"Think about the Twitter account of a modern intellectual who engages in a good bit of trolling, and how hard it can be to figure out when he’s presenting his authentic views as opposed to joking or trying to avoid getting into trouble."
I can't imagine doing that. Do you have anyone in mind?
We don’t need one more intellectual attempt to replace faith in God with a creation of the mind. You either have no faith, and all is permissible, or submit yourself to a righteous authority (not another human mind), and live constrained out of obedience.
Right. Christians have been evangelizing for 2000 years, but a presumed atheist is going to tell me I don’t know what I am doing, when atheism has only been a cult .. er .. alternative, for 100 years. Yeah. I’m totally persuaded.
Yes, but most of them were far better at it then you seem to be*. I can remember a good thirty rounds of evangelism in my childhood church community, and rule number one was to not be this much of an asshole. Rule number #2 was to bring specific facts, prophecies, etc to the table, *especially* when dealing with skeptics!
Now we’re getting somewhere. I am not here to be your friend. I am here to reveal the truth, to the best of my ability. This is never a “polite” process. When I am talking to a drug addict living in a trailer on my street they don’t need complex, dense inanities. They need the truth. I tell them that living on the streets as a drug addict is going to kill them. There’s nothing I can do for them until they admit they’re on the path towards death.
What does 'evangelizing for 2000 years' imply? Hinduism and Buddhism have been around for many centuries longer; Islam for almost that long. Zoroastrianism evangelized for 2,000 years before disappearing. Why are Christians so impressed themselves for this? And there were prominent atheists as far back as ancient Greece and Rome.
An earlier commenter, who sounded atheistic (but I cannot be certain) presumed to tell me that I was evangelizing wrong. Kind of like a bank robber giving the police advice on how they should perform their duties. I don’t take evangelism advice from those who are motivated to see me fail. You shouldn’t either.
The problem with your original comment was not (just) that you are evangelizing ineffectively, but that your argument is basically just an unsupported assertion that people who disagree with you in general will probably also disagree with: namely, that ethics is only possible under religion, so that without religious belief "all is possible". Since you argue against "replac[ing] faith in God with a creation of the mind", presumably you are trying to argue with atheists or people whose view of life is secular, not religious people (who probably basically agree with you anyway). Some atheists probably agree with you that externally imposed ethics doesn't make sense if it's not inescapably enforced (as by God), but even they will generally say that they have preferences or values analogous to ethics, so that they will want to do good to some extent even if they are not being externally compelled to. (This doesn't seem like a stable situation to me ― those values are themselves inculcated by society, which would cease to do so if most people saw ethical values as merely a personal preference, & history provides plenty of examples of (by our standards) horribly immoral social norms ― but you didn't clearly argue against the ethics-as-personal-preference view in your earlier comments.) However, most atheists or secularists (I think) think that some more generally applicable form of ethics does exist, i.e., that some form of ethical behavior is beneficial or obligatory even if an all-judging god isn't incentivizing it. (For instance, I think that the intuitive view of ethics ― in general, be kind, helpful, & willing to cooperate, but punish those who harm others or break agreed-upon norms ― is basically a more complicated society's analogue to the tit-for-tat strategy in the iterated prisoner's dilemma, & is a useful choice for basically the same reasons. Other atheists may believe in utilitarianism or some form of deontology.) If you intend to try to convince people who disagree with you, then you should actually argue against these views instead of stating without justification that they are wrong.
Right and wrong only exist if there’s an authority beyond all persons. Whatever that is, I call it God. If you don’t believe in God, you’re declaring that right and wrong do not exist, and that there is only will and power. Ethics ... is a rationalization to disguise your will as what is “right”.
I'm an atheist more by default (I wasn't raised in a religious tradition) than out of strong conviction. I don't want you see you fail, in fact I would rather be persuaded to convert.
I always love this argument where the religious apologist admits that he can't conceptualize categorical thinking or basic understanding of harm without imagining it as a man with a beard but this is somehow everyone else's deficiency.
Hey, dick head, I used to have no faith in God (mid 1990s to early 2000s). And I have a Physics degree from the United States Air Force Academy. If this is about who’s intellectual dick is bigger, I challenge you to head-to-head IQ tests or SATs. You up to the challenge of supporting your dismissive comment with an actual test?
This is not about "intellectual dick" (lol) and it doesn't need to be. I can pull a tribal out of the amazon rainforest who doesn't even have written language and even he knows intuitively that you don't impulsively rape and slaughter your community. This is about your superstitious need for people to signal fealty to community by hating orgasms or whatever. As a side note, I fully believe that you have IQ scores and credentials or what have you, and this marriage of intelligence and need for primitive signalling is exactly why I don't think IQ is all it's cracked up to be.
You are wrong. Tribal people are routinely documented as being capable of rape and murder of those not in the tribe. Read about the Comanche and the Apache. Read about the Mongols. Read about the inhabitants of North Sentinel island. Read about any number of tribal societies who come into contact with others - you will surely discover that rape and murder were accepted norms. I even run the thought experiment on myself, and what I find is that, if there’s no God, and I can escape earthly punishment, I can do whatever I please. I know that the same is true of you as well. But you’re like most people addicted to rationalism - you won’t admit this to yourself. Rationalism offers no escape from this truth, no escape from tribal warfare. All rationalism can do is play the bait-n-switch game of getting a culturally religious class of people - soldiers and policemen - to enforce your rationalistic solutions on peoples and cultures, so then you can disingenuously say, “see, humans are purely rational and we just have to reboot the malfunctioning humans with our perfect Operating System in order to stop bad behavior.” You can’t even call bad behavior sin, because you (likely) believe humans are merely biological machines with no free will.
Original: "even he knows intuitively that you don't impulsively rape and slaughter YOUR COMMUNITY."
Reply: "You are wrong. Tribal people are routinely documented as being capable of rape and murder of those NOT IN THE TRIBE."
Wait, I know the Air Force is queer now, but you're telling me they were putting actual honest to god illiterates in elite positions back in the 1990s? Were we ever a proper country?
Tribal people also kill those inside the community. I deliberately did not call that out because the out group violence is so much more obvious. Killing is not taboo in tribal societies. You’re only safe if you’re useful in a tribal society, and that is not morality. That’s living only one step removed from the animals. And that is where rationality alone will take us - we’ll become animals with nuclear bombs.
Why should we care about harming others? What law of nature demands this? You only think it's obvious because you grew up in a society built on Christian morality. But Genghis Khan would be flummoxed by your morality.
No law of nature demands it, and yet human society has existed long before Abrahamic morality and could exist just as well after. Sure, Genghis Khan would likely kill me, the same way any conquering force regardless of ideology or religion brutalizes an outgroup. But this notion that people will impulsively rape and slaughter without reason and sense unless restrained by the image of a universalist king is simply false even in primitive society. I don't know why exactly it is this way and not the other, but the inclination toward restraint is clearly there. In fact, why not run this argument backwards: If there is no God then you can just rape and murder as much as you like barring human intervention. Barring human intervention, I can rape and murder with impunity, therefore God is not real. Again, this is less an argument for anything other than the necessity of signaling commitment to the collective by pledging fealty to the name of its idea of universality. The state does all the actual work. As a Yarvinite, I would think you could intuit this.
Mr Pleasance, I promise you that I have no desire to be worshipped, certainly not by random strangers on the internet. No need to resist the call to worship me, because it is a call I do not make.
I don’t care what god or gods you choose to worship, so long as you refrain from using said god or gods as an excuse to use coercion on me. I do reserve the right to laugh at you, however.
This is not true, such attempts routinely succeed, people can and often do have morals without believing in an outside authority enforcing them, how are we still discussing it in 2023?
Morals without outside authority is nonsensical proposition. What you actually mean to say is that you often agree with people who do not believe in God. But there’s no morality in it - you merely agree. Tomorrow you could disagree with that same person,but this would not be a moral dilemma. Agreement between two biological machines, which have no free will (we’re just deterministic machines without “God”), is like two stones that both accelerate in a gravitational field - an amoral occurrence.
Impressive. Every sentence in that message is wrong.
Morals without outside authority are routinely found. I do not necessarily agree with such morals, nor do they agree with each other. They are morality par excellence - a set of ought-statements. Disagreements on morals can and do produce moral dilemmae - specifically, meta-moral dilemmae on what ought to be done when a bearer of a different morality is encountered. Free will is not needed for morality to exist as a category, even though many specific morality systems do include that false-ish hypothesis in themselves.
Metaethics - the question of what morality systems are better - is complicated but potentially solvable, see, e.g., https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/metaethics and https://www.lesswrong.com/s/bQgRsy23biR52poMf. In particular, the solution certainly does not lie in just accepting some invented outside authority which most likely doesn't exist.
(Correction: unless you want to declare Occam's razor or something like that is your god, as per https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/C8nEXTcjZb9oauTCW/where-recursive-justification-hits-bottom. But if you reject that, you will encounter predictable problems in is-statements, not just in ought-statements. So, conditional on your already having a framework that works with describing how the world (with high probability) is, you are unlikely to need anything on top for ought.)
I mean I agree that technically all is permitted without God, I can't call a rapist "wrong" in some universal law sense of the word, but we clearly have some emotional programming to stop us from doing those things. I feel bad when I hear about people being hurt or dying, even in the absence of God. I have no desire to cause that suffering and want to alleviate it. So if that's my natural biological programming, I don't think I need God to make it a "rule" when it is already an implicit one that lives inside me, and inside most people.
If the forces that control society can band together to say "this is wrong" and then enforce that norm that seems like enough? And lord knows believing in Jesus has not stopped many people around the world from committing horrible atrocities anyway so having God tell you what's right and wrong is not a completely effective backstop against immoral behavior.
You are coddled by a society you did not create, and that coddling permits you to pretend, quite convincingly, that you do not desire to kill, maim, or rape. But you will do all three of these things, under certain conditions. That’s the truth. And that’s why you need a standard for right and wrong, beyond mere human will. Without that external standard, there is no right or wrong. There’s just human will.
You really think everyone has some base secret desire to maim and rape and kill? That says more about you than anyone. I mean I guess I might do those things if someone held a gun to me head and forced me to or something, I couldn't say for sure, but I think my biological and cultural training has taken the URGE for those things out of me, and we can do that without needing God.
You don't do those things because you grew up in a society based on Christian morality that told you they were wrong. Had you been born amongst the Mongols, you would have no such reservations about doing those things to cities that resisted you.
