4 ms·

Returning to Church won't save us from nihilism

27 points by hhs 1y ago

codemonkey-zeta 1y ago
The absolute best resource I've found for educating myself about this topic is John Vervaeke's free online course "Awakening from the meaning crisis". You can search it in YouTube or Spotify. He explains in detail exactly why a "nostalgic return to religion" cannot save us from, not just nihilism, but the entire set of crises western society is undergoing.
- MonkeyClub 1y ago
  The series: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb...
- mallowdram 1y ago
  The crises stems not from a loss or lack of meaning, it's from recognizing how limited our forms like narratives and myths/religions provide access to meaning. If we fully recognize the meaning load in any event, it's endlessly connected to past and future events. Any event's local-load is likewise massive. The idea we use metaphors as meaning sinks is bizarre. Metaphors are arbitrary, meaning is not, it is specific. This is the inherent problem. The scaffolding we use for meaning, language, myth, causality, narratives, these are all Pleistocene tools that have long overstyed their welcome. Access to meaning is a total failure of imagination of the basics.
  - oidar 1y ago
    I'm not disagreeing, but what alternatives are there? And to continue with the tool metaphor: How would we know if it's a better tool? Without a vantage point where we could judge both the tools we have now to the alternative, we might be just trading one flawed tool for another. But I'm not going throw away a flashlight because it doesn't light up the universe either. At least with a flashlight, I can see something.
    - mallowdram 1y ago
      If what we get to navigate with the flashlight eventually extincts us in folk meaning, then better upgrade the tool. The problem with meaning is the problem with the words. Get rid of them and their agentic curse that lowballs meaning. There are glyphs, movies, Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Chorti/Yucatec etc., Chinese, Japanese, Korean. We use landfill for communication. Western languages are terrible hacks of sense-emotion-syntax. That got hacked in Gutenberg, ASCII, web now AI. It's dead.
      - oidar 1y ago
        Again, I'm sympathetic... but replacing one symbolic system for another doesn't answer the question of how any symbolic system relates to it's "meaning" or even in a more accurate way. We are always in the soup of language, change the seasoning, but we will always be in the soup.
        mallowdram 1y ago
        Ditch them. Movies already demonstrate what Mayan/Chinese accomplishes momentarily. It's post-representation, post-symbolic, post-metaphor. verbs only, references only. Concatenation. Humans are slaves to symbols, look at computers. We have an S&M relationship to the arbitrary and Wall Street and Silicon Valley want it this way: they've made trillions off an illusion. We either shift to external references for action-syntax or enjoy the ride the dinosaurs took down. And they had a meteor. We've got a self-made mirage of the arbitrary.
flanked-evergl 1y ago
[flagged]
- bsder 1y ago
  "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
- scienceman 1y ago
  Thanks brother
- cyanydeez 1y ago
  Doubtful. Far right violence "knows" christ just as well as the atheist and anchoring it in a symbol that's already fractured, is just painting nihilism with random paints that are just as nihilistic. Think of nihilism like all the colors in the visible spectrum, but instead of creating white, they create black because they're physically constrained, not metaphorically. As such, every figure associated with every religion once disassociative will _never_ be anything but an anchor for nihilism because of the natural deviations of man's desire to align god's intentions with one's actions, ad hoc.
  - cyanydeez 1y ago
    Alright sour pusses. Tell me which denomination _knows_ christ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denominations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denomination... Surely if "he" is real, atleast one of them has figured it out.
- novemp 1y ago
  Good idea. Let's start with "love thy neighbor" and "rich people won't go to heaven".
  - daymanstep 1y ago
    A more careful reading of the Bible will tell you that the Bible does not say that "rich people won't go to heaven" so much as "anyone who is fixated on riches won't go to heaven". As Haydock’s commentary puts it: “The apostles wondered how any person could be saved, not because all were rich, but because the poor were also included, who had their hearts and affections fixed on riches.” The problem with the rich young man, then, was not that he was rich, but that he valued riches above following Christ. And that is a spiritual malady that can afflict even those who are not rich.
metalman 1y ago
The best way to deal with nihilism is by also becoming a narcisist, which as we can see from many of the people in power, is extra creeply effective.
- NooneAtAll3 1y ago
  and the best way to deal with narcisism is becoming a nihilist, thus creating the spiral of doom
  - metalman 1y ago
    and the only way to thwart the spiral of doom, is with an anti spiral of absurdity of the intentional kind, rather than the other variety but wow, I mean WOW, there has never been so much material to whack a mole , I just watched a short vid of what looked and sounded like a bunch of school teachers and fast food kids lead by someone cosplaying captain america taking on the icestapo and they opened up with a barage of "less leathal" weapons, including a sniper, and dozen storm troopers grabbed and shit stomped captain america all thats missing is circus music
