Would you say the origins of other religions become more mysterious if there never were whatever magical beings those religions posit? Would you think it likely that Guanyin was real human of unknown gender? Do the origins of fictional stories become more mysterious if there never were the fictitious characters in the flesh? Did Paul Bunyan exist, as there were similar lumberjacks?
You’re not supposed to tie yourself to any hypothesis, even if mainstream, but rather update your probability distributions. Bits of the NT weren’t written until long enough after the supposed death of Jesus that people wouldn’t have been like, ‘Who you talkin’ about?′ And I doubt they would’ve cared whether the character existed, like no one cares whether Harry Potter existed, because it’s the stories that matter.
Would you say the origins of other religions become more mysterious if there never were whatever magical beings those religions posit?
Yes, of course.
The least mysterious explanation of Paul Bunyan stories is that there really was a Paul Bunyan. And the closer the real Paul Bunyan hews to the Bunyan of the stories, the smaller the mystery. P(stories about Bunyan | Bunyan) > P(stories about Bunyan | !Bunyan).
But just because a story is simple, doesn’t necessarily make it likely. We can’t conclude from the above that P(Bunyan | stories about Bunyan) > P(!Bunyan | stories about Bunyan).
You left out the ‘magical’ part of my question. If magical beings exist(ed), then everything becomes more mysterious. That’s partly why we don’t pester JK Rowling about what extra-special boy Harry Potter was based on. We don’t even suspect comic superheros like Batman, who has no magic, to have been based on a real-life billionaire. We certainly don’t have scholars wasting time looking for evidence of ‘the real Batman.’ Modern stories of unlikely events are easily taken as imaginings, yet when people bucket a story as ‘old/traditonal’, for some people, that bucket includes ‘characters must’ve been real persons’, as if humans must’ve been too stupid to have imagination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakelore
the closer the real Paul Bunyan hews to the Bunyan of the stories, the smaller the mystery
Of course magic makes everything else more mysterious i.e. P(magical Jesus) is infinitesimal. But P(non magical Jesus) is not low. We do ask JK Rowling what non magical boy inspired Harry Potter.
We do ask J K Rowling what non-magical boy inspired Harry Potter.
I guess you mean that we could and it wouldn’t be obviously silly, with which I agree. But, for what it’s worth, it never crossed my mind to assume that Harry Potter was based on any specific non-magical boy. The characteristics he has that aren’t essentially dependent on story-specific things (magic, being the prime target of a supervillain, etc.) seem pretty ordinary and not in any particular need of explanation.
I wouldn’t be astonished if it turned out that there was some kid Rowling knew once whom she used as a sort of basis for the character of Harry Potter, but I’d be a bit surprised. And if it did, I wouldn’t expect particular incidents in the books to be derived from particular things that happened to that child.
In particular, I wouldn’t say that the simplest (still less the most likely) explanation for the Harry Potter stories involves there being some non-magical child on whom they are based.
I don’t think any of this has much bearing on whether the simplest explanation for stories about Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha, Zeus, etc., involves actual historical characters on which they’re based. The answer to that surely varies a lot from case to case. (FWIW I’d say: historical Jesus of some sort likely but not certain; historical Muhammad almost certain; historical Buddha likely but not certain; historical Zeus-predecessor very unlikely. But I am not expert enough for my guesses to be worth anything.)
Historical Muhammad not certain: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122669909279629451 . Of course, people have set about trying to protect minds from a ‘fringe’ Bayesian view: “Prof. Kalisch was told he could keep his professorship but must stop teaching Islam to future school teachers.” In case anyone missed it, Richard Carrier explicitly used Bayes on question of historical Jesus. I don’t know if Kalisch used Bayes, but his language conveys intuitive Bayesian update.
The bearing of fictional stories is simple: calculate probabilities of historical X based on practically 100% probability that human imagination was a factor (given that the stories contain highly unlikely magic like in known-to-be fiction stories, plus were written long after X supposedly lived). Note that that still leaves out probabilities of motivations for passing fiction as nonfiction like Joseph Smith or L. Ron Hubbard did. Once you figure probabilities including motivations and iterations of previous religious memes, it becomes increasingly unlikely that X existed. Paul Bunyan, AFAIK, wasn’t based on previous memes for controlling people, nor were the stories used to control people, so I wouldn’t be suspicious if someone believed the stories started based on someone real. When people insist religious characters were real, OTOH, I become suspicious of their motivations, given unlikelihood that they examined evidence and updated Bayesian-like.
@Salemicus: Citation for “We do ask JK Rowling what non magical boy inspired Harry Potter”?
What’s your comparison baseline? Compared to the screen in front of your face, he’s not certain. Compared to pretty much anyone born in the VI century, he is quite certain.
You don’t count the Koran as “intact own writings”? :-) Yes, I am well aware that it was compiled quite some time after his death from a collection of records and that, by tradition, Muhammad was illiterate.
The Arab society around VII century wasn’t big on writing—the cultural transmission was mostly oral. However external sources mention Muhammad already in 636 AD.
You’re referring to the phrase “many villages were ravaged by the killing of the Arabs of Muhammad”, written after Muhammad’s supposed death, “Arabs of Muhammad” meaning ‘Muslims’ the way “people of Christ” means ‘Christians’. That Muslims and Christians existed doesn’t mean the characters they invoked to justify violence, supremacism, etc. existed as actual humans.
Criteria for considering Muhammad and Jesus near certain are so lax, we’d have to consider some Greek/Roman gods near certain.
So you’re arguing that by 632 the violent and supremacist Arab hordes were justifying their violence and supremacism by inventing an imaginary prophet who lived merely a few decades before (so some of “his” contemporaries were still alive). Because they were so tricksy they made him not a terribly appealing character—an illiterate merchant’s apprentice who married a cougar and then went a bit crazy—and attributed to him a whole book of poetry clearly written while on acid. And hey—it worked! Their creation (I guess it was a joint effort—takes a village and all that..?) was so successful that it caused the fastest massive conquest in human history.
The criteria for the historicity of Greek/Roman Gods and Muhammad/Jesus are not the same.
The Roman Gods are for the most part just Romanized versions of Greek Gods. If you examine the different characteristics closely, then the Greek Gods have much in common with Gods in the pantheons of other Indo-European peoples. For example Zeus is the God of Thunder, Thor is the God of Thunder in Germanic mythologies, and Perun serves the same purpose in Slavic mythologies.
Based on these similarities you can trace these stories to the stories of some common ancestral Gods of the old Indo-European nomads on the steppes of Russia and the Ukraine… So these stories are so ancient that any link to anyone living whether man or whatever is highly unlikely.
However stories of Jesus and Muhammad are much more likely considering since they occured at times when writing was already invented and shortly after their death, we can see stirrings of historical events linked to them. With Jesus, we have historical writing of him maybe 50 years after his death, including by his enemies. So a historical figure of Jesus is highly likely, although the miracles and stuff attributed to him are made up.
With Muhammad the probabilities are even higher. Shortly after his death, there were conquests of neighboring lands done by people who were saying they were his friends (meaning they saw him live). While most of the stories about him are probably highly exaggerated, there most likely was a historical Muhammad.
I did say almost certain. My impression—which, as I said above, is no more than that and could easily be very wrong—is that the Jesus-myth theories require less “conspiracy” than the Muhammad-myth ones.
Interestingly, after looking over Wikipedia a bit, apparently there may have been a Paul Bon Jean on whom the earliest Paul Bunyan tales could have been based… a big lumberjack, but with “big” being more like six to seven foot and less like sixty to seventy foot.
Hmmm. To mess around with equations a bit… what can we say about P(Bunyan | stories about Bunyan) and P(!Bunyan | stories about Bunyan), given P(stories about Bunyan | Bunyan) > P(stories about Bunyan | !Bunyan)?
Let’s genaralise it a bit (and reduce typing). What can we say about P(A|B) and P(!A|B) when P(B|A) > P(B|!A)?
...which means that either (1-P(A)) > P(A) or P(A|B) > P(!A|B), and quite possibly both; and whichever of these two inequalities is false (if either) the ratio between the two sides is closer than the inequality that is true.
To return to the original example; either P(Bunyan | stories about Bunyan) > P(!Bunyan | stories about Bunyan) OR P(!Bunyan) > P(Bunyan).
Also, if P(Bunyan | stories about Bunyan) > P(!Bunyan | stories about Bunyan) is false, then it must be true that P(Bunyan|stories about Bunyan) > P(Bunyan).
Your second point is clearly true. The first seems false; Christianity makes much more sense from a Greco-Roman perspective if Jesus was supposed to be a celestial being, not an eternal unchanging principle that was executed for treason. And the sibling comment leaves out the part about first-century Israelites wanting a way to replace the ‘corrupt,’ Roman-controlled, Temple cult of sacrifice with something like a sacrifice that Rome could never control.
Josephus saw the destruction of that Temple coming. For others to believe it would happen if they ‘restored the purity of the religion’ only requires the existence of some sensible zealots.