Yes, you're correct, but my point is more that humans malléable. Some are biologically more violent than others. Some cultures are more violent than others. But you don't need God not to want to murder and rape. Christianity, and other religions, may have played a useful role and helped establish those norms in our culture, but we don't need religion to maintain them.
Yes. It’s called original sin. I wasn’t born yesterday. I’ve worked with real people. They are capable of the darkest evil, including you, including me. If I imprisoned you, and killed all those you love, before your very own eyes - I guarantee you would suddenly notice feelings that you presently are desperate to suppress. You have them. They are part of you. Your only hope to be free of them is to seek treatment from the only one who can heal you - God.
That doesn't mean they are in me now, it means they can be put into me by certain circumstances, which is probably true, though I find it more likely I'd just become depressed and suicidal than interested in raping anyone. But I guess my main objection to that is that I think you could make that happen to most christians too despite their belief in/love of God.
But I do think I understand your position now at least. I think we just have a base disagreement about human nature, which I don't really feel like getting into.
Nietzsche and Ayn Rand are similar in that people who are true believers in those theories go crazy and generally don’t end up well -- but going through a Nietzsche or Rand phase and then tempering them with time tested more pro-social ways of being makes one a better person than normal.
I would argue that a Christian-Hellenistic synthesis is the only way forward for the right. A purely Nietzschean-pagan approach is missing that the past is long gone: we’re not in a society that has warriors relaxing by the fire, drinking sweetened wine and telling stories of sacking cities, killing the men and taking the women. We neither have that historical context nor do we want it.
While Nietzsche is critical of Christianity, what he’s actually criticizing is the post 30 years war and post-Enlightenment Christianity, which basically abandoned all values except for “tolerance.” Earlier Christians include Hernando Cortez, who conquered an entire continent with just a boatload of knights, Thomas Aquinas who made a synthesis of Aristotle and Christianity -- in fact, a pure Christianity without Hellenism never actually existed.
Also, Jesus was a spiritual Gigachad. If we team Him up with the intellectual heirs of Achilles, we’re unstoppable.
I believe Strauss referred to that synthesis in terms of Athens & Jerusalem.
> in fact, a pure Christianity without Hellenism never actually existed
Maybe Jamesian Christianity (though still emerging in the context of Roman rule), but Paul deliberately sought out to include gentiles and his success baked in Hellenization.
There is actually a strong (I think) argument that the writing of the Torah/Old Testament was influenced by the Greeks as well, so the contrast Athens and Jerusalem is a little fake (but with some merit, to the extent that myths from the Ancient Near East were incorporated in the Torah).
Christians and pagans noticed similarities between the Torah and Greek writings -- but Christians naturally explained them by the Greeks borrowing from the Jews.
But that just wasn't the cultural reality at the time: Hellenistic Greece was a cultural elephant, Jerusalem was a cultural mouse. The only reason the natural inference (that Judaism was influenced by Greeks and not the other way around, and not from a common source) wasn't made was because it was thought that the Torah was older than many Greek writings.
But the discovery of the Elephantine papyri made it plausible that by the 5th century B.C. the Jewish writings were extremely undeveloped. Which means that the Bible was written to a large extent later. Which would mean that the door is open for Greek writings to influence the composition of the Torah.
Many characteristics of Jewish Law (the king is subject to the law, there is a founder who gives the laws, there is constitutional law, military law, sacred law) are not found in Ancient Near East Laws -- but are found in Greek colony laws.
Russell Gmirkin develops this argument in three books. He believes that the Torah was basically written cca. 272 BC, when representative Jews were present at the library of Alexandria and consulted scrolls there, including scrolls about Hebrew and Ancient Near East history, to write the Pentateuch. Gmirkin also makes the argument (in an entire book ) that basically Plato's Laws was a huge inspiration for Jewish law (for instance, continually educating the population in the Law was sort of unique to Jews -- but it is presented as an essential part of Plato's Laws).
But you don't have to go all the way with Gmirkin to argue that in fact, the writing of the Torah was strongly influenced by the Greeks.
Jesus is probably the most unremarkable, boring, and unpersuasive spiritual figure to ever become a household name. If you don't believe he's the literal son of God who should be obeyed simply because of his Godly authority, there's no reason to care what he says.
Yeah this is my read of Nietzsche as well, and this is also the point that people like Charles Hayworth makes. I think this is probably the most viable political position, in the American context
The Christian Right has the advantage over the Nietzschean Right because of breeding. Evangelicals and Mormons have high TFR (although Mormon TFR has gone down a lot), while Nietzscheans are mostly cosmopolitan elites that don’t really have kids (based on what I’ve seen hanging out with some of them in NYC).
Religiousity is also very heritable, so as long as Christians can sustain parallel media and education separate from the woke mainstream media, their kids will remain Christian.
Also, most immigrants are Christians, further replenishing the Christian pool, whereas Nietzscheans are by definition niche, since they have to resist the masses to be the Overman.
Can you tell? I have a real beef with all these people placing their faith in their rationality. Your rationality will become your executioner...you need to put something else in charge, to keep your rationality under right authority, so that it does not lead you blindly to your own destruction. I speak from experience on this.
But Chad Jesus, at least of the papist sort (see SCOTUS and weep), is arguably still anti-eugenics, anti-abortion of undesirables, and anti-euthanasia. I don't see this changing easily because, unlike yielding to Chad Trump, support for actual scientific progress is entirely outside the instinctual framework of Christian women.
The meek and merciful Jesus is a modern invention . Though Jesus did have these qualities, he also expressed fierceness at times;"I come not bearing peace but a sword" is a favorite. Jesus also justifies capital punishment in Luke 17: Temptations to Sin
And he said to his disciples, “Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin."
The poster above you may be incorrectly attributing the current revisionist approach to cuddly Jesus to the second Vatican Council, though. This council did cut out a lot of traditional concepts from Catholicism in order to reconcile with the modern secular world in the 60s. It may have been a factor in revisionist Jesus, but not the sole source of blame; Protestant evangelicals in the US are also at fault. I think the above poster is using "Chad Jesus" to refer to the more severe Christ outlined in the plain text of the New Testament that is sometimes overshadowed by the contemporary invention of "Jesus just wants to hug you!"
Then stop doing it like an overbearing kindergarten teacher or HR lady eager to chastise everyone around her, it’s exactly this annoying moralizing that makes Christianity supremely unattractive to the young men you’re supposedly trying to win over, I don’t need yet other menopausal woman I’m not related to unsolicitedly yapping at me
I am not trying to attract you. I am trying to demoralize the pride out of you. When you’re drafted (I hope not, but damn it sure seems we’re going this route), and killing, and seeing others killed, you’re gonna see all the intellectual bullshit for what it is. It you’re going to vomit it out in disgust. And then you’re going to remember all us crazy Christians who were prattling on about Jesus. And if it’s not war, it’ll be disease. And if not that, someone very close to you will deeply betray you. In that moment your ideas will die and the seeds I’ve planted will have room to grow.
If I’m going to get *my* pride demoralized out of me, it’s not going to from someone replying to people in a consistently grandiose, self-aggrandizing manner who just challenged someone to a head to head IQ test. As an adult. I like Christians and respect Christianity, you’re rambling to an imaginary person who’s not me. Like the Bible says, “don’t point out the sawdust in your brothers eye when you have a plank that’s too hypocritically narcissistic to lecture people on humility in the other”
"most immigrants are Christians, further replenishing the Christian pool" - And yet what this means in practice is more preachers in more pulpits screaming about how the genetically irredeemable poor should get all your money, and pump out more kids.
"so as long as Christians can sustain parallel media and education" - Christian media has historically been an anti-recruitment tool as far as intelligent or remotely competent people are concerned. I'm not exactly a Christian anymore, but I once was one. I can still be moved by passages in the bible, or C.S Lewis' mere Christianity. And your average Christian cultural offering triggers whatever remaining purity sentiments I have, and makes me want to to pray "God, vindicate your name, and strike down these blasphemers who have perverted it into something so pathetic."
"while Nietzscheans are mostly cosmopolitan elites that don’t really have kids" : OK, you've got me. This one hurts.
If you’re not a Christian anymore, you should hate that f’ing liar Jesus of Nazareth. Do you? Or are you too polite to take an actual position? I believe He was who He said He was, and that’s the only reason I take Him, and His Bible, seriously.
"the only reason I take Him, and His Bible, seriously": I mean he kicked off a social technology that conquered a massive Empire, you really don't have to think he was divine to take him seriously.
"you should hate that f’ing liar Jesus of Nazareth": I did but I got over it. Someone needed to make useful creatures out of masses of useless sheep (and a single central religion did a pretty good job at that), and Roman stagnation was unconducive to European greatness.
But yes, I do think he was a liar. Or mentally ill in a similar way to an Alexander the Great or I guess a Mohammed.
The reason that “social technology” worked is because people believed Jesus was crucified, dead, buried, and raised back to life. If you don’t believe, you’re not going to benefit. Quite the opposite - life is going to become very bleak for you.
This is a Christian cope. If you don't control the culture those Christian children will leave the Church. Ultimately RW Christians are just not creative and intelligent enough to run a society that people find appealing. Even a dancing Drag Queen is more appealing than a crusty Boomer speaking in tongues about the End Times. No wonder young people are fleeing the dying Church. The idea that you can "breed your way to victory" is ridiculous. You will simply be providing more warm bodies for Trans-Floyd worship. Time to move on from this kind of thinking and Christianity more generally.
Christians need to take a page out of the Orthodox Jewish and Amish playbook. Create separate schools and colleges (Hillsdale and Grove City are good examples of conservative Christian-centered colleges), or create homeschooling networks. Live amongst other Christians (Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option) and create social pressure to marry and have big families. Don’t let kids watch Hollywood films. Then, let high fertility do its work and have vast future generations, while affluent libs in cities only have like 1 or 2 kids.
TGGP notes below that the Amish seem to be doing alright, but that just says how far you need to go to insulate your people from the outside world to prevent defection (and even the Amish are dependent on modern society for many things like healthcare). Given what the attrition rates say about how preferable the outside world is to extreme religious sects, I'm not fond of the idea of trying to scale them up for society in general. It's vastly more desirable to try to promote a culture that reconciles modernity with replacement level fertility, at least to me.
