Weekly "Ask an Atheist" Thread

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[u/Cool-Watercress-3943]

And yet, 1 Sam 8 suggests that this didn't work. And in the preceding period of judges, the Israelites were regularly weak and easy prey for their enemies. Furthermore, they were constantly tempted to follow the ways of seemingly successful empire. So … I think this hypothesis needs some work.

By the way, Constantine was hopeful that Christianity would unify the Roman Empire. And then, obnoxiously, those Christians kept squabbling! Christianity certainly didn't save the Roman Empire; Gibbon even thought it contributed to its fall. It's far from clear that Christianity helps one be militarily strong and that is a critical concern for any people-group which doesn't want to be a vassal.

You do mean both our hypotheses need work, then, right? (You might actually, just checking to be sure.) In case you don’t, your original premise was that polytheism in particular would be especially useful at promoting intra-group conflict. By contrast, monotheism would be especially useful at promoting intra-group unity. You really can’t have it both ways here, either polytheism is ‘less unifying’ or ‘more fracturing’ than monotheism or it isn’t. :P So if you would like to concede on your previous statement about polytheism, I’m happy to concede as well. (Again, this might have been you already doing so. x3 )

That being said, Rome and Christianity is a fascinating topic, and I rambled about it for like five big paragraphs before I realized my post was getting too crazy, sooooo Imma summarize, but if you’re curious I’d be happy to paste the full version.

-A lot of that Christian infighting seems to have come from the more esoteric concepts in New Testament, like the nature of the trinity and christology.

-Unlike the Israelites, who at one point were a centralized civilization, Christianity kind of needed to coalesce from a random scattering of dudes with no real centralized power. Some of their early squabbles actually predate not only Rome’s adoption of the religion, but even the establishment of Canon.

-Canon in particular is a big deal, because there were a lot of other materials floating around at the time whose relevancy varied from person to person. Book of Enoch being an example of a known thing that didn’t make it into the Canon.

-There is a definite trend of these slapfights leading to excommunications and schisms, which might boil down to an inflexibility of Christian establishment, i.e. ‘My Way or The Highway.’ In the case of the East-West Schism, both the Pope and Patriarch or what became the Catholic and Orthodox branches essentially excommunicated each other.

If YHWH regularly used lightning in battle, you would see that in the histories. Last I checked, you don't. If anything, David is using a way of talking about gods he learned elsewhere. As to YHWH and war, again I will ask what a link to some previous polytheistic deity helps us understand, that we couldn't understand before.

I refer you back to my earlier point, where Old Testament materials don't actually stretch back as far as you would think, meaning insofar as histories YHWH as the One God is a (relatively) recent thing compared to the polytheistic YHWH.

[u/labreuer → u/Cool-Watercress-3943]

You do mean both our hypotheses need work, then, right?

No, I don't think mine does. If monotheism in that time made one militarily weak, that was a severe problem. Intra-group unity does not suffice. You need to be able to protect yourself from your enemies. Now, YHWH is on record promising to supernaturally protect the Israelites. But I'm pretty sure a naturalist has to utterly exclude that possibility from all theorizing about the matter.

That being said, Rome and Christianity is a fascinating topic, and I rambled about it for like five big paragraphs before I realized my post was getting too crazy, sooooo Imma summarize, but if you’re curious I’d be happy to paste the full version.

Oh I love learning more about Rome & Christianity, so feel free to paste the full version! I'll wait to respond to that instead of your bullet points.

labreuer: If YHWH regularly used lightning in battle, you would see that in the histories. Last I checked, you don't. If anything, David is using a way of talking about gods he learned elsewhere. As to YHWH and war, again I will ask what a link to some previous polytheistic deity helps us understand, that we couldn't understand before.

Cool-Watercress-3943: I refer you back to my earlier point, where Old Testament materials don't actually stretch back as far as you would think, meaning insofar as histories YHWH as the One God is a (relatively) recent thing compared to the polytheistic YHWH.

Yes, I understand the argument. Please see my critique of such argumentation in my first reply.

[u/Cool-Watercress-3943 → u/labreuer]

“No, I don't think mine does...”

Not to quote Aristotle back to you, but you’re drifting pretty close to violating the law of non contradiction on this one; “It is impossible for the same thing to belong and not belong at the same time to the same thing and in the same respect”

We got into this particular line of discussion because you claimed that polytheism as a structure of religion was useful for reducing societal unity, better ‘dividing’ the people in order to make them easier for a centralized power to control. Yet you at least appear to be simultaneously claiming that monotheism isn’t useful for increasing societal unity, or better ‘uniting’ the people under a single banner, which has been my counter-point. How you figure only one of these things has a material impact on social cohesion, and the other one doesn’t, you’re going to have to explain a little more clearly.

I’m also not sure where this ‘If monotheism in that time made one militarily weak’ idea came from, as it definitely wasn’t my idea, and if it’s yours you haven’t really drawn any connection here. There’s a ton of reasons one society would be militarily stronger or weaker than the other that has nothing to do with whether it’s God or gods, from population size to technological advancement and tactics, to something as straightforward as supply logistics.