Broadly speaking, I agree, and Jesus mythicist Richard
Carrier would also
agree:
[A]mateurs should not be voicing certitude in a matter
still being debated by experts ([Jesus] historicity
agnosticism is far more defensible and makes far more
sense for amateurs on the sidelines) and [...]
criticizing Christianity with a lead of “Jesus didn’t even
exist” is strategically ill conceived—it’s bad strategy
on many levels, it only makes atheists look illogical, and
(counter-intuitively) it can actually make Christians more
certain of their faith.
I think it is more likely that Jesus began in the
Christian mind as a celestial being (like an
archangel), believed or claimed to be revealing divine
truths through revelations (and, by bending the ear of
prophets in previous eras, through hidden messages
planted in scripture). Christianity thus began the
same way Islam and Mormonism did: by their principal
apostles (Mohammed and Joseph Smith) claiming to have
received visions from their religion’s “actual”
teacher and founder, in each case an angel (Gabriel
dictated the Koran, Moroni provided the Book of
Mormon).
[...]
It would be several decades later when subsequent
members of this cult, after the world had not yet
ended as claimed, started allegorizing the gospel of
this angelic being by placing him in earth history as
a divine man, as a commentary on the gospel and its
relation to society and the Christian mission. The
same had already been done to other celestial gods and
heroes, who were being transported into earth history
all over the Greco-Roman world, a process now called
Euhemerization, after the author Euhemerus, who began
the trend in the 4th century B.C. by converting the
celestial Zeus and Uranus into ordinary human kings
and placing them in past earth history, claiming they
were “later” deified (in a book ironically titled
Sacred Scripture). Other gods then underwent the
same transformation, from Romulus (originally the
celestial deity Quirinus) to Osiris (originally the
heavenly lord whom pharaohs claimed to resemble, he
was eventually transformed into a historical pharaoh
himself).
[I]n Jewish cosmology, all sorts of things that
exist or occur on earth also do so in heaven:
fighting, writing, scrolls, temples, chairs, trees,
gardens.
The writings about Jesus that come the closest to being
contemporary with his putative lifetime are Paul’s
seven or so authentic
letters.
Paul, who converted to Christianity after Jesus came to
him in a vision sometime around 33
CE,
never claims to have met the historical Jesus, and never
unambiguously talks about Jesus as a human who lived on
Earth. (E.g.: Paul talks about about Jesus being
crucified, but this crucifixion took place in some
celestial realm not on Earth. Paul mentions “James the
Lord’s brother”, but this means not that James was a
literal brother of Jesus of Nazareth but that James is
a fellow
Christian,
the way a modern Christian might refer to their
“brothers and sisters in Christ”.)
I think this fails in the case where the experts are infected by a meme plague.
Isn’t this a Fully General Counterargument, though? Climate change deniers can claim that climate experts are ‘infected by a meme plague’. Creationists can claim anyone who accepts evolution is ‘infected by a meme plague’. So on and so forth.
Isn’t this a Fully General Counterargument, though?
It’s not a counterargument, it’s an observation about the limits of the maxim quoted. And while it can certainly be misapplied, are you going to argue that a memetic plague never happens?
Then I may have misunderstood the intention of the phrase.
As an observation about the limits of the maxim, I agree with it. And no, I’m not going to argue that a memetic plague never happens.
I am, however, going to argue that a memetic plague is hard to identify, making this observation very difficult to actually apply with any reliability. It’s just too easy—if I see a bunch of experts in the subject all saying something that I disagree with—for me to think “they’re infected by a memetic plague”. It’s so much more comforting to think that than to think “maybe I’m wrong”—especially when I already have some evidence that seems to say that I am right. So, while this observation can be applied correctly, it would be far, far too easy to misapply. And if I were to misapply it—I would have no idea that I am, in fact, misapplying it.
As a general observation, then, I cautiously agree. As a specific argument in virtually any debate, I deeply mistrust it.
We know how religion spreads. We know it well enough that when it is obvious enough that the “experts” are basing their “expertise” on religion, we can ignore it without worrying that we are just dismissing the experts because doing so is comforting.
It’s not as if the way religion spreads is seriously in question.
The predominant ways in which Christianity has spread are conversion by the sword, parent to child transmission, and social ostracism for people who refuse to believe it.
If this were true—and if it were an exhaustive list of the predominant ways—then I would expect to see the following:
Parent-to-child transmission only works if the parents are Christian. Social ostracisation only works if a majority of a given person’s possible social acquaintances are.
Thus, the only means on the list of introducing is into a new area is by the sword
Thus, I would expect missionaries to either have been abandoned, or to be given a sword as standard equipment on setting out. I do not see this.
Furthermore, I would expect to see, in countries where it is not a majority religion, it would slowly fade and die (as social ostracism is used against it by the majority)
Now, I am not saying that it is never spread by such means. (Fortunately, ‘by the sword’ appears to have been largely abandoned in recent history). But assuming it to be an exhaustive list does not appear to match reality—there seems to be a rather large gap where a single missionary, armed with nothing more than information and presumably a fairly persuasive tongue, can go into a large enough group of humans who have little or no previous knowledge of religion and end up persuading a number of them to join.
I would expect missionaries to either have been abandoned, or to be given a sword as standard equipment on setting out.
You would expect (peaceful) missionaries to be abandoned (at least as a tool for spreading Christianity to places where there is no Christianity) if there were a careful effort to track their effectiveness. I do not believe there usually is. Is your impression different?
If you look at the places where there are a lot of Christians, they do seem to match up pretty well with (1) where the Roman Empire was plus (2) places colonized by countries that used to be part of the Roman Empire.
One obvious counterexample is Korea, which (I think) is evidence that missionaries can sometimes introduce Christianity to a new place with long-term success. But what others are there?
(Incidentally, I think your analysis is incomplete. Another way to introduce Christianity to a new area would be immigration. I don’t know to what extent this has actually happened.)
I don’t think you need a careful effort to track their exact effectiveness. It would be fairly obvious in a couple of generations that peaceful missionaries would fall in one of two categories—either they have some success (as evidenced by some number of converts that they win over) or they have no success (as evidenced by every missionary outreach pretty much collapsing as soon as the missionary either leaves or dies).
A careful effort to track effectiveness could tell the difference between slight success and strong success, but I think that even with a merely cursory checkup people could tell the difference between some success and no success at all.
If you look at the places where there are a lot of Christians, they do seem to match up pretty well with (1) where the Roman Empire was plus (2) places colonized by countries that used to be part of the Roman Empire.
I’m not surprised. There are many possible explanations for this; a sufficient explanation might be that these are places that early (Latin-speaking) missionaries could be reasonably sure of finding Latin-speaking people, and thus were not required to face the additional hurdle of learning a new language first.
One obvious counterexample is Korea, which (I think) is evidence that missionaries can sometimes introduce Christianity to a new place with long-term success. But what others are there?
(Incidentally, I think your analysis is incomplete. Another way to introduce Christianity to a new area would be immigration. I don’t know to what extent this has actually happened.)
That is true. I don’t know to what extent that has happened either, but I imagine it would be accompanied (if successful) by a very strong spread of the immigrant’s culture in other ways, as well. (Such as language).
[...] or they have no success (as evidenced by every missionary outreach pretty much collapsing as soon as the missionary either leaves or dies).
I think missionaries are usually sent to particular places by organizations, and when one leaves another goes. So there isn’t opportunity to identify where they aren’t making progress. And the actual question isn’t really “no success” versus “any success”; no one claimed or implied that converting people is literally impossible, only that generally when Christianity spreads successfully it does so along with military conquest.
I’m not surprised.
You’re welcome to be (having had the facts pointed out to you) as surprised or unsurprised as you please; I remark that much the simplest explanation would seem to be that Christianity mostly spreads by military conquest.
would Japan count?
It’s hard to tell how big a Christian community the missionaries there were able to produce. (Right now, as I understand it, Japan is one of the world’s least religious countries, so I guess you are thinking of the 17th century.) So, I dunno: maybe?
… Oh, I thought of another way for Christianity to get into a new area that’s consistent with the “converting people is really ineffective” narrative. Again, no one claims that converting people is 100% ineffective. So, what you do is to find a place whose rulers are very much in control of the population, and send your missionaries to the royal court or whatever. They probably won’t convince the ruler, but if they do then bingo, you’ve got thousands or millions of new converts fairly immediately. I think this has happened once or twice. I bet it’s been attempted a lot more.
I think missionaries are usually sent to particular places by organizations, and when one leaves another goes.
It’s not going to be perfect. Sometimes there will be more missionaries than established places to send them, and new missions can be opened—but sometimes a missionary will, through mischance or malice, die before he’s expected to do so and there will be no replacement ready to send.
I don’t actually know about specific incidences, but there should be enough data on what happens when a mission is abandoned to be able to tell how successful it can be.
You’re welcome to be (having had the facts pointed out to you) as surprised or unsurprised as you please; I remark that much the simplest explanation would seem to be that Christianity mostly spreads by military conquest.