Christians have been out-breeding atheists for a long time, but the rate of attrition (now even among Mormons) is still more than high enough to put Christianity in a state of terminal decline. If one takes this for granted (which I do; even immigration is a temporary salve, as the countries immigrants are coming from are rapidly secularizing), then the real debate isn't over Nietzscheanism vs. Christianity, but over what form of irreligion will succeed Christianity, Nietzschean irreligion, Millian irreligion, Marxist irreligion?
As a corollary, I've read some arguments that due to liberalism's influence on lower TFRs, the remaining ones who identify as religious (Christian, Jewish) will in fact be more conservative and more stridently religious due to this blind selection process and heritability bottle-necking.
Liberalism, secularism, and urbanization/modernization have been pressuring human fertility downward for around 200 years in the West. Closer to 300 years for France.
At some point, that long-term graph will either pivot back upward to somewhere persistently well above 2.0 TFR, or human beings will go extinct. The further TFRs drop below 2, the more imminent the pivot becomes. So I think the fact that the forces that have been resisting sub-2 TFR have been defeated so far is not sufficient to prove that they will lose forever.
The pivot is going to look like one of two things: either some radical technology-driven change (of which I'm skeptical), or the gradual accumulation of the various existing pronatal forces, empowered by natural and memetic selection, to a tipping point. The most important of these pronatal forces remains the continuing influence of the Abrahamic religions.
Nietzscheans and Christians alike overestimate the importance of Christianity in shaping modern morality. I'll grant there's a good deal of thematic continuity, but many obvious exceptions (see anything related to sex). IMO, most of what is attributed to Christian influence on modern morality is really just a consequence of wealth, peace, and stability. These things make every society more risk averse, less adventurous, more concerned with the weakest members, etc. The obsession with victimhood is a natural consequence of having a stable, peaceful society where disputes are resolved by each party trying to convince an institution that they are the aggrieved party. I think we'll see the same moral patterns emerge in non-Christian countries too as they become more developed.
This makes the problem more intransigent. Ironically, I think Richard here is overestimating the importance of ideas. Even persuading them away from the ideas of Christianity won't much change people's moral attitudes. The challenge is to convince rich, fat, comfortable people who rarely have to deal with direct confrontation to become adventurous, risk-tolerant, and ambitious. I think your enemy here is prosperity itself rather than Christianity or its legacy.
I don't think your premise holds at all. Poorer societies are broadly more communal and nepotistic to a fault, while wealthier ones tend to be more individualistic. Although Christianity alone cannot create an individualistic culture, it is by far the religion most tolerant and inspirational to many of liberalism's greatest figures. The infamously skeptical deist Jefferson who tore up the Bible to best fit his own views removed the Old Testament and Revelation, not the message of Christ.
Your claim that wealth and risk-tolerance are inversely correlated is also pretty absurd when talking about new wealth; if you mean the trust-fund kids create charities to entertain themselves, who cares? Most old wealth is eventually diluted through enough family generations. The most sloth-promoting programs came under FDR's administration in the middle of the Great Depression; the most laissez-faire governance under a booming near-full employment Gilded Age. Again, your premise is completely backwards from reality. Prosperity begets prosperity; poverty begets desperation and theft.
People who are anti-egalitarian and anti-Woke need to understand that Christianity is the number 1 problem. The last should come first/neither Jew nor Greek is the origin point of all of this. You should read Tom Holland's book Dominion which explains just how revolutionary these ideas are and how they persist today even as Christianity formally dies in the West.
For Nietzscheans who believe in civilisation and science, we must make sure that we don't throw out the baby with the bath water when it comes to Western civilisation and Christianity. Extricating these poisonous Christian ideas from our morality and society will take time. Embracing barbarism and LARPing will not help in this endeavour. Having said that I like Mr BAP, he provides a necessary slap in the face to the Christian Right even if it comes with homoerotic muscle worship and Barbarian LARP.
Can you name a couple of the most poisonous Christian ideas? It seems pretty odd that the Christian culture on which substantial amounts of Western civilization were built would be more poisonous than most of that which has attempted to succeed it. Don't know your position on the following events but it should be noted that Jews originated communism, secular hate speech law, international slave trade, psychoanalysis, neoconservatism, and much more, not Christians.
The original tribe of Jews, like Druze, basically never attempted to spread their ideas, religious or otherwise, outside of their tribe. It is Christians who decided to spread their highly-socialist ideas to everyone, who both decided that the whole world must live under their customs and declared those customs egalitarian (well, human-egalitarian, "everyone's under God"). And if you're speaking about some kind of "Ashkenazi conspiracy" based on blood rather than culture (such as Irving Kristol being offspring of non-observing Jews), that's all it is, an unmotivated conspiracy theory.
So your main problem with Christianity is simply that it has been widely propagated? Because that argument could easily be made against any non-insular religion (though perhaps you blame Islam on Christianity), as well as any secular empire. I'm highly skeptical of the idea that the liberalism which came out of Western Christian nations is more socialist than their pre-Christian tribal ancestors were. The Arabic accounts of pre-Christian Nordics certainly weren't indicative of a highly individualistic society.
I meant the slave trade within a Western context. Jews (mostly Sephardic rather than Ashkenazi) were the most prominent slave merchants in the 17th and 18th centuries in America, and it's no coincidence that South Carolina was both our slave capital and home to the single largest Jewish population in the entire Western Hemisphere up until the early 19th century. Obviously the trade involved many participants of all faiths and ethnic groups, and there were plenty of Southern Christian aristocrats happy to buy slaves, but they played a vital role, and it was egalitarian Christians that ultimately ended the institution.
Tribal societies are a curious mix of egalitarianism and hierarchy. The chief is not absolute but he exists and is there to be obeyed; and merit is certainly recognized as such. It is Christianity that first spread the idea "merit doesn't matter because you are all worms in the eyes of God". (What role Islam played here, I am not qualified to say, except that it obviously started later, but I don't harbor much love for it, either. I don't _like_ insular religions, but at least they are not a spreading poison.)
Jews were the most prominent slave merchants because they were the most prominent merchants period, because they were forced out of other activities by Christians. Although, again, no love for either religion. And the reasons for ending slave trade are complicated, economy among them; I believe we would have seen it ending even without the idea above.
We have a bad habit of intellectualizing reason and morality. We do it religiously. We do it politically. We do it selfishly. And we do it without any real thinking!
Edmund Burke is considered the father of conservatism. He served in the English Parliament before and during the American revolution and wrote, “Reflections on the Revolution in France” during the French Revolution in 1790. In reading about Edmund Burke it becomes clear that he believed and was very outspoken about embracing the past and at the same time he knew change was inevitable. I think Burke was right in his thought, that traditional values can be reaffirmed under new circumstances. He argued, and I agree, that the French Revolution ended disastrously because it’s abstract foundations, purportedly rational, ignored the complexities of human nature and society. In Thomas Aquinas we find a religious philosophy that was heavily influenced by the argumentative reasoning associated with the Greek philosophers, particularly Aristotle. In 1267 he completed a work on government called “Politics”, where he asserted “yet it is natural for man, more than any other animal, to be a social and political animal, to live in a group. He called the common good as protecting life and promoting peace. Aristotle would have called this “the good life.” For his efforts he was initially rejected by the Catholic Church, which condemned some of his writings based on Aristotle’s ideas. About 50 years after his death the church revived his works and made him a saint. His writings combined reason and faith and became the basis for the official Roman Catholic doctrine known as Thomism. In addition, his forward looking political ideas regarding natural law, unjust rulers, and rebellion influenced Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke, and even Americans such as Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King. History gives great lessons; Confucius was a great philosopher in early Asian history, who had significant early philosophical ideas. Here is a man born more than two thousand years before John Locke, but could he not be seen as an early proponent of liberalism?
Modern intellectuals have a bad habit of being to closely aligned to their own ideas and resist logical discussion and arguments. More inclined to the importance of their theory than allowing critical analysis.
Can a conservative be liberal, of course! Can a liberal be religious, of course! Are all conservatives religious, no! Can a liberal become illiberal, absolutely! Can a conservative be an atheist, of course!
I’ll leave it with this quote by C.S. Lewis, “If you love for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end despair.”
I am Christian, and as I’ve aged I have been horrified to find that Liberalism is the enemy of Jesus. When I was younger, I thought Liberalism was a friendly word, like “democracy”. Now it appears to be a societal suicide pact. I want nothing to do with it.
I too am a Christian, a Roman Catholic. I attend Mass pretty regularly. I volunteer in my community, love my family and I just try to be and do my best. I sometimes fail too. I consider myself to be a conservative in the the more classical sense, and I try to seek balance between reason, my faith, and my moral obligation to myself and fellow man. I’m truly sorry that you’re horrified to find liberalism to be an enemy of Jesus. In many ways, taken in historical context, Jesus could be called liberal. Why do I say this? For me it’s simple, “Don’t impose on others what you yourself do not desire.” I realize this is not a direct quote, so I won’t argue it is. But it’s pretty clear to me that he could have said this, or inferred it. I am a man, with my share of faults and hopefully my share of of good too. Liberal is not an unfriendly word or bad word. Our country, our constitution is a very liberal document. It is very short in terms of many other constitutions and nowhere in the document will you find the word democracy.
We would all help ourselves, my opinion, if we just could take a moment to pause, and think about words, meanings, influences and judgments. My worry is not that we live in a place where dreams can come true, but what kind of dream? For example we talk about equity as though that will make everything equal. My question is does it mean we need to all be the same in order to be or do our best. I say no. In science, nature or faith we are all different, choose your group and you’ll find everything has opportunity or can be dismissed. Equality assures freedoms for all, but freedom does not assure equity for all.
We’re in divisive times, in our country and around the world. We battle many things, good and evil. Let’s not battle words or label each other with falsehoods just because we’re told by others what it means to be liberal. Or conservative. Or virtuous. Or whatever?
Maybe the problem here is liberalism as the single ideology unto itself, and then liberalism that is anchored on Christian moral framework. Without this grounding, I find liberalism to be completely empty framing, would maybe even go as far to say it's logical conclusion is nihilism. "Don't impose into others what you yourself don't desire", but what do you desire? There doesn't seem to be a definite conception of the good in liberalism, except for maximizing desire, but desire for what?