intalentive 1y ago
>we need to work to bring back the Ancient Greek model of the polis and in particular the Ancient Greek model of politics as what gives life meaning. The Ancient Greek model of politics isn't compatible with liberal pluralism. The former assumes a common end and the latter assumes diverse conflicting ends. The Ancient Greek model looks more like modern China than it does like modern America or Europe.
- evanjrowley 1y ago
  The ancient Greek model assumes a common end but in practice there were many conflicts demonstrating the ends were conflicting. The model itself is like the ideal form. Suggesting that western politics adopt this model when the current state of things opposes it is not necessarily an error.
  - mallowdram 1y ago
    5th C BC Greece was far from an ideal state, the collapse is visible here in rampant gambling. Take a civilization class, the first thing you learn is the West is overly confident and never expects change so change is imposed. While the Chinese expect change, and can pivot when things get bad. Continuity isn't a Western way.
rattlesnakedave 1y ago
Aside from being true, Christianity is basically the only way to inoculate yourself against mimetic violence spirals. Which is missed here.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- vkou 1y ago
  Many modern supply-side Christians don't believe in any of those parts of the Bible. Turn the other cheek, love thy neighbour, etc, etc, are not something they are keen on.
  - rattlesnakedave 1y ago
    Yeah, that’s the problem. In my estimation a large part of it is because Christianity, especially as practiced in the United States, is a cultural phenomenon. Evangelicalism has won the popularity contest, and it’s not moored by anything. There’s an uptick in new Catholics and Orthodox converts though, which are more “moored” if you will by tradition and at least some kind of doctrinal constraint.
    - vkou 1y ago
      So, since Evangelicals don't meet the bar, but Catholics do, it's not Christianity (the belief in Christ/a singular Judean God) that is the relevant demarcation, it's adherence to canon. This undermines your thesis, because it's not the mystic woo about virgin birth and transubstantiation and resurrection (which they all profess to believe in) that's important - it's the canon - adherence to which is entirely orthogonal to faith.
      - rattlesnakedave 1y ago
        No, it is just Christianity that is the demarcation. I’m saying that when you have American evangelicalism (which functions as a social club, and is not moored by anything other than “get people in the door”) as your delivery mechanism, you’re less likely to get solid catechisis. This is of course not impossible, I know many bad catholic Christian’s and many good Protestant Christians, but your odds of getting the good news delivered correctly are higher in more orthodox settings.
kelseyfrog 1y ago
> In a recent op-ed, [David Brooks] warns that a rigid political climate on the left has led people on the right of the political spectrum to actively embrace nihilism. That’s a strange dodge. "The Left made me do it" is a child's excuse, not an analysis. The deeper truth is that nihilism isn’t born of politics. Nihilism what's left when after the exhaustion of meaning under total commodification. It's born of the spectacle, the replacement of reality with its endless representations. Every human relation is mediated through an economic relation, and eventually every gesture, every feeling, every passing thought gets rendered into a commodity. We are desperate for connection, and the spectacle knows it. So it offers us platforms that promise intimacy but can’t deliver it. They were designed not to connect us to other humans but to make us friends with brands. We log in for friendship and get advertising. Go outside? Good luck. It's empty because this stupid city was designed around cars, and even if there are people, they're tucked into their phones. It's a social ghost town. If I propose to decommission the spectacle, I'd expect to receive a bewildering array of responses: "naive," "utopian," "impossible." So here we are, trapped in a world of our making where no one has the choice to enter nor to leave and everyone has been leveraged to maintaining it despite no one wanting it. Good job. We have only ourselves to blame.
notmyjob 1y ago
Religion is anti-fragile. The more persecution and negative press it gets, the more certainty we feel in our faiths. I would point out that nihilism is the opposite of religious faith, so the author is a little bit confused on that point.
- kelseyfrog 1y ago
  This is only true for some religions. Since the author mentions Nietzsche, it feels fair to pull in On the Genealogy of Morality. Many religions today have this feature because they out-competed religions that didn't, but it's not a universal feature of religions by a long shot. If anything, religions that have this feature are inextricably connected to social coping mechanisms(evidently due the persecution).
  - notmyjob 1y ago
    If you define religion to include all possible religions, even those that have few adherents, or those that have disappeared or even those not yet created, that’s not a very useful definition. I use “religion” like most people, to refer to Abrahamic religions and large eastern religions like Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, etc
