That article is the purest manifestation of Religion as strategy game tech tree I have ever seen. It's as if, being fundamentally secular people, they don't understand that the compelling aspect of religion is the fact that it provides a much truer vision of reality than anything that they have experienced in the world of best practices and scientific papers. Even the falsest traditional religions have more than such people.
I can't possibly be as friendly towards this as you, Dave. I think I'd very much enjoy squishing this transparent lie of a "faith".
I mean if your goal is to follow that of either to double down on the Orthodox church or Roman Catholic church I think I hedge my bets with the Collins project toward creating a new religious sect, though the only difference I do is it would be less secular and more in line with how Protestants go about creating new church body as those tend to have a better historical track record with helping to increase fertility rates.
well secular religion has been in a entropic state of decay from the the original mainline protestant sect religions for the last 400 years.
But even then sure if they are trying to form a new religious sect out of Abrahamic religions I still would say is better trying that then trying to return to an older traditional Christian group. Especially if we look at the current graph those same groups aren't fairing any better then the progressives. and don't even try looking at the evengelical baptist types who currently right now all they can do is maintain their population but never seem to grow it.
Best example of Christians winning right now are all new modern protestant Christian groups that don't interface with modern technology and don't send women into high education. Those two optimizations along with a solid community aimed at something higher seem to be what helps the most when it comes to increasing fertility rate
It's precisely this attitude of worshipping the line before God that makes this sort of system so fragile. The point isn't to please the line, it's to please God. Therefore, any sort of decline will immediately make such a straightforwardly fake congregation collapse.
The Collins don't even have a reason for interpreting the world as they do. It's literally just because they think it's beneficial for the future they would like to see. Maybe if they could at least show why they think God sits at the end of time and tries to guide us into the stars their religion would have a chance, but there is literally no reason to believe that except the benefits they see from it.
What other texts or prophets from history do they see that proves this, for example? Because you can't prove that god's existence with just the Bible.
And how do we know which efforts here on Earth will help us get to the stars? Their god will guide us, somehow, but how will we recognize his signs of which studies, engineers, companies and scientists to support? It's completely nonsensical.
The "faith" is just
Step 1. Have more children
Step 2. Tell them God will guide them to the stars
"What other texts or prophets from history do they see that proves this, for example? Because you can't prove that god's existence with just the Bible"
I think it's just the basic Pinker-esque/Kurzweilian argument for increasing cognitive complexity and moral awareness over evolutionary and historical timescales, albeit with a lot of bumps and hiccups. You can make the argument that the analysis is wrong- and I do think there's good evidence for backsliding according to various measures in the post-industrial period- but you can't say that it's entirely unrooted in historical observation. A lot of what Pinker has to say about the past is accurate, as far as I can tell, and I don't think it's tenable to argue that man isn't superior in value to something like a Lemur.
I broadly agree with Dave that progressivism has more to answer for than the Collins appreciate and reaching a kind of critical mass with regard to adoption of community norms may be fundamentally difficult if 'maximise freedom' is enshrined as your primary goal and pursued myopically. But I don't think "increase knowledge, health, and cooperation" are particularly subjective virtues, and with an adequate recognition of the facts of mortality and heredity this leads to something functionally resembling conservatism.
I listened to Malcolm Collins when he was on Brian Chau's podcast. While I'm glad that he's found a mate, he and his mate have no emotional awareness at all, and treat religion as a fancy game.
He's completely unconvincing to anyone aside from committed rationalists, who won't listen to him because religion is stupid. (tm)
While a project like the Collinses' may have some merit, they themselves appear to be too far gone down the wokeness hole to carry it out. They can't even bring themselves to denounce transgenderism without inserting cringeworthy disclaimers. And don't get me started on Malcom's position on porn.
Honestly, all we need to take away from this, as always, enlightened writer; “To be real a religion must constrain the will, and so the question of genuine belief can never be sidestepped. That's a hard issue if you literally own the yellow legal pad where you cooked up your doctrines as a means to another theoretical end. And if the prospect is hard for the designer, how much more for the designer’s children, much less their distant posterity.”
Succinctly, religious systems in a historical sense have lasting power due to the adherents' willful submission to a perceived greater authority outside of themselves. They are accountable to this greater authority for how closely they maintained the laws and customs built into the system. This means individuals have something even higher than the state they must answer to, and likewise sons have someone higher than their father (or the family patriarch) they are accountable to. The idol of "progress" (or whatever the current age wants to call it) is deconstructionist in nature, as it permits a near-anarchic freedom; so long as your actions/words do not harm another based on the current social norms (and in many dehumanizing cases, horrible things are permissible if the other party "consents"), you are permitted. The attempts by this couple to create a new religious system is just different wrapping paper on the same self-serving suicide cult that has enthralled the West for the past 150+ years. Satan laughs.
The only way you can have your cake and eat it too - a technocratic hyper-progressive utopia WITHOUT failing birth rates - is to industrialize human reproduction as seen in various sci-fi properties: artificial fertilization and gestation of humans in machinery. But to do that, could we even call the product humanity?
It's fitting you mention that this is a circle - without clear start or end, and totally vacuous. Reminds me of the image of Ouroboros - constantly consuming itself and producing nothing.
I couldn't agree more that a utilitarian religion is a doomed. God is greatest, and to celebrate his utility, to reduce Him to servant of something else, is to dethrone Him. Carl Schmidt wrote the fundamental distinction in aesthetics is between ugly and beautiful, in morality between good and evil and in politics between friend and enemy. I would add that in religion, which I think cannot be separated from ideology or philosophy, the central distinction is between truth and falsehood.
But this is also why I cannot believe that traditional religion, at least for myself and others like me, can be any solution. I was raised an atheist, and while I now reject the smug nihilism of New Atheism, I still think that that naturalistic view of the world is fundamentally correct. Christianity holds little rational or emotional appeal for me. The aesthetics and outlook of Paganism speak to me, but I no more believe in the polytheistic deities of Ancient Europe that Christ's divinity, so Paganism too, at least in the strict, reconstructionist sense as advocated by someone like Survive the Jive, is a nonstarter. Even if I bought into all of your arguments for the indispensably of religion, even if I became convinced that there is no solution to the fertility crisis outside of traditional religion, this still would not convince me of the truth of religion.
Better I think, to create a new religion, or at least a worldview, based on what one truly believes, than to treat God as a utilitarian instrument, as though the Almighty were a trowel.
The best example of a failed progressive attempt to re-engineer religion with Science and values of the day was August Comte’s positivist Church. Which only took hold in Brazil and was a big thing that even influenced our flag design. “Order and progress” written there was a positivist slogan. But all it did was wreck the country and depose the wildly popular and effective Catholic Emperor, Dom Pedro II. In the end the last positivist church with its “religion of humanity” closed down in Rio de Janeiro back in 2022. Finally being cast out into the dust bin of history after meeking out a pathetic existence as a quasi museum of the country’s ideological past.
