian theology compelling because it argues that these good deeds, while admirable, are ultimately inadequate to earn our way to God, and we must rely on God's mercy and forgiveness rather than our own righteousness. However, the fact that it would be awkward for me if another religion turned out to be true doesn't seem like a good argument for rejecting all specific religious claims. Maybe I'm too much of a scientist, but the correct theory is not found by averaging all of the hypotheses out - ultimately, you have to pick one and test whether it seems to be true.
(I find Islam the most challenging to me as a Christian, the moral claims are very similar but the theological claims have key differences. I'm not too worried if Buddhism turns out to be true, I can just try again next time)
My impression of most major religions is that they argue that doing good is instrumental to the real purpose of life, which is drawing closer to some kind of higher purpose, which may or may not be a god or gods. Framing that as window dressing misses the whole point of religion - if you think the morality is what's truly important, just be an atheist and spend your time on moral philosophy instead. "Religion is a trick to get apes to behave well" is not exactly a bold new claim, but it only makes sense if you assume a priori that the transcendent is illusory.
I loved your insight about Christians avoiding explicit movies! I often wonder if the Netflix finance department will figure out that several million Christian subscribers gave up on finding the one-in-a-hundred video that doesn’t conflict with my Christian faith and traditional values.
Maybe their programming is just following the younger, woker audience, but I honestly feel like I’m being indoctrinated into a world that I don’t want to live in.
I heard a comment from a blacklisted conservative person in the movie industry who wondered why they only make films critical of the US military. Not saying it’s not corrupt, like every organization becomes, but wouldn’t some large number of conservative consumers pay to see those?
I've often thought that it's weird that they don't have "cable edit" versions as an option on Netflix movies - those tapes have to exist still, right? I want to show my kids Revenge of the Nerds as much as the next guy, but the version without tons of nudity/rape isn't available to me, and there doesn't seem to be a good reason why.
The cable edits probably exist only on Betamax in abysmally low quality. I suspect the demand is perceived to be low enough that Netflix doesn't expect the cost to result in enough additional subscriptions to be profitable... Not to mention that I think most film creators are not in favor of their works being censored in this way especially given that Netflix has no FCC obligation to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearPlay (the now-legal successor to CleanFlicks) exists for DVDs.
Re: Mormons and the Trinity. Here are some possible factors, ordered by descending significance IMO (I'm LDS):
1. For many, missions are the first time they've had meaningful discussions about their beliefs with non-Mormons, so in general they'll be likely to fumble instead of giving a clear answer.
2. Perhaps in your area, the Trinity is a common objection, and the local missionaries prefer to avoid the topic ("we just spent an hour arguing about the Trinity with the last guy!"). (I served my mission in Malaysia/Singapore, and it wasn't a big deal there--but I've heard of this kind of thing from people who served in the US).
3. To a Mormon (drawing on my own experience), the topic of "Are Mormons really Christian?" feels somewhat exasperating ("Duh, it's literally called 'The Church of *Jesus Christ* ...'!"). Until you've been exposed to it enough (see #1), it's surprising that the Trinity is such an important belief for many Christians that not believing in it would make them think of you as being in an entirely different religion. This might cause missionaries to not take your questions fully seriously, making them more likely to go for #2 ("look, we're both Christians, can we please just move on to Joseph Smith instead...").
Thanks for the thoughtful answer and the kindness - it's appreciated.
I think as to 1. that's understandable - I'm pretty sure I was probably similar in terms of trying to talk about things when I was 18-20 (that's correct, right? for the age range of the mission?). And realistically that's most of the LDS folks I've talked to about religion are missionaries - the others I would have talked to about... like, just stuff. Where good pizza restaurants are, that kind of thing.
As to 2. and 3., I think there's an unavoidable conflict with me-type Christians that's going to make it hard to get past, because we are talking about a fairly big difference in the fundamental nature of the dude we are worshipping. Sometimes you get enough difference piled up that it becomes clear you aren't worshipping the same guy - for instance, both you and I would be suspicious of someone who came from the Church of Jesus Christ The Guy From The Bible but who, like, believed he was a reincarnation of the Buddha. Details probably matter here, and this is a pretty big one.
I think part of why it looks different from our different vantages is because (from what I can tell) LDS people are raised on a dogma that, ultra-condensed, is something like "Listen, the Christians are Christians - but they don't have our full gospel, so we need to get that to them". If my impression there is right, that's a lot different from our "this is a new religion; you need to check it out and see how it lines up before you go accepting it willy-nilly" general stance. And then you run into a pretty big difference in who Jesus is, and it matters, because it reinforces the "different religion" bit.
Yeah, age range is 18-20-or-so.
re: 2 and 3, I agree, and hopefully not everyone gets through their entire mission before realizing that. One of the main difficulties for missionaries is that by the time you kinda-sorta figure out what you're doing, it's time to go home :).
That being said--another potential factor is that most people who actually end up converting (in my anecdotal experience, which is an exceptionally small sample) tend to come somewhat easily ("golden investigators" -- my wife was one of these), whereas there are lots of people who will happily meet with you and talk about doctrine but who have a very low probability of converting. Missionaries' priors perhaps get optimized for the former, causing them to neglect people who might convert if their doctrinal concerns were addressed.
This is kind of encoded in missionaries' training. The idea is that God/the Holy Ghost/angels/whatever are preparing specific people who will then be receptive, you just have to find them. (See "Find them that will receive" near the top of https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/preach-my-gospel-a-guide-to-missionary-service/how-do-i-find-people-to-teach?lang=eng).
This is largely speculation, and again I'm guessing the dominant factor is just #1/lack of general competence. I should ask my brother what he thinks; he served in Florida.
> I think part of why it looks different from our different vantages is because ...
Yeah, this seems like an accurate assessment.
We have a pretty similar concept in terms of people getting prepped for hearing a message from above. The Calvinists do this the hardest, as far as I know - to the extent where (to my understanding) a person who wasn't prepped couldn't actually accept Christ in their system. It doesn't make a practical difference as far as I know, since everyone who accepts Christ was self-evidently prepped.
I'm not sure the "looking for people who will listen as-is" tactic is that bad from a pure numbers perspective - my guess is that precious few of the people who Knew enough about LDS to ask those questions would like the answers - some might, but most who asked them would be trying to see if they "matched up" and they don't. That's of course not taking into account the latter category in your post.
Really salient points re: the salutary effects of committed religious belief on personal behavior, and why. One more point: religious people reproduce at 2x the rate of the non-religious (essentially the difference between replacement value and serious population decline), which will absolutely lead to a reversal of the present secularizing trend in the mid-term future.
Quick fact check, data I could find shows Christians do have a higher birth rate (varying by denomination) than agnostics or atheists, but it's nowhere near double. Outside of Mormons, it's somewhere between 20-60% higher, not 100% AND per RC's link below, ~20% of those fall out and deconvert. Christians were having more kids 15-20 years ago. Atheists about the same so their advantage was greater, yet Christianity has been plummeting. Really really fast. If that theory had any weight, why hasn't it played out at all for 20+ years?
Only if all those kids actually stay religious, which often does not turn out to be the case. It would be an interesting exercise to model how a population changes based on conversion at various rates and ages.
Judging by just being raised by nominal protestants and ending up a nominal protestant, the numbers are pretty good: https://www.pewforum.org/2016/10/26/links-between-childhood-religious-upbringing-and-current-religious-identity/
I hope you continue to write more pieces like this. I'm an atheist, but have become much more interested in religion lately. Maybe I'll end up in the Thomas Jefferson Category.
One thing I've started appreciating is that there are definitely different levels of sophistication of religious belief. Fundamentalist Christian types have this idea that the Biblical corpus has the same ontological and epistemological status as a scientific theory. I'm not sure what to make of that. It's obviously not correct. Why is that belief still so prevalent? Contrast that with someone like Mircea Eliade. Maybe this hierarchy of religious sophistication is demeaning to many people, but it seems correct.
But I also believe that Atheists don't take religion seriously enough at all. We've done very little to study and understand religion from a biological perspective, a phenomenological perspective, a literary perspective and a metaphorical perspective, just for starters. There is so much going on and we seem so eager to throw it away without understanding it first.
Sometimes I think religion is like math. It is an extremely important part of our society, and almost everyone is embarrassingly bad at it. Those who dismiss it offhand are like the kid in grade 8 learning algebra and complaining that he'll never use it. Maybe he's right. But I'm glad mathematicians still exist.
What you are asking parses out to something like "Why do people who believe a thing think it's true?". If they didn't believe it, they wouldn't be Christians; they'd be religious studies majors with a focus on the Bible. That's not a bad thing to be, but it's not the same thing as religious. When you spread it out to Mircea Eliade, it's similar and becomes something like "Why can't these people believe in Christianity like this this guy that doesn't believe in anything?
I bring this up not to "prove" religion to you but to point out that being religious and being interested in religion aren't the same thing. What you are asking is why a bunch of people won't suddenly abandon their beliefs as clearly untrue. The answer to that should be obvious - they believe they are true.
The flip side of this is the idea that atheists should study religion, since there's clearly so much going on with it and how people interact with it. I'm always suspicious that they'd get much out of it - most of the effects religion seems to have for people are tied to an at least somewhat sincere belief in it. I think it's hard to go "everything spiritual is fake, but act like it isn't" no matter how well you understand religion.