Liberalism or the meaning of being liberal is only about three hundred years old. To be liberal means to be willing to respect new ideas. In political terms it is a social philosophy that promotes individual rights, and free enterprise. Since a nihilist generally doesn’t believe in God, and Jesus is the son of God, being nihilistic would not have been used in any context by a believer of liberty such as John Locke for example. Obviously the term “liberal” was spoken and promoted by Christian men who would not have thought liberalism to be an empty term. For me Jesus and his followers would have been quite liberal given the era they lived in, given the modern definition.
Ideas have momentum, and when you look at the idea of individual rights, it vests the ultimate arbitration of good and evil in the individual. During the enlightenment era when Christianity was still a strong religious force, individual conceptions of a Universal good still mostly converged on a common conception, with some (In my opinion) insignificant doctrinal differences. Fast forward to the modern era, with waning influence of religion, that Universal conception of the Good no longer hold sway in our cultural fabric. And ultimately, I think the incompatibility of liberalism and Christianity starts to show, because Christianity (or any moral framework) is a set of restrictions on individual autonomy (sexual deviancy bad, etc.). So I guess my point, is not really to wholesale disagree with your liberal + Christian position, but rather to point out that liberalism does have these tendencies embedded deep in its ideological core, and without grounding itself in some other moral framework, is a recipe for nihilism (because again, liberalism == individual freedom, but freedom to do what?)
"Think about the Twitter account of a modern intellectual who engages in a good bit of trolling, and how hard it can be to figure out when he’s presenting his authentic views as opposed to joking or trying to avoid getting into trouble. "
>The cult of knighthood and chivalry owed much more of a debt to the Homeric epics than the Sermon on the Mount.
Joshua, commanding the Sun and Moon to stand still so that his army could fight until midnight: "Am I a joke to you?"
The Christian tradition might have taken a lot of things from Hellenism, but the celebration of great warriors isn't one of them. That came straight from the Old Testament.
While I'm glad BAP is out there doing his thing, I'm getting pretty depressed at considering what it implies if Nietzscheanism really is the only alternative. Can't we just have compassion, BUT ONLY for the deserving (ie. those who show gratitude and would reciprocate it if they could, ie. not generally Bantus...) Is the only choice really between people that would drown their children to use their corpses as lifeboats for those that hate them or "the justice of nature: the zoos opened, predators unleashed by the dozens, hundreds….four thousand hungry wolves rampaging on streets of these hive cities, elephants and bison stampeding, the buildings smashed to pieces, the cries of the human bug shearing through the streets as the lord of beasts returns (BAP)."?
I can’t believe I’m saying this but that’s quite unfair to Bantus. Most are “good people” but are struggling with mismatch w their genes and first world civilization.
And if you lean towards Nietzsche’s views but like compassion (as I do) then I *highly* recommend Schopenhauer if you haven’t read him already
My version of Nieztchean compassion is just help the ones that can help themselves (the strong). The weak are not worth helping because your help just sends them further down the rensitment spiral. But maybe this is my Christian cope of Nietzcheism idk
Conservatives are not satisfied with the world as it now is. What to do about it? There is currently a debate between Rufoism, which is the idea that we should trace the influence of pernicious ideas over centuries, and Hananianity, which posits that we should really focus on what the EEOC was up to in 1968.
It is more than passing strange, then, to see Hanania put forward Costin Almariu’s esoteric reading of a 2,400 year old scrap of Greek philosophy as a foundation for modern conservatism. The Gorgias dialogue has traditionally been understood as standing for the primacy of justice and right over mere power. Almariu now argues that this is all wrong, Plato really agrees with the might-makes-right philosophy of Callicles, but merely wishes this argument to be better concealed. I’m pretty sure that Almariu’s interpretation of the dialogue is wrong, but what I am absolutely certain of is that if Almariu is right, and Plato had been read correctly to endorse Callicles’ point of view, the consequence would not be that we would now be living in a Nietschian world of supermen. The consequence would be that Plato would now be completely forgotten. That is because the philosophy of Callicles cannot satisfy even those whom it most exalts.
To see this, consider the Iliad. Achilles isn’t merely stronger and faster and a much greater warrior than everyone else. He’s also better looking. His sexuality probably doesn’t correspond to any of our modern categories, but it’s clear that his beloved is another warrior, Patroclus. Achilles is, in short, the ultimate Bronze Age Pervert. But as the Iliad shows, all that is not enough. Achilles’ superhuman strength and beauty can’t save him from being dishonored by Agamemnon (backed by the whole Greek army). It can’t keep Patroclus alive. All it’s good for, ultimately, is slaughtering Trojans. Which Achilles does magnificently, when he returns to battle; but in a sort of frenzy of despair. To a Trojan begging for mercy, he says: Patroclus is dead; I’ll be dead soon; you die too. He calls himself a useless burden on the earth. He finally achieves transcendence at the end when he forgoes violence and returns Hector’s body to his aged father Priam, saying sadly as he does so that he is doing nothing to help his own aged father; instead he sits in Troy, afflicting Priam and his children. And he agrees to hold the Greek army back for two weeks so that the Trojans can give Hector a proper burial.
It is quite impossible to imagine Achilles fighting the Trojans again after his interview with Priam, though the story of the Trojan war requires it; for that reason, I think, Homer ends the Iliad with Hector’s burial, with the truce still in effect.
Some critics have argued that there was an earlier poem, an Achillead, in which Achilles’ killing of Hector and mutilation of his body in revenge for Patroclus was presented as a fully satisfactory conclusion, both to Achilles and to the poem’s audience. The later bits of Achilles’ despair and his mercy, in this account, were bolted on later. As with Almariu’s account of the correct reading of the Gorgias, I have no idea if the Achillead ever existed, but I do know that if it did, the poem would be forgotten today. Whereas with the Iliad we do have, major translations are still being produced, most recently this very year. The common lesson of the Iliad, Hamlet, and for that matter Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven is that revenge is never fully satisfactory.
It’s ironic that Hanania says that the chivalric epics owe more to Homer than they do to Christianity. It would be more correct to say that the epics complete the Iliad. Achilles comes to see his own supreme excellence in combat as pointless and futile. Lancelot and Galahad and Gawain don’t feel that way about their own prowess. But why not? Because they use their excellence in the service of goals a Calliclean would despise: protecting the weak and defenseless, delivering the land from ancient evils, finding the Holy Grail. If Achilles could be transported to the world of the chivalric epics, he would be much happier and more fulfilled than he was in his own world.
Of course, if BAP’s philosophy cannot satisfy even Achilles, it cannot possibly satisfy anyone else. See Mrs. Psmith’s bemused review of the book. https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-bronze-age-mindset-by-bronze In her own way she rejects modernity as thoroughly as BAP does; but she is also the married mother of young children. What does this have to do with me?, she asks. What does this have to do with the real business of life?
A philosophy that doesn’t speak to probably 95% of women, and 80% of men, and is ultimately unsatisfactory even to Achilles himself, does not seem like a good foundation for conservatism.
> Socrates is in effect trying to tame his interlocutor, since too open a defense of rule by elite will motivate the mob to ban philosophy altogether.
This seems unlikely as a broader explanation, because it is too specific to classical Athens. Athens was unusual among the Greek poleis in the extent to which it embraced democracy: aristocratic oligarchy & rule by dictators (τύραννοι) were common in classical Greece, & Athenians who thought they couldn't live well under democracy could have gone to a less democratic polis, or gotten together and founded a separate colony (colonists starting new poleis in foreign lands was common in archaic & classical Greece, & this was sometimes done by a losing faction in an existing city's politics). Indeed, Plato did leave Athens to live for a time in the autocratically ruled colony polis of Syracuse.
Flaviu lepure made a comment here that I agree with, which is namely that the contours of this religion/creed/w.e would probably form something approximating to Christian Hellenism, as a revitalized form of Christianity that gets criticized by Nietzsche in Genealogies. And I agree with lepure's point on this that Nietzsche wasn't critiquing Christianity as a whole, just the effects that it has had on elites. He saw it as a irreplaceable valve to offload resentment from the masses, to great social utility, but when the same ideology of egalitarian humility was taken up by the elites, it corrupted them and made them incapable of rule. So in comes Hellenism to provide the Chad backbone for our new ideology, an escape hatch from the Christian neurosis.
This could be the core of something, but it’d have to be a generalistic perennialist world syncretism. The world is too big and connected for all other faiths to be ignored
I think if you stretch protestant christianity far enough, it accommodates the core ideas from the other major religions. Like the founding fathers version of Christianity, Jefferson's Providence. Actually, I think the founding era of America already embodied this kind of Christian Hellenism, and when you read Adams and the founding fathers, they make a lot of explicit references to Cicero, Seneca and the like. Even architecturally, just driving through America, they love those Roman columns. So really, this is pretty much encoded in America's DNA, and would not be so much a new ideology but a return to the roots
"Think about the Twitter account of a modern intellectual who engages in a good bit of trolling, and how hard it can be to figure out when he’s presenting his authentic views as opposed to joking or trying to avoid getting into trouble."
I can't imagine doing that. Do you have anyone in mind?
We don’t need one more intellectual attempt to replace faith in God with a creation of the mind. You either have no faith, and all is permissible, or submit yourself to a righteous authority (not another human mind), and live constrained out of obedience.
This assertion isn't going to persuade anyone who isn't already Christian.
Right. Christians have been evangelizing for 2000 years, but a presumed atheist is going to tell me I don’t know what I am doing, when atheism has only been a cult .. er .. alternative, for 100 years. Yeah. I’m totally persuaded.
Yes, but most of them were far better at it then you seem to be*. I can remember a good thirty rounds of evangelism in my childhood church community, and rule number one was to not be this much of an asshole. Rule number #2 was to bring specific facts, prophecies, etc to the table, *especially* when dealing with skeptics!
Now we’re getting somewhere. I am not here to be your friend. I am here to reveal the truth, to the best of my ability. This is never a “polite” process. When I am talking to a drug addict living in a trailer on my street they don’t need complex, dense inanities. They need the truth. I tell them that living on the streets as a drug addict is going to kill them. There’s nothing I can do for them until they admit they’re on the path towards death.
What does 'evangelizing for 2000 years' imply? Hinduism and Buddhism have been around for many centuries longer; Islam for almost that long. Zoroastrianism evangelized for 2,000 years before disappearing. Why are Christians so impressed themselves for this? And there were prominent atheists as far back as ancient Greece and Rome.
An earlier commenter, who sounded atheistic (but I cannot be certain) presumed to tell me that I was evangelizing wrong. Kind of like a bank robber giving the police advice on how they should perform their duties. I don’t take evangelism advice from those who are motivated to see me fail. You shouldn’t either.
