Pat Robertson

[yyy]

@finley

I wasn’t suggesting that religion explains the grand sweep of history. My claims are usually a lot less broad than you insist on making them; all I’m saying is that, all else being equal, a country that believes in and acts upon Christian memes is more likely to be happy and prosperous than one that believes in bashing people over the head and taking their stuff, but it doesn’t make them immune to invasions, earthquakes, the effects of deforestation, etc etc. I think I said that earlier, and would have thought it’s fairly uncontentious.

It’s very contentious. I don’t think you’re that ignorant of European and Euro-colonial history, so for you to hold that view that there’s a direct, causative* correlation between the having of Christian memes and reduction of head-bashing and stuff-stealing, you need to conflate the having of Christian memes with being the West in modern times. This is essentially the same fallacy that a certain other member presented in a thread about Islam a few years ago, which you read at least part of since you participated in it (he said it was Christianity per se, not just the memes, but he dismissed all counter-examples true Scotsman style, or by saying it doesn’t count when Christians kill other Christians).

*You didn’t say causative in the text quoted there, but it’s the point of what you’ve been saying.

If you conflate the having of Christian memes with being the West in modern times, the problem with using the result to say this proves it’s because of the Christian memes and not any of the other reasons (try Jared Diamond’s reasons for example) is that it ignores all of history until roughly the Enlightenment, which oddly enough is when the West noticeably started becoming less Christian. The other problem is that Christianity today is more diverse than it’s ever been. For example, Christian memes are widely used both to condemn the LGBT+ rights movement and to support it, both to condemn jab mandates and to support them, both to condemn specific politicians and to support them…

The more one argues that true Christians or true understanders of Christian memes support X and condemn Y, the fewer opportunities Christianity or Christian memes have to take credit for the doings of those who (one argues) don’t understand it/them properly.

@finley

LOL, they aren’t. Some of them are. A few of them. The great unwashed masses only know one quotation from the Bible (“go forth and multiply”), and to the extent that there is any religious adherence at all, it’s to Spanish-style Catholicism, which was explicitly designed as a slave-control religion (“do as you’re told or God will punish you”), and an excellent design it is too. There’s also a very popular cult called Iglesia ni Cristo, whose purpose - whoever would have guessed? - is to skim lots of money from the congregation and achieve voter control. A lot of Elbonians find it hard to pass up an opportunity to get ripped off.

That’s next level Scotsmanning. You now have the task of identifying these true Christian societies of which you speak.

@finley

Right, that was my point. Christians don’t go around burning heretics. Nowhere in the NT does Jesus suggest you should do anything remotely like that (and coincidentally, this is why I describe religions based upon or referring to the OT/Judaism as fundamentally incompatible with Christianity - I haven’t entirely resolved in my own head how the OT and NT are part of the same canon, but the explanation is somewhere in Jesus’s description of a ‘New Convenant’).

Okay, we’re making some progress, but you’ve shot yourself in the foot wrt the original argument. Almost all Christians do believe in the OT, to the extent that they believe in the Bible. Yes there is abrogation to some extent, but the abrogation rarely extends to the 10C (as I pointed out in the Islam thread). I’m talking official dogma here, as well as what people-who-identify-and-generally-are-identified-as-Christians believe.

Again, that’s to the extent that they believe in the Bible. Joe Christian might say the Bible is full of nonsense but that he still believes in Jesus etc. in spite of the nonsense. If he’s a proper, dogma-abiding member of any of the major denominations, the OT matters to him. Prove me wrong by naming a major denomination whose dogma explicitly rejects the OT, or even just the 10C.

@finley

Again, I don’t see how this is problematic. The ‘No True Scotsman’ thing is not relevant; there are some fairly basic and non-negotiable actions that exclude you from the fuzzy set ‘All Christians’, and one of them is going around burning people alive.

This is like when you say poor doesn’t mean poor, rich doesn’t mean rich, education doesn’t mean education… Sorry dude, you’re not the “Académie anglaise”. You don’t get to decide what words mean.

If you did have that privilege, you would also need to decide how many centuries this and that society spent not being Christian – as evidenced by the witch burnings, heretic burnings, etc. etc. – and when they suddenly started being Christian. There’s an awful lot of history textbooks that would need to be rewritten as soon as you figured out what they’re supposed to say.

@finley

Right. It doesn’t make any sense, so don’t do it;

@finley

if you follow that train of thought you’ll end up arguing that all religions are basically interchangeable.

No you won’t. It’s exactly the opposite: you’ll end up with as many religions as there are (religious) human beings.

@finley

I’ll also add that Christians, in general, don’t obsess over the nature of ‘True Christianity’. While they might have doctrinal spats, it doesn’t descend into Sunni-vs-Shi’ite dogma these days. There are some very basic do’s and do-not’s, and everything else is trimmings.

That’s a bit of an ironic statement considering this all started with you objecting to criticism of someone who did obsess over it and built his career around it, someone who according to you wasn’t a true Christian anyway.

@finley

Although it seems to me you’re drawing a hard line between “religious beliefs” and “secular beliefs”. Beliefs are just beliefs. There’s nothing qualitatively different about religious beliefs. If someone believes in, say, polygamy, it matters not one jot if he believes in it because that’s the way his society has always been, or because God says so. The behaviours are identical.

If you really mean culture and not religion, why mention religion at all?

(I think most people would disagree with religion and culture being identical, but that would be another discussion.)

@finley

No. That wasn’t my argument. Again, I was suggesting something far more mundane and (I would have thought) incredibly uncontentious: if you believe in action-patterns that, by their nature are harmful (eg., cutting down all the trees or stealing all the tax money) your society will experience harm. If you unreservedly condemn those action-patterns you won’t necessarily stop them happening, but you might keep a lid on them. Whether you associate those beliefs with Voodoo, or with Christianity, is by-the-by.

No, whether you associate certain beliefs with X or with Y was the point. If you had said people who grow up in third world conditions generally have a different Weltanschauung compared to those who grow up in first world conditions, and people’s Weltanschauungs influence their behavior, you wouldn’t get any argument from me. The problem is you made it a religious argument that depends on your own personal theology.

@finley

Scotland - since you mentioned it - represents an interesting point of comparison with Haiti.

Apples to potatoes. For one thing, they weren’t literally slaves.

@finley

There would have been multiple factors at play here

Bingo.

@finley

including the industrial revolution - but I have a hunch that The Disruption resolved some philosophical and theological differences that were more important than the superficial issue of State control.

Why keep playing when you’ve already hit bingo? In any case, we weren’t talking about statism.

If you want to argue culture, go ahead and argue culture, but be clear that you’re arguing culture. Arguing religion and then saying religion = culture will get you into much deeper holes.