Your “don’t commit adultery” combined with your Christian ethics: how to you sit with ethical non monogamy or polyamory? By name, they are not hidden, openly discussed and entered into by all parties.
Another thing I wanted to throw in here, as an afterthought: I try to be pretty clear that when you are asking me something like this, I take it to both a "advice I'd give" and a "what the religion seems to be" level. Someone *will* eventually stumble in and I say I hate them for doing one or both of those things. I don't hate you, y'all. I'm not trying to get you banned or anything like that; we can chat, be friends. I might not approve of everything you do, which would put you on a level with everyone else I know, but I don't spend most of my time giving people shit about their lifestyles either.
Rest assured, I won’t be the reader to come in claiming hate. I think your perspectives are valid - and I wouldn’t ask if I had a firm and strongly supported point of view. I think the comedian sort of nailed then dynamic I’ve seen too - it’s a “cake and eat it too” for those who might end up breaking up, but want to try it out without it being seen as morally “bad”.
Disclaimer: I'm not that incredible of a theologian. I'll do my best, but honestly I can't put an article's worth of effort in on this RN, and it's a subject that realistically would need at least that to flesh it out. Also, this had to be cut into several parts because of character limits.
So there's a couple things here that make this complex. I'll try to break them out in an orderly way, but I doubt I'll do a great job, so buckle up.
The first thing you have to understand (and the most controversial, so I'll get it out of the way first) is that I don't actually believe in ethical polyamory. I have met people who tell me it's fine and works great, but the few-to-several couples I've known who have practiced it have all been visibly unhealthy. Imagine if you were super anti-spanking, thought it was child abuse, and although there was a contingent of people on the internet that said it was great you knew several children who were spanked who were visibly screwed up by it and it's pretty close to the experience.
Coupling on to that is a thing were at least two of the relationships I observed were relationships where one partner absolutely did not want to do it and eventually left over it, but accepted what was really, absolutely emotional abuse because the alternative was losing a person they loved - this wasn't a confirmed thing in any relationship but those two, but in those two the person basically showed up and said "hey, guess what? I found a fancy new word for cheating on you, and I'm leveraging that linguistic trick and the overall ideology of the thing to get just enough leverage to twist your arm into it. Thanks, SO with significant emotional trauma that's about to get a whole lot worse." One of the friends this happened to was a stand-up comedian, and had a joke he told at least once that was "my girlfriend is polyamorous - if you don't know what that means, it means they cheat on you and you have to be OK with it."
This doesn't mean I want it to be illegal or anything, but does mean something like "if somebody asked me if it was a good idea, I'd tell them no; if they insisted they were going to do it, I'd then try my damnedest to make sure it wasn't one of those worse-case-scenario "renamed normal adultery" situations above.
That's before we get into the religious part of it; obviously my religious background plays into how I formulated all that, but I think I'd believe all of that even if I wasn't religious and had known the same people.
Getting into the religious part of it makes it a lot more complex. First, there's some sins that aren't sins if the potentially wronged party gives you permission to do them - stealing with permission is receiving a gift; it's definitionally impossible to steal in that way. But that's not because the sin of "stealing" stops being bad there - it's because you aren't doing the sin in the first place. So we have to examine adultery through that lens - i.e. is adultery any sex act in which at least one partner is part of a marriage not included in the act, or does having permission to do this render it not adultery in the first place?
For context on this, we need scripture. So first we start with the prohibition itself, from Exodus 20:
"You shall not commit adultery."
That's one of the ten commandments, so pretty much as authoritative old-testament can get. But Christians are part of a new covenant, a new deal not necessarily identical to that of Jewish law. When we try to see if something is part of it, we then jump to the new testament and see if it's mentioned, to see if that rule or some form of it stays in effect.
From Mark 5:
"You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell."
So we find that it's not only in place, but stricter than was previously made explicit in at least one way. So we know from here that the entire sin of adultery didn't go away in the same way that some sins (say, eating pork) apparently did; it survives. We can find this again other places, such as Hebrews 5:
"Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral."
Here Hebrews gets us a step closer, because we see that marriage has abstract "being honored" and "being kept pure" states. But what are those? We still don't know about the permission part of it - can a spouse give their spouse permission to commit adultery, and thus make it impossible for them to? From Mark 5 again again:
" “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce. But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery." "
Mark (all four gospels contain this bit but there's some interesting historic controversy about the "except on the grounds of sexual immorality" bit you might remember from Henry VIII) clears this up a bit further. First, adultery is not just a sin committed by people in a marriage, but a sin against marriage itself - otherwise the person who married the divorced woman wouldn't be necessarily committing adultery as stated here.
Second, there's no exceptions here for mutually desired divorce; it's just flat-out adultery, Even though we can certainly imagine a situation where both people say "hey, let's break up this marriage so we can sleep with other people", that act is still black-and-white adultery.
From Romans 7, where again we see no exceptions:
"For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law that binds her to him. So then, if she has sexual relations with another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man."
So we get to this place where you have these rules with no exceptions to allow "voluntary" adultery, where it's pretty flat out "yeah, you just have sex with that one person,", and where the spouse thing seems pretty well understood to be the structure of the thing. Some other verses reinforcing that structure, starting 1 Corinthians 7:
"Now for the matters you wrote about: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” 2 But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband. 3 The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4 The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. 5 Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. 6 I say this as a concession, not as a command. 7 I wish that all of you were as I am. But each of you has your own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that. 8 Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. 9 But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion. 10 To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. 11 But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife."
So there Paul allows for people to get married and have sex in the first place instead of just working all the time for the church and the gospel of Christ without the draw on attention that marriages and families represent, but gives a pretty narrow interpretation of why this is OK: because otherwise they will do stuff outside of marriage, which is worse.
Or this pretty (but very male-centric) one from Proverbs 5:
18 May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. 19 A loving doe, a graceful deer— may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be intoxicated with her love. 20 Why, my son, be intoxicated with another man’s wife? Why embrace the bosom of a wayward woman? 21 For your ways are in full view of the LORD, and he examines all your paths. 22 The evil deeds of the wicked ensnare them; the cords of their sins hold them fast. 23 For lack of discipline they will die, led astray by their own great folly.
