Empathy as a Sin

In Timothy Snyder’s account of the White Russian fascist Ivan Ilyin’s philosophy, Ilyin conceived of a kind of monarchist Christian fascism. Snyder calls Ilyin “Putin’s philosopher” and attempts to situate Putinism as a blend of Stalinism and Ilyinism. I believe the world view is similar in very conservative Catholicism and Seven Mountains Dominionism and other Christofascist movements in the United States. In Ilyin’s view, influenced by Hegel, the Christian monarchist state is the goal of history. The individual is hopelessly corrupt, so the state becomes a form of Inquisition. The state purifies itself through inflicting the sufferings of Christ on its citizens, through ‘purge’. I believe to say that “Empathy is a sin” is conditioning for the scapegoating rituals of fascism, which is actually an anti-Christian nihilism, I think, Camus would say, where scapegoating is the central ritual. A fundamentalist denomination can go off track, positively reinforcing each other’s bipolar manias, calling each other “Prophet Danny” and “Apostle Dillan”. It’s like an anti-Great Awakening, to this Methodist, but I shouldn’t say that about fellow believers because I’m taught to believe if there’s communion, there’s grace, but I can’t see how any of these philosophies are consistent with God’s love and grace.

I’ll never forget this: when I lived in Arkansas, the local newspaper gave the episcopal priest a regular column. he was actually the most progressive voice in that generally very right wing newspaper. He got letters to the editor lecturing himn, and I quote, that “helping the poor is against the Bible”. No words. This was back in Obama times.

“I do mean to reject the demonization of everyone who has embraced this politics as if they are all sociopaths themselves. This, I think, neglects a critical sociological factor in the interpersonal dynamics driving this politics, which inflicts great damage on its participants, very much including the men among them.”

I don’t know what follows from this. Yes on some level the fascist henchmen suffer, killing people is hard work and damages the soul. But they are still the henchmen, not the victims. Not all MAGA voters are henchmen, of course, but many of them are in fact itching for blood and would gladly and on the spot sign up for the SS. Yes they are damaged men but we can’t help them, we need to defend against them.

Trader Joe@5 is wrong. There are too many Rigneys to simply dismiss him as an outlier, especially on the basis of Trader Joe’s personal revelation from Jesus.

wetzel-rhymes-with@2 seems to forget that the pure Calvinist project seems to see the Christian state in very similar terms, much less the Catholic precedents. It’s not just the inquisition, but church courts etc. I suppose theologically you can say a Christian state is the Good News itself, evangelism in the world? At least, I would not consider Snyder a reliable historian.

It should be remembered that empathy was a particular target of Ayn Rand, even the leading edge of her appeal to (mostly) male libertarians. I remember as a child watching with grim fascination as Nathanial Brandon extolled egoism on his weekly Objectivist TV show. Well, it never went away, and Randism is arguably a major building block of the alt-right ideological convergence. It is certainly quite visible in the tech part of it. Perhaps the new part of it today is the connection to masculine assertion in a society still struggling to assimilate feminism, which is LA’s point.

I found this interesting article by Andrea Timár: “Against Compassion: Post-traumatic Stories in Arendt, Benjamin, Melville, and Coleridge” (Arendt Studies, 2022; doi: 10.5840/arendtstudies202211444).

According to Timár, some years after the French Revolution, “Many conservative writers of the period, including Coleridge himself, endowed sentiment and sympathy with a negative political significance, considering ‘sympathy as a disruptive social phenomenon, which functioned to spread […] like a “contagion”‘.” (Timár attributes the latter quotation to Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd. Sympathy, Controversy, and Print Culture [Cambridge, 2013])

Timár positions Coleridge and others as reacting against 18th-century sentimentalism, including Hume’s emphasis on sympathy. Coleridge’s reaction against against empathy/sympathy/compassion seems motivated by a perhaps Kantian set of associations (or his reading of them): sympathy was an emotion, a passion, a form passivity, and was therefore feminine. Reason, will, and agency were active, not passive, and were therefore superior.

The topic seems far removed from what’s happening in 21st-century American religion and politics, but this 19th-century stage of our empathy/sympathy concepts may have left its mark in today’s discourse.

Re Trader Joe, one person’s strawman is the flip-side of another’s No True Scotsman. If all the Christians that are evil are defined as Not True Christians, then there are only good Christians. Easy. But that is not how Christianity is usually defined; the criterion is either church membership or belief in a single god* plus considering Jesus to be at least the most important prophet**. Promoting empathy is not a criterion.