    - kelseyfrog 1y ago
      I just mean religion in the usual sense. I've never seen the word used as a metonym until now.
      - notmyjob 1y ago
        I don’t think you are using it in the usual sense, as I stated, but maybe I just need an example of what you mean. I gave examples of what I think most people think of when they consider religion. Few people think of say, Athenians, to cite one of my own favorite out competed religions.
- whytaka 1y ago
  Negative press about religion, whether its corruption or its inefficacy, has led to lower participation in religion the world over.
DaveZale 1y ago
Sure, but for many, it's a place for community too. Rites of passage. Selecting a godparent. And singing! Hey without gospel music, we might not have had Motown. Also, in some religions the temples are places for job searching, business networking... nothing wrong with that. I wish I could have faith, a double major in science and philosophy killed all of that. But mystical moments still happen without all of the religious trappings, in conversation or nature. I just don't know. Here in the US, Christian ethics still predominate, usually, and without organized religious participation, will that continue? Is it too much work to agonize over decisions without it?
- BalinKing 1y ago
  Obviously it’s a very broad question, but could I ask you to elaborate on why “a double major in science and philosophy killed all of that”?
  - thisoneisreal 1y ago
    You didn't ask me, but I can respond as someone with a similar background. I grew up in a religious household. I spent about a decade from ages 18-28 studying philosophy both academically and casually, then entered a technical field and got reaquainted with science. Many philosophical problems informed my view of religion, but probably the most profound were Carl Sagan's invisible dragon and the problem that there are so many differing and incompatible religions. Many religious people will freely admit their beliefs have no evidence, and yet from my point of view, if that's true, how can anyone claim their particular religion is correct? Why should I believe in Hinduism instead of Catholicism? I never got a satisfactory answer to that in any of my philosophy classes or reading. (The problem of evil is another strong one, but didn't have as big of an impact on me as the first two.) As far as science goes, the two main contributors to that were biology and physics (although there are some countervailing forces there: the order of the universe truly does seem miraculous). Jay Gould's essay "non-moral nature" where he describes parasites that lay their eggs on paralyzed victims, then the eggs hatch and the larvae eat the victims alive, was probably the first thing I read that had bearing on religion. But if you look at nature generally there is obviously an overwhelming amount of suffering. Kids who die from random genetic mutations, animals that get eaten alive crying. I could never square any of that with God. As far as physics, what really gets me is the sheer immensity and seeming indifference to human scales. Because of the speed of light, we are basically trapped within our own universe. Space is mostly an enormous empty void, and there is no sign that any other planet would be especially hospitable to our species. On a more mundane level, human beings have been killed in incredibly stupid ways, like the guy who was irradiated to death because of a software bug in the x-ray machine. So you put all of that together and it just doesn't suggest any sort of divine guidance to everything going on around us. (Which isn't to say there aren't counterarguments, but that's the sort of evidence and thought processes I imagine the parent was referring to.)
cvoss 1y ago
The author's understanding of ritual/tradition as the sum total what religion means is at best extremely naive, but I am receiving it as condescending and dismissive. There was a way for the author to redeem the subtitle of the article. He could have gone down the route of "ritual for ritual's sake is not good, but the bigger thing that ritual is attached to is good". But instead, the argument went "religious ritual is empty and has nothing else attached to it, and that's bad; let's be sure to attach Humanism to the ritual to make it good." The irony of the whole thing is that Humanism is a religion too, though many people won't recognize it as such. This makes the author's argument doubly misguided.
AaronAPU 1y ago
Well, Church isn’t God. So I’ll grant them the title. But the stronger claim, that God won’t save us from nihilism, I disagree with entirely.
deadeye 1y ago
This reads more like misdirection than analysis. Suggesting religion is just a collection of empty rituals is just sad. It's almost as if he's trying to prevent those looking for help from considering religion. "You don't want those gold bars over there, they're just painted rocks". But are they?
roxolotl 1y ago