Of all people, I think religious ones are the most open to the idea of different types of truth. So I am not asking why they believe something, but why they insist it has the same type of truth claims as Science. Most of the stories of the Bible far predate the first scientists. Whatever these stories are, they are not scientific claims. I think the story of Cain and Abel is true, but in a very different way than evolution is true. Does a religious person lose anything by making this distinction? Some very prevalent religious figures do make this distinction, so what I'm wondering is why so many don't?
Because once you make the decision that the Bible is a book of lies, it's then a book of lies no matter how you phrase it.
Let's put it a different way: you want me to, say, discount something like the parting of the red sea. You convince me it's ridiculous and couldn't be right - and I believe you in this scenario, and now I don't believe that. But the crux of the whole religion is there's an actual God who actually exists, and he sent his son who then died, took a trip to hell, defeated the abstract concept of sin and who then came back to life. If you strip away any of these, the religion breaks; there's nothing more central to the religion than those things. But they are no less magical and no more believable than the red sea.
I've met some people who can maintain a firewall by deciding that most of it is lies but some of it is truth, but they are basically aware that they drew an arbitrary line somewhere; I've watched several people of this type take the next step from that into explicit non-belief. It's not impossible to, say, discount the entire creation story as metaphor because it's silly and dumb while still believing in the equally silly and dumb blood-sacrifice-and-resurrection-story, but it's hard; most people who try it don't end up maintaining the effort for long in my experience.
The problem you run into - the one you can't avoid forever - is that when you start declaring the magic parts of the bible to be false because they are magic, you basically reduce it to a book of philosophy. And philosophy is nice, but it's not religion.
Resident Contrarian, I think you’re being culpably uncharitable here. (Where I’m coming from: I am a Christian who believes that miracles can and do happen and have no patience with namby-pamby Christianity-and-water churches that relativize clear moral commands and allegorize the historical claims of the faith, and yet I deny the six-day Creation, and I’m agnostic about the historical accuracy of some other stories in early Genesis and books like Job.)
You seem to assume that the line between some biblical texts literally and others non-literally is simply arbitrary and decided based on the interpreter’s personal sense of how likely the events described are, which is clearly a terrible heuristic for evaluating religious claims. There is, however, a non-arbitrary, non-terrible heuristic, and it is genre. Parts of the Bible that are written in different genres are clearly intended to be read in different ways, and loving attention to the text will notice and respect those generic differences.
The clearest example: Jesus characteristically spoke in parables, that is, non-literal stories that convey moral and spiritual truths. You would never say that parables are “lies” or even just a cover-up for philosophy in different clothes; they are our Lord’s preferred method of teaching our religion. Parabolic form is central to Jesus’s teaching ministry and his whole style of thinking. In fact this indirect style one of the strongest impressions I have of the “personality” of God in both the Old and New Testaments: he never answers a question straight but loves to answer with another question (“Whose picture is on this coin?” “Where were you when I laid the world’s foundation?”), and he is constantly presenting enigmatic pictures instead of clear messages (visions about almond branches, instructions to cut off one’s beard and scatter it to the winds, the withering of the fig tree).
Everybody knows (more or less) how to read a parable, and we’re perfectly capable of believing that Jesus really, literally multiplied loaves of bread to feed five thousand people and also that, in the very next chapter, he invented the figure of the Good Samaritan to make a theological point. Why? Clues in the text itself tell us to read those two passages in different ways. The question is: are there other parts of the Bible where generic markers signal to us that they were not written, and need not be read, as literal assertions about historical fact?
Once the issue is framed this way, Christians can certainly still disagree about how to read specific passages, but we can discuss those decisions in terms of consistent interpretative principles and textual evidence. The Gospels and Acts obviously claim to be close historical accounts based on eyewitness evidence; there is no wiggle room for allegorizing or mythologizing them. Biblical stories about miracles, like those in Exodus, are clearly asserting that supernatural events happened in historical time, and Bible-believing Christians must believe them. The opening chapters of Genesis, on the other hand, are poetic and highly stylized, quite different even from the story of Abraham that follows in the same book, and it’s hard to know how to read them; interpretations that treat the passage non-literally while affirming the kinds of underlying truths it clearly does assert (e.g. that God made everything from nothing by the power of his Word, that humankind has disobeyed God and are therefore doomed to suffer toil, pain, and death) are being offered in good faith.
Believe it or not, I'm a short-day-agnostic of sorts; I allow for long-day interpretations, a couple other things.
There's a couple things that are happening here that I feel like need to be expanded:
1. Remember that this chain starts out with someone asking why Christians can't be like Mircea Eliade, a person who pretty well lumps all religion of all types into a sort of amorphous mythos; he doesn't believe any of it is true in any sense of the word beyond "has some level of significance, however small and indistinct".
The post you are responding to responded directly to someone who said he believes "I think the story of Cain and Abel is true, but in a very different way than evolution is true."; evolution, by context, seeming to be true to the author as a "this actually happened in a no-BS way where when I say "happened" I mean in the conventional sense as opposed to other stuff that didn't happen".
So I'm responding in that context - someone asking me why Christians don't abandon all belief in the Bible as anything besides light metaphor, and another person who reaffirming the same question to an extent, using Cain and Abel as an example.
2. You say something that boils down to "but there's other Heuristics we can reasonable use to determine these things that don't have to do with belief - we aren't rejecting them for disbelief reasons, but for other reasons".
I think I have reasonably hard time balancing 1 and 2, and often figuring out what I'm dealing with. I have a friend who believes Job is a parable; he doesn't think it literally happened. Based on only that I can project three possible situations:
1. That my friend doesn't think Job happened because of the style it was written, or something else like that - he thinks it's an important part of the Bible, has lessons none-the-less important and binding to us. But he doesn't think it was meant to be taken literally.
2. He doesn't think Job happened because he doesn't think things like Job happen - i.e. he doesn't think supernatural stuff like that happens.
3. He doesn't think Job happened because he doesn't like/doesn't accept the story of Job; he thinks it's too mean in the typical way people criticize job.
In the case of my friend it's #1, or seems to be near as I can tell. And I think you are right that it's not the case that every heuristic that would make someone consider that the seven days weren't literal days or that Job was meant to be taken as metaphor is wrong. It's also not necessarily the case that even if I thought a particular heuristic was wrong/flawed that it would necessarily be "salvation-threatening" for lack of a more precise term, or my business to bring up.
But on the same token there are a lot of heuristics that ARE dangerous. Does somebody categorically not think a red sea *can* be parted? Because if he does, that doesn't exist in isolation to his beliefs in things like resurrections. Does he not allow for God to be right and him to be wrong re: the handling of Job? That has implications.
All that to say it's complex. Here I was being asked something in the vein of "why do Christians believe all that silly stuff?" and answered in that vein. But it's not a uniform monolith.
I guess I understand that. But this gets very confusing for me. A friend of mine will be ordained as a Rabbi pretty soon. He does not think Genesis is a literal and historical description of the creation of earth and man. He views it as the key to understanding the fundamental moral, psychological, narrative, etc, truths about human reality. I can't do his position justice, but It's certainly more than just a philosophy to him. As far as I can tell he has elevated the Torah, not reduced it. It's awe inspiring to hear him talk about neuroscience and the Garden of Eden at once. Sorry for moving away from Christianity with this example.
Isn't there a lot of room between silly lies and literal truth? Maybe even a category of description above that? Human experience is at least partly played out in a symbolic, metaphorical, narrative structure. Some would call this the domain of religion. So I'm not sure if there needs to be a line drawn somewhere between true and not.
Anyways this is all beyond my knowledge, hence why I appreciate smart people like you writing about it.
"Isn't there a lot of room between silly lies and literal truth?"
Understand that when you ask me this, I'm answering this as Me, as opposed to every religious person.
I think there's less room than we like to think there is, because of what we are representing the source of the "silly lies/literal truth" to be. So say I write a novel; it's filled with clever metaphor. It's nice, and it teaches a lot of perhaps interesting lessons. In it, the main character reveals the path to heaven is eating a lot of leafy greens, and praying a special poem while you eat them.
You might read that book; you might like some of the philosophy in it and it might affect your behavior. But where you found a place where the philosophy disagreed with that seemed to be "local optimum" behavior(the best apparent choice for a specific situation) you wouldn't and I wouldn't expect you to still follow it; it might be smart and even generally true in its philosophy, but it's just a book, written by a man. You probably already do this - you might have read Plato and might have liked it, but you don't consider it authoritative in that way; it's just a nice book of nice philosophy.
Even if that's not true, you certainly don't expect the vegetables prayer to work.
Now imagine you have a different book; you think a literal omniscient and omnipotent god wrote it. You think this god is authoritative; like he actually knows what's right or wrong. You would treat the commands in the book differently in that case, if you actually thought those things; it's a different kind of book.
Now, I don't know your friend. But making a strawmanned version of it, let's say he does the same thing for the story of Job as Genesis; it's just a myth, it's not true. Ditto Noah. Ditto the 40 years in the desert and parting of the Red Sea; Ditto Gideon and the Wall. Eventually we'd start to realize something - he doesn't think the book is reliable; he does not in fact think it's true. He might think it *contains truth*, but that's not the same thing. And if that's his pattern, we'd expect he *probably* doesn't believe in God in a literal sense, either. He's been rejecting all the magic-sounding stuff, and God's the most magic-sounding thing in there..