This is a bit off-topic, but I must apologise to John Quiggin. Under past posts on the future of democracy in the USA, I argued that the most likely scenario is continued elections but rigged even more than before to make it impossible for Democrats to win, while the Democrats are allowed to govern places like California and New York as long as they continue to be as center-right and ineffective as they have been the last few decades. On recent evidence it now looks increasingly as if an attempt is underway to justify ‘liberating’ places like Los Angeles from their elected governments and to normalise suppression of dissent by the military. What is more, I see no evidence that the military or the media push back in any way, nor that Democratic leadership appreciates the severity of the situation, nor that the public at large understands what is happening. The trajectory is now towards not merely authoritarian electoralism but towards an open military dictatorship. I did not expect them to be that blatant, nor did I want to believe that everybody outside of a few local protesters simply lies down and lets them do it.

*) Bit complicated by the incoherence of belief in Satan, admittedly. If Satan is not also a god, the problem arises why the good god doesn’t simply get rid of him. If he cannot get rid of Satan, then Satan must be another god…

**) However, if belief in the trinity or even merely in some divine nature of Jesus were to be considered criteria, it would exclude large parts of Christianity of the first four centuries.

A follow-up to my previous comment:

Altemeyer wrote the book The Authotitarian Spectre in 1996, almost 30 years ago.

According to the blurb, This is an important, timely work. It explains a growing movement to submit to a “man on horseback,” to attack those who are different, to march in lockstep. Altemeyer reveals that these sentiments are strongly held even by many American lawmakers. These discoveries deserve careful attention in a presidential election year.

But this was almost 30 years ago. So, was Altemeyer just the kind of guy who always cries wolf, so soner or later he will be right, or did authoritarianism really grow for 30+ years?
My opinion is that there was indeed a continuous growth of authoritarianism, and that this was due to increasing economic inequality, although we see clearly the fruits of this only now; but on the other hand in the last 30 years there was also much progressive changes e.g. in gender politics, so it is a bit weird, more like a sort of polarisation that a simple shift to the right.

“I don’t know who to believe.”–my evangelically-raised sister-in-law, who does not read non-Christian sources, and always voted for Republicans, as did her parents, but has heard some disturbing things about Trump, e.g., from one of her sons.

Religions which survive become proficient in teaching people not to think for themselves.

I’m old enough (most are) to remember when Republicans accused the Affordable Care Act of instituting “death panels”. Who knew the correct answer was “everybody is going to die”?

I disagree that these RWNJs lack empathy. The question is, “empathy for -whom-?” And the answer is: “for people like -them-“. Which doesn’t mean “the right-wing Base”, but rather the clique in which each of these RWNJs finds themselves, their avatars/thought-leaders, etc. It’s the old Burke quote wherein (in-between rubbing one out dreaming of her) he is all tears and empathy for that poor, poor abused monarch, Marie Antoinette. And nothing for the poor of France.

When they say things like “the fundamental weakness of Western culture is empathy” what they mean (and is unstated) is “empathy for -those people-“. That’s all.

It’s just Wilhoit’s Law. It’s -all- just Wilhoit’s Law.

“I suspect you believe as you do because the media and blogs etc. focus on the outlier cases”

80% of evangelicals voted for President-elect Donald Trump in 2024…..

every american who attended church regularly between 2020 and the present (not, it should be noted, everyone who classifies themselves as christian because they have warm feelings when they see a nativity diorama under the tree at christmas), within a modest margin of error, would gladly support a military dictatorship that dragged gays and trans people out of their homes and drilled out their eyeballs in the street before dumping their broken bodies in a drainage ditch to finish dying. if you have come across one that says they would not, you can disregard them – they’re lying or a tiny minority faction with no power or importance. god will comfort their hearts but eventually the military will get around to them too. their churches will be turned over to bigballs and the other doge boys to make into a data center for ai to generate images of a flexing, muscular, amputee jesus wearing a military uniform holding a sign saying it’s his birthday. historians will later say this was the predominant image of the “american christ”, other than, of course, trump himself

MisterMr at 13, bekabot at 15, Trader Joe at 17,

it is obvious that Christian ethics generally is for compassion and practically everything [Jesus] ever said

Sorry, but it isn’t obvious to me. When I read the gospels, I see a doomsday preacher who told his followers to renounce worldly possessions because the world was going to end within their lifetimes. He repeatedly rants about the fires of hell and what will happen to those who don’t believe him. In Matthew 11: 20-24, he threatens eternal vengeance against several entire towns that didn’t accept his teachings. And Jesus was building a cult. I suggest reading the gospels very carefully without emotional attachment to any nice Christians in your lives but paying attention to how “every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life” and “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law” would be understood by you if you heard that some other preacher said it today. You would try to stage an intervention for any loved ones who got into that preacher’s orbit because you know they will end up in a remote compound somewhere after transferring all their money to the cult.

Some later Christians, including perhaps most (?) alive today, happened to be good people and stressed love thy neighbour; other later Christians, including most alive in the 5th to 19th centuries, happened to be bad people and committed genocide and slavery in the name of God. But a cult that cut its members off from their families and taught that the world was going to end circa two thousand years ago was the foundational idea of the religion. It is plain in the text of the gospels, especially the earlier-written ones, and one would have to try very hard not to see it.