The problem with your original comment was not (just) that you are evangelizing ineffectively, but that your argument is basically just an unsupported assertion that people who disagree with you in general will probably also disagree with: namely, that ethics is only possible under religion, so that without religious belief "all is possible". Since you argue against "replac[ing] faith in God with a creation of the mind", presumably you are trying to argue with atheists or people whose view of life is secular, not religious people (who probably basically agree with you anyway). Some atheists probably agree with you that externally imposed ethics doesn't make sense if it's not inescapably enforced (as by God), but even they will generally say that they have preferences or values analogous to ethics, so that they will want to do good to some extent even if they are not being externally compelled to. (This doesn't seem like a stable situation to me ― those values are themselves inculcated by society, which would cease to do so if most people saw ethical values as merely a personal preference, & history provides plenty of examples of (by our standards) horribly immoral social norms ― but you didn't clearly argue against the ethics-as-personal-preference view in your earlier comments.) However, most atheists or secularists (I think) think that some more generally applicable form of ethics does exist, i.e., that some form of ethical behavior is beneficial or obligatory even if an all-judging god isn't incentivizing it. (For instance, I think that the intuitive view of ethics ― in general, be kind, helpful, & willing to cooperate, but punish those who harm others or break agreed-upon norms ― is basically a more complicated society's analogue to the tit-for-tat strategy in the iterated prisoner's dilemma, & is a useful choice for basically the same reasons. Other atheists may believe in utilitarianism or some form of deontology.) If you intend to try to convince people who disagree with you, then you should actually argue against these views instead of stating without justification that they are wrong.
Right and wrong only exist if there’s an authority beyond all persons. Whatever that is, I call it God. If you don’t believe in God, you’re declaring that right and wrong do not exist, and that there is only will and power. Ethics ... is a rationalization to disguise your will as what is “right”.
I'm an atheist more by default (I wasn't raised in a religious tradition) than out of strong conviction. I don't want you see you fail, in fact I would rather be persuaded to convert.
I always love this argument where the religious apologist admits that he can't conceptualize categorical thinking or basic understanding of harm without imagining it as a man with a beard but this is somehow everyone else's deficiency.
Hey, dick head, I used to have no faith in God (mid 1990s to early 2000s). And I have a Physics degree from the United States Air Force Academy. If this is about who’s intellectual dick is bigger, I challenge you to head-to-head IQ tests or SATs. You up to the challenge of supporting your dismissive comment with an actual test?
This is not about "intellectual dick" (lol) and it doesn't need to be. I can pull a tribal out of the amazon rainforest who doesn't even have written language and even he knows intuitively that you don't impulsively rape and slaughter your community. This is about your superstitious need for people to signal fealty to community by hating orgasms or whatever. As a side note, I fully believe that you have IQ scores and credentials or what have you, and this marriage of intelligence and need for primitive signalling is exactly why I don't think IQ is all it's cracked up to be.
You are wrong. Tribal people are routinely documented as being capable of rape and murder of those not in the tribe. Read about the Comanche and the Apache. Read about the Mongols. Read about the inhabitants of North Sentinel island. Read about any number of tribal societies who come into contact with others - you will surely discover that rape and murder were accepted norms. I even run the thought experiment on myself, and what I find is that, if there’s no God, and I can escape earthly punishment, I can do whatever I please. I know that the same is true of you as well. But you’re like most people addicted to rationalism - you won’t admit this to yourself. Rationalism offers no escape from this truth, no escape from tribal warfare. All rationalism can do is play the bait-n-switch game of getting a culturally religious class of people - soldiers and policemen - to enforce your rationalistic solutions on peoples and cultures, so then you can disingenuously say, “see, humans are purely rational and we just have to reboot the malfunctioning humans with our perfect Operating System in order to stop bad behavior.” You can’t even call bad behavior sin, because you (likely) believe humans are merely biological machines with no free will.
Original: "even he knows intuitively that you don't impulsively rape and slaughter YOUR COMMUNITY."
Reply: "You are wrong. Tribal people are routinely documented as being capable of rape and murder of those NOT IN THE TRIBE."
Wait, I know the Air Force is queer now, but you're telling me they were putting actual honest to god illiterates in elite positions back in the 1990s? Were we ever a proper country?
Tribal people also kill those inside the community. I deliberately did not call that out because the out group violence is so much more obvious. Killing is not taboo in tribal societies. You’re only safe if you’re useful in a tribal society, and that is not morality. That’s living only one step removed from the animals. And that is where rationality alone will take us - we’ll become animals with nuclear bombs.
Why should we care about harming others? What law of nature demands this? You only think it's obvious because you grew up in a society built on Christian morality. But Genghis Khan would be flummoxed by your morality.
No law of nature demands it, and yet human society has existed long before Abrahamic morality and could exist just as well after. Sure, Genghis Khan would likely kill me, the same way any conquering force regardless of ideology or religion brutalizes an outgroup. But this notion that people will impulsively rape and slaughter without reason and sense unless restrained by the image of a universalist king is simply false even in primitive society. I don't know why exactly it is this way and not the other, but the inclination toward restraint is clearly there. In fact, why not run this argument backwards: If there is no God then you can just rape and murder as much as you like barring human intervention. Barring human intervention, I can rape and murder with impunity, therefore God is not real. Again, this is less an argument for anything other than the necessity of signaling commitment to the collective by pledging fealty to the name of its idea of universality. The state does all the actual work. As a Yarvinite, I would think you could intuit this.
Faith is gay, stop being gay
Do you have faith in the force of gravity? Yes you do! Now pick up that bar of soap...
If this is how most Christians thought and responded I’d like them more!
Don’t feed the monster (in me).
The problem is that “God” is a creation of the mind. It’s something humans made up.
Then you have made yourself God. And I refuse to worship you. Get ready for resistance.
Mr Pleasance, I promise you that I have no desire to be worshipped, certainly not by random strangers on the internet. No need to resist the call to worship me, because it is a call I do not make.
I don’t care what god or gods you choose to worship, so long as you refrain from using said god or gods as an excuse to use coercion on me. I do reserve the right to laugh at you, however.
This is not true, such attempts routinely succeed, people can and often do have morals without believing in an outside authority enforcing them, how are we still discussing it in 2023?
Morals without outside authority is nonsensical proposition. What you actually mean to say is that you often agree with people who do not believe in God. But there’s no morality in it - you merely agree. Tomorrow you could disagree with that same person,but this would not be a moral dilemma. Agreement between two biological machines, which have no free will (we’re just deterministic machines without “God”), is like two stones that both accelerate in a gravitational field - an amoral occurrence.
Impressive. Every sentence in that message is wrong.
Morals without outside authority are routinely found. I do not necessarily agree with such morals, nor do they agree with each other. They are morality par excellence - a set of ought-statements. Disagreements on morals can and do produce moral dilemmae - specifically, meta-moral dilemmae on what ought to be done when a bearer of a different morality is encountered. Free will is not needed for morality to exist as a category, even though many specific morality systems do include that false-ish hypothesis in themselves.
My declaration of faith, “it is immoral to be an atheist.” By what authority might you claim I am wrong?
Metaethics - the question of what morality systems are better - is complicated but potentially solvable, see, e.g., https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/metaethics and https://www.lesswrong.com/s/bQgRsy23biR52poMf. In particular, the solution certainly does not lie in just accepting some invented outside authority which most likely doesn't exist.
(Correction: unless you want to declare Occam's razor or something like that is your god, as per https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/C8nEXTcjZb9oauTCW/where-recursive-justification-hits-bottom. But if you reject that, you will encounter predictable problems in is-statements, not just in ought-statements. So, conditional on your already having a framework that works with describing how the world (with high probability) is, you are unlikely to need anything on top for ought.)
I mean I agree that technically all is permitted without God, I can't call a rapist "wrong" in some universal law sense of the word, but we clearly have some emotional programming to stop us from doing those things. I feel bad when I hear about people being hurt or dying, even in the absence of God. I have no desire to cause that suffering and want to alleviate it. So if that's my natural biological programming, I don't think I need God to make it a "rule" when it is already an implicit one that lives inside me, and inside most people.
If the forces that control society can band together to say "this is wrong" and then enforce that norm that seems like enough? And lord knows believing in Jesus has not stopped many people around the world from committing horrible atrocities anyway so having God tell you what's right and wrong is not a completely effective backstop against immoral behavior.
You are coddled by a society you did not create, and that coddling permits you to pretend, quite convincingly, that you do not desire to kill, maim, or rape. But you will do all three of these things, under certain conditions. That’s the truth. And that’s why you need a standard for right and wrong, beyond mere human will. Without that external standard, there is no right or wrong. There’s just human will.
You really think everyone has some base secret desire to maim and rape and kill? That says more about you than anyone. I mean I guess I might do those things if someone held a gun to me head and forced me to or something, I couldn't say for sure, but I think my biological and cultural training has taken the URGE for those things out of me, and we can do that without needing God.
You don't do those things because you grew up in a society based on Christian morality that told you they were wrong. Had you been born amongst the Mongols, you would have no such reservations about doing those things to cities that resisted you.
Yes, you're correct, but my point is more that humans malléable. Some are biologically more violent than others. Some cultures are more violent than others. But you don't need God not to want to murder and rape. Christianity, and other religions, may have played a useful role and helped establish those norms in our culture, but we don't need religion to maintain them.
Yes. It’s called original sin. I wasn’t born yesterday. I’ve worked with real people. They are capable of the darkest evil, including you, including me. If I imprisoned you, and killed all those you love, before your very own eyes - I guarantee you would suddenly notice feelings that you presently are desperate to suppress. You have them. They are part of you. Your only hope to be free of them is to seek treatment from the only one who can heal you - God.
That doesn't mean they are in me now, it means they can be put into me by certain circumstances, which is probably true, though I find it more likely I'd just become depressed and suicidal than interested in raping anyone. But I guess my main objection to that is that I think you could make that happen to most christians too despite their belief in/love of God.
But I do think I understand your position now at least. I think we just have a base disagreement about human nature, which I don't really feel like getting into.
You are correct. We disagree about human nature.
Nietzsche and Ayn Rand are similar in that people who are true believers in those theories go crazy and generally don’t end up well -- but going through a Nietzsche or Rand phase and then tempering them with time tested more pro-social ways of being makes one a better person than normal.
