Christianity is and always has been predicated on belief in the actual, historical virgin birth, death, and resurrection of God in the flesh.
You can try to promote a Christianity divorced from those propositions, but it will no longer be the religion that underlay the Western world for 2k years.
That Christianity is dead for educated, intellectually honest people, and it’s not coming back. This article comes off as an expression of the conservative impulse desperately grasping at straws (no offense).
No offense taken. I respect this argument, and I think it partially true. However, it's worth noting that analogical and metaphorical interpretation has always a part of Biblical exegesis. Many elites did not believe the faith literally. If you read Clement or Origen, for example, you encounter an abstract, philosophical God. And of course this is even more true for post-Enlightenment theologians, e.g., Schleiermacher, Rahner, Kung, et cetera.
So, yes, literalist Christianity is dead for educated, intellectually honest people. But I do not think that precludes sincere faith.
Clement and Origen both explicitly and forcefully defend the historical reality of the virgin birth and resurrection. Their abstract/philosophical conception of God is irrelevant, but that's how lots of Christian theologians have understood God anyways. But they pretty much all believe in the miracles if they can call themselves Christians. Belief in salvation through the actual, historical resurrection of Jesus as God in the flesh is the definition of a Christian for most people, and Clement and Origen were definitely Christians in that respect.
I don't know anything about the post-enlightenment theologians, but whatever the case may be they are irrelevant to this discussion. The enlightenment was the death of Christianity as it was known for 2k years. There was and continues to be lots of cope in the aftermath of Darwin and Newton.
Sincere faith in what? Without the miracles and the God in the flesh, I'm not sure what's left to have faith in. Symbols? Mythos? Good luck selling that to the masses. People aren't singing songs or (back in the day) martyring themselves to a symbol. They sing songs to and die for a God who actually sacrificed himself for their sins.
I appreciate your sincere defense of a symbolic interpretation. I just think this is a purely intellectual exercise that will have no psychological or cultural teeth whatsoever.
To be clear about Clement and Origen: I did not mean to claim that they were entirely scientifically rational or eschewed all metaphysics moderns would find unacceptable. Rather, my claim was that their notion of God was quite elevated and philosophical and required scripture mythologically.
I also agree that Christianity as it existed in, say, 545 CE was killed. About that, Nietzsche was right. In my view, that leaves room for a different understanding of Christianity, one more poetic and mythical. The faith is in the institutions and stories that preserve the message.
I also agree that the "masses" have more literalist beliefs. They likely always will. I'd make a distinction, as Catholics do, between implicit and explicit faith. Most people have implicit faith. They do not know exactly what they believe, but if asked, they'd probably assert literalist beliefs in the virgin birth, resurrection, and so forth. That's fine. Theologians and philosophers, on the other hand, will have more elevated and less literalist beliefs. I don't think one can avoid this, and it's certainly true in any area of empirical/theoretical inquiry.
It's a purely intellectual exercise, I agree, since it's an attempt to justify deeply held beliefs and hat are emotionally powerful. Any explicit articulation of those beliefs is bound to be an pale ghost of the actual faith.
In my personal opinion, a lot of Catholic orthodoxy must have been the product of church politics. Which doctrines won out was also about who was going to control the church as an on-going institution. The precise way the doctrine of the Trinity was interpreted, for instance. It functioned in much the same way certain litmus tests function among woke academics today: either you believe [fill in the blank] or you are not going to get tenure.
Not that this was necessarily a bad thing for the future history of the Church the way woke orthodoxy is for the future of today's liberal arts colleges and universities, where it needs to be rooted out.
I think that may have been an *effect* of the debates and controversies—i.e., being on the right side of the Arian vs. Homoousion argument certainly made a difference to one's career in the Church—but I don't think political considerations were the main motivator, nor necessarily the deciding factor, in most cases. Both the actual writings of the various participants in the various doctrinal disputes, and the behaviors of said participants, suggest to me that they *really believed* in their arguments: e.g., a whole lotta foot-shooting seems to have gone on, from a purely "Realpolitik"-like perspective; and (at least, in the early days, when the grosser shape of doctrine was still being hammered out) a lot of wealthy & powerful figures seem to have lost to—or been themselves convinced by—lesser clerics, on (theological/rhetorical) merits.
Of course, I don't mean to say that political power didn't result from winning such disputes, or that it's never the case that Cardinal-Bishop Orsini's theological views received greater consideration than those of Deacon Felice, or whatever... just that maybe we ought not be *too* cynical about the making of the theological sausage. Er... so to speak.
I don't necessarily disagree. The relationship between Jesus and God is a tricky one. I will say this: If God is the fairest and most beautiful possible thing, given everything we know, then Jesus read the mind of God like nobody else was able to do. But, again, that's just me.
This is a confusing proposition for me. You’re saying sincere faith, but without the virgin birth, death, and resurrection, what is the sincere faith in? Is it just that the Bible does an especially good job of providing ‘meaning?’ The idea seems to be that we need stories, but not the wrong stories, so let’s use this older set of stories, even though they didn’t exactly prevent the predicament which seem to be triggering the call to return to these stories.
It sounds more like a social-cognitive tool in this context. Am I reading you badly?
While it’s true that central mysteries of Christianity like the Incarnation and Resurrection can’t be reduced to metaphor, the world-historical power of Christianity never came from assent to propositions. It came from the tragic, symbolic drama that consecrated life and death, sacrifice and redemption, into cosmic meaning. This drama created the West’s form of life, its art, and its language of justice and mercy.
To say that Christianity is dead for educated people is to mistake the decline of literalist assent for the death of the underlying form itself. Civilizations cannot live without the sacred; and the sacred always returns. The real question is not whether belief can be made to fit a particular standard of intellectual honesty, but whether the West can survive without the grammar of tragedy and redemption that Christianity alone provides.
I basically agree that the power of Christianity never came from assent to propositions, but that doesn't mean there can be anything like Christianity apart from those propositions. Without assent to the propositions, it's just not Christianity as it has been understood for 2k years.
"It came from the tragic, symbolic drama that consecrated life and death, sacrifice and redemption, into cosmic meaning."
True, that is the power of the Christian mythos. But if you affirm that while denying the historical reality of Jesus Christ as resurrecting God in the flesh, you're still not a Christian. Saying that you believe in the power of the symbolic drama of sacrifice and redemption, and denying the historical reality of virgin birth and resurrection does not make you a Christian, certainly not in the eyes of the vast majority of Christians.
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"The real question is not whether belief can be made to fit a particular standard of intellectual honesty, but whether the West can survive without the grammar of tragedy and redemption that Christianity alone provides."
Probably not. But the task here is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and doing so will leave us with something that has little in common--aesthetically and intellectually--with what currently calls itself Christianity.
I'm reminded of the effect of the Vatican's various—in my view, misguided—efforts to mold the Church into a shape more pleasing to modern sensibilities. It has not, at all, made Catholicism more appealing to the average modern; it has not given the Church any extra authority, nor lent any new force to its dogma—quite the opposite; it has made it lose what savor it had, a dilute & milquetoast dog's breakfast. (Er... I intended that to be a brilliant new synthesis of figurative elements, but I think it came out as just a terribly mixed metaphor–)
Christianity conquered the West in an age wherein its message was not at all consonant with the prevailing views, for the most part, and I have seen it argued that it was this same unbending alienness that gave it a certain power. (We might see something similar in, say, Trump's rise, or the various "alt-right" figures online: nothing was gained in decades of puling, insincere deference to the results of Cthulhu's leftward swim... but defiance & unabashed rejection of the Great Old One had, as it turned out, a good deal more appeal & authority than had been suspected.)
TL;DR, it's the First Law of the Playground at work: trying to be cool makes you uncool. Trying to construct an Acceptable Christianity just gives you a lamer Christianity—a toothless version, not a workable one
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FWIW, I spoke to a priest who said that it was acceptable, in the Church's eyes, to view most of the Bible as metaphorical or allegorical—moral lessons, deeper meanings, stories for the masses—but that the Resurrection itself was absolutely non-negotiable. Don't know how official this position is, though.
That’s fair, but the problem here is the assumption that the mysteries must be affirmed or denied in the scientific sense. This is what I would call (following Spengler) a mistake of Faustian rationalism. They can be affirmed as mysteries, which are not less but more real than facts, because they transfigure facts into meaning; and it was precisely this transfiguration that gave the West its form of life.
If you want to promote a version of Christianity in which the virgin birth and resurrection aren’t understood as historical facts (which is how they were understood long before science came along), go for it. But again, my contention is that it will have no psychological or cultural teeth.
Out of touch comment. Younger more educated (men) are much more likely to attend Church. President of the Harvard GOP club was raised with 0 religion and became Catholic. This is a 90s talking point unsubstantiated with any current data
OP is confused and this comment section reads like a bunch of 19th century historians who have just disassembled and twisted the documents that make up the Bible. A literal interpretation of the Bible, that the events happened as described, can be the only way that Christianity will survive and it will survive, and will ultimately be the only thing in the West to survive this period.
West transmitted progressive, evolutionist ideologies to east asia. Also East Asia was not always atheist, and the scientific method (from the west) revolutionized their belief systems.
The west is behind a lot of generalist innovations.
If the European people/genetic cluster does not survive. Then the west is gone. It's more than the creative outputs of a people.
Christians don't even hold the genetic cluster to geography relation sacred. And that relation absolutely influenced history at the political and genetic level. Yet everyone seems hellbent on destroying it.
Also most of that transmission was done by Communist or otherwise despotic States at the point of a gun. West didn’t do much that they didn’t do to themselves. It doesn’t help that much of East Asian culture has a thing with passivity, hundreds of millions of people versus a few million with guns and they all just took it lying down from their own people. It didn’t revolutionize their belief system, it just revealed exactly how empty the pagan system was before and how dependent it was on (in China) the Han system, tradition and state apparatus. I mean, most of these societies were just this: rice farmer, Confucian scholar of some kind, dude with spear (maybe on horseback) and the Imperial clique). In the West, this kindve of rigid societal despotism would never work but it’s all East Asia has ever known and so one system famous for creating herds of uneducated, unoriginal worker drones traded itself for a communist system of brainwashed, unoriginal worker drones. Very little difference between the power wielded by the Chairman and the Emperor (aside the divine right angle but even then the Son of Heaven doctrine still operates - Emperor as Messiah) as both relied on a mass bureaucracy, a slave like populace, and the willingness to use despotic military power. There has never been anything like a separate body of laws or constitution in East Asia traditionally. The West had the Bible, the 12 Tables, the Magna Carta, church covenants and constitutionalism and so on. Enlightenment thinker praised China precisely because it was a despotic bureaucrat state and several of the emperors in that period had a silly little knack for the south sea barbarians (as Euro’s were called) scientific experiments and was willing to put to death 10,000 peasants if it meant that the Court was entertained for a weekend. The same thing happened to Greek science in the Hellenic period. Despotism sucks.
Biblically, all nations (Gr. ethnos) have an inheritance. “When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, When he separated the sons of Adam, He set the bounds of the people According to the number of the children of Israel (“sons of God, LXX/DSS).”
Deuteronomy 32:8 and “neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.” Acts 17:25-28
Now this is in accordance with the predetermined fore-council of the Divine Trinity. Indeed, this is what the Divine Trinity did when at Babel, ““And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.”
Genesis 11:5-8
God has plans for eternal generations of every ethnicity of people. When they initially tried to globalize, God divided their tongues, transported many afar, and further divided the geography of the known world to create more cultural and ethnic differentiation. No doubt this folly had occurred in Noah’s time as the “whole earth” and the whole of humanity had corrupted themselves completely which speaks to me of an overwhelming monolithic Cainatic civilization similar to Babel but God would no longer use a flood but it was in the following generations that God would eventually call out a single husband and wife from the very heart of Babel and the rest is history.
Also never mind that the New Testament ethic is simply the purest ethical/social standard imaginable. Its whole purpose is to engender peace and a love and walk with God. This mode of social life will no doubt improve the outcomes of anyone who should be either saved or otherwise adopt its do’s and don’t, which is essentially what ethics or moral philosophy is all about.