Anyway, there's a lot there to unpack. My personal opinion on this is it takes a pretty tortured read to get this idea of the New or Old Testament concept of marriage being something that allows for "oh, sure, whatever' type rules on sleeping with other people; the hard and fast rules absolutely ban it and don't offer exceptions that would otherwise allow it in this pocket situation, at least that I can tell.
If you want the flip side of this, you can always find a Christian somewhere who will tell you anything is OK if you look hard enough, and this is no exception to that rule. So you will find people like Dirtbag Christian, another substacker; she's polyamorous and thinks that's fine. But note that her arguments generally don't involve the bible at all (this sounds mean, but I just went four months back in her archive and she doesn't mention scripture once, unless I missed something). She's pretty much just going to give you permission to have a very progressive, 2021 level morality and think of everyone who doesn't as fundamentalist bigots; that's pretty much her whole schtick.
I think this is a relatively complete look at what the Bible states about the issue, but I'm willing to talk more about it if you want to know.
I really appreciate the time you took with this. As a woman I find some of the gendered language in the bible difficult - and symptomatic of now as then where men largely set and maintain the rules. It’s very reductionist, for me, to set marriage as good and otherwise celibacy, or bad. Nonetheless I acknowledge that families are the structure societies are built on.
Lastly, scriptures challenge me, as a Christian, because a 2000 year old text allows things we no longer do (slavery), but can otherwise be held as the authority in other areas (adultery). I don’t refute the bible, i find it hard to reconcile the modern changes that are or are not biblically permissible.
"I really appreciate the time you took with this. As a woman I find some of the gendered language in the bible difficult - and symptomatic of now as then where men largely set and maintain the rules. It’s very reductionist, for me, to set marriage as good and otherwise celibacy, or bad. Nonetheless I acknowledge that families are the structure societies are built on."
This is something I run into a lot, and I end up trying out new ways to explain it, but there's a lot of ways this looks different when you look at it through a "this is actually real" lens as opposed to a "this is the artifact of a patriarchal society putting it's men at advantage with a fake book". If it's "real" then it's a lot harder to adjust the rules to what society likes at any given moment - and if you can adjust the rules like that, you might as well not have them since they are redundant with what you'd have anyway.
"Lastly, scriptures challenge me, as a Christian, because a 2000 year old text allows things we no longer do (slavery), but can otherwise be held as the authority in other areas (adultery). I don’t refute the bible, i find it hard to reconcile the modern changes that are or are not biblically permissible."
This is partially why it's important for us (us meaning "Christians like me") to do some of the work I did above when trying to determine what's going on. In this case, for instance, For us, there's a benefit to knowing exactly how much flexibility we have. The Bible never specifically permits (I think) slavery, but it definitely never compels one to be a slave-owner (I'm pretty sure. This isn't an oft-revisited subject for me, since we don't have slavery). But it does seem to require a certain definition of marriage and a certain way sex interacts with it. So I have the flexibility to, say, disapprove of slavery and advise people against owning slaves, but I can't tell someone it's fine to sleep with people they aren't married to. It's complex.
The trick here is that if I'm doing what I'm supposed to, I don't drive the rules, the rules drive me. I'm very firmly of the opinion that once I'm able to change rules I disagree with, I've basically declared the entire thing worthless even if I haven't admitted it yet.
A lot of the over-used advice for real life is much more true on the internet. Find a group of people with similar interests (which is easier on the internet). Be interested in things they say. And - since this is at a premium on the internet - be unfailingly kind. That doesn't mean pushover, but a fairly nice, reasonable person who can talk well in text will often do well.
The one trick to this I've found is that forums aren't all that great for this - forums are for "discussion", which is a weird casual version of short-form essay writing. Contrast this to "talking", which is what you want - friends may more may not discuss, but all friends talk. Talking in this sense is a sort of real-time, off the cuff thing - personality comes out more. And to get it you need a faster pace of discussion that's in an "un-threaded" format and just sort of persists over time.
So what you want, I think, is something like a discord for something you are interested in. Chat rooms are great for talking; people hang out in some chat rooms all day. Find one or several, hang out, get to know people, be interested in the stuff they say, and be nice. I think that's going to work for most people, honestly - it's not something that happens overnight, but I think off the top of my head that's the best bet.
Let me know if that made any sense - I didn't sleep a whole lot last night so I'm not necessarily at my clearest.
I'd second the discord idea.. But I think another part of it is small communities are important. Its often hard to meet people in large groups, or forums. Small communities with a few dozen regulars give to much more opportunities to meet new people
I'd agree with this. A big crypto discord with +500 members isn't going to allow you to make connections with individuals as easily as the size Souleater mentions.
I'm just leaving this here. This blog is possibly the most well-aligned with a theoretical blog I could write if I were a better writer. Aligned in temperament, sense of humor, writing style (not quality, though).....Anyways, I just thought you might like to know that you have a less talented doppelganger somewhere and it is me.
Thank you very much! I'm glad it's a good fit. And don't be surprised if you write at some point and find out you are better than me; I spend a lot of time on each of these and I suspect the goodness of them is a function of that.
Hey so I read your poor-people problems essay and your later follow-up to it in the Updates post. Maybe you already wrote about it somewhere and I missed it, but I'm wondering what your high school to marriage to kids timeline looks like and what, if any, college education you got. You seem pretty intelligent for an office manager.
I think your mental perception of the history of the thing is probably pretty close. My dad grew up brutally poor and found that worked for him sales as an escape hatch from poverty. He later expanded that to "sales and running a small business". I think his education stopped at high school, with him techically graduating but never doing the diploma walk or something similar.
He was one of 9 kids; none of them went to college. So not only was it not something he knew about/understood in any intimate way, but he also had this other thing he understood better (sales and business) that he sort of guided us all towards. I don't think it was really on my radar.
At some point he split up his business and gave us each a piece of it; I would have been 18 or 19. Being 18 or 19, I promptly ran it into the ground. By the time this process was complete to the point where I wasn't doing so well, I was 22 with a pregnant wife.
Now I have most of an accounting degree, but it's all from really, really low tier educational facilities that don't really teach you anything. It will be nice to have the piece of paper, but that's about it.
Some of it's just me making poor choices. Note that at any time I could have made decisions for myself that would have made this better. I can't blame this on stuff like what I mentioned above, and I don't really regret getting married young.