I would argue that a Christian-Hellenistic synthesis is the only way forward for the right. A purely Nietzschean-pagan approach is missing that the past is long gone: we’re not in a society that has warriors relaxing by the fire, drinking sweetened wine and telling stories of sacking cities, killing the men and taking the women. We neither have that historical context nor do we want it.
While Nietzsche is critical of Christianity, what he’s actually criticizing is the post 30 years war and post-Enlightenment Christianity, which basically abandoned all values except for “tolerance.” Earlier Christians include Hernando Cortez, who conquered an entire continent with just a boatload of knights, Thomas Aquinas who made a synthesis of Aristotle and Christianity -- in fact, a pure Christianity without Hellenism never actually existed.
Also, Jesus was a spiritual Gigachad. If we team Him up with the intellectual heirs of Achilles, we’re unstoppable.
I believe Strauss referred to that synthesis in terms of Athens & Jerusalem.
> in fact, a pure Christianity without Hellenism never actually existed
Maybe Jamesian Christianity (though still emerging in the context of Roman rule), but Paul deliberately sought out to include gentiles and his success baked in Hellenization.
There is actually a strong (I think) argument that the writing of the Torah/Old Testament was influenced by the Greeks as well, so the contrast Athens and Jerusalem is a little fake (but with some merit, to the extent that myths from the Ancient Near East were incorporated in the Torah).
Christians and pagans noticed similarities between the Torah and Greek writings -- but Christians naturally explained them by the Greeks borrowing from the Jews.
But that just wasn't the cultural reality at the time: Hellenistic Greece was a cultural elephant, Jerusalem was a cultural mouse. The only reason the natural inference (that Judaism was influenced by Greeks and not the other way around, and not from a common source) wasn't made was because it was thought that the Torah was older than many Greek writings.
But the discovery of the Elephantine papyri made it plausible that by the 5th century B.C. the Jewish writings were extremely undeveloped. Which means that the Bible was written to a large extent later. Which would mean that the door is open for Greek writings to influence the composition of the Torah.
Many characteristics of Jewish Law (the king is subject to the law, there is a founder who gives the laws, there is constitutional law, military law, sacred law) are not found in Ancient Near East Laws -- but are found in Greek colony laws.
Russell Gmirkin develops this argument in three books. He believes that the Torah was basically written cca. 272 BC, when representative Jews were present at the library of Alexandria and consulted scrolls there, including scrolls about Hebrew and Ancient Near East history, to write the Pentateuch. Gmirkin also makes the argument (in an entire book ) that basically Plato's Laws was a huge inspiration for Jewish law (for instance, continually educating the population in the Law was sort of unique to Jews -- but it is presented as an essential part of Plato's Laws).
But you don't have to go all the way with Gmirkin to argue that in fact, the writing of the Torah was strongly influenced by the Greeks.
I had thought it was agreed by everyone they were written during the Babylonian exile.
Well, not by everyone. The Copenhagen International Seminar published a bunch of books exploring the influence of Hellenism on the Bible.
("The Bible and Hellenism", "Hellenism and Primary History" is another. I don't have this last one)
It was Origin who came up with that antithesis. "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" But we eventually decided he was a heretic.
Did you mean to say Tertullian?
Yes.
Nietzsche is an indispensable balance to Christianity, but Nietzscheanism alone is bananas
"Jesus was a spiritual Gigachad"
Jesus is probably the most unremarkable, boring, and unpersuasive spiritual figure to ever become a household name. If you don't believe he's the literal son of God who should be obeyed simply because of his Godly authority, there's no reason to care what he says.
You've obviously never read the Gospels.
Silly
Yeah this is my read of Nietzsche as well, and this is also the point that people like Charles Hayworth makes. I think this is probably the most viable political position, in the American context
When can we found a church together?
The Christian Right has the advantage over the Nietzschean Right because of breeding. Evangelicals and Mormons have high TFR (although Mormon TFR has gone down a lot), while Nietzscheans are mostly cosmopolitan elites that don’t really have kids (based on what I’ve seen hanging out with some of them in NYC).
Religiousity is also very heritable, so as long as Christians can sustain parallel media and education separate from the woke mainstream media, their kids will remain Christian.
Also, most immigrants are Christians, further replenishing the Christian pool, whereas Nietzscheans are by definition niche, since they have to resist the masses to be the Overman.
High fertility Christians all love Trump now, which makes me think we can win them over to paganism at least, if not atheism.
Can you tell? I have a real beef with all these people placing their faith in their rationality. Your rationality will become your executioner...you need to put something else in charge, to keep your rationality under right authority, so that it does not lead you blindly to your own destruction. I speak from experience on this.
You don't have to win them over. They are already pagan, but more Druid than Lucretius.
I would bet large amounts you are wrong. Even as Christianity declines, actual paganism will be the domain of marginal weirdos.
I’m thinking, or hoping, for Chad Jesus, not literal Paganism. That’s to a large extent the conservative movement now.
"Chad Jesus" is just most of historical Christianity.
But Chad Jesus, at least of the papist sort (see SCOTUS and weep), is arguably still anti-eugenics, anti-abortion of undesirables, and anti-euthanasia. I don't see this changing easily because, unlike yielding to Chad Trump, support for actual scientific progress is entirely outside the instinctual framework of Christian women.
At the risk of sounding oblivious, please explain?
The meek and merciful Jesus is a modern invention . Though Jesus did have these qualities, he also expressed fierceness at times;"I come not bearing peace but a sword" is a favorite. Jesus also justifies capital punishment in Luke 17: Temptations to Sin
And he said to his disciples, “Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin."
The poster above you may be incorrectly attributing the current revisionist approach to cuddly Jesus to the second Vatican Council, though. This council did cut out a lot of traditional concepts from Catholicism in order to reconcile with the modern secular world in the 60s. It may have been a factor in revisionist Jesus, but not the sole source of blame; Protestant evangelicals in the US are also at fault. I think the above poster is using "Chad Jesus" to refer to the more severe Christ outlined in the plain text of the New Testament that is sometimes overshadowed by the contemporary invention of "Jesus just wants to hug you!"
Abstraction is not paganism.
We’re trying to win you over to the truth.
Then stop doing it like an overbearing kindergarten teacher or HR lady eager to chastise everyone around her, it’s exactly this annoying moralizing that makes Christianity supremely unattractive to the young men you’re supposedly trying to win over, I don’t need yet other menopausal woman I’m not related to unsolicitedly yapping at me
DO YOU DENOUNCE? I DEMAND RESPEC
I am not trying to attract you. I am trying to demoralize the pride out of you. When you’re drafted (I hope not, but damn it sure seems we’re going this route), and killing, and seeing others killed, you’re gonna see all the intellectual bullshit for what it is. It you’re going to vomit it out in disgust. And then you’re going to remember all us crazy Christians who were prattling on about Jesus. And if it’s not war, it’ll be disease. And if not that, someone very close to you will deeply betray you. In that moment your ideas will die and the seeds I’ve planted will have room to grow.
If I’m going to get *my* pride demoralized out of me, it’s not going to from someone replying to people in a consistently grandiose, self-aggrandizing manner who just challenged someone to a head to head IQ test. As an adult. I like Christians and respect Christianity, you’re rambling to an imaginary person who’s not me. Like the Bible says, “don’t point out the sawdust in your brothers eye when you have a plank that’s too hypocritically narcissistic to lecture people on humility in the other”
So you admit your pride?
Foolish.
"most immigrants are Christians, further replenishing the Christian pool" - And yet what this means in practice is more preachers in more pulpits screaming about how the genetically irredeemable poor should get all your money, and pump out more kids.
"so as long as Christians can sustain parallel media and education" - Christian media has historically been an anti-recruitment tool as far as intelligent or remotely competent people are concerned. I'm not exactly a Christian anymore, but I once was one. I can still be moved by passages in the bible, or C.S Lewis' mere Christianity. And your average Christian cultural offering triggers whatever remaining purity sentiments I have, and makes me want to to pray "God, vindicate your name, and strike down these blasphemers who have perverted it into something so pathetic."
"while Nietzscheans are mostly cosmopolitan elites that don’t really have kids" : OK, you've got me. This one hurts.
If you’re not a Christian anymore, you should hate that f’ing liar Jesus of Nazareth. Do you? Or are you too polite to take an actual position? I believe He was who He said He was, and that’s the only reason I take Him, and His Bible, seriously.
"the only reason I take Him, and His Bible, seriously": I mean he kicked off a social technology that conquered a massive Empire, you really don't have to think he was divine to take him seriously.
"you should hate that f’ing liar Jesus of Nazareth": I did but I got over it. Someone needed to make useful creatures out of masses of useless sheep (and a single central religion did a pretty good job at that), and Roman stagnation was unconducive to European greatness.
But yes, I do think he was a liar. Or mentally ill in a similar way to an Alexander the Great or I guess a Mohammed.
The reason that “social technology” worked is because people believed Jesus was crucified, dead, buried, and raised back to life. If you don’t believe, you’re not going to benefit. Quite the opposite - life is going to become very bleak for you.
I agree, hence why I am not a Christian, and am not pretending to be!
Great. Now don’t complain about bad things happening to you. It’s a dog eat dog world and you just need to suck it up when you get eaten.
So you settled on making yourself God. You made a bad trade.
You should hate liars ... whoever is doing the lying.
"average Christian cultural offering" - this is why I prefer Christianity-inspired music to actual Christian rock.
This is a Christian cope. If you don't control the culture those Christian children will leave the Church. Ultimately RW Christians are just not creative and intelligent enough to run a society that people find appealing. Even a dancing Drag Queen is more appealing than a crusty Boomer speaking in tongues about the End Times. No wonder young people are fleeing the dying Church. The idea that you can "breed your way to victory" is ridiculous. You will simply be providing more warm bodies for Trans-Floyd worship. Time to move on from this kind of thinking and Christianity more generally.
Christians need to take a page out of the Orthodox Jewish and Amish playbook. Create separate schools and colleges (Hillsdale and Grove City are good examples of conservative Christian-centered colleges), or create homeschooling networks. Live amongst other Christians (Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option) and create social pressure to marry and have big families. Don’t let kids watch Hollywood films. Then, let high fertility do its work and have vast future generations, while affluent libs in cities only have like 1 or 2 kids.