This is the kind of appropriation you’d expect from lib. Homesteading vs. farming, protonatalism vs children. Nothing new here. Just two libs dancing around the lifestyle “tic” they believe they created (from scratch of course), raking in the dopamine bumps from other blues who are ONCE again, following anything. Perhaps they just ran out of ink space on their bodies. They’ll be exposed on tik tok in few years as parents who look great with kids who have rats nest in their hair. Seriously, Dave, EW.
Technology has the effect of separating oneself from one's own body, which is the reason we have such a wave of different mental issues with the current generation. One who doesn't have an innate sense of connection to a physical form is going to have a hard time reconciling their reason with the innate irrationality of their core biological urges. This is also why high IQ tends to be a fertility shredder, as they are stuck in their heads with abstract reasoning and forgetting their identity as a physical being.
Technocratic solutions to fertility fail because they see everyone is poisoned and insist more poison will solve the issue. Can we have high technology and high fertility? Yes, but not in its current form.
Noticed some typos. Here they are in case you want to fix them. Double the in "tries to fix the the problems with". Also work instead of word in "but it’s got the work “effective” in front of it".
Their video on why witchcraft is bad is good up until they aggressively misunderstand Catholicism like a caricature of seething Bible Belt evangelicals (no offense to Bible Belt evangelicals, I said they acted like a caricature).
It all strikes me as the typical “I’m so smart” arrogance leading to their folly. The Collins once again prove that Intelligence and Wisdom are two different ability scores.
> Their video on why witchcraft is bad is good up until they aggressively misunderstand Catholicism like a caricature of seething Bible Belt evangelicals
If you listen to the episodes where they talk about their family history and how proud they are of it, that's not a coincidence.
I like the Collins a lot, I've consumed a lot of their contet lately, however their religion episodes do leave me fealling I just spend half an hour doing a corporate Mision, Vision and Values exsercise.
I have trouble taking the Collinses seriously. My first thought watching their channel was that they had to be a piece of Portlandia-style performance art. The “let’s MAKE a new religion” feels like something in that vein.
This is less of a criticism than it might be because I think you have consistently the wisest Substack, but this is easily your worst article. It even has - dare I say it!? - vibes of neoconservatism about it. I'm not sure if Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a Substack attack, but if she does, I think a Like from her might be coming your way. And in the course of the meandering around the instrumentalist argument for non-instrumentalist religion, you don't address at all the most crucial points raised by the Collins.
1) You write that for a religion to be effective, people have to believe in it. Well, educated people, as a rule, don't believe in any of the actually existing religions, so now what? Collinsism obviously has a lot of handicaps, but it has one obvious advantage in that none of its teachings are demonstrably untrue things that its adherents will have to allegorise, or handwave, or relativise, or theologically torture when their kids read a Wikipedia article about geology or whatever. One of the things I noticed when reading the Ancient City is that the Indo-European traditional religious beliefs that certain dissident rightists think were so great suffered from the problem that they were just too retarded for even slghtly educated people to believe sincerely. Christianity's major advantage was not being completely ridiculous on its face. But now we all have personal computers.
2) Every smart person who knows a bit about science, archaeology, higher biblical criticism etc. and is traditionally religious has made his own personal accomodation to cope with it. You have yours and I have mine and none of them are scalable. Actual traditionalist communities with positive demographics alll have the same solution: 'Just don't think about it bro' and then set up their internal society to make it easier not to think about it. But the cost is obvious: negative selection for intelligence combined with a lifetime being trained in mental habits of credulity and unclear thought. Best case scenario you get the Amish, a nation of hearty Tim-nice-but-dims. But most groups don't have the luxury of living under the protection of the global military hegemon who chooses to leave them alone and are not so nice. In any case, you are not getting any Bachs or Titians out of any of these groups. You won't even get many engineers.
3) While traditionalist religious communities have cracked the natalism question at the expense of accepting dullard status, even this isn't scalable to countries. Iran's fertility is trash; Brazil's fertility is trash; Greece's fertility is trash. Social conservatism and fertlity are negatively correlated at the country level once you control for IQ.
4) The work of squaring utilitarian liberalism with high fertility on a theoretical level has been done by Bryan Caplan already. I won't repeat all his argument, but the main points are (1) most middle class couples irrationaly favour more convenience in their 30s over the long-term happiness of having children and grandchildren and just need to think ahead a bit more (2) most middle class couples drastically overrate how hard it is to have children because they don't know that it's mostly genetics that determine how their kids will turn out. It's true that only intelligent people with a capacity for independent, abstract thought will be receptive to these arguments, but that's not a problem *because these are the only people who you actually want to breed anyway*.
Big disagree, the problems I am pointing out here are way bigger than having certain background elements not up to date with the latest science. Religions are never up to date with the latest science, and if they were they would be out of date in the next generation anyway. People have been trying to create scientifically aligned religions for ages, they never work. If you subject your ethical religious system to deconstruction, the deconstruction will always win. People have to adopt to this reality, instead of keeping trying to beat an impossible game.
This is cope. Most people 500 years ago thought the earth was roughly as old as Genesis says because why not? Everyone even 200 years ago thought humans were created in a special act of creation because how else were they supposed to have got here? The Documentary Hypothesis is only 150 years old, and early versions of it had lots of holes and nonsense that religious people could identify and ignore the rest. Before modern archaeology got going, everyone assumed that there was going to be *some* evidence of the Exodus. I'm aware of, indeed have read far too much of, how medieval theologians struggled to harmonise their beliefs with Aristotelianism and other philosophical trends. but it's not just the same thing at all. It's a difference in quantity that amounts to a difference in quality.
To reiterate, you said, not me, that religion only works if you sincerely believe in it, and the problem is that it's pretty hard to believe in any actually existing religion if you are educated. You have your own way of dealing with this issue which you would never, I think, formally state in longform (which is the smart thing to do btw) that I guess involves a lot of aesthetics and personal experience, but these solutions are not scalable and they absolutely don't give you generational continuity.
OK, whatever. Obviously I rubbed you up the wrong way and you are not going to engage the issue at all. Have a nice day. You will at some point need something quite a lot better than this though if you want to actually achieve generational continuity. Smart inquiring people have smart inquiring kids.
"The problem is that it's pretty hard to believe in any actually existing religion if you are educated."
'Educated people' currently believe that men can become women. Most 'educated people' are blithering idiots who can argue long and loquaciously in favor of absolute nonsense. I don't care what the soon-to-be-overturned 'scientific consensus' is.
Apparently, the word 'cope' is triggering, so I'll just say that I'm sorry but the scientific consensus (a term I did not use, though you put in in quotation marks, which is a stereotypical internet rightoid tell btw) that the universe is billions of years old, or that evolution produced the diversity of species on earth, along with dozens of other issues that challenge traditional religious belief, is not going to be soon overturned.
You say the scientific consensus isn't going to be 'soon overturned', but scientific consensus is meaningless, and you have no way of knowing what the future consensus will be. Moreover, the examples you gave of 'billions of years' and 'evolution of the species' are not and cannot be 'scientific' anyway. Those are just the creation myths that scientists believe because it makes them feel smart.
It is a category error to use naturalistic thinking to analyze the supernatural. Science is a tool for analyzing the physical world, nothing more. Spirits, gods, metaphysics, and so forth cannot possibly be put into a petri dish and analyzed in a lab, even in theory. Neither can any historical event, including the age of the universe and the development of species. Until engineers invent a time machine to go back and check, everything 'Science!(tm) says about the past is nothing more than speculation.
