Look, I'm no theologian, so I can't really speak to the Greek and Latin concepts that have been worked on by some many philosophers or theologians over 2000 years. But it just strikes me when...
Exemplary
Look, I'm no theologian, so I can't really speak to the Greek and Latin concepts that have been worked on by some many philosophers or theologians over 2000 years. But it just strikes me when people think Jesus' message, or Christianity in general, is particularly unique for its pacifism. Jainism is an Indian religion well known for its extreme pacifism, to the extent where it obviously couldn't defend itself. The Moriori of NZ had a choice between keeping to their pacifist traditions and slavery, or to fight, and they chose slavery.
What allowed Christianity to win wasn't forgiveness and pacifism. That made it a compelling message for the poor and downtrodden, for sure. What made it win was that Christian Roman emperors and officials ruthlessly crushed every single competitor in a way that no pagan had even contemplated doing. By sheer chance (that had been determined centuries before Christianity existed), this same empire that conquered Judea was the same empire that went to conquer Europe, which went on to colonise the world for reasons unrelated to religion. Christianity won because it was appealing enough to an interconnected empire where a thousand cultures were now in a dialogue, and violent enough to eliminate any internal rivals once it gained power.
Dr Hart makes a passing mention about messianic movements in the empire, but he's underselling just how many eastern mystery cults (including Christianity) the Romans were dealing with. Why did Christianity triumph out of those hundreds of cults? I dunno, why did Islam rise at the same time the Romans and Persians were at their absolute lowest point, shattered them both, and change the world? Why did an Indian religion like Buddhism spread to China and Japan like wildfire while dying in India? Why did the Persians end up praising the ashuras and the Indians the devas? Things happen, and they go one way or the other, sometimes by sheer chance.
A trend I notice with a lot of theologians is that they frame the argument as Christianity vs atheism. But that's not the argument. Have you read and analysed the Qur'an, for years and years? Than how can you possibly know that you're right and the Muslim is wrong? Have you read the Avesta? If not, could you possibly be missing an ever more compete truth in Zoroastrianism? But almost always it ends with the author discovering that the ancestral religion of his nation and people ended up being the correct one, which I find extremely convenient.
Separately from this, there seems to be somewhat of a trend of American Protestants converting to Orthodoxy specifically. There's some cultural thing happening in American Christianity, and I wonder if someone is studying it.
There are some really interesting thoughts in your comment. One note is that the linked article doesn't talk about pacificism, when they're talking about the (alleged) uniqueness of Jesus's...
There are some really interesting thoughts in your comment. One note is that the linked article doesn't talk about pacificism, when they're talking about the (alleged) uniqueness of Jesus's teachings. Instead they talk about boundless forgiveness and a unique concern for the poor. Similar, but distinct - and probably a more defensible claim for uniqueness, especially 2,000 years ago.
Dr Hart makes a passing mention about messianic movements in the empire, but he's underselling just how many eastern mystery cults (including Christianity) the Romans were dealing with. Why did Christianity triumph out of those hundreds of cults?
I agree with you that there's not really a concrete answer here, but you may find this article interesting:
Separately from this, there seems to be somewhat of a trend of American Protestants converting to Orthodoxy specifically. There's some cultural thing happening in American Christianity, and I wonder if someone is studying it.
But almost always it ends with the author discovering that the ancestral religion of his nation and people ended up being the correct one, which I find extremely convenient.
Thanks for the articles! I have a lot to say about some of the thoughts here, but I'll just point out the one that stood out the most for me: I'm not sure what the author means by this. The Roman...
Thanks for the articles! I have a lot to say about some of the thoughts here, but I'll just point out the one that stood out the most for me:
The Roman Empire was corrupt and decadent to the core. People were looking for a community they could trust.
I'm not sure what the author means by this. The Roman empire was corrupt in the sense that any ancient polity was corrupt, but it wasn't particularly decadent or corrupt, especially in this era. Christianity was born after the ruinous civil wars of the republic, but I'm not sure if your average Jew in Jerusalem would've noticed that those wars even happened, beyond maybe Antony mobilising before his war with Octavian. This would've been followed by the Pax Romana, which while often exaggerated, would've been a unique period of stability for many people in the empire. It just seems odd to invoke the Roman decadence trope just as the empire is entering its golden era.
On your article regarding Orthodoxy, I find it extremely appropriate that the same tactics that the East Romans used effectively to psychologically overwhelm Westerners (big fuck off rising throne, centuries of weighty tradition, pretending that Orthodoxy hasn't changed massively) still works on Westerners like clockwork! All we need is the mechanical throne back and another piece of the True Cross!
From this side, as someone whose family converted from folk spirituality to Protestantism, then myself from Protestantism to Orthodoxy, I basically lived what you outlined for the world, and is a...
From this side, as someone whose family converted from folk spirituality to Protestantism, then myself from Protestantism to Orthodoxy, I basically lived what you outlined for the world, and is a repeat of the story of Genesis to Revelations: one moves from folk spirituality of household gods (specific location, specific to tribe) to an Abrahamic faith, then to one specific worship of the Abrahamic God intended for all nations and all time.
It's very interesting how by chance this all was.
There's some cultural thing happening in American Christianity, and I wonder if someone is studying it.
American Orthodox are studying the shift for sure, and apparently we are very worried. Converts are beating down our doors and a few priests have talked about this in numerous podcasts, (the podcast host, Ft Andrew Stephen Damick, calling it a crisis). Orthodox Christianity is never going to consider women priests, and never going to meet one priest in mass numbers at a mega "church" building or a stadium for practical reasons rather than theological, or support internet video as being the same thing. It is not even preaching based: you go and read an extremely predictable rotation of prayers, come up for Holy Communion, and you're dismissed. The priest speaking part is completely optional, almost always brief, and in fact some priests prefer to do this after the official dismissal to specifically note them as personal thoughts rather than part of the service. We shall see what happens to North American Orthodoxy in a hundred years.
What allowed Christianity to win wasn't forgiveness and pacifism. That made it a compelling message for the poor and downtrodden, [...]
I have wondered about what you observed too, from many many cults, culled down to one empire officially endorsed faith, and how it is that the meek, the hungry, the grieving, the poor, the persecuted who finally inherits the kingdom. It is my hope that the Moriori and Jianists, who have surely endured, prosper and make a raging come back. I would be delighted if their ancients see fit to call me a brethren when they inherit the Kingdom.
What you outlined, is that an empire spends its time crushing mass competition, until the field is well weeded, and fertilised with the blood of the martyrs, meaning their nonviolent deaths at the hands of the empire have been witnessed by all, and then that firm conviction that even persecution won't crush, with messages for the poor and downtrodden, will persist and become the religion that examplifies the empire's people.
This would never have happened if we had empires without the poor and downtrodden: in places like Norway where people are treated with dignity and equitable support, we see the other kind of faith, in materialism and the innate and obvious goodness in mankind that is only occasionally obscured by cultish practices. The healthy have no need for hospitals, as I have heard it said in Orthodoxy: the Church is for the hurting, and for those who are the most sick in their hearts.
If American Christian Nationalism continues, we will see every other religion and Christian sect brutally crushed, including Catholicism (see Trump's feud with Pope) and including Orthodoxy. If the pattern holds, the sects that persist (possibly literally underground) in the face of oppression to care for the last, the lost, and the least among us will finally be worthy of inheriting the kingdom, because by then almost everyone will be poor and downtrodden.
The poor don't study competing theologies and pick the most reasonable ones: they choose the ones where they can see the faithful live out their faith in practice even while under fire.
Thanks for your reply! I'm going to do the Reddit thing and try to break it down just to keep it reasonable, but please let me know if I'm portraying your points wrong. But this isn't a universal...
Thanks for your reply! I'm going to do the Reddit thing and try to break it down just to keep it reasonable, but please let me know if I'm portraying your points wrong.
From this side, as someone whose family converted from folk spirituality to Protestantism, then myself from Protestantism to Orthodoxy, I basically lived what you outlined for the world, and is a repeat of the story of Genesis to Revelations: one moves from folk spirituality of household gods (specific location, specific to tribe) to an Abrahamic faith, then to one specific worship of the Abrahamic God intended for all nations and all time.
But this isn't a universal experience. It's a common one, because universal religions tend to be exclusive in a way that ethnic religions are not, but I can think of examples where the ethnic religion won out. The biggest one is the Hindus of India resisting the Abrahamic Muslims, reversing conversions and reclaiming old temples (and seizing mosques). Japanese Christians similarly faced an imperial counter movement where traditional religion largely won. In smaller scale, the rising worship of Santa Muerte in Mexico (which sometimes take the shape of a feathered serpent) is a clear signal that the Mexica gods aren't totally gone. The progression from ethnic religion to universal religion isn't inevitable or an improvement. It's just a different belief system. Both are equally valid expressions of the human experience.
What you outlined, is that an empire spends its time crushing mass competition, until the field is well weeded, and fertilised with the blood of the martyrs, meaning their nonviolent deaths at the hands of the empire have been witnessed by all, and then that firm conviction that even persecution won't crush, with messages for the poor and downtrodden, will persist and become the religion of the empire's people.
But the Roman empire wasn't particularly bad for the time period. The vast, vast, vast majority of Christians were left alone. Most governors seemed to have ignored the orders to suppress them, as they weren't much of a bother. The orders were also rare. Jews, by and large, faced far greater repression overall, both by pagans and Christians. The empire was brutal by our standards, but by and large extremely tolerant and open for the era. And recall that once Christians take power, the brutality remains, just aimed at different groups. Pagan temples were destroyed by mobs, pagan officials were displaced, pagan philosophers had to flee to Persia. Emperor Justinian, a saint in Orthodoxy, passed laws allowing women to be stones to death for adultery. He also murdered 30,000 during the Nika riots. He's a saint. The ancient world was brutal. That's just how it was.
Very true: my family's example is only one data point, perhaps more fitting as the "ackshually..." to your point about how theologians "ends with the author discovering that the ancestral religion...
The progression from ethnic religion to universal religion isn't inevitable or an improvement. It's just a different belief system. Both are equally valid expressions of the human experience.
Very true: my family's example is only one data point, perhaps more fitting as the "ackshually..." to your point about how theologians "ends with the author discovering that the ancestral religion of his nation and people ended up being the correct one" :) I know you weren't saying this is 100% of the case, and obviously I was no theologian, but this type of leave-your-ancestral-ways conversion do happen after deep introspection and much anguish. We've always had the Martin Luther types who look super deep into theology and end up having to reject the faith of their people. C S Lewis, born in Ireland, was probably more Celtic pagan than Catholic before his conversion1 to Christianity (he chose Anglicanism, but all denominations claim him as their own) when he looked deeper into theology.
100% on your point about it not being inevitable and different expressions of the human experience. Maybe slightly less in agreement with some systems not being .... better .... Not all faith systems are rooted in goodness, peace, fairness and co-prosperity of human beings. Look at Christian Nationalism, for a punching up example: I will always regard moving away from that camp as being an improvement upwards, a rejection of the dark forces of greed, selfishness and pride, a denouncment of exerting ones will upon another, a spitting upon apathy towards human suffering.
I am not yet ready to draw the conclusion on the Japanese Christian saga....let's give it another few centuries. :)
But you are right: when changes happen, when one faith system supercedes another, it's not because it's some magical universal theology. Plenty of Christian systems get tossed: Christ said that when salt becomes flavorless it will be tossed out onto the streets. A theology that uses the name of Jesus to hurt and colonize and abuse and economically coerce will be rejected in favour of something that actually meets the people where they are, whether folk or scientific or same theology reinterpreted or a merge. I was just reading Miriam Toew's Women Talking, based on the real events in a terrible Mennonite colony in Bolivia that hurt / is hurting all those girls and women and I'm sure also boys and men.... all in the name of Jesus. Whatever the people choose to mirage to will be better than that system of forced forgiveness without repentance and guarding the powerless.
The Roman Empire spanned a vast amount of time, which, predominantly, was not terrible. But it's human nature to remember its low points, though, eh? ( This Nika riots seemed more political than religious in nature, but I'm not well informed2. ) The ancient world was indeed brutal; I wonder if large scale bloodshed is how anything good mixed in with the bad survives sometimes, that it was a kill or be killed world between a culture that's 3% good vs another that's 97% bad.
1. "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England"
No one asked this lay person, but perhaps emperors shouldn't be saints.... Then again we have King David, surely one of the most blood stained figures of the faith. "If you should mark iniquities, oh Lord, who shall stand?"
No, that's definitely fair enough. It's not like converts don't exist. I've seen people convert from Christianity to Islam and feel very strongly about it. Islam historically in particular was...
Very true: my family's example is only one data point, perhaps more fitting as the "ackshually..." to your point about how theologians "ends with the author discovering that the ancestral religion of his nation and people ended up being the correct one" :)
No, that's definitely fair enough. It's not like converts don't exist. I've seen people convert from Christianity to Islam and feel very strongly about it. Islam historically in particular was very open to converts in a way Christianity wasn't always. The Spanish, for example, expelled many Christian moriscos because, well, they weren't really Christian of their ancestors weren't Christian. Whereas many European Muslims in the Ottoman Empire flaunted their converted status as people who had chosen Islam, and weren't merely born to it.
But it is a phenomenon I see with theologians, where they have 5,000 well written and well argued words about how the religion they were born with lucikly turned out to be the right one. People convert usually because something is happening, but I've rarely seen a scholar (of any religion) research themselves into a religion to which they have no ties. Like, I've never seen someone from Oregon turn to Amaterasu.
I know you weren't saying this is 100% of the case, and obviously I was no theologian, but this type of leave-your-ancestral-ways conversion do happen after deep introspection and much anguish. We've always had the Martin Luther types who look super deep into theology and end up having to reject the faith of their people. C S Lewis, born in Ireland, was probably more Celtic pagan than Catholic before his conversion1 to Christianity (he chose Anglicanism, but all denominations claim him as their own) when he looked deeper into theology.
True, but entire books have been written about the process through which Christianity (and other universal religions) supresses, demean and dismantle the ethnic religions of the places Christian conquer, and make the ethnic and traditional belief system seem stupid, outdated and superstitious. Christian countries historically made it imposible to operate in civilised society without converting. You can't separate those pressures from the conversion of a pagan populace. Millions of Christians in the Middle East and North Africa converted to Islam over the centuries for the same reason. It just makes sense to convert to the religion of your conqueror if it's a universal religion.
I am not yet ready to draw the conclusion on the Japanese Christian saga....let's give it another few centuries. :)
Anything can happen, of course, but it has already been a few centuries since contact between Europeans and the Japanese. East Asians.just have a different conception of the spiritual world compared to Westerners. There is no contradiction in honouring your local river spirit, marrying in a Christian church, and following the teachings of the Buddha. It's all perfectly normal to many of them.
But you are right: when changes happen, when one faith system supercedes another, it's not because it's some magical universal theology. Plenty of Christian systems get tossed: Christ said that when salt becomes flavorless it will be tossed out onto the streets. A theology that uses the name of Jesus to hurt and colonize and abuse and economically coerce will be rejected in favour of something that actually meets the people where they are, whether folk or scientific or same theology reinterpreted or a merge. I was just reading Miriam Toew's Women Talking, based on the real events in a terrible Mennonite colony in Bolivia that hurt / is hurting all those girls and women and I'm sure also boys and men.... all in the name of Jesus. Whatever the people choose to mirage to will be better than that system of forced forgiveness without repentance and guarding the powerless.
Honestly, I very rarely blame religion for things like this. People have been awful under every belief system under the Sun. There's usually something running far deeper than religion when humans perform atrocities on one another. I see religion as language or dance or food; just another expression of a group's culture.
The Roman Empire spanned a vast amount of time, which, predominantly, was not terrible. But it's human nature to remember its low points, though, eh? ( This Nika riots seemed more political than religious in nature, but I'm not well informed2. ) The ancient world was indeed brutal; I wonder if large scale bloodshed is how anything good mixed in with the bad survives sometimes, that it was a kill or be killed world between a culture that's 3% good vs another that's 97% bad.
Oh yes, for sure, Nika was a political event. I just sometimes poke fun at Chalcedonians (mostly the Orthodox) canonising people like Justinian and Constantine. I love the Roman Empire, but man, these two were unrepentant mass murderers. At least Ashoka the Great in India felt bad after his slaughters in the Kalinga wars, as he converted to Buddhism. Whereas I don't think Justinian shed a year as his forces killed tens of thousands instead of resigning his office.
Most people write arguments because they already believe something about that argument. That is hardly specific to theology. That is just how human motivation works.
But it is a phenomenon I see with theologians, where they have 5,000 well written and well argued words about how the religion they were born with lucikly turned out to be the right one.
Most people write arguments because they already believe something about that argument. That is hardly specific to theology. That is just how human motivation works.
It's not so much this argument for me, it's the trend of doing deep research into something to believe in and come out the other end believing it. You had every single incentive to continue to...
It's not so much this argument for me, it's the trend of doing deep research into something to believe in and come out the other end believing it. You had every single incentive to continue to believe in the gods of your childhood. It's just hard to see it as a fully intellectual exercise for me when that's almost always the result in every religion. Everybody confidently coming to the confusion that the religion they lucked into turned out to be the correct one.
Which becomes even more apparent when put this way. A monotheistic religious person already rejects and doesn't believe in thousands of gods, for no particularly convincing reason, yet they rarely...
Which becomes even more apparent when put this way.
A monotheistic religious person already rejects and doesn't believe in thousands of gods, for no particularly convincing reason, yet they rarely entertain the thought why those gods and that faith can be dismissed as false so easily.
This is very true, and I believe I, along with others, will be held to task for it. From the Wikipedia entry on the Aluet Language: St Innocent, as he is remembered today, celebrated and protected...
Christian countries historically made it imposible to operate in civilised society without converting.
This is very true, and I believe I, along with others, will be held to task for it.
It was not until 1819 that the first professional linguist, the Dane Rasmus Rask, studied Aleut. He collected words and paradigms from two speakers of Eastern Aleut dialects living in Saint Petersburg. In 1824 came the man who would revolutionize Aleut as a literary language. Ioann Veniaminov, a Russian Orthodox priest who would later become a saint, arrived at Unalaska studying Unalaskan Aleut. He created an orthography for this language (using the Cyrillic alphabet; the Roman alphabet would come later), translated the Gospel according to St. Matthew and several other religious works into Aleut, and published a grammar of Eastern Aleut in 1846.
Having spent a large part of his life in journeys, Saint Innocent translated a Catechism and the Gospel into the Aleut language. In 1833, he wrote in this language one of the finest works of Orthodox missionary activity INDICATION OF THE WAY TO THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.
In 1859, the Yakut first heard the Word of God and divine services in their native language. Twice (in 1860 and 1861) Saint Innocent met with Saint Nicholas the Apostle to Japan (February 3), sharing with him his spiritual experience.
The Aluet language dialects are critically endangered today, though, so even Saintly human effect does not last forever, sadly ...
Not many smaller communities received their own dictionaries and grammatical treatise when a missionary from an empire visits. But that ought to be the way, for cultures not just to be preserved but celebrated. I do feel like we are losing a lot of languages and cultures today, even when religion isn't involved. As you say, religious practices is one among human expression. Movies and technology and international trade are others
To be clear, I am not critising you or any Christian for these historical events, any more than I'd criticise a New Zealander for something an English king had done in the 15th Century. I just...
To be clear, I am not critising you or any Christian for these historical events, any more than I'd criticise a New Zealander for something an English king had done in the 15th Century. I just wanted to illustrate the immense pressure pagans come under when Christians (or Muslims) become the ruler class of a country. Even when they mean well, it usually means and thing for the ethnic religion. As you point out, it doesn't mean everything is bad. In addition to your examples, the creation of Cyrillic itself is work by Christians to help with conversion. But the religion itself is usually not one of the things that is protected, as the whole point is obviously conversion.
Anyway, I'm rambling s bit, and I don't think we're really disagreeing! I'm an atheist, but I think religion is like music or hugs, just a core core part of the human animal that can't really go away.
:D I love that! Like music, or hugs. I really really like that. Thanks for the conversation and no I never felt attacked :) just appreciate the opportunity of learning from you and this thread
:D I love that! Like music, or hugs. I really really like that.
Thanks for the conversation and no I never felt attacked :) just appreciate the opportunity of learning from you and this thread
I tried to think of something else, but that's how I feel! We apes like hugs and pats and picking at our hair. And like religion, that will never go away, it's just part of our species. I did used...
I tried to think of something else, but that's how I feel! We apes like hugs and pats and picking at our hair. And like religion, that will never go away, it's just part of our species.
I did used to be an annoying better-than-you atheist when I was younger (and I'm sure that's not all gone), but I'm in my late 30s, tired, and (I like to think) more clear-eyed. I think the specific beliefs are irrational, but I no longer think people are perfectly rational anyway. Quantum phycists of all religious stripes are still shaking off their weird quantum woo stage. Many atheists think that if you make everyone an atheist an utopia follows, which is irrational and not borne out by even the good examples of a wide atheist population such as Czechia.
So what if you believe the world flooded 10k years ago, or someone in Tokyo believe Amaterasu formed the islands of Japan, or a Hindu believes they'll reincarnate when they die? I believed Hilary Clinton was a shoo-in for the presidency, what the fuck right to complain about irrational beliefs do I have? We all think we're right, ultimately.
While I get what you're going for, pedantically I'd point out that there are people who don't really get as much from physical affection, it's a trend but not an absolute rule. Less pedantically,...
While I get what you're going for, pedantically I'd point out that there are people who don't really get as much from physical affection, it's a trend but not an absolute rule.
Less pedantically, what we believe does influence how we act, and while religion isn't unique in this it's not a unique exception either. Raising someone to believe in a God who forgives is more likely to result in them valuing kindness to others than raising someone to believe in a God who eternally torments any who stray (conversely, if someone came to me as an agonistic-leaning-atheist with solid proof that if I don't follow specific rules then Ammit the Devourer will eat my soul, that'd be a pretty hefty consequence to consider). Teaching someone about how scientists are all lying or ignorant regarding a global flood is more likely to result in them dismissing science as a whole (e.g. vaccine denial) than teaching someone about how we've realized mistakes in our worldviews and gradually deepened our understanding of history and nature alike.
We will all be wrong many times in our lives, including about fundamental things, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't care about truth and beliefs, it just means we need to be open to listening.
Fair point on hugs! I'm speaking broadly, but there are exceptions to every behaviour. I don't think religion is really the cause of these things. The reasons Americans don't believe in climate...
Fair point on hugs! I'm speaking broadly, but there are exceptions to every behaviour.
I don't think religion is really the cause of these things. The reasons Americans don't believe in climate change isn't really Christianity or being anti-science, I don't think. It's because they don't want to believe it, don't want the guilt, don't want to stop eating meat, don't want to change their lifestyles. Their core belief is that climate change isn't real, and they'll finds belief systems that supplement that.
In terms of whether you believe in Jesus the forgiver, or Yahweh the brutal war god, I feel a people's gods are a reflection of a cultural moment and their environment. The desert is brutal, and Yahweh was the god of desert nomads. Yahweh (and the rest of the Yahwist pantheon) comes from that, as did Allah (who did exist for pagan Arabs before monotheism).
When a culture changes, religion changes as well. Romans adopted Christianity. Then what happened? They made it into a hierarchical ritualistic religion. They were told, hey, this god is the One God. The Romans said, say no more! We'll just have God the Father (clearly the same Indo European Deus Pater they were already workshipping), and his son Yeshua the demigod. Then elevate Maria to Mother Goddess status, make a bunch of statues out of her. What the heck, have entire tiers of angels to we can pray to. And obviously we need divinely raised demigo-- uh, sorry, I want saints. Yeah, saints I can pray to, no biggie, there's just One God, don't worry about it. Oh, we need to fight? Just invent the concept of Holy War, gogogo.
The culture comes first and the religion second, almost always. Cultures will fit anything into pre-existing frameworks to justify the things they already want to do. So I wouldn't say Christianity made the empire more forgiving. I would say the empire was already becoming a kinder place to live in, which made Christianity attractive.
This is a false dichotomy, imo. Religion is not the only way to be kind, but a church that opens a food shelter because they believe Christ commands them to care for the downtrodden is being kind...
This is a false dichotomy, imo. Religion is not the only way to be kind, but a church that opens a food shelter because they believe Christ commands them to care for the downtrodden is being kind for a religious reason. Religion is not the only way to be hurt, but a queer child whose parents pressure them to deny who they are because a pastor said they'd burn eternally otherwise is hurting for religious reasons. Religion is not the only way to be curious, but a scientist who studies nature to understand God's glory is being curious for religious reasons. Religion is not the only way to be ignorant, but someone who avoids the COVID vaccine because they were taught scientists are morons who can't even get the age of the Earth right was kept ignorant for religious reasons. Religion is obviously not immune to people, but people are not immune to religion either. They influence each other, just as with any cultural belief.
Their core belief is that climate change isn't real, and they'll finds belief systems that supplement that.
With all due respect, this sounds to me like a secular version of presuppositionalist assumptions—"everyone knows I'm right, they just pretend otherwise so they can sin". Perhaps there are some who fall in that camp, but there are also people who are just incorrect, and the reasons for that incorrectness can be influenced by religion as much as by any other element of society.
I think we have to agree to disagree there. I don't see a particular difference in Roman behaviour on the whole after Christianity. Offensive wars mostly stopped, yes, but that had already...
I think we have to agree to disagree there. I don't see a particular difference in Roman behaviour on the whole after Christianity. Offensive wars mostly stopped, yes, but that had already happened. The empire had hit the absolute limits of its administrative apparatus, the empire was going to be more peaceful regardless. The empire built hospitals, but that's because a state has been formed and local elites had stopped contributing to their local communities. That had more to do with the centralisation of the state rather than anything particularly about Christianity.
Sunni Islam was very very very specific about the abomination of sale sex relations, yet there are more Ottoman poems about man's anuses than vaginas. Fuck, there's an entire argument about why sleeping with men is preferable. These were Sunni Muslims saying this. Americans have taken a religion about the poor and made it about money, and feel absolutely no discomfort about it. It doesn't matter. People will adapt whatever comes into their actual belief systems. Those belief systems are cultural. It's not a coincidence that this conspiracy problem is prevalent in the US and Australia, frontier countries that developed a strong independentist streak over the course of their cultural development.