However, whereas the commands of the Old Testament had the force of law and penalty was often death, the commands of the NT are meant to be received and acted upon through living relationship with God and God’s Spirit, which avoids the pitfall of the Law/Death transaction. This is articulated in Roman’s 7-8.
In short, the peoples that made up the original West will ultimately survive, because of prophecy but its vitality in real time will only continue if they cling to their guns and Bibles. A reformation based on personally responsibility, the smallest unit of civil government, the individual, graduating the social club and the marriage unit, followed by municipal government followed by State and Imperial (Federal) government, will be needed. Aristotle was correct in stating that man was a political ‘animal’ (Aristotle thought animals were essentially fleshly automatons so ‘machine’ works just as well) and God’s government, coached for us by Him in terms of natural or divine law, is the source of all national, social, cultural, political, economic, etc, health.
Suffice to say, a look at modern Europe and its social implosion is as much a study in the decline of public Christianity. While the actual, underground or evangelical church is thriving in Europe, all public religions institutions, nearly all, are going through apostasy and the health of those countries is reflected therein. Christianity is the most pro-growth religion ever (ignore the blighted nunneries and wayward monks and aesthetes, there’s a Biblical AND historical reason the reformation did away with them). It was the death penalty if you injured sexual organs and it was a folly in Israel if one did not perform the levirite duty to a brother. It would take another post of this length to go over even some of many verses in the Bible supporting the doctrine of pro-growth and the eternal generations of peoples.
The West has sown apostasy and backsliding and has reaped many whirlwinds. AI is a good analogy. Total ethical and moral declension in this day and age (let’s say 50 year period) at every level. However, we’ve had so many advancements, especially in space and information technology. , it is apparent that while we have backslidden on the small things (to us but not God), we have had great material success. God loves material success when righteously accrued. However, I think we are all nervous that AI will deprive us ultimately of our own soul-consciousness. We backslid on God, we sowed technology and material progress and have reaped the same but we now see the total collapse of our society and cultures soul feeling. Look at the suicide rates.
Sort of ramblingat this point. I really don’t feel well. I need to get some of these ideas into essay form. Time to sleep.
Brilliant apologia for Christianity. It becomes increasingly clear that humanity abhors a spiritual vacuum and that which is left by the absence of Christianity will be filled by destructive nihilism, Marxism, radical Islamism, or other spiritual toxins.
This has become a common refrain, but all I have seen is opinion, anecdotes, and correlation, no persuasive evidence. Counter examples are secular societies such as Japan and Nordic countries.
Non-western religions are as deeply meaningful for their practitioners as Christianity. Meditation, which doesn’t necessarily require a supernatural belief, cultivates equanimity and compassion, not ideological extremism.
Of course, Christians will insist their particular version of the sacred is superior, but their arguments are primarily persuasive to those who already believe. A Buddhist friend of mine from Thailand read the Bible last year and said he didn’t recognize much spirituality in it (although he was fond of some of Jesus’ teachings).
Because those religions harbor no actual ethic and even if they do have some high ethics, it is obvious that everyone fails to do it, as in all religious systems. But Christianity promises a personal relationship with the Creator of the Universe, no other religion can possibly boast that, and that He will fill you with His Spirit. Take that as you will but no other has this concept, especially without an associated ritual or cultic system which is ultimately so that the people’s money are siphoned into priestlings bake accounts. Also Christians lead the world in defenseless martyrdom, which has to be the highest ethic imaginable.
I wrote a really long reply as to why Hindus could not possibly have a relationship with their physical idols or with their concept of Brahman, which included philosophical questioning and a analytical comparison between these contradictory doctrines of Hinduism and with the doctrine of personal relationship and Spirit indwelling found in the Christian Scriptures but I accidental swiped left and this stupid app deleted all of it. I also offered speculation as to why it was so in Hindu religion. In short, one cannot have a personal relationship with an object, which would be the case for Shiva and many multiplied gods as they exist materially and cannot be classified as persons. They cannot dwell, they cannot move. If I know longer see them, they no longer have bearing on my life. Not so with an actual person like my wife or children, let alone the members of the Divine Trinity. I noted analogically that Hinduism contains within it a confusion of doctrines, classifying the many gods and forms of popular religion within as cthonic and the worship of the Brahman as being ouranic or more lofty and noble. While lofty, I demonstrated that the Brahman or universal consciousness is impersonal and would never be able to dwell corporately or individually with people or peoples, it being a contradiction to the concept. In short to this point, that whether the form of the religion is popular and based on idols or whether it is more abstract and seemingly monotheistic, it still is not providing a level of relationship that the Bible and Jesus Christ claims to provide. Idols are not alive and universal consciousness is not personal. You cannot say you have a personal relationship with a plunger, no matter how much ritual or theology you drape it in - you cannot be interpersonally penetrated, in dwelt, or receive the spirit of a plunger or Hindu idol-god as they have bodies or are otherwise non-consenting to human personal levels. This is called anthropomorphism.
I pointed out many modern Hindu proselytes are aware of these deep contradiction in Hindu doctrine and attempt to make up the contradiction by saying the many depictions and multiplied gods and demons are actually emanations of the single divine GodHead the Svayam-Bhagavan, a concept somewhat found in oriental Christian Orthodoxy (mainly due to geographical/cultural proximity to this mainly Persian mode of thinking). I point this out as beating around the bush.
I speculated at length why the early Hindu texts were less idolatrous and I gave the reason that the later tradition that Hinduism appears from misunderstood much, especially in its knowledge of the uni-plural noun for God found in the OT, Elohim. Finally, I pointed out that a personal God who claims to be all knowledge and all knowing and all loving would never compel His people to commit acts that hurt or damage the body. I just selected a bare few practices to zero in on. The ingestion of bovine excrement is a common form of workshop in Hinduism. The prostitution of daughters in temple worship, while once more popular, still goes on. The wife burnings that were famously ended by the British. We could go on about morally and ethically questionable rituals and demands made upon Hindus in their religion. The ancient Egyptians depicted nearly all deity as possessing animal qualities (often found in Hinduism as well) and yet they were one of cleanest peoples in all Antiquity. The ancient Egyptians did not posses a body of literature as immense as the Hindus and ultimately the Pharaoh ran the whole society, something unparalleled in Indian history. Obviously there are major disagreements about the afterlife between the two but I think that analogy is helpful.
I wrote it a lot better before but here is the substance of it. I hope this helps! Super short version: there is no way that Hinduism fulfills the personal relationship factor with Creator-God found in the Bible, on its own terms or the Bible’s. Whatever those people in Bali are doing is not personal faith relationship, it’s just religion and religious meditation.
Also as a writer, lyricist, and musician myself, i understand where you’re getting at. But it’s no replacement for God and certainly we don’t need to endorse your Godless shaped soul hole to world. It’s good you found meaning though, I would simply say that God could take contemplation, meditation, and artistic creativity to a whole new level. He gives many kinds of gifts to men, even if they ask or if they are one of His own kids or not. He has concern for everyone. He has concern for you and your art.
Anyways, they need to fix this app my first run was much better and now it’s 25 minutes later.
There are millions of non-Christian believers who would reject your assertion that they don’t have a deeply meaningful “personal relationship” with God. Go visit India, Bali, or a thousand other places where intimate and personal devotion is undeniable. Many people might find your particularly version intrusive. As for me, a former Christian believer, I find contemplation, meditation, and artistic creativity similar to the Christian phenomenon, when one interacts with non-egotistical “voices” in the brain.
As for martyrdom, it is not unique to Christianity (and I doubt comparative statistics exist), nor limited to religion. Dying for one’s beliefs signifies conviction, not truthfulness, and very possibly, foolishness.
Ask a Muslim and they’ll tell YOU that. Throw in a Jew too. Have you not heard of the Abrahamic God? All three of these religions worship Him, which is why the conflict between the three is so tragically ironic.
The fault lies not in the gods men worship, but in themselves. Religion at its best seeks to help men overcome their bestial tribal tendencies and love one another. Thus in my view, it is a force for good.
Can men love one another and behave morally and justly without divine intervention? I refer you to the bloody, violent history of the human race. In my estimation, the evidence is to the contrary.
"Ask a Muslim and they’ll tell YOU that. Throw in a Jew too. Have you not heard of the Abrahamic God? All three of these religions worship Him, which is why the conflict between the three is so tragically ironic."
But they slaughter and brutalize each other in the name of their religion. So one could conclude that religion is evil.
You certainly know that religion has often justified terrible wars. Nevertheless, I suspect that the human race overall has benefited from religion (and obviously it served a purpose in Evolution), and a case can be made that Christianity contributed uniquely to moral development in the West (as did Buddhism in the East). But it is not a cure all, it doesn’t work for everyone, there are good alternatives for individuals, and, eventually, it will probably be replaced by something better (if we don’t blow ourselves up). It is not, after all, true objectively, so it’s vulnerable to reality.
Like religious conservatives aren't guilty of blank slate-style thinking. They really don't like innate dispositions as well and think human agency can trump that. It can't.
Hard work and grit is not everything (being lazy is just a handicap), inherent attributes matter a lot. Getting angry at Black Africans for the state of their nations or communes is futile. A lot can't help it, and evolutionists has the actual solution (selective breeding, eventually transhumanism).
Ontologically, trans humanism is and always will be a failure for, “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” evolution has also never been scientifically proven and it is likely never to be proven. Certainly some elements of certain Evolutionist doctrines are true such as elements of survival of the fittest as well as some parts of the traits but we have never witnessed long term adaptation. Whether the birds develop slightly different beaks, the bird in several generations will always revert back to its ‘kind’ I could go on about all of the failures of the evolutionary model and the lack of data supporting it, especially as to discovery of man. The cavemen were degenerated men and is , hardly a whole skeleton can be found. Most in museums are collections of bones put together like the dinosaurs (more evidence for dinos than evolution).
Your ignorance regarding Evolution is shocking. You will never convince someone of your viewpoint if you don’t understand the core concepts. But you are not interested in what is scientifically accurate, because your priority is to defend a particular ideology despite the facts. By the way, many Christians, including Evangelical scientists, accept evolution (descent with modification via natural selection) from simple to complex organisms over billions of years. The evidence is overwhelming.
Please explain to me the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In fact, explain the first one as well (all four are relevant). Please explain how evolution can occur when we have the Second Law. Please name a single biological system that has increased its level of complexity. I will wait.
While I think there are good faith Christians who hold to evolution, it is done out of ignorance and world pleasing. Evolution is an explicit rejection of the account of Genesis 1-3 and destroys the entire story of the Bible. No creation in six days. No “And it was good.” No satan. No angels. No fall and original sin. No need of redemption.
Most ‘Christian’s’ who hold to this and not purely through ignorance, are either lefty on theological issues, near apostates, or are Roman Catholic, hardly Christians but instead, Catholic and only because the Roman church told them so.
So no real Bible believing Christian can agree with evolution while also being a concerned reader of the Bible.
You are trotting out an old creationist argument regarding thermodynamics, again demonstrating profound ignorance about science. Again, please get educated and take a physics class. The 2nd law states that disorder (entropy) will increase within a closed system. The Earth is not a closed system (solar energy), so an increase in order does not violate the 2nd law. Eventually, over billions of years, disorder will reign, but in the meantime plants grow, embryos develop into mature animals, and animals evolve.
While I agree with Bo’s comments about the natural persistence and value of Christianity and unfair criticisms by some atheists, his portrayal of Christianity is hygienic and romanticized. I’ve noticed this tendency in non-religious conservatives who have limited or no experience in the U.S. Christian world.
Evangelicalism is the dominant form of Christianity in the U.S. and if anybody is committing a category error, it is Evangelicals. More than 50% believe the universe is less 10,000 years old and that Darwinian evolution is false. It condemns homosexuality and enforces an unnatural repression of sexual desire between unmarried people. Christian nationalism, which rejects the idea of a secular state, is a growing force, thus its embrace of Russia. It is evangelistic, and often condescending towards people outside the fold.
I am sympathetic with Sara Hader’s argument that, concerning intellectual benefits, religion provides a higher floor than secularism, but a lower ceiling. For example, religious people have resisted absurd woke illiberalism, but it also limits the benefits of rationality.