Regardless of how strawman-version of your friend then lives his life and acts, he's not actually religious at this point - he's indistinguishable in belief from someone who just really, really likes my really nice fictional book. Because that's what he's doing - he has this fictional book, nothing in it true in a "this is what actually happened" sense, that he really likes. But he's a philosopher, not religious - he has rejected the spiritual and the supernatural.
There's another thing in play here that matters, and that's *why* strawmanned-version-of-your-friend rejected those things. If he read his religious texts and honestly interpreted them to be metaphors absent anything else, that's one thing. But we can imagine another version of this where he at one point had a book he thought was true and that a deity wrote, and then the world told him "no, don't believe that" and he sided with the world. Both those stances have implications, but the implications of the second one(if true) are that whatever else he might be, he's not someone to whom religion is the actual important bit.
None of this means your actual friend is bad by non-christian-morality standards! Even if he believed exactly like I just described, he might behave spectacularly and treat a lot of people well. But strawmanned-version of your friend isn't actually religious in any way that's different from a philosophy class except where he teaches his philosophy class and what kind of clothes he wears when he does it.
As I understand it, Jews take the Torah to be precisely the word of God as he dictated it to Moses. They absolutely believe every word of the the Torah to be true. They do not, necessarily, believe that humans are capable of understanding the precise ways in which it is true. Just because God dictated a true story does mean that the story is a necessarily a historical account. Jews do not presume to understand what God meant by the story, and assuming that the story is a literal, historical document is presumptuous.
Many Christians, on the other hand, seemed to have missed out on this and, instead, have interpreted the same text in their own ways. They intentionally disregard the exclusive ways in which it was read and understood for the first thousand years. (Rabbinic Judaism also holds that Moses was given an oral law with the written law which is necessary to understand the written law. Early Christians dismissed this and modern Christians are completely unaware of how badly they misread the text they consider to be holy!)
Lots to think about here. I'll need to pose these questions to him. Though I wonder how many people would actually pass your criteria. Wouldn't Pope Francis and many other religious leaders fail? I guess some people would think so.
Here's how I see religious stories. Take one book (or for most of human history, an oral story) which many people enjoy the philosophy in, and helps them live better lives. Then another and another. Then start extracting out common elements. Continue the process for thousands and thousands of years. You get myths, fables, legends. Continue this filtering and extraction process across many generations, maybe add in some shared spiritual experiences along the way, and you eventually get religious stories. People live and die by these stories. Cultures form around and are shaped by them. They become integrated into the evolutionary path of humans. We seem to have evolved some sort of religious instinct to incorporate them deep into our psyches. Our language, music, art, architecture, law etc is all shaped by them. Whether you have read them or not, they are integrated into your being.
At this point I think we are far beyond studying Plato. I'm not sure "this happened, or didn't" is a meaningful question anymore. Of course the type of Christian you describe probably wouldn't agree with the above. But I think the study of these stories, and the question of what happens when a human actually lives up to the ideals within, is at least approaching the domain of religion.
A few things I have lots of thoughts about but can't find the language to convey accurately: You separate belief and action. I'm hesitant to think you should do that so easily. I do think we should separate the spiritual and the supernatural. Through years of meditation I've developed a sense of spirituality. Maybe I'm way off, but it seems very different than any supernatural beliefs. Likewise, my friend seems very spiritual still.
I'm not sure what, if anything, changes meangingfully if Cain and Abel goes from literal, two specific historical figures truth to parable truth. Why do you think this would matter?
I think that's partly my point. I'm not sure how much it does matter, and therefor am not sure why people are so resistant to take that position.
But from a different perspective, as RC pointed out in response, it's the fundamental difference between religion and philosophy. I think this is too black and white though, and there is a lot of room to play around with these ideas in a religious context without accepting them literally.
For instance, here's the current official Catholic position on the scientific accuracy of Genesis:
"Because Genesis is not making scientific assertions, it is wrong to charge Genesis with scientific error. If someone draws erroneous scientific conclusions from a misreading of Genesis, the error belongs not to Genesis but to the person who has misread it.
Therefore we should not say that Genesis does not have “full scientific accuracy”—a statement that is bound to disturb the faithful and undermine their confidence in Scripture. Instead we should say that Genesis is not making scientific assertions and that we will draw erroneous conclusions if we treat the text as though it were.
The same applies to statements such as “We should not expect total accuracy from the Bible.” In fact we should, for everything asserted in Sacred Scripture is asserted by the Holy Spirit, and he does not make mistakes.
The burden is on us to recognize what the Spirit is and is not asserting, and we may stumble into error if we make a mistake in doing this."
I suspect that RC considers this to be some sort of strange weasel maneuver, but the majority of religious people do not.
I don't know how RC feels, but I don't think it's weaselly. It's not even in the same ballpark as Mircea Eliade or KC's rabbi friend, either, though. If there is a spectrum between "silly lies" and "literal truth,"* the Catholic Church is much closer to the "literal truth" side. It's also a very sensible position, but being Catholic I suppose I would say that.
And it does, by the way, matter the extent to which you accept Christianity's historical, metaphysical, etc. claims. See e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:
"12 But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is worthless, and so is your faith."
That is, Christianity itself resists any temptation to reduce it to mere metaphor, or to evacuate the historicity of Jesus or his status as Savior.
*this is a dumb framing, though, for the record, because reading Genesis like some kind of scientific treatise is silly
Like I said, I don't think religious people are hesitant to take that position. I think that a certain subsect of modern protestants fall into the category of people for whom the bible is only meaningful if it is taken to be a literal, historical document. Jews do not read it that way, Catholics do not currently read it that way, and many protestants don't either. There is nothing that says a book can't be true without it being an accurate historical document, but this is a sticking point for many current Christian sects.
The Bible is more than a few sentences, and saying whether it is or isn't intended to be read literal is a bit too simplistic. Some parts are clearly and explicitly meant to be metaphor, and some parts are clearly and explicitly supposed to be historical.
Some aren't so clear.
Someone who holds the New Testament to be largely metaphorical is simply in no way a Christian. Full stop.
Now, someone who does the reverse, and reads too much literal-ness into metaphor is not necessarily heretical... they may simply be unsophisticated. And on the unclear parts, we need to allow for differences of opinion.
I'd be willing to get into the weeds, but there's too much nesting here and everyone else has probably moved on from the conversation!
That was interesting, and large chunks of it seem to be realistic, based on my observations of what I'd call "committed Christians in the US".
I'm not part of that demographic; realistically, many evangelicals would probably class me among their collective enemies.
I'm not going to unsubscribe because you are "one of them," or even because you talk about it but I'm afraid this puts your immediately previous article - where we did clash - in a kind of perspective. Of course the needs and desires of men, young or otherwise, are more important to you than the needs and desires of women; in fact, the archetypal person is male for you. The former is arguably supported by the Bible, and consistent with the subculture; the latter seems so prevalent in US Christian culture and literature as to be unarguable, except among the groups you tend to exclude from your definition of Christianity.
No real point to this comment, except that I'm glad I'm not your daughter. (Your daughters, if any, may well be perfectly happy - but probably not if they were born with my personality and talents.) Also, I'll probably have less to say next time I disagree with you about gender relations.
At any rate, I'm happy to see you explaining your background. It gives me a much rounder picture than I generally get of anyone who sets out to be a pundit, even in a small way.
I do think this is really profoundly weird; I've never, even once, said the needs of women are inferior to the needs of men. You've certainly tried to paint that target on my back a lot. In the case of incels you did it by saying, essentially, that I didn't care about women and wanted to somehow subjugate them to the needs of the incels - but I never said this! I asked you to acknowledge that the incels had a real problem; I asked this in the context of saying their behavior as a reaction to that problem was unacceptable and gross.
I certainly can't prove that I don't hate women like you seem to want me to, but "Oh, he's a christian; that means I can write him off as filled with hatred he's never expressed so I don't have to grapple with anything he says" is... it's something, but it's not actually responding to anything I ever said.
I don't think you hate women. And I agree, you never said that the needs of women are inferior to those of men.
You and your supporters merely agreed on the importance of the need for young men to have heterosexual partners of their own age, and the importance of sympathizing with their plight - with no discussion whatsoever of the plight of young women who don't appear to want to be partners for those young men, or for that matter of older women who may find themselves unable to find heterosexual partners due to lack of interest from those same young men.
That's not hate. That's regarding women as tools and servants to be used by real people.
There's a lot going on here; I want to break it down.
1. I'm not sure I have supporters - I have a very small blog and occasionally now have an article popular enough that people comment on it. Some of those people agreed with me, some of those people thought they agreed with me but misunderstood what I was trying to say, and some disagreed. I'm not sure that makes me a cult leader quite yet.
2. You bring up both the plight of young women and of older women who might be lonely. But you brought this up in my last article as well(at least as it relates to you) and I said this:
"In terms of the rest of it, very briefly: I do have sympathy for you about the things you went through, both those caused by specific people and just because of how the world is built. That sympathy costs me nothing - I just have to genuinely care about some level of the pain you feel or felt and agree I wish it didn't happen."