That is a simple explanation, yes. Another simple explanation is that Christianity mostly spreads where language barriers don’t get in the way.
I don’t see either of these two explanations as being significantly simpler than the other.
… Oh, I thought of another way for Christianity to get into a new area that’s consistent with the “converting people is really ineffective” narrative. Again, no one claims that converting people is 100% ineffective. So, what you do is to find a place whose rulers are very much in control of the population, and send your missionaries to the royal court or whatever. They probably won’t convince the ruler, but if they do then bingo, you’ve got thousands or millions of new converts fairly immediately. I think this has happened once or twice. I bet it’s been attempted a lot more.
Hmmmm. That would be a sensible scenario. There have also been cases where non-Christian rulers, perhaps fearing the political power of the church, made practice of the religion illegal, with severe punishments for doing so. Taking the two together, it seems fairly clear that converting the ruler would be a very important step for many successful missionaries.
there should be enough data on what happens when a mission is abandoned to be able to tell how successful it can be.
I remain doubtful, but perhaps you’re right.
where language barriers don’t get in the way
Also a reasonable hypothesis. Hmm, do we have cases where the boundaries of the Roman Empire don’t match up well with linguistic boundaries? Probably not, simply because anywhere conquered by the Romans would probably have tended to learn to speak Latin, producing an artificial lowering of language barriers within the empire.
cases where non-Christian rulers [...] made practice of the religion illegal
Yes. Though in the most famous recent case I can think of—the Soviet Union—it seems that they weren’t very effective in suppressing Christianity; it came back pretty strongly once the communists lost power. Still, paying a lot of attention to the ruler(s) does seem like an effective strategy for those wanting to spread a religion to a new place.
Going back to the higher-level question of how necessary conquest is to the spread of Christianity: there are apparently something like 100M Christians in China, and not because China was ever conquered by Christians. On the other hand, in the past there seem to have been multiple instances where Christian missions produced a fair number of converts but then the religion largely died out until the next wave of missionaries came in.
My impression after all this is as follows. (1) It is certainly not impossible for Christianity to spread without conquest, and there are a few major instances where it has done so. (2) Most of the world’s Christians, however, are part of Christian communities that got way way by conquest. (3) Attempts to spread Christianity by mere persuasion are sometimes very effective but often very ineffective.
I would expect that all these things apply equally to any other major religion. #2 will of course be untrue for religions that have never gained official approval by any political power, but we should expect all such religions to be pretty small in numbers for that exact reason. Maybe Hinduism is a sort of exception, being found almost exclusively in India, but I am shockingly ignorant of Indian history and don’t know whether e.g. there’s a history of conquest within what is now a single country.
Hmm, do we have cases where the boundaries of the Roman Empire don’t match up well with linguistic boundaries? Probably not, simply because anywhere conquered by the Romans would probably have tended to learn to speak Latin, producing an artificial lowering of language barriers within the empire.
Hmmm. I don’t know enough history to be able to name specific situations, but what about the other way round—countries that learned Latin without being conquered? (Perhaps for ease of trading?)
Though in the most famous recent case I can think of—the Soviet Union—it seems that they weren’t very effective in suppressing Christianity
I believe the Roman Empire once tried to suppress it as well. It doesn’t appear to have worked then, either.
Going back to the higher-level question of how necessary conquest is to the spread of Christianity: there are apparently something like 100M Christians in China, and not because China was ever conquered by Christians. On the other hand, in the past there seem to have been multiple instances where Christian missions produced a fair number of converts but then the religion largely died out until the next wave of missionaries came in.
Yes; there seem to have been specific instances where missionary conversion worked, and specific instances where it did not.
My impression after all this is as follows. (1) It is certainly not impossible for Christianity to spread without conquest, and there are a few major instances where it has done so. (2) Most of the world’s Christians, however, are part of Christian communities that got way way by conquest. (3) Attempts to spread Christianity by mere persuasion are sometimes very effective but often very ineffective.
Those conclusions do not seem unreasonable to me.
I would expect that all these things apply equally to any other major religion.
I think it also depends somewhat on the structure of the religion in question. Judaism doesn’t have missionaries, for example, and I don’t think there’s any way for a non-Jew to become a Jew (I may be wrong on that point, but if there is, the Jews certainly don’t advertise it).
You can convert to Judaism. However you are right that they are not actively interested in converting someone.
There seems to be a certain historical arc here. The earliest religions did not try to convert anyone because they were simply part of the culture of an individual nation, and you don’t convert people to a nationality. Judaism is part of this tradition but at the border of the next, namely the point where people realize that insofar as religions make claims about the world, it does not make sense for some people to accept them and some people to reject them. If a claim about the world is true, everyone should accept it. This leads religions to try to convert people. Now we are reaching a third stage: as even religious people come closer to realizing that those claims were not actually true in the first place, even the religious people are backing away again from converting people. An example would be Pope Francis condemning proselytism and saying that he is not interested in converting Evangelicals etc.
Consider also that religions that convert more people tend to spread faster and farther than religions that don’t. So over time religions should become more virulent.
The book “The Rise of Christianity” is an excellent analysis, using the tools of modern sociology, of the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Key insights
It grew exponentially mostly via transmission from people you knew. As your social world became more than 50% Christian, you were more likely to convert. In recent times Mormanism has grown in a similar fashion.
It had many rules that encouraged having large families (no birth control, no abortion, no infanticide, no sex outside marriage which encouraged young marriage, bans on many sources of fun other than having sex with your spouse, bans of divorce which made marriage more secure in a sense).
The higher status of women in Christianity than in the Roman world encouraged women to convert. An example of this higher status was that a pagan man could order his wife to have an abortion. Many of the patriarchal statements in the new testament were latter additions when the church, which was originally very egalitarian, did become very patriarchal.
Christians were only allowed to marry pagans if the pagan converted, or at a minimum, agreed for the children to brought up as Christians.
(3) and (4) combined with the shortage of women due to infanticide of female children meant that men who wanted a wife often had little choice but to marry a Christian. The children would then be Christians.
Once they achieved critical mass they seized control of the state and enacted coercive measures which ruthlessly crushed the other religions. As an example, even visiting pagan temples was banned, books were destroyed, priests killed, temples burned or converted to churches.
Another factor is that Christianity is exclusive—one could not adhere to Christianity and, say, Mithraism at the same time, since Christianity claimed a monopoly on religious truth. Other saviour cults which did not function in the same way would not have been able to work up the same amount of religious fervour, since a man’s trust in his religion is limited by that religion’s trust in itself.
there seems to be a rather large gap where a single missionary, armed with nothing more than information and presumably a fairly persuasive tongue, can go into a large enough group of humans who have little or no previous knowledge of religion and end up persuading a number of them to join.
When do you believe this happened, aside from cases where “Jesus” was translated as “Buddha”? Missionaries today typically harass other Christians.
A brief Google points me at this fellow. He was a medieval Fransiscan missionary to China, and established what appears to have been a reasonably successful church there that stayed around for about forty years after his death (until the Ming Dynasty arose in 1369 and expelled them from the country).
Furthermore, I would expect to see, in countries where it is not a majority religion, it would slowly fade and die (as social ostracism is used against it by the majority)
No, it just has to get big enough that Christians have enough other Christians around that the social structure becomes self-sustaining. Social ostracism is used to get rid of spontaneously appearing non-Christian individuals, not large groups.
But assuming it to be an exhaustive list does not appear to match reality -
So don’t assume it’s an exhaustive list.
It really doesn’t matter for the purposes of my point that it also spreads through peaceful missionaries. You seem to think that I’m complaining that Christianity spreads violently, so you’re bringing up non-violent missionaries. But that isn’t my point.
My point is that Christianity spreads as a meme system. Belief systems have traits which lead them to spread regardless of their truth. Some of those traits I listed above. Other traits include, of course, the belief system telling its members to send out missionaries to spread the belief system. Having missionaries is an adaptation which helps the belief system to spread, in the same way that coconuts being able to float so they can travel to distant islands helps coconuts to spread. Belief systems which spread efficiently will do better than belief systems that don’t, and will soon cover as much area as they can right until they run into other well-adapted belief systems.
No, it just has to get big enough that Christians have enough other Christians around that the social structure becomes self-sustaining. Social ostracism is used to get rid of spontaneously appearing non-Christian individuals, not large groups.
Fair enough. A neighbourhood or other small community can be self-sustaining, then.
But it still needs to be started.
So don’t assume it’s an exhaustive list.
As soon as I don’t assume it’s an exhaustive list, your point collapses. Yes, it does spread as a meme system, This is because it is a meme system.
Newtonian physics is also a meme system. And Newtonian physics can also spread as a meme system, in all three of the ways you describe. (I don’t think anyone ever has tried to spread Newtonian physics by the sword, but it could be done in theory; but Newtonian physics has most certainly been spread by parent-to-child transmission and by social ostracisation).