Yes, religion has an influence, in the same way that any cultural belief has an influence. But religion, like any cultural belief, is still subject to the primacy of the culture of belongs to. That is why Romans saw a deeply monotheistic religion and plugged it in to their polytheistic religion, making sure they retained a Mother Goddess and a lower tier of gods. The Romans already believed there were more figures than a singular God, so they made that God into three. You can find similar things like Saint Brigid in Ireland or Santa Muerte in Mexico. Religions are based on consensus.
I don't know enough about those specific examples to comment, but I'm not denying that religion is heavily affected by the culture in which it's practiced, I'm disagreeing with the "so what?" and...
I don't know enough about those specific examples to comment, but I'm not denying that religion is heavily affected by the culture in which it's practiced, I'm disagreeing with the "so what?" and "what the fuck right to complain about irrational beliefs do I have?" framing. What someone believes about the world influences how they interact with that world, which impacts both them and the people around them (both positively and negatively). That makes those worldviews important.
You use the analogy of believing Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in for the presidency. Perhaps this was rational-but-ill-informed or perhaps it was irrational, I don't know enough about how you formed the conclusion, but when it was shown to be false you evidently accepted that. On the other hand, in 2021 we saw thousands of people who had believed their preferred candidate was a shoo-in decide that rather than accepting they were incorrect they would storm the Capitol. The presence or absence of a well-informed and rational response to the situation led to two very different outcomes. Should we have reacted by going "well really we're all irrational sometimes, what right do we have to complain?"
Perhaps, but that cuts both ways. For example, ethnic religions tend to treat the land with far greater respect and care than anyone else. These people are tied to their land in a way even the...
Perhaps, but that cuts both ways. For example, ethnic religions tend to treat the land with far greater respect and care than anyone else. These people are tied to their land in a way even the most liberal atheist probably isn't. I don't think this is unrelated to how fucking miserable and disconnected a lot of Westerners feel. It's not rational to believe that Artemis listens to you as you pray to her when you kill a deer. But know what? It's probably good for your brain to go through this internal forgiveness cycle. You and I are ultimately apes and these little rituals evolved to protect our brains for a reason. If you take those rituals away and leave nothing behind, I'm not altogether sure you end with a happy or healthy humanity.
As an example, one of the worst contributors to climate change is meat consumption. A lot of Hindus, Buddhists and especially Jains are vegetarian. A lot of Western vegetarians are crunchy spiritualists. Conversely, I don't personally know a lot of vegetarian atheists, in my circles anyway. So maybe if we're all irrational Jains, the planet (and us) wouldn't be dying.
Probably like you, I can't force myself. I can't force myself to believe in things that (to me) are very clearly irrational magic stories. But I also don't necessarily think that this attribute is objectively good. Over the years, I admire truth less and less, and good and bravery more and more. Whoever's volunteering the most at the soup kitchen is the person I think I have the most to learn from.
J6 was bad. But you know what? It's pretty indicative of the power of belief. Where are the leftists and liberals laying siege to the WH after all the death and pain Trump has caused to millions? Rationally sitting in their houses, waiting for the midterms. They clearly don't believe in stopping all these wars as much as the J6 insurrectionists believes that there was a crime ring at a pizzeria or whatever dumb ahit they were saying. Belief makes change possible.
There's plenty of irrational stuff we believe. Whatever country you're from probably has a national mythos that is mostly fake. You have an imagined relationship with people you don't in your country that is largely fake as well. Etc.
I've been mentioning both positives and negatives, my position has never been that religion is evil nor that belief is unimportant. Just that our beliefs about the world do have consequences that...
I've been mentioning both positives and negatives, my position has never been that religion is evil nor that belief is unimportant. Just that our beliefs about the world do have consequences that matter, and while religion is not alone in this it's not a lone exception either.
You say good is more important truth, but where does that judgement come from? In your deer-hunting example, the behavior is good because it accounts for your physical and emotional needs. In your vegetarianism example, the behavior is good because of the consequences of meat consumption. In your soup kitchen example, the behavior is good because those beliefs drive someone to recognize the humanity in those around them. In your leftist passivity example, the behavior is bad because of the harm being allowed. In these contexts those people having those beliefs is a net positive (or in the last case perhaps not), but we can only determine this because we try to look at the beliefs and their outcomes analytically too rather than treating them as separate from the rest of life.
When I say truth, I should say truth at the expense of everything else. Extreme example; your grandma is dying of old age, says she thinks she'll go to Heaven. Do you spend the next few moments...
When I say truth, I should say truth at the expense of everything else. Extreme example; your grandma is dying of old age, says she thinks she'll go to Heaven. Do you spend the next few moments persuading her that Heaven is patently a myth, or do you indulge her?
I just don't think being right (which I think I am, naturally) is the most important thing in the world right now.
Sure, you can probably leave it be since the effects of the belief in this context are almost solely good (bringing her comfort). On the other hand, if she believed she was going to Hell, I'd...
Sure, you can probably leave it be since the effects of the belief in this context are almost solely good (bringing her comfort). On the other hand, if she believed she was going to Hell, I'd instead try to convince her otherwise. What the actual belief is and what its consequences are is just as relevant to the decision here as it is to the other examples, it's not a "who cares what they think, we're all irrational" scenario.
But you would probably try convincing her by reminded her of the good she's done, not by saying her religion is fake. Would it feel better if I said, something being rational or irrational doesn't...
But you would probably try convincing her by reminded her of the good she's done, not by saying her religion is fake.
Would it feel better if I said, something being rational or irrational doesn't make it good or evil inherently? I didn't really mean to formulate a philosophical statement, I was speaking a bit off the cuff.
I agree with that, yeah. I was just disagreeing with the framing that which irrational beliefs people hold doesn't matter at all, which IME is a well-intentioned sentiment that nonetheless can end...
I agree with that, yeah. I was just disagreeing with the framing that which irrational beliefs people hold doesn't matter at all, which IME is a well-intentioned sentiment that nonetheless can end up leading to ignoring more subtle harms (like the example I used earlier about science denial).
I, too, thought the pokemon would go to the polls. :/ I guess we believe what we want the world to be like sometimes, and as I get older, I find it also mattering less to me what people say they...
I, too, thought the pokemon would go to the polls. :/ I guess we believe what we want the world to be like sometimes, and as I get older, I find it also mattering less to me what people say they believe, and instead more on their actions and their empathy.
Same. I think it's also a matter of safety and confidence, at least with me. When becoming an atheist in a Christian society, or becomes very important to establish some lines, and you don't...
Same. I think it's also a matter of safety and confidence, at least with me. When becoming an atheist in a Christian society, or becomes very important to establish some lines, and you don't necessarily know which ones are reasonable and which ones are excessive. But then you travel, meet other people, interact with other religions, and get older. I can't speak for anyone else, but at least for me, I'm just less hostile to the concept of religion and I no longer consider it a threat, either physically or intellectually. I can kinda wonder at the fact that as a Catholic I used to cannobalistically feed on the flesh of my God and drank His blood, and that was normal! The same way I'd love to pray at a Shinto shrine or a local important river, or take off my shoes at a mosque. It's no longer particularly important to me that I don't think the spiritual elements to these things are human constructs, because ultimately what matters is humans (and other creatures!).
That's a good point about boundary and safety. May teens don't get to choose their own relatives and Sunday activities.... Knowing what we all now know about American Nationalistic Christians, I'm...
That's a good point about boundary and safety. May teens don't get to choose their own relatives and Sunday activities.... Knowing what we all now know about American Nationalistic Christians, I'm sure a lot of people discovering their atheism probably need that safe space online to say whatever it is they can't say anywhere else irl.
That's a very wonderful attitude you have, of seeing past cultural divides and even past your own value system, to focus on the human being on the other side.
I may not be praying to the host entity at a temple, but I can still visit a friend there who might be in mourning, or simply appreciate the human art and history, and would take off my shoes and wash my hands if customary. Some of those are hygiene things that maybe the ancients had a feel about even without knowing germ theory, and that's a cool way of protecting ones tribe, hand washing, staying away from dead bodies, isolate for a few days before coming back from a potential infectious source etc. Some have unfortunate side effects like not allowing lepers close to community, but without antibiotics or a cure, permanent quarantine seems understandable if cruel.
(I used to be upset about religious practices that ask women to dress modestly or cover my hair, but after being in a community where I felt 100% accepted even when I don't, eventually I got to a point where I'm choosing to freely do so without pressure, and the practice started making sense. As you say, what matters is the humans! And all creation too!)
Funny as Protestants we never did anything with the river, but now I really appreciate the annual blessing of waters. Priests in full vestments doing stuff like in this image(source article) is probably the closest thing we get to a D&D style cleric in modern life.
In (non argumentative) defense of Holy Communion,
(1) it's a cool concept, and blood being magic is a common cross culture ritual thing (obvious bias)
(2) it's consensual, He said to do this. (asterisk: Orthodoxy encourages infants and children to partake; Catholics wait for confirmation; some Protestants wait for adulthood) and
(3) life giving mammalian cell sharing has been around since the first milk glands were licked by pups. The fats, calcium, and plasma inside milks is taken from my own flesh, bone and blood. In a 2014 study, they counted thousands to millions of maternal cells per milliliter of mothers milk (science direct), full of white blood cells, which are a kind of leukocyte:
Major Types of Maternal Leukocytes in Breast Milk
Fresh breast milk contains numerous types of hematopoietic-derived immune cells of maternal origin. Compiled data from human and murine studies indicate that myeloid cells are predominant in breast milk (>80% of total leukocytes), followed by lymphocytes (<20% of total leukocytes), the latter being mainly T cells (~80%). Of note, the composition of milk immune cells is dynamic, changing with the maturation stage of the breast milk
My guess is that if our red blood cells had any valuable organelles the baby could benefit from, our milk would be red. Maybe they're filtered out not because it's gross but just evolutionarily unnecessary.
Yup, totally fair enough on safety. I grew up as a Catholic in Puerto Rico, and whole obviously my mom and society would've preferred I stay Catholic, I wasn't ever in any danger, either...
Yup, totally fair enough on safety. I grew up as a Catholic in Puerto Rico, and whole obviously my mom and society would've preferred I stay Catholic, I wasn't ever in any danger, either physically or socially. My experience wouldn't be the same as someone in West Virginia, or God forbid Iran.
Yup, that's a really good point about a lot of these things just being local wisdom disguised as religion. In a pre internet era, you had to pass down wisdom somehow.
I also immediately need to say that as a man, a lot of the shitty religious stuff is patriarchal, so I'm coming from a privileged position there as well, good callout. My wife also had to put on headscarves so we could explore some mosques together, and while she didn't particularly mind, it's just one more thing that she has to do that I don't.
I've never heard of the blessing of the waters! I love little traditions like that.
I don't mind Communion as a sacrament! I did find it a strong spiritual experience when I was a Christian. But explaining to people not familiar with it is wild.
So the priest blesses the bread, which transfigures it into the flesh or our God. We then... eat the flesh, as a community. It sounds like something out of a Lovecraft story!
Communion really is strange, you are right. It was wild when Jesus instituted it and it freaked out his disciples and the early Church, it was scandalous and definitely a bigger deal than merely...
Communion really is strange, you are right. It was wild when Jesus instituted it and it freaked out his disciples and the early Church, it was scandalous and definitely a bigger deal than merely symbolically eat a bland biscuit as memorial gesture. The whole concept of you eat God, then you become god (theosis) is pretty wonderous and awesome.
It's usually my go to when someone makes fun of the Mexicans for thinking their ancestors become birds, or the Romans for their sacred chickens, or the Muslims for the amount of times they have to...
It's usually my go to when someone makes fun of the Mexicans for thinking their ancestors become birds, or the Romans for their sacred chickens, or the Muslims for the amount of times they have to bow. Man, we're all fucking weird, it's part and parcel of being human 🤣
As I understand it, you would throw feed at them, and depending on how they ate, you would look for portents. I don't think they ate them, but I'm not sure! The Romans had always been extremely...
As I understand it, you would throw feed at them, and depending on how they ate, you would look for portents.
I don't think they ate them, but I'm not sure! The Romans had always been extremely religious, so I would be surprised if they did.
I don't think those chickens were ritually slaughtered for augury too (and then eaten) but maybe at the end of their um, term, as sacred chicken they become sacred fried chicken. I know in the...
I don't think those chickens were ritually slaughtered for augury too (and then eaten) but maybe at the end of their um, term, as sacred chicken they become sacred fried chicken. I know in the past in the US chicken wasn't really a common meat crop because they were comparatively expensive and it was a more seasonal or rare food as they were raised for eggs. I don't know the history as far back as Rome though.
Of note you also typically didn't feed sacred chickens prior to your augury... Which meant their enthusiasm and thus the gods will was, shall we say, easily manipulated.
Edit because I got curious: there was actually a sumptuary law limiting chicken to no more than one (total not per person) per meal. It was a delicacy because they fattened the chickens up and even discovered that castration fattened them faster.
Couldn't find specifics but if chicken was a delicacy, old chicken augurs were probably on the menu, but maybe just of the priests.
But then sometimes the chickens didn't eat (then let drink instead!), and that was bad times, gods aren't happy right now. I don't actually know enough about sacrifice rules. My understanding is...
But then sometimes the chickens didn't eat (then let drink instead!), and that was bad times, gods aren't happy right now.
I don't actually know enough about sacrifice rules. My understanding is that you would sacrifice these animals to the gods, but the actual meat was eaten by the community. So the sacrifice serves a religious purpose, like damn near anything ancient people did, but it also served a community purpose, and economic purpose, a legitimising for the elites purpose.
Funny that chickens are now a common meat for us, but a delicacy for them!
Well and apparently chickens get seasick which would be the other major reason they don't eat, besides being fed shortly before. As for the sacrificial meat it depended on what was being killed I...
Well and apparently chickens get seasick which would be the other major reason they don't eat, besides being fed shortly before.
As for the sacrificial meat it depended on what was being killed I think, birds would probably have been small enough that only the priests got their cut but large public sacrifices were for the people (and large military ones for the army and so on).
I like Rome for its policy of orthopraxy over orthodoxy. Doesn't matter what you believe, it matters if you did the right offerings.
Chickens being commonly and cheaply available meat is really a modern thing afaik, with maybe some variations throughout like 10k years. The opposite of gentrification I suppose
I guess a little like lobsters, right? Used to be be what the peasants would eat before the rich realised that they were good eating and made them inaccessible to the poor. I think orthopraxy was...
I guess a little like lobsters, right? Used to be be what the peasants would eat before the rich realised that they were good eating and made them inaccessible to the poor.
I think orthopraxy was the norm, right? I mean, heresy and atheism were definitely concepts, but no one cared what you thought in the ancient world, just what you did. Ethnic religions are still like that. Shinto, Hinduism, and even Judaism all allow for things that would be considered heresy in Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism and other universal religions.
It feels really stupid when you see mini civil wars weaken the empire over whether Jesus had one nature both human and divine, or two natures of one human and one divine. You're never going to convince me that the mobs that were mobilised by some of the bishops had any idea what the fuck the difference was, because I sure don't.
Yeah kind of the reverse of the peasant food turned gourmet! I can't really speak for modern religions, I don't have the theological grounding outside of Roman Catholicism (and like neopaganism...
Yeah kind of the reverse of the peasant food turned gourmet!
I can't really speak for modern religions, I don't have the theological grounding outside of Roman Catholicism (and like neopaganism kind of, which I'd argue mostly has neither orthodoxy/praxy) to speak for what beliefs are expected. Like I know there are a variety of beliefs and practices in Hinduism but not enough to know whether there is expectation or pressure to adhere to any of them. And the big three Abe faiths all have multiple sects that split due to different dogma (and then praxis) But the wiki page for heresy has entries for a number of non-Abrahamic faiths too.
Much like today though, you don't have to get the mobs moving with actual facts, enough effort to make "those" people obviously evil goes a long way to raised pitchforks. (I uh, can explain that theological point but only because again, extensive Catholic education and I find things interesting.)
That's a good point, I really shouldn't generalise. It's not like Christianity doesn't have orthopraxy. Hell, the filoque dispute is one of the main causes of the schism between East and West, and...
That's a good point, I really shouldn't generalise. It's not like Christianity doesn't have orthopraxy. Hell, the filoque dispute is one of the main causes of the schism between East and West, and it revolves entirely around whether you're allowed to add "and from the Son" to the Creed.
Like I said elsewhere, I'm often sceptical of religious disputes being just religious. I often find they represent an ethnic or civil divide where each group, for whatever deep-seated reasons, interprets the same thing differently.
I'd agree that this is likely true, most of the time at least. Though I think detangling religion from other aspects of one's life can be hard for religious people. I'm thinking of the recent...
I'd agree that this is likely true, most of the time at least. Though I think detangling religion from other aspects of one's life can be hard for religious people. I'm thinking of the recent Methodist schism, both sides believe they're right about their faith and interpretation thereof in regards to queer ordination and marriage, and that belief is also deeply intertwined with the politics of the moment. But I don't think that makes it less of a religious divide either, the acceptability of those things is part of the dogma.
So there's definitely the "good us vs evil them" of it all, but religious (or again at least Christian) folks wouldn't make a distinction between the political/civil and the religious, since their religion is wrapped into their daily lives and political beliefs.
I think that makes sense, I feel a bit rambly
ETA and we do love a good filioque on the RCC side of things. Of course the real debate is who schismed and who is the real Church™ and obviously that is...˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗
No, I agree, I think it's probably difficult for a religious person to detach the actual belief system from everything else in their life, as it's part of them. To that person, adding a different...
No, I agree, I think it's probably difficult for a religious person to detach the actual belief system from everything else in their life, as it's part of them. To that person, adding a different explanation probably feels unnecessary.
I find the Catholic and Orthodox dispute about who's changed less so interesting because... they're both children of Nicaea and Chalcedon. Whatever Christianity was before the emperors got ahold of it, it was not either. They're both innovative.
I agree that people have been awful under every belief system. Thanks for saying it. Specifically, the explicitly atheist regimes of the USSR and the PRC could be very cruel and arbitrary, even...
I agree that people have been awful under every belief system. Thanks for saying it.
Specifically, the explicitly atheist regimes of the USSR and the PRC could be very cruel and arbitrary, even while sharing the necessities of life more effectively than their preceding economic/political systems.
The Aztecs were apparently noteworthy for ritual torture.
Yup. Like I say somewhere here, I very rarely blame religion for human atrocities,.or thobk that the death of religion will help with our social problems. If you take religion from a far right...
Yup. Like I say somewhere here, I very rarely blame religion for human atrocities,.or thobk that the death of religion will help with our social problems. If you take religion from a far right American conservative, you don't get a tolerate liberal. You get a far right American conservative that also now thinks that kindness and empathy are woke.
For many people, I would honestly say it was pretty good, particularly after the republic had fallen. The wars stopped, Roman law was pretty stable and strong, Romans mostly left you alone if you...
For many people, I would honestly say it was pretty good, particularly after the republic had fallen. The wars stopped, Roman law was pretty stable and strong, Romans mostly left you alone if you paid your taxes. There's a reason tribe after tribe after tribe would negotiate, and even invade, not to overthrow the empire, but to settle in its lands and become its subjects.
That's not to say we in the modern era would enjoy it. I just don't see how any pagan tempted by Christianity would think the empire was decadent or corrupt. Compared to what polity?
The reason I call that out is because there's been a trope in Christian circles (for over a millennium) that the Roman religion felt fake to the pagans of the empire and was empty anf soulless, so therefore Christianity was destined to fill the void. There's like... no evidence of this. Paganism hung on stubbornly to many regions in the empire, particularly in the home province of Italy, and it took force to remove it, and centuries of concerted effort. Christianity won, but this wasn't teleological. There were structural advantages, but also proximate events that really could've gone either way, like Constantine's eventual victory, or Julian's death in battle.
There's little in writing about how peasants lived because the people doing the writing didn't care much about them. But reasoning from what we know, it was really terrible. [...] From acoup.blog.
There's little in writing about how peasants lived because the people doing the writing didn't care much about them. But reasoning from what we know, it was really terrible.
What is going on here is the substantial impact of absolutely staggering infant and child mortality. Under these assumptions, by age 10, fully 50% of all children born are already dead; only about 45% of all children make it to adulthood as we generally define it (around 18 years). And as a reminder that is only for live births – we have not yet considered miscarriages, stillbirths or maternal mortality. This enormous child mortality rate is not an accident of a particular ancient society, but in fact an absolute constant for all pre-industrial societies, be they hunter-gatherers, pastoralists or farmers, be they urbanized or not, ‘civilized’ or not, ‘western’ or not. For all societies, everywhere at every time before about 1750 (and in most places for a long time after that) it was simply a fact of life that half, HALF of all children died.
[...]
First a high proportion of these societies at any given time were children, even by their standards of childhood (often ending between 15 and 17, not at 18). Generally about half of the population at any given time under this mortality regime is going to be age 15 and below, whereas for a modern population close to replacement that figure is going to be 20-25%. Children were thus socially omnipresent in a way that they simply aren’t in any modern industrial society (but are in some developing countries).
Equally, for societies with very low productivity the demand to feed that population means that pre-modern cultures do not have a ‘childhood’ as we understand it, as an extended vacation from work and adult life. Children were instead working in whatever capacity they were physically able as soon as they were physically able because these societies simply lacked the resources to support half of the population on a non-working basis (which is also going to be true when it comes to labor and gender, but we’ll get to that later in the series). This, of course, was especially true for our peasants, at the bottom of the society, whose work was necessary for its basic subsistence, but one gets the sense that childhoods were short and transition into work was common even among the higher rungs of society – for instance the age for an elite boy to become a page attending a knight was seven.
Yes, terrible compared to us. Pretty good compared to the chaos of the collapse of the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman republic. Pretty good compared the Egyptian civil war, the Celtic raids...
Yes, terrible compared to us. Pretty good compared to the chaos of the collapse of the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman republic. Pretty good compared the Egyptian civil war, the Celtic raids into Greece, the exploitative transactional nature of both Republican Rome and Carthaginian exploitation of Spain.
People can't possibly compare their life to what things would be like 2000 years from now. I am comparing their lifestyle to their contemporaries. And for a lot of them, it was pretty terrible even by those standards! But for another large part, it was pretty good.
I'll point that the Roman Empire never ever had large scale independence movements. In the Achaemenid Empire, when the king of kings died, Babylon and Egypt would try to seccede almost every time. The Ottomans spent a lifetime battling independence movements. The Chinese would break apart with alarming regularity. This never happened in the Roman state. The wars were about overthrowing the emperor, changing policies, faction warfare. But not a single coherent group ever tried to secede, and even when they empire broke apart before Aurelian restitched it together, they were all still Roman, and all call themselves the Roman Empire.
The empire also similarly never saw significant abolitionist movements, even from former slaves. Slaves were still abused and mistreated in all the ways slaves tend to be, but a freed slave could rise high in society, and their descendants could even become emperors. The extreme openness of Roman society (a quirk of history) allowed something that had never happened in this side of the world before; people started calling themselves Romans even having never visited the city of Rome.
It’s true that generals who had success in the provinces often tried to become emperor, and they often succeeded. Kind of an odd dynamic. Also, many local rulers would call themselves “Roman” even...
It’s true that generals who had success in the provinces often tried to become emperor, and they often succeeded. Kind of an odd dynamic.
Also, many local rulers would call themselves “Roman” even long after the western empire collapsed. It was a popular label. Maybe compare with all the countries that put “democratic” in their name nowadays?
I do see the concept of Roman citizenship as a set of legal rights that eventually were extended to all free people in the empire as pretty important in history.
But there were plenty of revolts and uprisings. I asked ChatGPT to make a list of the major ones. Looks like there were two slave uprisings in Sicily?
It seems like “large-scale” is doing a lot of work there. Revolts not becoming widespread might have more to do with a lack of cohesiveness between different peoples as well as poor communication over long distances. When the Jews revolted, why should anyone else join in?
The lack of abolition movements probably has more to do with the concept not being invented yet? After all, slavery was often the result of conquest. Slaves were an important form of loot. What good would a law after being conquered by foreigners?
All this has little to do with conditions for the average peasant.
It was ultimately a republic, in the eyes of the Romans. No one had an inherent right to rule. Anthony Kaldellis made the point that the Roman Empire is the polity that had the most amount of...
It's true that generals who had success in the provinces often tried to become emperor, and they often succeeded. Kind of an odd dynamic.
It was ultimately a republic, in the eyes of the Romans. No one had an inherent right to rule. Anthony Kaldellis made the point that the Roman Empire is the polity that had the most amount of civil wars that changed absolutely nothing about the underlying systems.
By the mediaeval era, the wars were extremely short at decisive.. Someone would show up at the walls of Constantinople with an army and start making campaign promises. They would either be let in and kill the emperor, or not be let in and be killed. Like a weird election.
Also, many local rulers would call themselves “Roman” even long after the western empire collapsed. It was a popular label. Maybe compare with all the countries that put “democratic” in their name nowadays?
They would've been Roman. Roman identity survived the death of the state, as identities often do. Many rulers lass laws that specifically separate their own people (e.g the Franks) from their Roman subjects. It took centuries for the Roman identity in the West to disappear.
I do see the concept of Roman citizenship as a set of legal rights that eventually were extended to all free people in the empire as pretty important in history.
Citizenship helped, but the Edict of Caracalla was just a recognition of reality of the ground. Not every Roman citizen thought of themselves as Roman. But all parts of the empire were slowly romanising into a collective identity. That process gets interrupted in places like Syria when the Arabs invaded, but completed in Greece and Anatolia, where the Hellenic self-identity completely dies off.
But there were plenty of revolts and uprisings. I asked ChatGPT to make a list of the major ones. Looks like there were two slave uprisings in Sicily?
Plenty of slave revolts (Spartacus being the most common one), no ideology of slave abolitionism. People didn't want to be slaves, but had no issues with slavery as a systems,.as.far as we can tell. We have tombs of people lamenting their enslavement who then go on to brag about how many slaves they had when they became emancipated.