This post is getting very, very unorganized but another thing to consider is that I went all-in on rhetoric. I'm better with words than I am almost anything else, and the way the market rewards that is mostly either with A. Sales jobs, which are mostly bad or B. With much better jobs that are pretty much entirely reserved for people with liberal arts/English/journalism degrees.
I'm currently in a much better job, if you didn't catch that update. I have imposter syndrome like you wouldn't believe and my nerves are conditioned to think it's about to crash down around me at any time, but realistically/rationally I'm in a much, much better spot income/career wise than I was before I wrote that article. It's been a fun ride.
Thanks for the response! On the imposter syndrome, I have an Ivy League undergrad degree and a law degree from a respectable school--I'm in my 15th year of practicing law and I feel like an imposter every day (with intermittent breakthroughs and regressions, of course). "Fake it until you make it" is trite advice but there's a lot of truth to it....
What type of law do you practice? I feel like if it wasn't for the hours I'd want to be a discovery lawyer - just parsing documents and things all day for little relevant nuggets of whatever.
"Fake it until you make it" is great advice, I think (CS Lewis has a whole book about it, sort of). Of course the dream is to get where I can just write for a living, but that's low enough probability/slow enough to happen that I'm pretty far from quitting my day job.
Mostly civil litigation--some business, some personal injury. I've also done some contract drafting/reviewing and some insurance coverage work. The parsing of documents is one of the parts I dislike the most, although it depends on the type of case. Medical records have good nuggets but are super-repetitive (you can't just skip things because you assume they're repetitive--you have to put eyes on every page or else the potential for malpractice lurks). Keep in mind, I have a tiny attention span and test in the 10th percentile for conscientiousness.
From what I've seen of your writing, you'd be great at lawyering as long as you can master the other aspects of the job (research, persuasion, theatrics/charisma/gravitas [if you want to be a trial lawyer and/or attract clients], managing client expectations, risking personal failure on behalf of someone else, being okay with bureaucratic nonsense and learning to navigate it, making decisions in the face of uncertainty, delegating non-billable tasks to subordinates even though it will take more time and the work won't be up to your standard, thinking on your feet, etc.) I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. I have some typical and atypical lawyer experiences....
What CS Lewis book is that? I read most of them in my college days, but not sure which one you're referencing. Mere Christianity, maybe?
Have you thought about doing a book-club-style series of posts where you interact with your readers about a book you all read together? I'm thinking of examples like what Freddie DeBoer and Bryan Caplan have done recently. I would be interested in participating in that kind of thing--as long as it's not an esoteric tome like Sadly, Porn.....
We were talking over on Astral Codex Ten, so I came over here and found this. I've been thinking about this for a little while and don't have anyone to talk about it with, so I'm going to put it here and, if you'd like to respond, I'd welcome it. I apologize in advance that this post is kind of a LOT.
I was raised as an atheist and later a Unitarian (but still an atheist, which is totally copacetic in UUism). And I mean, not just that I didn't happen to believe in God - I was a militant child atheist. I actually went to Catholic school for a couple of years and would tell other kids in the playground that I was an atheist and argue with them about it. In 2nd grade.
As an adult (now middle-aged), through C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton and Toystoy and others, I'm kind of in love with Christianity, or at least, the sort of cobbled-together version in my head. I go to church (sometimes). I pray (sporadically but sincerely (?)). But I don't know that I believe anything "for real." I still feel a bit like the whole thing is stupid? (Even though I'm posting this, I'm not trying to debate with anyone whether the metaphysics is true or whatever. That's so boring to me. I especially don't want to debate it with anyone who thinks it IS true - the last thing I want to do is convert anyone to atheism.)
Christianity feels like a candy store to me, only I don't have the currency. I just look at the stuff in the cases and admire it and think about what it tastes like and about all of my opinions about the proper preparation methods and techniques and ingredients based on all of my reading and thinking. Some writers make me feel like I've almost tasted the candy - sometimes my imagination is so vivid it feels like maybe I did - but I really can't get any. It stays in the cases.
If Calvinism is right, I'm clearly NOT one of the elect. I mean, unlike Kermit, I've never even heard the voices calling my name when I was half asleep. When I pray, half the time I have to forcibly keep myself together so I don't start crying at my sense of being left out of...the universe.
And yet, I've gotten so much more from this life than I deserve, and been shown grace and love by so many people and events. I love this world. I'm so grateful and I want to be grateful to SOMEONE.
I have no idea how anyone would respond to this, but if a question helps, here's mine, I guess: how do you actually, like, believe things? What's the trick? I'm not talking about having no doubts, I'm just talking about not having like 90% of your mind be a totally different track that says the whole thing is obviously dumb.
So for some quick context, what do you mean "whole thing is stupid"? Your pursuit of faith? The faith itself? Feel really free to be blunt here - I'm not gonna get offended or anything, but I think it would help me answer if I knew.
Faith itself, I suppose. Belief in anything beyond materialism. I don't REALLY think it's stupid - I think it's beautiful. But...perhaps just like a person raised in church can renounce their faith but still secretly fear going to hell, I was raised as an atheist and to see the whole thing as dumb, and I can't quite shake that. But I'm not asking you to convince me it's not dumb - please feel free not to engage with that idea at all.
It's not so much that I want to convince you it's not dumb - I think it probably is dumb, in a sense. I'm going to do scripture-stuff at you whether you like it or not, so this is as good a time as any:
"For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men."
So that reference to say I not only can't convince you it's not dumb, but I'm also not really supposed to try; it's supposed to look dumb, in a lot of ways it's supposed to feel dumb. And that "lest the Cross be emptied of it's power" is important there; if I could convince you through wisdom, if I could make it seem less dumb to you to the point where you accepted it as non-dumb, it *wouldn't work as a method of salvation*.
I think it's sort of important from a mechanical sense to start there, because the whole bit is that salvation is grace that you get *through* faith, as it were. So whatever you do don't approach this by trying to make it less dumb, because literally everyone should it's a big fucking waste of time to try and do it that way.
I don't want to ramble too much, so before I move on - does that make any sense so far? Objections/questions? Because the next stuff is a lot shakier in a way so probably getting this part resolved first would help, even as it avoids a gish gallop.
Loved this thread. Thanks. I would like to pass on the whole belief in God question, Not a dumb question, but I totally don't know. And then agree with the meta God question. Regardless of truth, it's better to believe in God than not.. and just let it go at that. And move on to living a good life.
