I tend to think of following or not following moral strictures as loading the dice of life. You CAN break the rules and still do well; and you CAN follow the rules and still fail; but each choice loads the dice in one direction or the other.
Agree to the premise of the article, but wonder at the differentiation of trad/con vs. secularism and your thoughts.
I view both, and others, as methodologies grounded in opposing world views, and it is more important to address the worldview which informs the methods versus the methods themselves.
I believe both ultimately seek peace and prosperity, but one through selfless sacrifice for others, and the other through the glorification of self at the individual level at scale. The former is temporally aligned on the future, while the latter to the present.
Trad / con values, ultimately, are driven by selfless actions taken today, informed by an observable nature and past to ensure prosperity for the future.
Secular values are driven by need to fulfill the desires for prosperity and happiness of the present. When each generation behaves the same prosperity broadly increases in the future.
So, this should not be viewed from trad/secular frame, but from a self-less/ish one. The argument remains correct as demonstrated through nature itself, observable human history, and the very actions of the selfish worldview crowd.
The one immutable truth of nature is that there cannot be life without death. Death gives life. The colloquial circle of life. Trees grow and live feeding on the organic matter of long dead others, then die and feed back into the system for rebirth. Death and sacrifice are an immutable truth to give life. In marriage we sacrificially give ourselves to one another, we die to self. The natural order of that produces life, which entails further giving of self and life to ensure the continuation of life itself. Trad / Con values are grounded in the very nature of life and is completely focused on preserving the future for its offspring. Truly, in the world there is no observable life / ecosystem that denies this truth.
This natural truth extrapolated further denies such current thoughts of polygamy being either natural or sustainable to the human condition and ecosystem. We can see this today through the fact that not a single dominant culture of the world is based on anything but monogamy. Through J.D. Unwin’s extensively research book “Sex and Cultures” we see that not a single society in history embraced free sex without collapsing.
A selfish (secular) worldview cannot square the circle of this natural truth and therefore must only prioritize the present and rob from the future society to feed itself. It is ultimately destructive and cannot exist in nature. Those who live with this worldview inherently understand this and therefore try and replicate the natural order (marriage / surrogacy robbing resources from the ecosystem to sustain it), or denying the future to prioritize the selfish endeavors of today (yolo, climate calamity..)
I’d argue that the vitalist of today, try and have both - selfish prioritization of the present informed by the observable order of the past.
So, selfless values (sometimes expressed through traditionalism) are self-evidently correct.
As a parting shot, theology is ultimately the narrative of our history and attempting to describe the natural world we observe. But, there is only one God and religion (that I am aware of) in which the very nature of God is revealed in the life-death truth we live within and therefore perfectly describes it. If there is an immutable proof that life only exists with death, it stands to reason that this truth was created. Eternal life, or enlightenment requires a created life form breaking a truth defined by God which entails becoming truth oneself - another god. But, in Jesus (who we know existed and died on a cross) we have a God who existed within the life-death paradox himself and died in order to give life - to break the truth / rule He created. The only thing with the power to break the life death truth is the God which created it, otherwise he is not god.
Traditional values can also be seen as future-oriented at the individual level. This is why I used the thought experiment of looking back on your life when you're 80 and it's nearly over. If you pursue the traditional ideal aggressively and without reservation, you're much more likely to achieve long-term life goals than if you mess around "partying," being a bum that still lives with mom and dad, etc.
If you look at the four points I outlined near the beginning of the article, the secular side of each of those always represents a sacrifice of future success for short-term pleasure or convenience.
Agree entirely, which is ultimately one of the issues I have with labeling things “Trad” because it creates the appearance that is grounded in the past. It’s not, its worldview value structure is unequivocally future oriented - living selflessly for future generations. That’s why I advocate away from the Trad / Secular mythological distinction and focus on the value structures which inform each.
Ultimately, it is a second order argument of sorts as Trad is grounded on future outcomes while secular is present outcomes. But I agree with reframing the argument away from theological premises (which is a definite second order disagreement) and focusing on the values which create the most positive outcomes in the future. This remains difficult / delicate given the temporal differences of foci for each, but I believe is achievable because tomorrow exists for both.