Similarly for relativistic physics. Or, for that matter, any other descriptive model of the universe, including ones that are perfectly accurate and 100% true. Because any descriptive model of the universe is a meme system, and can therefore be spread as a meme system.
Your conclusion, in short, relies on the idea that Christianity is only spread by means that are not dependant on the truth of its ideas, and never spread by means that are dependant on the truth of those ideas. This you have not shown.
It isn’t all or nothing. These methods of transmission exist for Newtonian physics, but they are much less fundamental to how Newtonian physics spreads.
If it’s medieval times, and I announce to the members of my village that I’m not a Christian and act accordingly. I may end up dead, lynched, expelled, tortured by the Inquisition, or sent to a ghetto. If i get up now and announce that I don’t believe in Newtonian physics, not much is going to happen to me unless I have a job that depends on Newtonian physics. The social ostracization may not be completely missing (people can still laugh at me), but it’s far weaker than for Christianity.
And parents teach Christianity to their children because Christianity directly asserts that it is good to teach itself to your children, and implies that their children will be in terrible supernatural peril if they don’t. There really isn’t anything comparable for Newtonian physics that isn’t related to the fact that Newtonian physics works—if parents don’t teach their children not to walk off cliffs, the children won’t grow up to refuse to teach Newtonian physics to their own children.
I’m pretty sure that the main modern transmission vector for Newtonian physics is schoolteacher-to-child (which is very similar to parent-to-child, except that the parent hires an intermediary). Mind you, I don’t have any stats or data handy to back that up, it’s just a general impression.
But again, that happens because it’s piggybacking on the fact that people teach things that work. Since science works, it gets taught. If science didn’t make factual claims with real-world implications, nobody would teach it. Religion is not bound by this; it gets taught even in the absence of such factual claims, because it has a bunch of commands that amount to “spread this religion regardless of the facts”.
I think there’s some equivocation here between different meanings of “expert”. Experts in Shakespeare are experts in what Shakespeare said and what things mean within the context of Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespeare’s life. A comparable “expert in Christianity” would be able to tell me what Christianity claims and put it into context as a whole.
But “amateurs should defer to experts”, in reference to Christianity, doesn’t mean “amateurs should accept the experts’ word about Christianity,” it means “amateurs should accept the claims presented by Christianity”. There’s nothing comparable for Shakespeare. In this sense, neither experts nor schools teach Shakespeare at all.
But “amateurs should defer to experts”, in reference to Christianity, doesn’t mean “amateurs should accept the experts’ word about Christianity,” it means “amateurs should accept the claims presented by Christianity”. There’s nothing comparable for Shakespeare. In this sense, neither experts nor schools teach Shakespeare at all.
Um.
Going back to the comment that started this all—over here—shows that the quote originally comes from this page, which is an essay written from the atheist perspective on how to go about arguing the historicity of Jesus. The ‘experts’ in question appear (to me) to be not theologists but historians, seeking whether or not a given person, referenced in certain historical documents, actually lived at one point or not, and the author bluntly states that he expects the odds of said existence, using his best estimate of requisite probabilities, to be about one in twelve thousand. (He then goes on to say that this is far from the least likely claim in the Christian faith; supernatural miracles are far more unlikely, and thus far better things to call into question).
So, no, the original context does not say that amateurs should accept the claims made by Christianity (and it does not define professionals by their religious leanings). It says that amateurs should not take a firm position on a question where the experts do not take that firm position. (It does not say that the amateurs have to agree with the experts when those experts do take a firm position, amateurs are allowed to remain uncertain).
You made a claim that schools teach their curriculum because the curriculum is useful. (e.g. If science didn’t make factual claims with real-world implications, nobody would teach it)
Teaching Shakespeare is an example where it’s not clear whether there any use to it. Schools might simply teach it because teaching Shakespeare is high status.
The math curriculum is also not optimized by teaching children the kind of math that’s likely to be useful for them. It instead tries to teach them calculus because calculus is high status while making Fermi estimates isn’t.
I didn’t claim that the only reason schools teach their curriculum is that it is useful. There can be (and are) different parts of the curriculum taught for different reasons, some related to being useful and some not.
How well do they serve each purpose? I’m given to understand Newton’s Laws are highly useful in engineering. How do they compare with alternative means of producing status, like teaching everyone ‘Ubik’ and ‘fnord?’
Or latin. Theres a bedrock sense of what works, and there is a more socially defined sense. If your society values some religion, dead language or author, then it works to teach it, because it gives people acceptability and status.
I live in a suburban school district in the Southeast US. The public middle and high schools here do teach Latin as one of the foreign language options, along with Mandarin, French, German and Spanish.
This is a good argument, and one way of seeing that is by contrast with Islam, where the method described is historically much closer to being exhaustive—and in general it was indeed introduced into new areas was by means of swords, and missionaries did take swords with them as standard equipment. (In the future Islam may continue to spread more in the fashion that Christianity did in the past, however.)
This idea seems to be more or less taken for granted by people who oppose either Islam. Is there actually a perspicuous source of data describing in detail how Islam spread, that allows assessments of that kind to be made?
You could start by reading about the topic on Wikipedia (that will also refer you to many other sources.) Of course you could say that probably most of those articles and their sources were written by non-Muslims. But that is like saying that most people who have argued for any position have tended to be people who believe that position, and therefore we should ignore their arguments.
Just because there’s an article on the spread of Islam doesn’t mean that a balanced quantitative analysis on the means of its proliferation either exists or is possible. Usually when someone asserts something to that effect, the onus is on them to support their assertion by referencing a specific source.
The predominant ways in which Christianity has spread are conversion by the sword, parent to child transmission, and social ostracism for people who refuse to believe it. It spreads for reasons related to its fitness as a system of ideas but unrelated to its factual truth. This is not how evolution spreads.
Also, distinguish between “anyone can claim X” and “anyone can correctly claim X”. Creationists could claim that evolution spreads the same way—but they’d be wrong.
It spreads for reasons related to its fitness as a system of ideas but unrelated to its factual truth. This is not how evolution spreads.
The historical survival of religions and societies is a matter of factual truth. Evolution rewards success, not epistemic purity. Is peacock’s plumage related to factual truth?
Please don’t be Internet-pedantic here. “Factual truth” here means “the factual truth of the statements made by the religion”, not “factual truths about the religion”.
Maybe there’s a confusion being caused here by the sentence “This is not how evolution spreads.”
It could mean at least one of the following:
1) “This is not how the theory of evolution itself was spread”
2) “This is not the mechanism according to which evolution spreads ideas”
It seems as if Lumifer interpreted your statement in the second sense (as I did initially), whereas reading your post in its original contexts suggests the first sense was the one which you intended.
Also, distinguish between “anyone can claim X” and “anyone can correctly claim X”. Creationists could claim that evolution spreads the same way—but they’d be wrong.
Assume a climate change denier or a creationist who (a) makes such an argument and (b) firmly believes it to be correct. How would he be best convinced that he is, in fact, wrong?
Same way you convince him of anything else—by arguing specific facts.
Just because two sides can produce arguments with similar forms doesn’t mean they also have similar facts. “Anyone can claim X”, divorced from the facts about X, is only about having similar forms.
Hmmm. Could work. Or perhaps the first thing he’d conclude is that you are infected by the meme plague, and the second thing he’d do is suspect that you are trying to infect him with the meme plague.
He could respond to this in two ways; either by ending the debate, in the hope of immunising himself; or by arguing against you, in the hopes of curing you.
...huh. Actually, thinking about this, a lot of bad debate habits (ignoring the other person’s evidence, refusing to change your mind, etc.) actually make a lot of sense when seen as protective measures specifically to prevent infection by meme plagues.
What to do then, when experts sometimes are infected with meme plagues, have conflicts of interest, are able to prevent alternative views from being presented?
If all experts are infected with meme plagues, and are able to prevent alternative views from being presented, then you have a problem. This implies that one of the following is true:
Studying the subject at all carries a strong risk of meme plague infection
Only those pre-infected with the meme plague have the interest and/or the ability to study the subject
You’re wrong about something—either the presence of the meme plague or its spread or… something.
You could attempt to study the subject to expert level yourself, taking appropriate anti-meme-plague precautions; but you have to be very careful that you’re not shutting your ears to something that’s really true (you don’t want to become a climate-change-denying weather expert, after all) so you’ll need to seriously consider all necessary data (maybe re-run some vital experiments). This would take significant time and effort.
I don’t know what other strategy could reasonably be followed...
A deciding factor was that I no longer know what to say to students and postdocs regarding how to navigate the CRAZINESS in the field of climate science. Research and other professional activities are professionally rewarded only if they are channeled in certain directions approved by a politicized academic establishment — funding, ease of getting your papers published, getting hired in prestigious positions, appointments to prestigious committees and boards, professional recognition, etc.
How young scientists are to navigate all this is beyond me, and it often becomes a battle of scientific integrity versus career suicide (I have worked through these issues with a number of skeptical young scientists).