OK. So taking as a given that Christian faith is in some way stupid (a modified/non-standard way, obviously) and that things that approach proof/good evidence on it that would get you to accept it specifically on a proof/good evidence standard both *don't generally work to convince you* and *wouldn't get you saved anyhow*, we have to have somewhere to go from there.
I think the potentially insulting thing to say is that on some levels I think you already know it's true. And often a Christian thinks this about other people, that they know it's true; they don't accept that it's true, or rather they don't accept "the truth" in the absolute usage of the word, but on some level something in their soul speaks to them of the truth of the thing. And you learn, as a Christian, not to say that a whole lot because the easy response to that is "no I don't, and you are being a jerk". And there's nowhere good that conversation goes, for obvious reasons.
I think in your case if I was making that claim I'd have better evidence. Because we have this person who was raised atheist - no reason to change from that, right? Like it's a workable system, probably most people in your life are fine with it, evidentally it's not fucking up family thanksgiving or whatever. But we have this person, and as an adult they are reintroduced to Christianity and there's enough reaction between Christianity and their soul that they start doing things that don't make sense; they go to church, where they listen to things they don't accept. They see people who believe something they don't accept as true and envy them; they feel something those people have that they don't, or something, I don't know your whole story but we can agree this doesn't make any sense for you on most levels.
And this goes beyond the normal rationalist "I want their social advantages, how do I get those" thing I see sometimes. You aren't describing wanting the community, you aren't describing wanting the social support or a trad-spouse or anything like that. You say things like this:
"And yet, I've gotten so much more from this life than I deserve, and been shown grace and love by so many people and events. I love this world. I'm so grateful and I want to be grateful to SOMEONE."
And of course you could be grateful to the world in some hippy-dippy quasi-spiritual sense; you could call yourself agnostic or read The Secret or a bunch of things. You could be not-that and just be thankful to the people around you and fortune, sort of appreciating everything in a magical "we are all star-stuff" quasi-scientific way.
And I don't doubt for a minute that you ARE thankful to fortune and the people around you who have helped you. But you do all that, and we still get sentences from you like the quote above - you know there's a missing component, you know there's somewhere this thankfulness should also be funneled that isn't getting any. The wrongness of the absence is at least strong enough that you are looking for what's missing.
Or, a much shorter version: You don't have the candy that's in the case, but everything about how you talk about this issue and the steps you describe yourself as taken aren't the descriptions and path of someone who actually doubts that the candy is in the case.
So that's sort of the second of what I'm feeling is probably three things I'm supposed to say here. Same thing as last time: what am I missing, if anything? What am I misunderstanding so far?
This is very on point for me, and i don't think you're missing anything. (And in response to your sense that I'm not seeking social standing or benefits - that's basically true. If anything, being religious causes trouble in my social and family circles rather than the opposite, although not to an extreme extent. Most of my friends can tolerate the eccentricity of having religious beliefs.)
The only objection - and I really, really hate to make it - to the idea that I must know that it's true, is, like, can't I just be wishing it were true? I mean I can think of other beautiful pictures of reality that are unlikely to be true, but where I'd be envious if huge crowds of people believed them, and I'd want in on it.
Ugh - I really do not want that objection in my head at all. (I wonder, can I counter it with your first point and just go for it, be stupid?)
At any rate, I appreciate all of this very much and will likely read this quite a few times. Carry on, mysterious stranger who is somehow willing to do this work!
Hi Tam, I enjoyed your conversation with the RC here. I just wanted to share my thoughts/ journey. Baptized Episcopalian, later went to UU church in teens and then more seriously UU when we had our kids. For almost forever now I've called myself agnostic. I find that atheists and theists can be equally dogmatic in their faith/ belief. (Blah, how can you be so sure.) Me I just decided time is limited and there's more interesting things for me to ponder. So I treat the question of God as an unknown. I'm a physicist, and I'm also agnostic on the question of whether the photon is real or not*. However I find the idea of a photon very useful, and so I can treat it as true. And if you'll forgive me the sin of comparing God to a photon. I also find it useful to live my life as if there was a God. I don't have any personal relation. I don't pray, unless thoughts are prayers. When I say "Thank God", it feels like something leaving me, a release of emotion.... but walking in woods sometimes has a similar feel.
Church is a good thing, you can have zero faith (total atheist) and still get much out of church. Unfortunately, I can't stomach going to my local UU. They have a 'Black Lives Matter' banner, I don't want politics at church. What's the second most liberal church after UU?
Anyway thanks again, and good luck on your journey.
*it could just be quantization of the electron by which we measure the photon.
Ha, I know what you mean about politics in church. I can't do UU churches for the same reason. I was enjoying a Disciples of Christ church (this might be literally the next most liberal although they vary from congregation to congregation) before I moved away during the pandemic, and now I'm (for now, anyway) at a UMC one, which does not feel as liberal.
This is one of those things where I have to be a little bit unsatisfactory, because I don't know a lot about the technical side of it. When I think about stuff like this, I tend to think of it in terms of full-dive VR fiction, like where you can go play a real-to-you MMO in a pod that feeds information into your brain. Or stuff like dreaming is a private thing from Asimov, or the parts about directly jacking experiences into your brain from Palahnuik's Rant, or whatever.
Obviously those are a lot more advanced than tech offers right now. But a while back someone at church asked an open-ended question: Where do you live? and I had to answer that I live to a great extent, at least half my waking time, on the internet on in a mix of internet and real life. So when I think about potential downsides and upsides, I have to acknowledge I'm already living in a world that has a lot of each; I can talk to a lot of people at a distance, work remotely, etc. I can retreat from my family, see friends less often in real life, get less exercise, etc.
If I was going to write something about this I'd probably start there - that we are talking about the window dressing when we talk about this stuff. And the window dressing matters, the capabilities of the tech matter. But we are already in a situation where our world is compromised for the better or worse by tech, if that makes sense.
Your “don’t commit adultery” combined with your Christian ethics: how to you sit with ethical non monogamy or polyamory? By name, they are not hidden, openly discussed and entered into by all parties.