I've been pretty consistent on this point - I don't want anyone to suffer, especially unnecessarily. And the conversations with you keep getting awkward because you keep coming in and saying "you hate women, you don't care about women, you consider women tools and sex slaves". But I've never said any of this! I don't think any of this! You are fully accusing me of a bunch of hate I never indicated I had!
The best support I think you could muster for me hating women is that I haven't actually written an article going through their struggles. But that's explainable a bunch of ways besides me hating women and thinking they exist merely to be slaves to men - for one, I haven't written a lot of articles, and like half of them have been about fringe science stuff.
More importantly, though, it would be really, really hard for me to write a meaningful article about women in a lot of ways - I've been a lonely man before, so I get some of what that feels like. But I've never been a lonely woman or a woman who is getting cat-called or any of that stuff. I'll probably never write an article about what it's like to be black or an astronaut, either, simply because I don't understand those experiences as well. Even talking about incels was pretty close to an over-reach, because I was lonely but not really all that close to being what they are culturally.
3. Taking 1 and 2 together, I think you are being pretty spectacularly unfair to me - you've accused me of an awful lot of shit. It seems like your justification for this is I asked for a very limited, conditional sympathy for a group you don't like. I'm not going to stop doing things like that; getting people to make a minimum effort to treat their enemies like humans is something I want. But asking for sympathy for a group *is not the same thing* as expressing animus for every group that doesn't like them.
I'm not even asking you to stop doing this - I'm just pointing out, like, listen, this isn't fair. There's a lot of ways I'm not perfect. I'm sort of an asshole sometimes. It might even turn out later that someone unmasks me and it turns out that you were right the whole time and I'm this horrible woman-hating mysogynist who would try his very hardest to muzzle his own daughters and prevent them from being successful out of sheer spite, like a literal monster and that still wouldn't change the fact that you have no evidence that I'm like that at all, today.
You are being very mean.
I feel like you're pattern-matching RC against someone who hurt you in the past. I don't think a person without your baggage would walk away with the impression that RC thinks of women as "tools and servants to be used by real people"
Do you sincerely believe that if there was a plight of young females desiring heterosexual partners of their own age, that he would care less?
Also, "with no discussion whatsoever of the plight of young women who don't appear to want to be partners for those young men"
.... is it a plight to have decline an option? In that situation the choice is being made BY empowered women and FOR incel males. He never bemoaned that they made the wrong choice or that they shouldn't be empowered to make the choice at all, but merely the circumstances. That seems antithetical to being a tool/servant.
"Of course the needs and desires of men, young or otherwise, are more important to you than the needs and desires of women; in fact, the archetypal person is male for you."
Just a bizarre statement that is far away from RC and his beliefs and anything he has ever written on this blog. And I say this as someone who is not a literalist Christian myself.
Thanks for writing this. While I didn't learn anything new on the literal level, I found it interesting and surprising to see such self-aware descriptions of what it looks like from the outside. You've accurately described what the average Christian looks like to me, a non-Christian, and that's an impressive feat. I don't think most of us are able to describe what we look like to the outsider while still being true to what we think we are. If that makes any sense.
This bit especially:
"So to go to them and say “but none of that matters, really, without Jesus” seems like an insanely shitty thing to do." This is an extremely common interaction I've had with Christians. And it's also this bit of philosophy that I find the most repelling. I'm more likely to trust someone who has a strong ethical core that's not religiously centered. I think that if you're doing good just because of Jesus that it seems a lot more likely to me that you're not going to do good tomorrow because that's a hard motivation to stick with in the long run. And, if you're Christian, it's okay, because Jesus will forgive you for not doing good as long as you ask. So, in general, I find Christians to be less trustworthy than those with a non-religious ethical system...
"And, if you're Christian, it's okay, because Jesus will forgive you for not doing good as long as you ask."
A basic precondition to being forgiven is being sorry, and to be sorry you have to think what you did was wrong. To be sure, you can ask for forgiveness without being sorry, but then you have no expectation of being forgiven; it's not as though you can fool Jesus. In my experience as a Catholic this point is certainly hammered on, and it would take impressive amounts of rationalization to get around it.
Sure, but I'm approaching it from a point of trustworthiness. From my perspective, the fundamental Christian philosophy is that as long as you're genuinely sorry for what you did, there are no real repercussions. When compared to someone with an internal commitment to ethical behavior--how is it that I should find the Christian equally trustworthy?
If a Christian believes that what matters is some future state of mind, how is it inconsistent to act unethically today as long as I'm truly repentant tomorrow? From what I can tell, Christians (and especially Catholics) live in a constant cycle of sin/repent. I don't think this is some attempt to game the system, I think it *is* the system, and it's a fundamentally flawed way of looking at humanity.
For what it's worth, it's not the system; it's actually explicit within the system that it's not the system. Sometimes this is with soft warnings against what you describe:
6 What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? 2 By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? 3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
Or sometimes with harder warnings:
26 For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, 27 but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.
This just to say that the system itself is explicitly against the "hey, I found a loophole!" type system you are describing.
I'm a poor student of your bible, but I'm surprised no one has brought this up before. Point taken; I stand corrected.
I do want to clarify that, like, nothing I'm talking about here has much to do with expectations - like I'm not really asserting that a Christian will in practice be a lot less likely to burgle or something; they aren't suddenly fundamentally more moral creatures; they just have, as you noted, different motivations now.
One quibble I'd like to make here is that the Jesus-motivation isn't necessarily a "replacement" motivation as it's representative here; it can be fully additive. It's actually explicitly so; the first rule of Christian Fight Club is "love god"; the second rule of Christian Fight Club is "Love Your Neighbor" and there's a lot of references scattered around to the idea that if you can't demonstrate that you are motivated in your actions by other people, you also can't claim to love God:
"If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother."
So here you and the Bible actually agree; someone who loves only God doesn't actually love God at all, and isn't a good dude in that sense.
My other quibble here is that you assert that something like "God wants certain things and I love God so I'll do them" is a "hard motivation to stick with in the long run", there's an implication that other forms of morality are super-easy to stick with; I'm not sure that's in evidence. I think my idea of the platonic ideal here is something like a person who has thought hard about their morality in a lot of ways - utilitarian, religiously-motivated, etc. - and also thinks there's some sort of enforcement in play.
Good point that I have no evidence for whether religious-based morality is easier to stick with or not. I guess it seems self-evident to me because that's how I react, but I suppose I have no reason to think that what's true for me is true for anyone else. I know that I have what I consider to be a strong moral compass around many issues and I follow it because it's easier to do that than not to do that. I'm not suggesting there aren't times when I engage in behavior that I think is wrong, but guilt is a sufficiently motivating corrective. I'm not at all motivated by the promise of heaven or the punishment of hell because that morality doesn't resonate with me at all.
So, I tend to assume that, exactly as you said, an ethical system based on religion is additive to whatever in-built system someone possesses. Because I don't find the additional religious ethical system to be at all motivating personally, I'm highly suspect of someone who claims to have received their entire moral code from Christianity. I interpret that as their internal compass is likely weak enough that they need to substitute what I view as a much weaker system. Furthermore it's a system that seems to work poorly for many of the people who espouse it. I don't think it's vaguely an accident or coincidence that Catholicism is ripe with priests who sexually abuse children. I think that if your own moral compass is weak enough that you'd do that sort of thing, that additionally if you recognize in yourself some sort of sexual deviance that your church tells you is wrong, that the priesthood is a likely place for you to end up because you think it's best available corrective available to you. Similar to the proliferation of religious anti-gay homsexuals (eg Ted Haggard)--I suspect he was drawn to religiosity as a direct result of what he viewed as evil within himself. And it's true that I have no evidence to back this up.
And it probably doesn't matter--that's talking about extreme outliers. It probably matters more whether Christianity has a net positive or negative impact on the average Christian, and I guess I have no data either way. My intuition, though, is that I'm less likely to trust a church-goer (possibly because of the outliers, no matter how rare), even though I know that the general American intuition is exactly the opposite and I'd kind of like to understand why. On both sides.
I think you're absolutely right that the actual philosophy of Christianity should theoretically act as an additive to make someone more moral, and that it probably does act that way in some people. I'm unconvinced that it actually does in the majority of church-going Christians. Have you come across anything that indicates that church-going Christians are, in fact, more moral than the population as a whole? Something like your divorce statistics, but applied to, say, crime? It's one thing to stipulate that church-going Christians stay married because those are exactly the sort of people who think that staying married is a virtue. But I'd like to see it applied to a more general morality...
I think we are coming from opposite ends - you seem to have an anti-christian bias(please read this "softly" - I don't mean it to be as negative sounding as it sounds) and I have an absurdly pro-christian bias. That right away is going to make things difficult. But with that said, I think you are "cheating" a bit here - I'll explain why.
So you say to me something that basically goes like this: "Here we have a Christian; he's weak of mind and morals, so he needs a system. But he's still weak of mind and morals, or else he wouldn't need the system; I don't trust him. And here we have a guy who from scratch created a complex system of morals and ethics that he reasoned out. Not only does this work for him, but because it's his he's more likely to follow it; he's a superman, and I trust him.".