Being self evident they don't require a magical source to validate them. This is my argument. However some people are best motivated by this belief and tbh aligning yourself with the "order of the cosmos" is really the same thing on an esoteric, as opposed to dogmatic, level - so we can square the circle with that, regardless if you are a True Believer on the literal level or simply see religion as a very useful set of rituals an allegory to shape human behavior.
Perhaps this is for the greater good. The weird thing about esoteric knowledge (of which I am not claiming any certain possession of) is that it creates a paradoxical relationship between the adherents and their chosen religion’s dogma.
I tend to agree. Furthermore, I think religion came as a result of experience. Observations of human behavior and action/consequences that lead to beneficial outcomes versus detrimental ones.
We are a narrative based species. Religion provides simple narratives that are wrapped around the lessons learned. All religions have allegories.
I find religion fascinating, but it holds no more guiding authority in my life than Star Wars does (which is to say, none).
I don't shit in religious people. To each their own. However, I do take issue with people who try to claim that I am insufficiently capable of having morals and values without religion.
I've said this a thousand times and I'll say it again. There are two branches of all thought: the metaphysical search for truth (Plato) and the pragmatic result of observation in reality (Aristotle).
One uses real life examples to mentally masturbate about the metaphysical, while the other disregards the metaphysical all together. I fall in the latter group.
You can view the complex systems of the nervous system as nothing more than an innate drive to survive and reproduce and all behaviors toward said goal either as an individual or a group stemming from that. Deviation from that can usually be explained due to trauma, retardation or learned behavior.
Or you can view it from the spiritual sense and all these operations as the will of a higher power.
One doesn't contradict the other. One places the will on something metaphysical and the other just concerns itself with what is.
When you place your argument in faith circumstances can pose an issue.
For example, for whatever reason a virus wipes out 90% of men as it only affects the Y chromosome. A devout Christian who only follows sex within a monogamous marriage is going to have to deal with many, many, many, women dying alone and childless and all the issues that come with that. Someone like myself, though wired to be monogamous, would have no moral qualm with taking on multiple wives (assuming I survived). The women, would also more than likely have no moral qualms there is now only a 10% chance of reproducing with the Christian monogamous model.
Monogamy more than likely stemmed from the problem of having sexless men revolt and fuck shit up than any divine directive.
Sure, the question of whether anything is divine is a completely separate discussion. So long as we agree on what the end goals in life actually are, we can develop pragmatic courses of action from there.
Well, at least what the goals are for like minded people. For example, I have no desire to force anyone who doesn't want to have a family to have one. Rather I would incentivize people who do want to have them.
That's where policy comes in. Tax breaks for families, building more single detached homes instead of condos, maybe even tax breaks for living in suburbs and rural areas.
Maybe even the creation of family neighborhoods (similar to retirement communities) where land taxes are extremely low and land is sold once the youngest moves out or turns 25 whichever comes first.
People will complain, say you're exclusionary, etc. etc. And rather than buckle to sqwaking losers, say "yes. And if you want these benefits, have kids or shut the fuck up".
I think the more important argument is for people that deny God or a higher power, where do the moral codes come from? It seems many atheists deny God yet borrow the moral framework from Him. They often confuse epistemology with ontology. If there is a moral law, there must be a moral law giver.
I did. I’m not attacking your POV. I’m simply adding what I’ve observed in many debates between atheists and Christians. Christopher Hitchens was a favorite of mine. A brilliant man and he could debate like no other
Gotcha. I do honestly believe that a good amount of people require moral guidance from somewhere, whether it be through religion or elsewhere.
Being able to codify your own values is an ugly task that takes a lot of self reflection, in which many times you will not like what you see.
I'm not even am atheist. I couldn't care, so I don't watch such debates or try to refute God exists.
To be honest, I find atheism a pointless endeavor. Why do you care so much to prove something doesn't exist? What harm does it do to allow people to believe what they want so long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others?
I think that some atheists see certain values in religion that they view as detrimental and try to throw the baby put with the bathwater (read: prove there is no God) to challenge said view. Conversely, many people of faith, because it is "divine" don't ever question it.