Another thing I wanted to throw in here, as an afterthought: I try to be pretty clear that when you are asking me something like this, I take it to both a "advice I'd give" and a "what the religion seems to be" level. Someone *will* eventually stumble in and I say I hate them for doing one or both of those things. I don't hate you, y'all. I'm not trying to get you banned or anything like that; we can chat, be friends. I might not approve of everything you do, which would put you on a level with everyone else I know, but I don't spend most of my time giving people shit about their lifestyles either.
Rest assured, I won’t be the reader to come in claiming hate. I think your perspectives are valid - and I wouldn’t ask if I had a firm and strongly supported point of view. I think the comedian sort of nailed then dynamic I’ve seen too - it’s a “cake and eat it too” for those who might end up breaking up, but want to try it out without it being seen as morally “bad”.
Disclaimer: I'm not that incredible of a theologian. I'll do my best, but honestly I can't put an article's worth of effort in on this RN, and it's a subject that realistically would need at least that to flesh it out. Also, this had to be cut into several parts because of character limits.
So there's a couple things here that make this complex. I'll try to break them out in an orderly way, but I doubt I'll do a great job, so buckle up.
The first thing you have to understand (and the most controversial, so I'll get it out of the way first) is that I don't actually believe in ethical polyamory. I have met people who tell me it's fine and works great, but the few-to-several couples I've known who have practiced it have all been visibly unhealthy. Imagine if you were super anti-spanking, thought it was child abuse, and although there was a contingent of people on the internet that said it was great you knew several children who were spanked who were visibly screwed up by it and it's pretty close to the experience.
Coupling on to that is a thing were at least two of the relationships I observed were relationships where one partner absolutely did not want to do it and eventually left over it, but accepted what was really, absolutely emotional abuse because the alternative was losing a person they loved - this wasn't a confirmed thing in any relationship but those two, but in those two the person basically showed up and said "hey, guess what? I found a fancy new word for cheating on you, and I'm leveraging that linguistic trick and the overall ideology of the thing to get just enough leverage to twist your arm into it. Thanks, SO with significant emotional trauma that's about to get a whole lot worse." One of the friends this happened to was a stand-up comedian, and had a joke he told at least once that was "my girlfriend is polyamorous - if you don't know what that means, it means they cheat on you and you have to be OK with it."
This doesn't mean I want it to be illegal or anything, but does mean something like "if somebody asked me if it was a good idea, I'd tell them no; if they insisted they were going to do it, I'd then try my damnedest to make sure it wasn't one of those worse-case-scenario "renamed normal adultery" situations above.
(Continued)
That's before we get into the religious part of it; obviously my religious background plays into how I formulated all that, but I think I'd believe all of that even if I wasn't religious and had known the same people.
Getting into the religious part of it makes it a lot more complex. First, there's some sins that aren't sins if the potentially wronged party gives you permission to do them - stealing with permission is receiving a gift; it's definitionally impossible to steal in that way. But that's not because the sin of "stealing" stops being bad there - it's because you aren't doing the sin in the first place. So we have to examine adultery through that lens - i.e. is adultery any sex act in which at least one partner is part of a marriage not included in the act, or does having permission to do this render it not adultery in the first place?
For context on this, we need scripture. So first we start with the prohibition itself, from Exodus 20:
"You shall not commit adultery."
That's one of the ten commandments, so pretty much as authoritative old-testament can get. But Christians are part of a new covenant, a new deal not necessarily identical to that of Jewish law. When we try to see if something is part of it, we then jump to the new testament and see if it's mentioned, to see if that rule or some form of it stays in effect.
From Mark 5:
"You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell."
So we find that it's not only in place, but stricter than was previously made explicit in at least one way. So we know from here that the entire sin of adultery didn't go away in the same way that some sins (say, eating pork) apparently did; it survives. We can find this again other places, such as Hebrews 5:
"Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral."
Here Hebrews gets us a step closer, because we see that marriage has abstract "being honored" and "being kept pure" states. But what are those? We still don't know about the permission part of it - can a spouse give their spouse permission to commit adultery, and thus make it impossible for them to? From Mark 5 again again:
" “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce. But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery." "
Mark (all four gospels contain this bit but there's some interesting historic controversy about the "except on the grounds of sexual immorality" bit you might remember from Henry VIII) clears this up a bit further. First, adultery is not just a sin committed by people in a marriage, but a sin against marriage itself - otherwise the person who married the divorced woman wouldn't be necessarily committing adultery as stated here.
Second, there's no exceptions here for mutually desired divorce; it's just flat-out adultery, Even though we can certainly imagine a situation where both people say "hey, let's break up this marriage so we can sleep with other people", that act is still black-and-white adultery.
From Romans 7, where again we see no exceptions:
"For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law that binds her to him. So then, if she has sexual relations with another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man."
So we get to this place where you have these rules with no exceptions to allow "voluntary" adultery, where it's pretty flat out "yeah, you just have sex with that one person,", and where the spouse thing seems pretty well understood to be the structure of the thing. Some other verses reinforcing that structure, starting 1 Corinthians 7:
"Now for the matters you wrote about: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” 2 But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband. 3 The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4 The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. 5 Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. 6 I say this as a concession, not as a command. 7 I wish that all of you were as I am. But each of you has your own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that. 8 Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. 9 But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion. 10 To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. 11 But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife."
So there Paul allows for people to get married and have sex in the first place instead of just working all the time for the church and the gospel of Christ without the draw on attention that marriages and families represent, but gives a pretty narrow interpretation of why this is OK: because otherwise they will do stuff outside of marriage, which is worse.
Or this pretty (but very male-centric) one from Proverbs 5:
18 May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. 19 A loving doe, a graceful deer— may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be intoxicated with her love. 20 Why, my son, be intoxicated with another man’s wife? Why embrace the bosom of a wayward woman? 21 For your ways are in full view of the LORD, and he examines all your paths. 22 The evil deeds of the wicked ensnare them; the cords of their sins hold them fast. 23 For lack of discipline they will die, led astray by their own great folly.
Anyway, there's a lot there to unpack. My personal opinion on this is it takes a pretty tortured read to get this idea of the New or Old Testament concept of marriage being something that allows for "oh, sure, whatever' type rules on sleeping with other people; the hard and fast rules absolutely ban it and don't offer exceptions that would otherwise allow it in this pocket situation, at least that I can tell.