But that's sort of cheating for a couple reasons:
1. You say, basically, that the Christian is shitty from the start, and that he needs Christianity for that reason. OK, cool - but that doesn't mean that Christianity doesn't work. If the guy is shitty and dumb, Christianity might leave him shitty and dumb while still having improved him and deserving some credit in the same way a really good mechanic deserves credit when they do a good repair on a 1993 Geo Metro, even though they didn't turn it into a Ferrari.
2. You say "OK, but a guy who does a lot of hard work and reasons his own working and beneficial moral system from first principles is going to be more trustworthy than those dumb Christians I described.". Well, yeah, probably - you just described a group that's by definition in the top 5-10% of everybody; that's a hell of a self-selected group.
To put it a different way, I might have a really good book for teaching PC use; it might be clear and teach a great system. But we'd expect that people who used it would still mostly suck at using PCs; they are seeking remedial methods meant for underperformers. We can then compare them to people who just love computers and voluntarily self-teach themselves, but that's a different group we'd expect to excel - we are comparing grandmas to tech enthusiasts at some point.
As I read your scenario, those things are sort of automatically going to be true no matter what Christianity is or isn't - the biggest, best known system is going to draw in the casuals and remedials; that's just part of it. And the build-your-own-morality-system-after-much-study people are going to be a different class; many of them probably don't need a system at all in the first place to be "good enough", although the system they make might improve it.
The other side of things is that you are working under an apparent assumption that Christianity doesn't get any of those 5-10% top-tier people; that's going to be hard to disprove, because I can go "Well, I know a lot of really absurdly nice and moral people within the system who would have been nice and moral anyway, but who the system has none-the-less" helped and you can still more or less dismiss that.
As to the last bit, as stated in the article, the "statistically measured behaviors of church-going Christians as a category" is pretty limited - I tried to do something with "teen pregnancy" but it's pretty hopelessly confounded by geographic area in terms of how they tried to measure it(look it up, try to find something with a map representation if you can and you will see what I mean).
I don't think you are being very fair with the "they think staying married is a virtue" bit, though - they think it's a virtue because of Christianity, mostly - if Christianity doesn't get credit for that, what could it possibly get credit for?
I'll admit an anti-christian bias. It's not malicious against any given individual (I'm married to an evangelical!), but I'm definitely biased against it.
My theory is that people exhibit some innate level of morality that's pretty hard to influence either way. You've at least convinced me that Christian theology is theoretically constructed in such a way to motivate people toward a greater Christian morality--but I remain unconvinced this actually works. I think it's much more likely that most people hover very close to some baseline determined by a combination of genetics, upbringing and environment.
So, I'm willing to step back from my original argument that Christianity is set up to provide perverse incentives if your goal is moral behavior. I still think it's likely it does this, but I don't have any evidence either way. (Bias, yes.) I can still take issue with the statement that otherwise moral behavior "doesn't matter" without God. Not that it's wrong (I think it's pretty easy to demonstrate that it's wrong), but that it's an actively harmful position. The fact that you realize it's a shitty thing to say gets me most of the way there--it's a shitty thing to believe for the same reasons. If you genuinely believe that good without God isn't, then you're at best dismissing a lot of things that make the world better. It's sort of analogous to thinking that abortion is wrong, but supporting abstinence-only sex education when we've shown that leads to greater rates of abortion. If you don't believe in an objective good, your religion is making the world a worse place by dismissing important things that are, in fact, making the world better.
I think that divorce rates are pretty meaningless in any example of whether Christianity increases morality. You admit that it only affects "church-going" Christians, which means that if it were a virtue, Christianity is only helping a very small subset of Christians. (But, of course, not only do I consider it not a virtue, I consider it harmful. The Jewish understanding of divorce where a husband is commanded to give his wife a divorce should she ask for it is far superior.) But yes, Church-going Christians stay married because they are church-going Christians. I don't think that's any evidence of conferring morality, rather merely enforcing social norms in your society. Because getting divorced is public and there's a strong prohibition against it, of course divorce is lower! There's a strong prohibition against theft as well, but since theft isn't a public act, I suspect it's far less likely that theft is committed at lower rates among church-going Christians.
(I realize you're specifically NOT making that claim, but I'm still curious...)
This is on my list of "comments I'd like to make that are going to take more time than is appropriate while I'm at work". I will return to this tonight, probably.
From my perspective as an atheist who'd never been religious, Christian morality is basically a black box. Because I cannot perceive the (putative) desires of Jesus, and because Jesus is the main driver of Christian morality, I therefore cannot predict what a Christian might do from one moment to the next.
For example, I had a coworker who was a basically the nicest guy you'd ever meet. He would help you change the tire at 3am, no questions asked. He would never say an unkind word to you. If he thought you weren't feeling great, he would actively offer ways to help, even if it's just a sympathetic ear. But, one day, we were talking about the Bible, and he casually said, "oh yeah, the Caananites were a spiritually corrupted people, so they had to be wiped out down to the last man, woman, and child". I was so shocked that I couldn't even bring myself to ask the follow-up question, "so, do you think any modern people are spiritually corrupt ?"
Thus, from my perspective, here's a guy who's basically the nicest person in the world, but who is also willing to commit genocide at a moment's notice, for reasons that I can neither predict not fathom. From my perspective as an atheist, truly devout Christians are ticking time bombs. Yes, they're not genociding me right now, but that could change at any moment. Thus, I'd take an imperfect atheist over a perfect Christian any day; he might be a bit of a jerk, but at least I can understand his motivations -- and I can be pretty sure he's not going to murder anyone, at least.
I think I kind of understand this from a purely mechanical perspective - i.e. if you think god is the boss and defines morality, and you also think god is telling you to to kill all the French, yeah, you are going to go kill all the French. But I think you are a little bit jumpy on the whole "at any moment" bit; functionally, commands to genocide don't come down that often, individual-driven murders don't to my knowledge happen more often with Christians than other groups, and when they do church leadership pretty much never goes "welp, what do you do, God told him to".
This overlaps a bit with an uncharitable take it's possible to take as a Christian towards atheist morality. There's a take where you go "Listen, we believe good and bad exist as real things. They mostly have an arbitrary system, one based on utility - in the end of their story, everything is eventually ash. Besides punishments that might be meted out on them, there's no reason they are good at all - don't trust them". But that skips over a lot of stuff about how atheist morality works and also a lot of stuff about how "humans in general" generally work as well.
Yes, you are right in saying that "commands to genocide don't come down that often", but I think you might see how this sounds less than entirely comforting to someone like me. Christians have been pretty genocide-happy throughout recorded history, after all; perhaps not more so than other religions, but that still isn't super comforting. That said, genocide is just part of the picture; my main problem is the opacity of the Christian morality. You say:
> and when they do [murder people], church leadership pretty much never goes "welp, what do you do, God told him to".
But why not ? I understand that there are all kinds of Biblical reasons and literally millenia of scholarship devoted to answering this question; but I also understand that "God told us to" had often been presented as a perfectly valid justification for all kind of actions that I find morally wrong... and such justifications have been backed up by a similar amount of scholarship.
Furthermore, taking a seemingly random and highly destructive action is, logically speaking, exactly what I'd expect from a person who believes (correctly or not) that an inscrutable God is literally sending him direct commands. Ironically, the kinds of Christians you deplore -- the ones who just show up in church every Sunday, but lead their lives according to their own moral standards -- are a lot easier for me to understand.
I think part of the conflict you are seeing is because you are conflating a couple different things, particularly "God told us to" and "God told me to".
"God told me to, as an individual, kill an individual, so I did - not as a part of a greater political anything, but just like, let's kill my friend or a sinner on the street" isn't as common in the literature as you seem to think. There's a distinction in the moral system between "things like war" and "things like stabbing someone in an alley" - the "Thou Shalt Not Murder" commandment being pretty prominent.
The other thing you are conflating (quietly, subtly) is sanity and insanity. You don't believe in God, but you believe your friend might *hear an actual voice he believes is from God* and decide, based on nothing else, to kill you. But in your own system where God doesn't exist, hearing that voice and being at a point where he doesn't question it implies he's severely mentally ill; the conversation of "are schizophrenic Christians more dangerous" isn't the same as every Christian being a murder time bomb as was originally explicit in your argument.
So we sort of have to build out what to expect in both our systems, working with a relatively sane normal person.
In your system, sans God:
Bob, your friend, has internalized an awful lot of "love your neighbor as yourself" and "thou shalt not kill". So he ends up changing a lot of tires, being a really nice guy, showing a lot of love, and never hears from a god that doesn't exist and so never gets around to killing anyone. If he ever becomes a severely schizophrenic, things might change. But for now, there's no god to overrule "though shalt not kill", and that's basically what it takes in most or all Christian systems.
In my system, with God:
Bob, your friend, has absorbed the exact same "thou shalt nots" and "love your neighbors" as before. As before, he also probably (maybe! it's complex) thinks a direct command from God can override those, and he'd do it if he got it. Bob is still mentally sound and he might stab you to death if God told him to, but his default is "no killing".
I think both these scenarios play out in real life. For instance, your friend who you think of as a time bomb spends most of his time helping people and being a good, caring guy who technically believes that God has the authority to order people dead. The mechanism you, an atheist, think is likely to trigger him to kill people just doesn't exist outside of extreme insanity, a situation in which all bets are off anyway. But we knew this already, since the scenario you are afraid of verifiably isn't happening - christians aren't super likely to commit murder compared to other groups, and your anecdata shows that really committed christians spend an awful lot of time changing tires out and helping people as opposed to flying off the handle and dismembering them.