If you look at the world with Darwinian presuppositions and mindset, you will find 'evidence' of your beliefs. This is true for every other worldview. If you don't believe in the supernatural, you will not find it anymore than a man who has plucked out his eyes will not see any evidence of light. If you take the supernatural seriously then you have to radically adjust your thinking. What meaning is there in even talking about 'billions of years' when there is an Eternal God outside time and space who can manipulate them at will?
The issue most 'religious' people have is that they still think like materialists, and are persuaded by materialist arguments. To one who rejects materialism such arguments are easily ignored as being irrelevant.
Spengler predicted that the West would walk away from Science!(tm). We can already see this happening.
I'm not sure if you really want an answer on this topic, but I'll say that basic things like red-shift observations of distant galaxies provide fairly strong evidence for the universe being billions of years old, simply based on the time it would take for light to reach us from such distant objects. At some point if you want to sustain a literal interpretation of genesis you have to argue that God meticulously created the universe in such a way as to convey a false impression in order to test your faith.
I'm in total agreement about the lunacy of trans ideology, FWIW, but the left have been willing to mix truth with lies, you could say.
I'm sympathetic to your general argument that the decline of religion is at least partly attributable to genuine conflicts between scripture and scientific evidence about the age and scale of the cosmos (or really any honest examination of the moral and factual contradictions internal to scripture), and I agree that the theory of evolution is backed by mountains of corroborating data.
However, I also think Josiah has a point about trans ideology overtaking the West with breakneck speed being a pretty clear sign that our elites aren't especially motivated by evidence. If so, perhaps the tradeoffs you propose between fecundity and enlightenment are largely illusory?
I'll respond to this post, but this is also a response to Josiah and DaFilosFur. I'll preface by saying that I am not, in fact, a Reddit Atheist or an atheist at all. I have spent the last two decades of my life living in fundamentalist religious communities, including *very* fundamentalist religious communities. I am doing my best to bring up my children as religious fundamentalists. I personally chose to teach my kids chemistry and geology and to read critically, and I hope that I didn't eternally screw up by doing so. I'm partly here to let off steam I can't let off elsewhere. What is most disturbing to me is the kneejerk TradGPT responses to what are really very basic and obvious questions. Now, to review:
1) This Substack (not me!) argues that for a religion to be effective at promoting natalism, people need to sincerely believe it. I agree!
2) This Substack argues that the fact that the doctrines of your religion were cobbled together by your dad explicitly for the purpose of promoting natalism is going to make sincere belief a tough sell. I agree!
3) I'm pointing out that, for analogous reasons, all actually existing religions make sincere belief a tough sell if you are smart enough to have gone to university.
Now, the response is basically 'if liberal educated elites can believe in trans nonsense, then they can get on board with anything'. The obvious problem with that is that *contemporary progressivism is not a religion*. Sure, we are used to the argument that wokism is 'like' a religion, but unless you are yourself a convinced materialist you can't argue that something that lacks the divine and the sublime is *actually* a religion. So maybe it's as simple as saying that religion requires sincere belief, but politics doesn't. This certainly maps with what I know about politics and my experience of normie liberals once you poke them a bit.
But let's say we go full Yarvin and say progressivism is literally a religion, what it certainly isn't is a *good* religion or, more specifically, a religion that promotes fertility. Maybe, the fact that progressivism has to constantly radicalise is a function of its inherent absurdity; it needs to continually disorientate its believers with new doctrines so they can't reflect too much on the ones they already have. This certainly fits with defective religions ('cults') of the past. Everyone knows that a liberal in 1960 is far right in 2020. But a religion, if it is going to be stable, and healthy and fruitful needs people to believe the same thing in 1960 as 2020, or at least close enough to maintain plausible deniability.
To take on your approach to the Exodus, we do have plenty of evidence of the Exodus. See On the Reliability of the Old Testament by Kenneth Kitchen.
I think people also assume that we are somehow more educated than those 500 years ago. Actually reading some of their actual books will disavow you of that belief quite quickly, with the exception of some views that are scientific. Cornelius a Lapide or Calmet would eat Bart Ehrman alive.
It's kind of telling that I make pretty basic point germane to the article and the response is a bunch of canned trad arguments as if I just turned up from the Reddit Atheism page screaming TrustTheScience. I don't think that, in general, people today are very educated, it's just a fact though that in fields including, but not limited to, geology, astronomy, Hebrew philology, archaeology, physics, biology, ancient Near East religion you can with not all that much effort *literally* know more than anyone knew even a hundred years ago and a lot of this stuff is very problematic in fairly obvious ways for traditional religious belief. One can deal with this is various ways, but the only answer that presently works at scale is Don't Think About it Bro, and that means no Aquinas, no Bach, no Michelangelo, no Milton.
This is the reasons why the Collins think a new religion is the only option. They will almost certainly fail to build anything more than a small online "community", but so will all the niche trad movements.
I don't think that it is necessarily that problematic, at least insofar as Catholicism is concerned, because we have been dealing with this academically from the beginning and explicitly dealt with this problem over 100 years ago. If one wants to, they can dive into it, and many traditional religious people do indeed do that.
In terms of "Don't think about it bro", that's most people, not even most religious people, and that's a habit and not a desirable outcome. I think it's perfectly possible to raise a society in the image I am getting at, with access to all of these sources. In fact, many of us already have families and are educating our children in this way. I should know, I'm one of them.
I wish you the best of luck. It's certainly possible you will succeed in having faithful grandchildren, and the world will be a better place if you do. Statistically, though, your chances aren't great, and I have seen far too many cases of generational wreckage, both Jews and Christians, among those who have tried to follow the higher path. Conversely, everyone I know who just agreed to turn off their brain and allowed an obscurantist community to raise their children got the grandchildren they wanted from it. And my experience is the norm.
I think the strongest external evidence is a mixture of two things. Firstly, the sacking of Canaanite cities maps pretty well to how Joshua's raids are mapped out in Joshua, where the geography is able to tell us this (For instance, Hazor, the most important city in Canaan at the time of Joshua's conquest is burnt down as Joshua describes). Second of all, all of a sudden, the population in Canaan increases 5 fold in the same period, sort of like there was a mass migration. Israel is also named for the first time in the Meneptah stele at about this time. There are other things which show inhabitation by people who followed something like the Mosaic covenant, like the bizzare absence of Pig Bones in Israelite regions while being quite present in Philistine areas.
The internal evidence in the Torah is quite interesting too. The big find is that there is a preponderence of Middle Egyptian loan words in the Torah which is out of proportion for the rest of the Old Testament. Additionally, the Ark of the Covenant is reminiscent of Ancient Egyptian styles of construction, and literary constructions like God having an "Outstretched arm" are Egyptian in character. The literary structure of the Torah, strangely, is also that of legal treaties of this time period as well, and is quite different from both earlier and later documents of this sort.
It's well worth reading Kitchen because he goes into far more depth than I can and responds to critics in the book.