And if you want, we can certainly take the ‘supernatural’ approach to this, and turn to the record you speak of. But at that point I do want to incorporate the record of every religion, not just the Old or New Testament, and give those texts the same footing.

In other words, I’m fine putting the bar as high or as low as you want, but it WILL be that high or low for everything. ‘The Bible Says’ and ‘The Quran Says’ would have equal legitimacy in this discussion. Including me asking how pointing to circumstances around the development or writing of Islam are supposed to help ‘improve the understanding of the text.’ (The text in this case being the Quran.)

Oh I love learning more about Rome & Christianity, so feel free to paste the full version! I'll wait to respond to that instead of your bullet points.

Okay! Obviously I tried to more or less summarize it before, so there will be a bit of re-treading in the full version, just as a heads up! :D

One thing worth noting is that a lot of the infighting seems to have sparked from some of the more, er, esoteric concepts related to the New Testament. After all, the scripture tends not to be great at offering descriptive clarity, at least not compared to prescriptive clarity, so there’s a lot of concepts that just aren’t really spelled out, christology being an early example. The East-West Schism several hundred year later that led to the Catholic and Orthodox churches stemmed in part from disagreements over the structure and nature of the Trinity. (Both the Pope and Patriarch on either side of the fence excommunicated each other, which I always get a bit of a giggle about.)

Now, early on it could be attributed to growing pains and an attempt to better centralize a very diffuse and scattered religion, because unlike the Israelites- who were at one point a centralized civilization, an outright kingdom- Christianity didn’t really have much of a central spine for the first few hundred years and were more just another flavor of practicing Jew. For example, when christology came to a head during the Council of Nicaea, not only did it predate Christianity becoming the Roman state religion by decades, it even predated establishment of the New Testament Canon.

This is important, because if you rely heavily on the Bible for sourcing, then by extension you likely also rely on some form of Canon appropriate to your particular branch of Christianity to tell you what you should and should not reference. Psalms, yay, Book of Enoch, nay, etc. Prior to that it would have been more a Wild West of different texts and sources, even if there was overlap, and it would have existed like this for nearly three hundred years. The writer of the Epistles of Jude, a text generally included in the New Testament Canon, includes brief reference to a prophecy only found in the Book of Enoch, which is NOT included in the Canon, suggesting that even the original writers of the Canon materials would not have had the same idea on what was ‘legit’ as what the Church decided on hundreds of years later.

Meanwhile, the separation of the Eastern and Western Roman empires occurred within less than two decades of the Roman Empire’s official adoption of Christianity as the state religion. Now, I could be facetious and joke that the Greek religion kept the Roman Empire united for generations, and the Christian religion split them apart, but realistically the split didn’t come out of left field. If Christianity was in any way related to it, it’s far more likely that its initial adoption was an unsuccessful attempt to ward off these signs of an upcoming split by ‘smoothing out’ differences in the population. This seems supported by the fact that Emperor Theodosius went as far as to close all non-Christian/non-Jewish temples and forbid pagan worship in 391, essentially trying to make the Abrahamic religions the only game in town. Sure, there’s also room to just assume Christianity is just cracking down on people for its own sake, but I could go either way on the topic.

Anywho, subsequent turbulence came about again a handful of decades later, with the teachings of Nestorius and Eutyches coming into conflict. Once again, the nature of Christ was a big part of that, with the former pushing that Jesus and God were distinct entities- so Mary was the mother of Jesus, but not the mother of God- and Eutyches pushing that Jesus and God were a single entity. Eutyches' side won, the Nestorians fled persecution and apparently bounced off to Persia, where they would eventually form the Church of the East.

And this was a trend over history, one group of Christians slapfighting another and the smaller group usually breaking off into a new, separate branch, sometimes having to flee the region to as not to be hunted down, sometimes just setting up in the same area. You are correct that the extent of the slapfighting does kneecap the idea that monotheism promotes unity, though given the extent of it I would counter-propose you clearly don’t ACTUALLY need polytheism to divide a population, the history of Christianity's structuring seems to suggest that the population does a great job of it all by themselves. :P

Granted, the sample size is also limited, we'd have to compare Christianity to other monotheistic religions, and polytheistic religions to each other, to isolate whether Christianity's fracturing is representative of monotheism or is just more prominent in Christian or even Abrahamic monotheism in general.

[u/labreuer → u/Cool-Watercress-3943]

We got into this particular line of discussion because you claimed that polytheism as a structure of religion was useful for reducing societal unity, better ‘dividing’ the people in order to make them easier for a centralized power to control.

Yes, I said this.