I accept that Christianity is meaningful for many people and has social benefits. But we must remain vigilant to its negatives and dangerous impulses. Furthermore, we must recognize that Christianity does not work for everyone. I was raised in an Evangelical home and believed fervently. But ultimately, I could not affirm the literal beliefs that Christianity requires. I would have to sacrifice an essential part of who I was to be welcomed in the church. The transition from my Christian beliefs and community was excruciating and lonely. In the end, I discovered greater sources of meaning and a more authentic relationships.
Yes this is very fair. I was making the case for a certain form of Christianity, and undoubtedly there are many perverse versions out there. I think we should criticize them.
I think people generally underestimate the affect of rituals and get it confused with organized religion. Durkheim got it right. Hence, they go along with the virgin birth, etc. because they like the feeling from the religious rituals. As an atheist, I can't deny the feeling of getting married on the alter of a Catholic church in front of a couple hundred relatives and friends.
I think you can grant Bo all his points, namely that civilisation seems to require religion, that when Christianity withdraws other superstitions fill the void, that a rationalist view of life is colder and less 'human' than a religious one but somehow that doesn't help those of us who would quite like to be religious but can't. I know, I know, we moderns are supposed to view Christianity as a myth, as poetry, and not as a rival to science. But if you don't believe that it is literally true, I'm not sure in what way it can transform your life. Once you've seen that the wardrobe is simply a wardrobe with a solid wooden back and not after all a portal to a winter wonderland, it becomes very difficult to still believe in Aslan.
Regarding the New Atheists Bo said, '...the man who rages against the divine is often more religious than the man who simply shrugs'.
This is simply a mistake. Dawkins et al. were not raging against the divine. They were raging against people who believe in the divine. If I make fun of people for believing in fairies this doesn't suggest that deep down I too believe in fairies. It suggests instead that, unlike the man who just shrugs, people who believe in fairies annoy the hell out of me!
Julian Jaynes thought religion came about through humans imagining the voices of ancestors telling them what to do. If he was right, then perhaps the best way to retrieve religion is to reimagine those voices.
Fair points. I do think the thoughtful atheist is often more religious in some ways that the casual believer. But I do not think that mocking belief (or raging against believers as you put it) means one is more religious that somebody who just shrugs.
I do not believe that many of the stories of Christianity are literally true, and they profoundly influence my life. Of course, I do not believe that Anna Karenina is literally true, and it moved me to tears--and to joy and deep meditation.
In my mind I have always made a distinction between 'the godless' and atheists. The godless are those for whom God has never been 'a thing' and irrelevant to their often dysfunctional lives.
Atheists on the other hand are people who have at least thought about the problem of God and decided the evidence for Him is unconvincing. Yet the fact that atheists have grappled with the problem at all perhaps suggests that the question of God is more important to them than to either the godless or unthinking religious sheep.
The older I get the more I take on the rational modern mindset, the one that disenchants the world. Most of my old romantic views about Christmas; Ye Olde England; rural life; night trains to Berlin; Batavia and Conrad's exotic East; the lowering skies and desolate moorland of Wuthering Heights; women. None of these have survived real world contact, as opposed to the wonderfulness of them all in my imagination. I have now been to the 'exotic' East many times and seen it up close and it really isn't that exotic. Christmas now means out of town shopping centres and mingling with big-bodied, loud people. Women can be just as petty-minded and nasty as men.
If there were some way to recapture the way I used to drape the world in the lovely hues of my imagination, a way to re-enchat the world, then I would. But it seems that once you have been expelled from Eden there is no going back. Now the only things that make me see the world as slightly wonderful are TikTok videos of kittens, puppies and beautiful Japanese children.
While folk tales like those of the Brothers Grimm still make me feel they are tapping into something deep in the northern European psyche, the Bible stories, set as they are in the Middle East, don't give me any such tingle of ancient forests and ancestors.
Above I referred to unthinking believers as 'sheep' but I want to take that back. Perhaps the only way to view some things and to keep them alive is either by not thinking about them or by looking at them aslant. The people I really don't understand are the ones who spend a lifetime looking into religion to finally conclude that the evidence for the truth of the Bible and the existence of God is unimpeachable. Really?
I know that this was your second go at defending Christianity but how you view it is still not clear to me. You don't believe the Bible is literally true but you do believe the stories contain a lot of wisdom, in the same way that Anna Karenina also does. Since Christianity is so old it has accrued some extra quality that Anna Karenina doesn't have? Is that it? I don't understand how a myth, which is understood to be a myth rather than the literal truth, is something a people can rally behind in the way Muslims rally behind, and organise their lives around, Islam. Surely the only reason Muslims take Islam so seriously is because they think it's true. If they thought it were a myth then surely Islam would soon go the same way as Christianity.
Most Modern Middle Easterners are nowhere near as religious as Westerners assume they are and they haven't been in the last 200 years. Many Westerners have this delusion that the so-called "Islamic World" is the only one that's unaffected by Secularism, which is laughably false.
Take Iran for example, over one third of its population is Atheist/Agnostic and almost 2/3rds of them don't believe in any form of an Afterlife. It's a country that's actually less religious than USA. Turkey is similar.
Fundamentalist/Extremist Middle Eastern Muslims aren't really an exception, in fact, Muslims who identify as Salafi/Wahhabi or subscribe to some Islamist ideology are on average more likely to be closet Atheists and/or eventually leave Islam entirely than Muslims who don't.
Fundamentalist Muslims do take Islam seriously, but it's not because that actually believe it's all literally true or even at all in many cases, it's actually because Islamic Fundamentalism the only coherent Socially Conservative ideology that's possible for them in the Modern World after the breakdown and disappearce of the traditional Pre-Industrial cultures of many predominantly Muslim lands.
West Asia is still deeply dysgenic, a good chunk of Israel is the exception.
and I'm not saying that to be an asshole. Europe is dysgenic even without the invasion. Those same evolutionary mechanics that gave us an advantage over West Asians can easily take away those disadvantages. Our blood is not magical nor is our dirt.
That's a relief to know that modern Middle Easterners aren't as religious as we thought.
You say that it is laughably false for westerners to believe that the Islamic world is the only one unaffected by secularism but then you didn't go on to name any others that are unaffected by it.
I just looked up atheists and agnostics in Iran and the figures AI came up with were 9% and 5.8% respectively. That is not 'over one third'.
I imagine Turkey can be separated into the modern west and the trad east but I would be suprised if Turkey as a whole, including Anatolia, were less religious than the USA. And of course it all depends on the degree. Often you have to ask an American if they are religious or not. With most Muslims you can simply observe.
You said that westerners overestimate how religious Middle Easterners are but then say 'Fundamentalist/Extremist Middle Eastern Muslims aren't really an exception'. To me these two claims are contradictory. What is your evidence for claiming that most Fundamentalists Muslims are in reality closet atheists or end up leaving Islam entirely? That sounds very improbable to me.
You say that many Muslim Fundamentalists only take Islam seriously because it is the only form of social conservatism open to them. If there are really so many of them, why don't they start a non-Islamic socially conservative movement? I'm sure those Muslims who don't take Islam very seriously would be overjoyed. Or could it be that a secular conservative alternative to Fundamental Islam doesn't exist because there isn't a market for it? But if there is a market which is presently not permitted to express itself, which section of the population is it that is keeping these atheists, agnostics, lukewarm believers and Fundamentalists (who are really secret Unbelievers) in check?
May be worth noting here that Spengler saw Christianity in its earliest form as a product of Magian civilization, only later adopted and re-shaped by the Faustian West. That helps explain why Biblical narratives can feel symbolically alien compared to European folk tales. Where the Magian world is dualistic, desert-bound, and compressed, the Faustian is expansive, forested or oceanic, and infinite in potential. Grimm’s stories speak natively in the Faustian idiom, while the Gospels and Old Testament retain the Magian imprint even when naturalised into the Western canon. Hence the sense of strangeness alongside familiarity.
The more I learn and study about Biological Human Nature and Anthropology, the more it becomes clear to me that Oswald Spengler was an unoriginal charlatan who didn't know what he was talking about. This is especially obvious whenever he speaks about any culture/civilization besides the Modern West, even with Greco-Roman culture he's completely off base. For example, take his false association of Ethical Dualism with the "Magian" cultures and religions (which is a common misconception many Westerners have). With the exception of some Iranian religions like Zoroastrianism and Manicheanism, none of the Middle Eastern religions traditionally teach any form of Dualism, and in the West itself Moral Dualism only became common after the Protestant Reformation and (ironically) The Enlightenment.
Spengler was anything but unoriginal. Dualism doesn't have to be a core aspect of metaphysics to be integral to the symbolic structure. In that sense, all the Abrahamic religions are suffused with Dualism, even when explicit doctrine disavows it.
There is no Dualism in Traditional Abrahamic Mythology nor scripture, Westerners simply project Dualism onto them because it is they/you who are the actual dualists. In fact, Dualism was traditional regarded as a denial of the Oneness of God (and therefore incompatible with Monotheism) and both The Bible and Quran outright teach that God created both Good and Evil along with everything else, which makes Dualism impossible under its framework
I think you are mistaken about what the New Atheists were for.
Growing up in England in the 70s and 80s, most my friends were atheists and a bunch were Christians — but no one cared about the difference. We went to church together and said the Lord’s Prayer together. America circa 2000 was very different. The wall between Christians and Atheists was high, most atheists kept it to themselves and there was a great deal of disdain for them (”I don’t know that atheists should even be considered as citizens. This is one nation under God.” — The President). The New Atheists just showed young atheists that it was OK to believe what they believed. I don't think they even changed many minds.
The number of people who checked ‘no religion’ on the surveys tripled though.
That's a fair comment--and you are likely correct. They didn't change many minds, but their very public embrace of atheism showed atheists that atheism was all right.
I think you should have added that, 'The New Atheists just showed young AMERICAN atheists that it was OK to believe what they believed'. As you suggested at the start of your comment, it had already been okay to be an atheist in England for a long, long time. In fact, as you possibly remember, from the 1960's onwards Christianity was viewed more as something for your grandmothers and other old folk.
I'm not sure I agree. The question of whether or not God exists is one of probability. Not even Richard Dawkins claims to KNOW that there isn't a God. I therefore think it's correct to say that while believers believe God exists, atheists don't believe this. I think it's completely possible to believe that something isn't true.
Nope, I'm afraid you've lost me there. You don't believe that God exists, therefore it's not a matter of belief? That makes no sense to me. Are you saying that it WOULD be a matter of belief if you DID believe but since you don't, it's not a matter of belief?
It's true that most people thought of Christianity as for old folks (my grandparents went to church regularly), but the atheists went to church too, and we all got along. That doesn't happen in America.
Gotta say that I didn't know any atheists that went to church. What on earth would possess them to do so? Just to keep their Christian friends company? Was this a regular weekly thing? That Christians and atheists got on fine together in England is not something I dispute. After all, very few people took it seriously.
Yes, Dawkins has often talked of his love of English churches, carols, religiously-inspired music (Bach's St. Matthew Passion) and various Christian holidays and traditions. Some people see in this a contradiction but I'm not one of them.
Schools were required to have a Christian assembly every morning. We sang hymns and said our prayers. We had a church near the school, and we went there for Holy Communion quite often. We went to weddings, funerals and christenings all the time. Not as often as Christians, sure, but WAY more than American atheists do.
Yes, I remember 'assembly' very well. We sang (or rather missang) hymns, often having no idea what the actual words were or what they meant ('Hosana is ex-Chelsea', anyone?).
It sounds like your school was Catholic as opposed to the usual C of E that I attended. So, no church attendance for me and no Holy Communion. The only wedding I attended was my sister's and to this day I have never been to a Christening. The first funeral I attended was at the age of 40-something. The first time I remember entering a church was Westminster Abbey on a trip to London. Christianity just wasn't a thing in the suburban East Midlands housing estate I grew up in in the 1960's.
I was CofE, too, but I got to enjoy a lot more church than you! And I still go to Evensong quite often! ;-)
I like the way we do it better than the way they do it over there. We lived there for 25 years, and my kids were never exposed to religion at all. It makes the wall between believers and non-believers so much higher.
"To demand that Christianity speak the language of empirical science, and to subject its myths to historical or rationalist scrutiny, is to misunderstand the nature of religion."