Okay. In this particular real-life example, though, it is clear that the politicisation is in the infrastructure around the science, not in the science itself. That is to say, learning climate science is not memetically dangerous—it is simply difficult to get a paper published that does not agree with certain politics. And that is bad, but it is not the worst possibility—it means that someone merely studying climate science is safe in so doing.
So, in this particular case, the solution of studying climate science oneself, becoming an expert, and then forming a suitable opinion is a viable strategy (albeit one that takes some significant time).
(An alternative solution—which will also be a hard thing to do—is to create some form of parallel infrastructure for climate science; another magazine in which to publish, another source of funding, and so on. There will likely be serious attempts to politicise this infrastructure as well, of course, and fending off such attempts will doubtless take some effort).
learning climate science is not memetically dangerous
If you are an autodidact and study the climate science by yourself from first principles, yes, it’s not dangerous. However if you study it in the usual way—by going to a university, learning from professors and published papers, etc. -- you will absorb the memes.
Hmmmm. Depends how ingrained the memes are in the material. Oh, you’d certainly have awareness of the memes—but accepting them is a different story, and a certain skepticism in a student (or in a professor) can probably blunt that effect quite a bit.
Even if the memes are that thoroughly integrated, though, the only effect is to make the establishment of a parallel infrastructure that much more appropriate a solution.
There is another possibility: the selection process for experts eliminates diverse perspectives.
Try getting tenure as a political scientist as a conservative republican, as an example.
But there are more subtle problems. For example, the selection process for medical doctors actively screens out people with a high level of mathematical and statistical skill, knowledge and ability.
It does this by very strongly selecting for other characteristics—ability to memorize vast arrays of words and facts, physical and mental stamina. Because if you strongly select for X, it will generally be at a cost to anything else that is not strongly correlated with X.
Neither sufficient nor necessary:
The origins of Christianity become more mysterious, not less, if there never was a Jesus.
We don’t need to tie ourselves to a fringe hypothesis to posit non-supernatural origins for the Gospels.
Would you say the origins of other religions become more mysterious if there never were whatever magical beings those religions posit? Would you think it likely that Guanyin was real human of unknown gender? Do the origins of fictional stories become more mysterious if there never were the fictitious characters in the flesh? Did Paul Bunyan exist, as there were similar lumberjacks?
You’re not supposed to tie yourself to any hypothesis, even if mainstream, but rather update your probability distributions. Bits of the NT weren’t written until long enough after the supposed death of Jesus that people wouldn’t have been like, ‘Who you talkin’ about?′ And I doubt they would’ve cared whether the character existed, like no one cares whether Harry Potter existed, because it’s the stories that matter.
Yes, of course.
The least mysterious explanation of Paul Bunyan stories is that there really was a Paul Bunyan. And the closer the real Paul Bunyan hews to the Bunyan of the stories, the smaller the mystery. P(stories about Bunyan | Bunyan) > P(stories about Bunyan | !Bunyan).
But just because a story is simple, doesn’t necessarily make it likely. We can’t conclude from the above that P(Bunyan | stories about Bunyan) > P(!Bunyan | stories about Bunyan).
You left out the ‘magical’ part of my question. If magical beings exist(ed), then everything becomes more mysterious. That’s partly why we don’t pester JK Rowling about what extra-special boy Harry Potter was based on. We don’t even suspect comic superheros like Batman, who has no magic, to have been based on a real-life billionaire. We certainly don’t have scholars wasting time looking for evidence of ‘the real Batman.’ Modern stories of unlikely events are easily taken as imaginings, yet when people bucket a story as ‘old/traditonal’, for some people, that bucket includes ‘characters must’ve been real persons’, as if humans must’ve been too stupid to have imagination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakelore
No, I didn’t leave that part out.
Of course magic makes everything else more mysterious i.e. P(magical Jesus) is infinitesimal. But P(non magical Jesus) is not low. We do ask JK Rowling what non magical boy inspired Harry Potter.
I guess you mean that we could and it wouldn’t be obviously silly, with which I agree. But, for what it’s worth, it never crossed my mind to assume that Harry Potter was based on any specific non-magical boy. The characteristics he has that aren’t essentially dependent on story-specific things (magic, being the prime target of a supervillain, etc.) seem pretty ordinary and not in any particular need of explanation.
I wouldn’t be astonished if it turned out that there was some kid Rowling knew once whom she used as a sort of basis for the character of Harry Potter, but I’d be a bit surprised. And if it did, I wouldn’t expect particular incidents in the books to be derived from particular things that happened to that child.
In particular, I wouldn’t say that the simplest (still less the most likely) explanation for the Harry Potter stories involves there being some non-magical child on whom they are based.
I don’t think any of this has much bearing on whether the simplest explanation for stories about Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha, Zeus, etc., involves actual historical characters on which they’re based. The answer to that surely varies a lot from case to case. (FWIW I’d say: historical Jesus of some sort likely but not certain; historical Muhammad almost certain; historical Buddha likely but not certain; historical Zeus-predecessor very unlikely. But I am not expert enough for my guesses to be worth anything.)
Historical Muhammad not certain: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122669909279629451 . Of course, people have set about trying to protect minds from a ‘fringe’ Bayesian view: “Prof. Kalisch was told he could keep his professorship but must stop teaching Islam to future school teachers.” In case anyone missed it, Richard Carrier explicitly used Bayes on question of historical Jesus. I don’t know if Kalisch used Bayes, but his language conveys intuitive Bayesian update.
The bearing of fictional stories is simple: calculate probabilities of historical X based on practically 100% probability that human imagination was a factor (given that the stories contain highly unlikely magic like in known-to-be fiction stories, plus were written long after X supposedly lived). Note that that still leaves out probabilities of motivations for passing fiction as nonfiction like Joseph Smith or L. Ron Hubbard did. Once you figure probabilities including motivations and iterations of previous religious memes, it becomes increasingly unlikely that X existed. Paul Bunyan, AFAIK, wasn’t based on previous memes for controlling people, nor were the stories used to control people, so I wouldn’t be suspicious if someone believed the stories started based on someone real. When people insist religious characters were real, OTOH, I become suspicious of their motivations, given unlikelihood that they examined evidence and updated Bayesian-like.
@Salemicus: Citation for “We do ask JK Rowling what non magical boy inspired Harry Potter”?
What’s your comparison baseline? Compared to the screen in front of your face, he’s not certain. Compared to pretty much anyone born in the VI century, he is quite certain.
Then why don’t you just point to evidence of his existence being more likely than others’? We have bodily remains, intact own writings, or historical records made during the lives of many born in 6th century, e.g. Columbanus, Pope Gregory I, founding emperor of Tang Dynasty, Radegund, Venantius Fortunatus, Theodora). So why don’t we have any one of those types of evidence about Muhammad?
You don’t count the Koran as “intact own writings”? :-) Yes, I am well aware that it was compiled quite some time after his death from a collection of records and that, by tradition, Muhammad was illiterate.
The Arab society around VII century wasn’t big on writing—the cultural transmission was mostly oral. However external sources mention Muhammad already in 636 AD.
You’re referring to the phrase “many villages were ravaged by the killing of the Arabs of Muhammad”, written after Muhammad’s supposed death, “Arabs of Muhammad” meaning ‘Muslims’ the way “people of Christ” means ‘Christians’. That Muslims and Christians existed doesn’t mean the characters they invoked to justify violence, supremacism, etc. existed as actual humans.
Criteria for considering Muhammad and Jesus near certain are so lax, we’d have to consider some Greek/Roman gods near certain.
So you’re arguing that by 632 the violent and supremacist Arab hordes were justifying their violence and supremacism by inventing an imaginary prophet who lived merely a few decades before (so some of “his” contemporaries were still alive). Because they were so tricksy they made him not a terribly appealing character—an illiterate merchant’s apprentice who married a cougar and then went a bit crazy—and attributed to him a whole book of poetry clearly written while on acid. And hey—it worked! Their creation (I guess it was a joint effort—takes a village and all that..?) was so successful that it caused the fastest massive conquest in human history.
An interesting theory.
The criteria for the historicity of Greek/Roman Gods and Muhammad/Jesus are not the same.
The Roman Gods are for the most part just Romanized versions of Greek Gods. If you examine the different characteristics closely, then the Greek Gods have much in common with Gods in the pantheons of other Indo-European peoples. For example Zeus is the God of Thunder, Thor is the God of Thunder in Germanic mythologies, and Perun serves the same purpose in Slavic mythologies.
Based on these similarities you can trace these stories to the stories of some common ancestral Gods of the old Indo-European nomads on the steppes of Russia and the Ukraine… So these stories are so ancient that any link to anyone living whether man or whatever is highly unlikely.
However stories of Jesus and Muhammad are much more likely considering since they occured at times when writing was already invented and shortly after their death, we can see stirrings of historical events linked to them. With Jesus, we have historical writing of him maybe 50 years after his death, including by his enemies. So a historical figure of Jesus is highly likely, although the miracles and stuff attributed to him are made up.