In both cases they are two people shouting at a wall.
I’ve never been an atheist so I can’t comment on their motives. It appears many of them object to religion and rightly so, based upon the horrible history of how religions have oppressed and abused people. I won’t defend the horrible things done by men in the name of religion.
Ultimately traditional values and religion cannot be separated.
You can try to reverse-engineer the beneficial values from “the way we’ve always done things”, but you can’t mandate traditions without a code of conduct, dogma, which is something all religions possess.
Aside from that, I’m not so cynical to think that religion only has a utilitarian value, and nothing beyond that. Religion represents the highest principle of truth and central axis of reality in a culture. Whatever that axis may be, is the religion. More specifically, divinity, or the absolute principle of the culture.
When a religion becomes simply utilitarian in nature, lacking in its transcendent dimension, you get materialism and the modern world.
While I obviously agree, it is very important that one is ready and able to answer secular critics (or just people who are genuinely doubtful/curious and asking questions) with something other than reference back to religious dogma (i.e. "we do it this way because God says so"). You definitely do need to have a code of conduct, but you also need to be able to articulate why the code of conduct is the way that it is ("God tells us to do it this way because of reasons X, Y and Z") if you want people to understand and respect the code, rather than simply obeying it because they feel browbeaten into compliance.
Spot on. I’ve since developed a much more philosophical understanding of reasons for why they work but the “traditional” values (really Catholic values) always appealed to me when I was younger because they clearly work. As for the effective altruists, good luck with their project, because it’s doomed to fail because of their stupid obsession with equity which isn’t “data driven” like they claim all their beliefs are
You are missing something very important: the planet isn't growing.
Traditional marriage and having lots of kids is a *privilege*. Kids are both a challenge and a delight.
Back in the day, having lots of kids was offset by famine, disease, and war. Polygamy was acceptable in Old Testament times because war was really really lethal to actual soldiers. Those who survived had a surplus of mates to choose from plus brides taken from the other side.
Peace and polygamy do not mix. Polygamy *requires* perpetual war.
But peace, prosperity, and disease control require some sort of birth control. The ancient Greeks used monogamy, heterae, and disgusting man-boy relationships to limit the need for war. Early Christianity celebrated mysticism and celibacy.
What we have now in the West is efforts to control population mixed with open borders for those who do not restrain themselves. This is national suicide.
Birth control, war, mad science, or mass quantities of space travel. Which do you think best?
On "the gays", several people have noted that gay men were not always like this, they were "queer" in the revived sense of the word; they believed they were fundamentally different to straight people, and they didn't want to be assimilated into a heteronormative culture. This was the dominant form of gay rights activism in the eighties. When Andrew Sullivan, who I guess you could call a figurehead for the assimilationist wing of the gay rights movement, called for equal marriage in the early nineties, his biggest critics weren't straight people so much as the queer gays, represented by people like Peter Tatchell. (All the while, lesbians were busy settling down into monogamous relationships without much fuss; this battle was specifically among gay men.)
Fond as I am of Sullivan, his faction only rose to ascendancy through tragic circumstances. The queer gays were absolutely ravaged by AIDS, obviously they had a much greater number of sexual partners than the largely monogamous assimilationists, and so it was the queers that were killed in their thousands; and even those who survived the bloodbath began to see the wisdom in monogamy. If AIDS had not existed, I suspect it is highly likely that we wouldn't have gay marriage now (maybe we would for lesbians, but not gay men), as they largely kept to their own polygamous subculture.
It has always been obvious to me that "trad" is about breeding, not religion.
I disagree that it is the obviously better choice.
1) Why would the 80 years old me's opinion matter more than current me's opinion? Why does 5 hours of happiness before death matter more than decades of happiness?
2) Why do elites matter? If you want to be antiliberal, you have to say elites are not making sense.
3) But if I had a bunch of wealth, maybe I would be interested in having heirs. Also I could afford so much hired help that we are not cooking, cleaning, changing nappies, and only spend time with out kids when we feel like doing and the rest is for the nanny. For elites kids are easy.