According to a 2013 Pew poll (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/10/17/eight-facts-about-orthodox-jews-from-the-pew-research-survey/), less than half of people raised orthodox stay in it. That says 1) it's not a viable strategy, and 2) it's such a bad lifestyle that no one wants to stay with it, which should also give pause to anyone promoting it.
TGGP notes below that the Amish seem to be doing alright, but that just says how far you need to go to insulate your people from the outside world to prevent defection (and even the Amish are dependent on modern society for many things like healthcare). Given what the attrition rates say about how preferable the outside world is to extreme religious sects, I'm not fond of the idea of trying to scale them up for society in general. It's vastly more desirable to try to promote a culture that reconciles modernity with replacement level fertility, at least to me.
Over a long enough time period, the Amish would indeed breed themselves to victory. Their defection rates have gone down over time. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/12/23/boiling-off/
“We can breed like rats, that will show them”
Literally that’s the point. You breed for mere quantity, not quality. Why even bother
Christians have been out-breeding atheists for a long time, but the rate of attrition (now even among Mormons) is still more than high enough to put Christianity in a state of terminal decline. If one takes this for granted (which I do; even immigration is a temporary salve, as the countries immigrants are coming from are rapidly secularizing), then the real debate isn't over Nietzscheanism vs. Christianity, but over what form of irreligion will succeed Christianity, Nietzschean irreligion, Millian irreligion, Marxist irreligion?
As a corollary, I've read some arguments that due to liberalism's influence on lower TFRs, the remaining ones who identify as religious (Christian, Jewish) will in fact be more conservative and more stridently religious due to this blind selection process and heritability bottle-necking.
To expand on that idea:
Liberalism, secularism, and urbanization/modernization have been pressuring human fertility downward for around 200 years in the West. Closer to 300 years for France.
At some point, that long-term graph will either pivot back upward to somewhere persistently well above 2.0 TFR, or human beings will go extinct. The further TFRs drop below 2, the more imminent the pivot becomes. So I think the fact that the forces that have been resisting sub-2 TFR have been defeated so far is not sufficient to prove that they will lose forever.
The pivot is going to look like one of two things: either some radical technology-driven change (of which I'm skeptical), or the gradual accumulation of the various existing pronatal forces, empowered by natural and memetic selection, to a tipping point. The most important of these pronatal forces remains the continuing influence of the Abrahamic religions.
Nietzscheans and Christians alike overestimate the importance of Christianity in shaping modern morality. I'll grant there's a good deal of thematic continuity, but many obvious exceptions (see anything related to sex). IMO, most of what is attributed to Christian influence on modern morality is really just a consequence of wealth, peace, and stability. These things make every society more risk averse, less adventurous, more concerned with the weakest members, etc. The obsession with victimhood is a natural consequence of having a stable, peaceful society where disputes are resolved by each party trying to convince an institution that they are the aggrieved party. I think we'll see the same moral patterns emerge in non-Christian countries too as they become more developed.
This makes the problem more intransigent. Ironically, I think Richard here is overestimating the importance of ideas. Even persuading them away from the ideas of Christianity won't much change people's moral attitudes. The challenge is to convince rich, fat, comfortable people who rarely have to deal with direct confrontation to become adventurous, risk-tolerant, and ambitious. I think your enemy here is prosperity itself rather than Christianity or its legacy.
You don't even believe in atheism! Is NOTHING sacred? :)
I don't think your premise holds at all. Poorer societies are broadly more communal and nepotistic to a fault, while wealthier ones tend to be more individualistic. Although Christianity alone cannot create an individualistic culture, it is by far the religion most tolerant and inspirational to many of liberalism's greatest figures. The infamously skeptical deist Jefferson who tore up the Bible to best fit his own views removed the Old Testament and Revelation, not the message of Christ.
Your claim that wealth and risk-tolerance are inversely correlated is also pretty absurd when talking about new wealth; if you mean the trust-fund kids create charities to entertain themselves, who cares? Most old wealth is eventually diluted through enough family generations. The most sloth-promoting programs came under FDR's administration in the middle of the Great Depression; the most laissez-faire governance under a booming near-full employment Gilded Age. Again, your premise is completely backwards from reality. Prosperity begets prosperity; poverty begets desperation and theft.
I’ve been thinking something along these lines for a while and you did a great job putting it into words
People who are anti-egalitarian and anti-Woke need to understand that Christianity is the number 1 problem. The last should come first/neither Jew nor Greek is the origin point of all of this. You should read Tom Holland's book Dominion which explains just how revolutionary these ideas are and how they persist today even as Christianity formally dies in the West.
For Nietzscheans who believe in civilisation and science, we must make sure that we don't throw out the baby with the bath water when it comes to Western civilisation and Christianity. Extricating these poisonous Christian ideas from our morality and society will take time. Embracing barbarism and LARPing will not help in this endeavour. Having said that I like Mr BAP, he provides a necessary slap in the face to the Christian Right even if it comes with homoerotic muscle worship and Barbarian LARP.
As much shit as he gets (including from me) Jordan Peterson has achieved a sort of Nietzsche Christian synthesis that’s worth taking seriously
Plus no buttseccs
Can you name a couple of the most poisonous Christian ideas? It seems pretty odd that the Christian culture on which substantial amounts of Western civilization were built would be more poisonous than most of that which has attempted to succeed it. Don't know your position on the following events but it should be noted that Jews originated communism, secular hate speech law, international slave trade, psychoanalysis, neoconservatism, and much more, not Christians.
The original tribe of Jews, like Druze, basically never attempted to spread their ideas, religious or otherwise, outside of their tribe. It is Christians who decided to spread their highly-socialist ideas to everyone, who both decided that the whole world must live under their customs and declared those customs egalitarian (well, human-egalitarian, "everyone's under God"). And if you're speaking about some kind of "Ashkenazi conspiracy" based on blood rather than culture (such as Irving Kristol being offspring of non-observing Jews), that's all it is, an unmotivated conspiracy theory.
(As for slave trade, it's older than Exodus.)
So your main problem with Christianity is simply that it has been widely propagated? Because that argument could easily be made against any non-insular religion (though perhaps you blame Islam on Christianity), as well as any secular empire. I'm highly skeptical of the idea that the liberalism which came out of Western Christian nations is more socialist than their pre-Christian tribal ancestors were. The Arabic accounts of pre-Christian Nordics certainly weren't indicative of a highly individualistic society.
I meant the slave trade within a Western context. Jews (mostly Sephardic rather than Ashkenazi) were the most prominent slave merchants in the 17th and 18th centuries in America, and it's no coincidence that South Carolina was both our slave capital and home to the single largest Jewish population in the entire Western Hemisphere up until the early 19th century. Obviously the trade involved many participants of all faiths and ethnic groups, and there were plenty of Southern Christian aristocrats happy to buy slaves, but they played a vital role, and it was egalitarian Christians that ultimately ended the institution.
Tribal societies are a curious mix of egalitarianism and hierarchy. The chief is not absolute but he exists and is there to be obeyed; and merit is certainly recognized as such. It is Christianity that first spread the idea "merit doesn't matter because you are all worms in the eyes of God". (What role Islam played here, I am not qualified to say, except that it obviously started later, but I don't harbor much love for it, either. I don't _like_ insular religions, but at least they are not a spreading poison.)
Jews were the most prominent slave merchants because they were the most prominent merchants period, because they were forced out of other activities by Christians. Although, again, no love for either religion. And the reasons for ending slave trade are complicated, economy among them; I believe we would have seen it ending even without the idea above.
We have a bad habit of intellectualizing reason and morality. We do it religiously. We do it politically. We do it selfishly. And we do it without any real thinking!
Edmund Burke is considered the father of conservatism. He served in the English Parliament before and during the American revolution and wrote, “Reflections on the Revolution in France” during the French Revolution in 1790. In reading about Edmund Burke it becomes clear that he believed and was very outspoken about embracing the past and at the same time he knew change was inevitable. I think Burke was right in his thought, that traditional values can be reaffirmed under new circumstances. He argued, and I agree, that the French Revolution ended disastrously because it’s abstract foundations, purportedly rational, ignored the complexities of human nature and society. In Thomas Aquinas we find a religious philosophy that was heavily influenced by the argumentative reasoning associated with the Greek philosophers, particularly Aristotle. In 1267 he completed a work on government called “Politics”, where he asserted “yet it is natural for man, more than any other animal, to be a social and political animal, to live in a group. He called the common good as protecting life and promoting peace. Aristotle would have called this “the good life.” For his efforts he was initially rejected by the Catholic Church, which condemned some of his writings based on Aristotle’s ideas. About 50 years after his death the church revived his works and made him a saint. His writings combined reason and faith and became the basis for the official Roman Catholic doctrine known as Thomism. In addition, his forward looking political ideas regarding natural law, unjust rulers, and rebellion influenced Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke, and even Americans such as Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King. History gives great lessons; Confucius was a great philosopher in early Asian history, who had significant early philosophical ideas. Here is a man born more than two thousand years before John Locke, but could he not be seen as an early proponent of liberalism?
Modern intellectuals have a bad habit of being to closely aligned to their own ideas and resist logical discussion and arguments. More inclined to the importance of their theory than allowing critical analysis.
Can a conservative be liberal, of course! Can a liberal be religious, of course! Are all conservatives religious, no! Can a liberal become illiberal, absolutely! Can a conservative be an atheist, of course!
I’ll leave it with this quote by C.S. Lewis, “If you love for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end despair.”
I am Christian, and as I’ve aged I have been horrified to find that Liberalism is the enemy of Jesus. When I was younger, I thought Liberalism was a friendly word, like “democracy”. Now it appears to be a societal suicide pact. I want nothing to do with it.
I too am a Christian, a Roman Catholic. I attend Mass pretty regularly. I volunteer in my community, love my family and I just try to be and do my best. I sometimes fail too. I consider myself to be a conservative in the the more classical sense, and I try to seek balance between reason, my faith, and my moral obligation to myself and fellow man. I’m truly sorry that you’re horrified to find liberalism to be an enemy of Jesus. In many ways, taken in historical context, Jesus could be called liberal. Why do I say this? For me it’s simple, “Don’t impose on others what you yourself do not desire.” I realize this is not a direct quote, so I won’t argue it is. But it’s pretty clear to me that he could have said this, or inferred it. I am a man, with my share of faults and hopefully my share of of good too. Liberal is not an unfriendly word or bad word. Our country, our constitution is a very liberal document. It is very short in terms of many other constitutions and nowhere in the document will you find the word democracy.