With Muhammad the probabilities are even higher. Shortly after his death, there were conquests of neighboring lands done by people who were saying they were his friends (meaning they saw him live). While most of the stories about him are probably highly exaggerated, there most likely was a historical Muhammad.
I did say almost certain. My impression—which, as I said above, is no more than that and could easily be very wrong—is that the Jesus-myth theories require less “conspiracy” than the Muhammad-myth ones.
Interestingly, after looking over Wikipedia a bit, apparently there may have been a Paul Bon Jean on whom the earliest Paul Bunyan tales could have been based… a big lumberjack, but with “big” being more like six to seven foot and less like sixty to seventy foot.
Hmmm. To mess around with equations a bit… what can we say about P(Bunyan | stories about Bunyan) and P(!Bunyan | stories about Bunyan), given P(stories about Bunyan | Bunyan) > P(stories about Bunyan | !Bunyan)?
Let’s genaralise it a bit (and reduce typing). What can we say about P(A|B) and P(!A|B) when P(B|A) > P(B|!A)?
Consider Bayes’ Theorem: P(A|B) = [(P(B|A)*P(A)]/P(B). Thus, P(B) = [(P(B|A)*P(A)]/P(A|B)
Therefore, P(!A|B) = [(P(B|!A)*P(!A)]/P(B)
Now, P(!A) = 1-P(A). So:
P(!A|B) = [(P(B|!A)*{1-P(A)}]/P(B)
Solve for P(B):
P(B) = [(P(B|!A)*{1-P(A)}]/P(!A|B)
Since P(B) = [(P(B|A)*P(A)]/P(A|B):
[(P(B|A)*P(A)]/P(A|B) = [(P(B|!A)*{1-P(A)}]/P(!A|B)
Since P(B|A) > P(B|!A)
[(P(B|A)*P(A)]/P(A|B) > [(P(B|!A)*P(A)]/P(A|B)
Therefore:
[(P(B|!A)*{1-P(A)}]/P(!A|B) > [(P(B|!A)*P(A)]/P(A|B)
Since probabilities cannot be negative:
[{1-P(A)}]/P(!A|B) > [P(A)]/P(A|B)
.[1-P(A)]*P(A|B) > [P(A)]*P(!A|B)
...which means that either (1-P(A)) > P(A) or P(A|B) > P(!A|B), and quite possibly both; and whichever of these two inequalities is false (if either) the ratio between the two sides is closer than the inequality that is true.
To return to the original example; either P(Bunyan | stories about Bunyan) > P(!Bunyan | stories about Bunyan) OR P(!Bunyan) > P(Bunyan).
Also, if P(Bunyan | stories about Bunyan) > P(!Bunyan | stories about Bunyan) is false, then it must be true that P(Bunyan|stories about Bunyan) > P(Bunyan).
Your second point is clearly true. The first seems false; Christianity makes much more sense from a Greco-Roman perspective if Jesus was supposed to be a celestial being, not an eternal unchanging principle that was executed for treason. And the sibling comment leaves out the part about first-century Israelites wanting a way to replace the ‘corrupt,’ Roman-controlled, Temple cult of sacrifice with something like a sacrifice that Rome could never control.
Josephus saw the destruction of that Temple coming. For others to believe it would happen if they ‘restored the purity of the religion’ only requires the existence of some sensible zealots.
Broadly speaking, I agree, and Jesus mythicist Richard Carrier would also agree:
But reading some of his stuff made me upgrade the idea that there was no historical Jesus from “almost certainly false” to “plausible”. (Carrier has written a couple books on this —Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus and On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt —but I haven’t read those, only some stuff available on the web.)
Carrier:
Carrier:
(To make the following paragraph more concise I’ll omit hedge phrases like “according to Carrier”. And even Carrier doesn’t regard this as certain, only more likely than not.)
The writings about Jesus that come the closest to being contemporary with his putative lifetime are Paul’s seven or so authentic letters. Paul, who converted to Christianity after Jesus came to him in a vision sometime around 33 CE, never claims to have met the historical Jesus, and never unambiguously talks about Jesus as a human who lived on Earth. (E.g.: Paul talks about about Jesus being crucified, but this crucifixion took place in some celestial realm not on Earth. Paul mentions “James the Lord’s brother”, but this means not that James was a literal brother of Jesus of Nazareth but that James is a fellow Christian, the way a modern Christian might refer to their “brothers and sisters in Christ”.)
I think this fails in the case where the experts are infected by a meme plague.
Isn’t this a Fully General Counterargument, though? Climate change deniers can claim that climate experts are ‘infected by a meme plague’. Creationists can claim anyone who accepts evolution is ‘infected by a meme plague’. So on and so forth.
It’s not a counterargument, it’s an observation about the limits of the maxim quoted. And while it can certainly be misapplied, are you going to argue that a memetic plague never happens?
Then I may have misunderstood the intention of the phrase.
As an observation about the limits of the maxim, I agree with it. And no, I’m not going to argue that a memetic plague never happens.
I am, however, going to argue that a memetic plague is hard to identify, making this observation very difficult to actually apply with any reliability. It’s just too easy—if I see a bunch of experts in the subject all saying something that I disagree with—for me to think “they’re infected by a memetic plague”. It’s so much more comforting to think that than to think “maybe I’m wrong”—especially when I already have some evidence that seems to say that I am right. So, while this observation can be applied correctly, it would be far, far too easy to misapply. And if I were to misapply it—I would have no idea that I am, in fact, misapplying it.
As a general observation, then, I cautiously agree. As a specific argument in virtually any debate, I deeply mistrust it.
I hope that makes my position clearer.
We know how religion spreads. We know it well enough that when it is obvious enough that the “experts” are basing their “expertise” on religion, we can ignore it without worrying that we are just dismissing the experts because doing so is comforting.
It’s not as if the way religion spreads is seriously in question.
I’m not sure that you do.
From your previous post:
If this were true—and if it were an exhaustive list of the predominant ways—then I would expect to see the following:
Parent-to-child transmission only works if the parents are Christian. Social ostracisation only works if a majority of a given person’s possible social acquaintances are.
Thus, the only means on the list of introducing is into a new area is by the sword
Thus, I would expect missionaries to either have been abandoned, or to be given a sword as standard equipment on setting out. I do not see this.
Furthermore, I would expect to see, in countries where it is not a majority religion, it would slowly fade and die (as social ostracism is used against it by the majority)
Now, I am not saying that it is never spread by such means. (Fortunately, ‘by the sword’ appears to have been largely abandoned in recent history). But assuming it to be an exhaustive list does not appear to match reality—there seems to be a rather large gap where a single missionary, armed with nothing more than information and presumably a fairly persuasive tongue, can go into a large enough group of humans who have little or no previous knowledge of religion and end up persuading a number of them to join.
You would expect (peaceful) missionaries to be abandoned (at least as a tool for spreading Christianity to places where there is no Christianity) if there were a careful effort to track their effectiveness. I do not believe there usually is. Is your impression different?
If you look at the places where there are a lot of Christians, they do seem to match up pretty well with (1) where the Roman Empire was plus (2) places colonized by countries that used to be part of the Roman Empire.
One obvious counterexample is Korea, which (I think) is evidence that missionaries can sometimes introduce Christianity to a new place with long-term success. But what others are there?
(Incidentally, I think your analysis is incomplete. Another way to introduce Christianity to a new area would be immigration. I don’t know to what extent this has actually happened.)
I don’t think you need a careful effort to track their exact effectiveness. It would be fairly obvious in a couple of generations that peaceful missionaries would fall in one of two categories—either they have some success (as evidenced by some number of converts that they win over) or they have no success (as evidenced by every missionary outreach pretty much collapsing as soon as the missionary either leaves or dies).
A careful effort to track effectiveness could tell the difference between slight success and strong success, but I think that even with a merely cursory checkup people could tell the difference between some success and no success at all.
I’m not surprised. There are many possible explanations for this; a sufficient explanation might be that these are places that early (Latin-speaking) missionaries could be reasonably sure of finding Latin-speaking people, and thus were not required to face the additional hurdle of learning a new language first.
Hmmm… would Japan count?
That is true. I don’t know to what extent that has happened either, but I imagine it would be accompanied (if successful) by a very strong spread of the immigrant’s culture in other ways, as well. (Such as language).
I think missionaries are usually sent to particular places by organizations, and when one leaves another goes. So there isn’t opportunity to identify where they aren’t making progress. And the actual question isn’t really “no success” versus “any success”; no one claimed or implied that converting people is literally impossible, only that generally when Christianity spreads successfully it does so along with military conquest.
You’re welcome to be (having had the facts pointed out to you) as surprised or unsurprised as you please; I remark that much the simplest explanation would seem to be that Christianity mostly spreads by military conquest.
It’s hard to tell how big a Christian community the missionaries there were able to produce. (Right now, as I understand it, Japan is one of the world’s least religious countries, so I guess you are thinking of the 17th century.) So, I dunno: maybe?