Very funny this is partly in response to a Brooks piece. He fits nihilism very well. Doesn’t every really write about much and when cornered contends that most of his attempts to make points are really just vibes[0] like famously claiming $60 spent on alcohol and a $17 burger make him relatable to Americans struggling with inflation[1]. But particularly hilarious is that he wrote this exact piece two months ago in the Atlantic[2]. He argued that the Greeks had it right and we all need to be more virtuous again. As someone who’d describe themselves as a virtue ethicist I’d be inclined to agree. Utilitarianism leads to the bureaucratic tyranny Arendt discusses and deontology is just as hollow as belief in belief. The reality is that we can’t optimize ourselves out of where we are. [0]: https://www.foodandwine.com/1911-smoke-house-bbq-david-brooks-7974911 https://www.foodandwine.com/1911-smoke-house-bbq-david-brook... [1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/142708/david-brooks-tyranny-data https://newrepublic.com/article/142708/david-brooks-tyranny-... [2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/trump-administration-supporters-good/683441/?gift=zTZzSmsuiZBvX7XuJ3UhpQekECtOsm4obYDAs5niQoo https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/trump-admi...
- jhanschoo 1y ago
  > Utilitarianism leads to the bureaucratic tyranny Arendt discusses and deontology is just as hollow as belief in belief. Can you sketch your reasoning behind these claims? And put forth the most common criticisms against virtue ethics, and defend your position against these criticisms? I don't agree with you, but you have not given me a sufficiently tight argument to convince me or take issue with.
  - roxolotl 1y ago
    Utilitarianism has two issues. The first is the utility monster which is a classic criticism that boils down to "what if there was something which gains infinite utility from the suffering of others". I think it's a rather weak criticism however it is currently what the AI/Crypto effective altruists have almost fully given in to. They argue utter destruction of humanity by an AI is a reason you should donate all your time and money to AI safety research. But the more useful criticism is that it's too simple to actually model reality and leads to an economic approach to ethics. This is what leads to a primacy of the bureaucratic state. It becomes a moral imperative to gather as much information as possible to enable the state to maximize utility. The best example of this is that Brave New World is a utilitarian utopia. Deontology is answered by the parent article. Most deontological frameworks are defined as correct in and of themselves. If you genuinely believe in one you're likely a moral individual by other definitions so that's not necessarily a bad thing. Virtue Ethics is commonly criticized as not being normative enough, it doesn't really tell you explicitly how to act it instead tells you what a good person looks like, and too complex so at to be actually useful, the definition of virtues aren't simple. I like Hursthouse's defense and formation of it in her paper on Abortion[0][1]. It boils down the the criticisms being the reason that it's a useful theory. I like these two points she makes: "Second, the theory is not trivially circular;it does not specify right action in terms of the virtuous agent and then immediately specify the virtuous agent in terms of right action. Rather,it specifies her in terms of the virtues, and then specifies these, not merely as dispositions to right action, but as the character traits(which are dispositions to feel and react as well as act in certain ways) required for eudaimonia" "Third, it does answer the question "What should I do?"as well as the question "What sort of person should I be?" (That is, it is not, as one of the catchphrases has it, concerned only with Being and not with Doing.)" In short the theory isn't trivial, unlike utilitarianism which can easily fall victim to being over trivialized as shown by today's AI effective altruists and utopias like Brave New World, and it provides answers to both what you should do and who you should be, unlike deontology which just answers what you should do. I like this paper because it makes a genuinely unique case for the ethics of abortion. She argues that you can both grant personhood to a fetus, or more accurately that personhood is irrelevant, and still ethically justify many abortions. That likely is too nuanced for today's discourse but that's the point. As we've moved to either utilitarianism or deontology as the driving motivation behind our moral actions we've over simplified the world. Anyways hope that's interesting, helpful and provides some insights into my thought. [0]: stable jstor source https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265432?origin=JSTOR-pdf https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265432?origin=JSTOR-pdf [1]: free pdf which may or may not go away https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/PPP504/Hursthouse%20Rosalind%2C%20Virtue%20theory%20and%20abortion.pdf https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/PPP504/Hurst...
PeterWhittaker 1y ago
Nihilism appeals because the root causes are oligarchy and kleptocracy: when you realize you are powerless in the large, the only real alternatives are disengagement and violence in the small. Why violence? In this context, it is the only thing guaranteed to leave a mark. The third alternative, the difficult way, is social engagement on a path to social democracy, to limiting the reach of autocrats and robber barons, and to defetishizing the first two amendments. But that path requires lifting one's eyes, abandoning one's out groups, working with all, and foregoing at least some comfort and self advantage. It is the only way. I doubt I will see it (entered 7th decade recently, feel pretty confident about that).
nikolay 1y ago
[flagged]
GeoAtreides 1y ago
Why is this very interesting post about the philosophy of nihilism and empty rituals flagged?