It seems like “large-scale” is doing a lot of work there. Revolts not becoming widespread might have more to do with a lack of cohesiveness between different peoples as well as poor communication over long distances. When the Jews revolted, why should anyone else join in?
You named one of the only two groups in the empire with a coherent self-identity that were not easily romanised, the other being the Armenians. So yes, the Jews revolted. But never the Punics in the Middle East and North Africa, or the Egyptians,.or the Greeks, or the Celts, or the Assyrians, or the Illyrian.
It's not doing a lot of work, it was.extremely standard for the time for empires of this scale to face large rebellions when a ruler changed. It has nothing to do with communication,.Egypt and Babylon often rebelled against the Persians together because they both had large populations with dreams of independence. Not once did the Romans have to put down a pretender pharaoh, like the Persians had to.
The lack of abolition movements probably has more to do with the concept not being invented yet? After all, slavery was often the result of conquest. Slaves were an important form of loot. What good would a law after being conquered by foreigners?
Mass freedom of slaves has been invented. Emperors had to pass laws to prevent to many slaves from being freed when the owners died. They were writing it in their wills and it was starting to affect the economy.
Out of curiosity - and because I don't see it in the other comments - what drew you from pagan spirituality to Protestantism to Orthodoxy? It's not a pipeline that is super common these days to my...
Out of curiosity - and because I don't see it in the other comments - what drew you from pagan spirituality to Protestantism to Orthodoxy? It's not a pipeline that is super common these days to my knowledge and I'd love to know what you found enticing about it! If you're not comfortable sharing, no pressure at all! I'm just very curious.
I had a bit of the opposite move. I was raised going intermittently to Catholic church, then found myself as a staunch atheist, and now really love the world of folk spirituality. I don't really believe any of the tails, but I love learning about all the little myths, dieties, and creatures in them! We even celebrated Beltane this year with a bonfire and midnight swim! It feels much more in rhythm with my life and the ecosystems I spend time in.
Ah, I can't take credit for the first generational step, that was my mom. As a child and a teen she was really really afraid of dying. The local traditions were frightening and conflicting, at the...
Exemplary
Ah, I can't take credit for the first generational step, that was my mom. As a child and a teen she was really really afraid of dying. The local traditions were frightening and conflicting, at the time, a mix of Chinese Buddhism, Taoist, South East Asian hmmm magic (?), folk non specific beliefs, ancestral worship, and Communist atheism. There's a lot of stories and personal experiences from people, and weirdness, that materialists growing up in historically Christian places can't fully appreciate, I think.
Her older brother joined a Christian youth group for fun, she went as well, and she became convinced that that was it. There was a period where my mom and her parents were in a stand still, with my maternal grandfather striking her at one point, and she literally turned the other day cheek and just.... wore them down with love. Now our entire extended family is (Protestant non-denom) Christian, plus one Orthodox (myself) and one (Lutheran).
She never finished elementary school, her mom was a rescued child bride and her dad was a pirate/blue collar worker: none of the conversion process was theology based, all Praxis. For the older generation, the fact that the children have followed foreign gods and will refuse to bring offerings to support them in the afterlife, and abandon the ancestors, as well as in general following Western values instead of traditional Confucianism, was a huge deal. I'm glossing over it but it was a big transition/break.
To be fair to my mom, she would be the last person to claim being well educated, but she would always be curious about other people's religions and beliefs in a sincere way. If it was just youthful falling in, she had plenty of time and opportunity to choose a much easier religion that also feed the poor and welcome the downtrodden etc. That she, and our family, continue to believe is one of those things an outside observer will attribute to confirmation bias / selective reasoning, but from inside it feels like supernatural protection, leading, and blessings/comfort in hardship too many to be random/coincidental.
Apparently, the cultural (eg non practicing) Christian > atheist > pagan > Eastern Mysticism / Old Gods > Orthodoxy pipeline is very well in full swing right now in North America. A good number of inquirers and new converts I know personally are coming from that direction. People want to experience something, and to put names to secret fears and respond to unspeakable joy, to surrender themselves to something ancient and deep, and to have daily practices that go beyond cognitive acknowledgement.
I came to Orthodoxy via the shortcut of hating contemporary Christian music .... But at the beginning my head was spinning and I had many moments of panic / many months of struggled with literal biblical interpretation / sola scriptura / Mary the Mother of God / the existence or body or activities of Saints / etc.
Would it be weird if I tell you that Orthodoxy is absolutely the least dogmatic Christian community I've been in? (The most dogmatic was a Christian homeschooling group I failed to join.) We don't even say this is the only way to God: we were given this way in the form of traditions including the text and liturgical worship ("we have found the true faith / worshipping the undivided Trinity / who has saved us"), but we can't say that other ways do not lead to God.
But yeah the old myths and seasonal events are super cool! There is definitely a rhythm to the seasons, the day and night and each day, and a connection to each other, nature, and life that is found in the universe that is missing from cold pews, and silent texts. I hadn't heard of Beltane before but I'm willing to wager the celebration sees more new comers every year ?
Edit!! Forgive me, I shouldn't have used the word pipeline, to suggest something inevitably goes from one the the next and any of the in between are temporary stops not as complete ends in themselves. a journey then, like yourself, people choose different participation into what is true and good by their best judgement
That was one of the most interesting reads in a while!! I'd love to hear more but only if you're excited to share, no pressure at all! I'm so interested in learning more about the religion your...
That was one of the most interesting reads in a while!! I'd love to hear more but only if you're excited to share, no pressure at all!
I'm so interested in learning more about the religion your mom grew up under this sounds incredible:
The local traditions were frightening and conflicting, at the time, a mix of Chinese Buddhism, Taoist, South East Asian hmmm magic (?), folk non specific beliefs, ancestral worship, and Communist atheism. There's a lot of stories and personal experiences from people, and weirdness, that materialists growing up in historically Christian places can't fully appreciate, I think.
I really like the idea of locally cobbled religions. They feel so specific not only to a region, but familialy. Also, can we get some background on
her dad was a pirate
That's wild!
I have never thought of Orthodox as being the least dogmatic, but in light of the current white christian nationalist movements, I can see that happening. Wild that the folks who used to seem the most out of touch are now seemingly the most rational. It's been a wild decade.
I was writing a bunch of folks worship examples when the page refreshed and I lost the draft. Take that as my cue to not speak about things I don't understand 'x' The goal of them all is for...
I was writing a bunch of folks worship examples when the page refreshed and I lost the draft. Take that as my cue to not speak about things I don't understand 'x'
The goal of them all is for cultural cohesion, respecting ones ancestral roots, feeling safe again after something terrible, having someone else acknowledge difficulties, and many many ways of praying for blessings. Look up Cantonese wedding culture, that one seems fun and positive.
Re: dogmatism
In Orthodoxy, there's a concept I didn't encounter in Protestantism, of economia (wiki), where rules are applied with flexibility in each home (oiko / eco), the older meaning of economy as in household peduent management. From Wikipedia:
discretionary deviation from the letter of the law in order to adhere to the spirit of the law and charity. This is in contrast to legalism, or akribia (Greek: ακριβεια), which is strict adherence to the letter of the law of the church.
Small example, on fast days your kid is hungry, by all means feed the poor thing even if there's only burger places nearby, and you should eat too if your fainting is going to just distract yourself and others in prayer. Try again next time if there's ability to prepare nutritious vegan snacks. "All things are lawful, but not all things are beneficial". The practices are for our benefit, not to hurt us. See also Jesus healing on the Sabbath etc.
Example: we should be quiet in the Church during worship. But we also semi-seriously call cries from babies Holy Noise: this is a household, we absolutely want there to be babies.
I know we've talked a bit about Orthodoxy after I joined Tildes in DMs, and I wanted to say I appreciate you taking the time to type out yours and your family's journey of faith! It was an...
I know we've talked a bit about Orthodoxy after I joined Tildes in DMs, and I wanted to say I appreciate you taking the time to type out yours and your family's journey of faith! It was an interesting read and reminds me of my Mother in law who converted to Christianity as an early teenager in Southeast Asia and then eventually converted her family.
I've still been needing to dive in to the resources you shared, as I sit in a more baptist/non-denominational church background after becoming an adult and learning about the history of the church/theology and the different faiths are fascinating. Typing this comment out has got thinking I'll be setting aside some time for further reading outside my normal scripture/devotional time.
I do find the emphasis on the liturgical calendar and tradition fascinating and I know that the deep roots of the church are very desirable, and I even recently listened to a sermon series from my past non-denominational church that was specifically focused on drawing upon the roots of faith/doctrine/history/examples that has been built up over the millennia.
her dad was a pirate/blue collar worker
When I read this I pictured someone taking off a stereotypical pirate hate and then putting on a tie while sitting in front of a spreadsheet to calculate the latest haul of treasure/goods and ensuring that the proper taxes are filed for their gains with some sort of pirate governing body/local government.
Random crew members: "We're supposed to receive 1 share each, this is less than our total share!"
Blue collar pirate dad: "I've deducted your taxes for this raid and your share of operating expenses, so you are receiving your net share. If you have any complaints regarding pay, please file the appropriate form, and it will be processed by the Captain and Officers at their next operations meeting."
Blue collar, Pekt! :D pirate grandpa would have been the one wondering why the paycheque seems smaller this month, and some pointy haired boss giving him the jargon filled lecture. His land job...
Blue collar, Pekt! :D pirate grandpa would have been the one wondering why the paycheque seems smaller this month, and some pointy haired boss giving him the jargon filled lecture. His land job was a boring paper factory/ printing house. We would occasionally get beautiful coffee table books with a missing cover, or some other small defects. He probably chose it based on knowing a guy who needs a guy basis, rather than interest or expertise, but he stayed there for decades until retirement.
Sailing was a common job in his day for younger men selling their labour who is able to be gone for a year at a time away from home. Apparently in the 50-70s about 80,000 Hongkonger sailed, being port city. Sometimes , demand for foreign goods highly depend on fast and cheap, proper import taxes and procedures be danged. Before GPS, lidar depth maps, satellite weather prediction, it was a very dangerous profession, and the family never really knew where he was going or when he would be coming back. Just read this article that said they would rely on unique lighthouse light patterns to figure out where they are and how to navigate through rocky straits (Chinese, about HK maritime museum).
He had a lot of tall tales of his sailing days, which I'm not totally sure about, including one about how he was in a European city square with many many pigeons, and him and a buddy rounded some up in burlap sacks. In the tale, some busy body disapproving local would come investigate, and he would give them some kind of reason that turns the situation around, and the local would end up helping pirate grandpa round up more birds. I honestly don't remember if the reason ever made any sense or were just funny themselves, but the tale of delicious free birds + locals getting duped was always the focal point.
It looks like I'm online collar color-blind haha, thank you for taking the time to share all of that! I was recently talking with a coworker regarding how fun it is to talk to grandparents and get...
It looks like I'm online collar color-blind haha, thank you for taking the time to share all of that!
I was recently talking with a coworker regarding how fun it is to talk to grandparents and get stories like this. Learning family history and also hearing about a different time, and then being able to pass those stories along to our children to whom it will sound like ancient times.
Also I've never eaten a pigeon, and have heard about them carrying pathogens and other things which has kept me from trying them without knowing where they were sourced from. I've wondered how they taste though.
There's probably farmed squab where you live :) it's like duck meat: dark and juicy but really itty bitty sized. Chinese restaurants do a great job frying them m
There's probably farmed squab where you live :) it's like duck meat: dark and juicy but really itty bitty sized. Chinese restaurants do a great job frying them m
You're spot on I found some places after a quick search, so I'll need to go and give them a try. I also did not know what "squab" was and had to look it up. I may have seen this as an option...
You're spot on I found some places after a quick search, so I'll need to go and give them a try. I also did not know what "squab" was and had to look it up. I may have seen this as an option before and not know that it was pigeon.
Hopefully I remember to tell you how I find it when I do get around to trying it.
I honestly don't know too much about that. I swim in the ocean every day and I kind of glombed onto it two years ago when 2 mom/pup harbor seals followed us into the cove we swim from on Beltane...
I honestly don't know too much about that. I swim in the ocean every day and I kind of glombed onto it two years ago when 2 mom/pup harbor seals followed us into the cove we swim from on Beltane one year. I had heard about it and its association with Selkies from the game A Highland Song (excellent if you haven't played it!). I looked it up after I played the game, about a month later, and saw that it had happened on May 1st!!! After that I celebrated every year! There are just a few of us who do it here, mostly friends and other swim folk.
This year we actually had a very funny Beltane because the local burner/burlesque groups did a witches event as a middle finger to our new Secretary of the Navy. I'm blowing up where I live a little bit, but it meant there were lots of folks keen to join this year!
I'm a fan of this song to celebrate. But I'm agnostic and thus it's not religiously specific. First of May - Jonathan Coulton -NSFW @chocobean I've seen Beltane Blessings or Beltane Greetings from...
I'm a fan of this song to celebrate. But I'm agnostic and thus it's not religiously specific.
So bring your favourite lady 🎵 I remember the first time I heard JoCo play this live at PAX :) I don't have the money to go on his cruises but it still sounds like a fun time after all these years
So bring your favourite lady 🎵
I remember the first time I heard JoCo play this live at PAX :) I don't have the money to go on his cruises but it still sounds like a fun time after all these years
Sure! The route we swim passes a pupping beach that is frequented by harbor seals in the spring/summer. The adults are usually very wary or slightly aggressive towards swimmers, but the pups are...
Sure! The route we swim passes a pupping beach that is frequented by harbor seals in the spring/summer. The adults are usually very wary or slightly aggressive towards swimmers, but the pups are super curious. They swim with us for miles! Just bobbing and weaving across the sea floor below us (maybe 10-20 feet) and come up now and then for a closer inspection when they think we're not looking. We've had some really fun encounters with them.
This day was absolutely wild though. Usually it's just the pups that check us out, but they'll usually turn at the mouth of the cove as it's a heavily trafficked tourist beach. On this particular morning however two pups followed us all the way in and swam circles around us for about 5 minutes. My wife had met me at the water - she'll sometimes take a dip and we'd walk home together - and so she got to experience too! So we're all just standing in like waist deep water in shock when the mother harbor seals swim into the cove. They didn't come close and their presence ended the pups fun, but the whole experience was just unbelievable. Like, I don't think my wife would have believed me had she not shown up. It was awesome! Doubly so that it was Beltane!
It's not uncommon for us to have really interesting experiences with wildlife while we're out there and it makes me think that before we heavily de-wilded the planet, these kinds of experiences would have been much more common place. Like you can feel the curiosity and get some insight into what the baby seals are thinking when they check you out. You can understand the communication between the moms and their pups. Hell, even the fish seem to have little personalities. I think we're so detached from nature that it's easy to diminish shintoism or Dine spiritual practices as anthropomorphic. But there really is a whole universe out there that folks are missing out on!
That sounds wonderful and magical, and you're right that there is a lot of enchantment we've been missing out on. Treating earth like just a piggy bank to be raided, instead of a living network...
That sounds wonderful and magical, and you're right that there is a lot of enchantment we've been missing out on. Treating earth like just a piggy bank to be raided, instead of a living network that has its own kind of consciousness and (dare I say) a different kind of will.
That's a really good question. I drove through rural eastern Indiana recently and I was surprised by all the Indian restaurants, gas stations, etc. I didn't expect that area to have anything but...
Why did the Persians end up praising the ashuras and the Indiana the devas?
That's a really good question. I drove through rural eastern Indiana recently and I was surprised by all the Indian restaurants, gas stations, etc. I didn't expect that area to have anything but white people.
I know you were just replying in fun for the misspelling, but interesting fact about trucking in the United States, Punjabi, and particularly Sikh, represent a very large proportion of the US...
I know you were just replying in fun for the misspelling, but interesting fact about trucking in the United States, Punjabi, and particularly Sikh, represent a very large proportion of the US trucking fleet. Something like 20% nationwide, going to 40% on the West Coast. A knock-on effect of this is that you will see Indian restaurants and food across the interstates everywhere.
Yup, and I recognise the limitations of human mortality, but it's still a big weakness. If I play Final Fantasy VII Rebirth 100 times for 50 years, I would probably become the world expert at the...
Yup, and I recognise the limitations of human mortality, but it's still a big weakness. If I play Final Fantasy VII Rebirth 100 times for 50 years, I would probably become the world expert at the game and be able to talk about its details in a way most people would never be able to follow. But I can't then assert that it's the best made game of all time, because I have nothing to compare it to.
Muslims, for example, have their own religious and teleological explanations for how they went from a small confederation of tribes in southern Arabia to swallowing two huge empires that went back millennia to founding Caliphates that stretched from Spain to India. But I doubt Dr Hart would be unable to engage with the centuries of dialogue around those justifications. Which is fine! But it's a black hole that theologians don't often acknowledge.
The choice isn't Christianity or atheism. It's that or Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism or any of the 10,000 universal and ethnic religions out there, all with their own dizzying histories and mythologies. As I mildly poked fun at the end, I am not surprised at a Christian digging really deep into the meaning of existence and coming out the other end as a Christian. It was always going to be the culturally easiest and most familiar choice.
The Kalam cosmological argument is the most respected defense of theism in analytic philosophy. It is based on an argument by Persian Muslim philosopher Al-Ghazali, who lived in the 12th century.
The Kalam cosmological argument is the most respected defense of theism in analytic philosophy. It is based on an argument by Persian Muslim philosopher Al-Ghazali, who lived in the 12th century.
I confess that I'm way out of my depth here, but just the first two premises: Are these true? The description says that premise 1 if self-evident, which doesn't sound like a great way to start the...
I confess that I'm way out of my depth here, but just the first two premises:
Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
Premise 2: The universe began to exist.
Are these true? The description says that premise 1 if self-evident, which doesn't sound like a great way to start the argument! We don't know anything about the pre Big Bang period, so I dunno that we can say anything with confidence about how cause and effect worked before the laws of reality that we're familiar with existed.
I am also not a philosopher so IDK. But the argument is respected by non-theists. I assume you have to read the entire book to really understand its nuances. Or at least some of his articles on...
I am also not a philosopher so IDK. But the argument is respected by non-theists. I assume you have to read the entire book to really understand its nuances. Or at least some of his articles on the subject.
That's fair enough, I certainly don't know enough to say anything with certainty. These old arguments have had hundreds of humans much smarter than I am spend lifetimes discussing them. It was...
That's fair enough, I certainly don't know enough to say anything with certainty. These old arguments have had hundreds of humans much smarter than I am spend lifetimes discussing them.
It was just my immediate reaction that the premises read... I dunno, a bit 20th Century. Whereas we now generally realise that we can't really apply logic and common sense to, say, observations in QM, or what we think a black hole might do. We just follow the math and iterate from there. The universe is just way to weird to have self-evident premises about it, is my lay gut feel!
Not a philosopher either, . The cosmological argument is not a very convincing one, even if it isn't particularly wrong, either. Most philosophers today can point to a few solid critiques of it,...
Not a philosopher either, but I play one on TV. The cosmological argument is not a very convincing one, even if it isn't particularly wrong, either. Most philosophers today can point to a few solid critiques of it, going back to early modernity.
I've spent a long portion of my life researching these kinds of neutral theological arguments, and I'm not sure any really hold up under interpersonal scrutiny. If there is a God, or are gods, in the kind of simplistic way that terminally modern atheists strawman and some misled souls actually believe, then the only good reason to believe is going to be in the eye of the beholder. If our God/gods exist as most actually tend to believe (speaking to a broad set of disparate beliefs), then looking for a logical root at the beginning of time starts to feel fallacious and beside the actual point.
The only point for articles like these is to do the hard work of browbeating reductionist believers in Scientism until they go back to their inglorious pits. Science has its limits, because communication and logic have theirs, and in that space of Meaning beyond truth is where anyone builds their conception of deity, should they decide to.
Edit: wanted to clarify that I'm aware this is not a dissimilar argument from Kalam, but that's kind of the issue with bringing it up as an argument "for God".
I don't have much to say. But /r/askphilosophy is excellent and full of academics. Nowadays only verified academics can make top-level comments over there. Here's a search for "Kalam" in that sub.
I don't have much to say. But /r/askphilosophy is excellent and full of academics. Nowadays only verified academics can make top-level comments over there. Here's a search for "Kalam" in that sub.
yup I just went through the Critique of Pure Reason a few months ago, Kant's pretty ruthless with it. Hell, I don't even particularly agree with Kant, but he wasn't wrong there.
I just went through the Critique of Pure Reason a few months ago, Kant's pretty ruthless with it. Hell, I don't even particularly agree with Kant, but he wasn't wrong there.
I’ve only skimmed the article, but they don’t say “unique,” they say “new,” and it seems likely that the combination of monotheism and universalism (not based in one city or region and anyone can...
I’ve only skimmed the article, but they don’t say “unique,” they say “new,” and it seems likely that the combination of monotheism and universalism (not based in one city or region and anyone can join) was understood to be pretty different to the people who lived in the Roman empire at that time.
We don’t know for sure why Christianity became so popular with the ancient Greeks and Romans, but that doesn’t mean we have to throw up our hands and say it was random. The ideological content likely played some role. This popularity can’t be explained by it becoming the state religion because it became popular first and then became the state religion a few centuries later, in 313. Constantine was going along with a trend that was well under way.
After Christianity becomes the state religion of the Roman empire, things do change quite a bit. In particular, religious disputes became much more prominent. The Christians cared what people believed, not just that they did the rituals correctly. Now they had the power and the emperor making laws about religion was considered as legitimate as other laws. Modern religious tolerance hadn’t been invented yet.
Other aspects of Christianity resulted in a state religion that was different, such raising the status of the poor and an emphasis on charity towards the poor, which resulted things like building hospitals. I don’t imagine those hospitals were any good by modern standards, but I don’t think the Romans built them before that?
I think it’s fair to say that other popular world religions and ideologies also had reasons why they became popular, but they were sometimes different reasons. Being adopted by the powerful definitely gives an ideology an edge, though.
From my understanding, one of the major contributing factors to the rise in the popularity of Christianity in the Roman world was its appeal and accessibility to the lower classes. Many of the...
From my understanding, one of the major contributing factors to the rise in the popularity of Christianity in the Roman world was its appeal and accessibility to the lower classes.
Many of the mystery cults that flourished in the first and second centuries CE required some amount of wealth to participate, as animal sacrifice was often a component of their central rites. If you were a devotee of Mithras, for example, you would likely have to contribute toward the purchase of a sacrificial bull. This was in line with the orthodox religious observances of the time, in which the wealthy held a privileged position by dint of their ability to give high-value offerings.
The central rite of Christianity on the other hand has always only ever required some bread and watered wine, two things which even the poorest plebeian could scrape together. Together with Jesus' teachings to eschew worldly possessions, his disdain for commerce in the temple, and his insistence that the meek shall inherit the earth, Christianity offered a compelling deal to the impoverished and otherwise disenfranchised of the early Empire.
That's certainly not the whole story, but I contend it's an important factor.
Ultimately, it was a very Roman religion. Christianity was an open mystery cult, which made it pretty rare. Coincidentally and similarly, one of the things that made Rome unique as a city-state...
Ultimately, it was a very Roman religion. Christianity was an open mystery cult, which made it pretty rare. Coincidentally and similarly, one of the things that made Rome unique as a city-state was how open their citizenship was compared to places like Athens, Sparta, Carthage, etc. Well before Christianity, the Roman's own mythos about their origins (even amongst the elite) was that Rome had been a city of criminals, exiles and ne'er-do-wells. It lined pretty well with the Christian mythos.
Sorry, when I said that I dunno, I meant it literally. I don't know enough about the history of religion in the empire. I know monotheism wasn't unique. The process by which Yahweh had eaten the...
Sorry, when I said that I dunno, I meant it literally. I don't know enough about the history of religion in the empire. I know monotheism wasn't unique. The process by which Yahweh had eaten the rest of the pantheon had already happened in Iran for Ahura Mazda, Ashur in Assyria, and had mostly happened to Marduk before Babylon had fallen. Pantheons consolidating into monotheism seems to have been a common Near Eastern phenomenon. Neither was consolidating monotheism with universalism special either, Zoroastrianism was well on that path by the time of the Parthians. Why specifically Christianity? The openness, as you say, bad a big effect. Why was it so open? That I'm not sure about, I don't know enough about early Christianity. I also don't know how every other mystery cult compared.
And you point out another unique aspect of Christianity, in that it uniquely cared about uniformity of thought, not of practice. Again, I personally don't know how early this developed. Certainly by the time the Romans got ahold of it, serious doctrinal disputes had already arisen. Islam would later build on this model as well.
In regards to hospitals, when talking about the Roman east (where Christianity spread and was not imposed, like in Italy), I think so? Asclepions were definitely a thing in the Hellenistic east. Don't know common they were compared to hospitals. Not sure how many were sponsored by the state, but the state sponsoring so much was a development unique to the Romans, as the elites left their local power bases behind and went to Rome (or Constantinople). Same.l reasons that sacrifices stopped, was the civil and social justification disappeared, and it no longer made any sense for local elites to showcase their wealth as they left it to the state.
But yeah, there's definitely reasons, that someone far more educated than me can go into with greater confidence!
As someone that was not born in a religious family I honestly find it hard to comprehend how people like the interviewee think. To me, there needs no more argument to believe that there isn’t a...
As someone that was not born in a religious family I honestly find it hard to comprehend how people like the interviewee think. To me, there needs no more argument to believe that there isn’t a God than simply the fact that the Bible does not make a particularly strong argument for its existence.
I’ve read the Bible I’d argue more closely than most people, since I took a few classes on esoteric Christian sects in college for fun. It seems so clear to me that the Old Testament is an Iron Age religious text, which documents the beliefs and practices of a specific tribe. It’s clear the God in that work existed in a polytheistic world - why else would it need to be so jealous and such a dick about things. It’s clear that it shares a heritage with Baal, the storm god worshipped elsewhere in the region. Yahweh is just one version of Baal. He’s so far from omnipotent and and omniscient and all loving. The scope of the work is so limited and focused on a tiny slice of humanity. While the Israelites were going around in the desert, great empires had already formed in the Yangtze River valleys. And the middling power of the kingdoms of Judah, whose heights were at most a regional power being dominated by its more powerful neighbors, is the kingdom of the universal god?
