
The Digitized Culture Wars - longdefeat
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-digitized-culture-wars
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exolymph
One of the best newsletters going at the moment.

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Kednicma
The author doesn't quite put it in one sentence, perhaps because they feel
that it would commit them to a side, but I notice that they lay out all the
ingredients for the thesis that one side of the culture wars is fueled by a
desire to impose Christian moral authority upon the USA. Such authority has
been undermined by a pair of understandable happenstances: It happens that
empiricism and the scientific method are simply better at making predictions
about the world than priestly divination, and it also happens that the abuses
and frauds committed behind church doors keep coming to light.

I wonder to what degree some participants in the culture war are trying to
simply communicate the idea that we do not need a deity to deliver unto us
tablets of moral rules, and running up against folks who cannot imagine
existence without Jehovah.

~~~
tengbretson
I'm curious to hear how you are making the jump from "empiricism and the
scientific method are simply better at making predictions about the world" to
deriving any kind of moral order that instructs how you ought to act in this
world.

~~~
msla
> I'm curious to hear how you are making the jump from "empiricism and the
> scientific method are simply better at making predictions about the world"
> to deriving any kind of moral order that instructs how you ought to act in
> this world.

I'm curious to hear why you need an explicit moral order in your life at all.

Imagine you didn't believe in any religion, if you happen to be religious now,
and further imagine we were alone and nobody would know what you or I did
after it was done. If I walked up to you and gave you a gun, would you shoot
me? I'm pretty sure you wouldn't. My society is pretty sure you wouldn't. It
has, after all, bet the existence of New York City on that proposition. NYC
has a population of a bit over eight million. If even 0.1% of them were
utterly amoral and violent, the city would collapse under the weight of eight
thousand murderers. Extrapolate for Tokyo, London, Beijing, Singapore...
humanity bets quite a lot on the notion that most people, when handed a way to
commit a perfect murder, would not do so.

~~~
jacobush
Sidenote but, amoral does not imply stupid. There are wolves among us.