It slightly predates the Darwinian era where reconciling scripture and reality got especially difficult, but would Mormonism qualify as a possible counter-example? I'm told that Mormon cosmology was designed to be up to date with the best known astrophysics of the time. Scientology might be a more recent example of a science (or at least sci-fi-inspired) religious cult taking off, though obviously both the ethics and cosmology leave a lot to be desired.
I mean... there is the cynical clown-world-uniform-interpretation that religion derives its force as a social binding agent precisely from signalling belief in ideas that lack evidence, in which case a reconciliation with science in the purest sense is impossible. I don't think religious conservatives are especially fond of this interpretation, though.
I’m not convinced at all from the argument that religion is something only stupid people follow.
The current educated class are not embracing secularism because they were rationalized away from it with their towering intellects that were just incapable of grappling with the book of Genesis. They were socialized away from it as it is associated with low status and secular technocratic thinking is high status. They are smart enough to be self interested to drift into that direction of high status.
We have had almost all of human history seeing the core of religious organization and thought being dominated and propagated by the brightest minds of their time. Dismissing them all as a bunch of well meaning dim wits that would never compare to our super smart modern brains seems…stupid.
While it is kind of wild you would cite people like Bach never coming out of religious thought or communities. Given the Bach family was an intergenerational family of renowned musicians that composed and performed music almost exclusively for religious ceremonies for centuries. I would think Bach would be an excellent example of highly educated and elite men that were products of religious culture, not something we would miss if we became religious again.
I think maybe you are an example of religion's human capital problem. Obviously, I chose Bach as an example of what Christianity was once capable of producing, and today is not capable of producing (I put him in a list with *Aquinas*). It's a bit disturbing how even an elite trad substack seems to be populated by human chatbots who struggle with pretty elementary comprehension and then splurge canned trad cliches.
What a wonderful non-response interested in calling me a dumb “elite trad”.
The thrust of what I got from your point 1 and 2 was that the smart people in our society can’t take religion seriously because they can’t get over rationalizing it. Thanks to their education and easy access to information in the modern day.
My challenge to that is that it is not because we are such big brain moderns with access to information that proves to use how stupid religion is. But because we have socialized our educated classes to associate religion with being low status peasants and secularism as a high status thing to value. I think that is rooted in technocratic, materialist, and liberal values within society and education, all of which presuppose traditional religions as antagonistic.
This has not been a permanent fixture to our thought leaders; a more recent phenomenon where people who thought like that were outsiders as opposed to those running things. You seem to recognize this, but you seem to say this change is because we have geology textbooks and Wikipedia now.
I suppose I just struggle with seeing how things like that are the root causes. There are plenty of serious economic and social problems with detailed materialist analysis that our educated class willingly ignores and actively makes worse because of dumb ideas they have about it. It is commonly taboo to challenge their solutions because it violates their sensibilities more than is false. However, if it has to do with God, we are supposed to throw up our hands and admit that they are too smart for it?
It's a fair point, but couldn't insular religious communities self-educate their children on the subjects of geology and astrophysics and so on, if they didn't pose any intrinsic threat to their own belief systems? I mean, I suppose a few are attempting this, but the Hutterites and Hasidim are notable for *not* doing so, despite the former being relatively wealthy and technologically astute, and the latter having plenty of time for study.
I’d agree with this, as I do not agree with his opinion that all of the current traditional religious communities are producing dumb cattle. They are just producing people that do not communicate with secular liberal materialists on the terms the secular liberal materialists identify as “smart” or at least as high status.
My comment was less a recommendation per se and more a suggestion that insular religious communities may be declining to pursue advanced scholarship because of a genuine intrinsic conflict between the technical sciences and traditional religious belief. I could be wrong, but I haven't seen a community combine both as of yet.
There's probably plenty of intelligence potential locked up in insular religious communities like the Amish, but I do wonder about the effects of 'evaporative cooling' via defectors leaving the population, and the observation that more technologically conservative factions have higher fertility rates, even within the sample.
> Actual traditionalist communities with positive demographics alll have the same solution: 'Just don't think about it bro' and then set up their internal society to make it easier not to think about it. But the cost is obvious: negative selection for intelligence combined with a lifetime being trained in mental habits of credulity and unclear thought.
This is an outright bizarre statement to make. Many trad communities are formed because of intelligent people seeing the huge issues of modernity and seeking something else. This requires a huge amount of reflection and abstact thought.
The homeschool co-op my kids go to was started by a guy with a Phd. The most popular traditional Church in my diocese is funded by some of the most educated and powerful people in the area.
Traditional communities have heard all the arguments, and contrary to your beliefs, have been inundated in arguments against their worldview their entire life. They've heard it all. Contrast this with your modern progressive, who I can guarantee has an order of magnitude more thought-severing defenses when discourse goes into icky territory that challenges their worldview.
I'm not talking about some niche LARPing group that is 'formed' by educated progressives who get dissatisfied with modernity. None of these have any generational continuity at all and they are sociologically of no significance. All large and growing groups of religious people base their society on Don't Think About it Bro. Touch grass.
I am talking about Amish (370,000 people), Charedim (1,800,000 people), Laestadians (200,000), Pentecostalism (279,000,000 people!). You are talking about a few dozen very White families in Palo Alto agonising about whether they resonate more with Armenian Orthodoxy or Nestorianism. I wish you the best of luck, of course, but these are just not the same things. The reality is that a lot of clever people who have put a lot of thought into how to to make traditional religion work in the modern world. Everything has been tried many times, and none of them work at scale, except one: Don't Think About it Bro.
“Indo-European traditional religious beliefs that certain dissident rightists think were so great suffered from the problem that they were just too retarded for even slghtly educated people to believe sincerely. Christianity's major advantage was not being completely ridiculous on its face.”
This book is widely recommended on the Dissident Right and it is indeed a very good book. But it seemed obvious to me that it proved almost the opposite of what it is purportedly supposed to prove.
I appreciate IP and I’ll definitely read that one when I can, but for the sake of discussion, could you perhaps share a few of the things you found ridiculous?
Going to the grave of your ancestors and pouring rice pudding on it because otherwise your hungry ancestors will haunt you, and, moreover, restricting the right to pour the rice pudding to one member of the clan, whereas anyone else who touched the rice pudding defiles it.
In general, the first half book uses various techniques to infer the existence of the pre-writing-era Indo European social order, shows how strong and and cohesive this order was. The second half of the book shows that this social order started collapsing the second people in it had a few minutes when they weren't farming or fighting to reflect on whether any of it made any sense whatsoever.
That article is the purest manifestation of Religion as strategy game tech tree I have ever seen. It's as if, being fundamentally secular people, they don't understand that the compelling aspect of religion is the fact that it provides a much truer vision of reality than anything that they have experienced in the world of best practices and scientific papers. Even the falsest traditional religions have more than such people.
I can't possibly be as friendly towards this as you, Dave. I think I'd very much enjoy squishing this transparent lie of a "faith".
I mean if your goal is to follow that of either to double down on the Orthodox church or Roman Catholic church I think I hedge my bets with the Collins project toward creating a new religious sect, though the only difference I do is it would be less secular and more in line with how Protestants go about creating new church body as those tend to have a better historical track record with helping to increase fertility rates.