If you want the flip side of this, you can always find a Christian somewhere who will tell you anything is OK if you look hard enough, and this is no exception to that rule. So you will find people like Dirtbag Christian, another substacker; she's polyamorous and thinks that's fine. But note that her arguments generally don't involve the bible at all (this sounds mean, but I just went four months back in her archive and she doesn't mention scripture once, unless I missed something). She's pretty much just going to give you permission to have a very progressive, 2021 level morality and think of everyone who doesn't as fundamentalist bigots; that's pretty much her whole schtick.
I think this is a relatively complete look at what the Bible states about the issue, but I'm willing to talk more about it if you want to know.
I really appreciate the time you took with this. As a woman I find some of the gendered language in the bible difficult - and symptomatic of now as then where men largely set and maintain the rules. It’s very reductionist, for me, to set marriage as good and otherwise celibacy, or bad. Nonetheless I acknowledge that families are the structure societies are built on.
Lastly, scriptures challenge me, as a Christian, because a 2000 year old text allows things we no longer do (slavery), but can otherwise be held as the authority in other areas (adultery). I don’t refute the bible, i find it hard to reconcile the modern changes that are or are not biblically permissible.
"I really appreciate the time you took with this. As a woman I find some of the gendered language in the bible difficult - and symptomatic of now as then where men largely set and maintain the rules. It’s very reductionist, for me, to set marriage as good and otherwise celibacy, or bad. Nonetheless I acknowledge that families are the structure societies are built on."
This is something I run into a lot, and I end up trying out new ways to explain it, but there's a lot of ways this looks different when you look at it through a "this is actually real" lens as opposed to a "this is the artifact of a patriarchal society putting it's men at advantage with a fake book". If it's "real" then it's a lot harder to adjust the rules to what society likes at any given moment - and if you can adjust the rules like that, you might as well not have them since they are redundant with what you'd have anyway.
"Lastly, scriptures challenge me, as a Christian, because a 2000 year old text allows things we no longer do (slavery), but can otherwise be held as the authority in other areas (adultery). I don’t refute the bible, i find it hard to reconcile the modern changes that are or are not biblically permissible."
This is partially why it's important for us (us meaning "Christians like me") to do some of the work I did above when trying to determine what's going on. In this case, for instance, For us, there's a benefit to knowing exactly how much flexibility we have. The Bible never specifically permits (I think) slavery, but it definitely never compels one to be a slave-owner (I'm pretty sure. This isn't an oft-revisited subject for me, since we don't have slavery). But it does seem to require a certain definition of marriage and a certain way sex interacts with it. So I have the flexibility to, say, disapprove of slavery and advise people against owning slaves, but I can't tell someone it's fine to sleep with people they aren't married to. It's complex.
The trick here is that if I'm doing what I'm supposed to, I don't drive the rules, the rules drive me. I'm very firmly of the opinion that once I'm able to change rules I disagree with, I've basically declared the entire thing worthless even if I haven't admitted it yet.
What's your strategy for making Internet friends?
A lot of the over-used advice for real life is much more true on the internet. Find a group of people with similar interests (which is easier on the internet). Be interested in things they say. And - since this is at a premium on the internet - be unfailingly kind. That doesn't mean pushover, but a fairly nice, reasonable person who can talk well in text will often do well.
The one trick to this I've found is that forums aren't all that great for this - forums are for "discussion", which is a weird casual version of short-form essay writing. Contrast this to "talking", which is what you want - friends may more may not discuss, but all friends talk. Talking in this sense is a sort of real-time, off the cuff thing - personality comes out more. And to get it you need a faster pace of discussion that's in an "un-threaded" format and just sort of persists over time.
So what you want, I think, is something like a discord for something you are interested in. Chat rooms are great for talking; people hang out in some chat rooms all day. Find one or several, hang out, get to know people, be interested in the stuff they say, and be nice. I think that's going to work for most people, honestly - it's not something that happens overnight, but I think off the top of my head that's the best bet.
Let me know if that made any sense - I didn't sleep a whole lot last night so I'm not necessarily at my clearest.
I'd second the discord idea.. But I think another part of it is small communities are important. Its often hard to meet people in large groups, or forums. Small communities with a few dozen regulars give to much more opportunities to meet new people
I'd agree with this. A big crypto discord with +500 members isn't going to allow you to make connections with individuals as easily as the size Souleater mentions.
I'm just leaving this here. This blog is possibly the most well-aligned with a theoretical blog I could write if I were a better writer. Aligned in temperament, sense of humor, writing style (not quality, though).....Anyways, I just thought you might like to know that you have a less talented doppelganger somewhere and it is me.
Thank you very much! I'm glad it's a good fit. And don't be surprised if you write at some point and find out you are better than me; I spend a lot of time on each of these and I suspect the goodness of them is a function of that.
Hey so I read your poor-people problems essay and your later follow-up to it in the Updates post. Maybe you already wrote about it somewhere and I missed it, but I'm wondering what your high school to marriage to kids timeline looks like and what, if any, college education you got. You seem pretty intelligent for an office manager.
I think your mental perception of the history of the thing is probably pretty close. My dad grew up brutally poor and found that worked for him sales as an escape hatch from poverty. He later expanded that to "sales and running a small business". I think his education stopped at high school, with him techically graduating but never doing the diploma walk or something similar.
He was one of 9 kids; none of them went to college. So not only was it not something he knew about/understood in any intimate way, but he also had this other thing he understood better (sales and business) that he sort of guided us all towards. I don't think it was really on my radar.
At some point he split up his business and gave us each a piece of it; I would have been 18 or 19. Being 18 or 19, I promptly ran it into the ground. By the time this process was complete to the point where I wasn't doing so well, I was 22 with a pregnant wife.
Now I have most of an accounting degree, but it's all from really, really low tier educational facilities that don't really teach you anything. It will be nice to have the piece of paper, but that's about it.
Some of it's just me making poor choices. Note that at any time I could have made decisions for myself that would have made this better. I can't blame this on stuff like what I mentioned above, and I don't really regret getting married young.
This post is getting very, very unorganized but another thing to consider is that I went all-in on rhetoric. I'm better with words than I am almost anything else, and the way the market rewards that is mostly either with A. Sales jobs, which are mostly bad or B. With much better jobs that are pretty much entirely reserved for people with liberal arts/English/journalism degrees.