LFC at 19,

The question is perhaps how many still count as “few” in a population of hundreds of millions of people, and what the expected appropriate reaction to the end of democracy is. When Trump’s lackeys claimed that Los Angeles was sinking into anarchy, people rightly posted on social media a map showing that the protests are restricted to a minuscule area while everybody else in LA was going on with their lives. At the same time, we get the Democrats working with the Republicans in a bipartisan spirit on a cryptocurrency bill that will legalise financial fraud, and they have mostly approved Trump’s appointments by large margins, no matter how incompetent the nominees were. The media have headlines like “Hegseth, Democrats accuse the other of politicizing the military” (both sides!) and “From Los Angeles to Washington, Trump leans in as commander in chief” (this is normal!) instead of “Embattled US ruler deploys armed troops against citizens amid mass protests against regime’s kidnapping spree” (this last one suggested by Manisha Sinha on Bluesky, part of the genre of what if US politics were covered like the exact same events would be covered in other countries).

That is all the defending democracy equivalent of, “it is but a flesh wound” after getting both arms chopped off.

I remember thinking this was good (from a one-time friend of teh blog):
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-35/politics/the-evangelical-mind/

engels@26 Following the link to the essay, I will note two chronological issues. First, the counter-culture of the Sixties was not when liberalized* practices in sexuality actually spread to the larger part of the population in rural and suburban areas. (Maybe even in more of the cities?) The counter-culture of the Sixties got the headlines precisely because it was so exotic. Places like Haight-Ashbury were something of a zoo exhibit.
*Liberalized is not a complete or rigorously descriptive adjective but it’s at least short and more or less comprehensible.

Second, the perception of Baptists as Calvinists was relatively new. I suspect the Baptists fleeing to the writer’s Nazarene-style church were dissident Baptists precisely because the Calvinization of the Baptists had not made sufficient progress.

The commitment to a fundamental social conformity with a Christian veneer noted in the essay is in my view essentially a sociopolitical movement. But I disagree that that the cause of this sociopolitical movement is the evangelical mind. The forces that engendered this movement (like all others) are not solely individual. Any personal decisions follow upon success, or failure, or even simple stagnation, of the movement. I think the increasing reliance of the State to act as the Scourge of God reflects the failure of moral suasion—even if the persuader is the Holy Spirit, according to most evangelical theologies I know of. Contra the anarchists, if you really want a job done at all, you need a government to do it. (Even if results are never what was hoped for.) Or, as they say, there oughtta be a law.

Alex SL @24

You are mixing up the contents of Christianity (official teachings) with its sociological nature: it is a bit like confusing that Buddhism theaches to avoid earthly attachments, and that buddhists have no interest in money.

If we speak of the teachings od Christianity, there are many examples but here are two:

Matthew 5:43-48
43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor[a] and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

This directly contradicts Vance (if I tremember correctly his argument was that Christians owe first love to their families and groups and only later to others).

And also: the parable of the “good Samaritan”. Samaritans were (still are) a different religious group from Jews, and ethnically perceived as different, so the modern day equivalent in USA or EU would be a parable of the “good Muslim”, and in fact the Catholic Church has a very pro-immigrant stance in Europe, at the point of pissing many ethnicist groups.

While mainstream christianity can’t be equated to a cult, because there are too many and too many moderates anyway, some christians do in fact act in a cult like way, and most likely they embrace christianity exactly because they do like the cult-like situation (a group of people which is stable, everyone with the same ideas), which is exactly my point: these people have high RWA (authoritarian follower) tendencies, an as a consequence they choose to become christian and to be part of christian extremist groups, because this assuages their RWA desires; but this hasn’t really much to do with the specific teachings of Christianity, this could work also with Taoism, or Ufology.

Also, I should note it here but high RWA tendencies are not innate, but depend on a lot of social conditioning (mostly having an upbringing that is somehow secluded and having had bad experience with change, e.g. big falls in social-economic standing).
The USA has a freaking high percentage of high RWA citizens compared to european countries.

About aquiescence:
There is the problem that people who are most likely to be pissed by Trump’s authoritarian behaviour are also the ones who are less likely to go against the law, because even if Trump is an ass he is still the legitimate president, so there will be a lot of not violent protest (with a few violent guys on the margins who will be used to justify the use of authoritarian police/army) but not much more, because what other could they (anti-trump american citizens) do?
Unless we are speaking of civil war, but who really wants it?

I have an onion-on-the-belt take about some of this.

We got our television set around 1955, which was normal though a little late. I became a teen-ager in 1960, or thereabouts. I remember walking around my neighborhood in Atherton one night about then and seeing the glow of the television in every darkened house and thinking, all these people listening for hours and hours to lies about brands of toothpaste and kitchen cleanser– this might not work out so well.