And it’s also clear how in the New Testament, the apostles had a pretty naked power grab after Jesus died. Like it’s so transparent and there in the subtext the way that they “conveniently” had visions from Jesus that it was a fabrication to solidify their power over the people of their cult (in a non-derogatory sense). It’s something we’ve seen time and time again in more modern recorded history, from Mormonism to JWs to Scientology.
If there isn’t strong evidence to believe in something, you don’t.
The problem is that we’re still using a model that was perfected through the exclusion of all the properties of the mental. It is impossible, using that model, to make sense of the phenomena of consciousness.
I find this hard to take seriously in a world where we have carefully dissected and mapped the neurons of a fruit fly, modeled those with a computer model, and observed fruit-fly behavior replicated in a simulation.
Partially jumping off of your point, I think people have this idea that Judaism (and therefore Christianity) was somewhat special. An old religion worshipping a one true God in a sea of...
Partially jumping off of your point, I think people have this idea that Judaism (and therefore Christianity) was somewhat special. An old religion worshipping a one true God in a sea of polytheism. But this just wasn't true.
Judaism came from Yahwism, which is well documented. Yahweh was the head of a polytheistic pantheon. Asherah was his consort. Baal was there too. It was a normal ethnic religion.
It did become monotheistic, but this was normal as well. The same process was happening with Ashur in Assyria and Marduk in Babylonia. The same process successfully finished in Iran with Ahurza Mazda, who is still worshipped today. A consolidation into the single national god of the ethnic group was a phenomenon occurring everywhere in the Near East.
Not much in the Old Testament would be out of place if we found it in Assyria or Babylon (if it had survived a bit longer). People go to war, their war god blesses or curses depending on the situation, the chosen people triumph. The names and locations would change, but this entire region's religious developments had been linked to each other ever since the days Sumer established literacy.
I once read a book that had a small bit riffing on this, where a character stuck in an alternate history timeline asks about Christianity, but finds that here Ahura Mazda is more popular and is...
I once read a book that had a small bit riffing on this, where a character stuck in an alternate history timeline asks about Christianity, but finds that here Ahura Mazda is more popular and is said to have intervened when the Romans tried to crucify Yeshua and in so doing taken "the Yeshuans" into the Zoroastrian fold for a time.
It was The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson. (To be clear, it's not at all a major part of the book, just a brief joke to show how out of his element...
It was The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson. (To be clear, it's not at all a major part of the book, just a brief joke to show how out of his element the main character is by upending his assumption.)
Different book, but the Kushiel's Dart series is an alternate history fantasy earth where the Yeshuites live in a very nomadic form and are considered odd for being "monotheists" when a number of...
Different book, but the Kushiel's Dart series is an alternate history fantasy earth where the Yeshuites live in a very nomadic form and are considered odd for being "monotheists" when a number of Angels literally walked the earth and gave birth to the people of Terre D'Ange (fantasy France) with one commandment above all "Love as Thou Wilt." (Which humans then fail at a lot) They are descended from and pledge themselves to different angels/bloodlines of angels and they all took different angles on the whole thing. (Content warnings abound)
Personally the Yeshuites read very Jewish but also maybe Roma? It's been a while though so now I'm due for a reread.
Note: My background is I was raised Catholic. I'm not an atheist but I am not currently religious. There are a number of problematic things about religion in general, and Christianity in...
Note: My background is I was raised Catholic. I'm not an atheist but I am not currently religious.
There are a number of problematic things about religion in general, and Christianity in particular, that should cause people to be suspicious. Here are just a few things
The religion is highly focused on the importance of faith. It's the most important thing of all! You should notice that means you are being asked to believe something that has no proof. We wouldn't have to cover this topic if you could actually see God in the sky or something.
It promises invisible rewards in a future life. That way, you will be content with this one where the leaders take most of the resources for themselves. The poor will be rewarded after they die! Don't worry about how much gold the king has hoarded. Convenient.
The religion itself is not protected from charlatans, grifters, and evildoers. There has been a lot of violence and crime that arose out of various heresies and misrepresentations. You may say "yes, of course, humans are involved and they commit sin". Yeah, but the religion says that faith is the most important thing! Faith in what? Tammy Faye Baker? Jim Jones? Trump? The "one true version" of Christianity? Which one? The vast majority of Christians don't even follow the official teachings. Instead they follow popular supernaturalism or some buffet of things they picked and chose. For example, the extreme focus on sexuality by many Christians is not supported by the text.
Specific random thing: The 10 commandments in general is very odd. It is too largely focused on believing the religion itself and following authority. Maybe there are four things on the list that are actually related to practical morality (don't hurt people). The rest are focused on "sins against a God" and "obey authority".
Another specific random thing: For something that has been divinely inspired, the Bible sure has a lot of repetition and internal inconsistency. Could really use an editor to give the Gospels one coherent author, for example.
BTW there is a core message in there that is obviously very nice and comforting by many people. It's just a shame that it's constantly being leveraged by the powerful to do evil.
Only curious about the fruit fly part: is behaviour all of consciousness and motivation? You're taking about this 2024 Berkeley, Shiu news right? Where if we give the model the signal for sugar...
Only curious about the fruit fly part: is behaviour all of consciousness and motivation?
You're taking about this 2024 Berkeley, Shiu news right? Where if we give the model the signal for sugar water, we can predict the neurons for moving its proboscis will light up in a way that it does not for bitter water? That's very far from being able to simulate an entire being. If they have subsequently done more please let me know, it's very exciting stuff. From the link:
Shiu cautioned, however, that his computer model of neurons and their connections, or synapses, is a rather elementary one, simulating synaptic connections in a simplistic way he referred to as a “leaky integrate-and-fire computational model” in which neurons fire if they get more positive than negative inputs.
“We essentially ignore all of the different morphologies of individual neurons and assume all excitatory or inhibitory neurons work the same, which we know isn’t the case,”
I'm not able to understand the research too much, but it seems like the application is matching stimulus to responsible neurons, and not demonstrating consciousness via running a well built sim.
But. I'm not going to "God in the Gap". Let's say there is absolutely no God. Let's say we can perfectly neural simulate 1 million fruit flies, and compare them to behaviour of 1 million actual fruit flies. Would we expect a small percentage, or even just one in a million, one individual who seems less motivated by sugar water than others, or one who paints with its own spit seemingly for fun, or one who somehow stayed with a "friend" fruit fly when it is injured? If none of them do, if the sim flies are just hardware put to visualized software, are the real animals mere automatons? Are we all animals that are really just automatons?
I think the author is arguing for what lies beyond, after we can perfectly explain every physical mechanism. Its fair enough, though, if you think there won't be anything, just that this is where you and the author are differing on conclusions past where we don't yet have definitive proof.
I’m not saying we’ve replicated consciousness, rather there’s no gap in our mechanistic understanding of brains. If what the author said is true, we would have evidence that points to X, but the...
I'm not able to understand the research too much, but it seems like the application is matching stimulus to responsible neurons, and not demonstrating consciousness via running a well built sim.
I’m not saying we’ve replicated consciousness, rather there’s no gap in our mechanistic understanding of brains. If what the author said is true, we would have evidence that points to X, but the empirical analysis of actual brains would point to Y. There would be a gap, some missing element that would necessitate a “spirit” in the same way the expansion of the universe necessitates dark matter.
There’s no such thing, though. We continue to make progress on our understanding of the brain and there hasn’t been any spirits confounding it.
Would we expect a small percentage, or even just one in a million, one individual who seems less motivated by sugar water than others, or one who paints with its own spit seemingly for fun, or one who somehow stayed with a "friend" fruit fly when it is injured?
I don’t see why not. Everything we know about neural biology supports models capable of large amounts of variance, both in its initial state and it its development over the lifetime of the creature.
Its fair enough, though, if you think there won't be anything, just that this is where you and the author are differing on conclusions past where we don't yet have definitive proof.
I think that presents a false dichotomy. Both positions are not logical equals. The default to not having evidence is to not believe something. If I were to say that there is a race of sentient lizard people on Mars who live underground, that is something I’m saying with no evidence. If you were to “not believe” in it, it’s the default - it’s up to me to prove it.
I’ve only skimmed the article so far, but I’d like to come back and read it in detail if I have time because it’s an interesting one… From my quick read, two things strike me, both of which seem...
I’ve only skimmed the article so far, but I’d like to come back and read it in detail if I have time because it’s an interesting one…
From my quick read, two things strike me, both of which seem like a recurring theme when I hear theological ideas from clearly intelligent, thoughtful, and well read believers:
There’s at least some rejection of the mainstream church, in favour of constructing one’s own morality: “So as I say, dogma and tradition as such don’t compel me. If I find them deficient, I feel no moral or intellectual obligation to take them seriously.”
There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what the scientific method actually entails: I don’t have a snappy quote for this one, but he’s essentially asserting that materialistic thought fundamentally can’t explain consciousness (debatable), and then using that to suggest science fundamentally can’t explain consciousness (despite saying earlier that science has moved away from pure materialism). It’s a conflation of “hasn’t explained” or “can’t currently explain” with “is fundamentally incapable of explaining” that I often see from thinkers like this.
The first point almost always leaves me asking whether these people are religious in the sense that the average person would understand it, or are they effectively freelance believers, forging their own philosophical path with existing religious texts as a broad map?
The second leaves me asking whether they are missing some pages from the map that might have nudged their path a little if they’d had them… Not in the reddit atheist sense of “oh if they knew the facts they’d abandon belief”, more just in the literal sense that I think it would make their conclusions more robust, and I’d be more interested in their theology and religious philosophy if it did a better job of accounting for the non-religious approach.
About explanation it's also important to contrast the scientific explanations (or lack thereof) with the alternatives, because they often have serious issues of their own; e.g. for consciousness...
About explanation it's also important to contrast the scientific explanations (or lack thereof) with the alternatives, because they often have serious issues of their own; e.g. for consciousness dualism has the interaction problem (how non-causal "stuff" influences matter/causal stuff), panpsychism has the recombination problem (how small consciousnesses makes a big one), plus these theories also often have lower prior probabilities. Theists will often just assume that their explanations work when they don't.
It seems to me that he's making a classic God of the gaps argument, but with more better education and more words. It still relies on the same logical fallacy though. The thing is that science...
It seems to me that he's making a classic God of the gaps argument, but with more better education and more words.
It still relies on the same logical fallacy though.
The thing is that science never claimed to be able to explain everything.
It's a massive logical leap to go from "science can't explain everything" to "and thus God and his divine son, Jesus Christ are real and our Savior".
God doesn't need to exist for science to not explain, or not even be able to explain everything. It's entirely possible for some things to just be unknowable without a mystical being controlling the whole universe.
To be fair to them, we can't even really define consciousness. Of course science can't explain something that can't be defined. You usually need to know what you're studying in order to study it,...
To be fair to them, we can't even really define consciousness. Of course science can't explain something that can't be defined. You usually need to know what you're studying in order to study it, and something that isn't philosophy can't mesh well with something that is philosophical. It's not a failing of science so much as it's just a definition of science.
I'd throw that into the "can't currently define" bucket - I think it's fair to say we might never come to a falsifiable definition of what consciousness actually is, or of what the mind is as...
I'd throw that into the "can't currently define" bucket - I think it's fair to say we might never come to a falsifiable definition of what consciousness actually is, or of what the mind is as distinct from the brain and body. But I think it's also fair to say we might manage it at some point!
For what it's worth, I don't personally think these questions are likely to exist fundamentally outside the realm of the testable, and I'd want at least a millennium more of scientific advancement with little to no progress on the topic before I'd be willing to throw them into the "yeah, most likely not testable" bucket.
We've only even had fMRI for 30 years or so, for example - and I'm not even saying that's the tool to answer the question, I'm more saying that when it comes to the brain, let alone the mind, we've been doing the equivalent of trying to theorise about the origin of disease without even having a basic microscope even within my own lifetime. Let's get analysis on a century of fMRIs, another century of analysis on whatever magic quantum state scanner we end up building to replace that, a century or two of computational development until we can simulate every neuron in a brain with near-complete accuracy rather than as a heavily simplified analogy. Then let's hypothesise on whether the origin of consciousness is a truly fundamental mystery that cannot be isolated, or whether it's just a very very very hard question to answer.
I guess what I'm saying is that humanity has had a lot of things we've believed to be unknowable over the centuries, and the vast majority of them have turned out to be knowable once we had the tools and foundational understanding to do so. If consciousness is a fundamental outlier, which it could be, that's tricky because it's going to be an open question forever: you can't prove a negative, you'd need a working definition in order to conclusively show it's undefinable, which is obviously a paradox. But falling back to "balance of probabilities" on that basis, I think it's pretty early to make a call on a subject we've barely scratched the surface of in a truly rigorous way.
For your second point, I think this is hinting on an innate tendency humans have towards tribalism and opposition. For some reason many people put science and religion in opposition. This is...
For your second point, I think this is hinting on an innate tendency humans have towards tribalism and opposition. For some reason many people put science and religion in opposition. This is especially the case (in my experience) with American religious sects. If you actually look to the Catholic Church, they have had the Pontifical Academy of Sciences for almost 100 years now. They are at least somewhat dedicated to furthering the understanding of the world because they believe that brings us closer to understanding God. Evolution is not a problem for the Catholic Church, but it is a problem for certain American denominations.
Moreso, the scientific method leads us to believe that if there were a verifiable religious proof of consciousness, or creation, then that would be accepted as scientifically accurate! These things are not separate tribes. They are not in opposition. Yet for some reason we increasingly read about them as if accepting one is a rejection of the other.
Anyway, as a born and raised Catholic who grew turned agnostic, then grew to reject the church and eventually because an atheist: I honestly just don't understand what is going on in the "popculture" zeitgeist of the modern religious world. The more I read about it, interact with it and hear about it, the more confused I get.
[edit] I wanted to add that I hope rational people of faith like Stephen Colbert and now James Talarico can give us some direction and clarity in the religious world in the future.
As someone who grew up Catholic I also always struggled with the framing of science and religion as inherently in opposition. Many scientific discoveries came from monks and Catholic lay people,...
As someone who grew up Catholic I also always struggled with the framing of science and religion as inherently in opposition. Many scientific discoveries came from monks and Catholic lay people, and some of the biggest "church cracking down on science aka heresy" moments in history are usually more political than theological. I'm certainly biased by my Jesuit university education, but I just never saw the conflict.
Keeping up with what the modern evangelical doomsday cult of a church believes is difficult but it is countered by some lovely Methodists and Quakers and UUs and the like who demonstrate that not all Christians share the same religion.
(Now certainly in things like policy/law and ethics I see a number of conflicts, but most folks aren't talking about, the principle of double effect in the treatment of ectopic pregnancy for example.)
I'll pull out the section related to the post title, as that's what drew me in. My (admittedly uncharitable) summary of the argument: Scientists are, at present, confused about consciousness....
I'll pull out the section related to the post title, as that's what drew me in.
Hart: The reason I’m not an atheist is that I think the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable, or at least the philosophical arguments for something beyond materialism are unanswerable.
The problem with people like Dennett wasn’t so much his truculence toward all things religious, which was quite real, but that he was in an odd bind that a lot of modern materialist thought is in: Our sciences are not strictly mechanistic. Physics has not been mechanistic in a comprehensive way for more than a century now. Biology, the life sciences, are undergoing some rather extreme paradigm shifts regarding the levels of intentionality within cells, how homeostasis comes about, and the degree to which genetic-centric theory was adequate. It wasn’t. Richard Dawkins’s “The Selfish Gene,” just at the logical level, fails. And as a scientific proposal, it was decades out of date when it first appeared.
The 17th-century metaphysics of the sciences has captured our minds at a far deeper level than it did originally. The whole reason the mechanical picture of nature was created was to perfect a method of inductive reasoning. So instead of presuming metaphysical causes and instead of presuming the activity of God or the soul, we were going to start just from physical processes, viewing them as mechanical, as machine processes that we would examine discretely. That’s a very good impulse. It’s why we have medical treatments today that were undreamed of before this revolution in thinking.
But this was a filtering process. It was creating a bracketing by excluding from our picture of nature all the marks of mentality — not just consciousness, but intentionality with a purpose, purposive thinking, the unity of consciousness. The realities you’re dealing with here are composite. You don’t have to account for that inexplicable oneness that underlies conscious apprehension.
At first everyone was happy just to keep the two realms separate — here’s nature, it’s mechanical; here’s a realm of God and spirits, which is not mechanical. In the terms of Descartes, there’s an extended substance, res extensa — that’s matter, and that works mechanically. And then there’s a thinking substance, res cogitans, the mind, the soul or God, and that works nonmechanically. The two have a liaison with one another in embodied minds, in human minds, but otherwise they’re distinct. And we don’t have to confuse them.
The sciences commendably want to understand everything. And so in time, they weren’t going to accept this segregation of fields anymore. The attitude was: We want to understand mind and consciousness, too.
The problem is that we’re still using a model that was perfected through the exclusion of all the properties of the mental. It is impossible, using that model, to make sense of the phenomena of consciousness. So what you have to do instead is say that the phenomena of consciousness aren’t real. They can be reduced to mechanical processes. The more you try to do this, the more absurd it becomes. You do end up with, say, Dennett, who said that consciousness is an illusion.
This is the bind we find ourselves in. And many of the phenomena of life, I would argue, also don’t fit the mechanical model. You can explain a great deal regarding physiological systems at the level of their mechanical operation. You can explain a great number of things in terms of evolutionary attrition and retention. But there are many things you cannot explain.
I just think that when you pursue the actual phenomena, not basing this on metaphysical or religious commitments, but just the phenomena themselves, the materialist answers invariably fail. They were right in the 17th century — what the mind does is inherently contrary to what mechanism does.
The straightforward materialism of the new atheists with its mechanistic prejudices is the most self-defeating project there is.
To my mind, if you come to the end of a phenomenology of something like conscious acts and you have to square it with your theory, and you say “The theory doesn’t fit the phenomenon so I better get rid of the phenomenon,” that’s no longer good philosophy or good science. The rule of the sciences and the philosophy that deals in natural thought, natural philosophy, is that if the theory doesn’t fit the phenomenon, it’s the theory that goes.
My (admittedly uncharitable) summary of the argument:
Scientists are, at present, confused about consciousness.
Therefore: God.
That's the opposite of what the headline states. I think it's more The argument is more that saying science leads you to atheism is like saying that words can't explain what color looks like to a...
That's the opposite of what the headline states. I think it's more
Scientists are, at present, confused about consciousness.
Therefore: not no God.
The argument is more that saying science leads you to atheism is like saying that words can't explain what color looks like to a blind man so the blind man shouldn't believe color exists.
No, but if your assertion is, like the article, that it cannot be the case that there is no God, then that logically entails the existence of God. Most atheists do not claim they can prove that...
No, but if your assertion is, like the article, that it cannot be the case that there is no God, then that logically entails the existence of God. Most atheists do not claim they can prove that God doesn't exist, merely that they don't consider there to be sufficient evidence that one exists, but that is not remotely the same as what the person in this article argues. I don't think the arguments presented for why there cannot be no God are particularly sound, but if you do accept that premise, that is how the logical entailment works out.
Framing it as a negative is, imo, an attempt to shirk any responsibility for providing proof for the existence of God, but that's a rhetorical strategy, not formal logic.
I look at it this way: I do not know whether there is a perfectly baked Chicago deep dish pizza on the surface of Mars at this very moment, and I also can't conclusively prove that one doesn't....
I look at it this way: I do not know whether there is a perfectly baked Chicago deep dish pizza on the surface of Mars at this very moment, and I also can't conclusively prove that one doesn't. That does not entail that it necessarily and absolutely must exist nor that I should believe by default someone's claim that it does.
I agree with this line of thinking, but this serves better as a justification for atheism itself rather than as a description of this person's argument for rejecting atheism. His argument is more...
I agree with this line of thinking, but this serves better as a justification for atheism itself rather than as a description of this person's argument for rejecting atheism. His argument is more akin to "There are things on the surface of Mars we cannot fully explain with current science, therefore it cannot be the case that there is no pizza on the surface of Mars."
I think you're being at best overly charitable to his claims if you assert that he's merely arguing that there is an absence of proof that there is no God. But my point about logical entailment...
I think you're being at best overly charitable to his claims if you assert that he's merely arguing that there is an absence of proof that there is no God.
But my point about logical entailment was intended more to address the meaninglessness of making a distinction between "therefore God" and "therefore not no God" in the pithy summaries of his position from the perspective of formal logic (in which ¬(∄x.God'(x)) and ∃x.God'(x) are logically equivalent) than it was intended to be a fully-formed representation of his perspective.
I don't know; I feel like you're being overly uncharitable about it. Perhaps those statements are equivalent on the face, but at this point with all of the discussions, I feel it should be clear...
I don't know; I feel like you're being overly uncharitable about it. Perhaps those statements are equivalent on the face, but at this point with all of the discussions, I feel it should be clear that it's not literally "not no God" but rather "not [in a state of there being proof of] no God," a.k.a. "not necessarily no God," a.k.a. "no proof of God," a.k.a., as someone already said, "Absence of proof [is not equivalent to] proof of absence."
(Note that these aren't intended to be formally logically equivalent because language doesn't exist exclusively within formal logic—"not" could mean negation, but it can also mean "this is not intended to say...")
Also keep in mind that the headline is not written by the author, and even though the headline is a direct quote, it's not the full quote:
The reason I’m not an atheist is that I think the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable, or at least the philosophical arguments for something beyond materialism are unanswerable.
So even where the direct quote comes from, he even qualifies that he's not even explicitly talking about there not being a God. Just that we can't prove that there's nothing beyond what we can prove exists.
I think the quote you provide nearly illustrates the slight of hand that he's doing, however, to shift the burden of proof off theists to provide evidence for the existence of God and onto...
I think the quote you provide nearly illustrates the slight of hand that he's doing, however, to shift the burden of proof off theists to provide evidence for the existence of God and onto atheists by insisting that a lack of evidence that no God exists constitutes a cogent philosophical argument against atheism. At best he's building an argument against a strawman atheist who insists that an absence of evidence is evidence of absence, but the vast majority of actual atheists don't believe this -- they simply are not convinced in the existence of God given that absence of evidence. Even if I thought his arguments about consciousness and materialism were solid (I don't) and didn't have a problem with the jump from "God exists therefore my specific religion is the right one", I don't think this is philosophically rigorous or even honest.
But my initial comment was intended on a much more literal level anyway.
Hart isn't actually shifting of the burden of proof, though, because he's presenting it as his reasoning for not choosing atheism rather than as an argument against atheism. Not everything has to...
Hart isn't actually shifting of the burden of proof, though, because he's presenting it as his reasoning for not choosing atheism rather than as an argument against atheism. Not everything has to be an epistemological debate. This is just a confession in an interview. He isn't really demanding anyone prove anything. He just states that the arguments aren't compelling to him.
If we don't accept that, then every time anyone (including you and I) states "I believe x because y" becomes the opening move of a debate.
Every time someone publicly states "I believe X because Y", they are indeed inviting people to form opinions on their stated beliefs and whether their justification for those beliefs makes sense,...
Every time someone publicly states "I believe X because Y", they are indeed inviting people to form opinions on their stated beliefs and whether their justification for those beliefs makes sense, yes. When you frame your reasoning as being based on philosophical arguments, which he explicitly does, you are then inviting people to consider your perspective through the lens of philosophical argument. When you say the philosophical arguments against something are unanswerable, you are making the claim that philosophical arguments exist against it which must be answered, and when said philosophical argument is "there is no clear proof that God (or at least something beyond materialism) doesn't exist", you are placing the burden of proof onto atheists to provide evidence of the lack of existence of something (something that is notoriously difficult to impossible to do when one eliminates "there is no evidence for this thing's existence" as an option even for things that are much more obvious and concrete than the concept of a higher power) rather than on theists to provide evidence it exists. This is also an extremely common lazy tactic from Christians who want to give their beliefs the veneer of philosophy without engaging in the necessary rigor.
I can be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the arguments regarding consciousness he brings up, perhaps they are extremely poor solely because he was speaking off the cuff. But I don't think it's fair to insist one should ignore the weaknesses in this line of reasoning, especially when it appears to just be a fresh coat of paint on an extremely common and weak part of Christian apologetics.
Of course public discourse always invites people to evaluate what you say (at least implicitly—I definitely know people who would be surprised to hear you're evaluating what they say). But that...
Of course public discourse always invites people to evaluate what you say (at least implicitly—I definitely know people who would be surprised to hear you're evaluating what they say). But that doesn't mean you're actually assigning a burden of proof. It's like the difference between stating an opinion and entering a formal debate.
You're framing his argument as "there is no clear proof that God (or something beyond materialism) doesn't exist, therefore atheists must disprove it." But he's making a specific claim that materialism in and of itself cannot account for consciousness, therefore materialism is insufficient.
There's a difference between "you haven't disproven my position, so the burden's on you" (lazy apologetics) and "here's a structured reason your position is insufficient" (normal philosophical argument).
I'm sorry to walk in with a basic question... I think I don't understand the connection between "materialism", "consciousness" and "theism" that the interwee wants to make. It probably has to do...
I'm sorry to walk in with a basic question...
I think I don't understand the connection between "materialism", "consciousness" and "theism" that the interwee wants to make.
It probably has to do with me not understanding what these words mean in this context.
Would you mind explaining them or pointing me towards a resource that explains them.
My understanding of the connection
To me (with my very, very limited understanding of the matter) this line of thinking reads more like a defence for, rather than against, atheism.
If theisms only value is in giving comfort to people who can't stand that some things are not yet explainable by them or humanity then it is obvious that all the gods are make believe.
Drawing the line at consciousness today is no different than drawing the line at lightning when Thor was invented. By moving the goalposts theists weaken their point and show a form of hubris that says today we as humans know everything that can be known and I am the judge of this and therefore there must exist something more and this more is this god or these gods.