27 points by hhs 1y ago

The absolute best resource I've found for educating myself about this topic is John Vervaeke's free online course "Awakening from the meaning crisis". You can search it in YouTube or Spotify. He explains in detail exactly why a "nostalgic return to religion" cannot save us from, not just nihilism, but the entire set of crises western society is undergoing.

MonkeyClub 1y ago
The series: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb...
mallowdram 1y ago
The crises stems not from a loss or lack of meaning, it's from recognizing how limited our forms like narratives and myths/religions provide access to meaning. If we fully recognize the meaning load in any event, it's endlessly connected to past and future events. Any event's local-load is likewise massive. The idea we use metaphors as meaning sinks is bizarre. Metaphors are arbitrary, meaning is not, it is specific. This is the inherent problem. The scaffolding we use for meaning, language, myth, causality, narratives, these are all Pleistocene tools that have long overstyed their welcome. Access to meaning is a total failure of imagination of the basics.
- oidar 1y ago
  I'm not disagreeing, but what alternatives are there? And to continue with the tool metaphor: How would we know if it's a better tool? Without a vantage point where we could judge both the tools we have now to the alternative, we might be just trading one flawed tool for another. But I'm not going throw away a flashlight because it doesn't light up the universe either. At least with a flashlight, I can see something.
  - mallowdram 1y ago
    If what we get to navigate with the flashlight eventually extincts us in folk meaning, then better upgrade the tool. The problem with meaning is the problem with the words. Get rid of them and their agentic curse that lowballs meaning. There are glyphs, movies, Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Chorti/Yucatec etc., Chinese, Japanese, Korean. We use landfill for communication. Western languages are terrible hacks of sense-emotion-syntax. That got hacked in Gutenberg, ASCII, web now AI. It's dead.
    - oidar 1y ago
      Again, I'm sympathetic... but replacing one symbolic system for another doesn't answer the question of how any symbolic system relates to it's "meaning" or even in a more accurate way. We are always in the soup of language, change the seasoning, but we will always be in the soup.
      - mallowdram 1y ago
        Ditch them. Movies already demonstrate what Mayan/Chinese accomplishes momentarily. It's post-representation, post-symbolic, post-metaphor. verbs only, references only. Concatenation. Humans are slaves to symbols, look at computers. We have an S&M relationship to the arbitrary and Wall Street and Silicon Valley want it this way: they've made trillions off an illusion. We either shift to external references for action-syntax or enjoy the ride the dinosaurs took down. And they had a meteor. We've got a self-made mirage of the arbitrary.

flanked-evergl 1y ago

[flagged]

bsder 1y ago
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
scienceman 1y ago
Thanks brother
cyanydeez 1y ago
Doubtful. Far right violence "knows" christ just as well as the atheist and anchoring it in a symbol that's already fractured, is just painting nihilism with random paints that are just as nihilistic. Think of nihilism like all the colors in the visible spectrum, but instead of creating white, they create black because they're physically constrained, not metaphorically. As such, every figure associated with every religion once disassociative will _never_ be anything but an anchor for nihilism because of the natural deviations of man's desire to align god's intentions with one's actions, ad hoc.
- cyanydeez 1y ago
  Alright sour pusses. Tell me which denomination _knows_ christ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denominations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denomination... Surely if "he" is real, atleast one of them has figured it out.
novemp 1y ago
Good idea. Let's start with "love thy neighbor" and "rich people won't go to heaven".
- daymanstep 1y ago
  A more careful reading of the Bible will tell you that the Bible does not say that "rich people won't go to heaven" so much as "anyone who is fixated on riches won't go to heaven". As Haydock’s commentary puts it: “The apostles wondered how any person could be saved, not because all were rich, but because the poor were also included, who had their hearts and affections fixed on riches.” The problem with the rich young man, then, was not that he was rich, but that he valued riches above following Christ. And that is a spiritual malady that can afflict even those who are not rich.

metalman 1y ago

The best way to deal with nihilism is by also becoming a narcisist, which as we can see from many of the people in power, is extra creeply effective.