When Ronald Reagan was running for governor I saw him interviewed on the public television station. He had been my favorite actor, presenting GE Theater and sometimes acting in an episode, but when the interviewer asked him why he thought a B-level actor had the chops to run a state he looked aw shucks at the camera and said that when that lens zooms in you cannot tell a lie. You cannot lie to a television camera. I thought– this might not work out so well.

And it didn’t. He was a nasty man, quick with a slur. There was nothing bright and sunny about him. I was never in the room with Ron ‘n’ Tip. During various minor riots at Berkeley he would joke slyly about the hippie B.O., and how you couldn’t tell if the students were boys or girls if you were looking from behind. He was that kind of guy.

Then years later I watched one of his inaugural balls, twirp Donnie Osmond a master of ceremonies and the shining faces of large women in furs beaming nasty like I imagined pigs beam when they get to the trough. And I was thinking well this sure ain’t gonna work out right.

On the day after the 2016 election I didn’t even let loose a tear, because I had seen it all before, a little less close to the bone.

Religion? When I was in the Peace Corps in Côte d’Ivoire in 1972 local families would sometimes send an extra son to the missionaries where he could eat and maybe break in on the white man’s magic. There was one kid we came to know who had been raised by very pious and selfless Christians, the people who for one thing ran a clinic where I would go for an amoeba cure before I’d go to the French hospital; they must have saved thousands of lives while I was struggling to keep my lycée kids in line. The kid knew nothing about local culture and hardly spoke his own language, but he managed to get it on with a local girl and the missionaries caught him and threw him out. So long, kid, you are dead to us. He wandered around Korhogo begging for rice until one of the vols took him in.

Without hammering this too hard and getting into RWAs and SDOs and primate evolution, jump to Dick Cheney and my realization that this was a guy who in another situation could easily work himself up to lining women and children up and shooting them into a ditch. They’ve always been with us and maybe in us.

I could be wrong. I read Rick Pearlstein telling it all and think, what universe is this guy talking about? I saw Walter Cronkite on television once, at my grandma’s house, because like the plurality of Nielsen families of the America I think I remember I watched Huntley-Brinkley. I entirely missed the millions of Americans spitting on GI’s arriving back from Viet Nam. It was either a sixty-year acid flashback or somebody is over-thinking something.

My opinion of Christianity took a bit of a hit when I learned that the two kids I knew from school who were sons of vicars are both now senior managers at tax-dodging City accountancy firms.

Alex Sl @31

“The context here is the question whether Christianity is fundamentally about empathy. I argue it is fundamentally a doomsday cult, and that today’s Christians pick and choose statements from the bible that match what they want to believe or do anyway. ”

Is Christianity about empathy? It turns out that I’m currently reading a variety of books about empathy and the psychology thereof, many taking an evo-psych point of view.
The problem is what exactly do you mean with empathy, but if you mean a natural, instinctive tendency to help other and relieve their pain (that some call “compassion” and distinguish from “empathy” that is just the ability to understand other’s feelings), the general agreement (also quite intuitive) is that we have empathy for (a) our close relatives (b) friends and much less for other people, with descending empathy for people who are far and different from us.
Ancestral humans probably lived in groups of 50-200 individuals, but now we live in societies of millions and billions, so there is a discrepancy between our natural instincts and the society we live in; while some evo-psych authors have the tendency to analyze cultural developments as if they were also the consequence of some darwinian natural selection (I’m looking at you, Buss) I think that it makes more sense to see cultural items as something that work against our natural instincts, and redirect those in ways that are more functional for modern societies.
But how do these things work? For example, anti-racism works by treating racists as the bad guys, so by “outgrouping” them, and Christianity works the same way, by treating unchristians as outgroups.
In this sense, we have a natural empathy only for our close friends; Christianity tries to force us to expand this empathy to everyone, but it does so by creating an ingroup of “good christians” opposed to the outgroup, so it can be used to hate the outgroups even more.
So it doesn’t really make sense to ask if “Christianity” is more about empathy or about hate, though it makes sense to ask this about present day Christians.

“I argue it is fundamentally a doomsday cult”
Well yeah, like all religions, in fact “cult” is a synonim for “religion”, although nowadays is most often used for small, reclusive religions.
If you mean specifically the “small, reclusive” part, it is true for some Christians, who also are the most extremist ones, but not for others, and is more true for American Christians than for european ones (where e.g. in Italy you will find people who self describe as Catholics but only go to the church on Christmas and Easter, are ok with abortion etc.).
The “cult” thing, in this sense, is about the “sociology” of the Christians; even if there was a political movement against racism, but these anti-racists only lived with other friends of the anti-racist party, and assumed that everyone else was racist and therefore an enemy you’d have the same problem.
I don’t think this would work for 12th century Christians, I think there the problem would be more that they were 12th century people with moral values that are very distant from ours, expressed through Christianity.