I demand nothing from Christianity or any religion. What I expect from modern humans is reasoning, logic, critical thinking, and searching for the truth. Of course, I am mostly disappointed.
The nature of religion is to provide a crutch for those afraid of the truth and a tool for control of the masses.
I do not, of course, agree with this description of religion, although certainly religion (like any other ideology) can be used for these purposes.
I do not expect more of human nature than we can get. And since humans live by more than logic, reasoning, critical thinking, and searching for the truth, I think your expectations are unreasonable. Most people want to live meaningful lives and be decent humans. They don't care about abstract metaphysical truths or skeptical inquiry. And that's fine by me.
"I do not, of course, agree with this description of religion, although certainly religion (like any other ideology) can be used for these purposes."
And all of them have.
"I do not expect more of human nature than we can get."
How do you know how much we can get? I am a firm believer in the ascent of humanity. We are nowhere near our full potential. Through psychometric research and genetic enhancement, we can make vast improvements in positive traits.
"And since humans live by more than logic, reasoning, critical thinking, and searching for the truth, I think your expectations are unreasonable.
Most people want to live meaningful lives and be decent humans."
Sadly, most humans live for bread and circuses, e.g, mind-numbing entertainment.
"They don't care about abstract metaphysical truths or skeptical inquiry."
I said nothing of abstract metaphysical truths. A lack of critical thinking and skeptical inquiry has brought us to our current disastrous situation.
"And that's fine by me."
Are you happy with the current state of the world?
In your opinion but then there lies the problem. You talk of closed minds, I would suggestion yours is not only closed but bricked up. What did God/Christianity do to you apart from, some one argue, give you life and your free will!
Religion makes people believe in absurdities, which leads to atrocities. Good ol ideology can do the same thing, but for religion it's just baked in all of them.
Christianity didn't give me life, my people's inventions did (enabled massive population growth) and the fragile happenstance behind my conception.
Galton was right, and he told us exactly what evolutionary mechanics to exploit in order for us to see civilization reach its summit.
The right wingers and left wingers all want to believe in their absurd version of blank slate theory.
Evolutionists provide the answer, but nobody likes the explanation behind the answer. Nobody likes how it's dehumanizing and brutal. But it is what has to happen until it's no longer needed. You don't increase a population's positive inherent attributes without some pain. The artificial way is a lot less painful than the natural way.
Richard Lynn was not 100% right, he got some things wrong, he missed some things. But for a "racist" he actually cared deeply about others. Making Black Africans have a higher raw intelligence will only do them good and allow them some dignity. Woke blank slate thinking will just screw them over and ultimately enforce the racial and class hierarchies which arise from group superiority/inferiority. While eugenicists/transhumanist will dismantle that hierarchy unintentionally as civilization progresses.
Typical Atheist snobbery smh. It's ironically Atheists who are far more intellectually cowardly and prone to existential anxiety on average than religious people of any stripe according to Psychometric research. For example, Your typical conservative Muslim for example has more mental strength (not related to IQ) on average than 90% of White Western people. Atheists and Sceptics frequency make the pseudo-scientific claim that Religion is rooted in fear, but Cognitive Science has consistently shown that this largely projection on part of the critics.
The bravest men and cultures in the world and throughout history have consistently been either highly religious or followers of some quasi-religious ideology like Communism or Fascism. The only known exception to this is Napoleon and even he wasn't an Atheist. The most cowardly and weakest willed peoples tend to be Secular Utilitarian types such as the Epicureans of antiquity and the Modern Liberals of today.
Conservative muslims like Arabs seem to flee often in warfare. So much for mental strength versus a cold selected people like North europeans or east asians. But I guess we're all wussies in their mind because we stopped putting the boot on their necks.
Conservative muslims also don't want to process information that tears down the foundations of their belief systems.
This guy simply despises ppl of european descent.
And there was a lot of very brave who spoke the truth to controlling entities like the Church and lost their life for it. Thomas Aikenhead gave his life to speaking the truth during the Scottish enlightenment.
It's a new mythology that the third worlder has created post colonialism. It was irresponsible to give a population access to tech that causes population growth when their avg intellgence was far lower than the creators. It was a smart investment for east asians, and some SE asians. But not so much for the rest of Asia and Africa. They should have been told to do eugenics first to raise their intelligence, then get access to tech that ultimately raises quality of life.
No shortcuts. No creating a hostile biomass that threatens people who can create developed nations. We showed them mercy when we had the potential to wipe them out with ease, they aren't showing us the same mercy. We won't forget that.
Yeah and so what? Just because most people hold a certain position doesn’t mean it’s true. You’d have to defend materialism otherwise you’re simply arguing fallaciously. However materialism can’t account for features of the mind such as qualia, intentionality, and rationality so no matter how popular it is, it’s simply a nonstarter
"Ok so you’re not a materialist and you think traditional religion is for fools, what do you think is correct then?"
What does materialism have to do with religion? I do not say that traditional religion was for fools. I believe religion is for those who can not face the reality of life...those who need a sky daddy to guide them. They are incapable of controlling their actions and read scripture written by others who can, supposedly, converse with the sky daddy. Of course, this gives church elders tremendous power over the weak, which they readily exploit...I give you the Catholic Church as one example.
It’s great that you’re not hostile to Christianity as it clearly was the backbone of the West. However the problem is being vaguely pro Jesus isn’t enough. No one makes sacrifices for a fake myth. If one is told they need to give up fornication, require fasting, tithe instead of going on a nicer vacation you’d be an idiot to do that for something you don’t believe. And nothing in science contradicts the Catholic faith that’s a myth created by John William Draper to stir up anti Catholic immigration sentiment to get back at his sister who was a nun and Andrew Dickson White who wanted money and power to start Cornell. Instead you should just read some old books and realize modernity is the outlier and classical theism and divine simplicity as stated in the Fourth Lateran Council still holds up today.
We perhaps have different views of what is consistent with science, which is fine. But I wouldn't call the view that Christianity is a collection of powerful myths, fake. The point of Genesis, let us say, is not to describe the actual creation of the universe. But I don't think that means Genesis is fake.
I do take your point that literal belief is a more powerful motivator of behavior. I don't have a great answer to that. These are difficult issues.
But the message of Genesis is that a literal supernatural being created the Cosmos, right? What is the non-literal, mythological, personally edifying interpretation? (By the way, Bo, I greatly appreciate your thoughtful, respectful, and engaging interaction with commenters.)
Genesis says that supernatural being started farming, seasons and the work/rest schedule of the weekday. That supernatural being also invented writing, language, and blah blah. No ice age is mentioned at all though.
Archeology has shown that is all false. It was people. And we even know what group of people first started nascent civilization in Anatolia.
Have you read any serious traditional philosophers? You should check out Ed Fesers work. The idea that Christianity can be inconsistent with science is a false one because science has to do with discoveries of the hypo-deductive method while theology and philosophy have to do with first principles of being. They are totally unrelated fields and advances in science don’t discredit metaphysics because science takes certain metaphysical assumptions for granted
You absolutely must reject Darwin and evolution if you must be a Christian. Long term evolutionary theory is a direct denial of the first couple of pages of Genesis. It’s also unprovable and has never been demonstrated under scientific conditions. The synthesis of both is ultimately impossible and will lead to apostasy, as the last 50 years have demonstrated.
You don't even need fancy evolutionary theories that ground oneself nearly perfectly to biological reality to disprove Genesis. Where was the ice age? How come the cave man paintings had wolly, furry animals? Those animals could never survive in today's climate.
Even some hunter gatherer cave art casts doubt on that creation myth. You'd also have to believe that god created writing, farming, the work/rest weekday and weekend concepts.
If it were possible for Christianity to be practiced as representing mere myth and poetry, then, given the hundreds of millions of Christians across the world, one would think that there would already exist some denomination that did so with success. But I don't know what such a denomination might be. The Unitarian Universalists might be the best example of a denomination that has dispensed with all explicitly supernatural tenets. Yet they have notoriously supplanted any such tenets with ideological ones. Some of the more mainline Christian denominations are also minimizing the supernatural component -- but there too ideology seems to be replacing it -- almost, it would seem, in proportion to how much the supernatural is ignored.
Perhaps other religions -- Shinto in Japan for example -- can be practiced purely as a myth. But I see no evidence that Christianity can be so handled.
This piece is really good, but all the commenters are right that Christianity stripped of truth claims becomes meaningless to believers. What we really need is what Carl R Trueman referred to as “A New Humanism” - a not-explicitly-theistic common rational framework in which religious and non-religious people can discuss morality and what it means to be human together. This would not replace religion or nullify its truth claims, but would add to it a rational framework for cultural conversations that invokes God’s reasons, not relying on God’s existence itself as the ultimate reason. In practice this probably looks like natural law, which had a moment but isn’t popular right now.
Beginning last December, I and my wife attended a conservative evangelical church for a few months. I thought it would be a safe bet: no wokeness, no guilt-mongering, no political lecturing. Just Christian fellowship.
Here are a few of my observations:
- Most of the people were casually dressed, and quite a few were dressed shabbily. This was also my wife’s impression.
- The people were friendly. Many were of Dutch descent, being either the children of postwar immigrants or newly arrived Afrikaners.
- There were no traditional hymns. The one exception was a rap rendition of Silent Night.
- Both the music and the church literature had a strange focus on Blackness. Asians outnumbered Blacks in the congregation, and the overwhelming majority were of European descent, but you wouldn’t know it from the materials we were given.
- One service had a presentation on outreach to immigrants. The speaker talked about how Canada was now receiving over a million immigrants a year, mostly from non-Christian sources. He said this was a wonderful opportunity to introduce Jesus to people who never knew Him previously. His presentation ended with a standing ovation.
That was the last service we attended. I agree that Christianity used to play a key role in defending our culture and society, but that is no longer the case. Today, churches are like the Judenrats of an occupied country. They allow us to act collectively but only in ways that help us disappear as orderly and tidily as possible.
Is it possible to have a cultural Christianity that preserves the architecture, myths, language, and rituals without being a faith in Christ being the son of God who performed miracles? If so, can this cultural Christianity be widely practiced across the bulk of society or is it just reserved for intellectuals?
Or do we truly have to choose between a traditional faith-based religion and a scientific outlook?
Great questions. I think we need a third way: fully informed by Science, not supernatural, values the arts (broadly defined), and includes a “spiritual” discipline. I think forms of meditation that cultivate attentiveness and loosen the grip of egoism could be a good foundation.
"To call them false because they are not literally true is a category mistake, as though one were to shout that The Godfather Part II is a “false film” because Michael Corleone never lived". Maybe, but when enough people start perceiving whole story as made up fairy tale, it just automatically loses grip and power, can't really help it.
The Christian faith astonishes me not so much for its transcendence and mystery--present and available to any who seeks it--but its grounding in reason and reality. The pathway of reason--the high road--leads to the transcendent Christ always. Bless you, Bo Winegard, for seeing this and spreading the good Word.
Christianity is and always has been predicated on belief in the actual, historical virgin birth, death, and resurrection of God in the flesh.
You can try to promote a Christianity divorced from those propositions, but it will no longer be the religion that underlay the Western world for 2k years.
That Christianity is dead for educated, intellectually honest people, and it’s not coming back. This article comes off as an expression of the conservative impulse desperately grasping at straws (no offense).
No offense taken. I respect this argument, and I think it partially true. However, it's worth noting that analogical and metaphorical interpretation has always a part of Biblical exegesis. Many elites did not believe the faith literally. If you read Clement or Origen, for example, you encounter an abstract, philosophical God. And of course this is even more true for post-Enlightenment theologians, e.g., Schleiermacher, Rahner, Kung, et cetera.
So, yes, literalist Christianity is dead for educated, intellectually honest people. But I do not think that precludes sincere faith.
Bo W
Clement and Origen both explicitly and forcefully defend the historical reality of the virgin birth and resurrection. Their abstract/philosophical conception of God is irrelevant, but that's how lots of Christian theologians have understood God anyways. But they pretty much all believe in the miracles if they can call themselves Christians. Belief in salvation through the actual, historical resurrection of Jesus as God in the flesh is the definition of a Christian for most people, and Clement and Origen were definitely Christians in that respect.