4) Thus elites can combine having kids with non-trad lifestyles. Leave the kids with the nanny on Saturday evening and go to some drug fueled BDSM or gay orgy.
5) Indeed even non-elites can do this. I am a divorced dad of one kid every second weekend, rest of the time I do whatever I want to. Kids and "degeneracy" can be combined.
6) Achievement can be composing music, researching science etc. do you seriously find an achievement that any rat can do - reproduction - the best achievement? In fact rats will do it better than you - so much more fertile.
7) Why would achievement matter more than happiness?
But I understand where you are coming from. Humans are a storytelling species and our terminal goals are usually aesthetic. Basically it is like "whatever would look cool on the movie screen is good" is the basis of all value instincts.
And that is why people like achievements. "Why did you climb the Mount Everest?" "Because it was there." That would make a cool movie, right? Heroism, suffering, overcoming, all vitality?
What a fucking cool movie it would be if humankind would breed the galaxy full!
Well I personally gave up on that achievement stuff, to be fair, not from the viewpoint of truly happy hedonism, but feeling like everything is futile and nothing really ever matters. The hedonism is just trying to sweeten this blackpill.
(BTW have you ever realized that if you look at the common features of conspiracy theories, so much liked by the alt-right, you basically get a recipe for writing cool movie scripts? And that is why they are not true.)
> It bears repeating here that “gay marriage” was mainstreamed by disguising itself as identical to actual marriage, simply with two men or two women instead. The common libtard understanding of LGBT is that they “are just like us” with this one small change and essentially want the same things in life. The actual alternative sexual behaviors engaged in by the “LGBT Community” not only never gained mainstream acceptance, they’re so toxic that you’re likely to be accused of “homophobia” if you point them out, in much the same way that it is “racist” to point out black crime rates.
I assume the “alternative sexual behaviors” you allude to involves promiscuous sex with multiple partners, and fetishes. Gay monogamous married people cannot answer for a largely non-overlapping group of promiscuous fetishists. Black people who adopt White/Asian norms of family formation likewise are not the same people who you see in shoplifting videos from Ross Dress for Less or in gangbanger violence.
If you believe that the Pete Buttigieg and Dave Rubin types are engaged in some behaviors that are incompatible with family formation, say it directly; but it doesn’t follow from pointing to a separate group (that is also by some broad definition “gay”).
What I am referring to here is the motte-and-bailey by which the average normie has come to think of Dave Rubin and Pete Buttigieg when they imagine what gay people are like, when in fact the “homophobic” stereotypes of the past were more accurate.
This sort of misperception has led to all kinds of wildly harmful policies and attitudes regarding, for instance, racial relations between blacks and the rest of society. Likewise, there are a range of harmful policies and attitudes regarding sexuality that have been laundered in by these means, one of which is “gay marriage.” Some are arguably much more harmful and not covered here, for instance transgenderism.
When Andrew Sullivan made the case for gay marriage, he was also trying to wishcast the idea that if gay people had the option to marry, that most would. (Like Talented Tenth idealists)
After running the experiment, we now know it was only true at the margins. Perhaps there was a “domino effect” that led to the current trans stuff that a lot of gays like Sullivan don’t like.
If politics is about coalition-building, family-oriented gay people can either be friend or enemy wrt reducing the harms of an antinatalist culture. That’s why precision matters here.
>After running the experiment, we now know it was only true at the margins. Perhaps there was a “domino effect” that led to the current trans stuff that a lot of gays like Sullivan don’t like.<
I think the path to normalization of transgenderism runs directly through "gay marriage." Do we really imagine that a world which rejected the "gay rights movement" would somehow be accepting of the even more disordered "transgender movement?" No, obviously not. There's probably a lot of discussion to be had about the exact mechanisms at play, but it seems self-evident that transgenderism could not have been mainstreamed without Gay having gone first.