NooneAtAll3 1y ago
and the best way to deal with narcisism is becoming a nihilist, thus creating the spiral of doom
- metalman 1y ago
  and the only way to thwart the spiral of doom, is with an anti spiral of absurdity of the intentional kind, rather than the other variety but wow, I mean WOW, there has never been so much material to whack a mole , I just watched a short vid of what looked and sounded like a bunch of school teachers and fast food kids lead by someone cosplaying captain america taking on the icestapo and they opened up with a barage of "less leathal" weapons, including a sniper, and dozen storm troopers grabbed and shit stomped captain america all thats missing is circus music

intalentive 1y ago

>we need to work to bring back the Ancient Greek model of the polis and in particular the Ancient Greek model of politics as what gives life meaning. The Ancient Greek model of politics isn't compatible with liberal pluralism. The former assumes a common end and the latter assumes diverse conflicting ends. The Ancient Greek model looks more like modern China than it does like modern America or Europe.

evanjrowley 1y ago
The ancient Greek model assumes a common end but in practice there were many conflicts demonstrating the ends were conflicting. The model itself is like the ideal form. Suggesting that western politics adopt this model when the current state of things opposes it is not necessarily an error.
- mallowdram 1y ago
  5th C BC Greece was far from an ideal state, the collapse is visible here in rampant gambling. Take a civilization class, the first thing you learn is the West is overly confident and never expects change so change is imposed. While the Chinese expect change, and can pivot when things get bad. Continuity isn't a Western way.

rattlesnakedave 1y ago

Aside from being true, Christianity is basically the only way to inoculate yourself against mimetic violence spirals. Which is missed here.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
vkou 1y ago
Many modern supply-side Christians don't believe in any of those parts of the Bible. Turn the other cheek, love thy neighbour, etc, etc, are not something they are keen on.
- rattlesnakedave 1y ago
  Yeah, that’s the problem. In my estimation a large part of it is because Christianity, especially as practiced in the United States, is a cultural phenomenon. Evangelicalism has won the popularity contest, and it’s not moored by anything. There’s an uptick in new Catholics and Orthodox converts though, which are more “moored” if you will by tradition and at least some kind of doctrinal constraint.
  - vkou 1y ago
    So, since Evangelicals don't meet the bar, but Catholics do, it's not Christianity (the belief in Christ/a singular Judean God) that is the relevant demarcation, it's adherence to canon. This undermines your thesis, because it's not the mystic woo about virgin birth and transubstantiation and resurrection (which they all profess to believe in) that's important - it's the canon - adherence to which is entirely orthogonal to faith.
    - rattlesnakedave 1y ago
      No, it is just Christianity that is the demarcation. I’m saying that when you have American evangelicalism (which functions as a social club, and is not moored by anything other than “get people in the door”) as your delivery mechanism, you’re less likely to get solid catechisis. This is of course not impossible, I know many bad catholic Christian’s and many good Protestant Christians, but your odds of getting the good news delivered correctly are higher in more orthodox settings.

kelseyfrog 1y ago

> In a recent op-ed, [David Brooks] warns that a rigid political climate on the left has led people on the right of the political spectrum to actively embrace nihilism. That’s a strange dodge. "The Left made me do it" is a child's excuse, not an analysis. The deeper truth is that nihilism isn’t born of politics. Nihilism what's left when after the exhaustion of meaning under total commodification. It's born of the spectacle, the replacement of reality with its endless representations. Every human relation is mediated through an economic relation, and eventually every gesture, every feeling, every passing thought gets rendered into a commodity. We are desperate for connection, and the spectacle knows it. So it offers us platforms that promise intimacy but can’t deliver it. They were designed not to connect us to other humans but to make us friends with brands. We log in for friendship and get advertising. Go outside? Good luck. It's empty because this stupid city was designed around cars, and even if there are people, they're tucked into their phones. It's a social ghost town. If I propose to decommission the spectacle, I'd expect to receive a bewildering array of responses: "naive," "utopian," "impossible." So here we are, trapped in a world of our making where no one has the choice to enter nor to leave and everyone has been leveraged to maintaining it despite no one wanting it. Good job. We have only ourselves to blame.

notmyjob 1y ago

Religion is anti-fragile. The more persecution and negative press it gets, the more certainty we feel in our faiths. I would point out that nihilism is the opposite of religious faith, so the author is a little bit confused on that point.

kelseyfrog 1y ago
This is only true for some religions. Since the author mentions Nietzsche, it feels fair to pull in On the Genealogy of Morality. Many religions today have this feature because they out-competed religions that didn't, but it's not a universal feature of religions by a long shot. If anything, religions that have this feature are inextricably connected to social coping mechanisms(evidently due the persecution).
- notmyjob 1y ago
  If you define religion to include all possible religions, even those that have few adherents, or those that have disappeared or even those not yet created, that’s not a very useful definition. I use “religion” like most people, to refer to Abrahamic religions and large eastern religions like Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, etc
  - kelseyfrog 1y ago
    I just mean religion in the usual sense. I've never seen the word used as a metonym until now.
    - notmyjob 1y ago
      I don’t think you are using it in the usual sense, as I stated, but maybe I just need an example of what you mean. I gave examples of what I think most people think of when they consider religion. Few people think of say, Athenians, to cite one of my own favorite out competed religions.
whytaka 1y ago
Negative press about religion, whether its corruption or its inefficacy, has led to lower participation in religion the world over.