Again, I think this is similar to me saying atheist morality lends itself to suddenly realizing there is no right/wrong, only utility, and that if one day you decide my utility of living is lower than your utility of me dying I should die, and thus you are a time bomb that might go off at any time. Even if I'm not oversimplifying atheist morality (I am) then I'm still ignoring a lot of mechanisms that keep you from doing that kind of thing.
> The other thing you are conflating (quietly, subtly) is sanity and insanity. You don't believe in God, but you believe your friend might *hear an actual voice he believes is from God* and decide, based on nothing else, to kill you.
No, it is actually much worse than that. I mean, yes, some people sometimes hear voices from God and end up killing perfect strangers (or even their own children); but such cases are rare (and arguably Biblically justifiable, but still).
The scarier scenario, IMO, is that my friend and people like him hear perfectly ordinary voices from his pastor, his neighbours, and his community. He then goes home and, assuming he's the scholarly sort, pores over the Bible and all the related theological literature. And then, he has a feeling deep inside his heart, a glowing feeling of righteousness and goodness, a feeling that tells him that all left-handed blondes born on a Tuesday are abominations before the Lord who must be scourged from the face of the Earth.
I made my example deliberately ridiculous, but I'm sure you and I can both think of real-life examples that are sadly all too real. The problem, from my point of view, is that the communal decision-making process that goes from "God exists" to "all morality flows from Him" to "purge all sinister flaxen-haired Tuesdayites" is completely opaque to me. I literally cannot fathom any chain of thought that would lead a man who is by all appearances perfectly loving and kind (much more so than I), to cheerfully endorse genocide -- be it modern or historical.
It would be comforting to think that anti-Tuesdayite Christians are cynically (or, perhaps, subconsciously) using Christianity as a front to mask their own bigotry; but people like my IRL coworker, as well as yourself, disabuse me of this comfort. You demonstrate that, while the majority of Christians are probably just going through the motions like the rest of us, there are many who are entirely sincere in their beliefs.
Thanks for the post. Religion is very much a foreign country to me, so I like to educate myself about it.
Did you notice that all your examples of Christians are about men or "people"? Even when you refer to a hypothetical friend, you use male pronouns. I kept waiting for the part about women, but you never got there.
My perception is that a lot of conservative religions are associated with sex-segregated social groups, whether it's explicitly banning cross-sex interactions apart from family members or just viewing male-female friendships with a suspicious eye. Is that true of your religious community, and do you think it contributes to this tendency to center men?
Your previous post revealed (well, sort of—you kinda buried it) that your financial struggles were largely the result of choosing to have two kids before you were prepared to support them, plus the unemployed wife. How much of that was driven by Christian beliefs/social pressure about, e.g., birth control, abortion, natalism, or women's roles? I speculate that an atheist couple would not have this particular failure mode, because they would more likely avoid unplanned childbirth.
I definitely have a tendency to center men/think from a male perspective; it's not great, but it's more a product of me tending to write from personal experience than it is me thinking women in the church aren't important/equal.
I would say that the sex segregated group thing is definitely more common in the Church than otherwise. There's plenty of mixed services/small groups, but "Men's Bible studies" or "Women's Bible Studies" are also a thing. The mechanics there are probably more about Men being able to talk freely about their personal, a lot of which might have to do with their wives. Or younger men/women being able to talk about sex without getting tittilated.
I think male-female friendships ARE viewed with a more suspicious eye - I certainly view them so, and things like the Pence Rule indicate they are fairly widespread. This is more centered on married people; a lot of effort is put into avoiding adultery, which we tend to think of as very bad(TM). There's no explicit "don't be friends with women" rule, but there tends to be a lot of encouragement to not spend a lot of time alone with people of the opposite sex. I don't actually think this is unreasonable; I'm cool to talk more about that if you want.
Some context: Both our kids were planned, believe it or not; the wife asked me for the first and I asked her for the second. We weren't financially ready for them in the sense that we were set up/super comfortable when we had them. I was fine with the wife working, especially before we had kids, but she wanted to be a homemaker and I feel that's a meaningful, real job. We weren't pressured at all to have kids immediately (that's not common in our bubble). We don't have any problems with birth control morally (also not common in our bubble) but we would have kept any "accidents" as we both would consider an abortion to be murdering a human being (which is common in our bubble).
I would correct that a *high SES* atheist would be a lot more likely to not have that "failure mode" as opposed to a Christian. Also note we don't consider it a failure mode - it had an affect on our finances, but it was a choice we made that we still think was a good one; there's a lot to be said for being young parents, and we love both our kids. The part where I talk about my personal choices in the previous article wasn't meant to imply all those choices were wrong, but that they were choices; I wanted to limit sympathy, but that doesn't mean I regret marrying my wife when I had an opportunity to do so, for instance.
Some typos-
"This does effect things"
"I’d like the say the same is true"
"A final unrelate disclaimer"
"believe in the trinity(which"
Please delete this comment once you've seen it, since it doesn't actually add any useful discussion.
Spellcheck/proofreading is a good thing
Unless you specifically object, I agree with Kayla: I'm a horrible spellchecker and generous acts of spellchecking to make me look less dumb to subsequent readers should live on in glory.
Sure. I'm a recovering prescriptivist, so I had a bit of an internal debate about whether to even point them out or not. I decided to do so since my own writing tends to be error-prone and I'm always thankful for free proofreading. As an occasional comment-reader, I love the comments of substance here and didn't want to detract, but if you want to leave it, no objections.
Thanks for this insight - extremely interesting. As someone who grew up in a Freewill Baptist household, this squares with my memories of that experience and how my family and friends that still subscribe to beliefs in that vein think about the world.
One of the main reasons I am no longer a Christian is the belief in the inherent wickedness of humans that you describe. While I agree that the community building aspects of religion are real and vital, I feel Christianity’s assumption of awfulness is a HUGE net negative for its adherents and the world around them. It makes sense from making Christianity a religion that competes effectively with other belief systems for adherents, yet the consequences of feeling and believing that the church is the only thing keeping us from evil, both on an individual and societal scale, screws up a lot of people. I don’t see a way to excise that without making the result “not Christian”.
This feels like one of those irreconcilable differences, yet perhaps I am overlooking something.
Sorry about the delay - I like my current job a lot and I'm trying very hard to justify my salary there.
So this might end up being a semantics thing, but I wanted to clarify a bit of what we are talking about here.
1. You talk a bit about an assumption of awfulness. I've found that in a lot of cases people tend to "mix terms" between earthly standards and something that for the sake of this discussion we will call heavenly standards, and that makes conversations on this a bit difficult.
Let's start out by defining earthly good as a sort of secular good; it concerns itself with what it can see, which means it's really hard for it to be anything but based on comparisons between things we can see. So over on one end we have really bad guys - your Hitlers, Stalins, Mitch Zeller; people who killed or will kill millions of people. And then on the other side we have your really good people - your Molly Pitcher, your Florence Nightingale, Aang from Avatar, whoever. So we compare those and draw a spectrum from really good to really bad, probably basing it on net utility or net effect on suffering or whatever. In a completely physical world, this makes sense - it's probably about the best we can do.
Then we move on the the spiritual standards and it gets tricky. For the sake of argument, imagine there's a god; it doesn't have to be mine, just a god. Imagine that he can have characteristics that exceed what we can easily imagine. And imagine that built around this god or stemming from the god or whatever there's some kind of moral system that exists and has rules in a similar way to systems we can easily observe, like physics.
Now, holding that in your mind, think of something like the two-slit experiment. If I asked you to guess about how particles would act in that situation and you didn't have any pre-existing knowledge of it, you'd probably say just about anything but "I bet they act like particles when you are looking to see which slot they go through, and like waves otherwise". And when people are first introduced to that concept, their first action regarding it is to often rebel against it - they go on Reddit and explain how it couldn't possibly so, and something must be wrong. But physics doesn't care; that's just how physics is.
And when you get into something really big, or infinite big, you would expect if there is an actual system of "laws of morality" that exist in a real sense like laws of physics do, you might have something like what we see in black holes - it's not cool that they eat light, and you might not expect them to eat light, but once you are dealing with some really massive stuff you find they slow down time and perhaps destroy information; that kind of thing.
So that's one thing: the relevant question here isn't so much "Do we have an unpleasant reaction to this, and that renders it untrue somehow" but instead "Is it actually true that morality is a particular way", because if morality does exist and is a particular way in the same way physics is, it probably doesn't care what you think it should be.
The second thing here that I want to go over is your idea that the church is the only thing keeping us from evil, because that doesn't really parse with most systems of Christianity. The church isn't keeping you from evil particularly; it's allowing you to approach good. It doesn't make people sinless; it redeems the sin.
In this case I'm proposing that Christianity mostly says something like this:
There's a system of morality that has as it's ideal something that's good in extreme ways - an absolutely holy being. Since that is the set-point, anything less than that is pretty bad. And the being has absolutely deserved authority; since the authority is really, really deserved things that contradict that authority are really bad.
Because the being is so very good, so very in ownership of everything, and so very authoritative, a thing's goodness is determined not only by the action (say, utilitarian good) but also the aim of the action (in this case, glorifying the very good being in the way it deserves).