>If politics is about coalition-building, family-oriented gay people can either be friend or enemy wrt reducing the harms of an antinatalist culture. That’s why precision matters here.<
I find "family-oriented gay people" to be a bit of an oxymoron. A certain degree of anti-family sentiment is baked into the very identity of "gay" itself--a truly pro-family person, even if they had homosexual inclinations, would recognize that and reject that label. That being said, in theory, yes, "family-oriented gay people" *could* be allies if they were willing to acknowledge the obvious truths that homosexuality and family formation are naturally at odds with each other, that it is better generally speaking for people to be heterosexual than homosexual, and so forth and so on.
However, for obvious reasons, they are not generally willing to do so. I do not know if I have ever come across a single gay person who meets this criteria to my satisfaction (again, this may be due in part to those who are truly pro-family opting out of the "gay" identity entirely).
> If you rely on religious dogma to defend your values, people are now completely justified in characterizing you as an unthinking zealot.
The Bible contains an amazing depth of wisdom. If you are a Christian then you simply think "well duh it is the word of God".
However, even if you are not religious or are of a different religion if you have some wisdom of your own you can recognize the wisdom in the Bible.
A vitalist movement could take out the supernatural from biblical teachings and call it the "collective wisdom of our ancestors".
The people who can't acknowledge this either lack wisdom or have hate/animosity/malice in their heart. Neither should be treated the same way you would treat a wise man with different beliefs.
If you haven't at least tried these three, you're really not trying very hard. If you are a man and still struggling, my rather unfortunate advice would be to make money. The hard truth is that being worth more money is the #1 way to make yourself more attractive as a marriage partner, assuming you aren't screwing up anything obvious such as being fat/not grooming/etc. If your earnings are significantly above the median and you're *still* having trouble, we'd probably have to look at individual-level factors at that point (i.e., are you socially retarded, do you have an addiction you need to get under control, etc.).
There were some posts recently about a guy who would literally just drive around in rural areas and ask out random young women working at gas stations or in other service positions. Shame I'm having trouble finding them. I imagine that if you take care of yourself and you have money, even this strategy would probably succeed.
LMAO I should try that guy's strategy in reverse: just drive around Sturgis during the festival and ask out any biker who looks attractive. I'll write about it afterwards if I try it. I think it would be hilarious to just be that straight forward about it.
after our seventh child was born my wife bled a real lot and I decided to stop having children, but damn looking back at my life before her, and my life since we our sex life became more pleasure sex - the beauty of the traditional sex ethic, with a wife open to children has become ever more clear.
and general idea that sin degrades us, the more I live life the more I see that, in my life, the old ethics weren't put there randomly
Some amount of abortion (not the abortion of pure convenience we currently know) is self evidently correct. Life is a struggle to survive. Sometimes women or families are ill prepared to raise a child, especially a disabled one. Medieval Christian Europe had plenty of instances of abortions and abandoned newborns where attempted cases did not result in hangings. Pro life maximalists who insist that every baby must be saved and compare abortion to child sacrifice have lib brains and are using lib arguments.
First off, I think you might have commented on the wrong post by accident. This one is not about abortion.
Second, yes, in the past, you might have been able to plausibly make the case that the child may very well literally starve, if the circumstances they were born into were dire enough. This is not the case in the modern world. In the United States of 2024, the poor have higher rates of obesity than the wealthy, and even the homeless and destitute do not starve.
I don't know what the reference to hangings is about.
I suppose you could thus make the case that "some amount of abortion is self-evidently correct" in a world where starvation is a genuine threat that the average person might face at some point, but the fact that abortion can no longer be justified in a world of abundance demonstrates that the act is not actually "correct" in the sense of inherent right action, the sense in which having children is self-justifying--rather, as the hardship that may necessitate an occasional abortion wanes, we move away from the practice and towards the ideal of, y'know, *not* killing our children.
I tend to think of following or not following moral strictures as loading the dice of life. You CAN break the rules and still do well; and you CAN follow the rules and still fail; but each choice loads the dice in one direction or the other.
Agree to the premise of the article, but wonder at the differentiation of trad/con vs. secularism and your thoughts.
I view both, and others, as methodologies grounded in opposing world views, and it is more important to address the worldview which informs the methods versus the methods themselves.