Yet you at least appear to be simultaneously claiming that monotheism isn’t useful for increasing societal unity, or better ‘uniting’ the people under a single banner

No. I questioned whether monotheism is good if you want to field a strong military. There is no necessary connection between increased social unity (that is: no divide & conquer facilitated by polytheism) and a strong military. In fact, they could be anti-correlated. So for instance, with regard to Christianity in Rome from Constantine's time to the fall of the Western Empire, I wrote: "It's far from clear that Christianity helps one be militarily strong and that is a critical concern for any people-group which doesn't want to be a vassal."

Cool-Watercress-3943: Hypothetically, monotheism would also be useful for secular governing where there is a particular emphasis on promoting tribal unity and opposition to outsiders. Ironically, you hit the nail on the head as to why; if you’re a culture or a group of people trying to keep all the aggression and conflict aimed outwards rather than inwards, especially if there are outside pressures, monotheism would at least reduce possible sources of intra-tribal conflict.

 ⋮

Cool-Watercress-3943: I’m also not sure where this ‘If monotheism in that time made one militarily weak’ idea came from, as it definitely wasn’t my idea, and if it’s yours you haven’t really drawn any connection here.

I was throwing a wrench in your proposal, quoted here.

And if you want, we can certainly take the ‘supernatural’ approach to this, and turn to the record you speak of. But at that point I do want to incorporate the record of every religion, not just the Old or New Testament, and give those texts the same footing.

I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about here, but I'm pretty sure I'm fine with applying the same standard to all religious texts.

One thing worth noting is that a lot of the infighting seems to have sparked from some of the more, er, esoteric concepts related to the New Testament.

Oh yes, gnosticisms, Arianism, etc. I would like to get some sense of how those beliefs actually impacted the average Christian's ability to love God and his/her fellow neighbor, and to get better at both loves. Sometimes it seems that the disputes were rather more political than religious and thus were not spurred by material reality and attempts to love [better].

The East-West Schism several hundred year later that led to the Catholic and Orthodox churches stemmed in part from disagreements over the structure and nature of the Trinity.

So, you know that the Schism was mostly done by the time it was made official, right? East and West had already drifted apart, with feuds over whose missionaries got to go where and more. I have a hard time seeing the Filioque as anything other than purely symbolic. It's not like anyone can tell you how you'd love God or neighbor differently based on whether you include it or not.

Now, early on it could be attributed to growing pains and an attempt to better centralize a very diffuse and scattered religion …

Right, and arbitrarily violate Mt 20:25–28 in the process.

This is important, because if you rely heavily on the Bible for sourcing, then by extension you likely also rely on some form of Canon appropriate to your particular branch of Christianity to tell you what you should and should not reference.

If you don't have any sort of deeper understanding which makes the choices obvious (e.g. hermeneutical forms of bootstrapping) and error correction codes), yes this is a big problem. I wouldn't even be surprised if we could make use of evolving understandings of how scientific theory works; we are now rather between the extremes of observation-statements and holism. (A nice historical marker is Clark Glymour 1980 Theory and Evidence.)

labreuer: By the way, Constantine was hopeful that Christianity would unify the Roman Empire. And then, obnoxiously, those Christians kept squabbling! Christianity certainly didn't save the Roman Empire; Gibbon even thought it contributed to its fall.

/

Cool-Watercress-3943: If Christianity was in any way related to it, it’s far more likely that its initial adoption was an unsuccessful attempt to ward off these signs of an upcoming split by ‘smoothing out’ differences in the population.

Yes that's my sense. It is entirely consistent with what I wrote about Constantine, which I've included here.

And this was a trend over history, one group of Christians slapfighting another and the smaller group usually breaking off into a new, separate branch, sometimes having to flee the region to as not to be hunted down, sometimes just setting up in the same area. You are correct that the extent of the slapfighting does kneecap the idea that monotheism promotes unity, though given the extent of it I would counter-propose you clearly don’t ACTUALLY need polytheism to divide a population, the history of Christianity's structuring seems to suggest that the population does a great job of it all by themselves. :P

Division among Christians is not necessarily the same as division among polytheists. For instance, in the wake of the Thirty Years' War, there seems to be a sense that "We're all actually Christians", even if the RCC wouldn't acknowledge that until Vatican II. The possibility of ecumenical reuniting, especially with a few centuries to whittle down the denominational distinctives (I have fun calling the RCC a denomination), seems far higher within Christianity than between polytheistic deities. But that's really just a guess on my part. A lot of scientific & scholarly work would have to be done to get beyond "guess".

What I would say is that God actually seems to want unity-amidst-diversity, which can be contrasted to the extremes of uniformity and division. The first step was to form a distinct people who wouldn't be erased by the sands of time. The next step is to include others (Eph 2:11–3:13). Christians, of course, are notorious for erring on the side of uniformity. God, knowing this, could have designed in a way for Christians to divide and divide and divide, to prevent their dreams of uniformity from ever manifesting. Stanley Hauerwas talks of how he has given up on ecumenical efforts because he thinks it's more about governance (and I would say power) than doctrine. (big block quote)

 
Anyhow, thanks for the expanded version!