I'm currently in a much better job, if you didn't catch that update. I have imposter syndrome like you wouldn't believe and my nerves are conditioned to think it's about to crash down around me at any time, but realistically/rationally I'm in a much, much better spot income/career wise than I was before I wrote that article. It's been a fun ride.
Thanks for the response! On the imposter syndrome, I have an Ivy League undergrad degree and a law degree from a respectable school--I'm in my 15th year of practicing law and I feel like an imposter every day (with intermittent breakthroughs and regressions, of course). "Fake it until you make it" is trite advice but there's a lot of truth to it....
What type of law do you practice? I feel like if it wasn't for the hours I'd want to be a discovery lawyer - just parsing documents and things all day for little relevant nuggets of whatever.
"Fake it until you make it" is great advice, I think (CS Lewis has a whole book about it, sort of). Of course the dream is to get where I can just write for a living, but that's low enough probability/slow enough to happen that I'm pretty far from quitting my day job.
Mostly civil litigation--some business, some personal injury. I've also done some contract drafting/reviewing and some insurance coverage work. The parsing of documents is one of the parts I dislike the most, although it depends on the type of case. Medical records have good nuggets but are super-repetitive (you can't just skip things because you assume they're repetitive--you have to put eyes on every page or else the potential for malpractice lurks). Keep in mind, I have a tiny attention span and test in the 10th percentile for conscientiousness.
From what I've seen of your writing, you'd be great at lawyering as long as you can master the other aspects of the job (research, persuasion, theatrics/charisma/gravitas [if you want to be a trial lawyer and/or attract clients], managing client expectations, risking personal failure on behalf of someone else, being okay with bureaucratic nonsense and learning to navigate it, making decisions in the face of uncertainty, delegating non-billable tasks to subordinates even though it will take more time and the work won't be up to your standard, thinking on your feet, etc.) I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. I have some typical and atypical lawyer experiences....
What CS Lewis book is that? I read most of them in my college days, but not sure which one you're referencing. Mere Christianity, maybe?
Hey RC:
Have you thought about doing a book-club-style series of posts where you interact with your readers about a book you all read together? I'm thinking of examples like what Freddie DeBoer and Bryan Caplan have done recently. I would be interested in participating in that kind of thing--as long as it's not an esoteric tome like Sadly, Porn.....
No, but one sec.
There you go!
That was fast!
New RC sections while-you-wait: Tell your friends.
We were talking over on Astral Codex Ten, so I came over here and found this. I've been thinking about this for a little while and don't have anyone to talk about it with, so I'm going to put it here and, if you'd like to respond, I'd welcome it. I apologize in advance that this post is kind of a LOT.
I was raised as an atheist and later a Unitarian (but still an atheist, which is totally copacetic in UUism). And I mean, not just that I didn't happen to believe in God - I was a militant child atheist. I actually went to Catholic school for a couple of years and would tell other kids in the playground that I was an atheist and argue with them about it. In 2nd grade.
As an adult (now middle-aged), through C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton and Toystoy and others, I'm kind of in love with Christianity, or at least, the sort of cobbled-together version in my head. I go to church (sometimes). I pray (sporadically but sincerely (?)). But I don't know that I believe anything "for real." I still feel a bit like the whole thing is stupid? (Even though I'm posting this, I'm not trying to debate with anyone whether the metaphysics is true or whatever. That's so boring to me. I especially don't want to debate it with anyone who thinks it IS true - the last thing I want to do is convert anyone to atheism.)
Christianity feels like a candy store to me, only I don't have the currency. I just look at the stuff in the cases and admire it and think about what it tastes like and about all of my opinions about the proper preparation methods and techniques and ingredients based on all of my reading and thinking. Some writers make me feel like I've almost tasted the candy - sometimes my imagination is so vivid it feels like maybe I did - but I really can't get any. It stays in the cases.
If Calvinism is right, I'm clearly NOT one of the elect. I mean, unlike Kermit, I've never even heard the voices calling my name when I was half asleep. When I pray, half the time I have to forcibly keep myself together so I don't start crying at my sense of being left out of...the universe.
And yet, I've gotten so much more from this life than I deserve, and been shown grace and love by so many people and events. I love this world. I'm so grateful and I want to be grateful to SOMEONE.
I have no idea how anyone would respond to this, but if a question helps, here's mine, I guess: how do you actually, like, believe things? What's the trick? I'm not talking about having no doubts, I'm just talking about not having like 90% of your mind be a totally different track that says the whole thing is obviously dumb.
So for some quick context, what do you mean "whole thing is stupid"? Your pursuit of faith? The faith itself? Feel really free to be blunt here - I'm not gonna get offended or anything, but I think it would help me answer if I knew.
Faith itself, I suppose. Belief in anything beyond materialism. I don't REALLY think it's stupid - I think it's beautiful. But...perhaps just like a person raised in church can renounce their faith but still secretly fear going to hell, I was raised as an atheist and to see the whole thing as dumb, and I can't quite shake that. But I'm not asking you to convince me it's not dumb - please feel free not to engage with that idea at all.
It's not so much that I want to convince you it's not dumb - I think it probably is dumb, in a sense. I'm going to do scripture-stuff at you whether you like it or not, so this is as good a time as any:
"For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men."
So that reference to say I not only can't convince you it's not dumb, but I'm also not really supposed to try; it's supposed to look dumb, in a lot of ways it's supposed to feel dumb. And that "lest the Cross be emptied of it's power" is important there; if I could convince you through wisdom, if I could make it seem less dumb to you to the point where you accepted it as non-dumb, it *wouldn't work as a method of salvation*.
I think it's sort of important from a mechanical sense to start there, because the whole bit is that salvation is grace that you get *through* faith, as it were. So whatever you do don't approach this by trying to make it less dumb, because literally everyone should it's a big fucking waste of time to try and do it that way.
I don't want to ramble too much, so before I move on - does that make any sense so far? Objections/questions? Because the next stuff is a lot shakier in a way so probably getting this part resolved first would help, even as it avoids a gish gallop.
Loved this thread. Thanks. I would like to pass on the whole belief in God question, Not a dumb question, but I totally don't know. And then agree with the meta God question. Regardless of truth, it's better to believe in God than not.. and just let it go at that. And move on to living a good life.