I believe both ultimately seek peace and prosperity, but one through selfless sacrifice for others, and the other through the glorification of self at the individual level at scale. The former is temporally aligned on the future, while the latter to the present.
Trad / con values, ultimately, are driven by selfless actions taken today, informed by an observable nature and past to ensure prosperity for the future.
Secular values are driven by need to fulfill the desires for prosperity and happiness of the present. When each generation behaves the same prosperity broadly increases in the future.
So, this should not be viewed from trad/secular frame, but from a self-less/ish one. The argument remains correct as demonstrated through nature itself, observable human history, and the very actions of the selfish worldview crowd.
The one immutable truth of nature is that there cannot be life without death. Death gives life. The colloquial circle of life. Trees grow and live feeding on the organic matter of long dead others, then die and feed back into the system for rebirth. Death and sacrifice are an immutable truth to give life. In marriage we sacrificially give ourselves to one another, we die to self. The natural order of that produces life, which entails further giving of self and life to ensure the continuation of life itself. Trad / Con values are grounded in the very nature of life and is completely focused on preserving the future for its offspring. Truly, in the world there is no observable life / ecosystem that denies this truth.
This natural truth extrapolated further denies such current thoughts of polygamy being either natural or sustainable to the human condition and ecosystem. We can see this today through the fact that not a single dominant culture of the world is based on anything but monogamy. Through J.D. Unwin’s extensively research book “Sex and Cultures” we see that not a single society in history embraced free sex without collapsing.
A selfish (secular) worldview cannot square the circle of this natural truth and therefore must only prioritize the present and rob from the future society to feed itself. It is ultimately destructive and cannot exist in nature. Those who live with this worldview inherently understand this and therefore try and replicate the natural order (marriage / surrogacy robbing resources from the ecosystem to sustain it), or denying the future to prioritize the selfish endeavors of today (yolo, climate calamity..)
I’d argue that the vitalist of today, try and have both - selfish prioritization of the present informed by the observable order of the past.
So, selfless values (sometimes expressed through traditionalism) are self-evidently correct.
As a parting shot, theology is ultimately the narrative of our history and attempting to describe the natural world we observe. But, there is only one God and religion (that I am aware of) in which the very nature of God is revealed in the life-death truth we live within and therefore perfectly describes it. If there is an immutable proof that life only exists with death, it stands to reason that this truth was created. Eternal life, or enlightenment requires a created life form breaking a truth defined by God which entails becoming truth oneself - another god. But, in Jesus (who we know existed and died on a cross) we have a God who existed within the life-death paradox himself and died in order to give life - to break the truth / rule He created. The only thing with the power to break the life death truth is the God which created it, otherwise he is not god.
Traditional values can also be seen as future-oriented at the individual level. This is why I used the thought experiment of looking back on your life when you're 80 and it's nearly over. If you pursue the traditional ideal aggressively and without reservation, you're much more likely to achieve long-term life goals than if you mess around "partying," being a bum that still lives with mom and dad, etc.
If you look at the four points I outlined near the beginning of the article, the secular side of each of those always represents a sacrifice of future success for short-term pleasure or convenience.
Agree entirely, which is ultimately one of the issues I have with labeling things “Trad” because it creates the appearance that is grounded in the past. It’s not, its worldview value structure is unequivocally future oriented - living selflessly for future generations. That’s why I advocate away from the Trad / Secular mythological distinction and focus on the value structures which inform each.
Ultimately, it is a second order argument of sorts as Trad is grounded on future outcomes while secular is present outcomes. But I agree with reframing the argument away from theological premises (which is a definite second order disagreement) and focusing on the values which create the most positive outcomes in the future. This remains difficult / delicate given the temporal differences of foci for each, but I believe is achievable because tomorrow exists for both.
Being self evident they don't require a magical source to validate them. This is my argument. However some people are best motivated by this belief and tbh aligning yourself with the "order of the cosmos" is really the same thing on an esoteric, as opposed to dogmatic, level - so we can square the circle with that, regardless if you are a True Believer on the literal level or simply see religion as a very useful set of rituals an allegory to shape human behavior.