DaveZale 1y ago

Sure, but for many, it's a place for community too. Rites of passage. Selecting a godparent. And singing! Hey without gospel music, we might not have had Motown. Also, in some religions the temples are places for job searching, business networking... nothing wrong with that. I wish I could have faith, a double major in science and philosophy killed all of that. But mystical moments still happen without all of the religious trappings, in conversation or nature. I just don't know. Here in the US, Christian ethics still predominate, usually, and without organized religious participation, will that continue? Is it too much work to agonize over decisions without it?

BalinKing 1y ago
Obviously it’s a very broad question, but could I ask you to elaborate on why “a double major in science and philosophy killed all of that”?
- thisoneisreal 1y ago
  You didn't ask me, but I can respond as someone with a similar background. I grew up in a religious household. I spent about a decade from ages 18-28 studying philosophy both academically and casually, then entered a technical field and got reaquainted with science. Many philosophical problems informed my view of religion, but probably the most profound were Carl Sagan's invisible dragon and the problem that there are so many differing and incompatible religions. Many religious people will freely admit their beliefs have no evidence, and yet from my point of view, if that's true, how can anyone claim their particular religion is correct? Why should I believe in Hinduism instead of Catholicism? I never got a satisfactory answer to that in any of my philosophy classes or reading. (The problem of evil is another strong one, but didn't have as big of an impact on me as the first two.) As far as science goes, the two main contributors to that were biology and physics (although there are some countervailing forces there: the order of the universe truly does seem miraculous). Jay Gould's essay "non-moral nature" where he describes parasites that lay their eggs on paralyzed victims, then the eggs hatch and the larvae eat the victims alive, was probably the first thing I read that had bearing on religion. But if you look at nature generally there is obviously an overwhelming amount of suffering. Kids who die from random genetic mutations, animals that get eaten alive crying. I could never square any of that with God. As far as physics, what really gets me is the sheer immensity and seeming indifference to human scales. Because of the speed of light, we are basically trapped within our own universe. Space is mostly an enormous empty void, and there is no sign that any other planet would be especially hospitable to our species. On a more mundane level, human beings have been killed in incredibly stupid ways, like the guy who was irradiated to death because of a software bug in the x-ray machine. So you put all of that together and it just doesn't suggest any sort of divine guidance to everything going on around us. (Which isn't to say there aren't counterarguments, but that's the sort of evidence and thought processes I imagine the parent was referring to.)

cvoss 1y ago

The author's understanding of ritual/tradition as the sum total what religion means is at best extremely naive, but I am receiving it as condescending and dismissive. There was a way for the author to redeem the subtitle of the article. He could have gone down the route of "ritual for ritual's sake is not good, but the bigger thing that ritual is attached to is good". But instead, the argument went "religious ritual is empty and has nothing else attached to it, and that's bad; let's be sure to attach Humanism to the ritual to make it good." The irony of the whole thing is that Humanism is a religion too, though many people won't recognize it as such. This makes the author's argument doubly misguided.

AaronAPU 1y ago

Well, Church isn’t God. So I’ll grant them the title. But the stronger claim, that God won’t save us from nihilism, I disagree with entirely.

deadeye 1y ago

This reads more like misdirection than analysis. Suggesting religion is just a collection of empty rituals is just sad. It's almost as if he's trying to prevent those looking for help from considering religion. "You don't want those gold bars over there, they're just painted rocks". But are they?

