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Speaking as someone essentially atheist (or at least, secular humanist), this entire piece is IMHO the strongest [secular] argument that can be made for Christi

Speaking as someone essentially atheist (or at least, secular humanist), this entire piece is IMHO the strongest [secular] argument that can be made for Christianity's positive effect on Western values.

ShabbosGoy 8y ago
To be honest, it read to me like the ramblings of an unemployed academic who’s struggling to find employment. Academia breeds and welcomes this type of toxic attitude and personality. The sad part is, this piece is passed off as intellectual, when the author himself didn’t reflect on anything in his time in China. He looks at the Chinese as the “Other”, much like many academics looked at Japan in the 80s as some menacing threat they could never understand. Overall, I rate it 5/10.
- curuinor 8y ago
  Dude was fully employed as effectively-tenured (tenure track, theoretically) professor for a decade. The forcing out was for 100% political reasons. If he treated China as an Other, then it was with a decade's worth of experience living full-time in China.
- throwaway37585 8y ago
  Got anything to back up those insults of yours? > the author himself didn’t reflect on anything in his time in China Patently and objectively false to anyone who read the article. It really makes me wonder what your motivations are for lying so blatantly.
  - ShabbosGoy 8y ago
    > Patently and objectively false to anyone who read the article. It really makes me wonder what your motivations are for lying so blatantly. Wrong. He clearly didn’t, because he describes a caricature of a Chinese person, reminiscent of a Fu Manchu type character that is dishonest and untrustworthy. Your motivations were clearly revealed the moment you created a throwaway account my man.
    - throwaway37585 8y ago
      > he describes a caricature of a Chinese person, reminiscent of a Fu Manchu type character Explain where you think this happens. > Your motivations were clearly revealed the moment you created a throwaway account my man. Explain what you mean by this. Careful, my account is older than yours!
      - throwaway080383 8y ago
        I think you missed the year in Shab's account start date.
        throwaway37585 8y ago
        I did, my mistake :) Not that it should matter at all. FWIW I've had older accounts on HN but abandoned them a while ago.
sophistication 8y ago
To the downvoters, there is actually some historic and sociological evidence supporting this notion: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3201031 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3201031 > Recent research not only confirms the existence of substantial psychological variation around the globe but also highlights the peculiarity of populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD). We propose that much of this variation arose as people psychologically adapted to differing kin-based institutions — the set of social norms governing descent, marriage, residence and related domains. We further propose that part of the variation in these institutions arose historically from the Catholic Church’s marriage and family policies, which contributed to the dissolution of Europe’s traditional kin-based institutions, leading eventually to the predominance of nuclear families and impersonal institutions. By combining data on 20 psychological outcomes with historical measures of both kinship and Church exposure, we find support for these ideas in a comprehensive array of analyses across countries, among European regions and between individuals with different cultural backgrounds.
- pmarreck 8y ago
  Thank you. My worldview is, far more often than not, based on evidence I’ve read. I hope HN does not turn into Reddit and “downvote for disagreeing with what is in fact true upon further examination”
tdb7893 8y ago
What positive effect has it had? I'm not trying to be combative but in history (and this was at a Catholic school) I was taught that most of the good parts of modern European political philosophy came only after it became less entangled with religion and came through the greater focus on rationality.
- sophistication 8y ago
  This is how I'm understanding it: Rationality is essentially the practice to value truthful speech. But for rationality to last in any culture, you first of all require a gut level propensity to trust complete strangers that they are indeed telling truthful things (rather than to only trust the immediate familiar environment). There is some evidence that the Catholic church did indeed bring this about, possibly mostly by banning consanguineous marriage. This way, people were forced to interact with widely different families, to open to them and to establish a culture of showing kinship behavior to people outside of the family clan. World-wide, you find such societal organization almost exclusively in parts which had substantial exposure to the Catholic church. Of course, the Catholic church was in many ways obstructive to rationality, but it did possibly provide the psychological foundation for it.

ShabbosGoy 8y ago

To be honest, it read to me like the ramblings of an unemployed academic who’s struggling to find employment. Academia breeds and welcomes this type of toxic attitude and personality. The sad part is, this piece is passed off as intellectual, when the author himself didn’t reflect on anything in his time in China. He looks at the Chinese as the “Other”, much like many academics looked at Japan in the 80s as some menacing threat they could never understand. Overall, I rate it 5/10.

curuinor 8y ago
Dude was fully employed as effectively-tenured (tenure track, theoretically) professor for a decade. The forcing out was for 100% political reasons. If he treated China as an Other, then it was with a decade's worth of experience living full-time in China.
throwaway37585 8y ago
Got anything to back up those insults of yours? > the author himself didn’t reflect on anything in his time in China Patently and objectively false to anyone who read the article. It really makes me wonder what your motivations are for lying so blatantly.
- ShabbosGoy 8y ago
  > Patently and objectively false to anyone who read the article. It really makes me wonder what your motivations are for lying so blatantly. Wrong. He clearly didn’t, because he describes a caricature of a Chinese person, reminiscent of a Fu Manchu type character that is dishonest and untrustworthy. Your motivations were clearly revealed the moment you created a throwaway account my man.
  - throwaway37585 8y ago
    > he describes a caricature of a Chinese person, reminiscent of a Fu Manchu type character Explain where you think this happens. > Your motivations were clearly revealed the moment you created a throwaway account my man. Explain what you mean by this. Careful, my account is older than yours!
    - throwaway080383 8y ago
      I think you missed the year in Shab's account start date.
      - throwaway37585 8y ago
        I did, my mistake :) Not that it should matter at all. FWIW I've had older accounts on HN but abandoned them a while ago.

sophistication 8y ago

To the downvoters, there is actually some historic and sociological evidence supporting this notion: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3201031 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3201031 > Recent research not only confirms the existence of substantial psychological variation around the globe but also highlights the peculiarity of populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD). We propose that much of this variation arose as people psychologically adapted to differing kin-based institutions — the set of social norms governing descent, marriage, residence and related domains. We further propose that part of the variation in these institutions arose historically from the Catholic Church’s marriage and family policies, which contributed to the dissolution of Europe’s traditional kin-based institutions, leading eventually to the predominance of nuclear families and impersonal institutions. By combining data on 20 psychological outcomes with historical measures of both kinship and Church exposure, we find support for these ideas in a comprehensive array of analyses across countries, among European regions and between individuals with different cultural backgrounds.

pmarreck 8y ago
Thank you. My worldview is, far more often than not, based on evidence I’ve read. I hope HN does not turn into Reddit and “downvote for disagreeing with what is in fact true upon further examination”

tdb7893 8y ago

What positive effect has it had? I'm not trying to be combative but in history (and this was at a Catholic school) I was taught that most of the good parts of modern European political philosophy came only after it became less entangled with religion and came through the greater focus on rationality.

sophistication 8y ago
This is how I'm understanding it: Rationality is essentially the practice to value truthful speech. But for rationality to last in any culture, you first of all require a gut level propensity to trust complete strangers that they are indeed telling truthful things (rather than to only trust the immediate familiar environment). There is some evidence that the Catholic church did indeed bring this about, possibly mostly by banning consanguineous marriage. This way, people were forced to interact with widely different families, to open to them and to establish a culture of showing kinship behavior to people outside of the family clan. World-wide, you find such societal organization almost exclusively in parts which had substantial exposure to the Catholic church. Of course, the Catholic church was in many ways obstructive to rationality, but it did possibly provide the psychological foundation for it.