Yes, this is what secular people, whether their ignorance is genuine or willful, consistently fail to grasp.
Perhaps this is for the greater good. The weird thing about esoteric knowledge (of which I am not claiming any certain possession of) is that it creates a paradoxical relationship between the adherents and their chosen religion’s dogma.
the key is transcending and integrating the dogma into a larger picture
a lot harder than it sounds
I tend to agree. Furthermore, I think religion came as a result of experience. Observations of human behavior and action/consequences that lead to beneficial outcomes versus detrimental ones.
We are a narrative based species. Religion provides simple narratives that are wrapped around the lessons learned. All religions have allegories.
I find religion fascinating, but it holds no more guiding authority in my life than Star Wars does (which is to say, none).
I don't shit in religious people. To each their own. However, I do take issue with people who try to claim that I am insufficiently capable of having morals and values without religion.
I've said this a thousand times and I'll say it again. There are two branches of all thought: the metaphysical search for truth (Plato) and the pragmatic result of observation in reality (Aristotle).
One uses real life examples to mentally masturbate about the metaphysical, while the other disregards the metaphysical all together. I fall in the latter group.
Pragmatism requires an end goal towards which one's pragmatism is then oriented, does it not?
Yes, but that doesn't mean it is divine.
You can view the complex systems of the nervous system as nothing more than an innate drive to survive and reproduce and all behaviors toward said goal either as an individual or a group stemming from that. Deviation from that can usually be explained due to trauma, retardation or learned behavior.
Or you can view it from the spiritual sense and all these operations as the will of a higher power.
One doesn't contradict the other. One places the will on something metaphysical and the other just concerns itself with what is.
When you place your argument in faith circumstances can pose an issue.
For example, for whatever reason a virus wipes out 90% of men as it only affects the Y chromosome. A devout Christian who only follows sex within a monogamous marriage is going to have to deal with many, many, many, women dying alone and childless and all the issues that come with that. Someone like myself, though wired to be monogamous, would have no moral qualm with taking on multiple wives (assuming I survived). The women, would also more than likely have no moral qualms there is now only a 10% chance of reproducing with the Christian monogamous model.
Monogamy more than likely stemmed from the problem of having sexless men revolt and fuck shit up than any divine directive.
Sure, the question of whether anything is divine is a completely separate discussion. So long as we agree on what the end goals in life actually are, we can develop pragmatic courses of action from there.
Well, at least what the goals are for like minded people. For example, I have no desire to force anyone who doesn't want to have a family to have one. Rather I would incentivize people who do want to have them.
That's where policy comes in. Tax breaks for families, building more single detached homes instead of condos, maybe even tax breaks for living in suburbs and rural areas.
Maybe even the creation of family neighborhoods (similar to retirement communities) where land taxes are extremely low and land is sold once the youngest moves out or turns 25 whichever comes first.
People will complain, say you're exclusionary, etc. etc. And rather than buckle to sqwaking losers, say "yes. And if you want these benefits, have kids or shut the fuck up".
I think the more important argument is for people that deny God or a higher power, where do the moral codes come from? It seems many atheists deny God yet borrow the moral framework from Him. They often confuse epistemology with ontology. If there is a moral law, there must be a moral law giver.
Did you read what I wrote?
Let me add, I know plenty of moral non believers and vice versa.
I did. I’m not attacking your POV. I’m simply adding what I’ve observed in many debates between atheists and Christians. Christopher Hitchens was a favorite of mine. A brilliant man and he could debate like no other
Gotcha. I do honestly believe that a good amount of people require moral guidance from somewhere, whether it be through religion or elsewhere.
Being able to codify your own values is an ugly task that takes a lot of self reflection, in which many times you will not like what you see.
I'm not even am atheist. I couldn't care, so I don't watch such debates or try to refute God exists.
To be honest, I find atheism a pointless endeavor. Why do you care so much to prove something doesn't exist? What harm does it do to allow people to believe what they want so long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others?
I think that some atheists see certain values in religion that they view as detrimental and try to throw the baby put with the bathwater (read: prove there is no God) to challenge said view. Conversely, many people of faith, because it is "divine" don't ever question it.