roxolotl 1y ago

Very funny this is partly in response to a Brooks piece. He fits nihilism very well. Doesn’t every really write about much and when cornered contends that most of his attempts to make points are really just vibes[0] like famously claiming $60 spent on alcohol and a $17 burger make him relatable to Americans struggling with inflation[1]. But particularly hilarious is that he wrote this exact piece two months ago in the Atlantic[2]. He argued that the Greeks had it right and we all need to be more virtuous again. As someone who’d describe themselves as a virtue ethicist I’d be inclined to agree. Utilitarianism leads to the bureaucratic tyranny Arendt discusses and deontology is just as hollow as belief in belief. The reality is that we can’t optimize ourselves out of where we are. [0]: https://www.foodandwine.com/1911-smoke-house-bbq-david-brooks-7974911 https://www.foodandwine.com/1911-smoke-house-bbq-david-brook... [1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/142708/david-brooks-tyranny-data https://newrepublic.com/article/142708/david-brooks-tyranny-... [2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/trump-administration-supporters-good/683441/?gift=zTZzSmsuiZBvX7XuJ3UhpQekECtOsm4obYDAs5niQoo https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/trump-admi...

jhanschoo 1y ago
> Utilitarianism leads to the bureaucratic tyranny Arendt discusses and deontology is just as hollow as belief in belief. Can you sketch your reasoning behind these claims? And put forth the most common criticisms against virtue ethics, and defend your position against these criticisms? I don't agree with you, but you have not given me a sufficiently tight argument to convince me or take issue with.
- roxolotl 1y ago
  Utilitarianism has two issues. The first is the utility monster which is a classic criticism that boils down to "what if there was something which gains infinite utility from the suffering of others". I think it's a rather weak criticism however it is currently what the AI/Crypto effective altruists have almost fully given in to. They argue utter destruction of humanity by an AI is a reason you should donate all your time and money to AI safety research. But the more useful criticism is that it's too simple to actually model reality and leads to an economic approach to ethics. This is what leads to a primacy of the bureaucratic state. It becomes a moral imperative to gather as much information as possible to enable the state to maximize utility. The best example of this is that Brave New World is a utilitarian utopia. Deontology is answered by the parent article. Most deontological frameworks are defined as correct in and of themselves. If you genuinely believe in one you're likely a moral individual by other definitions so that's not necessarily a bad thing. Virtue Ethics is commonly criticized as not being normative enough, it doesn't really tell you explicitly how to act it instead tells you what a good person looks like, and too complex so at to be actually useful, the definition of virtues aren't simple. I like Hursthouse's defense and formation of it in her paper on Abortion[0][1]. It boils down the the criticisms being the reason that it's a useful theory. I like these two points she makes: "Second, the theory is not trivially circular;it does not specify right action in terms of the virtuous agent and then immediately specify the virtuous agent in terms of right action. Rather,it specifies her in terms of the virtues, and then specifies these, not merely as dispositions to right action, but as the character traits(which are dispositions to feel and react as well as act in certain ways) required for eudaimonia" "Third, it does answer the question "What should I do?"as well as the question "What sort of person should I be?" (That is, it is not, as one of the catchphrases has it, concerned only with Being and not with Doing.)" In short the theory isn't trivial, unlike utilitarianism which can easily fall victim to being over trivialized as shown by today's AI effective altruists and utopias like Brave New World, and it provides answers to both what you should do and who you should be, unlike deontology which just answers what you should do. I like this paper because it makes a genuinely unique case for the ethics of abortion. She argues that you can both grant personhood to a fetus, or more accurately that personhood is irrelevant, and still ethically justify many abortions. That likely is too nuanced for today's discourse but that's the point. As we've moved to either utilitarianism or deontology as the driving motivation behind our moral actions we've over simplified the world. Anyways hope that's interesting, helpful and provides some insights into my thought. [0]: stable jstor source https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265432?origin=JSTOR-pdf https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265432?origin=JSTOR-pdf [1]: free pdf which may or may not go away https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/PPP504/Hursthouse%20Rosalind%2C%20Virtue%20theory%20and%20abortion.pdf https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/PPP504/Hurst...

PeterWhittaker 1y ago

Nihilism appeals because the root causes are oligarchy and kleptocracy: when you realize you are powerless in the large, the only real alternatives are disengagement and violence in the small. Why violence? In this context, it is the only thing guaranteed to leave a mark. The third alternative, the difficult way, is social engagement on a path to social democracy, to limiting the reach of autocrats and robber barons, and to defetishizing the first two amendments. But that path requires lifting one's eyes, abandoning one's out groups, working with all, and foregoing at least some comfort and self advantage. It is the only way. I doubt I will see it (entered 7th decade recently, feel pretty confident about that).

nikolay 1y ago

[flagged]

GeoAtreides 1y ago

Why is this very interesting post about the philosophy of nihilism and empty rituals flagged?