I wouldn’t be a Christian

[Belacqua]

Not all christians are foolish or unkind, the majority I interact with are not. But most are unthinking when it comes to interactions with atheists.

Yes, I reject their thoughts in part, the part that they tie any thought(s) to the existence of a god, and are the a result of a god. You can tell me which thoughts you consider great and I'll tell you what I think of them.

I'm sure that many many people use their religion as justification for bad things. I would never excuse that. And there's no need to look into the work of the better Christians, if that isn't interesting to you.

---

But perhaps that reflects more on those people than it does on Christianity in general.

Well, anyone who ever wrote a sentence is an individual working out of a tradition. I wouldn't want to attribute sentences we like to the individual and sentences we don't like to the tradition. 

Millions and millions of people are convinced that homosexuality is somehow wrong. Why? It says so in the book.

I don't agree with them. And the Thomists and others who base this on Natural Law theory, instead of commandments, I also disagree with. Fortunately, things change, and many modern Christians have no problem with it. 

Christianity as a mode of transcendence almost doesn't deserve to be called "Christianity."

This seems very strange to me. Does the whole history of mystical experience in Christian Europe somehow get discounted now? I'm feeling a little bit of a No True Scotsman thing going on. 

At a colloquial level, if you ask someone what Christianity is, they will point to a cultural phenomenon... not anything related at all to the ideas of Augustine or William James. You ought not blame anyone for assuming the colloquial definition of something. That's unfair. (And Augustine is a bit of a sore spot for some here because (regardless of what the man actually wrote) he is used to move goalposts when Christians feel the need to do greasy apologetics.

If modern American Christians have some version of the religion which is unaware of the great thinkers of their church, they are being foolish. I wish they would study more. But I don't see how that stops me from getting the wisdom from the people that they have rejected. 

And Augustine is not responsible for anybody's greasy apologetics. 

For all the good that can be found in Christianity (and I agree, there is good to be found), there is also a rottenness in it whose source can be traced back to its core tenets: the belief that people are wicked and immoral deviants that deserve eternal torment, the belief that sex between consenting adults is somehow immoral, the belief in Hell... it is by propagating beliefs such as these that Christianity creates distress. And in light of all the distress it has created, it is understandable that some people have a generally negative attitude about it:

Yes, the things you name cause distress. Some Christians (e.g. those in the tradition best exemplified by William Blake) would disagree that they are core tenets. Again, there are different types. 

Then there is the possibility that we should be distressed about certain things. Harsh self-criticism goes against the spirit of our own times, but is probably justified. One of the good things about the very strange writing of people like Simone Weil is that their values are so completely at odds with those of our own society. The degree to which we are soaked into bourgeois liberal society, and its core tenets, is sometimes hard to discern. The values people find acceptable on this forum, for example, tend to fall within a very narrow range. Disagreements may amount to "the narcissism of small differences." Even if we can't accept Weil's extremes, it puts into relief our own (largely unexamined) assumptions and makes clear that very different modes would be possible. 

With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul. Let any one dare to speak to me of its “humanitarian” blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to abolish distress; it lives by distress; it creates distress to make itself immortal....

Well, Nietzsche's reasons for condemning Christianity are almost entirely different from those of wyzas or robvalue. I'm not sure that we want to follow Nietzsche on this if it means accepting his values instead. But that's another topic. 

Why not attribute Simone Weil's insights to Simone Weil, and Wittgenstein's insights to Wittgenstein? If they took influence from Christianity, fine. But they undoubtedly took inspiration from other sources, too. And (in that case) Christianity is just one item on a laundry list; only a certain myopic perspective gives Christianity more credit than it is due.

[/quote]

Because Weil's insights would be impossible without the Christian tradition she was a part of. And she did take inspiration from other sources -- she was vastly knowledgable about the Upanishads, for example, and the Greeks -- but in the last 2000 years Christian thought has worked with and through these influences. (More the Greeks than the Upanishads, obviously.)