I don't mind individuals deciding that they don't want to engage with certain topics (I sure do that) but I do mind these persons rationalising that behaviour in a way where I must do it too using the same tools to not threaten their mental health.
I think the point of difference that this narrows things down to in terms of our perspectives is that I think the insistence that materialism must be able to fully account for consciousness in...
I think the point of difference that this narrows things down to in terms of our perspectives is that I think the insistence that materialism must be able to fully account for consciousness in order to be sufficient to constitute a weaker form of the same burden-shifting, and I think you're downplaying the connection he draws between arguments against atheism and arguments against pure materialism. I think the way he near-conflates the two amounts to strawmanning, even if it was in fact unintentional, off-the-cuff strawmanning, and I don't think it's fair to completely dismiss the way he draws an equivalence between atheism and materialism.
But then I also think his arguments when it comes to consciousness themselves are pretty egregiously bad -- it's just that their quality isn't directly relevant to my criticisms of the logic and rhetoric here, since I think this line of reasoning is flawed even under the presumption that his arguments about consciousness and materialism are airtight.
It really depends on if you end up with "not no gods" or "not no God" because "God" ends up being quite different than one of those. But as noted, people do always seem to discover that the...
It really depends on if you end up with "not no gods" or "not no God" because "God" ends up being quite different than one of those.
But as noted, people do always seem to discover that the dominant religion and/or their personal inclination towards religion are the inevitable truth.
yeah funny how that works. And of course even if this author had a 100% bulletproof argument that there cannot be no higher power at all (which he doesn't), he doesn't remotely justify why the...
yeah funny how that works. And of course even if this author had a 100% bulletproof argument that there cannot be no higher power at all (which he doesn't), he doesn't remotely justify why the Christian God he believes in must be the higher power that exists. But in my experience Christians tend to have an arrogant sense of superiority to other religions despite usually knowing very little about them, so perhaps he thinks that part is so self-explanatory that he doesn't even need to argue it 🙄😒
I mean I looked him up*, he's been Christian so it's not like this was a surprise revelation for him. I can do apologia with the best of them, but that's all it is, not a neutral examine of the...
I mean I looked him up*, he's been Christian so it's not like this was a surprise revelation for him. I can do apologia with the best of them, but that's all it is, not a neutral examine of the nature of the world.
I'm an unwilling agnostic, I'd like to believe but I don't. I'm culturally Catholic in many ways - it informs my sense of the inherent dignity of people -and culturally Christian in general due to living in the US. So when I revert to throwing a prayer into the world it's usually Christian related, but I still don't believe. This is all that is, subconsciously reverting to the "default"
He does clarify at the start of the section that he's just talking about "something beyond materialism" in general: And that part is just one question near the end when he's been primarily...
He does clarify at the start of the section that he's just talking about "something beyond materialism" in general:
The reason I’m not an atheist is that I think the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable, or at least the philosophical arguments for something beyond materialism are unanswerable.
And that part is just one question near the end when he's been primarily addressing a different topic for the rest of the article (pretty sure it was only pulled out to be the title because it's provocative and draws clicks). So while I'm not particularly convinced of Christianity by what he says there (nor especially drawn by it to look into more), I'm willing to guess it's probably not the full extent of his thoughts on the matter.
That's probably fair. I have enough experience with bad Christian apologetics to unfortunately have low expectations when it comes to such things, but it's certainly possible he approaches the...
That's probably fair. I have enough experience with bad Christian apologetics to unfortunately have low expectations when it comes to such things, but it's certainly possible he approaches the issue with more rigor elsewhere.
I've no idea whether his full reasoning is good or not, mind (though admittedly the answer here doesn't feel like a very compelling start to me). I just don't think a single question in an...
I've no idea whether his full reasoning is good or not, mind (though admittedly the answer here doesn't feel like a very compelling start to me). I just don't think a single question in an interview about a separate topic is likely to be a complete position, especially when it starts out with a caveat like that.
I mean I’d argue that colour is just the experience of a person when light hits their eyes, so you could say that colour doesn’t exist for a blind person
I mean I’d argue that colour is just the experience of a person when light hits their eyes, so you could say that colour doesn’t exist for a blind person
But if they were continually arguing with people about their impoverished worldview that invents a magical field of visual depth that has nothing to do with space, time, or anything material as...
But if they were continually arguing with people about their impoverished worldview that invents a magical field of visual depth that has nothing to do with space, time, or anything material as far as they're concerned, I doubt they'd be very pleasant company.
I think that's either wrong or question begging. On the one hand if you define "mental" has what psychology, neuroscience, .. study then it's pretty clear those field produced knowledge on their...
The problem is that we’re still using a model that was perfected through the exclusion of all the properties of the mental. It is impossible, using that model, to make sense of the phenomena of consciousness. So what you have to do instead is say that the phenomena of consciousness aren’t real. They can be reduced to mechanical processes. The more you try to do this, the more absurd it becomes.
I think that's either wrong or question begging. On the one hand if you define "mental" has what psychology, neuroscience, .. study then it's pretty clear those field produced knowledge on their objects of study and most people in these field don't think consciousness is an illusion (even among philosophers that's an uncommon view afaik), so it's just false science doesn't work there (although I agree it might have fundamental limitations). On the other hand if you define "mental" as something fundamentally unexplainable by physical factors then it's trivially true science can't explain it...
Thank you for extracting that blurb -- I started skimming, then gave up on, the article as they dove into religious specifics that seemed disconnected from the stated topic. Yeah; this just seems...
Thank you for extracting that blurb -- I started skimming, then gave up on, the article as they dove into religious specifics that seemed disconnected from the stated topic.
Yeah; this just seems like a well spoken person who hasn't kept up with science beyond the high school level. Cool that they're into philosophy, ancient cultures, and all that jazz, but the opinion of a niche anthropologist on the nature of life feels like a stretch to me.
Consciousness and God (an anti-physicalist's take) I feel a certain kind of negative way about Hart gesturing at minds being merely mechanical if God doesn't exist. I have defended panpsychism...
Exemplary
Consciousness and God (an anti-physicalist's take)
I feel a certain kind of negative way about Hart gesturing at minds being merely mechanical if God doesn't exist. I have defended panpsychism here before, and have spent the past few years digging into all of the contemporary philosophy of mind literature. I'll try to put forward a basic sketch of the case for anti-physicalism, you can see if you find it persuasive, and then we can see if there's a good case from anti-physicalism to God.
1. The trouble with consciousness: an explanation
The issues in contemporary philosophy of mind come from analyzing our language about consciousness. All the arguments in the literature seem to boil down to analyzing the concepts we have related to consciousness, and seeing what these concepts "point to" in reality (if anything) and whether they are pointing at the same things. We seem to have two very different kinds of concepts to describe what brains do. One is known as phenomenal concepts and the other as physical concepts. Understanding arguments in pop philosophy like "Mary's room" or "the zombie argument" help with understanding the conceptual distinction.
1.1 Phenomenal concepts
Phenomenal concepts are language we use when we talk about "redness" or "pleasure". It is the "what-it's-likeness" or "qualitative nature" of an experience. The taste of mint, the smell of coffee. There are two important elements of these concepts: ineffability and privacy. These concepts are ineffable, which is to say that there is at least something about the experience that cannot be described to someone who hasn't had the experience before. If you are colorblind, I can't tell you what "redness" is, because when I talk about redness, I verbally "point" at an experience that only color-sighted people have had. They are "private" for roughly the same reason; we can never learn what it feels like to use echolocation by examining bat brains.
1.2 Physical concepts
Physical concepts are all of the other kinds of language we use. Neuronal firings, avoidance behavior, disposition to become violent, etc. These are the "quantitative properties" of an experience. Quantities fit neatly in formulas and models.
1.3 The core of the problem
It's a trivial truth that if there are indescribable aspects of our experience, then they cannot be described in our physical theories. There's a seeming gap between our phenomenal and our physical concepts. To use Saul Kripke's example, there's something very different between pain and c-fibres firing. How can we reconcile these seemingly incongruent ways of describing brain and mind stuff?
2. The solutions
2.1 Solution one: physicalism
It's important to note that "common sense" physicalism (the thesis that our experience is ineffable/qualitative AND describable by physics) is not a major position in philosophy of mind largely for reasons that ineffability trivially entails indescribability.
2.1.1 Type-a physicalism: deny the conceptual gap
One way to go is to deny that the phenomenal concepts described above accurately pick out anything in the world. This involves denying the ineffable, private nature of our experiences. All there is to our experience is what is captured by the physical concepts. One major way to go is illusionism (a view (allegedly) held by Daniel Dennett) where we are in error about the nature of our experiences, at least as far as we think they are ineffable/private. Our beliefs about our experiences are due to some kind of conceptual confusion, or maybe some kind of misleading intuition humans are predisposed to have. Others think that philosophers are incorrect in identifying ineffability/privacy with normal "folk" usage of phenomenal concepts.
Whatever the diagnosis of the conceptual confusion, there isn't any genuine conceptual/language "gap" between some facts about our first person experiences and third person facts about brains and if there is, the concepts in conflict with physics don't actually point to anything in reality.
2.1.2 Type-b physicalism: "identities don't need explaining"
The dominant type-b view is endorsed by a famous philosopher David Papineau. He grants that there is a genuine conceptual gap between our ineffable, private experiences and brain states. But, they are identical, and identities do not require a scientific explanation. Explanation here means something like a scientific description, not merely something like a story consistent with science. They aren't conceptually identical the way bachelors and unmarried men are, but they are identical nonetheless.
Take for instance The Morning Star and The Evening Star. The ancients thought these were two different stars, but it turns out, they are the same planet Venus! They had two different concepts that pointed at the same object. This doesn't require specifically an explanation; no scientific theory needs to tell us why Venus is identical to Venus. When people pointed to either star, in both cases they were pointing to Venus. When I say "I'm in pain!" I'm pointing at something inside myself, so says Papineau, and whatever I'm pointing at may just turn out to be c-fibres firing, to use the example from before. Other cases with these kinds of identities that aren't conceptual identities are Superman and Clark Kent or the clear liquid that fills rivers and lakes and the chemical compound H2O.
2.2 Solution two: anti-physicalism
I will not provide a robust defense of anti-physicalism about the mind here, as that would take too much time. Some view type-a views as denying the most obvious aspects of reality, or type-b views as running into issues such as psychophysical harmony or problems with brute emergence. Regardless, I will set aside a full defense of anti-physicalism and merely survey some of the most popular views.
These views say, roughly, that there are two fundamental kinds of properties; phenomenal properties and physical properties. The phenomenal concepts are about the phenomenal properties, and the physical concepts are about the physical properties.
2.2.2 Panpsychism
This view, esp the popular Russellian panpsychism, says that fundamental entity(s) have an intrinsically phenomenal nature, and this phenomenal nature bears the physical quantitative properties described by physics.
2.2.3 Substance dualism
This view says that we are a soul, and that souls bear phenomenal properties, and physical objects bear physical properties. Our soul is embodied in a particular brain, but is distinct from it.
2.2.4 Idealism
There are lots of views here that aren't popular enough nowadays to dig into, but roughly the idea is that, if type-a physicalists deny that our phenomenal concepts accurately point to anything in reality, then idealists (usually) say that our physical concepts do not accurately pick out anything in reality.
3. Conclusion: where is God?
If you made it this far, thank you kindly for reading this, I put my heart into it ❤️. Would any of the anti-physicalist solutions, if true, provide unique evidence for God? If there are fundamental properties like physical properties, and those aren't a problem for atheists, why would fundamental phenomenal properties, objects, or substances? Maybe substance dualism cries out for a God to play the role of ensouling minds into bodies, but many indigenous and eastern cultures have had no trouble believing in souls without The Un-ensouled Ensouler™.
I'm an agnostic without much leaning one way or the other, but maybe you can reference this next time someone says something like "atheists think our brains are just mechanisms!" or something similar.
Indeed it does! Thank you for remembering. It'll take me a bit to chew on the new comments here since I looked through this thread this morning. I will say though, in the time since that past...
Indeed it does! Thank you for remembering. It'll take me a bit to chew on the new comments here since I looked through this thread this morning.
I will say though, in the time since that past conversation and again reading your great summary here: I really dislike the names "physicalism" and "anti-physicalism". I understand the history and the semantics that they represent, but I don't like the words. To me, it seems that if you believe phenomenological experiences come about due to the physical universe then you must admit phenomenological experience as part of the physical universe. The discrepency is that the "physicalist" positions seem to deny qualia outright or (as I generally did before the referenced conversation) ignore the hard problem of consciousness. The only positions that seem to admit phenomenological experience as part of the physical universe are, ironically, the "anti-physicalist" ones. So I am forced to identify as a dualist of some variety, even though I disagree with the notion of "soul" as often associated with those views.
I think your conclusion is the most important point though. "Athiests think our brains are just mechanisms!" is a straw man that must be rejected. The conclusions don't follow, either. Suppose we do have eternal nonphysical souls: what bearing does that have on the existence of a god or any other aspect of theology not directly about the nature of the soul?
I'm an atheist and I despise religion. I admit I'm not even close to have read or understoodd the text and comments in full. I think my perspective is important anyway even though it hopefully...
I'm an atheist and I despise religion.
I admit I'm not even close to have read or understoodd the text and comments in full.
I think my perspective is important anyway even though it hopefully doesn't bring anything new to the table I believe it's important it is at the table so you don't forget it exists.
I don't understand why it would fall on me to prove I'm right, I'm not the one claiming something; you are. It is your job to prove you're correct if you want to use logic and reason to prove your point. It is also fine if you don't - in my opinion - that's the whole point of faith; to allow us to function in the world without having to prove things.
(I do however also understand that I'm not the target audience for this article or discussion as this is more about what god(s) and religious practices to pick rather than picking at all - even though it is disguised as a piece about atheism.)
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is the distinction between faith and religion.
I do have faith in different phenomenons regarding humans and nature at large but that does not have to lead me into also having faith in a being or group of beings that have power to control nature (including humans) for their own agenda.
And even if I had faith in some god(s) I wouldn't have to follow a religion or accept any religious leaders.
One of my biggest objections to faith in god(s) and religions is the constant use if good/evil with the "other:ing" that follows from that. While I do believe that other:ing is a kind of biological imperative I also think (and have faith in) that humans have the moral capacity to overcome that part of biology.
While it is easy to dismiss a perpetrator as evil to distance yourself it doesn't really change anything to prevent future similar evil acts.
While I see that my comment is quite negative about the topic I also want to say that I am very grateful to be able to be part of this community where I get to read these kind of articles and the very interesting discussions that follow, thank you.
@mycketforvirrad I have a typo in the title if you can please change it. "The reason I'm not an atheist is that I think the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable" (gifted link)
@mycketforvirrad I have a typo in the title if you can please change it.
"The reason I'm not an atheist is that I think the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable" (gifted link)
Look, I'm no theologian, so I can't really speak to the Greek and Latin concepts that have been worked on by some many philosophers or theologians over 2000 years. But it just strikes me when people think Jesus' message, or Christianity in general, is particularly unique for its pacifism. Jainism is an Indian religion well known for its extreme pacifism, to the extent where it obviously couldn't defend itself. The Moriori of NZ had a choice between keeping to their pacifist traditions and slavery, or to fight, and they chose slavery.
What allowed Christianity to win wasn't forgiveness and pacifism. That made it a compelling message for the poor and downtrodden, for sure. What made it win was that Christian Roman emperors and officials ruthlessly crushed every single competitor in a way that no pagan had even contemplated doing. By sheer chance (that had been determined centuries before Christianity existed), this same empire that conquered Judea was the same empire that went to conquer Europe, which went on to colonise the world for reasons unrelated to religion. Christianity won because it was appealing enough to an interconnected empire where a thousand cultures were now in a dialogue, and violent enough to eliminate any internal rivals once it gained power.
Dr Hart makes a passing mention about messianic movements in the empire, but he's underselling just how many eastern mystery cults (including Christianity) the Romans were dealing with. Why did Christianity triumph out of those hundreds of cults? I dunno, why did Islam rise at the same time the Romans and Persians were at their absolute lowest point, shattered them both, and change the world? Why did an Indian religion like Buddhism spread to China and Japan like wildfire while dying in India? Why did the Persians end up praising the ashuras and the Indians the devas? Things happen, and they go one way or the other, sometimes by sheer chance.
A trend I notice with a lot of theologians is that they frame the argument as Christianity vs atheism. But that's not the argument. Have you read and analysed the Qur'an, for years and years? Than how can you possibly know that you're right and the Muslim is wrong? Have you read the Avesta? If not, could you possibly be missing an ever more compete truth in Zoroastrianism? But almost always it ends with the author discovering that the ancestral religion of his nation and people ended up being the correct one, which I find extremely convenient.
Separately from this, there seems to be somewhat of a trend of American Protestants converting to Orthodoxy specifically. There's some cultural thing happening in American Christianity, and I wonder if someone is studying it.
There are some really interesting thoughts in your comment. One note is that the linked article doesn't talk about pacificism, when they're talking about the (alleged) uniqueness of Jesus's teachings. Instead they talk about boundless forgiveness and a unique concern for the poor. Similar, but distinct - and probably a more defensible claim for uniqueness, especially 2,000 years ago.
I agree with you that there's not really a concrete answer here, but you may find this article interesting:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-early-christian-strategy
You may find this separate NYT article interesting as well:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/us/orthodox-christianity.html?unlocked_article_code=1.f1A.nCtm.vke82gFcOLBE&smid=nytcore-android-share
I laughed. Agreed.
Thanks for the articles! I have a lot to say about some of the thoughts here, but I'll just point out the one that stood out the most for me:
I'm not sure what the author means by this. The Roman empire was corrupt in the sense that any ancient polity was corrupt, but it wasn't particularly decadent or corrupt, especially in this era. Christianity was born after the ruinous civil wars of the republic, but I'm not sure if your average Jew in Jerusalem would've noticed that those wars even happened, beyond maybe Antony mobilising before his war with Octavian. This would've been followed by the Pax Romana, which while often exaggerated, would've been a unique period of stability for many people in the empire. It just seems odd to invoke the Roman decadence trope just as the empire is entering its golden era.
On your article regarding Orthodoxy, I find it extremely appropriate that the same tactics that the East Romans used effectively to psychologically overwhelm Westerners (big fuck off rising throne, centuries of weighty tradition, pretending that Orthodoxy hasn't changed massively) still works on Westerners like clockwork! All we need is the mechanical throne back and another piece of the True Cross!
From this side, as someone whose family converted from folk spirituality to Protestantism, then myself from Protestantism to Orthodoxy, I basically lived what you outlined for the world, and is a repeat of the story of Genesis to Revelations: one moves from folk spirituality of household gods (specific location, specific to tribe) to an Abrahamic faith, then to one specific worship of the Abrahamic God intended for all nations and all time.
It's very interesting how by chance this all was.
American Orthodox are studying the shift for sure, and apparently we are very worried. Converts are beating down our doors and a few priests have talked about this in numerous podcasts, (the podcast host, Ft Andrew Stephen Damick, calling it a crisis). Orthodox Christianity is never going to consider women priests, and never going to meet one priest in mass numbers at a mega "church" building or a stadium for practical reasons rather than theological, or support internet video as being the same thing. It is not even preaching based: you go and read an extremely predictable rotation of prayers, come up for Holy Communion, and you're dismissed. The priest speaking part is completely optional, almost always brief, and in fact some priests prefer to do this after the official dismissal to specifically note them as personal thoughts rather than part of the service. We shall see what happens to North American Orthodoxy in a hundred years.
I have wondered about what you observed too, from many many cults, culled down to one empire officially endorsed faith, and how it is that the meek, the hungry, the grieving, the poor, the persecuted who finally inherits the kingdom. It is my hope that the Moriori and Jianists, who have surely endured, prosper and make a raging come back. I would be delighted if their ancients see fit to call me a brethren when they inherit the Kingdom.
What you outlined, is that an empire spends its time crushing mass competition, until the field is well weeded, and fertilised with the blood of the martyrs, meaning their nonviolent deaths at the hands of the empire have been witnessed by all, and then that firm conviction that even persecution won't crush, with messages for the poor and downtrodden, will persist and become the religion that examplifies the empire's people.
This would never have happened if we had empires without the poor and downtrodden: in places like Norway where people are treated with dignity and equitable support, we see the other kind of faith, in materialism and the innate and obvious goodness in mankind that is only occasionally obscured by cultish practices. The healthy have no need for hospitals, as I have heard it said in Orthodoxy: the Church is for the hurting, and for those who are the most sick in their hearts.
If American Christian Nationalism continues, we will see every other religion and Christian sect brutally crushed, including Catholicism (see Trump's feud with Pope) and including Orthodoxy. If the pattern holds, the sects that persist (possibly literally underground) in the face of oppression to care for the last, the lost, and the least among us will finally be worthy of inheriting the kingdom, because by then almost everyone will be poor and downtrodden.
The poor don't study competing theologies and pick the most reasonable ones: they choose the ones where they can see the faithful live out their faith in practice even while under fire.
[Edited]
Thanks for your reply! I'm going to do the Reddit thing and try to break it down just to keep it reasonable, but please let me know if I'm portraying your points wrong.
But this isn't a universal experience. It's a common one, because universal religions tend to be exclusive in a way that ethnic religions are not, but I can think of examples where the ethnic religion won out. The biggest one is the Hindus of India resisting the Abrahamic Muslims, reversing conversions and reclaiming old temples (and seizing mosques). Japanese Christians similarly faced an imperial counter movement where traditional religion largely won. In smaller scale, the rising worship of Santa Muerte in Mexico (which sometimes take the shape of a feathered serpent) is a clear signal that the Mexica gods aren't totally gone. The progression from ethnic religion to universal religion isn't inevitable or an improvement. It's just a different belief system. Both are equally valid expressions of the human experience.
But the Roman empire wasn't particularly bad for the time period. The vast, vast, vast majority of Christians were left alone. Most governors seemed to have ignored the orders to suppress them, as they weren't much of a bother. The orders were also rare. Jews, by and large, faced far greater repression overall, both by pagans and Christians. The empire was brutal by our standards, but by and large extremely tolerant and open for the era. And recall that once Christians take power, the brutality remains, just aimed at different groups. Pagan temples were destroyed by mobs, pagan officials were displaced, pagan philosophers had to flee to Persia. Emperor Justinian, a saint in Orthodoxy, passed laws allowing women to be stones to death for adultery. He also murdered 30,000 during the Nika riots. He's a saint. The ancient world was brutal. That's just how it was.
Very true: my family's example is only one data point, perhaps more fitting as the "ackshually..." to your point about how theologians "ends with the author discovering that the ancestral religion of his nation and people ended up being the correct one" :) I know you weren't saying this is 100% of the case, and obviously I was no theologian, but this type of leave-your-ancestral-ways conversion do happen after deep introspection and much anguish. We've always had the Martin Luther types who look super deep into theology and end up having to reject the faith of their people. C S Lewis, born in Ireland, was probably more Celtic pagan than Catholic before his conversion1 to Christianity (he chose Anglicanism, but all denominations claim him as their own) when he looked deeper into theology.
100% on your point about it not being inevitable and different expressions of the human experience. Maybe slightly less in agreement with some systems not being .... better .... Not all faith systems are rooted in goodness, peace, fairness and co-prosperity of human beings. Look at Christian Nationalism, for a punching up example: I will always regard moving away from that camp as being an improvement upwards, a rejection of the dark forces of greed, selfishness and pride, a denouncment of exerting ones will upon another, a spitting upon apathy towards human suffering.
I am not yet ready to draw the conclusion on the Japanese Christian saga....let's give it another few centuries. :)
But you are right: when changes happen, when one faith system supercedes another, it's not because it's some magical universal theology. Plenty of Christian systems get tossed: Christ said that when salt becomes flavorless it will be tossed out onto the streets. A theology that uses the name of Jesus to hurt and colonize and abuse and economically coerce will be rejected in favour of something that actually meets the people where they are, whether folk or scientific or same theology reinterpreted or a merge. I was just reading Miriam Toew's Women Talking, based on the real events in a terrible Mennonite colony in Bolivia that hurt / is hurting all those girls and women and I'm sure also boys and men.... all in the name of Jesus. Whatever the people choose to mirage to will be better than that system of forced forgiveness without repentance and guarding the powerless.
The Roman Empire spanned a vast amount of time, which, predominantly, was not terrible. But it's human nature to remember its low points, though, eh? ( This Nika riots seemed more political than religious in nature, but I'm not well informed2. ) The ancient world was indeed brutal; I wonder if large scale bloodshed is how anything good mixed in with the bad survives sometimes, that it was a kill or be killed world between a culture that's 3% good vs another that's 97% bad.
1. "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England"No, that's definitely fair enough. It's not like converts don't exist. I've seen people convert from Christianity to Islam and feel very strongly about it. Islam historically in particular was very open to converts in a way Christianity wasn't always. The Spanish, for example, expelled many Christian moriscos because, well, they weren't really Christian of their ancestors weren't Christian. Whereas many European Muslims in the Ottoman Empire flaunted their converted status as people who had chosen Islam, and weren't merely born to it.
But it is a phenomenon I see with theologians, where they have 5,000 well written and well argued words about how the religion they were born with lucikly turned out to be the right one. People convert usually because something is happening, but I've rarely seen a scholar (of any religion) research themselves into a religion to which they have no ties. Like, I've never seen someone from Oregon turn to Amaterasu.
True, but entire books have been written about the process through which Christianity (and other universal religions) supresses, demean and dismantle the ethnic religions of the places Christian conquer, and make the ethnic and traditional belief system seem stupid, outdated and superstitious. Christian countries historically made it imposible to operate in civilised society without converting. You can't separate those pressures from the conversion of a pagan populace. Millions of Christians in the Middle East and North Africa converted to Islam over the centuries for the same reason. It just makes sense to convert to the religion of your conqueror if it's a universal religion.
Anything can happen, of course, but it has already been a few centuries since contact between Europeans and the Japanese. East Asians.just have a different conception of the spiritual world compared to Westerners. There is no contradiction in honouring your local river spirit, marrying in a Christian church, and following the teachings of the Buddha. It's all perfectly normal to many of them.