They’ll break down into the “sparkle creed” in a few generations
Well the "sparkle creed" in its current form is barely a decade old and I'd be shocked if it managed to last a full generation, much less several.
Correct - and then the only ones surviving will be the Orthodox or the Roman Catholic church. (As well as smaller cults like LDS, JWs, or the Amish.)
I think if the last 200 years tells us anything, it's that these sorts of secularish religions tend to fail
well secular religion has been in a entropic state of decay from the the original mainline protestant sect religions for the last 400 years.
But even then sure if they are trying to form a new religious sect out of Abrahamic religions I still would say is better trying that then trying to return to an older traditional Christian group. Especially if we look at the current graph those same groups aren't fairing any better then the progressives. and don't even try looking at the evengelical baptist types who currently right now all they can do is maintain their population but never seem to grow it.
Best example of Christians winning right now are all new modern protestant Christian groups that don't interface with modern technology and don't send women into high education. Those two optimizations along with a solid community aimed at something higher seem to be what helps the most when it comes to increasing fertility rate
It's precisely this attitude of worshipping the line before God that makes this sort of system so fragile. The point isn't to please the line, it's to please God. Therefore, any sort of decline will immediately make such a straightforwardly fake congregation collapse.
I don't think you could actually prove this
The Collins don't even have a reason for interpreting the world as they do. It's literally just because they think it's beneficial for the future they would like to see. Maybe if they could at least show why they think God sits at the end of time and tries to guide us into the stars their religion would have a chance, but there is literally no reason to believe that except the benefits they see from it.
What other texts or prophets from history do they see that proves this, for example? Because you can't prove that god's existence with just the Bible.
And how do we know which efforts here on Earth will help us get to the stars? Their god will guide us, somehow, but how will we recognize his signs of which studies, engineers, companies and scientists to support? It's completely nonsensical.
The "faith" is just
Step 1. Have more children
Step 2. Tell them God will guide them to the stars
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Technofuturism
"What other texts or prophets from history do they see that proves this, for example? Because you can't prove that god's existence with just the Bible"
I think it's just the basic Pinker-esque/Kurzweilian argument for increasing cognitive complexity and moral awareness over evolutionary and historical timescales, albeit with a lot of bumps and hiccups. You can make the argument that the analysis is wrong- and I do think there's good evidence for backsliding according to various measures in the post-industrial period- but you can't say that it's entirely unrooted in historical observation. A lot of what Pinker has to say about the past is accurate, as far as I can tell, and I don't think it's tenable to argue that man isn't superior in value to something like a Lemur.
I broadly agree with Dave that progressivism has more to answer for than the Collins appreciate and reaching a kind of critical mass with regard to adoption of community norms may be fundamentally difficult if 'maximise freedom' is enshrined as your primary goal and pursued myopically. But I don't think "increase knowledge, health, and cooperation" are particularly subjective virtues, and with an adequate recognition of the facts of mortality and heredity this leads to something functionally resembling conservatism.
Ooh. Somebody’s on top of the game. Well said.😌
I listened to Malcolm Collins when he was on Brian Chau's podcast. While I'm glad that he's found a mate, he and his mate have no emotional awareness at all, and treat religion as a fancy game.
He's completely unconvincing to anyone aside from committed rationalists, who won't listen to him because religion is stupid. (tm)
While a project like the Collinses' may have some merit, they themselves appear to be too far gone down the wokeness hole to carry it out. They can't even bring themselves to denounce transgenderism without inserting cringeworthy disclaimers. And don't get me started on Malcom's position on porn.
Honestly, all we need to take away from this, as always, enlightened writer; “To be real a religion must constrain the will, and so the question of genuine belief can never be sidestepped. That's a hard issue if you literally own the yellow legal pad where you cooked up your doctrines as a means to another theoretical end. And if the prospect is hard for the designer, how much more for the designer’s children, much less their distant posterity.”
This was an inch away from our Read of the Week, really enjoyed.
Succinctly, religious systems in a historical sense have lasting power due to the adherents' willful submission to a perceived greater authority outside of themselves. They are accountable to this greater authority for how closely they maintained the laws and customs built into the system. This means individuals have something even higher than the state they must answer to, and likewise sons have someone higher than their father (or the family patriarch) they are accountable to. The idol of "progress" (or whatever the current age wants to call it) is deconstructionist in nature, as it permits a near-anarchic freedom; so long as your actions/words do not harm another based on the current social norms (and in many dehumanizing cases, horrible things are permissible if the other party "consents"), you are permitted. The attempts by this couple to create a new religious system is just different wrapping paper on the same self-serving suicide cult that has enthralled the West for the past 150+ years. Satan laughs.
The only way you can have your cake and eat it too - a technocratic hyper-progressive utopia WITHOUT failing birth rates - is to industrialize human reproduction as seen in various sci-fi properties: artificial fertilization and gestation of humans in machinery. But to do that, could we even call the product humanity?
It's fitting you mention that this is a circle - without clear start or end, and totally vacuous. Reminds me of the image of Ouroboros - constantly consuming itself and producing nothing.
I couldn't agree more that a utilitarian religion is a doomed. God is greatest, and to celebrate his utility, to reduce Him to servant of something else, is to dethrone Him. Carl Schmidt wrote the fundamental distinction in aesthetics is between ugly and beautiful, in morality between good and evil and in politics between friend and enemy. I would add that in religion, which I think cannot be separated from ideology or philosophy, the central distinction is between truth and falsehood.
But this is also why I cannot believe that traditional religion, at least for myself and others like me, can be any solution. I was raised an atheist, and while I now reject the smug nihilism of New Atheism, I still think that that naturalistic view of the world is fundamentally correct. Christianity holds little rational or emotional appeal for me. The aesthetics and outlook of Paganism speak to me, but I no more believe in the polytheistic deities of Ancient Europe that Christ's divinity, so Paganism too, at least in the strict, reconstructionist sense as advocated by someone like Survive the Jive, is a nonstarter. Even if I bought into all of your arguments for the indispensably of religion, even if I became convinced that there is no solution to the fertility crisis outside of traditional religion, this still would not convince me of the truth of religion.
Better I think, to create a new religion, or at least a worldview, based on what one truly believes, than to treat God as a utilitarian instrument, as though the Almighty were a trowel.
Agreed
The best example of a failed progressive attempt to re-engineer religion with Science and values of the day was August Comte’s positivist Church. Which only took hold in Brazil and was a big thing that even influenced our flag design. “Order and progress” written there was a positivist slogan. But all it did was wreck the country and depose the wildly popular and effective Catholic Emperor, Dom Pedro II. In the end the last positivist church with its “religion of humanity” closed down in Rio de Janeiro back in 2022. Finally being cast out into the dust bin of history after meeking out a pathetic existence as a quasi museum of the country’s ideological past.
This is the kind of appropriation you’d expect from lib. Homesteading vs. farming, protonatalism vs children. Nothing new here. Just two libs dancing around the lifestyle “tic” they believe they created (from scratch of course), raking in the dopamine bumps from other blues who are ONCE again, following anything. Perhaps they just ran out of ink space on their bodies. They’ll be exposed on tik tok in few years as parents who look great with kids who have rats nest in their hair. Seriously, Dave, EW.
