1. Basic situation as I see it is this, God got it in the neck for the following reasons: a. Kant reduced demonstrations for his existence to a shakey moral inference. b. Philologists shredded the Bible so the text became unstable c. Voltaire & co mocked the inconsistencies.
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2. d. Darwin knocked out the natural history side of it. Genetics accelerated this. What’s left is, at best, the Taleb, Jung & Peterson approach. Taleb says religion encodes useful nowledge. Jung & Peterson say it’s psychologically true, i.e. ....
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3. ...you’ve got believe in something, and it’s better to believe in this tried and tested thing than, say, communism, which has worse outcomes. The problem is that there’s more than psych truth. I also know that religion rests on shakey ideas.
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4. Even if I know it’s a psychological necessity, and there’s a need for the numinous. Further problem, it turns out that religion—Xtianity in particular—was a hidden animating force for the Enlightenment and science, because it prioritised truth.
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Replying to @tomxhart
I'm instinctively inclined to agree with the claim that Christianity prioritises truth and therefore caused its own downfall, but the details mostly escape me. How would you convince a sceptic?
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Replying to @IDJennings
Read Nietzsche? This chap (
@vncvrrentevents) has a quite nice summary of the historical aspect: http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/518/894 … I may have misunderstood you. I’m assuming you mean a sceptic of this thesis, not Xtianity?3 replies 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @tomxhart @vncvrrentevents
One further thought: Would this self-destructive tendency in Christianity apply to the other major monotheisms? If yes, how to account for their (somewhat) different historical trajectories? Islam, for one, appears to be ascendant, although that may of course be illusory.
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Replying to @IDJennings @vncvrrentevents
I don’t know. It strikes me that Judaism stresses adherence to law and Islam stresses obedience to the will of God (there is also an Islamic school of thought that says taqiyya, lying to enemies, is moral). It seems only Christianity priorities truth in particularly.
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Replying to @tomxhart @vncvrrentevents
On another tangent, I wonder whether defining yourself by an ideal you will not be able to live up to has caused/will cause the demise of other large-scale movements. Perhaps the demise of Marxism can be read that way?
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Replying to @IDJennings @vncvrrentevents
I think this matter of truth is more a case of your ideal eating you rather than not living up to it. Nietzsche is, in this sense, the most consistent Christian after Christ—he takes the injunction to tell the truth to the limits.
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I suggest that only by having an ideal to follow that you achieve anything. Marxism isn’t dead; it’s alive under new names, and it shapes the pop cultural life of the West. It’s an eternal force: entropy. It just changes guises. Marxism died bc Marxism is anti-life.
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