Now, if you believe in the claims of Christianity, none of this is a problem at all. You are gross in comparison to God, but God makes a really high-grade soap for that and gives it away for free; after that you are thought of as clean and beautiful by the only being whose opinion particularly counts. You can't do good without doing it for God, but God lets you, for free; he also pays you for doing it at an exchange rate of finite to infinite, which is pretty good.
The problems you are raising are only problems if you don't believe any of it is true; then they are just claims made by an organization control people.
I'm sort of putting beliefs in your mouth, so to speak. But I really think that's more fundamentally the kind of conflict I'd expect here - problems with easy solutions aren't really problems; if I tell you your teeth are dumb but you honestly believe I have teeth-un-dumbifying cream I'll give you for free, I'm not being a jerk; I'm a magic dentist of kindness. It's only when I tell you your teeth are dumb and you don't believe my cream works that you view my opinions on teeth so negatively.
Thanks for diving deeper into this with me - I appreciate your thoughtfulness on this topic. I see at least two issues with the system you are proposing:
1. The characterization of the price being “free” is inaccurate. A person who truly believes in Christianity gives their life for it, whether or not it is actually true. It might still be a bargain in the finite vs infinite sense if it is true, yet just because it may be viewed as a pittance does not make it costly if it turns out to not be true, since this life is all we have in that case.
2. There is also the whole “if you don’t accept this offer, you will be punished in the worst way possible for eternity” aspect of this. If this is not something you actually believe, then this is invalid for you, yet it certainly seems to be the mainstream view. Thus, all the arguments about whether $HIGHLY_RESPECTED_PERSON will roast in hell while $AWFUL_PERSON who repented on their deathbed will spend eternity in heaven. It is difficult to see how any religion that will extremely punish nonbelievers regardless of their acts does not also view each of us as inherently wicked.
No need to reply to this, of course, yet I would be interested in how these aspects play into your thinking in future posts.
As to 2., bear in mind I'm not saying that the system doesn't see you as inherently wicked, just that the semantics of how it sees you as in inherently wicked(what wicked "means") are a specific thing - wicked is "falling short of the glory of God", which everyone does. It's distinct from how you might say "RC is a gigantic dick and should feel bad about himself all the time" - it's a different definition of the word with different standards of avoidance. In this case, it's saying "all humans are worse than god", which is just an obvious thing if Christian God exists.
That's why 1. matters so much. Even if we take as a given that salvation isn't free(I think we can skip that semantics argument) we admit it's a bargain. Not just in salvation, either - if the Christian model is true, doing good within it not only does the good thing (feeding the poor) but gives you a bonus good thing (glorifying god); you get paid twice for the same good act in a way.
But if it's not true, you probably gave up some things you wanted to do along the way; I agree that it's potentially costly if it all ends up being fake. But that's sort of what I'm saying - the belief is really the crux here. I'm not trying to hand-wave your "hell isn't fair, it's bullshit, fuck that" argument in 2. But yeah, it's absolutely going to look that way if you think the rest of it's bullshit. Belief might not resolve everything here, but it resolves enough of it that I usually come back to belief and the probable core issue, if that makes sense.
Hi Roger! I want to talk about this but I also want to spend a little bit of time on answering because I think there's some nuance in the theology that matters here. I'll be back on later today to answer this better.
Really interesting post. TBH it was boring up right until the end. But the end was all worth it. That point is first time someone clearly explained the American Christian morality . If I were to put into sentence its like that "We are morally right because we do it in the name of the God and by his Book"
I instantly thought about Jewish morale code, which is basically this "we are God's chosen, and as long as we follow his words -we are justified in what we do"
There was a point in my life when I basically turned from science nerd atheist (militant when I was younger) into a person who chooses to believe in God. And there was a period when I was looking if it was appropriate to join a religious group. I read a few books, checked a few religions, talked to people. But still to this date I dont feel rigid religious codes resonate with me. Too self righteous. Too cock sure that their way is "the way"
I think it's probably worth thinking about both sides of that coin. On the one side you have the downsides you see in rigidity. But there's another side, which is that a religious code that lacks any rigidity isn't actually anything distinct, which carries its own disadvantages.
The advantages of a rigid code are that it's basically predictable; James thinks lying is actually wrong and that this is true no matter what his personal feelings on lying might be. So we can expect James not to lie where he follows his code, and when he does we can call him on it using his own rules, which he believes to be stable whether he participates in them or not.
If James believes something like "listen, I can't be sure my way is the right way; all moral systems have something to teach, and I can't be so arrogant as to say my religion's thoughts on things are the only correct ones", he's a good deal more flexible, but we've lost all that predictability or the ability to call him on anything based on a standard he believes, because he doesn't actually believe in any standard anymore. "Everything is as true as everything else" is the same thing as "nothing is valid"; he might put in other standards like "utility is the thing" or "just make sure you don't have malice", but those change the picture of what we might expect a lot, with their own advantages and disadvantages.
Another way to say this is that people who say multiple contradictory things are both true are basically saying they don't believe in truth in the sense that something that is "true" is real and actual. The implication for James is that he either thinks his moral system is true and real (and thus out of his control) or that it's something else that's more subjective (and thus some combination of unknowable/vague and changeable by James).
This isn't to say that flexible moral systems don't have advantages (like flexibility!) but you do lose certain kinds of advantages moving away from rigid systems, mostly in terms of definition and stability.
This is the best explainer I have ever read of the Christian culture I live in. I plan on reccomending it to everybody who stares at me in shock when I say I go to church.
And also, it reminds me that those people who scoff at the acolytes of Charles Murray who suggest community support can replace welfare likely look at it like I would look at communism: they have simply never ever seen it work.
I enjoyed this.
I was raised in the Lutheran Church: baptized, acolyte, confirmed, attended every Sunday and, during Lent, went to Wednesday services.
In my teenage years I decided the whole Christian thing was not just wrong, but very, very bad. I thought Christians were fools and I ridiculed them whenever possible. I got married, had kids, saw them through school and out of college. They are by all accounts good people.
As I passed through this experience, my position on Christianity gradually changed. I decided to read The Bible. I read The King James Bible cover to cover. (OK, I skimmed a lot of Jeremiah. Fifty chapters of negativity. Hence the word "jeremiad".)
After reading through the Old Testament, the book of Matthew is a shock. Jesus message is a stunning contrast. The synoptic Gospels are wonderful. Then comes John, written many many years later, and you can feel the difference. The Gospel of John begins to introduce elements of orthodoxy.
Later, the narrative is dominated by Paul. Paul takes the message of Jesus and solidifies it into an orthodox religion. The transmogrification is completed in the Revelation of John, which has far more in common with the Old Testament than the New.
From what I see, modern Christianity is the product of Paul, and has little to do with the teachings of Jesus. The message of Jesus is abundantly clear in the synoptic Gospels. A great example is Matthew 7:10: "By their fruits you shall know them." This is pure humanism. The most consistent interpretation of Jesus message is humanist, not orthodox.
I've got a lot more to say about this, and I hope, a lot more to learn. But it's getting late, and I probably should go to bed. Please keep writing, and keep trying to change mind mind. I've changed it before.
Great piece with a tone full of charity. My faith was formed by the world you describe. Over time and informed by the mystics of the Christian tradition I have come to see that we are not depraved sinners cut off from God but rather God is not separate at all. Rather God is in everyone, everywhere, equally. Jesus came to show us this and model what it looks like to bring the spark of the divine forth. I, and all creation, are evolving into Christ to the extent we allow it. Church for me becomes the place we do the hard work of practicing how to see the divine and bring it forth.
In addition to my previous comment on morality (https://residentcontrarian.substack.com/p/on-christian-culture-a-look-inside/comments#comment-2287630), this is a part that struck me as somewhat ironic:
> They [other Christian denominations] are lying, but they will swear up and down anyway.
You do soften up this statement in the next sentence, but still, IMO it betrays a certain lack of self-awareness. Being an atheist, I've had many conversations with all kinds of theists, and they *all* say this. I've seen a Muslim and a Christian engage in bitter debate right in front of me, a sort of ideological battle to the death for the right to convert this particular heathen to the one true faith.
I know that it feels like you've got the answer and everyone else is a liar or, at best, an idiot; but everyone else feels that way about you. I think that, in the absence of an actual physical 120-ft tall firebreathing Jesus (or equivalent), it is uncharitable to discount their perspective out of hand.
Another Latter-day Saint here taking a crack at your view of what we believe. Jacob O’Bryant did a good job of explaining why missionaries answer the way they do but he did not go into details about what we actually believe.
First things first: your notion that we do not believe that Jesus is God is incorrect. Jesus is God. But He is also the Son of the Eternal Father, who is also God. But they are not the same God. The Bible is a much more polytheistic book than 1,800 years of Catholic teachings about the nature of God would leave you to believe. In Genesis 1:26, for example, God says “let us make man in our image.” Father is speaking to Son. They are separate beings and they are both God. In Matthew 3, Jesus is baptized and the Father speaks from heaven and the Holy Ghost descends as a dove. Three separate beings.