I don't know anything about the post-enlightenment theologians, but whatever the case may be they are irrelevant to this discussion. The enlightenment was the death of Christianity as it was known for 2k years. There was and continues to be lots of cope in the aftermath of Darwin and Newton.
Sincere faith in what? Without the miracles and the God in the flesh, I'm not sure what's left to have faith in. Symbols? Mythos? Good luck selling that to the masses. People aren't singing songs or (back in the day) martyring themselves to a symbol. They sing songs to and die for a God who actually sacrificed himself for their sins.
I appreciate your sincere defense of a symbolic interpretation. I just think this is a purely intellectual exercise that will have no psychological or cultural teeth whatsoever.
To be clear about Clement and Origen: I did not mean to claim that they were entirely scientifically rational or eschewed all metaphysics moderns would find unacceptable. Rather, my claim was that their notion of God was quite elevated and philosophical and required scripture mythologically.
I also agree that Christianity as it existed in, say, 545 CE was killed. About that, Nietzsche was right. In my view, that leaves room for a different understanding of Christianity, one more poetic and mythical. The faith is in the institutions and stories that preserve the message.
I also agree that the "masses" have more literalist beliefs. They likely always will. I'd make a distinction, as Catholics do, between implicit and explicit faith. Most people have implicit faith. They do not know exactly what they believe, but if asked, they'd probably assert literalist beliefs in the virgin birth, resurrection, and so forth. That's fine. Theologians and philosophers, on the other hand, will have more elevated and less literalist beliefs. I don't think one can avoid this, and it's certainly true in any area of empirical/theoretical inquiry.
It's a purely intellectual exercise, I agree, since it's an attempt to justify deeply held beliefs and hat are emotionally powerful. Any explicit articulation of those beliefs is bound to be an pale ghost of the actual faith.
Bo
In my personal opinion, a lot of Catholic orthodoxy must have been the product of church politics. Which doctrines won out was also about who was going to control the church as an on-going institution. The precise way the doctrine of the Trinity was interpreted, for instance. It functioned in much the same way certain litmus tests function among woke academics today: either you believe [fill in the blank] or you are not going to get tenure.
Not that this was necessarily a bad thing for the future history of the Church the way woke orthodoxy is for the future of today's liberal arts colleges and universities, where it needs to be rooted out.
I think that may have been an *effect* of the debates and controversies—i.e., being on the right side of the Arian vs. Homoousion argument certainly made a difference to one's career in the Church—but I don't think political considerations were the main motivator, nor necessarily the deciding factor, in most cases. Both the actual writings of the various participants in the various doctrinal disputes, and the behaviors of said participants, suggest to me that they *really believed* in their arguments: e.g., a whole lotta foot-shooting seems to have gone on, from a purely "Realpolitik"-like perspective; and (at least, in the early days, when the grosser shape of doctrine was still being hammered out) a lot of wealthy & powerful figures seem to have lost to—or been themselves convinced by—lesser clerics, on (theological/rhetorical) merits.
Of course, I don't mean to say that political power didn't result from winning such disputes, or that it's never the case that Cardinal-Bishop Orsini's theological views received greater consideration than those of Deacon Felice, or whatever... just that maybe we ought not be *too* cynical about the making of the theological sausage. Er... so to speak.
I don't necessarily disagree. The relationship between Jesus and God is a tricky one. I will say this: If God is the fairest and most beautiful possible thing, given everything we know, then Jesus read the mind of God like nobody else was able to do. But, again, that's just me.
This is a confusing proposition for me. You’re saying sincere faith, but without the virgin birth, death, and resurrection, what is the sincere faith in? Is it just that the Bible does an especially good job of providing ‘meaning?’ The idea seems to be that we need stories, but not the wrong stories, so let’s use this older set of stories, even though they didn’t exactly prevent the predicament which seem to be triggering the call to return to these stories.
It sounds more like a social-cognitive tool in this context. Am I reading you badly?
While it’s true that central mysteries of Christianity like the Incarnation and Resurrection can’t be reduced to metaphor, the world-historical power of Christianity never came from assent to propositions. It came from the tragic, symbolic drama that consecrated life and death, sacrifice and redemption, into cosmic meaning. This drama created the West’s form of life, its art, and its language of justice and mercy.
To say that Christianity is dead for educated people is to mistake the decline of literalist assent for the death of the underlying form itself. Civilizations cannot live without the sacred; and the sacred always returns. The real question is not whether belief can be made to fit a particular standard of intellectual honesty, but whether the West can survive without the grammar of tragedy and redemption that Christianity alone provides.
I basically agree that the power of Christianity never came from assent to propositions, but that doesn't mean there can be anything like Christianity apart from those propositions. Without assent to the propositions, it's just not Christianity as it has been understood for 2k years.
"It came from the tragic, symbolic drama that consecrated life and death, sacrifice and redemption, into cosmic meaning."
True, that is the power of the Christian mythos. But if you affirm that while denying the historical reality of Jesus Christ as resurrecting God in the flesh, you're still not a Christian. Saying that you believe in the power of the symbolic drama of sacrifice and redemption, and denying the historical reality of virgin birth and resurrection does not make you a Christian, certainly not in the eyes of the vast majority of Christians.
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"The real question is not whether belief can be made to fit a particular standard of intellectual honesty, but whether the West can survive without the grammar of tragedy and redemption that Christianity alone provides."
Probably not. But the task here is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and doing so will leave us with something that has little in common--aesthetically and intellectually--with what currently calls itself Christianity.
I'm reminded of the effect of the Vatican's various—in my view, misguided—efforts to mold the Church into a shape more pleasing to modern sensibilities. It has not, at all, made Catholicism more appealing to the average modern; it has not given the Church any extra authority, nor lent any new force to its dogma—quite the opposite; it has made it lose what savor it had, a dilute & milquetoast dog's breakfast. (Er... I intended that to be a brilliant new synthesis of figurative elements, but I think it came out as just a terribly mixed metaphor–)
Christianity conquered the West in an age wherein its message was not at all consonant with the prevailing views, for the most part, and I have seen it argued that it was this same unbending alienness that gave it a certain power. (We might see something similar in, say, Trump's rise, or the various "alt-right" figures online: nothing was gained in decades of puling, insincere deference to the results of Cthulhu's leftward swim... but defiance & unabashed rejection of the Great Old One had, as it turned out, a good deal more appeal & authority than had been suspected.)
TL;DR, it's the First Law of the Playground at work: trying to be cool makes you uncool. Trying to construct an Acceptable Christianity just gives you a lamer Christianity—a toothless version, not a workable one
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FWIW, I spoke to a priest who said that it was acceptable, in the Church's eyes, to view most of the Bible as metaphorical or allegorical—moral lessons, deeper meanings, stories for the masses—but that the Resurrection itself was absolutely non-negotiable. Don't know how official this position is, though.
That’s fair, but the problem here is the assumption that the mysteries must be affirmed or denied in the scientific sense. This is what I would call (following Spengler) a mistake of Faustian rationalism. They can be affirmed as mysteries, which are not less but more real than facts, because they transfigure facts into meaning; and it was precisely this transfiguration that gave the West its form of life.
If you want to promote a version of Christianity in which the virgin birth and resurrection aren’t understood as historical facts (which is how they were understood long before science came along), go for it. But again, my contention is that it will have no psychological or cultural teeth.
Out of touch comment. Younger more educated (men) are much more likely to attend Church. President of the Harvard GOP club was raised with 0 religion and became Catholic. This is a 90s talking point unsubstantiated with any current data
For "educated, intellectually honest people" it should be more about understanding than belief.
OP is confused and this comment section reads like a bunch of 19th century historians who have just disassembled and twisted the documents that make up the Bible. A literal interpretation of the Bible, that the events happened as described, can be the only way that Christianity will survive and it will survive, and will ultimately be the only thing in the West to survive this period.
West transmitted progressive, evolutionist ideologies to east asia. Also East Asia was not always atheist, and the scientific method (from the west) revolutionized their belief systems.
The west is behind a lot of generalist innovations.
If the European people/genetic cluster does not survive. Then the west is gone. It's more than the creative outputs of a people.
Christians don't even hold the genetic cluster to geography relation sacred. And that relation absolutely influenced history at the political and genetic level. Yet everyone seems hellbent on destroying it.
Also most of that transmission was done by Communist or otherwise despotic States at the point of a gun. West didn’t do much that they didn’t do to themselves. It doesn’t help that much of East Asian culture has a thing with passivity, hundreds of millions of people versus a few million with guns and they all just took it lying down from their own people. It didn’t revolutionize their belief system, it just revealed exactly how empty the pagan system was before and how dependent it was on (in China) the Han system, tradition and state apparatus. I mean, most of these societies were just this: rice farmer, Confucian scholar of some kind, dude with spear (maybe on horseback) and the Imperial clique). In the West, this kindve of rigid societal despotism would never work but it’s all East Asia has ever known and so one system famous for creating herds of uneducated, unoriginal worker drones traded itself for a communist system of brainwashed, unoriginal worker drones. Very little difference between the power wielded by the Chairman and the Emperor (aside the divine right angle but even then the Son of Heaven doctrine still operates - Emperor as Messiah) as both relied on a mass bureaucracy, a slave like populace, and the willingness to use despotic military power. There has never been anything like a separate body of laws or constitution in East Asia traditionally. The West had the Bible, the 12 Tables, the Magna Carta, church covenants and constitutionalism and so on. Enlightenment thinker praised China precisely because it was a despotic bureaucrat state and several of the emperors in that period had a silly little knack for the south sea barbarians (as Euro’s were called) scientific experiments and was willing to put to death 10,000 peasants if it meant that the Court was entertained for a weekend. The same thing happened to Greek science in the Hellenic period. Despotism sucks.
Biblically, all nations (Gr. ethnos) have an inheritance. “When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, When he separated the sons of Adam, He set the bounds of the people According to the number of the children of Israel (“sons of God, LXX/DSS).”
Deuteronomy 32:8 and “neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.” Acts 17:25-28
Now this is in accordance with the predetermined fore-council of the Divine Trinity. Indeed, this is what the Divine Trinity did when at Babel, ““And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.”
Genesis 11:5-8
God has plans for eternal generations of every ethnicity of people. When they initially tried to globalize, God divided their tongues, transported many afar, and further divided the geography of the known world to create more cultural and ethnic differentiation. No doubt this folly had occurred in Noah’s time as the “whole earth” and the whole of humanity had corrupted themselves completely which speaks to me of an overwhelming monolithic Cainatic civilization similar to Babel but God would no longer use a flood but it was in the following generations that God would eventually call out a single husband and wife from the very heart of Babel and the rest is history.
Also never mind that the New Testament ethic is simply the purest ethical/social standard imaginable. Its whole purpose is to engender peace and a love and walk with God. This mode of social life will no doubt improve the outcomes of anyone who should be either saved or otherwise adopt its do’s and don’t, which is essentially what ethics or moral philosophy is all about.
However, whereas the commands of the Old Testament had the force of law and penalty was often death, the commands of the NT are meant to be received and acted upon through living relationship with God and God’s Spirit, which avoids the pitfall of the Law/Death transaction. This is articulated in Roman’s 7-8.
In short, the peoples that made up the original West will ultimately survive, because of prophecy but its vitality in real time will only continue if they cling to their guns and Bibles. A reformation based on personally responsibility, the smallest unit of civil government, the individual, graduating the social club and the marriage unit, followed by municipal government followed by State and Imperial (Federal) government, will be needed. Aristotle was correct in stating that man was a political ‘animal’ (Aristotle thought animals were essentially fleshly automatons so ‘machine’ works just as well) and God’s government, coached for us by Him in terms of natural or divine law, is the source of all national, social, cultural, political, economic, etc, health.
Suffice to say, a look at modern Europe and its social implosion is as much a study in the decline of public Christianity. While the actual, underground or evangelical church is thriving in Europe, all public religions institutions, nearly all, are going through apostasy and the health of those countries is reflected therein. Christianity is the most pro-growth religion ever (ignore the blighted nunneries and wayward monks and aesthetes, there’s a Biblical AND historical reason the reformation did away with them). It was the death penalty if you injured sexual organs and it was a folly in Israel if one did not perform the levirite duty to a brother. It would take another post of this length to go over even some of many verses in the Bible supporting the doctrine of pro-growth and the eternal generations of peoples.