“and that today’s Christians pick and choose statements from the bible that match what they want to believe or do anyway. ”
This is 100% true and was true probably for all the history of Christianity, but it’s a normal problem with ideologies.

MisterMr,

Again, the context here is an original post at the top of this thread that discusses how some Christian leaders now see empathy as a sin, and why, and the subsequent discussion about whether that is compatible with Christianity or not. A broader discussion of evolutionary psychology seems, shall we say, too broad here. Your argumentation implies that it makes no sense to discuss the characteristics of different religions, ideologies, or philosophies, as they all function the same way. That is not plausible to me. Looking at what tenets a movement was actually built upon matters, because while Christianity, Buddhism, Marxism, and Confucianism may all have at some point treated people as outgroups, they have extremely different tenets.

And while I argued above that Cafeteria Christians pick from the gospels whatever they want to hear and ignore the rest, the tenets as written down in the movement’s holy scripture are the most important, because they serve as a kind of metaphorical anchor that can pull the movement back in from time to time. For example, let’s say your scripture says both to love they neighbour and also, on a different page, to kill all the gays and all the unbelievers. As long as your movement teaches its children that this scripture is the word of god and that you are a good person for following what the scripture says, a nice, kind generation that reads love thy neighbour and quickly flips over the other page will at some point, perhaps in a social crisis, be followed by a new generation that thinks, but here the scriptures say to kill all the gays and all the unbelievers. You taught me this book tells us what god wants, so why aren’t you doing what it wants? We will now do some killing, as prescribed, to prove how much more pious we are than you. Conversely, a generation or two later may then be dragged back to the love they neighbour anchor. But as long as the community refers to that book, it matters what it says in that book.

No, I don’t mean cult as a synonym for religion, I mean specifically that Christianity started as a cult in the modern sense of oh no she has joined a cult that took away all her money and made her cut off all contact with her family. Most of Christianity today isn’t that, but it is the clear implication of Jesus’ many statements on cutting people off from their non-believing family, giving away all their belongings and following him around, and even his rebuff to his own mother (my followers are my real family).

JackCelliers,

I am sorry to say that I have a more cynical take. If the only reason somebody does charity is because they want to be rewarded in the afterlife, are they actually charitable? That is an economic transaction, nothing more. The chartiable take here

Regarding the question of sola scriptura, that is not what I argue. I argue that if we ask what a heterogeneous movement is about, it makes no sense to point at carefully selected members who are nominally part of that movement. You could make the argument that communism is fundamentally about hereditary monarchy by pointing at contemporary North Korea, or that it is a quasi-religious sect by pointing at certain splinter parties, or that it is a centre-left electoral party movement by pointing at certain European communist parties. But given that it cannot be all of these mutually exclusive things at the same time, reading the manifesto and a few party programs may be more fruitful for understanding where this movement is coming from and what, to use the metaphor from above, ‘anchors’ it in the same way that “be nice to others because the world is going to end within your lifetime, so you will be judged soon” ‘anchors’ Christianity.

A reminder that the OP goes further than asking whether Christianity teaches empathy – it points to the spectacle of self-described Christians affirmatively rejecting empathy as un-Christian. This to my knowledge is a rather new phenomenon. To be sure, Christians have often treated perceived enemies without empathy or mercy (and there is plenty of biblical precedent for that, although mostly in the Old rather than the New Testament), but this seems to go a step further in making Christianity a religion of egotistical narcissists. I don’t think this is consistent with scripture, but it’s definitely consistent with the cult of Trumpist fascism.

NB I came across a purported quote by Hannah Arendt: “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”

It seems the quote is fake, at least there is no source.

This post is full of strawmen fallacies and relies on ridicule more than on any substantial critique.

“Part of this attack on empathy stems from the resentment of populist voters who feel that empathy is being extended to the wrong people, that they are the ones who deserve empathy, as opposed to various others they despise–immigrants, foreigners, Muslims, blacks, feminists, LGBT people, poor people”

The problem is the opposite – the leftists extend expathy disproportionately to the above groups and deny it to natives, Christians, whites, men, straight people, and rich people. Empathy is intrinsically biased in one way or another, and this is why it must be rejected. Politics should be based on dispassionate analysis and overarching moral principles/duties that are by nature non-discriminatory, not on feelings of compassion that are naturally biased towards groups of special interest.

Almost all theologians agree with the substance of JD Vance’s point about the existence and hierarchy of different moral circles. Pope Francis wasn’t a particularly bright theologian and he frequently contradicted obvious biblical teachings.

You also haven’t debunked the obvious truth that empathy is a feminine virtue. This is in fact confirmed by observed personality differences between men and women, e.g. with regards to the trait of agreeableness, or preference for egalitarianism among women and competition among men.