… Oh, I thought of another way for Christianity to get into a new area that’s consistent with the “converting people is really ineffective” narrative. Again, no one claims that converting people is 100% ineffective. So, what you do is to find a place whose rulers are very much in control of the population, and send your missionaries to the royal court or whatever. They probably won’t convince the ruler, but if they do then bingo, you’ve got thousands or millions of new converts fairly immediately. I think this has happened once or twice. I bet it’s been attempted a lot more.
It’s not going to be perfect. Sometimes there will be more missionaries than established places to send them, and new missions can be opened—but sometimes a missionary will, through mischance or malice, die before he’s expected to do so and there will be no replacement ready to send.
I don’t actually know about specific incidences, but there should be enough data on what happens when a mission is abandoned to be able to tell how successful it can be.
That is a simple explanation, yes. Another simple explanation is that Christianity mostly spreads where language barriers don’t get in the way.
I don’t see either of these two explanations as being significantly simpler than the other.
Hmmmm. That would be a sensible scenario. There have also been cases where non-Christian rulers, perhaps fearing the political power of the church, made practice of the religion illegal, with severe punishments for doing so. Taking the two together, it seems fairly clear that converting the ruler would be a very important step for many successful missionaries.
I remain doubtful, but perhaps you’re right.
Also a reasonable hypothesis. Hmm, do we have cases where the boundaries of the Roman Empire don’t match up well with linguistic boundaries? Probably not, simply because anywhere conquered by the Romans would probably have tended to learn to speak Latin, producing an artificial lowering of language barriers within the empire.
Yes. Though in the most famous recent case I can think of—the Soviet Union—it seems that they weren’t very effective in suppressing Christianity; it came back pretty strongly once the communists lost power. Still, paying a lot of attention to the ruler(s) does seem like an effective strategy for those wanting to spread a religion to a new place.
Going back to the higher-level question of how necessary conquest is to the spread of Christianity: there are apparently something like 100M Christians in China, and not because China was ever conquered by Christians. On the other hand, in the past there seem to have been multiple instances where Christian missions produced a fair number of converts but then the religion largely died out until the next wave of missionaries came in.
My impression after all this is as follows. (1) It is certainly not impossible for Christianity to spread without conquest, and there are a few major instances where it has done so. (2) Most of the world’s Christians, however, are part of Christian communities that got way way by conquest. (3) Attempts to spread Christianity by mere persuasion are sometimes very effective but often very ineffective.
I would expect that all these things apply equally to any other major religion. #2 will of course be untrue for religions that have never gained official approval by any political power, but we should expect all such religions to be pretty small in numbers for that exact reason. Maybe Hinduism is a sort of exception, being found almost exclusively in India, but I am shockingly ignorant of Indian history and don’t know whether e.g. there’s a history of conquest within what is now a single country.
Hmmm. I don’t know enough history to be able to name specific situations, but what about the other way round—countries that learned Latin without being conquered? (Perhaps for ease of trading?)
I believe the Roman Empire once tried to suppress it as well. It doesn’t appear to have worked then, either.
Yes; there seem to have been specific instances where missionary conversion worked, and specific instances where it did not.
Those conclusions do not seem unreasonable to me.
I think it also depends somewhat on the structure of the religion in question. Judaism doesn’t have missionaries, for example, and I don’t think there’s any way for a non-Jew to become a Jew (I may be wrong on that point, but if there is, the Jews certainly don’t advertise it).
You can convert to Judaism. However you are right that they are not actively interested in converting someone.
There seems to be a certain historical arc here. The earliest religions did not try to convert anyone because they were simply part of the culture of an individual nation, and you don’t convert people to a nationality. Judaism is part of this tradition but at the border of the next, namely the point where people realize that insofar as religions make claims about the world, it does not make sense for some people to accept them and some people to reject them. If a claim about the world is true, everyone should accept it. This leads religions to try to convert people. Now we are reaching a third stage: as even religious people come closer to realizing that those claims were not actually true in the first place, even the religious people are backing away again from converting people. An example would be Pope Francis condemning proselytism and saying that he is not interested in converting Evangelicals etc.
Consider also that religions that convert more people tend to spread faster and farther than religions that don’t. So over time religions should become more virulent.
The book “The Rise of Christianity” is an excellent analysis, using the tools of modern sociology, of the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Key insights
It grew exponentially mostly via transmission from people you knew. As your social world became more than 50% Christian, you were more likely to convert. In recent times Mormanism has grown in a similar fashion.
It had many rules that encouraged having large families (no birth control, no abortion, no infanticide, no sex outside marriage which encouraged young marriage, bans on many sources of fun other than having sex with your spouse, bans of divorce which made marriage more secure in a sense).
The higher status of women in Christianity than in the Roman world encouraged women to convert. An example of this higher status was that a pagan man could order his wife to have an abortion. Many of the patriarchal statements in the new testament were latter additions when the church, which was originally very egalitarian, did become very patriarchal.
Christians were only allowed to marry pagans if the pagan converted, or at a minimum, agreed for the children to brought up as Christians.
(3) and (4) combined with the shortage of women due to infanticide of female children meant that men who wanted a wife often had little choice but to marry a Christian. The children would then be Christians.
Once they achieved critical mass they seized control of the state and enacted coercive measures which ruthlessly crushed the other religions. As an example, even visiting pagan temples was banned, books were destroyed, priests killed, temples burned or converted to churches.
Another factor is that Christianity is exclusive—one could not adhere to Christianity and, say, Mithraism at the same time, since Christianity claimed a monopoly on religious truth. Other saviour cults which did not function in the same way would not have been able to work up the same amount of religious fervour, since a man’s trust in his religion is limited by that religion’s trust in itself.
When do you believe this happened, aside from cases where “Jesus” was translated as “Buddha”? Missionaries today typically harass other Christians.
A brief Google points me at this fellow. He was a medieval Fransiscan missionary to China, and established what appears to have been a reasonably successful church there that stayed around for about forty years after his death (until the Ming Dynasty arose in 1369 and expelled them from the country).
No, it just has to get big enough that Christians have enough other Christians around that the social structure becomes self-sustaining. Social ostracism is used to get rid of spontaneously appearing non-Christian individuals, not large groups.
So don’t assume it’s an exhaustive list.
It really doesn’t matter for the purposes of my point that it also spreads through peaceful missionaries. You seem to think that I’m complaining that Christianity spreads violently, so you’re bringing up non-violent missionaries. But that isn’t my point.
My point is that Christianity spreads as a meme system. Belief systems have traits which lead them to spread regardless of their truth. Some of those traits I listed above. Other traits include, of course, the belief system telling its members to send out missionaries to spread the belief system. Having missionaries is an adaptation which helps the belief system to spread, in the same way that coconuts being able to float so they can travel to distant islands helps coconuts to spread. Belief systems which spread efficiently will do better than belief systems that don’t, and will soon cover as much area as they can right until they run into other well-adapted belief systems.
Fair enough. A neighbourhood or other small community can be self-sustaining, then.
But it still needs to be started.
As soon as I don’t assume it’s an exhaustive list, your point collapses. Yes, it does spread as a meme system, This is because it is a meme system.
Newtonian physics is also a meme system. And Newtonian physics can also spread as a meme system, in all three of the ways you describe. (I don’t think anyone ever has tried to spread Newtonian physics by the sword, but it could be done in theory; but Newtonian physics has most certainly been spread by parent-to-child transmission and by social ostracisation).
Similarly for relativistic physics. Or, for that matter, any other descriptive model of the universe, including ones that are perfectly accurate and 100% true. Because any descriptive model of the universe is a meme system, and can therefore be spread as a meme system.
Your conclusion, in short, relies on the idea that Christianity is only spread by means that are not dependant on the truth of its ideas, and never spread by means that are dependant on the truth of those ideas. This you have not shown.
It isn’t all or nothing. These methods of transmission exist for Newtonian physics, but they are much less fundamental to how Newtonian physics spreads.
If it’s medieval times, and I announce to the members of my village that I’m not a Christian and act accordingly. I may end up dead, lynched, expelled, tortured by the Inquisition, or sent to a ghetto. If i get up now and announce that I don’t believe in Newtonian physics, not much is going to happen to me unless I have a job that depends on Newtonian physics. The social ostracization may not be completely missing (people can still laugh at me), but it’s far weaker than for Christianity.
And parents teach Christianity to their children because Christianity directly asserts that it is good to teach itself to your children, and implies that their children will be in terrible supernatural peril if they don’t. There really isn’t anything comparable for Newtonian physics that isn’t related to the fact that Newtonian physics works—if parents don’t teach their children not to walk off cliffs, the children won’t grow up to refuse to teach Newtonian physics to their own children.
I’m pretty sure that the main modern transmission vector for Newtonian physics is schoolteacher-to-child (which is very similar to parent-to-child, except that the parent hires an intermediary). Mind you, I don’t have any stats or data handy to back that up, it’s just a general impression.