The West has sown apostasy and backsliding and has reaped many whirlwinds. AI is a good analogy. Total ethical and moral declension in this day and age (let’s say 50 year period) at every level. However, we’ve had so many advancements, especially in space and information technology. , it is apparent that while we have backslidden on the small things (to us but not God), we have had great material success. God loves material success when righteously accrued. However, I think we are all nervous that AI will deprive us ultimately of our own soul-consciousness. We backslid on God, we sowed technology and material progress and have reaped the same but we now see the total collapse of our society and cultures soul feeling. Look at the suicide rates.
Sort of ramblingat this point. I really don’t feel well. I need to get some of these ideas into essay form. Time to sleep.
You definitely haven't seen Eva Schubert's podcast on the Peasants Revolt.
Brilliant apologia for Christianity. It becomes increasingly clear that humanity abhors a spiritual vacuum and that which is left by the absence of Christianity will be filled by destructive nihilism, Marxism, radical Islamism, or other spiritual toxins.
Thank you. Agreed of course.
Bo
That ‘myth’ could teach you a thing about humility. Far from ‘brilliant’ and more like, as one commentator wrote, “grasping at straws”
This has become a common refrain, but all I have seen is opinion, anecdotes, and correlation, no persuasive evidence. Counter examples are secular societies such as Japan and Nordic countries.
Non-western religions are as deeply meaningful for their practitioners as Christianity. Meditation, which doesn’t necessarily require a supernatural belief, cultivates equanimity and compassion, not ideological extremism.
Of course, Christians will insist their particular version of the sacred is superior, but their arguments are primarily persuasive to those who already believe. A Buddhist friend of mine from Thailand read the Bible last year and said he didn’t recognize much spirituality in it (although he was fond of some of Jesus’ teachings).
Because those religions harbor no actual ethic and even if they do have some high ethics, it is obvious that everyone fails to do it, as in all religious systems. But Christianity promises a personal relationship with the Creator of the Universe, no other religion can possibly boast that, and that He will fill you with His Spirit. Take that as you will but no other has this concept, especially without an associated ritual or cultic system which is ultimately so that the people’s money are siphoned into priestlings bake accounts. Also Christians lead the world in defenseless martyrdom, which has to be the highest ethic imaginable.
I wrote a really long reply as to why Hindus could not possibly have a relationship with their physical idols or with their concept of Brahman, which included philosophical questioning and a analytical comparison between these contradictory doctrines of Hinduism and with the doctrine of personal relationship and Spirit indwelling found in the Christian Scriptures but I accidental swiped left and this stupid app deleted all of it. I also offered speculation as to why it was so in Hindu religion. In short, one cannot have a personal relationship with an object, which would be the case for Shiva and many multiplied gods as they exist materially and cannot be classified as persons. They cannot dwell, they cannot move. If I know longer see them, they no longer have bearing on my life. Not so with an actual person like my wife or children, let alone the members of the Divine Trinity. I noted analogically that Hinduism contains within it a confusion of doctrines, classifying the many gods and forms of popular religion within as cthonic and the worship of the Brahman as being ouranic or more lofty and noble. While lofty, I demonstrated that the Brahman or universal consciousness is impersonal and would never be able to dwell corporately or individually with people or peoples, it being a contradiction to the concept. In short to this point, that whether the form of the religion is popular and based on idols or whether it is more abstract and seemingly monotheistic, it still is not providing a level of relationship that the Bible and Jesus Christ claims to provide. Idols are not alive and universal consciousness is not personal. You cannot say you have a personal relationship with a plunger, no matter how much ritual or theology you drape it in - you cannot be interpersonally penetrated, in dwelt, or receive the spirit of a plunger or Hindu idol-god as they have bodies or are otherwise non-consenting to human personal levels. This is called anthropomorphism.
I pointed out many modern Hindu proselytes are aware of these deep contradiction in Hindu doctrine and attempt to make up the contradiction by saying the many depictions and multiplied gods and demons are actually emanations of the single divine GodHead the Svayam-Bhagavan, a concept somewhat found in oriental Christian Orthodoxy (mainly due to geographical/cultural proximity to this mainly Persian mode of thinking). I point this out as beating around the bush.
I speculated at length why the early Hindu texts were less idolatrous and I gave the reason that the later tradition that Hinduism appears from misunderstood much, especially in its knowledge of the uni-plural noun for God found in the OT, Elohim. Finally, I pointed out that a personal God who claims to be all knowledge and all knowing and all loving would never compel His people to commit acts that hurt or damage the body. I just selected a bare few practices to zero in on. The ingestion of bovine excrement is a common form of workshop in Hinduism. The prostitution of daughters in temple worship, while once more popular, still goes on. The wife burnings that were famously ended by the British. We could go on about morally and ethically questionable rituals and demands made upon Hindus in their religion. The ancient Egyptians depicted nearly all deity as possessing animal qualities (often found in Hinduism as well) and yet they were one of cleanest peoples in all Antiquity. The ancient Egyptians did not posses a body of literature as immense as the Hindus and ultimately the Pharaoh ran the whole society, something unparalleled in Indian history. Obviously there are major disagreements about the afterlife between the two but I think that analogy is helpful.
I wrote it a lot better before but here is the substance of it. I hope this helps! Super short version: there is no way that Hinduism fulfills the personal relationship factor with Creator-God found in the Bible, on its own terms or the Bible’s. Whatever those people in Bali are doing is not personal faith relationship, it’s just religion and religious meditation.
Also as a writer, lyricist, and musician myself, i understand where you’re getting at. But it’s no replacement for God and certainly we don’t need to endorse your Godless shaped soul hole to world. It’s good you found meaning though, I would simply say that God could take contemplation, meditation, and artistic creativity to a whole new level. He gives many kinds of gifts to men, even if they ask or if they are one of His own kids or not. He has concern for everyone. He has concern for you and your art.
Anyways, they need to fix this app my first run was much better and now it’s 25 minutes later.
There are millions of non-Christian believers who would reject your assertion that they don’t have a deeply meaningful “personal relationship” with God. Go visit India, Bali, or a thousand other places where intimate and personal devotion is undeniable. Many people might find your particularly version intrusive. As for me, a former Christian believer, I find contemplation, meditation, and artistic creativity similar to the Christian phenomenon, when one interacts with non-egotistical “voices” in the brain.
As for martyrdom, it is not unique to Christianity (and I doubt comparative statistics exist), nor limited to religion. Dying for one’s beliefs signifies conviction, not truthfulness, and very possibly, foolishness.
Why is the Christian god better than the Muslim god, or any other god? One does not have to believe in a god to be a moral human.
The Christian God is the Muslim god.
"The Christian God is the Muslim god."
Tell a Muslim that!
But you didn't answer my question. Why is the Christian god better than any other god???
Ask a Muslim and they’ll tell YOU that. Throw in a Jew too. Have you not heard of the Abrahamic God? All three of these religions worship Him, which is why the conflict between the three is so tragically ironic.
The fault lies not in the gods men worship, but in themselves. Religion at its best seeks to help men overcome their bestial tribal tendencies and love one another. Thus in my view, it is a force for good.
Can men love one another and behave morally and justly without divine intervention? I refer you to the bloody, violent history of the human race. In my estimation, the evidence is to the contrary.
"Ask a Muslim and they’ll tell YOU that. Throw in a Jew too. Have you not heard of the Abrahamic God? All three of these religions worship Him, which is why the conflict between the three is so tragically ironic."
But they slaughter and brutalize each other in the name of their religion. So one could conclude that religion is evil.
It's evil because they believe in absurdities. Ol Voltaire can tell you what happens next.
You certainly know that religion has often justified terrible wars. Nevertheless, I suspect that the human race overall has benefited from religion (and obviously it served a purpose in Evolution), and a case can be made that Christianity contributed uniquely to moral development in the West (as did Buddhism in the East). But it is not a cure all, it doesn’t work for everyone, there are good alternatives for individuals, and, eventually, it will probably be replaced by something better (if we don’t blow ourselves up). It is not, after all, true objectively, so it’s vulnerable to reality.
Like religious conservatives aren't guilty of blank slate-style thinking. They really don't like innate dispositions as well and think human agency can trump that. It can't.
Hard work and grit is not everything (being lazy is just a handicap), inherent attributes matter a lot. Getting angry at Black Africans for the state of their nations or communes is futile. A lot can't help it, and evolutionists has the actual solution (selective breeding, eventually transhumanism).
Ontologically, trans humanism is and always will be a failure for, “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” evolution has also never been scientifically proven and it is likely never to be proven. Certainly some elements of certain Evolutionist doctrines are true such as elements of survival of the fittest as well as some parts of the traits but we have never witnessed long term adaptation. Whether the birds develop slightly different beaks, the bird in several generations will always revert back to its ‘kind’ I could go on about all of the failures of the evolutionary model and the lack of data supporting it, especially as to discovery of man. The cavemen were degenerated men and is , hardly a whole skeleton can be found. Most in museums are collections of bones put together like the dinosaurs (more evidence for dinos than evolution).
Your ignorance regarding Evolution is shocking. You will never convince someone of your viewpoint if you don’t understand the core concepts. But you are not interested in what is scientifically accurate, because your priority is to defend a particular ideology despite the facts. By the way, many Christians, including Evangelical scientists, accept evolution (descent with modification via natural selection) from simple to complex organisms over billions of years. The evidence is overwhelming.
Please explain to me the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In fact, explain the first one as well (all four are relevant). Please explain how evolution can occur when we have the Second Law. Please name a single biological system that has increased its level of complexity. I will wait.
While I think there are good faith Christians who hold to evolution, it is done out of ignorance and world pleasing. Evolution is an explicit rejection of the account of Genesis 1-3 and destroys the entire story of the Bible. No creation in six days. No “And it was good.” No satan. No angels. No fall and original sin. No need of redemption.
Most ‘Christian’s’ who hold to this and not purely through ignorance, are either lefty on theological issues, near apostates, or are Roman Catholic, hardly Christians but instead, Catholic and only because the Roman church told them so.
So no real Bible believing Christian can agree with evolution while also being a concerned reader of the Bible.
You are trotting out an old creationist argument regarding thermodynamics, again demonstrating profound ignorance about science. Again, please get educated and take a physics class. The 2nd law states that disorder (entropy) will increase within a closed system. The Earth is not a closed system (solar energy), so an increase in order does not violate the 2nd law. Eventually, over billions of years, disorder will reign, but in the meantime plants grow, embryos develop into mature animals, and animals evolve.
While I agree with Bo’s comments about the natural persistence and value of Christianity and unfair criticisms by some atheists, his portrayal of Christianity is hygienic and romanticized. I’ve noticed this tendency in non-religious conservatives who have limited or no experience in the U.S. Christian world.
Evangelicalism is the dominant form of Christianity in the U.S. and if anybody is committing a category error, it is Evangelicals. More than 50% believe the universe is less 10,000 years old and that Darwinian evolution is false. It condemns homosexuality and enforces an unnatural repression of sexual desire between unmarried people. Christian nationalism, which rejects the idea of a secular state, is a growing force, thus its embrace of Russia. It is evangelistic, and often condescending towards people outside the fold.
I am sympathetic with Sara Hader’s argument that, concerning intellectual benefits, religion provides a higher floor than secularism, but a lower ceiling. For example, religious people have resisted absurd woke illiberalism, but it also limits the benefits of rationality.
I accept that Christianity is meaningful for many people and has social benefits. But we must remain vigilant to its negatives and dangerous impulses. Furthermore, we must recognize that Christianity does not work for everyone. I was raised in an Evangelical home and believed fervently. But ultimately, I could not affirm the literal beliefs that Christianity requires. I would have to sacrifice an essential part of who I was to be welcomed in the church. The transition from my Christian beliefs and community was excruciating and lonely. In the end, I discovered greater sources of meaning and a more authentic relationships.
Yes this is very fair. I was making the case for a certain form of Christianity, and undoubtedly there are many perverse versions out there. I think we should criticize them.