JakubS @42
“Empathy is intrinsically biased in one way or another, and this is why it must be rejected. Politics should be based on dispassionate analysis and overarching moral principles/duties that are by nature non-discriminatory”

And where do those moral principles come from without empathy?
Like, if I really had zero empathy and didn’t care for other people, why would I follow moral principles?

Also, if empathy is a virtue (that you just said it isn’t 7 lines above) it’s a virtue for everyone, even if it is more often or more strongly found in women.
Also agreeableness is not the same of empathy, and preference for competiton is not the opposite of egalitarianism (e.g., most competitive sportspeople are very pissed from a situation where there is not a fair starting point). Historically most support for leftish ideologies like marxism came from males up to the 70s, then the trend switched and now is more common from women, but it isn’t a natural or standard situation.

@42 JakubS

Pope Francis wasn’t a particularly bright theologian and he frequently contradicted obvious biblical teachings.

So, the Pope isn’t Catholic after all. Seriously, your tradcath bullshit is untenable on its own terms, never mind any Biblical exegesis.

JakubS 42: “Almost all theologians agree with the substance of JD Vance’s point about the existence and hierarchy of different moral circles. Pope Francis wasn’t a particularly bright theologian and he frequently contradicted obvious biblical teachings.”

This is precisely what I referred to at 4: right wing pseudo-Christians claiming with confidence that the Bible – which they have never read – says the opposite of what it does say, based on the teachings of openly fascist ideologues. People outside of this echo chamber don’t tend to believe this is real but it definitely is.

JakubS. @42. “You also haven’t debunked the obvious truth that empathy is a feminine virtue.”

Did that statement of “ the obvious truth” waft down from up there in your overarching moral principles? Down here, my personal observation is that empathy is a virtue normal to both males and females. Feminised it certainly is, by drill sergeants whose job, traditionally, is to eradicate it from the raw recruit. The success of that eradication, though, is chiefly seen in those recruits already on the sociopathic tail of the distribution. Old soldiers tend to grow out of a conditioning that required a reduction of empathy to its military desirable residue, ie.paranoia. Old soldiers (male and female) and their old enemies tend to empathise with each other fine; more so, I dare say, than they empathise with those civilians whose overarching moral principles often cause the fighting in the first place.

MisterMr,

My point is just that today, some christian groups are in the “semicult” mode, but this isn’t due to the specific tenets of christianity.

Well, the ‘because’ is difficult to untangle given how many factors there are. I would, however, at least argue that Christianity is predisposed to certain types of cultishness because of its founding and underlying characteristics. It is certainly not a coincidence that cults are frequently popping up in Christianity that predict the imminent end of the world, from the year 1,000 hysteria across Millerites and Jehovas Witnesses to many US evangelicals today, and unless I am missing something, that isn’t a prominent, recurring feature of, say, Buddhism. And that is because founding a cult that predicts the imminent end of the world is literally WWJD, it is what he actually did and thus lived as an example, whereas it isn’t what Buddha did. A hopeful caveat is that Paul had a greater influence than Jesus on what Christianity turned out to be in an organisational and sociological sense, but still, the doomsday cultism lingers.

JackCelliers,

Oh, I certainly agree that on any half-way reasonable reading of Jesus’ intentions as communicated in the gospels, including the earliest one, Joni Ernst isn’t a good follower of Jesus. And yes, you cannot detach A from “do A because B”, but again, if the A is only because threat or bribe B, then I find it difficult to accept that A is the central idea in the same way I would accept it if the statement was “do A because it is morally good”. If not B, then no A (if god will not boil me in a lake of sulfur for infinity years for being a bad person, what is left in the gospels’ argument for being a good person?), so B seems like the core idea here. Given the evidence right in front of our eyes about how the world is and how it works, I am unlikely to ever believe in any gods or souls. But had Jesus of the gospels primarily been a moral philosopher who teaches to be kind to each other to create a kinder world, I would find him more respectable than the preacher telling people not to care about the future because the end is nigh and ranting about the punishment of unbelievers who is actually apparent in those writings. And don’t get me started on Revelation; that revenge fantasy wasn’t recording his teachings directly, of course, but it is very much in the spirit of many of his own statements.

Right, there is the possibility of picking and choosing from the bible too, and that is a key part of my argumentation in previous comments about why people calling themselves Christians are so heterogeneous. Everything is possible to those who do not argue in good faith. Still, in a good faith debate, people can explore the meaning of a text, why certain statements and contradictions are in it, and consider how it anchors the movement that refers to it. We can read what the author wrote and, with admitted caveats around implied meanings and alternative meanings of a word or sentence, extract meaning, and at the very least we can narrow the possible interpretations down. For example, I find it implausible that any half-way reasonable person could read the gospels and come away convinced that Jesus’ teachings (rich guy less likely to go to heaven than a camel going through the eye of a needle) were really in favour of the modern prosperity gospel (believe in Jesus, and he will make you rich). But, and that is the difference, some preacher today can go full prosperity gospel and call himself Christian. How do you argue against him being Christian if your angle is sociology? You could only say, well, that’s Christianity now, end of. To me, that seems to stand in some tension with your position regarding Ernst, but perhaps I am missing nuance there.