But again, that happens because it’s piggybacking on the fact that people teach things that work. Since science works, it gets taught. If science didn’t make factual claims with real-world implications, nobody would teach it. Religion is not bound by this; it gets taught even in the absence of such factual claims, because it has a bunch of commands that amount to “spread this religion regardless of the facts”.
Do schools also teach Shakespeare because “that’s what works”?
I think there’s some equivocation here between different meanings of “expert”. Experts in Shakespeare are experts in what Shakespeare said and what things mean within the context of Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespeare’s life. A comparable “expert in Christianity” would be able to tell me what Christianity claims and put it into context as a whole.
But “amateurs should defer to experts”, in reference to Christianity, doesn’t mean “amateurs should accept the experts’ word about Christianity,” it means “amateurs should accept the claims presented by Christianity”. There’s nothing comparable for Shakespeare. In this sense, neither experts nor schools teach Shakespeare at all.
Um.
Going back to the comment that started this all—over here—shows that the quote originally comes from this page, which is an essay written from the atheist perspective on how to go about arguing the historicity of Jesus. The ‘experts’ in question appear (to me) to be not theologists but historians, seeking whether or not a given person, referenced in certain historical documents, actually lived at one point or not, and the author bluntly states that he expects the odds of said existence, using his best estimate of requisite probabilities, to be about one in twelve thousand. (He then goes on to say that this is far from the least likely claim in the Christian faith; supernatural miracles are far more unlikely, and thus far better things to call into question).
So, no, the original context does not say that amateurs should accept the claims made by Christianity (and it does not define professionals by their religious leanings). It says that amateurs should not take a firm position on a question where the experts do not take that firm position. (It does not say that the amateurs have to agree with the experts when those experts do take a firm position, amateurs are allowed to remain uncertain).
You made a claim that schools teach their curriculum because the curriculum is useful. (e.g. If science didn’t make factual claims with real-world implications, nobody would teach it)
Teaching Shakespeare is an example where it’s not clear whether there any use to it. Schools might simply teach it because teaching Shakespeare is high status.
The math curriculum is also not optimized by teaching children the kind of math that’s likely to be useful for them. It instead tries to teach them calculus because calculus is high status while making Fermi estimates isn’t.
I didn’t claim that the only reason schools teach their curriculum is that it is useful. There can be (and are) different parts of the curriculum taught for different reasons, some related to being useful and some not.
How do you know that the reason students teach Newtons laws is them being useful and not for status purposes?
How well do they serve each purpose? I’m given to understand Newton’s Laws are highly useful in engineering. How do they compare with alternative means of producing status, like teaching everyone ‘Ubik’ and ‘fnord?’
But most students will not do jobs as engineers.
Touch typing is a useful skill for nearly all jobs yet most schools don’t teach it.
There are no professors of touch typing that give the subject academic prestige. On the other hand academic physic has prestige.
Calculus has more academic prestige than statistics and thus schools are focusing more on teaching calculus.
Or latin. Theres a bedrock sense of what works, and there is a more socially defined sense. If your society values some religion, dead language or author, then it works to teach it, because it gives people acceptability and status.
Schools still teach Latin?
...mine didn’t. (It did teach Shakespeare, though).
I live in a suburban school district in the Southeast US. The public middle and high schools here do teach Latin as one of the foreign language options, along with Mandarin, French, German and Spanish.
Ive no idea if they do now. I went to a old fashioned school, a long time ago, which did.
This is a good argument, and one way of seeing that is by contrast with Islam, where the method described is historically much closer to being exhaustive—and in general it was indeed introduced into new areas was by means of swords, and missionaries did take swords with them as standard equipment. (In the future Islam may continue to spread more in the fashion that Christianity did in the past, however.)
This idea seems to be more or less taken for granted by people who oppose either Islam. Is there actually a perspicuous source of data describing in detail how Islam spread, that allows assessments of that kind to be made?
You could start by reading about the topic on Wikipedia (that will also refer you to many other sources.) Of course you could say that probably most of those articles and their sources were written by non-Muslims. But that is like saying that most people who have argued for any position have tended to be people who believe that position, and therefore we should ignore their arguments.
reading about the topic on Wikipedia
Just because there’s an article on the spread of Islam doesn’t mean that a balanced quantitative analysis on the means of its proliferation either exists or is possible. Usually when someone asserts something to that effect, the onus is on them to support their assertion by referencing a specific source.
The predominant ways in which Christianity has spread are conversion by the sword, parent to child transmission, and social ostracism for people who refuse to believe it. It spreads for reasons related to its fitness as a system of ideas but unrelated to its factual truth. This is not how evolution spreads.
Also, distinguish between “anyone can claim X” and “anyone can correctly claim X”. Creationists could claim that evolution spreads the same way—but they’d be wrong.
The historical survival of religions and societies is a matter of factual truth. Evolution rewards success, not epistemic purity. Is peacock’s plumage related to factual truth?
Please don’t be Internet-pedantic here. “Factual truth” here means “the factual truth of the statements made by the religion”, not “factual truths about the religion”.
Maybe there’s a confusion being caused here by the sentence “This is not how evolution spreads.”
It could mean at least one of the following: 1) “This is not how the theory of evolution itself was spread” 2) “This is not the mechanism according to which evolution spreads ideas”
It seems as if Lumifer interpreted your statement in the second sense (as I did initially), whereas reading your post in its original contexts suggests the first sense was the one which you intended.
Assume a climate change denier or a creationist who (a) makes such an argument and (b) firmly believes it to be correct. How would he be best convinced that he is, in fact, wrong?
Same way you convince him of anything else—by arguing specific facts.
Just because two sides can produce arguments with similar forms doesn’t mean they also have similar facts. “Anyone can claim X”, divorced from the facts about X, is only about having similar forms.
Hmmm. Could work. Or perhaps the first thing he’d conclude is that you are infected by the meme plague, and the second thing he’d do is suspect that you are trying to infect him with the meme plague.
He could respond to this in two ways; either by ending the debate, in the hope of immunising himself; or by arguing against you, in the hopes of curing you.
...huh. Actually, thinking about this, a lot of bad debate habits (ignoring the other person’s evidence, refusing to change your mind, etc.) actually make a lot of sense when seen as protective measures specifically to prevent infection by meme plagues.
What to do then, when experts sometimes are infected with meme plagues, have conflicts of interest, are able to prevent alternative views from being presented?
If all experts are infected with meme plagues, and are able to prevent alternative views from being presented, then you have a problem. This implies that one of the following is true:
Studying the subject at all carries a strong risk of meme plague infection
Only those pre-infected with the meme plague have the interest and/or the ability to study the subject
You’re wrong about something—either the presence of the meme plague or its spread or… something.
You could attempt to study the subject to expert level yourself, taking appropriate anti-meme-plague precautions; but you have to be very careful that you’re not shutting your ears to something that’s really true (you don’t want to become a climate-change-denying weather expert, after all) so you’ll need to seriously consider all necessary data (maybe re-run some vital experiments). This would take significant time and effort.
I don’t know what other strategy could reasonably be followed...
Real-life example. A relevant quote:
Huh.
Okay. In this particular real-life example, though, it is clear that the politicisation is in the infrastructure around the science, not in the science itself. That is to say, learning climate science is not memetically dangerous—it is simply difficult to get a paper published that does not agree with certain politics. And that is bad, but it is not the worst possibility—it means that someone merely studying climate science is safe in so doing.
So, in this particular case, the solution of studying climate science oneself, becoming an expert, and then forming a suitable opinion is a viable strategy (albeit one that takes some significant time).
(An alternative solution—which will also be a hard thing to do—is to create some form of parallel infrastructure for climate science; another magazine in which to publish, another source of funding, and so on. There will likely be serious attempts to politicise this infrastructure as well, of course, and fending off such attempts will doubtless take some effort).
If you are an autodidact and study the climate science by yourself from first principles, yes, it’s not dangerous. However if you study it in the usual way—by going to a university, learning from professors and published papers, etc. -- you will absorb the memes.
Hmmmm. Depends how ingrained the memes are in the material. Oh, you’d certainly have awareness of the memes—but accepting them is a different story, and a certain skepticism in a student (or in a professor) can probably blunt that effect quite a bit.
Even if the memes are that thoroughly integrated, though, the only effect is to make the establishment of a parallel infrastructure that much more appropriate a solution.
Oh, you actually believe this crap. Then you should be ashamed of yourself.
Request denied.
Anything else I should do?
There is another possibility: the selection process for experts eliminates diverse perspectives.
Try getting tenure as a political scientist as a conservative republican, as an example.
But there are more subtle problems. For example, the selection process for medical doctors actively screens out people with a high level of mathematical and statistical skill, knowledge and ability.
It does this by very strongly selecting for other characteristics—ability to memorize vast arrays of words and facts, physical and mental stamina. Because if you strongly select for X, it will generally be at a cost to anything else that is not strongly correlated with X.