I think people generally underestimate the affect of rituals and get it confused with organized religion. Durkheim got it right. Hence, they go along with the virgin birth, etc. because they like the feeling from the religious rituals. As an atheist, I can't deny the feeling of getting married on the alter of a Catholic church in front of a couple hundred relatives and friends.
I think you can grant Bo all his points, namely that civilisation seems to require religion, that when Christianity withdraws other superstitions fill the void, that a rationalist view of life is colder and less 'human' than a religious one but somehow that doesn't help those of us who would quite like to be religious but can't. I know, I know, we moderns are supposed to view Christianity as a myth, as poetry, and not as a rival to science. But if you don't believe that it is literally true, I'm not sure in what way it can transform your life. Once you've seen that the wardrobe is simply a wardrobe with a solid wooden back and not after all a portal to a winter wonderland, it becomes very difficult to still believe in Aslan.
Regarding the New Atheists Bo said, '...the man who rages against the divine is often more religious than the man who simply shrugs'.
This is simply a mistake. Dawkins et al. were not raging against the divine. They were raging against people who believe in the divine. If I make fun of people for believing in fairies this doesn't suggest that deep down I too believe in fairies. It suggests instead that, unlike the man who just shrugs, people who believe in fairies annoy the hell out of me!
Julian Jaynes thought religion came about through humans imagining the voices of ancestors telling them what to do. If he was right, then perhaps the best way to retrieve religion is to reimagine those voices.
Fair points. I do think the thoughtful atheist is often more religious in some ways that the casual believer. But I do not think that mocking belief (or raging against believers as you put it) means one is more religious that somebody who just shrugs.
I do not believe that many of the stories of Christianity are literally true, and they profoundly influence my life. Of course, I do not believe that Anna Karenina is literally true, and it moved me to tears--and to joy and deep meditation.
In my mind I have always made a distinction between 'the godless' and atheists. The godless are those for whom God has never been 'a thing' and irrelevant to their often dysfunctional lives.
Atheists on the other hand are people who have at least thought about the problem of God and decided the evidence for Him is unconvincing. Yet the fact that atheists have grappled with the problem at all perhaps suggests that the question of God is more important to them than to either the godless or unthinking religious sheep.
The older I get the more I take on the rational modern mindset, the one that disenchants the world. Most of my old romantic views about Christmas; Ye Olde England; rural life; night trains to Berlin; Batavia and Conrad's exotic East; the lowering skies and desolate moorland of Wuthering Heights; women. None of these have survived real world contact, as opposed to the wonderfulness of them all in my imagination. I have now been to the 'exotic' East many times and seen it up close and it really isn't that exotic. Christmas now means out of town shopping centres and mingling with big-bodied, loud people. Women can be just as petty-minded and nasty as men.
If there were some way to recapture the way I used to drape the world in the lovely hues of my imagination, a way to re-enchat the world, then I would. But it seems that once you have been expelled from Eden there is no going back. Now the only things that make me see the world as slightly wonderful are TikTok videos of kittens, puppies and beautiful Japanese children.
While folk tales like those of the Brothers Grimm still make me feel they are tapping into something deep in the northern European psyche, the Bible stories, set as they are in the Middle East, don't give me any such tingle of ancient forests and ancestors.
Above I referred to unthinking believers as 'sheep' but I want to take that back. Perhaps the only way to view some things and to keep them alive is either by not thinking about them or by looking at them aslant. The people I really don't understand are the ones who spend a lifetime looking into religion to finally conclude that the evidence for the truth of the Bible and the existence of God is unimpeachable. Really?
I know that this was your second go at defending Christianity but how you view it is still not clear to me. You don't believe the Bible is literally true but you do believe the stories contain a lot of wisdom, in the same way that Anna Karenina also does. Since Christianity is so old it has accrued some extra quality that Anna Karenina doesn't have? Is that it? I don't understand how a myth, which is understood to be a myth rather than the literal truth, is something a people can rally behind in the way Muslims rally behind, and organise their lives around, Islam. Surely the only reason Muslims take Islam so seriously is because they think it's true. If they thought it were a myth then surely Islam would soon go the same way as Christianity.
Most Modern Middle Easterners are nowhere near as religious as Westerners assume they are and they haven't been in the last 200 years. Many Westerners have this delusion that the so-called "Islamic World" is the only one that's unaffected by Secularism, which is laughably false.
Take Iran for example, over one third of its population is Atheist/Agnostic and almost 2/3rds of them don't believe in any form of an Afterlife. It's a country that's actually less religious than USA. Turkey is similar.
Fundamentalist/Extremist Middle Eastern Muslims aren't really an exception, in fact, Muslims who identify as Salafi/Wahhabi or subscribe to some Islamist ideology are on average more likely to be closet Atheists and/or eventually leave Islam entirely than Muslims who don't.
Fundamentalist Muslims do take Islam seriously, but it's not because that actually believe it's all literally true or even at all in many cases, it's actually because Islamic Fundamentalism the only coherent Socially Conservative ideology that's possible for them in the Modern World after the breakdown and disappearce of the traditional Pre-Industrial cultures of many predominantly Muslim lands.
West Asia is still deeply dysgenic, a good chunk of Israel is the exception.
and I'm not saying that to be an asshole. Europe is dysgenic even without the invasion. Those same evolutionary mechanics that gave us an advantage over West Asians can easily take away those disadvantages. Our blood is not magical nor is our dirt.
That's a relief to know that modern Middle Easterners aren't as religious as we thought.
You say that it is laughably false for westerners to believe that the Islamic world is the only one unaffected by secularism but then you didn't go on to name any others that are unaffected by it.
I just looked up atheists and agnostics in Iran and the figures AI came up with were 9% and 5.8% respectively. That is not 'over one third'.
I imagine Turkey can be separated into the modern west and the trad east but I would be suprised if Turkey as a whole, including Anatolia, were less religious than the USA. And of course it all depends on the degree. Often you have to ask an American if they are religious or not. With most Muslims you can simply observe.
You said that westerners overestimate how religious Middle Easterners are but then say 'Fundamentalist/Extremist Middle Eastern Muslims aren't really an exception'. To me these two claims are contradictory. What is your evidence for claiming that most Fundamentalists Muslims are in reality closet atheists or end up leaving Islam entirely? That sounds very improbable to me.
You say that many Muslim Fundamentalists only take Islam seriously because it is the only form of social conservatism open to them. If there are really so many of them, why don't they start a non-Islamic socially conservative movement? I'm sure those Muslims who don't take Islam very seriously would be overjoyed. Or could it be that a secular conservative alternative to Fundamental Islam doesn't exist because there isn't a market for it? But if there is a market which is presently not permitted to express itself, which section of the population is it that is keeping these atheists, agnostics, lukewarm believers and Fundamentalists (who are really secret Unbelievers) in check?
It is not appropriate to debate with "the figures AI came up with."
Wikipedia comes up with a figure of 1.3% atheists in Iran (2017-2022). Is Wikipedia appropriate? If not, which source would be?
May be worth noting here that Spengler saw Christianity in its earliest form as a product of Magian civilization, only later adopted and re-shaped by the Faustian West. That helps explain why Biblical narratives can feel symbolically alien compared to European folk tales. Where the Magian world is dualistic, desert-bound, and compressed, the Faustian is expansive, forested or oceanic, and infinite in potential. Grimm’s stories speak natively in the Faustian idiom, while the Gospels and Old Testament retain the Magian imprint even when naturalised into the Western canon. Hence the sense of strangeness alongside familiarity.
The more I learn and study about Biological Human Nature and Anthropology, the more it becomes clear to me that Oswald Spengler was an unoriginal charlatan who didn't know what he was talking about. This is especially obvious whenever he speaks about any culture/civilization besides the Modern West, even with Greco-Roman culture he's completely off base. For example, take his false association of Ethical Dualism with the "Magian" cultures and religions (which is a common misconception many Westerners have). With the exception of some Iranian religions like Zoroastrianism and Manicheanism, none of the Middle Eastern religions traditionally teach any form of Dualism, and in the West itself Moral Dualism only became common after the Protestant Reformation and (ironically) The Enlightenment.
Spengler was anything but unoriginal. Dualism doesn't have to be a core aspect of metaphysics to be integral to the symbolic structure. In that sense, all the Abrahamic religions are suffused with Dualism, even when explicit doctrine disavows it.
There is no Dualism in Traditional Abrahamic Mythology nor scripture, Westerners simply project Dualism onto them because it is they/you who are the actual dualists. In fact, Dualism was traditional regarded as a denial of the Oneness of God (and therefore incompatible with Monotheism) and both The Bible and Quran outright teach that God created both Good and Evil along with everything else, which makes Dualism impossible under its framework
I’m curious Bo, how do the Christian stories influence your life?
I think you are mistaken about what the New Atheists were for.
Growing up in England in the 70s and 80s, most my friends were atheists and a bunch were Christians — but no one cared about the difference. We went to church together and said the Lord’s Prayer together. America circa 2000 was very different. The wall between Christians and Atheists was high, most atheists kept it to themselves and there was a great deal of disdain for them (”I don’t know that atheists should even be considered as citizens. This is one nation under God.” — The President). The New Atheists just showed young atheists that it was OK to believe what they believed. I don't think they even changed many minds.
The number of people who checked ‘no religion’ on the surveys tripled though.
That's a fair comment--and you are likely correct. They didn't change many minds, but their very public embrace of atheism showed atheists that atheism was all right.
I think you should have added that, 'The New Atheists just showed young AMERICAN atheists that it was OK to believe what they believed'. As you suggested at the start of your comment, it had already been okay to be an atheist in England for a long, long time. In fact, as you possibly remember, from the 1960's onwards Christianity was viewed more as something for your grandmothers and other old folk.
'The New Atheists just showed young AMERICAN atheists that it was OK to believe what they believed'.
In the case of atheists, it is not a matter of belief.
I believe in lots of things. Just not God.
I'm not sure I agree. The question of whether or not God exists is one of probability. Not even Richard Dawkins claims to KNOW that there isn't a God. I therefore think it's correct to say that while believers believe God exists, atheists don't believe this. I think it's completely possible to believe that something isn't true.
I do not claim to know that God does not exist...I do NOT believe he exists. Therefore, it is not a matter of belief.
Nope, I'm afraid you've lost me there. You don't believe that God exists, therefore it's not a matter of belief? That makes no sense to me. Are you saying that it WOULD be a matter of belief if you DID believe but since you don't, it's not a matter of belief?
So you don't understand...move on.
It's true that most people thought of Christianity as for old folks (my grandparents went to church regularly), but the atheists went to church too, and we all got along. That doesn't happen in America.
Gotta say that I didn't know any atheists that went to church. What on earth would possess them to do so? Just to keep their Christian friends company? Was this a regular weekly thing? That Christians and atheists got on fine together in England is not something I dispute. After all, very few people took it seriously.
Even Richard Dawkins would have gone to chapel when he was a professor at Oxford. 😉 He still goes to Evensong. Me too.
Yes, Dawkins has often talked of his love of English churches, carols, religiously-inspired music (Bach's St. Matthew Passion) and various Christian holidays and traditions. Some people see in this a contradiction but I'm not one of them.
Schools were required to have a Christian assembly every morning. We sang hymns and said our prayers. We had a church near the school, and we went there for Holy Communion quite often. We went to weddings, funerals and christenings all the time. Not as often as Christians, sure, but WAY more than American atheists do.
Yes, I remember 'assembly' very well. We sang (or rather missang) hymns, often having no idea what the actual words were or what they meant ('Hosana is ex-Chelsea', anyone?).
It sounds like your school was Catholic as opposed to the usual C of E that I attended. So, no church attendance for me and no Holy Communion. The only wedding I attended was my sister's and to this day I have never been to a Christening. The first funeral I attended was at the age of 40-something. The first time I remember entering a church was Westminster Abbey on a trip to London. Christianity just wasn't a thing in the suburban East Midlands housing estate I grew up in in the 1960's.
I was CofE, too, but I got to enjoy a lot more church than you! And I still go to Evensong quite often! ;-)
I like the way we do it better than the way they do it over there. We lived there for 25 years, and my kids were never exposed to religion at all. It makes the wall between believers and non-believers so much higher.