Alex Sl,

Well at least some version of Buddhism had this social aspect, e.g. the Ikko-iki rebellions and Pure land Buddhism; maybe it is true that Christianity has more, maybe we don’t know the ones from the other religions.
But, this line of argument really leads to questions like “what is the nature of religion” or “what is the nature of morality”, so I’ll simplify this to: IMHO “morality” has to do with social behaviour, both with empathy but also with our introjected idea of the expectations other have about us.
This is the source of moral behaviour, but in some situations these tendencies can short-circuit and create the aggressive cult-like behaviour – here is my great wisdom.

Alex SL @52,

Fundamentally, I suppose I just do not buy the idea that what we see proposed by the gospels is a version of tit-for-tat. I read Jesus as teaching his disciples a way of life and set of principles that is relevant to life on this earth as much as the next. In this context, the fire and brimstone that he threatens seems a lot less like a vindictive fantasy than a description of the sort of existence that in fact awaits someone who makes hatred rather than love of the neighbor their maxim. If this comparison helps, the Bible seems to me to be an argument for the afterlife in roughly the same way as Plato’s Phaedo is.

One way of arguing for this interpretation would be to ask why, if otherworldly punishment and reward is the crux of the matter, do the New Testament authors waste so much space talking about Jesus’s life? Why leave all the description of the intimate cruelties awaiting the sinner over to an amateur like Dante? One could easily imagine a New Testament that reverses the proportions, such that the life and times of Jesus himself is reduced to a single book and the remaining twenty six get to sort out the details of the apocalypse. If the target audience of the Bible is the sort of the believer interested solely in ransoming their immortal soul, then wouldn’t this have been a more effective mode of expression?

Of course, this line of argument will not get us too far, nor, really, will any haggling over Bible passages, for the reason that it leaves perpetually open the question of what the interest of any given believer in the Bible actually is – merely transactional or authentically life-forming. You would perhaps just respond that my interpretation is, if not outright wrong, inadequate to the way that most view the matter. But this is just the reason why I think the debate needs to be conducted with an eye to the concrete communities in which what Jesus has to say is interpreted, codified, and to a certain degree actualized; viz., the various Christian churches. Because then, the temptation to treat Christianity in terms of any purely cognitive commitment (e.g. “if I do good, then I go to heaven”) starts to dissipate. The reason for this is that, setting the outlier cases of politicians and intellectuals aside, one’s interpretation of what the Bible says is structured by what one does with it, rather than the other way around. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t right and wrong interpretations.

So, there are at least two ways in which one could “fail” to be a Christian. One way is by distorting or misinterpreting the teachings laid out in the gospel. Another is by not even being a Christian – namely, by treating Christianity as a body of beliefs rather than a way of life involving membership in a community governed by norms which have their root in the Biblical teachings. My claim is that the second sort of failure is more fundamental than the first, though the two are undoubtedly not mutually exclusive.

Maybe the upcoming WW3 will finally decide whose side God is on, if not precisely what He wanted them to do.

I had been wondering when the question of whether Jesus actually existed would be brought up. This is now really off-topic, but two things to consider.

The authors of the gospels work really hard to make Jesus fulfill various expectations people apparently had about the messiah. The funniest in my eyes is this one:

And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins. Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.

(Just in case it isn’t clear, because not every reader may have had to endure the several years of Lutheran religious instruction at school that I had to, and this is at any rate maybe a very subtle point, but Jesus was called Jesus, and not… Emmanuel.)

Better known is the problem of Jesus having been known to hail from Nazareth when the expectation was that the messiah would be from Bethlehem, so early Christians had to invent a story that had him born in Bethlehem. Point is, if Jesus never actually existed, and the early Jesus cult could write what they wanted, why did they not write fan fiction about an Emmanuel of Bethlehem who was later crucified? These absurdities of the gospels only make sense if their founding figure was inconveniently a guy not named Emmanuel and not from Bethlehem.

Second, the gospels also have Jesus claim that the world would end in the lifetime of his contemporary listeners. As steven t johnson points out, the gospels were written decades after it had become clear that this was a failed prophecy. Again the question is, why would you write this claim down unless you are bona fide trying to preserve what your fellow cult members know the actually existing founder actually said? It makes no sense if the person was made-up.

Obviously, I am not a biblical scholar, so one may want to dismiss this post on that basis. But spotting these problems with the claim of Jesus never having existed seems to me like the equivalent of not having to be a fully certified car mechanic to understand that my car is on fire.

@60 ‘ a very subtle point, but Jesus was called Jesus, and not… Emmanuel.’