I don't know if it makes sense, but I do like it. It's a new idea for me. I'm very interested to see what you'll say next.
OK. So taking as a given that Christian faith is in some way stupid (a modified/non-standard way, obviously) and that things that approach proof/good evidence on it that would get you to accept it specifically on a proof/good evidence standard both *don't generally work to convince you* and *wouldn't get you saved anyhow*, we have to have somewhere to go from there.
I think the potentially insulting thing to say is that on some levels I think you already know it's true. And often a Christian thinks this about other people, that they know it's true; they don't accept that it's true, or rather they don't accept "the truth" in the absolute usage of the word, but on some level something in their soul speaks to them of the truth of the thing. And you learn, as a Christian, not to say that a whole lot because the easy response to that is "no I don't, and you are being a jerk". And there's nowhere good that conversation goes, for obvious reasons.
I think in your case if I was making that claim I'd have better evidence. Because we have this person who was raised atheist - no reason to change from that, right? Like it's a workable system, probably most people in your life are fine with it, evidentally it's not fucking up family thanksgiving or whatever. But we have this person, and as an adult they are reintroduced to Christianity and there's enough reaction between Christianity and their soul that they start doing things that don't make sense; they go to church, where they listen to things they don't accept. They see people who believe something they don't accept as true and envy them; they feel something those people have that they don't, or something, I don't know your whole story but we can agree this doesn't make any sense for you on most levels.
And this goes beyond the normal rationalist "I want their social advantages, how do I get those" thing I see sometimes. You aren't describing wanting the community, you aren't describing wanting the social support or a trad-spouse or anything like that. You say things like this:
"And yet, I've gotten so much more from this life than I deserve, and been shown grace and love by so many people and events. I love this world. I'm so grateful and I want to be grateful to SOMEONE."
And of course you could be grateful to the world in some hippy-dippy quasi-spiritual sense; you could call yourself agnostic or read The Secret or a bunch of things. You could be not-that and just be thankful to the people around you and fortune, sort of appreciating everything in a magical "we are all star-stuff" quasi-scientific way.
And I don't doubt for a minute that you ARE thankful to fortune and the people around you who have helped you. But you do all that, and we still get sentences from you like the quote above - you know there's a missing component, you know there's somewhere this thankfulness should also be funneled that isn't getting any. The wrongness of the absence is at least strong enough that you are looking for what's missing.
Or, a much shorter version: You don't have the candy that's in the case, but everything about how you talk about this issue and the steps you describe yourself as taken aren't the descriptions and path of someone who actually doubts that the candy is in the case.
So that's sort of the second of what I'm feeling is probably three things I'm supposed to say here. Same thing as last time: what am I missing, if anything? What am I misunderstanding so far?
This is very on point for me, and i don't think you're missing anything. (And in response to your sense that I'm not seeking social standing or benefits - that's basically true. If anything, being religious causes trouble in my social and family circles rather than the opposite, although not to an extreme extent. Most of my friends can tolerate the eccentricity of having religious beliefs.)
The only objection - and I really, really hate to make it - to the idea that I must know that it's true, is, like, can't I just be wishing it were true? I mean I can think of other beautiful pictures of reality that are unlikely to be true, but where I'd be envious if huge crowds of people believed them, and I'd want in on it.
Ugh - I really do not want that objection in my head at all. (I wonder, can I counter it with your first point and just go for it, be stupid?)
At any rate, I appreciate all of this very much and will likely read this quite a few times. Carry on, mysterious stranger who is somehow willing to do this work!
Hi Tam, I enjoyed your conversation with the RC here. I just wanted to share my thoughts/ journey. Baptized Episcopalian, later went to UU church in teens and then more seriously UU when we had our kids. For almost forever now I've called myself agnostic. I find that atheists and theists can be equally dogmatic in their faith/ belief. (Blah, how can you be so sure.) Me I just decided time is limited and there's more interesting things for me to ponder. So I treat the question of God as an unknown. I'm a physicist, and I'm also agnostic on the question of whether the photon is real or not*. However I find the idea of a photon very useful, and so I can treat it as true. And if you'll forgive me the sin of comparing God to a photon. I also find it useful to live my life as if there was a God. I don't have any personal relation. I don't pray, unless thoughts are prayers. When I say "Thank God", it feels like something leaving me, a release of emotion.... but walking in woods sometimes has a similar feel.
Church is a good thing, you can have zero faith (total atheist) and still get much out of church. Unfortunately, I can't stomach going to my local UU. They have a 'Black Lives Matter' banner, I don't want politics at church. What's the second most liberal church after UU?
Anyway thanks again, and good luck on your journey.
*it could just be quantization of the electron by which we measure the photon.
Ha, I know what you mean about politics in church. I can't do UU churches for the same reason. I was enjoying a Disciples of Christ church (this might be literally the next most liberal although they vary from congregation to congregation) before I moved away during the pandemic, and now I'm (for now, anyway) at a UMC one, which does not feel as liberal.
There's a local United Church of Christ, I should go see. I know several members.
How should I approach the whole idea of the metaverse? Everyone's talking about it, but I'm waiting for the Resident Contrarian take.
Help me out here: I hear "metaverse" and think "expanded marvel universe" or something. Are we talking about it in the vr/crypto/internety sense?
Yes, that one.
This is one of those things where I have to be a little bit unsatisfactory, because I don't know a lot about the technical side of it. When I think about stuff like this, I tend to think of it in terms of full-dive VR fiction, like where you can go play a real-to-you MMO in a pod that feeds information into your brain. Or stuff like dreaming is a private thing from Asimov, or the parts about directly jacking experiences into your brain from Palahnuik's Rant, or whatever.
Obviously those are a lot more advanced than tech offers right now. But a while back someone at church asked an open-ended question: Where do you live? and I had to answer that I live to a great extent, at least half my waking time, on the internet on in a mix of internet and real life. So when I think about potential downsides and upsides, I have to acknowledge I'm already living in a world that has a lot of each; I can talk to a lot of people at a distance, work remotely, etc. I can retreat from my family, see friends less often in real life, get less exercise, etc.
If I was going to write something about this I'd probably start there - that we are talking about the window dressing when we talk about this stuff. And the window dressing matters, the capabilities of the tech matter. But we are already in a situation where our world is compromised for the better or worse by tech, if that makes sense.