Honestly, I very rarely blame religion for things like this. People have been awful under every belief system under the Sun. There's usually something running far deeper than religion when humans perform atrocities on one another. I see religion as language or dance or food; just another expression of a group's culture.
Oh yes, for sure, Nika was a political event. I just sometimes poke fun at Chalcedonians (mostly the Orthodox) canonising people like Justinian and Constantine. I love the Roman Empire, but man, these two were unrepentant mass murderers. At least Ashoka the Great in India felt bad after his slaughters in the Kalinga wars, as he converted to Buddhism. Whereas I don't think Justinian shed a year as his forces killed tens of thousands instead of resigning his office.
Most people write arguments because they already believe something about that argument. That is hardly specific to theology. That is just how human motivation works.
It's not so much this argument for me, it's the trend of doing deep research into something to believe in and come out the other end believing it. You had every single incentive to continue to believe in the gods of your childhood. It's just hard to see it as a fully intellectual exercise for me when that's almost always the result in every religion. Everybody confidently coming to the confusion that the religion they lucked into turned out to be the correct one.
Which becomes even more apparent when put this way.
A monotheistic religious person already rejects and doesn't believe in thousands of gods, for no particularly convincing reason, yet they rarely entertain the thought why those gods and that faith can be dismissed as false so easily.
This is very true, and I believe I, along with others, will be held to task for it.
From the Wikipedia entry on the Aluet Language:
St Innocent, as he is remembered today, celebrated and protected the indigenous languages where he served:
The Aluet language dialects are critically endangered today, though, so even Saintly human effect does not last forever, sadly ...
Not many smaller communities received their own dictionaries and grammatical treatise when a missionary from an empire visits. But that ought to be the way, for cultures not just to be preserved but celebrated. I do feel like we are losing a lot of languages and cultures today, even when religion isn't involved. As you say, religious practices is one among human expression. Movies and technology and international trade are others
To be clear, I am not critising you or any Christian for these historical events, any more than I'd criticise a New Zealander for something an English king had done in the 15th Century. I just wanted to illustrate the immense pressure pagans come under when Christians (or Muslims) become the ruler class of a country. Even when they mean well, it usually means and thing for the ethnic religion. As you point out, it doesn't mean everything is bad. In addition to your examples, the creation of Cyrillic itself is work by Christians to help with conversion. But the religion itself is usually not one of the things that is protected, as the whole point is obviously conversion.
Anyway, I'm rambling s bit, and I don't think we're really disagreeing! I'm an atheist, but I think religion is like music or hugs, just a core core part of the human animal that can't really go away.
:D I love that! Like music, or hugs. I really really like that.
Thanks for the conversation and no I never felt attacked :) just appreciate the opportunity of learning from you and this thread
I tried to think of something else, but that's how I feel! We apes like hugs and pats and picking at our hair. And like religion, that will never go away, it's just part of our species.
I did used to be an annoying better-than-you atheist when I was younger (and I'm sure that's not all gone), but I'm in my late 30s, tired, and (I like to think) more clear-eyed. I think the specific beliefs are irrational, but I no longer think people are perfectly rational anyway. Quantum phycists of all religious stripes are still shaking off their weird quantum woo stage. Many atheists think that if you make everyone an atheist an utopia follows, which is irrational and not borne out by even the good examples of a wide atheist population such as Czechia.
So what if you believe the world flooded 10k years ago, or someone in Tokyo believe Amaterasu formed the islands of Japan, or a Hindu believes they'll reincarnate when they die? I believed Hilary Clinton was a shoo-in for the presidency, what the fuck right to complain about irrational beliefs do I have? We all think we're right, ultimately.
While I get what you're going for, pedantically I'd point out that there are people who don't really get as much from physical affection, it's a trend but not an absolute rule.
Less pedantically, what we believe does influence how we act, and while religion isn't unique in this it's not a unique exception either. Raising someone to believe in a God who forgives is more likely to result in them valuing kindness to others than raising someone to believe in a God who eternally torments any who stray (conversely, if someone came to me as an agonistic-leaning-atheist with solid proof that if I don't follow specific rules then Ammit the Devourer will eat my soul, that'd be a pretty hefty consequence to consider). Teaching someone about how scientists are all lying or ignorant regarding a global flood is more likely to result in them dismissing science as a whole (e.g. vaccine denial) than teaching someone about how we've realized mistakes in our worldviews and gradually deepened our understanding of history and nature alike.
We will all be wrong many times in our lives, including about fundamental things, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't care about truth and beliefs, it just means we need to be open to listening.
Fair point on hugs! I'm speaking broadly, but there are exceptions to every behaviour.
I don't think religion is really the cause of these things. The reasons Americans don't believe in climate change isn't really Christianity or being anti-science, I don't think. It's because they don't want to believe it, don't want the guilt, don't want to stop eating meat, don't want to change their lifestyles. Their core belief is that climate change isn't real, and they'll finds belief systems that supplement that.
In terms of whether you believe in Jesus the forgiver, or Yahweh the brutal war god, I feel a people's gods are a reflection of a cultural moment and their environment. The desert is brutal, and Yahweh was the god of desert nomads. Yahweh (and the rest of the Yahwist pantheon) comes from that, as did Allah (who did exist for pagan Arabs before monotheism).
When a culture changes, religion changes as well. Romans adopted Christianity. Then what happened? They made it into a hierarchical ritualistic religion. They were told, hey, this god is the One God. The Romans said, say no more! We'll just have God the Father (clearly the same Indo European Deus Pater they were already workshipping), and his son Yeshua the demigod. Then elevate Maria to Mother Goddess status, make a bunch of statues out of her. What the heck, have entire tiers of angels to we can pray to. And obviously we need divinely raised demigo-- uh, sorry, I want saints. Yeah, saints I can pray to, no biggie, there's just One God, don't worry about it. Oh, we need to fight? Just invent the concept of Holy War, gogogo.
The culture comes first and the religion second, almost always. Cultures will fit anything into pre-existing frameworks to justify the things they already want to do. So I wouldn't say Christianity made the empire more forgiving. I would say the empire was already becoming a kinder place to live in, which made Christianity attractive.
This is a false dichotomy, imo. Religion is not the only way to be kind, but a church that opens a food shelter because they believe Christ commands them to care for the downtrodden is being kind for a religious reason. Religion is not the only way to be hurt, but a queer child whose parents pressure them to deny who they are because a pastor said they'd burn eternally otherwise is hurting for religious reasons. Religion is not the only way to be curious, but a scientist who studies nature to understand God's glory is being curious for religious reasons. Religion is not the only way to be ignorant, but someone who avoids the COVID vaccine because they were taught scientists are morons who can't even get the age of the Earth right was kept ignorant for religious reasons. Religion is obviously not immune to people, but people are not immune to religion either. They influence each other, just as with any cultural belief.
With all due respect, this sounds to me like a secular version of presuppositionalist assumptions—"everyone knows I'm right, they just pretend otherwise so they can sin". Perhaps there are some who fall in that camp, but there are also people who are just incorrect, and the reasons for that incorrectness can be influenced by religion as much as by any other element of society.
I think we have to agree to disagree there. I don't see a particular difference in Roman behaviour on the whole after Christianity. Offensive wars mostly stopped, yes, but that had already happened. The empire had hit the absolute limits of its administrative apparatus, the empire was going to be more peaceful regardless. The empire built hospitals, but that's because a state has been formed and local elites had stopped contributing to their local communities. That had more to do with the centralisation of the state rather than anything particularly about Christianity.
Sunni Islam was very very very specific about the abomination of sale sex relations, yet there are more Ottoman poems about man's anuses than vaginas. Fuck, there's an entire argument about why sleeping with men is preferable. These were Sunni Muslims saying this. Americans have taken a religion about the poor and made it about money, and feel absolutely no discomfort about it. It doesn't matter. People will adapt whatever comes into their actual belief systems. Those belief systems are cultural. It's not a coincidence that this conspiracy problem is prevalent in the US and Australia, frontier countries that developed a strong independentist streak over the course of their cultural development.
Yes, religion has an influence, in the same way that any cultural belief has an influence. But religion, like any cultural belief, is still subject to the primacy of the culture of belongs to. That is why Romans saw a deeply monotheistic religion and plugged it in to their polytheistic religion, making sure they retained a Mother Goddess and a lower tier of gods. The Romans already believed there were more figures than a singular God, so they made that God into three. You can find similar things like Saint Brigid in Ireland or Santa Muerte in Mexico. Religions are based on consensus.
I don't know enough about those specific examples to comment, but I'm not denying that religion is heavily affected by the culture in which it's practiced, I'm disagreeing with the "so what?" and "what the fuck right to complain about irrational beliefs do I have?" framing. What someone believes about the world influences how they interact with that world, which impacts both them and the people around them (both positively and negatively). That makes those worldviews important.
You use the analogy of believing Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in for the presidency. Perhaps this was rational-but-ill-informed or perhaps it was irrational, I don't know enough about how you formed the conclusion, but when it was shown to be false you evidently accepted that. On the other hand, in 2021 we saw thousands of people who had believed their preferred candidate was a shoo-in decide that rather than accepting they were incorrect they would storm the Capitol. The presence or absence of a well-informed and rational response to the situation led to two very different outcomes. Should we have reacted by going "well really we're all irrational sometimes, what right do we have to complain?"
Perhaps, but that cuts both ways. For example, ethnic religions tend to treat the land with far greater respect and care than anyone else. These people are tied to their land in a way even the most liberal atheist probably isn't. I don't think this is unrelated to how fucking miserable and disconnected a lot of Westerners feel. It's not rational to believe that Artemis listens to you as you pray to her when you kill a deer. But know what? It's probably good for your brain to go through this internal forgiveness cycle. You and I are ultimately apes and these little rituals evolved to protect our brains for a reason. If you take those rituals away and leave nothing behind, I'm not altogether sure you end with a happy or healthy humanity.
As an example, one of the worst contributors to climate change is meat consumption. A lot of Hindus, Buddhists and especially Jains are vegetarian. A lot of Western vegetarians are crunchy spiritualists. Conversely, I don't personally know a lot of vegetarian atheists, in my circles anyway. So maybe if we're all irrational Jains, the planet (and us) wouldn't be dying.
Probably like you, I can't force myself. I can't force myself to believe in things that (to me) are very clearly irrational magic stories. But I also don't necessarily think that this attribute is objectively good. Over the years, I admire truth less and less, and good and bravery more and more. Whoever's volunteering the most at the soup kitchen is the person I think I have the most to learn from.
J6 was bad. But you know what? It's pretty indicative of the power of belief. Where are the leftists and liberals laying siege to the WH after all the death and pain Trump has caused to millions? Rationally sitting in their houses, waiting for the midterms. They clearly don't believe in stopping all these wars as much as the J6 insurrectionists believes that there was a crime ring at a pizzeria or whatever dumb ahit they were saying. Belief makes change possible.
There's plenty of irrational stuff we believe. Whatever country you're from probably has a national mythos that is mostly fake. You have an imagined relationship with people you don't in your country that is largely fake as well. Etc.
I've been mentioning both positives and negatives, my position has never been that religion is evil nor that belief is unimportant. Just that our beliefs about the world do have consequences that matter, and while religion is not alone in this it's not a lone exception either.
You say good is more important truth, but where does that judgement come from? In your deer-hunting example, the behavior is good because it accounts for your physical and emotional needs. In your vegetarianism example, the behavior is good because of the consequences of meat consumption. In your soup kitchen example, the behavior is good because those beliefs drive someone to recognize the humanity in those around them. In your leftist passivity example, the behavior is bad because of the harm being allowed. In these contexts those people having those beliefs is a net positive (or in the last case perhaps not), but we can only determine this because we try to look at the beliefs and their outcomes analytically too rather than treating them as separate from the rest of life.
When I say truth, I should say truth at the expense of everything else. Extreme example; your grandma is dying of old age, says she thinks she'll go to Heaven. Do you spend the next few moments persuading her that Heaven is patently a myth, or do you indulge her?
I just don't think being right (which I think I am, naturally) is the most important thing in the world right now.
Sure, you can probably leave it be since the effects of the belief in this context are almost solely good (bringing her comfort). On the other hand, if she believed she was going to Hell, I'd instead try to convince her otherwise. What the actual belief is and what its consequences are is just as relevant to the decision here as it is to the other examples, it's not a "who cares what they think, we're all irrational" scenario.
But you would probably try convincing her by reminded her of the good she's done, not by saying her religion is fake.
Would it feel better if I said, something being rational or irrational doesn't make it good or evil inherently? I didn't really mean to formulate a philosophical statement, I was speaking a bit off the cuff.
I agree with that, yeah. I was just disagreeing with the framing that which irrational beliefs people hold doesn't matter at all, which IME is a well-intentioned sentiment that nonetheless can end up leading to ignoring more subtle harms (like the example I used earlier about science denial).
I, too, thought the pokemon would go to the polls. :/ I guess we believe what we want the world to be like sometimes, and as I get older, I find it also mattering less to me what people say they believe, and instead more on their actions and their empathy.
Same. I think it's also a matter of safety and confidence, at least with me. When becoming an atheist in a Christian society, or becomes very important to establish some lines, and you don't necessarily know which ones are reasonable and which ones are excessive. But then you travel, meet other people, interact with other religions, and get older. I can't speak for anyone else, but at least for me, I'm just less hostile to the concept of religion and I no longer consider it a threat, either physically or intellectually. I can kinda wonder at the fact that as a Catholic I used to cannobalistically feed on the flesh of my God and drank His blood, and that was normal! The same way I'd love to pray at a Shinto shrine or a local important river, or take off my shoes at a mosque. It's no longer particularly important to me that I don't think the spiritual elements to these things are human constructs, because ultimately what matters is humans (and other creatures!).
That's a good point about boundary and safety. May teens don't get to choose their own relatives and Sunday activities.... Knowing what we all now know about American Nationalistic Christians, I'm sure a lot of people discovering their atheism probably need that safe space online to say whatever it is they can't say anywhere else irl.
That's a very wonderful attitude you have, of seeing past cultural divides and even past your own value system, to focus on the human being on the other side.
I may not be praying to the host entity at a temple, but I can still visit a friend there who might be in mourning, or simply appreciate the human art and history, and would take off my shoes and wash my hands if customary. Some of those are hygiene things that maybe the ancients had a feel about even without knowing germ theory, and that's a cool way of protecting ones tribe, hand washing, staying away from dead bodies, isolate for a few days before coming back from a potential infectious source etc. Some have unfortunate side effects like not allowing lepers close to community, but without antibiotics or a cure, permanent quarantine seems understandable if cruel.
(I used to be upset about religious practices that ask women to dress modestly or cover my hair, but after being in a community where I felt 100% accepted even when I don't, eventually I got to a point where I'm choosing to freely do so without pressure, and the practice started making sense. As you say, what matters is the humans! And all creation too!)
Funny as Protestants we never did anything with the river, but now I really appreciate the annual blessing of waters. Priests in full vestments doing stuff like in this image (source article) is probably the closest thing we get to a D&D style cleric in modern life.
In (non argumentative) defense of Holy Communion,
(1) it's a cool concept, and blood being magic is a common cross culture ritual thing (obvious bias)
(2) it's consensual, He said to do this. (asterisk: Orthodoxy encourages infants and children to partake; Catholics wait for confirmation; some Protestants wait for adulthood) and
(3) life giving mammalian cell sharing has been around since the first milk glands were licked by pups. The fats, calcium, and plasma inside milks is taken from my own flesh, bone and blood. In a 2014 study, they counted thousands to millions of maternal cells per milliliter of mothers milk (science direct), full of white blood cells, which are a kind of leukocyte:
My guess is that if our red blood cells had any valuable organelles the baby could benefit from, our milk would be red. Maybe they're filtered out not because it's gross but just evolutionarily unnecessary.
Yup, totally fair enough on safety. I grew up as a Catholic in Puerto Rico, and whole obviously my mom and society would've preferred I stay Catholic, I wasn't ever in any danger, either physically or socially. My experience wouldn't be the same as someone in West Virginia, or God forbid Iran.
Yup, that's a really good point about a lot of these things just being local wisdom disguised as religion. In a pre internet era, you had to pass down wisdom somehow.
I also immediately need to say that as a man, a lot of the shitty religious stuff is patriarchal, so I'm coming from a privileged position there as well, good callout. My wife also had to put on headscarves so we could explore some mosques together, and while she didn't particularly mind, it's just one more thing that she has to do that I don't.
I've never heard of the blessing of the waters! I love little traditions like that.
I don't mind Communion as a sacrament! I did find it a strong spiritual experience when I was a Christian. But explaining to people not familiar with it is wild.
So the priest blesses the bread, which transfigures it into the flesh or our God. We then... eat the flesh, as a community. It sounds like something out of a Lovecraft story!
Communion really is strange, you are right. It was wild when Jesus instituted it and it freaked out his disciples and the early Church, it was scandalous and definitely a bigger deal than merely symbolically eat a bland biscuit as memorial gesture. The whole concept of you eat God, then you become god (theosis) is pretty wonderous and awesome.
It's usually my go to when someone makes fun of the Mexicans for thinking their ancestors become birds, or the Romans for their sacred chickens, or the Muslims for the amount of times they have to bow. Man, we're all fucking weird, it's part and parcel of being human 🤣
Sacred chickens sound like a fun one . Do they .... Still eat them?
As I understand it, you would throw feed at them, and depending on how they ate, you would look for portents.
I don't think they ate them, but I'm not sure! The Romans had always been extremely religious, so I would be surprised if they did.
I don't think those chickens were ritually slaughtered for augury too (and then eaten) but maybe at the end of their um, term, as sacred chicken they become sacred fried chicken. I know in the past in the US chicken wasn't really a common meat crop because they were comparatively expensive and it was a more seasonal or rare food as they were raised for eggs. I don't know the history as far back as Rome though.
Of note you also typically didn't feed sacred chickens prior to your augury... Which meant their enthusiasm and thus the gods will was, shall we say, easily manipulated.
Edit because I got curious: there was actually a sumptuary law limiting chicken to no more than one (total not per person) per meal. It was a delicacy because they fattened the chickens up and even discovered that castration fattened them faster.
Couldn't find specifics but if chicken was a delicacy, old chicken augurs were probably on the menu, but maybe just of the priests.
But then sometimes the chickens didn't eat (then let drink instead!), and that was bad times, gods aren't happy right now.
I don't actually know enough about sacrifice rules. My understanding is that you would sacrifice these animals to the gods, but the actual meat was eaten by the community. So the sacrifice serves a religious purpose, like damn near anything ancient people did, but it also served a community purpose, and economic purpose, a legitimising for the elites purpose.
Funny that chickens are now a common meat for us, but a delicacy for them!
Well and apparently chickens get seasick which would be the other major reason they don't eat, besides being fed shortly before.
As for the sacrificial meat it depended on what was being killed I think, birds would probably have been small enough that only the priests got their cut but large public sacrifices were for the people (and large military ones for the army and so on).
I like Rome for its policy of orthopraxy over orthodoxy. Doesn't matter what you believe, it matters if you did the right offerings.
Chickens being commonly and cheaply available meat is really a modern thing afaik, with maybe some variations throughout like 10k years. The opposite of gentrification I suppose
I guess a little like lobsters, right? Used to be be what the peasants would eat before the rich realised that they were good eating and made them inaccessible to the poor.
I think orthopraxy was the norm, right? I mean, heresy and atheism were definitely concepts, but no one cared what you thought in the ancient world, just what you did. Ethnic religions are still like that. Shinto, Hinduism, and even Judaism all allow for things that would be considered heresy in Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism and other universal religions.
It feels really stupid when you see mini civil wars weaken the empire over whether Jesus had one nature both human and divine, or two natures of one human and one divine. You're never going to convince me that the mobs that were mobilised by some of the bishops had any idea what the fuck the difference was, because I sure don't.
Yeah kind of the reverse of the peasant food turned gourmet!
I can't really speak for modern religions, I don't have the theological grounding outside of Roman Catholicism (and like neopaganism kind of, which I'd argue mostly has neither orthodoxy/praxy) to speak for what beliefs are expected. Like I know there are a variety of beliefs and practices in Hinduism but not enough to know whether there is expectation or pressure to adhere to any of them. And the big three Abe faiths all have multiple sects that split due to different dogma (and then praxis) But the wiki page for heresy has entries for a number of non-Abrahamic faiths too.
Much like today though, you don't have to get the mobs moving with actual facts, enough effort to make "those" people obviously evil goes a long way to raised pitchforks. (I uh, can explain that theological point but only because again, extensive Catholic education and I find things interesting.)
That's a good point, I really shouldn't generalise. It's not like Christianity doesn't have orthopraxy. Hell, the filoque dispute is one of the main causes of the schism between East and West, and it revolves entirely around whether you're allowed to add "and from the Son" to the Creed.
Like I said elsewhere, I'm often sceptical of religious disputes being just religious. I often find they represent an ethnic or civil divide where each group, for whatever deep-seated reasons, interprets the same thing differently.
I'd agree that this is likely true, most of the time at least. Though I think detangling religion from other aspects of one's life can be hard for religious people. I'm thinking of the recent Methodist schism, both sides believe they're right about their faith and interpretation thereof in regards to queer ordination and marriage, and that belief is also deeply intertwined with the politics of the moment. But I don't think that makes it less of a religious divide either, the acceptability of those things is part of the dogma.
So there's definitely the "good us vs evil them" of it all, but religious (or again at least Christian) folks wouldn't make a distinction between the political/civil and the religious, since their religion is wrapped into their daily lives and political beliefs.
I think that makes sense, I feel a bit rambly
ETA and we do love a good filioque on the RCC side of things. Of course the real debate is who schismed and who is the real Church™ and obviously that is...˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗
No, I agree, I think it's probably difficult for a religious person to detach the actual belief system from everything else in their life, as it's part of them. To that person, adding a different explanation probably feels unnecessary.
I find the Catholic and Orthodox dispute about who's changed less so interesting because... they're both children of Nicaea and Chalcedon. Whatever Christianity was before the emperors got ahold of it, it was not either. They're both innovative.
No no no they're both the original church except one which is the most original, for sure (◠‿◕)
I agree that people have been awful under every belief system. Thanks for saying it.
Specifically, the explicitly atheist regimes of the USSR and the PRC could be very cruel and arbitrary, even while sharing the necessities of life more effectively than their preceding economic/political systems.
The Aztecs were apparently noteworthy for ritual torture.
Yup. Like I say somewhere here, I very rarely blame religion for human atrocities,.or thobk that the death of religion will help with our social problems. If you take religion from a far right American conservative, you don't get a tolerate liberal. You get a far right American conservative that also now thinks that kindness and empathy are woke.
“Not particularly bad for the time period” isn’t the same as “not terrible.” It’s a very low bar. As you say, brutal, by our standards.
For many people, I would honestly say it was pretty good, particularly after the republic had fallen. The wars stopped, Roman law was pretty stable and strong, Romans mostly left you alone if you paid your taxes. There's a reason tribe after tribe after tribe would negotiate, and even invade, not to overthrow the empire, but to settle in its lands and become its subjects.
That's not to say we in the modern era would enjoy it. I just don't see how any pagan tempted by Christianity would think the empire was decadent or corrupt. Compared to what polity?
The reason I call that out is because there's been a trope in Christian circles (for over a millennium) that the Roman religion felt fake to the pagans of the empire and was empty anf soulless, so therefore Christianity was destined to fill the void. There's like... no evidence of this. Paganism hung on stubbornly to many regions in the empire, particularly in the home province of Italy, and it took force to remove it, and centuries of concerted effort. Christianity won, but this wasn't teleological. There were structural advantages, but also proximate events that really could've gone either way, like Constantine's eventual victory, or Julian's death in battle.
There's little in writing about how peasants lived because the people doing the writing didn't care much about them. But reasoning from what we know, it was really terrible.
[...]
From acoup.blog.
Yes, terrible compared to us. Pretty good compared to the chaos of the collapse of the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman republic. Pretty good compared the Egyptian civil war, the Celtic raids into Greece, the exploitative transactional nature of both Republican Rome and Carthaginian exploitation of Spain.
People can't possibly compare their life to what things would be like 2000 years from now. I am comparing their lifestyle to their contemporaries. And for a lot of them, it was pretty terrible even by those standards! But for another large part, it was pretty good.
I'll point that the Roman Empire never ever had large scale independence movements. In the Achaemenid Empire, when the king of kings died, Babylon and Egypt would try to seccede almost every time. The Ottomans spent a lifetime battling independence movements. The Chinese would break apart with alarming regularity. This never happened in the Roman state. The wars were about overthrowing the emperor, changing policies, faction warfare. But not a single coherent group ever tried to secede, and even when they empire broke apart before Aurelian restitched it together, they were all still Roman, and all call themselves the Roman Empire.
The empire also similarly never saw significant abolitionist movements, even from former slaves. Slaves were still abused and mistreated in all the ways slaves tend to be, but a freed slave could rise high in society, and their descendants could even become emperors. The extreme openness of Roman society (a quirk of history) allowed something that had never happened in this side of the world before; people started calling themselves Romans even having never visited the city of Rome.
It’s true that generals who had success in the provinces often tried to become emperor, and they often succeeded. Kind of an odd dynamic.
Also, many local rulers would call themselves “Roman” even long after the western empire collapsed. It was a popular label. Maybe compare with all the countries that put “democratic” in their name nowadays?
I do see the concept of Roman citizenship as a set of legal rights that eventually were extended to all free people in the empire as pretty important in history.
But there were plenty of revolts and uprisings. I asked ChatGPT to make a list of the major ones. Looks like there were two slave uprisings in Sicily?
It seems like “large-scale” is doing a lot of work there. Revolts not becoming widespread might have more to do with a lack of cohesiveness between different peoples as well as poor communication over long distances. When the Jews revolted, why should anyone else join in?
The lack of abolition movements probably has more to do with the concept not being invented yet? After all, slavery was often the result of conquest. Slaves were an important form of loot. What good would a law after being conquered by foreigners?
All this has little to do with conditions for the average peasant.
It was ultimately a republic, in the eyes of the Romans. No one had an inherent right to rule. Anthony Kaldellis made the point that the Roman Empire is the polity that had the most amount of civil wars that changed absolutely nothing about the underlying systems.