Technology has the effect of separating oneself from one's own body, which is the reason we have such a wave of different mental issues with the current generation. One who doesn't have an innate sense of connection to a physical form is going to have a hard time reconciling their reason with the innate irrationality of their core biological urges. This is also why high IQ tends to be a fertility shredder, as they are stuck in their heads with abstract reasoning and forgetting their identity as a physical being.
Technocratic solutions to fertility fail because they see everyone is poisoned and insist more poison will solve the issue. Can we have high technology and high fertility? Yes, but not in its current form.
Noticed some typos. Here they are in case you want to fix them. Double the in "tries to fix the the problems with". Also work instead of word in "but it’s got the work “effective” in front of it".
Yeah I didn't have Grammarly installed on the new computer, fixed.
Their video on why witchcraft is bad is good up until they aggressively misunderstand Catholicism like a caricature of seething Bible Belt evangelicals (no offense to Bible Belt evangelicals, I said they acted like a caricature).
It all strikes me as the typical “I’m so smart” arrogance leading to their folly. The Collins once again prove that Intelligence and Wisdom are two different ability scores.
> Their video on why witchcraft is bad is good up until they aggressively misunderstand Catholicism like a caricature of seething Bible Belt evangelicals
If you listen to the episodes where they talk about their family history and how proud they are of it, that's not a coincidence.
I like the Collins a lot, I've consumed a lot of their contet lately, however their religion episodes do leave me fealling I just spend half an hour doing a corporate Mision, Vision and Values exsercise.
I have trouble taking the Collinses seriously. My first thought watching their channel was that they had to be a piece of Portlandia-style performance art. The “let’s MAKE a new religion” feels like something in that vein.
This is less of a criticism than it might be because I think you have consistently the wisest Substack, but this is easily your worst article. It even has - dare I say it!? - vibes of neoconservatism about it. I'm not sure if Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a Substack attack, but if she does, I think a Like from her might be coming your way. And in the course of the meandering around the instrumentalist argument for non-instrumentalist religion, you don't address at all the most crucial points raised by the Collins.
1) You write that for a religion to be effective, people have to believe in it. Well, educated people, as a rule, don't believe in any of the actually existing religions, so now what? Collinsism obviously has a lot of handicaps, but it has one obvious advantage in that none of its teachings are demonstrably untrue things that its adherents will have to allegorise, or handwave, or relativise, or theologically torture when their kids read a Wikipedia article about geology or whatever. One of the things I noticed when reading the Ancient City is that the Indo-European traditional religious beliefs that certain dissident rightists think were so great suffered from the problem that they were just too retarded for even slghtly educated people to believe sincerely. Christianity's major advantage was not being completely ridiculous on its face. But now we all have personal computers.
2) Every smart person who knows a bit about science, archaeology, higher biblical criticism etc. and is traditionally religious has made his own personal accomodation to cope with it. You have yours and I have mine and none of them are scalable. Actual traditionalist communities with positive demographics alll have the same solution: 'Just don't think about it bro' and then set up their internal society to make it easier not to think about it. But the cost is obvious: negative selection for intelligence combined with a lifetime being trained in mental habits of credulity and unclear thought. Best case scenario you get the Amish, a nation of hearty Tim-nice-but-dims. But most groups don't have the luxury of living under the protection of the global military hegemon who chooses to leave them alone and are not so nice. In any case, you are not getting any Bachs or Titians out of any of these groups. You won't even get many engineers.
3) While traditionalist religious communities have cracked the natalism question at the expense of accepting dullard status, even this isn't scalable to countries. Iran's fertility is trash; Brazil's fertility is trash; Greece's fertility is trash. Social conservatism and fertlity are negatively correlated at the country level once you control for IQ.
4) The work of squaring utilitarian liberalism with high fertility on a theoretical level has been done by Bryan Caplan already. I won't repeat all his argument, but the main points are (1) most middle class couples irrationaly favour more convenience in their 30s over the long-term happiness of having children and grandchildren and just need to think ahead a bit more (2) most middle class couples drastically overrate how hard it is to have children because they don't know that it's mostly genetics that determine how their kids will turn out. It's true that only intelligent people with a capacity for independent, abstract thought will be receptive to these arguments, but that's not a problem *because these are the only people who you actually want to breed anyway*.
Big disagree, the problems I am pointing out here are way bigger than having certain background elements not up to date with the latest science. Religions are never up to date with the latest science, and if they were they would be out of date in the next generation anyway. People have been trying to create scientifically aligned religions for ages, they never work. If you subject your ethical religious system to deconstruction, the deconstruction will always win. People have to adopt to this reality, instead of keeping trying to beat an impossible game.
This is cope. Most people 500 years ago thought the earth was roughly as old as Genesis says because why not? Everyone even 200 years ago thought humans were created in a special act of creation because how else were they supposed to have got here? The Documentary Hypothesis is only 150 years old, and early versions of it had lots of holes and nonsense that religious people could identify and ignore the rest. Before modern archaeology got going, everyone assumed that there was going to be *some* evidence of the Exodus. I'm aware of, indeed have read far too much of, how medieval theologians struggled to harmonise their beliefs with Aristotelianism and other philosophical trends. but it's not just the same thing at all. It's a difference in quantity that amounts to a difference in quality.
To reiterate, you said, not me, that religion only works if you sincerely believe in it, and the problem is that it's pretty hard to believe in any actually existing religion if you are educated. You have your own way of dealing with this issue which you would never, I think, formally state in longform (which is the smart thing to do btw) that I guess involves a lot of aesthetics and personal experience, but these solutions are not scalable and they absolutely don't give you generational continuity.
Uggg “cope”, an expressed disagreement can’t be entertained without psychologically disqualifying it.
OK, whatever. Obviously I rubbed you up the wrong way and you are not going to engage the issue at all. Have a nice day. You will at some point need something quite a lot better than this though if you want to actually achieve generational continuity. Smart inquiring people have smart inquiring kids.
"The problem is that it's pretty hard to believe in any actually existing religion if you are educated."
'Educated people' currently believe that men can become women. Most 'educated people' are blithering idiots who can argue long and loquaciously in favor of absolute nonsense. I don't care what the soon-to-be-overturned 'scientific consensus' is.
Apparently, the word 'cope' is triggering, so I'll just say that I'm sorry but the scientific consensus (a term I did not use, though you put in in quotation marks, which is a stereotypical internet rightoid tell btw) that the universe is billions of years old, or that evolution produced the diversity of species on earth, along with dozens of other issues that challenge traditional religious belief, is not going to be soon overturned.
You say the scientific consensus isn't going to be 'soon overturned', but scientific consensus is meaningless, and you have no way of knowing what the future consensus will be. Moreover, the examples you gave of 'billions of years' and 'evolution of the species' are not and cannot be 'scientific' anyway. Those are just the creation myths that scientists believe because it makes them feel smart.