We would all help ourselves, my opinion, if we just could take a moment to pause, and think about words, meanings, influences and judgments. My worry is not that we live in a place where dreams can come true, but what kind of dream? For example we talk about equity as though that will make everything equal. My question is does it mean we need to all be the same in order to be or do our best. I say no. In science, nature or faith we are all different, choose your group and you’ll find everything has opportunity or can be dismissed. Equality assures freedoms for all, but freedom does not assure equity for all.
We’re in divisive times, in our country and around the world. We battle many things, good and evil. Let’s not battle words or label each other with falsehoods just because we’re told by others what it means to be liberal. Or conservative. Or virtuous. Or whatever?
Maybe the problem here is liberalism as the single ideology unto itself, and then liberalism that is anchored on Christian moral framework. Without this grounding, I find liberalism to be completely empty framing, would maybe even go as far to say it's logical conclusion is nihilism. "Don't impose into others what you yourself don't desire", but what do you desire? There doesn't seem to be a definite conception of the good in liberalism, except for maximizing desire, but desire for what?
Liberalism or the meaning of being liberal is only about three hundred years old. To be liberal means to be willing to respect new ideas. In political terms it is a social philosophy that promotes individual rights, and free enterprise. Since a nihilist generally doesn’t believe in God, and Jesus is the son of God, being nihilistic would not have been used in any context by a believer of liberty such as John Locke for example. Obviously the term “liberal” was spoken and promoted by Christian men who would not have thought liberalism to be an empty term. For me Jesus and his followers would have been quite liberal given the era they lived in, given the modern definition.
Ideas have momentum, and when you look at the idea of individual rights, it vests the ultimate arbitration of good and evil in the individual. During the enlightenment era when Christianity was still a strong religious force, individual conceptions of a Universal good still mostly converged on a common conception, with some (In my opinion) insignificant doctrinal differences. Fast forward to the modern era, with waning influence of religion, that Universal conception of the Good no longer hold sway in our cultural fabric. And ultimately, I think the incompatibility of liberalism and Christianity starts to show, because Christianity (or any moral framework) is a set of restrictions on individual autonomy (sexual deviancy bad, etc.). So I guess my point, is not really to wholesale disagree with your liberal + Christian position, but rather to point out that liberalism does have these tendencies embedded deep in its ideological core, and without grounding itself in some other moral framework, is a recipe for nihilism (because again, liberalism == individual freedom, but freedom to do what?)
"Think about the Twitter account of a modern intellectual who engages in a good bit of trolling, and how hard it can be to figure out when he’s presenting his authentic views as opposed to joking or trying to avoid getting into trouble. "
Oh, Hanania I can never stay mad at you.
>The cult of knighthood and chivalry owed much more of a debt to the Homeric epics than the Sermon on the Mount.
Joshua, commanding the Sun and Moon to stand still so that his army could fight until midnight: "Am I a joke to you?"
The Christian tradition might have taken a lot of things from Hellenism, but the celebration of great warriors isn't one of them. That came straight from the Old Testament.
Why is this Necessary?
While I'm glad BAP is out there doing his thing, I'm getting pretty depressed at considering what it implies if Nietzscheanism really is the only alternative. Can't we just have compassion, BUT ONLY for the deserving (ie. those who show gratitude and would reciprocate it if they could, ie. not generally Bantus...) Is the only choice really between people that would drown their children to use their corpses as lifeboats for those that hate them or "the justice of nature: the zoos opened, predators unleashed by the dozens, hundreds….four thousand hungry wolves rampaging on streets of these hive cities, elephants and bison stampeding, the buildings smashed to pieces, the cries of the human bug shearing through the streets as the lord of beasts returns (BAP)."?
I can’t believe I’m saying this but that’s quite unfair to Bantus. Most are “good people” but are struggling with mismatch w their genes and first world civilization.
And if you lean towards Nietzsche’s views but like compassion (as I do) then I *highly* recommend Schopenhauer if you haven’t read him already
My version of Nieztchean compassion is just help the ones that can help themselves (the strong). The weak are not worth helping because your help just sends them further down the rensitment spiral. But maybe this is my Christian cope of Nietzcheism idk
Conservatives are not satisfied with the world as it now is. What to do about it? There is currently a debate between Rufoism, which is the idea that we should trace the influence of pernicious ideas over centuries, and Hananianity, which posits that we should really focus on what the EEOC was up to in 1968.
It is more than passing strange, then, to see Hanania put forward Costin Almariu’s esoteric reading of a 2,400 year old scrap of Greek philosophy as a foundation for modern conservatism. The Gorgias dialogue has traditionally been understood as standing for the primacy of justice and right over mere power. Almariu now argues that this is all wrong, Plato really agrees with the might-makes-right philosophy of Callicles, but merely wishes this argument to be better concealed. I’m pretty sure that Almariu’s interpretation of the dialogue is wrong, but what I am absolutely certain of is that if Almariu is right, and Plato had been read correctly to endorse Callicles’ point of view, the consequence would not be that we would now be living in a Nietschian world of supermen. The consequence would be that Plato would now be completely forgotten. That is because the philosophy of Callicles cannot satisfy even those whom it most exalts.
To see this, consider the Iliad. Achilles isn’t merely stronger and faster and a much greater warrior than everyone else. He’s also better looking. His sexuality probably doesn’t correspond to any of our modern categories, but it’s clear that his beloved is another warrior, Patroclus. Achilles is, in short, the ultimate Bronze Age Pervert. But as the Iliad shows, all that is not enough. Achilles’ superhuman strength and beauty can’t save him from being dishonored by Agamemnon (backed by the whole Greek army). It can’t keep Patroclus alive. All it’s good for, ultimately, is slaughtering Trojans. Which Achilles does magnificently, when he returns to battle; but in a sort of frenzy of despair. To a Trojan begging for mercy, he says: Patroclus is dead; I’ll be dead soon; you die too. He calls himself a useless burden on the earth. He finally achieves transcendence at the end when he forgoes violence and returns Hector’s body to his aged father Priam, saying sadly as he does so that he is doing nothing to help his own aged father; instead he sits in Troy, afflicting Priam and his children. And he agrees to hold the Greek army back for two weeks so that the Trojans can give Hector a proper burial.
It is quite impossible to imagine Achilles fighting the Trojans again after his interview with Priam, though the story of the Trojan war requires it; for that reason, I think, Homer ends the Iliad with Hector’s burial, with the truce still in effect.
Some critics have argued that there was an earlier poem, an Achillead, in which Achilles’ killing of Hector and mutilation of his body in revenge for Patroclus was presented as a fully satisfactory conclusion, both to Achilles and to the poem’s audience. The later bits of Achilles’ despair and his mercy, in this account, were bolted on later. As with Almariu’s account of the correct reading of the Gorgias, I have no idea if the Achillead ever existed, but I do know that if it did, the poem would be forgotten today. Whereas with the Iliad we do have, major translations are still being produced, most recently this very year. The common lesson of the Iliad, Hamlet, and for that matter Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven is that revenge is never fully satisfactory.
It’s ironic that Hanania says that the chivalric epics owe more to Homer than they do to Christianity. It would be more correct to say that the epics complete the Iliad. Achilles comes to see his own supreme excellence in combat as pointless and futile. Lancelot and Galahad and Gawain don’t feel that way about their own prowess. But why not? Because they use their excellence in the service of goals a Calliclean would despise: protecting the weak and defenseless, delivering the land from ancient evils, finding the Holy Grail. If Achilles could be transported to the world of the chivalric epics, he would be much happier and more fulfilled than he was in his own world.
Of course, if BAP’s philosophy cannot satisfy even Achilles, it cannot possibly satisfy anyone else. See Mrs. Psmith’s bemused review of the book. https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-bronze-age-mindset-by-bronze In her own way she rejects modernity as thoroughly as BAP does; but she is also the married mother of young children. What does this have to do with me?, she asks. What does this have to do with the real business of life?
A philosophy that doesn’t speak to probably 95% of women, and 80% of men, and is ultimately unsatisfactory even to Achilles himself, does not seem like a good foundation for conservatism.
> Socrates is in effect trying to tame his interlocutor, since too open a defense of rule by elite will motivate the mob to ban philosophy altogether.
This seems unlikely as a broader explanation, because it is too specific to classical Athens. Athens was unusual among the Greek poleis in the extent to which it embraced democracy: aristocratic oligarchy & rule by dictators (τύραννοι) were common in classical Greece, & Athenians who thought they couldn't live well under democracy could have gone to a less democratic polis, or gotten together and founded a separate colony (colonists starting new poleis in foreign lands was common in archaic & classical Greece, & this was sometimes done by a losing faction in an existing city's politics). Indeed, Plato did leave Athens to live for a time in the autocratically ruled colony polis of Syracuse.
And almost got himself killed for his efforts. :)
Flaviu lepure made a comment here that I agree with, which is namely that the contours of this religion/creed/w.e would probably form something approximating to Christian Hellenism, as a revitalized form of Christianity that gets criticized by Nietzsche in Genealogies. And I agree with lepure's point on this that Nietzsche wasn't critiquing Christianity as a whole, just the effects that it has had on elites. He saw it as a irreplaceable valve to offload resentment from the masses, to great social utility, but when the same ideology of egalitarian humility was taken up by the elites, it corrupted them and made them incapable of rule. So in comes Hellenism to provide the Chad backbone for our new ideology, an escape hatch from the Christian neurosis.
This could be the core of something, but it’d have to be a generalistic perennialist world syncretism. The world is too big and connected for all other faiths to be ignored
I think if you stretch protestant christianity far enough, it accommodates the core ideas from the other major religions. Like the founding fathers version of Christianity, Jefferson's Providence. Actually, I think the founding era of America already embodied this kind of Christian Hellenism, and when you read Adams and the founding fathers, they make a lot of explicit references to Cicero, Seneca and the like. Even architecturally, just driving through America, they love those Roman columns. So really, this is pretty much encoded in America's DNA, and would not be so much a new ideology but a return to the roots
Yes! Idk why it’s not a more popular approach, as you said it’s right there w the founders
Great read. Really needs to be longer👍🏻
No. Just no. Being the first member of a cult simply makes you a cult leader. Don’t do it. Abandon hope. Despair. But don’t do THIS.
Stop being gay
But have you read all 800 pages of Sexual Personae, it's... So... Dense