"To demand that Christianity speak the language of empirical science, and to subject its myths to historical or rationalist scrutiny, is to misunderstand the nature of religion."
I demand nothing from Christianity or any religion. What I expect from modern humans is reasoning, logic, critical thinking, and searching for the truth. Of course, I am mostly disappointed.
The nature of religion is to provide a crutch for those afraid of the truth and a tool for control of the masses.
I do not, of course, agree with this description of religion, although certainly religion (like any other ideology) can be used for these purposes.
I do not expect more of human nature than we can get. And since humans live by more than logic, reasoning, critical thinking, and searching for the truth, I think your expectations are unreasonable. Most people want to live meaningful lives and be decent humans. They don't care about abstract metaphysical truths or skeptical inquiry. And that's fine by me.
Bo
"I do not, of course, agree with this description of religion, although certainly religion (like any other ideology) can be used for these purposes."
And all of them have.
"I do not expect more of human nature than we can get."
How do you know how much we can get? I am a firm believer in the ascent of humanity. We are nowhere near our full potential. Through psychometric research and genetic enhancement, we can make vast improvements in positive traits.
"And since humans live by more than logic, reasoning, critical thinking, and searching for the truth, I think your expectations are unreasonable.
Most people want to live meaningful lives and be decent humans."
Sadly, most humans live for bread and circuses, e.g, mind-numbing entertainment.
"They don't care about abstract metaphysical truths or skeptical inquiry."
I said nothing of abstract metaphysical truths. A lack of critical thinking and skeptical inquiry has brought us to our current disastrous situation.
"And that's fine by me."
Are you happy with the current state of the world?
What utter rubbish!
"What utter rubbish!"
Great counter post. With considerable thought and substantiation.
I really cannot be bothered discussing God with people who have closed minds and hearts.
"I really cannot be bothered discussing God with people who have closed minds and hearts."
There is no one more close-minded than a dogmatic religionist.
In your opinion but then there lies the problem. You talk of closed minds, I would suggestion yours is not only closed but bricked up. What did God/Christianity do to you apart from, some one argue, give you life and your free will!
Religion makes people believe in absurdities, which leads to atrocities. Good ol ideology can do the same thing, but for religion it's just baked in all of them.
Christianity didn't give me life, my people's inventions did (enabled massive population growth) and the fragile happenstance behind my conception.
Galton was right, and he told us exactly what evolutionary mechanics to exploit in order for us to see civilization reach its summit.
The right wingers and left wingers all want to believe in their absurd version of blank slate theory.
Evolutionists provide the answer, but nobody likes the explanation behind the answer. Nobody likes how it's dehumanizing and brutal. But it is what has to happen until it's no longer needed. You don't increase a population's positive inherent attributes without some pain. The artificial way is a lot less painful than the natural way.
Richard Lynn was not 100% right, he got some things wrong, he missed some things. But for a "racist" he actually cared deeply about others. Making Black Africans have a higher raw intelligence will only do them good and allow them some dignity. Woke blank slate thinking will just screw them over and ultimately enforce the racial and class hierarchies which arise from group superiority/inferiority. While eugenicists/transhumanist will dismantle that hierarchy unintentionally as civilization progresses.
What utter rubbish! LOL
Typical Atheist snobbery smh. It's ironically Atheists who are far more intellectually cowardly and prone to existential anxiety on average than religious people of any stripe according to Psychometric research. For example, Your typical conservative Muslim for example has more mental strength (not related to IQ) on average than 90% of White Western people. Atheists and Sceptics frequency make the pseudo-scientific claim that Religion is rooted in fear, but Cognitive Science has consistently shown that this largely projection on part of the critics.
The bravest men and cultures in the world and throughout history have consistently been either highly religious or followers of some quasi-religious ideology like Communism or Fascism. The only known exception to this is Napoleon and even he wasn't an Atheist. The most cowardly and weakest willed peoples tend to be Secular Utilitarian types such as the Epicureans of antiquity and the Modern Liberals of today.
A diatribe with no substantiation, just your opinion.
Conservative muslims like Arabs seem to flee often in warfare. So much for mental strength versus a cold selected people like North europeans or east asians. But I guess we're all wussies in their mind because we stopped putting the boot on their necks.
Conservative muslims also don't want to process information that tears down the foundations of their belief systems.
This guy simply despises ppl of european descent.
And there was a lot of very brave who spoke the truth to controlling entities like the Church and lost their life for it. Thomas Aikenhead gave his life to speaking the truth during the Scottish enlightenment.
It's a new mythology that the third worlder has created post colonialism. It was irresponsible to give a population access to tech that causes population growth when their avg intellgence was far lower than the creators. It was a smart investment for east asians, and some SE asians. But not so much for the rest of Asia and Africa. They should have been told to do eugenics first to raise their intelligence, then get access to tech that ultimately raises quality of life.
No shortcuts. No creating a hostile biomass that threatens people who can create developed nations. We showed them mercy when we had the potential to wipe them out with ease, they aren't showing us the same mercy. We won't forget that.
Are you a materialist? Because materialism for most of history has been viewed as a joke of a philosophy of nature
"Are you a materialist?"
No, I am a Realist.
" Because materialism for most of history has been viewed as a joke of a philosophy of nature."
Yet, most people today are materialists, including those who believe in God.
Yeah and so what? Just because most people hold a certain position doesn’t mean it’s true. You’d have to defend materialism otherwise you’re simply arguing fallaciously. However materialism can’t account for features of the mind such as qualia, intentionality, and rationality so no matter how popular it is, it’s simply a nonstarter
I did not defend materialism. You asked me if I was a materialist.
Ok so you’re not a materialist and you think traditional religion is for fools, what do you think is correct then?
"Ok so you’re not a materialist and you think traditional religion is for fools, what do you think is correct then?"
What does materialism have to do with religion? I do not say that traditional religion was for fools. I believe religion is for those who can not face the reality of life...those who need a sky daddy to guide them. They are incapable of controlling their actions and read scripture written by others who can, supposedly, converse with the sky daddy. Of course, this gives church elders tremendous power over the weak, which they readily exploit...I give you the Catholic Church as one example.
Most Contemporary Westerners are also Relativists and (Post) Modernists, even though both of those views are self-refuting
Which speaks more about the psychological degeneracy of Modern Man than it does of the truth or falsehood of Materialism
It’s great that you’re not hostile to Christianity as it clearly was the backbone of the West. However the problem is being vaguely pro Jesus isn’t enough. No one makes sacrifices for a fake myth. If one is told they need to give up fornication, require fasting, tithe instead of going on a nicer vacation you’d be an idiot to do that for something you don’t believe. And nothing in science contradicts the Catholic faith that’s a myth created by John William Draper to stir up anti Catholic immigration sentiment to get back at his sister who was a nun and Andrew Dickson White who wanted money and power to start Cornell. Instead you should just read some old books and realize modernity is the outlier and classical theism and divine simplicity as stated in the Fourth Lateran Council still holds up today.
We perhaps have different views of what is consistent with science, which is fine. But I wouldn't call the view that Christianity is a collection of powerful myths, fake. The point of Genesis, let us say, is not to describe the actual creation of the universe. But I don't think that means Genesis is fake.
I do take your point that literal belief is a more powerful motivator of behavior. I don't have a great answer to that. These are difficult issues.
Bo
But the message of Genesis is that a literal supernatural being created the Cosmos, right? What is the non-literal, mythological, personally edifying interpretation? (By the way, Bo, I greatly appreciate your thoughtful, respectful, and engaging interaction with commenters.)
Genesis says that supernatural being started farming, seasons and the work/rest schedule of the weekday. That supernatural being also invented writing, language, and blah blah. No ice age is mentioned at all though.
Archeology has shown that is all false. It was people. And we even know what group of people first started nascent civilization in Anatolia.
Have you read any serious traditional philosophers? You should check out Ed Fesers work. The idea that Christianity can be inconsistent with science is a false one because science has to do with discoveries of the hypo-deductive method while theology and philosophy have to do with first principles of being. They are totally unrelated fields and advances in science don’t discredit metaphysics because science takes certain metaphysical assumptions for granted
You absolutely must reject Darwin and evolution if you must be a Christian. Long term evolutionary theory is a direct denial of the first couple of pages of Genesis. It’s also unprovable and has never been demonstrated under scientific conditions. The synthesis of both is ultimately impossible and will lead to apostasy, as the last 50 years have demonstrated.
You don't even need fancy evolutionary theories that ground oneself nearly perfectly to biological reality to disprove Genesis. Where was the ice age? How come the cave man paintings had wolly, furry animals? Those animals could never survive in today's climate.
Even some hunter gatherer cave art casts doubt on that creation myth. You'd also have to believe that god created writing, farming, the work/rest weekday and weekend concepts.
If it were possible for Christianity to be practiced as representing mere myth and poetry, then, given the hundreds of millions of Christians across the world, one would think that there would already exist some denomination that did so with success. But I don't know what such a denomination might be. The Unitarian Universalists might be the best example of a denomination that has dispensed with all explicitly supernatural tenets. Yet they have notoriously supplanted any such tenets with ideological ones. Some of the more mainline Christian denominations are also minimizing the supernatural component -- but there too ideology seems to be replacing it -- almost, it would seem, in proportion to how much the supernatural is ignored.
Perhaps other religions -- Shinto in Japan for example -- can be practiced purely as a myth. But I see no evidence that Christianity can be so handled.
This piece is really good, but all the commenters are right that Christianity stripped of truth claims becomes meaningless to believers. What we really need is what Carl R Trueman referred to as “A New Humanism” - a not-explicitly-theistic common rational framework in which religious and non-religious people can discuss morality and what it means to be human together. This would not replace religion or nullify its truth claims, but would add to it a rational framework for cultural conversations that invokes God’s reasons, not relying on God’s existence itself as the ultimate reason. In practice this probably looks like natural law, which had a moment but isn’t popular right now.
Beginning last December, I and my wife attended a conservative evangelical church for a few months. I thought it would be a safe bet: no wokeness, no guilt-mongering, no political lecturing. Just Christian fellowship.
Here are a few of my observations:
- Most of the people were casually dressed, and quite a few were dressed shabbily. This was also my wife’s impression.
- The people were friendly. Many were of Dutch descent, being either the children of postwar immigrants or newly arrived Afrikaners.
- There were no traditional hymns. The one exception was a rap rendition of Silent Night.
- Both the music and the church literature had a strange focus on Blackness. Asians outnumbered Blacks in the congregation, and the overwhelming majority were of European descent, but you wouldn’t know it from the materials we were given.
- One service had a presentation on outreach to immigrants. The speaker talked about how Canada was now receiving over a million immigrants a year, mostly from non-Christian sources. He said this was a wonderful opportunity to introduce Jesus to people who never knew Him previously. His presentation ended with a standing ovation.
That was the last service we attended. I agree that Christianity used to play a key role in defending our culture and society, but that is no longer the case. Today, churches are like the Judenrats of an occupied country. They allow us to act collectively but only in ways that help us disappear as orderly and tidily as possible.
The future will depend on whether humanity continues to let religion weaken the mind or whether it will move toward knowledge, curiosity, and courage.
Is it possible to have a cultural Christianity that preserves the architecture, myths, language, and rituals without being a faith in Christ being the son of God who performed miracles? If so, can this cultural Christianity be widely practiced across the bulk of society or is it just reserved for intellectuals?
Or do we truly have to choose between a traditional faith-based religion and a scientific outlook?
Great questions. I think we need a third way: fully informed by Science, not supernatural, values the arts (broadly defined), and includes a “spiritual” discipline. I think forms of meditation that cultivate attentiveness and loosen the grip of egoism could be a good foundation.
"To call them false because they are not literally true is a category mistake, as though one were to shout that The Godfather Part II is a “false film” because Michael Corleone never lived". Maybe, but when enough people start perceiving whole story as made up fairy tale, it just automatically loses grip and power, can't really help it.
Good text! Food for thought… but not an easy solution in sight, among other reasons, for what Brett Anderson says…
The Christian faith astonishes me not so much for its transcendence and mystery--present and available to any who seeks it--but its grounding in reason and reality. The pathway of reason--the high road--leads to the transcendent Christ always. Bless you, Bo Winegard, for seeing this and spreading the good Word.