It is a category error to use naturalistic thinking to analyze the supernatural. Science is a tool for analyzing the physical world, nothing more. Spirits, gods, metaphysics, and so forth cannot possibly be put into a petri dish and analyzed in a lab, even in theory. Neither can any historical event, including the age of the universe and the development of species. Until engineers invent a time machine to go back and check, everything 'Science!(tm) says about the past is nothing more than speculation.
If you look at the world with Darwinian presuppositions and mindset, you will find 'evidence' of your beliefs. This is true for every other worldview. If you don't believe in the supernatural, you will not find it anymore than a man who has plucked out his eyes will not see any evidence of light. If you take the supernatural seriously then you have to radically adjust your thinking. What meaning is there in even talking about 'billions of years' when there is an Eternal God outside time and space who can manipulate them at will?
The issue most 'religious' people have is that they still think like materialists, and are persuaded by materialist arguments. To one who rejects materialism such arguments are easily ignored as being irrelevant.
Spengler predicted that the West would walk away from Science!(tm). We can already see this happening.
I'm not sure if you really want an answer on this topic, but I'll say that basic things like red-shift observations of distant galaxies provide fairly strong evidence for the universe being billions of years old, simply based on the time it would take for light to reach us from such distant objects. At some point if you want to sustain a literal interpretation of genesis you have to argue that God meticulously created the universe in such a way as to convey a false impression in order to test your faith.
I'm in total agreement about the lunacy of trans ideology, FWIW, but the left have been willing to mix truth with lies, you could say.
I'm sympathetic to your general argument that the decline of religion is at least partly attributable to genuine conflicts between scripture and scientific evidence about the age and scale of the cosmos (or really any honest examination of the moral and factual contradictions internal to scripture), and I agree that the theory of evolution is backed by mountains of corroborating data.
However, I also think Josiah has a point about trans ideology overtaking the West with breakneck speed being a pretty clear sign that our elites aren't especially motivated by evidence. If so, perhaps the tradeoffs you propose between fecundity and enlightenment are largely illusory?
I'll respond to this post, but this is also a response to Josiah and DaFilosFur. I'll preface by saying that I am not, in fact, a Reddit Atheist or an atheist at all. I have spent the last two decades of my life living in fundamentalist religious communities, including *very* fundamentalist religious communities. I am doing my best to bring up my children as religious fundamentalists. I personally chose to teach my kids chemistry and geology and to read critically, and I hope that I didn't eternally screw up by doing so. I'm partly here to let off steam I can't let off elsewhere. What is most disturbing to me is the kneejerk TradGPT responses to what are really very basic and obvious questions. Now, to review:
1) This Substack (not me!) argues that for a religion to be effective at promoting natalism, people need to sincerely believe it. I agree!
2) This Substack argues that the fact that the doctrines of your religion were cobbled together by your dad explicitly for the purpose of promoting natalism is going to make sincere belief a tough sell. I agree!
3) I'm pointing out that, for analogous reasons, all actually existing religions make sincere belief a tough sell if you are smart enough to have gone to university.
Now, the response is basically 'if liberal educated elites can believe in trans nonsense, then they can get on board with anything'. The obvious problem with that is that *contemporary progressivism is not a religion*. Sure, we are used to the argument that wokism is 'like' a religion, but unless you are yourself a convinced materialist you can't argue that something that lacks the divine and the sublime is *actually* a religion. So maybe it's as simple as saying that religion requires sincere belief, but politics doesn't. This certainly maps with what I know about politics and my experience of normie liberals once you poke them a bit.
But let's say we go full Yarvin and say progressivism is literally a religion, what it certainly isn't is a *good* religion or, more specifically, a religion that promotes fertility. Maybe, the fact that progressivism has to constantly radicalise is a function of its inherent absurdity; it needs to continually disorientate its believers with new doctrines so they can't reflect too much on the ones they already have. This certainly fits with defective religions ('cults') of the past. Everyone knows that a liberal in 1960 is far right in 2020. But a religion, if it is going to be stable, and healthy and fruitful needs people to believe the same thing in 1960 as 2020, or at least close enough to maintain plausible deniability.
To take on your approach to the Exodus, we do have plenty of evidence of the Exodus. See On the Reliability of the Old Testament by Kenneth Kitchen.
I think people also assume that we are somehow more educated than those 500 years ago. Actually reading some of their actual books will disavow you of that belief quite quickly, with the exception of some views that are scientific. Cornelius a Lapide or Calmet would eat Bart Ehrman alive.
It's kind of telling that I make pretty basic point germane to the article and the response is a bunch of canned trad arguments as if I just turned up from the Reddit Atheism page screaming TrustTheScience. I don't think that, in general, people today are very educated, it's just a fact though that in fields including, but not limited to, geology, astronomy, Hebrew philology, archaeology, physics, biology, ancient Near East religion you can with not all that much effort *literally* know more than anyone knew even a hundred years ago and a lot of this stuff is very problematic in fairly obvious ways for traditional religious belief. One can deal with this is various ways, but the only answer that presently works at scale is Don't Think About it Bro, and that means no Aquinas, no Bach, no Michelangelo, no Milton.
This is the reasons why the Collins think a new religion is the only option. They will almost certainly fail to build anything more than a small online "community", but so will all the niche trad movements.
I don't think that it is necessarily that problematic, at least insofar as Catholicism is concerned, because we have been dealing with this academically from the beginning and explicitly dealt with this problem over 100 years ago. If one wants to, they can dive into it, and many traditional religious people do indeed do that.
In terms of "Don't think about it bro", that's most people, not even most religious people, and that's a habit and not a desirable outcome. I think it's perfectly possible to raise a society in the image I am getting at, with access to all of these sources. In fact, many of us already have families and are educating our children in this way. I should know, I'm one of them.
I wish you the best of luck. It's certainly possible you will succeed in having faithful grandchildren, and the world will be a better place if you do. Statistically, though, your chances aren't great, and I have seen far too many cases of generational wreckage, both Jews and Christians, among those who have tried to follow the higher path. Conversely, everyone I know who just agreed to turn off their brain and allowed an obscurantist community to raise their children got the grandchildren they wanted from it. And my experience is the norm.
Can you summarise evidence for the Exodus briefly?
Sure.
I think the strongest external evidence is a mixture of two things. Firstly, the sacking of Canaanite cities maps pretty well to how Joshua's raids are mapped out in Joshua, where the geography is able to tell us this (For instance, Hazor, the most important city in Canaan at the time of Joshua's conquest is burnt down as Joshua describes). Second of all, all of a sudden, the population in Canaan increases 5 fold in the same period, sort of like there was a mass migration. Israel is also named for the first time in the Meneptah stele at about this time. There are other things which show inhabitation by people who followed something like the Mosaic covenant, like the bizzare absence of Pig Bones in Israelite regions while being quite present in Philistine areas.
The internal evidence in the Torah is quite interesting too. The big find is that there is a preponderence of Middle Egyptian loan words in the Torah which is out of proportion for the rest of the Old Testament. Additionally, the Ark of the Covenant is reminiscent of Ancient Egyptian styles of construction, and literary constructions like God having an "Outstretched arm" are Egyptian in character. The literary structure of the Torah, strangely, is also that of legal treaties of this time period as well, and is quite different from both earlier and later documents of this sort.