By the mediaeval era, the wars were extremely short at decisive.. Someone would show up at the walls of Constantinople with an army and start making campaign promises. They would either be let in and kill the emperor, or not be let in and be killed. Like a weird election.
They would've been Roman. Roman identity survived the death of the state, as identities often do. Many rulers lass laws that specifically separate their own people (e.g the Franks) from their Roman subjects. It took centuries for the Roman identity in the West to disappear.
Citizenship helped, but the Edict of Caracalla was just a recognition of reality of the ground. Not every Roman citizen thought of themselves as Roman. But all parts of the empire were slowly romanising into a collective identity. That process gets interrupted in places like Syria when the Arabs invaded, but completed in Greece and Anatolia, where the Hellenic self-identity completely dies off.
Plenty of slave revolts (Spartacus being the most common one), no ideology of slave abolitionism. People didn't want to be slaves, but had no issues with slavery as a systems,.as.far as we can tell. We have tombs of people lamenting their enslavement who then go on to brag about how many slaves they had when they became emancipated.
You named one of the only two groups in the empire with a coherent self-identity that were not easily romanised, the other being the Armenians. So yes, the Jews revolted. But never the Punics in the Middle East and North Africa, or the Egyptians,.or the Greeks, or the Celts, or the Assyrians, or the Illyrian.
It's not doing a lot of work, it was.extremely standard for the time for empires of this scale to face large rebellions when a ruler changed. It has nothing to do with communication,.Egypt and Babylon often rebelled against the Persians together because they both had large populations with dreams of independence. Not once did the Romans have to put down a pretender pharaoh, like the Persians had to.
Mass freedom of slaves has been invented. Emperors had to pass laws to prevent to many slaves from being freed when the owners died. They were writing it in their wills and it was starting to affect the economy.
Out of curiosity - and because I don't see it in the other comments - what drew you from pagan spirituality to Protestantism to Orthodoxy? It's not a pipeline that is super common these days to my knowledge and I'd love to know what you found enticing about it! If you're not comfortable sharing, no pressure at all! I'm just very curious.
I had a bit of the opposite move. I was raised going intermittently to Catholic church, then found myself as a staunch atheist, and now really love the world of folk spirituality. I don't really believe any of the tails, but I love learning about all the little myths, dieties, and creatures in them! We even celebrated Beltane this year with a bonfire and midnight swim! It feels much more in rhythm with my life and the ecosystems I spend time in.
Ah, I can't take credit for the first generational step, that was my mom. As a child and a teen she was really really afraid of dying. The local traditions were frightening and conflicting, at the time, a mix of Chinese Buddhism, Taoist, South East Asian hmmm magic (?), folk non specific beliefs, ancestral worship, and Communist atheism. There's a lot of stories and personal experiences from people, and weirdness, that materialists growing up in historically Christian places can't fully appreciate, I think.
Her older brother joined a Christian youth group for fun, she went as well, and she became convinced that that was it. There was a period where my mom and her parents were in a stand still, with my maternal grandfather striking her at one point, and she literally turned the other day cheek and just.... wore them down with love. Now our entire extended family is (Protestant non-denom) Christian, plus one Orthodox (myself) and one (Lutheran).
She never finished elementary school, her mom was a rescued child bride and her dad was a pirate/blue collar worker: none of the conversion process was theology based, all Praxis. For the older generation, the fact that the children have followed foreign gods and will refuse to bring offerings to support them in the afterlife, and abandon the ancestors, as well as in general following Western values instead of traditional Confucianism, was a huge deal. I'm glossing over it but it was a big transition/break.
To be fair to my mom, she would be the last person to claim being well educated, but she would always be curious about other people's religions and beliefs in a sincere way. If it was just youthful falling in, she had plenty of time and opportunity to choose a much easier religion that also feed the poor and welcome the downtrodden etc. That she, and our family, continue to believe is one of those things an outside observer will attribute to confirmation bias / selective reasoning, but from inside it feels like supernatural protection, leading, and blessings/comfort in hardship too many to be random/coincidental.
Apparently, the cultural (eg non practicing) Christian > atheist > pagan > Eastern Mysticism / Old Gods > Orthodoxy pipeline is very well in full swing right now in North America. A good number of inquirers and new converts I know personally are coming from that direction. People want to experience something, and to put names to secret fears and respond to unspeakable joy, to surrender themselves to something ancient and deep, and to have daily practices that go beyond cognitive acknowledgement.
I came to Orthodoxy via the shortcut of hating contemporary Christian music .... But at the beginning my head was spinning and I had many moments of panic / many months of struggled with literal biblical interpretation / sola scriptura / Mary the Mother of God / the existence or body or activities of Saints / etc.
Would it be weird if I tell you that Orthodoxy is absolutely the least dogmatic Christian community I've been in? (The most dogmatic was a Christian homeschooling group I failed to join.) We don't even say this is the only way to God: we were given this way in the form of traditions including the text and liturgical worship ("we have found the true faith / worshipping the undivided Trinity / who has saved us"), but we can't say that other ways do not lead to God.
But yeah the old myths and seasonal events are super cool! There is definitely a rhythm to the seasons, the day and night and each day, and a connection to each other, nature, and life that is found in the universe that is missing from cold pews, and silent texts. I hadn't heard of Beltane before but I'm willing to wager the celebration sees more new comers every year ?
Edit!! Forgive me, I shouldn't have used the word pipeline, to suggest something inevitably goes from one the the next and any of the in between are temporary stops not as complete ends in themselves. a journey then, like yourself, people choose different participation into what is true and good by their best judgement
That was one of the most interesting reads in a while!! I'd love to hear more but only if you're excited to share, no pressure at all!
I'm so interested in learning more about the religion your mom grew up under this sounds incredible:
I really like the idea of locally cobbled religions. They feel so specific not only to a region, but familialy. Also, can we get some background on
That's wild!
I have never thought of Orthodox as being the least dogmatic, but in light of the current white christian nationalist movements, I can see that happening. Wild that the folks who used to seem the most out of touch are now seemingly the most rational. It's been a wild decade.
I was writing a bunch of folks worship examples when the page refreshed and I lost the draft. Take that as my cue to not speak about things I don't understand 'x'
The goal of them all is for cultural cohesion, respecting ones ancestral roots, feeling safe again after something terrible, having someone else acknowledge difficulties, and many many ways of praying for blessings. Look up Cantonese wedding culture, that one seems fun and positive.
Re: dogmatism
In Orthodoxy, there's a concept I didn't encounter in Protestantism, of economia (wiki), where rules are applied with flexibility in each home (oiko / eco), the older meaning of economy as in household peduent management. From Wikipedia:
Small example, on fast days your kid is hungry, by all means feed the poor thing even if there's only burger places nearby, and you should eat too if your fainting is going to just distract yourself and others in prayer. Try again next time if there's ability to prepare nutritious vegan snacks. "All things are lawful, but not all things are beneficial". The practices are for our benefit, not to hurt us. See also Jesus healing on the Sabbath etc.
Example: we should be quiet in the Church during worship. But we also semi-seriously call cries from babies Holy Noise: this is a household, we absolutely want there to be babies.
I know we've talked a bit about Orthodoxy after I joined Tildes in DMs, and I wanted to say I appreciate you taking the time to type out yours and your family's journey of faith! It was an interesting read and reminds me of my Mother in law who converted to Christianity as an early teenager in Southeast Asia and then eventually converted her family.
I've still been needing to dive in to the resources you shared, as I sit in a more baptist/non-denominational church background after becoming an adult and learning about the history of the church/theology and the different faiths are fascinating. Typing this comment out has got thinking I'll be setting aside some time for further reading outside my normal scripture/devotional time.
I do find the emphasis on the liturgical calendar and tradition fascinating and I know that the deep roots of the church are very desirable, and I even recently listened to a sermon series from my past non-denominational church that was specifically focused on drawing upon the roots of faith/doctrine/history/examples that has been built up over the millennia.
When I read this I pictured someone taking off a stereotypical pirate hate and then putting on a tie while sitting in front of a spreadsheet to calculate the latest haul of treasure/goods and ensuring that the proper taxes are filed for their gains with some sort of pirate governing body/local government.
Random crew members: "We're supposed to receive 1 share each, this is less than our total share!"
Blue collar pirate dad: "I've deducted your taxes for this raid and your share of operating expenses, so you are receiving your net share. If you have any complaints regarding pay, please file the appropriate form, and it will be processed by the Captain and Officers at their next operations meeting."
I have so many questions about that career path!
Blue collar, Pekt! :D pirate grandpa would have been the one wondering why the paycheque seems smaller this month, and some pointy haired boss giving him the jargon filled lecture. His land job was a boring paper factory/ printing house. We would occasionally get beautiful coffee table books with a missing cover, or some other small defects. He probably chose it based on knowing a guy who needs a guy basis, rather than interest or expertise, but he stayed there for decades until retirement.
Sailing was a common job in his day for younger men selling their labour who is able to be gone for a year at a time away from home. Apparently in the 50-70s about 80,000 Hongkonger sailed, being port city. Sometimes , demand for foreign goods highly depend on fast and cheap, proper import taxes and procedures be danged. Before GPS, lidar depth maps, satellite weather prediction, it was a very dangerous profession, and the family never really knew where he was going or when he would be coming back. Just read this article that said they would rely on unique lighthouse light patterns to figure out where they are and how to navigate through rocky straits (Chinese, about HK maritime museum).
He had a lot of tall tales of his sailing days, which I'm not totally sure about, including one about how he was in a European city square with many many pigeons, and him and a buddy rounded some up in burlap sacks. In the tale, some busy body disapproving local would come investigate, and he would give them some kind of reason that turns the situation around, and the local would end up helping pirate grandpa round up more birds. I honestly don't remember if the reason ever made any sense or were just funny themselves, but the tale of delicious free birds + locals getting duped was always the focal point.
It looks like I'm online collar color-blind haha, thank you for taking the time to share all of that!
I was recently talking with a coworker regarding how fun it is to talk to grandparents and get stories like this. Learning family history and also hearing about a different time, and then being able to pass those stories along to our children to whom it will sound like ancient times.
Also I've never eaten a pigeon, and have heard about them carrying pathogens and other things which has kept me from trying them without knowing where they were sourced from. I've wondered how they taste though.
There's probably farmed squab where you live :) it's like duck meat: dark and juicy but really itty bitty sized. Chinese restaurants do a great job frying them m
You're spot on I found some places after a quick search, so I'll need to go and give them a try. I also did not know what "squab" was and had to look it up. I may have seen this as an option before and not know that it was pigeon.
Hopefully I remember to tell you how I find it when I do get around to trying it.
Happy Beltane!
And to you!!!
Is there a special phrase folks say to each other on Beltane and am I too late to say it? Default: happy Beltane!
I honestly don't know too much about that. I swim in the ocean every day and I kind of glombed onto it two years ago when 2 mom/pup harbor seals followed us into the cove we swim from on Beltane one year. I had heard about it and its association with Selkies from the game A Highland Song (excellent if you haven't played it!). I looked it up after I played the game, about a month later, and saw that it had happened on May 1st!!! After that I celebrated every year! There are just a few of us who do it here, mostly friends and other swim folk.
This year we actually had a very funny Beltane because the local burner/burlesque groups did a witches event as a middle finger to our new Secretary of the Navy. I'm blowing up where I live a little bit, but it meant there were lots of folks keen to join this year!
I'm a fan of this song to celebrate. But I'm agnostic and thus it's not religiously specific.
First of May - Jonathan Coulton -NSFW
@chocobean I've seen Beltane Blessings or Beltane Greetings from more religious folks. Or just Happy Beltane!
So bring your favourite lady 🎵
I remember the first time I heard JoCo play this live at PAX :) I don't have the money to go on his cruises but it still sounds like a fun time after all these years
That's hilarious, I'd never heard it! I'll have to share it round
I want to hear more about the mama seal and baby!
Sure! The route we swim passes a pupping beach that is frequented by harbor seals in the spring/summer. The adults are usually very wary or slightly aggressive towards swimmers, but the pups are super curious. They swim with us for miles! Just bobbing and weaving across the sea floor below us (maybe 10-20 feet) and come up now and then for a closer inspection when they think we're not looking. We've had some really fun encounters with them.
This day was absolutely wild though. Usually it's just the pups that check us out, but they'll usually turn at the mouth of the cove as it's a heavily trafficked tourist beach. On this particular morning however two pups followed us all the way in and swam circles around us for about 5 minutes. My wife had met me at the water - she'll sometimes take a dip and we'd walk home together - and so she got to experience too! So we're all just standing in like waist deep water in shock when the mother harbor seals swim into the cove. They didn't come close and their presence ended the pups fun, but the whole experience was just unbelievable. Like, I don't think my wife would have believed me had she not shown up. It was awesome! Doubly so that it was Beltane!
It's not uncommon for us to have really interesting experiences with wildlife while we're out there and it makes me think that before we heavily de-wilded the planet, these kinds of experiences would have been much more common place. Like you can feel the curiosity and get some insight into what the baby seals are thinking when they check you out. You can understand the communication between the moms and their pups. Hell, even the fish seem to have little personalities. I think we're so detached from nature that it's easy to diminish shintoism or Dine spiritual practices as anthropomorphic. But there really is a whole universe out there that folks are missing out on!
That sounds wonderful and magical, and you're right that there is a lot of enchantment we've been missing out on. Treating earth like just a piggy bank to be raided, instead of a living network that has its own kind of consciousness and (dare I say) a different kind of will.
That's a really good question. I drove through rural eastern Indiana recently and I was surprised by all the Indian restaurants, gas stations, etc. I didn't expect that area to have anything but white people.
I know you were just replying in fun for the misspelling, but interesting fact about trucking in the United States, Punjabi, and particularly Sikh, represent a very large proportion of the US trucking fleet. Something like 20% nationwide, going to 40% on the West Coast. A knock-on effect of this is that you will see Indian restaurants and food across the interstates everywhere.
lmfao, thanks for pointing that out! fixed now
It is apparently very difficult to discuss theology in abstract. One must choose a specific faith to comment on.
Yup, and I recognise the limitations of human mortality, but it's still a big weakness. If I play Final Fantasy VII Rebirth 100 times for 50 years, I would probably become the world expert at the game and be able to talk about its details in a way most people would never be able to follow. But I can't then assert that it's the best made game of all time, because I have nothing to compare it to.
Muslims, for example, have their own religious and teleological explanations for how they went from a small confederation of tribes in southern Arabia to swallowing two huge empires that went back millennia to founding Caliphates that stretched from Spain to India. But I doubt Dr Hart would be unable to engage with the centuries of dialogue around those justifications. Which is fine! But it's a black hole that theologians don't often acknowledge.
The choice isn't Christianity or atheism. It's that or Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism or any of the 10,000 universal and ethnic religions out there, all with their own dizzying histories and mythologies. As I mildly poked fun at the end, I am not surprised at a Christian digging really deep into the meaning of existence and coming out the other end as a Christian. It was always going to be the culturally easiest and most familiar choice.
The Kalam cosmological argument is the most respected defense of theism in analytic philosophy. It is based on an argument by Persian Muslim philosopher Al-Ghazali, who lived in the 12th century.
I confess that I'm way out of my depth here, but just the first two premises:
Are these true? The description says that premise 1 if self-evident, which doesn't sound like a great way to start the argument! We don't know anything about the pre Big Bang period, so I dunno that we can say anything with confidence about how cause and effect worked before the laws of reality that we're familiar with existed.
I am also not a philosopher so IDK. But the argument is respected by non-theists. I assume you have to read the entire book to really understand its nuances. Or at least some of his articles on the subject.
That's fair enough, I certainly don't know enough to say anything with certainty. These old arguments have had hundreds of humans much smarter than I am spend lifetimes discussing them.
It was just my immediate reaction that the premises read... I dunno, a bit 20th Century. Whereas we now generally realise that we can't really apply logic and common sense to, say, observations in QM, or what we think a black hole might do. We just follow the math and iterate from there. The universe is just way to weird to have self-evident premises about it, is my lay gut feel!
Not a philosopher either,
but I play one on TV. The cosmological argument is not a very convincing one, even if it isn't particularly wrong, either. Most philosophers today can point to a few solid critiques of it, going back to early modernity.I've spent a long portion of my life researching these kinds of neutral theological arguments, and I'm not sure any really hold up under interpersonal scrutiny. If there is a God, or are gods, in the kind of simplistic way that terminally modern atheists strawman and some misled souls actually believe, then the only good reason to believe is going to be in the eye of the beholder. If our God/gods exist as most actually tend to believe (speaking to a broad set of disparate beliefs), then looking for a logical root at the beginning of time starts to feel fallacious and beside the actual point.
The only point for articles like these is to do the hard work of browbeating reductionist believers in Scientism until they go back to their inglorious pits. Science has its limits, because communication and logic have theirs, and in that space of Meaning beyond truth is where anyone builds their conception of deity, should they decide to.
Edit: wanted to clarify that I'm aware this is not a dissimilar argument from Kalam, but that's kind of the issue with bringing it up as an argument "for God".
I don't have much to say. But /r/askphilosophy is excellent and full of academics. Nowadays only verified academics can make top-level comments over there. Here's a search for "Kalam" in that sub.
yup
I just went through the Critique of Pure Reason a few months ago, Kant's pretty ruthless with it. Hell, I don't even particularly agree with Kant, but he wasn't wrong there.
I’ve only skimmed the article, but they don’t say “unique,” they say “new,” and it seems likely that the combination of monotheism and universalism (not based in one city or region and anyone can join) was understood to be pretty different to the people who lived in the Roman empire at that time.
We don’t know for sure why Christianity became so popular with the ancient Greeks and Romans, but that doesn’t mean we have to throw up our hands and say it was random. The ideological content likely played some role. This popularity can’t be explained by it becoming the state religion because it became popular first and then became the state religion a few centuries later, in 313. Constantine was going along with a trend that was well under way.
After Christianity becomes the state religion of the Roman empire, things do change quite a bit. In particular, religious disputes became much more prominent. The Christians cared what people believed, not just that they did the rituals correctly. Now they had the power and the emperor making laws about religion was considered as legitimate as other laws. Modern religious tolerance hadn’t been invented yet.
Other aspects of Christianity resulted in a state religion that was different, such raising the status of the poor and an emphasis on charity towards the poor, which resulted things like building hospitals. I don’t imagine those hospitals were any good by modern standards, but I don’t think the Romans built them before that?
I think it’s fair to say that other popular world religions and ideologies also had reasons why they became popular, but they were sometimes different reasons. Being adopted by the powerful definitely gives an ideology an edge, though.
From my understanding, one of the major contributing factors to the rise in the popularity of Christianity in the Roman world was its appeal and accessibility to the lower classes.
Many of the mystery cults that flourished in the first and second centuries CE required some amount of wealth to participate, as animal sacrifice was often a component of their central rites. If you were a devotee of Mithras, for example, you would likely have to contribute toward the purchase of a sacrificial bull. This was in line with the orthodox religious observances of the time, in which the wealthy held a privileged position by dint of their ability to give high-value offerings.
The central rite of Christianity on the other hand has always only ever required some bread and watered wine, two things which even the poorest plebeian could scrape together. Together with Jesus' teachings to eschew worldly possessions, his disdain for commerce in the temple, and his insistence that the meek shall inherit the earth, Christianity offered a compelling deal to the impoverished and otherwise disenfranchised of the early Empire.
That's certainly not the whole story, but I contend it's an important factor.
Ultimately, it was a very Roman religion. Christianity was an open mystery cult, which made it pretty rare. Coincidentally and similarly, one of the things that made Rome unique as a city-state was how open their citizenship was compared to places like Athens, Sparta, Carthage, etc. Well before Christianity, the Roman's own mythos about their origins (even amongst the elite) was that Rome had been a city of criminals, exiles and ne'er-do-wells. It lined pretty well with the Christian mythos.
Sorry, when I said that I dunno, I meant it literally. I don't know enough about the history of religion in the empire. I know monotheism wasn't unique. The process by which Yahweh had eaten the rest of the pantheon had already happened in Iran for Ahura Mazda, Ashur in Assyria, and had mostly happened to Marduk before Babylon had fallen. Pantheons consolidating into monotheism seems to have been a common Near Eastern phenomenon. Neither was consolidating monotheism with universalism special either, Zoroastrianism was well on that path by the time of the Parthians. Why specifically Christianity? The openness, as you say, bad a big effect. Why was it so open? That I'm not sure about, I don't know enough about early Christianity. I also don't know how every other mystery cult compared.
And you point out another unique aspect of Christianity, in that it uniquely cared about uniformity of thought, not of practice. Again, I personally don't know how early this developed. Certainly by the time the Romans got ahold of it, serious doctrinal disputes had already arisen. Islam would later build on this model as well.
In regards to hospitals, when talking about the Roman east (where Christianity spread and was not imposed, like in Italy), I think so? Asclepions were definitely a thing in the Hellenistic east. Don't know common they were compared to hospitals. Not sure how many were sponsored by the state, but the state sponsoring so much was a development unique to the Romans, as the elites left their local power bases behind and went to Rome (or Constantinople). Same.l reasons that sacrifices stopped, was the civil and social justification disappeared, and it no longer made any sense for local elites to showcase their wealth as they left it to the state.
But yeah, there's definitely reasons, that someone far more educated than me can go into with greater confidence!
As someone that was not born in a religious family I honestly find it hard to comprehend how people like the interviewee think. To me, there needs no more argument to believe that there isn’t a God than simply the fact that the Bible does not make a particularly strong argument for its existence.
I’ve read the Bible I’d argue more closely than most people, since I took a few classes on esoteric Christian sects in college for fun. It seems so clear to me that the Old Testament is an Iron Age religious text, which documents the beliefs and practices of a specific tribe. It’s clear the God in that work existed in a polytheistic world - why else would it need to be so jealous and such a dick about things. It’s clear that it shares a heritage with Baal, the storm god worshipped elsewhere in the region. Yahweh is just one version of Baal. He’s so far from omnipotent and and omniscient and all loving. The scope of the work is so limited and focused on a tiny slice of humanity. While the Israelites were going around in the desert, great empires had already formed in the Yangtze River valleys. And the middling power of the kingdoms of Judah, whose heights were at most a regional power being dominated by its more powerful neighbors, is the kingdom of the universal god?
And it’s also clear how in the New Testament, the apostles had a pretty naked power grab after Jesus died. Like it’s so transparent and there in the subtext the way that they “conveniently” had visions from Jesus that it was a fabrication to solidify their power over the people of their cult (in a non-derogatory sense). It’s something we’ve seen time and time again in more modern recorded history, from Mormonism to JWs to Scientology.
If there isn’t strong evidence to believe in something, you don’t.
I find this hard to take seriously in a world where we have carefully dissected and mapped the neurons of a fruit fly, modeled those with a computer model, and observed fruit-fly behavior replicated in a simulation.
Partially jumping off of your point, I think people have this idea that Judaism (and therefore Christianity) was somewhat special. An old religion worshipping a one true God in a sea of polytheism. But this just wasn't true.
Judaism came from Yahwism, which is well documented. Yahweh was the head of a polytheistic pantheon. Asherah was his consort. Baal was there too. It was a normal ethnic religion.
It did become monotheistic, but this was normal as well. The same process was happening with Ashur in Assyria and Marduk in Babylonia. The same process successfully finished in Iran with Ahurza Mazda, who is still worshipped today. A consolidation into the single national god of the ethnic group was a phenomenon occurring everywhere in the Near East.
Not much in the Old Testament would be out of place if we found it in Assyria or Babylon (if it had survived a bit longer). People go to war, their war god blesses or curses depending on the situation, the chosen people triumph. The names and locations would change, but this entire region's religious developments had been linked to each other ever since the days Sumer established literacy.
I once read a book that had a small bit riffing on this, where a character stuck in an alternate history timeline asks about Christianity, but finds that here Ahura Mazda is more popular and is said to have intervened when the Romans tried to crucify Yeshua and in so doing taken "the Yeshuans" into the Zoroastrian fold for a time.
Do you happen to remember the name of the book?
It was The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson. (To be clear, it's not at all a major part of the book, just a brief joke to show how out of his element the main character is by upending his assumption.)
Different book, but the Kushiel's Dart series is an alternate history fantasy earth where the Yeshuites live in a very nomadic form and are considered odd for being "monotheists" when a number of Angels literally walked the earth and gave birth to the people of Terre D'Ange (fantasy France) with one commandment above all "Love as Thou Wilt." (Which humans then fail at a lot) They are descended from and pledge themselves to different angels/bloodlines of angels and they all took different angles on the whole thing. (Content warnings abound)
Personally the Yeshuites read very Jewish but also maybe Roma? It's been a while though so now I'm due for a reread.
Note: My background is I was raised Catholic. I'm not an atheist but I am not currently religious.
There are a number of problematic things about religion in general, and Christianity in particular, that should cause people to be suspicious. Here are just a few things
The religion is highly focused on the importance of faith. It's the most important thing of all! You should notice that means you are being asked to believe something that has no proof. We wouldn't have to cover this topic if you could actually see God in the sky or something.
It promises invisible rewards in a future life. That way, you will be content with this one where the leaders take most of the resources for themselves. The poor will be rewarded after they die! Don't worry about how much gold the king has hoarded. Convenient.
The religion itself is not protected from charlatans, grifters, and evildoers. There has been a lot of violence and crime that arose out of various heresies and misrepresentations. You may say "yes, of course, humans are involved and they commit sin". Yeah, but the religion says that faith is the most important thing! Faith in what? Tammy Faye Baker? Jim Jones? Trump? The "one true version" of Christianity? Which one? The vast majority of Christians don't even follow the official teachings. Instead they follow popular supernaturalism or some buffet of things they picked and chose. For example, the extreme focus on sexuality by many Christians is not supported by the text.
Specific random thing: The 10 commandments in general is very odd. It is too largely focused on believing the religion itself and following authority. Maybe there are four things on the list that are actually related to practical morality (don't hurt people). The rest are focused on "sins against a God" and "obey authority".