A good point; the subtlties of Hebrew are beyond me; but, does not Emmanuel translate as “to be with” ? In English to be “with” has a range of uses e.g it may mean 1. to be in partnership with us, like Goldman is partner to Sachs; or 2. “with” may mean to side with some military entity–like the Ulster Constabulary sided with the British security services; or 3. one may, if one is female, be “with child”.
The prosperity gospellers go with 1) the Nationalists go with 2) the last item, 3) is perhaps the site of greatest controversy and contest; Did that mother’s son
( Joshua/Jesus) share the entire substance of the “heavenly father”? Or did the earthly mother amalgamate with the novelty she bore? (Joseph being merely the divine cuckoo’s earthly provider).
Or maybe God is within us, as well as with us? The later Egyptians reached that conclusion; and a huge number of their hymns read like the sermon on the Mount. Everyone got an afterlife, not just the Pharoahnic elect. Love thy neighbour as thyself, and the crocodile wont clamp its jaws to you.
Dangerous stuff. Rulers old and new need us to hate each other when it is necessary to their comfort and security. They need us to fear death, and judgment and punishment, beyond death—but under terms that subvert the possibilities of egalitarian sacrifice and reinforce the convemiences of elite overarching morality. The elite have been hugely succesful in that agenda.
As did, Ibn Arabi, Ernst Bloch, and Henri Corbin: We must fight them in Heaven and Hell, as well as on the earth.

In other news, it’s 2003 again (or is that 1095?)
https://www.ft.com/content/cc5f3407-22ef-4fd4-9825-7810bcea3c5e

Shorter: If Jesus was a made-up messiah figure, why does he behave exactly like a real human cult leader does?

engels 64: Donald the Dove is totally the opposite of war-mongers like GWB (not to mention Biden and Obama), haven’t you noticed?

https://newrepublic.com/article/197079/trump-iran-war-bombing-idiot

If Jesus was a made-up messiah figure, why does he behave exactly like a real human cult leader does?

Name an ordinary cult leader who came back from the dead.

@70 Elvis?

On the one hand, it seems courteous to answer direct questions. On the other, I’ve been invited to leave. This response may split the difference to act as my last word at CT? Over to the moderator…

Alex SL@66 “If Jesus was a made-up messiah figure, why does he behave exactly like a real human cult leader does?”The imagined god acts like a human cult leader to justify by example the demands of the living earthly agents of the imagined god. Jim@68 puts this down to the followers but I think the authors of revelations are more likely to be the ones projecting a magical or idealized version of themselves. I would add that human cult leaders may merely ask for voluntary donations or tax exemptions, whereas others reserve cult leaders who make excessive demands. But that’s me.

Alex SL@65 “Conversely, how often do we have a whole community make up a character and then forget that they never existed?” Pretty sure that such things work like folk music, you know that some part of the original music must have been composed by one person, however anonymous to us now. But we also know that transmission was rarely, if ever, copying. There were usually variations beyond mechanical errors, new material or revisions by later hands. I tend to believe that a historical Jesus whose biography (Gospels) was based on historical facts would be as constrained as the biography of Alexander. But to me, the Gospels/Acts etc. reads more like the Alexander Romance than Arrian or even Plutarch. And if only the Romance had survived I would be skeptical of that character’s real existence, even if I would have to concede I couldn’t be sure that there wasn’t some historical figure mythologized later.

Alex SL@65 “how often do we have a whole community make up a character and then forget that they never existed?” Cargo cults are reported to have claimed John Frum (John From…?) gave them their revelations. And they did so within a time frame of years. King Arthur should be a notorious example in my view. There are still mythologers making up stories about him and Merlin etc. where behavior is very human indeed, despite magic around him. Robin Hood or Ned Ludd are other well known examples in my opinion.

“Will our grandchildren think that Harry Potter was a real person?” I guarantee some of our grandchildren will think Jesus was a real person. So I can’t feel like this is a successful gotcha question.

“Still, again, if people can pick whatever bit of text they want, and they can pick whatever to believe without reference to any text but still call themselves Christian, how do you ever circumscribe what Christianity “is”?” You can’t. The possibility that all knowledge of any hypothetical historical Jesus is simply gone forever and only mythology remains may be objectionable (much less it was always mythology) precisely because it makes this obvious.

It is asserted Jesus was recorded within decades of his life…but the earliest sources we have, primarily the letters of Paul, do not record a historical Jesus. Another early source, the epistle to the Hebrews records a Jesus in the Celestial Temple. Even Acts records a key revelation of Jesus in Heaven by the dying Stephen in a way that suggests it was key to the foundation of Christianity, complete with the presence of Paul.

“But when Herod heard this, he said, “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised from the dead!” Mark 6:16 NIV Supernatural elements were present from the beginning (which is what is meant I think by “spiritualizing.”)