It's well worth reading Kitchen because he goes into far more depth than I can and responds to critics in the book.
Interesting. I appreciate the rundown.
It slightly predates the Darwinian era where reconciling scripture and reality got especially difficult, but would Mormonism qualify as a possible counter-example? I'm told that Mormon cosmology was designed to be up to date with the best known astrophysics of the time. Scientology might be a more recent example of a science (or at least sci-fi-inspired) religious cult taking off, though obviously both the ethics and cosmology leave a lot to be desired.
I mean... there is the cynical clown-world-uniform-interpretation that religion derives its force as a social binding agent precisely from signalling belief in ideas that lack evidence, in which case a reconciliation with science in the purest sense is impossible. I don't think religious conservatives are especially fond of this interpretation, though.
I’m not convinced at all from the argument that religion is something only stupid people follow.
The current educated class are not embracing secularism because they were rationalized away from it with their towering intellects that were just incapable of grappling with the book of Genesis. They were socialized away from it as it is associated with low status and secular technocratic thinking is high status. They are smart enough to be self interested to drift into that direction of high status.
We have had almost all of human history seeing the core of religious organization and thought being dominated and propagated by the brightest minds of their time. Dismissing them all as a bunch of well meaning dim wits that would never compare to our super smart modern brains seems…stupid.
While it is kind of wild you would cite people like Bach never coming out of religious thought or communities. Given the Bach family was an intergenerational family of renowned musicians that composed and performed music almost exclusively for religious ceremonies for centuries. I would think Bach would be an excellent example of highly educated and elite men that were products of religious culture, not something we would miss if we became religious again.
I think maybe you are an example of religion's human capital problem. Obviously, I chose Bach as an example of what Christianity was once capable of producing, and today is not capable of producing (I put him in a list with *Aquinas*). It's a bit disturbing how even an elite trad substack seems to be populated by human chatbots who struggle with pretty elementary comprehension and then splurge canned trad cliches.
What a wonderful non-response interested in calling me a dumb “elite trad”.
The thrust of what I got from your point 1 and 2 was that the smart people in our society can’t take religion seriously because they can’t get over rationalizing it. Thanks to their education and easy access to information in the modern day.
My challenge to that is that it is not because we are such big brain moderns with access to information that proves to use how stupid religion is. But because we have socialized our educated classes to associate religion with being low status peasants and secularism as a high status thing to value. I think that is rooted in technocratic, materialist, and liberal values within society and education, all of which presuppose traditional religions as antagonistic.
This has not been a permanent fixture to our thought leaders; a more recent phenomenon where people who thought like that were outsiders as opposed to those running things. You seem to recognize this, but you seem to say this change is because we have geology textbooks and Wikipedia now.
I suppose I just struggle with seeing how things like that are the root causes. There are plenty of serious economic and social problems with detailed materialist analysis that our educated class willingly ignores and actively makes worse because of dumb ideas they have about it. It is commonly taboo to challenge their solutions because it violates their sensibilities more than is false. However, if it has to do with God, we are supposed to throw up our hands and admit that they are too smart for it?
It's a fair point, but couldn't insular religious communities self-educate their children on the subjects of geology and astrophysics and so on, if they didn't pose any intrinsic threat to their own belief systems? I mean, I suppose a few are attempting this, but the Hutterites and Hasidim are notable for *not* doing so, despite the former being relatively wealthy and technologically astute, and the latter having plenty of time for study.
I’d agree with this, as I do not agree with his opinion that all of the current traditional religious communities are producing dumb cattle. They are just producing people that do not communicate with secular liberal materialists on the terms the secular liberal materialists identify as “smart” or at least as high status.
My comment was less a recommendation per se and more a suggestion that insular religious communities may be declining to pursue advanced scholarship because of a genuine intrinsic conflict between the technical sciences and traditional religious belief. I could be wrong, but I haven't seen a community combine both as of yet.
There's probably plenty of intelligence potential locked up in insular religious communities like the Amish, but I do wonder about the effects of 'evaporative cooling' via defectors leaving the population, and the observation that more technologically conservative factions have higher fertility rates, even within the sample.
> Actual traditionalist communities with positive demographics alll have the same solution: 'Just don't think about it bro' and then set up their internal society to make it easier not to think about it. But the cost is obvious: negative selection for intelligence combined with a lifetime being trained in mental habits of credulity and unclear thought.
This is an outright bizarre statement to make. Many trad communities are formed because of intelligent people seeing the huge issues of modernity and seeking something else. This requires a huge amount of reflection and abstact thought.
The homeschool co-op my kids go to was started by a guy with a Phd. The most popular traditional Church in my diocese is funded by some of the most educated and powerful people in the area.
Traditional communities have heard all the arguments, and contrary to your beliefs, have been inundated in arguments against their worldview their entire life. They've heard it all. Contrast this with your modern progressive, who I can guarantee has an order of magnitude more thought-severing defenses when discourse goes into icky territory that challenges their worldview.
I'm not talking about some niche LARPing group that is 'formed' by educated progressives who get dissatisfied with modernity. None of these have any generational continuity at all and they are sociologically of no significance. All large and growing groups of religious people base their society on Don't Think About it Bro. Touch grass.
> None of these have any generational continuity at all and they are sociologically of no significance.
Want to bet? A lot of the guys in this circle are third generation, and it's rapidly increasing.
> All large and growing groups of religious people base their society on Don't Think About it Bro.
Your assertion is just that, an assertion. It has no correlation to reality.
I am talking about Amish (370,000 people), Charedim (1,800,000 people), Laestadians (200,000), Pentecostalism (279,000,000 people!). You are talking about a few dozen very White families in Palo Alto agonising about whether they resonate more with Armenian Orthodoxy or Nestorianism. I wish you the best of luck, of course, but these are just not the same things. The reality is that a lot of clever people who have put a lot of thought into how to to make traditional religion work in the modern world. Everything has been tried many times, and none of them work at scale, except one: Don't Think About it Bro.
“Indo-European traditional religious beliefs that certain dissident rightists think were so great suffered from the problem that they were just too retarded for even slghtly educated people to believe sincerely. Christianity's major advantage was not being completely ridiculous on its face.”
What are you talking about?
https://www.imperiumpress.org/shop/the-ancient-city/
This book is widely recommended on the Dissident Right and it is indeed a very good book. But it seemed obvious to me that it proved almost the opposite of what it is purportedly supposed to prove.
I appreciate IP and I’ll definitely read that one when I can, but for the sake of discussion, could you perhaps share a few of the things you found ridiculous?
Going to the grave of your ancestors and pouring rice pudding on it because otherwise your hungry ancestors will haunt you, and, moreover, restricting the right to pour the rice pudding to one member of the clan, whereas anyone else who touched the rice pudding defiles it.
In general, the first half book uses various techniques to infer the existence of the pre-writing-era Indo European social order, shows how strong and and cohesive this order was. The second half of the book shows that this social order started collapsing the second people in it had a few minutes when they weren't farming or fighting to reflect on whether any of it made any sense whatsoever.
Malcolm Collins physiognomy check: failed.