Another specific random thing: For something that has been divinely inspired, the Bible sure has a lot of repetition and internal inconsistency. Could really use an editor to give the Gospels one coherent author, for example.
BTW there is a core message in there that is obviously very nice and comforting by many people. It's just a shame that it's constantly being leveraged by the powerful to do evil.
Only curious about the fruit fly part: is behaviour all of consciousness and motivation?
You're taking about this 2024 Berkeley, Shiu news right? Where if we give the model the signal for sugar water, we can predict the neurons for moving its proboscis will light up in a way that it does not for bitter water? That's very far from being able to simulate an entire being. If they have subsequently done more please let me know, it's very exciting stuff. From the link:
I'm not able to understand the research too much, but it seems like the application is matching stimulus to responsible neurons, and not demonstrating consciousness via running a well built sim.
But. I'm not going to "God in the Gap". Let's say there is absolutely no God. Let's say we can perfectly neural simulate 1 million fruit flies, and compare them to behaviour of 1 million actual fruit flies. Would we expect a small percentage, or even just one in a million, one individual who seems less motivated by sugar water than others, or one who paints with its own spit seemingly for fun, or one who somehow stayed with a "friend" fruit fly when it is injured? If none of them do, if the sim flies are just hardware put to visualized software, are the real animals mere automatons? Are we all animals that are really just automatons?
I think the author is arguing for what lies beyond, after we can perfectly explain every physical mechanism. Its fair enough, though, if you think there won't be anything, just that this is where you and the author are differing on conclusions past where we don't yet have definitive proof.
I’m not saying we’ve replicated consciousness, rather there’s no gap in our mechanistic understanding of brains. If what the author said is true, we would have evidence that points to X, but the empirical analysis of actual brains would point to Y. There would be a gap, some missing element that would necessitate a “spirit” in the same way the expansion of the universe necessitates dark matter.
There’s no such thing, though. We continue to make progress on our understanding of the brain and there hasn’t been any spirits confounding it.
I don’t see why not. Everything we know about neural biology supports models capable of large amounts of variance, both in its initial state and it its development over the lifetime of the creature.
I think that presents a false dichotomy. Both positions are not logical equals. The default to not having evidence is to not believe something. If I were to say that there is a race of sentient lizard people on Mars who live underground, that is something I’m saying with no evidence. If you were to “not believe” in it, it’s the default - it’s up to me to prove it.
I’ve only skimmed the article so far, but I’d like to come back and read it in detail if I have time because it’s an interesting one…
From my quick read, two things strike me, both of which seem like a recurring theme when I hear theological ideas from clearly intelligent, thoughtful, and well read believers:
The first point almost always leaves me asking whether these people are religious in the sense that the average person would understand it, or are they effectively freelance believers, forging their own philosophical path with existing religious texts as a broad map?
The second leaves me asking whether they are missing some pages from the map that might have nudged their path a little if they’d had them… Not in the reddit atheist sense of “oh if they knew the facts they’d abandon belief”, more just in the literal sense that I think it would make their conclusions more robust, and I’d be more interested in their theology and religious philosophy if it did a better job of accounting for the non-religious approach.
About explanation it's also important to contrast the scientific explanations (or lack thereof) with the alternatives, because they often have serious issues of their own; e.g. for consciousness dualism has the interaction problem (how non-causal "stuff" influences matter/causal stuff), panpsychism has the recombination problem (how small consciousnesses makes a big one), plus these theories also often have lower prior probabilities. Theists will often just assume that their explanations work when they don't.
It seems to me that he's making a classic God of the gaps argument, but with more better education and more words.
It still relies on the same logical fallacy though.
The thing is that science never claimed to be able to explain everything.
It's a massive logical leap to go from "science can't explain everything" to "and thus God and his divine son, Jesus Christ are real and our Savior".
God doesn't need to exist for science to not explain, or not even be able to explain everything. It's entirely possible for some things to just be unknowable without a mystical being controlling the whole universe.
To be fair to them, we can't even really define consciousness. Of course science can't explain something that can't be defined. You usually need to know what you're studying in order to study it, and something that isn't philosophy can't mesh well with something that is philosophical. It's not a failing of science so much as it's just a definition of science.
I'd throw that into the "can't currently define" bucket - I think it's fair to say we might never come to a falsifiable definition of what consciousness actually is, or of what the mind is as distinct from the brain and body. But I think it's also fair to say we might manage it at some point!
For what it's worth, I don't personally think these questions are likely to exist fundamentally outside the realm of the testable, and I'd want at least a millennium more of scientific advancement with little to no progress on the topic before I'd be willing to throw them into the "yeah, most likely not testable" bucket.
We've only even had fMRI for 30 years or so, for example - and I'm not even saying that's the tool to answer the question, I'm more saying that when it comes to the brain, let alone the mind, we've been doing the equivalent of trying to theorise about the origin of disease without even having a basic microscope even within my own lifetime. Let's get analysis on a century of fMRIs, another century of analysis on whatever magic quantum state scanner we end up building to replace that, a century or two of computational development until we can simulate every neuron in a brain with near-complete accuracy rather than as a heavily simplified analogy. Then let's hypothesise on whether the origin of consciousness is a truly fundamental mystery that cannot be isolated, or whether it's just a very very very hard question to answer.
I guess what I'm saying is that humanity has had a lot of things we've believed to be unknowable over the centuries, and the vast majority of them have turned out to be knowable once we had the tools and foundational understanding to do so. If consciousness is a fundamental outlier, which it could be, that's tricky because it's going to be an open question forever: you can't prove a negative, you'd need a working definition in order to conclusively show it's undefinable, which is obviously a paradox. But falling back to "balance of probabilities" on that basis, I think it's pretty early to make a call on a subject we've barely scratched the surface of in a truly rigorous way.
For your second point, I think this is hinting on an innate tendency humans have towards tribalism and opposition. For some reason many people put science and religion in opposition. This is especially the case (in my experience) with American religious sects. If you actually look to the Catholic Church, they have had the Pontifical Academy of Sciences for almost 100 years now. They are at least somewhat dedicated to furthering the understanding of the world because they believe that brings us closer to understanding God. Evolution is not a problem for the Catholic Church, but it is a problem for certain American denominations.
Moreso, the scientific method leads us to believe that if there were a verifiable religious proof of consciousness, or creation, then that would be accepted as scientifically accurate! These things are not separate tribes. They are not in opposition. Yet for some reason we increasingly read about them as if accepting one is a rejection of the other.
Anyway, as a born and raised Catholic who grew turned agnostic, then grew to reject the church and eventually because an atheist: I honestly just don't understand what is going on in the "popculture" zeitgeist of the modern religious world. The more I read about it, interact with it and hear about it, the more confused I get.
[edit] I wanted to add that I hope rational people of faith like Stephen Colbert and now James Talarico can give us some direction and clarity in the religious world in the future.
As someone who grew up Catholic I also always struggled with the framing of science and religion as inherently in opposition. Many scientific discoveries came from monks and Catholic lay people, and some of the biggest "church cracking down on science aka heresy" moments in history are usually more political than theological. I'm certainly biased by my Jesuit university education, but I just never saw the conflict.
Keeping up with what the modern evangelical doomsday cult of a church believes is difficult but it is countered by some lovely Methodists and Quakers and UUs and the like who demonstrate that not all Christians share the same religion.
(Now certainly in things like policy/law and ethics I see a number of conflicts, but most folks aren't talking about, the principle of double effect in the treatment of ectopic pregnancy for example.)
I'll pull out the section related to the post title, as that's what drew me in.
My (admittedly uncharitable) summary of the argument:
Scientists are, at present, confused about consciousness.
Therefore: God.
Do I have that right?
That's the opposite of what the headline states. I think it's more
The argument is more that saying science leads you to atheism is like saying that words can't explain what color looks like to a blind man so the blind man shouldn't believe color exists.
not no God entails God.
Absence of proof vs. proof of absence. I can't prove that God doesn't exist, doesn't entail that God exists.
No, but if your assertion is, like the article, that it cannot be the case that there is no God, then that logically entails the existence of God. Most atheists do not claim they can prove that God doesn't exist, merely that they don't consider there to be sufficient evidence that one exists, but that is not remotely the same as what the person in this article argues. I don't think the arguments presented for why there cannot be no God are particularly sound, but if you do accept that premise, that is how the logical entailment works out.
Framing it as a negative is, imo, an attempt to shirk any responsibility for providing proof for the existence of God, but that's a rhetorical strategy, not formal logic.
I look at it this way: I do not know whether there is a perfectly baked Chicago deep dish pizza on the surface of Mars at this very moment, and I also can't conclusively prove that one doesn't. That does not entail that it necessarily and absolutely must exist nor that I should believe by default someone's claim that it does.
I agree with this line of thinking, but this serves better as a justification for atheism itself rather than as a description of this person's argument for rejecting atheism. His argument is more akin to "There are things on the surface of Mars we cannot fully explain with current science, therefore it cannot be the case that there is no pizza on the surface of Mars."
That's not the article's actual assertion though, unless I (and an AI analysis) missed it.
I think you're being at best overly charitable to his claims if you assert that he's merely arguing that there is an absence of proof that there is no God.
But my point about logical entailment was intended more to address the meaninglessness of making a distinction between "therefore God" and "therefore not no God" in the pithy summaries of his position from the perspective of formal logic (in which ¬(∄x.God'(x)) and ∃x.God'(x) are logically equivalent) than it was intended to be a fully-formed representation of his perspective.
I don't know; I feel like you're being overly uncharitable about it. Perhaps those statements are equivalent on the face, but at this point with all of the discussions, I feel it should be clear that it's not literally "not no God" but rather "not [in a state of there being proof of] no God," a.k.a. "not necessarily no God," a.k.a. "no proof of God," a.k.a., as someone already said, "Absence of proof [is not equivalent to] proof of absence."
(Note that these aren't intended to be formally logically equivalent because language doesn't exist exclusively within formal logic—"not" could mean negation, but it can also mean "this is not intended to say...")
Also keep in mind that the headline is not written by the author, and even though the headline is a direct quote, it's not the full quote:
So even where the direct quote comes from, he even qualifies that he's not even explicitly talking about there not being a God. Just that we can't prove that there's nothing beyond what we can prove exists.
I think the quote you provide nearly illustrates the slight of hand that he's doing, however, to shift the burden of proof off theists to provide evidence for the existence of God and onto atheists by insisting that a lack of evidence that no God exists constitutes a cogent philosophical argument against atheism. At best he's building an argument against a strawman atheist who insists that an absence of evidence is evidence of absence, but the vast majority of actual atheists don't believe this -- they simply are not convinced in the existence of God given that absence of evidence. Even if I thought his arguments about consciousness and materialism were solid (I don't) and didn't have a problem with the jump from "God exists therefore my specific religion is the right one", I don't think this is philosophically rigorous or even honest.
But my initial comment was intended on a much more literal level anyway.
Hart isn't actually shifting of the burden of proof, though, because he's presenting it as his reasoning for not choosing atheism rather than as an argument against atheism. Not everything has to be an epistemological debate. This is just a confession in an interview. He isn't really demanding anyone prove anything. He just states that the arguments aren't compelling to him.
If we don't accept that, then every time anyone (including you and I) states "I believe x because y" becomes the opening move of a debate.
Every time someone publicly states "I believe X because Y", they are indeed inviting people to form opinions on their stated beliefs and whether their justification for those beliefs makes sense, yes. When you frame your reasoning as being based on philosophical arguments, which he explicitly does, you are then inviting people to consider your perspective through the lens of philosophical argument. When you say the philosophical arguments against something are unanswerable, you are making the claim that philosophical arguments exist against it which must be answered, and when said philosophical argument is "there is no clear proof that God (or at least something beyond materialism) doesn't exist", you are placing the burden of proof onto atheists to provide evidence of the lack of existence of something (something that is notoriously difficult to impossible to do when one eliminates "there is no evidence for this thing's existence" as an option even for things that are much more obvious and concrete than the concept of a higher power) rather than on theists to provide evidence it exists. This is also an extremely common lazy tactic from Christians who want to give their beliefs the veneer of philosophy without engaging in the necessary rigor.
I can be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the arguments regarding consciousness he brings up, perhaps they are extremely poor solely because he was speaking off the cuff. But I don't think it's fair to insist one should ignore the weaknesses in this line of reasoning, especially when it appears to just be a fresh coat of paint on an extremely common and weak part of Christian apologetics.
Of course public discourse always invites people to evaluate what you say (at least implicitly—I definitely know people who would be surprised to hear you're evaluating what they say). But that doesn't mean you're actually assigning a burden of proof. It's like the difference between stating an opinion and entering a formal debate.
You're framing his argument as "there is no clear proof that God (or something beyond materialism) doesn't exist, therefore atheists must disprove it." But he's making a specific claim that materialism in and of itself cannot account for consciousness, therefore materialism is insufficient.
There's a difference between "you haven't disproven my position, so the burden's on you" (lazy apologetics) and "here's a structured reason your position is insufficient" (normal philosophical argument).
I'm sorry to walk in with a basic question...
I think I don't understand the connection between "materialism", "consciousness" and "theism" that the interwee wants to make.
It probably has to do with me not understanding what these words mean in this context.
Would you mind explaining them or pointing me towards a resource that explains them.
My understanding of the connection
To me (with my very, very limited understanding of the matter) this line of thinking reads more like a defence for, rather than against, atheism.If theisms only value is in giving comfort to people who can't stand that some things are not yet explainable by them or humanity then it is obvious that all the gods are make believe.
Drawing the line at consciousness today is no different than drawing the line at lightning when Thor was invented. By moving the goalposts theists weaken their point and show a form of hubris that says today we as humans know everything that can be known and I am the judge of this and therefore there must exist something more and this more is this god or these gods.
I don't mind individuals deciding that they don't want to engage with certain topics (I sure do that) but I do mind these persons rationalising that behaviour in a way where I must do it too using the same tools to not threaten their mental health.
I think the point of difference that this narrows things down to in terms of our perspectives is that I think the insistence that materialism must be able to fully account for consciousness in order to be sufficient to constitute a weaker form of the same burden-shifting, and I think you're downplaying the connection he draws between arguments against atheism and arguments against pure materialism. I think the way he near-conflates the two amounts to strawmanning, even if it was in fact unintentional, off-the-cuff strawmanning, and I don't think it's fair to completely dismiss the way he draws an equivalence between atheism and materialism.
But then I also think his arguments when it comes to consciousness themselves are pretty egregiously bad -- it's just that their quality isn't directly relevant to my criticisms of the logic and rhetoric here, since I think this line of reasoning is flawed even under the presumption that his arguments about consciousness and materialism are airtight.
It really depends on if you end up with "not no gods" or "not no God" because "God" ends up being quite different than one of those.
But as noted, people do always seem to discover that the dominant religion and/or their personal inclination towards religion are the inevitable truth.
yeah funny how that works. And of course even if this author had a 100% bulletproof argument that there cannot be no higher power at all (which he doesn't), he doesn't remotely justify why the Christian God he believes in must be the higher power that exists. But in my experience Christians tend to have an arrogant sense of superiority to other religions despite usually knowing very little about them, so perhaps he thinks that part is so self-explanatory that he doesn't even need to argue it 🙄😒
I mean I looked him up*, he's been Christian so it's not like this was a surprise revelation for him. I can do apologia with the best of them, but that's all it is, not a neutral examine of the nature of the world.
I'm an unwilling agnostic, I'd like to believe but I don't. I'm culturally Catholic in many ways - it informs my sense of the inherent dignity of people -and culturally Christian in general due to living in the US. So when I revert to throwing a prayer into the world it's usually Christian related, but I still don't believe. This is all that is, subconsciously reverting to the "default"
*Note: the author, not the interviewee
Honestly I consider this pretty weak even among Christian apologia tbqh.
Agreed. I just meant that it's not neutral
He does clarify at the start of the section that he's just talking about "something beyond materialism" in general:
And that part is just one question near the end when he's been primarily addressing a different topic for the rest of the article (pretty sure it was only pulled out to be the title because it's provocative and draws clicks). So while I'm not particularly convinced of Christianity by what he says there (nor especially drawn by it to look into more), I'm willing to guess it's probably not the full extent of his thoughts on the matter.
That's probably fair. I have enough experience with bad Christian apologetics to unfortunately have low expectations when it comes to such things, but it's certainly possible he approaches the issue with more rigor elsewhere.
I've no idea whether his full reasoning is good or not, mind (though admittedly the answer here doesn't feel like a very compelling start to me). I just don't think a single question in an interview about a separate topic is likely to be a complete position, especially when it starts out with a caveat like that.
I mean I’d argue that colour is just the experience of a person when light hits their eyes, so you could say that colour doesn’t exist for a blind person
But if they were continually arguing with people about their impoverished worldview that invents a magical field of visual depth that has nothing to do with space, time, or anything material as far as they're concerned, I doubt they'd be very pleasant company.
I think that's either wrong or question begging. On the one hand if you define "mental" has what psychology, neuroscience, .. study then it's pretty clear those field produced knowledge on their objects of study and most people in these field don't think consciousness is an illusion (even among philosophers that's an uncommon view afaik), so it's just false science doesn't work there (although I agree it might have fundamental limitations). On the other hand if you define "mental" as something fundamentally unexplainable by physical factors then it's trivially true science can't explain it...
Thank you for extracting that blurb -- I started skimming, then gave up on, the article as they dove into religious specifics that seemed disconnected from the stated topic.
Yeah; this just seems like a well spoken person who hasn't kept up with science beyond the high school level. Cool that they're into philosophy, ancient cultures, and all that jazz, but the opinion of a niche anthropologist on the nature of life feels like a stretch to me.
Consciousness and God (an anti-physicalist's take)
I feel a certain kind of negative way about Hart gesturing at minds being merely mechanical if God doesn't exist. I have defended panpsychism here before, and have spent the past few years digging into all of the contemporary philosophy of mind literature. I'll try to put forward a basic sketch of the case for anti-physicalism, you can see if you find it persuasive, and then we can see if there's a good case from anti-physicalism to God.
1. The trouble with consciousness: an explanation
The issues in contemporary philosophy of mind come from analyzing our language about consciousness. All the arguments in the literature seem to boil down to analyzing the concepts we have related to consciousness, and seeing what these concepts "point to" in reality (if anything) and whether they are pointing at the same things. We seem to have two very different kinds of concepts to describe what brains do. One is known as phenomenal concepts and the other as physical concepts. Understanding arguments in pop philosophy like "Mary's room" or "the zombie argument" help with understanding the conceptual distinction.
1.1 Phenomenal concepts
Phenomenal concepts are language we use when we talk about "redness" or "pleasure". It is the "what-it's-likeness" or "qualitative nature" of an experience. The taste of mint, the smell of coffee. There are two important elements of these concepts: ineffability and privacy. These concepts are ineffable, which is to say that there is at least something about the experience that cannot be described to someone who hasn't had the experience before. If you are colorblind, I can't tell you what "redness" is, because when I talk about redness, I verbally "point" at an experience that only color-sighted people have had. They are "private" for roughly the same reason; we can never learn what it feels like to use echolocation by examining bat brains.
1.2 Physical concepts
Physical concepts are all of the other kinds of language we use. Neuronal firings, avoidance behavior, disposition to become violent, etc. These are the "quantitative properties" of an experience. Quantities fit neatly in formulas and models.
1.3 The core of the problem
It's a trivial truth that if there are indescribable aspects of our experience, then they cannot be described in our physical theories. There's a seeming gap between our phenomenal and our physical concepts. To use Saul Kripke's example, there's something very different between pain and c-fibres firing. How can we reconcile these seemingly incongruent ways of describing brain and mind stuff?
2. The solutions
2.1 Solution one: physicalism
It's important to note that "common sense" physicalism (the thesis that our experience is ineffable/qualitative AND describable by physics) is not a major position in philosophy of mind largely for reasons that ineffability trivially entails indescribability.
2.1.1 Type-a physicalism: deny the conceptual gap
One way to go is to deny that the phenomenal concepts described above accurately pick out anything in the world. This involves denying the ineffable, private nature of our experiences. All there is to our experience is what is captured by the physical concepts. One major way to go is illusionism (a view (allegedly) held by Daniel Dennett) where we are in error about the nature of our experiences, at least as far as we think they are ineffable/private. Our beliefs about our experiences are due to some kind of conceptual confusion, or maybe some kind of misleading intuition humans are predisposed to have. Others think that philosophers are incorrect in identifying ineffability/privacy with normal "folk" usage of phenomenal concepts.
Whatever the diagnosis of the conceptual confusion, there isn't any genuine conceptual/language "gap" between some facts about our first person experiences and third person facts about brains and if there is, the concepts in conflict with physics don't actually point to anything in reality.
2.1.2 Type-b physicalism: "identities don't need explaining"
The dominant type-b view is endorsed by a famous philosopher David Papineau. He grants that there is a genuine conceptual gap between our ineffable, private experiences and brain states. But, they are identical, and identities do not require a scientific explanation. Explanation here means something like a scientific description, not merely something like a story consistent with science. They aren't conceptually identical the way bachelors and unmarried men are, but they are identical nonetheless.
Take for instance The Morning Star and The Evening Star. The ancients thought these were two different stars, but it turns out, they are the same planet Venus! They had two different concepts that pointed at the same object. This doesn't require specifically an explanation; no scientific theory needs to tell us why Venus is identical to Venus. When people pointed to either star, in both cases they were pointing to Venus. When I say "I'm in pain!" I'm pointing at something inside myself, so says Papineau, and whatever I'm pointing at may just turn out to be c-fibres firing, to use the example from before. Other cases with these kinds of identities that aren't conceptual identities are Superman and Clark Kent or the clear liquid that fills rivers and lakes and the chemical compound H2O.
2.2 Solution two: anti-physicalism
I will not provide a robust defense of anti-physicalism about the mind here, as that would take too much time. Some view type-a views as denying the most obvious aspects of reality, or type-b views as running into issues such as psychophysical harmony or problems with brute emergence. Regardless, I will set aside a full defense of anti-physicalism and merely survey some of the most popular views.
2.2.1 Property dualism (dual aspect monism, Russelian monism, etc.)
These views say, roughly, that there are two fundamental kinds of properties; phenomenal properties and physical properties. The phenomenal concepts are about the phenomenal properties, and the physical concepts are about the physical properties.
2.2.2 Panpsychism
This view, esp the popular Russellian panpsychism, says that fundamental entity(s) have an intrinsically phenomenal nature, and this phenomenal nature bears the physical quantitative properties described by physics.
2.2.3 Substance dualism
This view says that we are a soul, and that souls bear phenomenal properties, and physical objects bear physical properties. Our soul is embodied in a particular brain, but is distinct from it.
2.2.4 Idealism
There are lots of views here that aren't popular enough nowadays to dig into, but roughly the idea is that, if type-a physicalists deny that our phenomenal concepts accurately point to anything in reality, then idealists (usually) say that our physical concepts do not accurately pick out anything in reality.
3. Conclusion: where is God?
If you made it this far, thank you kindly for reading this, I put my heart into it ❤️. Would any of the anti-physicalist solutions, if true, provide unique evidence for God? If there are fundamental properties like physical properties, and those aren't a problem for atheists, why would fundamental phenomenal properties, objects, or substances? Maybe substance dualism cries out for a God to play the role of ensouling minds into bodies, but many indigenous and eastern cultures have had no trouble believing in souls without The Un-ensouled Ensouler™.
I'm an agnostic without much leaning one way or the other, but maybe you can reference this next time someone says something like "atheists think our brains are just mechanisms!" or something similar.
@TangibleLight this relates to a conversation we have had before :)
Indeed it does! Thank you for remembering. It'll take me a bit to chew on the new comments here since I looked through this thread this morning.
I will say though, in the time since that past conversation and again reading your great summary here: I really dislike the names "physicalism" and "anti-physicalism". I understand the history and the semantics that they represent, but I don't like the words. To me, it seems that if you believe phenomenological experiences come about due to the physical universe then you must admit phenomenological experience as part of the physical universe. The discrepency is that the "physicalist" positions seem to deny qualia outright or (as I generally did before the referenced conversation) ignore the hard problem of consciousness. The only positions that seem to admit phenomenological experience as part of the physical universe are, ironically, the "anti-physicalist" ones. So I am forced to identify as a dualist of some variety, even though I disagree with the notion of "soul" as often associated with those views.
I think your conclusion is the most important point though. "Athiests think our brains are just mechanisms!" is a straw man that must be rejected. The conclusions don't follow, either. Suppose we do have eternal nonphysical souls: what bearing does that have on the existence of a god or any other aspect of theology not directly about the nature of the soul?
I'm an atheist and I despise religion.
I admit I'm not even close to have read or understoodd the text and comments in full.
I think my perspective is important anyway even though it hopefully doesn't bring anything new to the table I believe it's important it is at the table so you don't forget it exists.
I don't understand why it would fall on me to prove I'm right, I'm not the one claiming something; you are. It is your job to prove you're correct if you want to use logic and reason to prove your point. It is also fine if you don't - in my opinion - that's the whole point of faith; to allow us to function in the world without having to prove things.
(I do however also understand that I'm not the target audience for this article or discussion as this is more about what god(s) and religious practices to pick rather than picking at all - even though it is disguised as a piece about atheism.)
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is the distinction between faith and religion.
I do have faith in different phenomenons regarding humans and nature at large but that does not have to lead me into also having faith in a being or group of beings that have power to control nature (including humans) for their own agenda.
And even if I had faith in some god(s) I wouldn't have to follow a religion or accept any religious leaders.
One of my biggest objections to faith in god(s) and religions is the constant use if good/evil with the "other:ing" that follows from that. While I do believe that other:ing is a kind of biological imperative I also think (and have faith in) that humans have the moral capacity to overcome that part of biology.
While it is easy to dismiss a perpetrator as evil to distance yourself it doesn't really change anything to prevent future similar evil acts.
While I see that my comment is quite negative about the topic I also want to say that I am very grateful to be able to be part of this community where I get to read these kind of articles and the very interesting discussions that follow, thank you.
@mycketforvirrad I have a typo in the title if you can please change it.
"The reason I'm not an atheist is that I think the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable" (gifted link)
Fixed! 👍