If you would like the most concise and accurate view of the Restored Church’s conception of the relationship between Father and Son, it can be found here:
https://emp.byui.edu/SatterfieldB/PDF/Godhead/FatherSonTwelveExposition.pdf
We also reject the notion that our Jesus is a “different Jesus.” If we both knew a guy named Bill and you thought Bill’ father had passed away and I thought that Bill’s father was alive and that Bill also had a brother named Johnny, Bill would still be the same guy regardless of who we thought his father was. Our conception of Jesus differs from yours because we reject the Nicene Creed (and subsequent Creeds) that attempt to explain the nature of God. These Creeds were the product of 100+ years of Catholic argument about the nature of God. Ironically, when the debate about the nature of God began in roughly 285 A.D., the question about the Father and Jesus being one or separate beings wasn’t the thing they set out to debate. There was general consensus that Jesus was not the Father and that they were two separate beings. By the time the First Council of Nicea met in 325 A.D. the question at hand was “Is Jesus as much God as the Father? In other words, is He equally God or lesser God than the Father?” They debates this question for 100 years and came to the conclusion that God the Father and Jesus were made of the same substance, meaning that Jesus was just as much God as God the Father was. But they were still seen as two separate beings though the “same substance” conclusion led some to the idea that “if they’re the same substance then maybe they’re different manifestations of the same being.” This concept makes zero sense Biblically. Jesus teaches the people in the Sermon on the Mount to pray to the Father. He says only the Father, not Himself, is good. He says on John 17:3 that life eternal is to know both the Father and the Son. Even in John 1, the word is God and the word is with God. Jesus is God. And He is also with the Father who is also a separate God. But they, along with the Holy Ghost, are one in purpose. And to carry out the creation of our universe, the creation of mankind, and the redemption of mankind, you need the separate roles of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Each has a unique role in helping mankind to become immortal and to inherent eternal life. Therefore, they are one God. Three separate Gods but one Godhead because all three are necessary. Jesus by Himself would still be a God without the Father and the Holy Ghost. But by Himself He would lack the power to carry out the full plan of redemption.
Do we believe in a different Jesus? No. We simply believe that 1800 years of false Catholic doctrine about the nature of God has caused Catholics and Protestants, who get their understanding of God from the Catholics, has caused you to misunderstand who Jesus actually is.
Hopefully that makes sense. My analogy about the guy named Bill is a mess. I’m already sorry about it.
There's a lot here to respond to, so I want to unpack it neatly; this is going to be kind of a long post and I apologize in advance. I'll number everything and your arguments as I understand them (correct me if I'm wrong in that understanding) to try to keep it in order.
1. I am wrong that LDS people don't believe in God.
You say this:
"First things first: your notion that we do not believe that Jesus is God is incorrect."
So first I have to note that I didn't say that, exactly. I said this:
"An LDS person will say they believe that Jesus is god (note the small G) if asked; if pressed, they will admit they don’t think he was one with God-The-Father in the Trinitarian sense. I have never been able to get a straight answer from a Mormon missionary about why they try to be tricky about this instead of openly acknowledging the difference that they clearly know about..."
We can quibble about the lowercase G bit, but I'll give it to you for the sake of the argument because it's semantics and means different things to me than you (In our language, the big "G" means "The God" - literally the big, main and only one"). But dissecting everything else shows me making claims that unpack to something like this:
A. Christians in the sense that I'm a Christian are Trinitarians - they think Jesus is literally God the Father; not co-equal but separate, not "a God" but literally "The God".
B. LDS people tend to say Jesus is God knowing they mean an entirely different thing than Christians do by it; when pressed they will reveal they mean an entirely different thing by it - this is a weird, tricky thing to do from my perspective.
This isn't, mind you, an argument that I am right about God and that you are wrong. Obviously we both believe we are right (more on this later) but that's not what this argument is; I'm not saying you don't believe Jesus is God in your conception that there's more than one God; I'm saying you know you he's not God in mine, but claim he is anyway.
I'm not arguing against your religion - I'm arguing against the multiple times I've said "Do you believe Jesus is God in the sense I do?" and the missionary I'm talking to goes "Yes, absolutely" and I go "So you are a Trinitarian?" and he says "No!" instead of "what's that?". That guy knows he's being sly and misrepresenting the differences in our beliefs to me and doesn't admit it until pushed. That's what I'm pushing back on.
2. You are argue that your Jesus isn't fundamentally any different than our Jesus, that he's the same guy, and that the LDS church rejects my notion that they are different.
If the LDS church in fact rejects the idea that our Jesus is a different guy, it necessitates that I call out the entire LDS church on this - it's not so.
You say:
"We also reject the notion that our Jesus is a “different Jesus.” If we both knew a guy named Bill and you thought Bill’ father had passed away and I thought that Bill’s father was alive and that Bill also had a brother named Johnny, Bill would still be the same guy regardless of who we thought his father was."
But we aren't arguing about who God the Father is or if John-Jesus'-brother existed; we are arguing about who Jesus is, if we mean a different guy. So it matters that you believe this:
"Jesus is God. But He is also the Son of the Eternal Father, who is also God. But they are not the same God."
Because that's not what the non-LDS Trinitarians you are talking to believe at all; they believe he is God the Father, that they aren't separate. We aren't disagreeing about what Jesus ate for lunch - we are disagreeing about fundamental and huge characteristics of who we are talking about, literally about his identity, who he is.
And note that the LDS church thinks this matters too! No LDS person is going to go unquestioned in your religion if he or she started claim Jesus was the same personage who you refer to as Eternal Father - in your religion that would be a big, blasphemous deal. And it would be that because you believe there are certain fundamental, immutable qualities about your god(s) that are important in terms of describing who he is.
To take it back to Bill, if we found that my Bill was a black 50-year-old lawyer with four kids and only one leg, and yours was an Asian 25-year-old painter with no kids and both legs, we'd understand we were talking about a different thing. I (and likely you as well) think that whether Jesus is who you refer to as Eternal Father or not is a at least as much an important, fundamental and immutable characteristic of who he is as the race, age, progeny-having-ness and limbed-ness of Bill - changing that factor fundamentally changes who we are talking about.
Again, I want to stress that this isn't an argument that my religion is right and yours is wrong (although, again, we both clearly believe our respective religions are correct). But the LDS church can't have it both ways - if the LDS church believes Jesus is God-the-Father, then we are worshipping the same guy. If they don't, we aren't, because non-LDS Trinitarians DO believe Jesus is God-the-Father, literally that this is his identity. But that brings us around to the third argument, which is important for tying all this together.
3. We believe in the same Jesus, it's just that non-LDS Trinitarians are completely wrong about who Jesus is.
So we obviously disagree on a great many theological issues. I've said this throughout the post a few times, but it bears repeating that we both obviously also think our version of things is the right one, that I think the LDS church is mistaken and that the LDS church thinks I'm mistaken.
Your argument boils down to saying that I'm wrong about who Jesus is, and you are right; since you are right about who Jesus is, we worship the same Jesus - it's just that I'm wrong about who Jesus is. Frankly, and I mean this as nicely as I can, this is a bullshit argument.
Let's say I'm talking to a Buddhist, and trying to convert him. He says, "hey, I can't convert - I worship Buddha, that's who I think God is, I think he's all the things that Buddha is." And I go "listen, it's the same God. I also believe in Buddha.". And he goes "really?" and I say "Yes, absolutely." Let's say he believes me and converts, and then later finds out that everything I believe about God and religion is different than his conception of it - that I don't believe in Buddha at all.
He questions and I explain "Listen, we both believe in god. It's just that every single thing you believe about Buddha is wrong - the real Buddha is actually the Abrahamic God; he's different in almost every way besides being a deity. But your religion is a false religion, so really actually we worship the same guy - it's just that you are wrong about literally everything. Welcome to Christianity, sucker."
That's the upshot of argument you are making here, frankly. For the reasons stated previously, our concepts of the identity of Jesus have a fundamental difference that cuts to the core of his very identity. You say that doesn't matter, but then when we actually read the small print we find out that you think it really, really does matter - it's just that your religion is clearly true and mine is clearly false, so once you clear up that MY Jesus is the wrong one I'll understand it was the your guy all along.
I want to be gentle here, but there's no gentle way to say it: To the extent anyone actually brings that philosophy to bear by telling Christians that it's the same Jesus, they are lying to and deceiving them *regardless of whether they are right about who Jesus is or not*. I know you think it's noble to get them to your point of view (and frankly, if you are right, it is) but it doesn't make the tactic honest - telling them you believe the same thing when you don't is a lie, regardless of which belief is true.
You will note that I'm not actually debating which of our beliefs is true here; part of that is because if all it took to resolve LDS/non-LDS Trinitarian disagreements was two guys battling it out on the internet, we'd all either be in identically shaped churches or not by now. But more importantly it's because that was never the argument I was making - I never argued your religion was untrue in this article, I just pointed out we believe different things about Jesus. And we do, even if my beliefs are wrong; saying we don't is fundamentally a tactic to deceive me, even if it's a deception meant to eventually get me to the truth.
(Post Script: I'm not against arguing this a bit more, but bear in mind that I have new articles to write, so I want to forewarn you that at some point I might totally ghost you in an unfair way. But as a shortcut, I do want to state that I'm pretty iron-clad on a lot of this unless it turns out that you believe Jesus is God the Father - that's a big enough difference in his fundamentally identity that if if we disagree on that, I don't think my semantics will stretch far enough to pretend our deities are the same fella.)