In both cases they are two people shouting at a wall.
I’ve never been an atheist so I can’t comment on their motives. It appears many of them object to religion and rightly so, based upon the horrible history of how religions have oppressed and abused people. I won’t defend the horrible things done by men in the name of religion.
we are storytelling apes
That we are.
Ultimately traditional values and religion cannot be separated.
You can try to reverse-engineer the beneficial values from “the way we’ve always done things”, but you can’t mandate traditions without a code of conduct, dogma, which is something all religions possess.
Aside from that, I’m not so cynical to think that religion only has a utilitarian value, and nothing beyond that. Religion represents the highest principle of truth and central axis of reality in a culture. Whatever that axis may be, is the religion. More specifically, divinity, or the absolute principle of the culture.
When a religion becomes simply utilitarian in nature, lacking in its transcendent dimension, you get materialism and the modern world.
While I obviously agree, it is very important that one is ready and able to answer secular critics (or just people who are genuinely doubtful/curious and asking questions) with something other than reference back to religious dogma (i.e. "we do it this way because God says so"). You definitely do need to have a code of conduct, but you also need to be able to articulate why the code of conduct is the way that it is ("God tells us to do it this way because of reasons X, Y and Z") if you want people to understand and respect the code, rather than simply obeying it because they feel browbeaten into compliance.
Spot on. I’ve since developed a much more philosophical understanding of reasons for why they work but the “traditional” values (really Catholic values) always appealed to me when I was younger because they clearly work. As for the effective altruists, good luck with their project, because it’s doomed to fail because of their stupid obsession with equity which isn’t “data driven” like they claim all their beliefs are
You are missing something very important: the planet isn't growing.
Traditional marriage and having lots of kids is a *privilege*. Kids are both a challenge and a delight.
Back in the day, having lots of kids was offset by famine, disease, and war. Polygamy was acceptable in Old Testament times because war was really really lethal to actual soldiers. Those who survived had a surplus of mates to choose from plus brides taken from the other side.
Peace and polygamy do not mix. Polygamy *requires* perpetual war.
But peace, prosperity, and disease control require some sort of birth control. The ancient Greeks used monogamy, heterae, and disgusting man-boy relationships to limit the need for war. Early Christianity celebrated mysticism and celibacy.
What we have now in the West is efforts to control population mixed with open borders for those who do not restrain themselves. This is national suicide.
Birth control, war, mad science, or mass quantities of space travel. Which do you think best?
On "the gays", several people have noted that gay men were not always like this, they were "queer" in the revived sense of the word; they believed they were fundamentally different to straight people, and they didn't want to be assimilated into a heteronormative culture. This was the dominant form of gay rights activism in the eighties. When Andrew Sullivan, who I guess you could call a figurehead for the assimilationist wing of the gay rights movement, called for equal marriage in the early nineties, his biggest critics weren't straight people so much as the queer gays, represented by people like Peter Tatchell. (All the while, lesbians were busy settling down into monogamous relationships without much fuss; this battle was specifically among gay men.)
Fond as I am of Sullivan, his faction only rose to ascendancy through tragic circumstances. The queer gays were absolutely ravaged by AIDS, obviously they had a much greater number of sexual partners than the largely monogamous assimilationists, and so it was the queers that were killed in their thousands; and even those who survived the bloodbath began to see the wisdom in monogamy. If AIDS had not existed, I suspect it is highly likely that we wouldn't have gay marriage now (maybe we would for lesbians, but not gay men), as they largely kept to their own polygamous subculture.
Gay marriage - at least the male variety - is almost never monogamous. They never stopped being "queer" in the sense you are using it.
Great article. Sexual immorality is one of the major roadblocks for sure. Many people simply do not want to be told “no”.
It has always been obvious to me that "trad" is about breeding, not religion.
I disagree that it is the obviously better choice.
1) Why would the 80 years old me's opinion matter more than current me's opinion? Why does 5 hours of happiness before death matter more than decades of happiness?
2) Why do elites matter? If you want to be antiliberal, you have to say elites are not making sense.
3) But if I had a bunch of wealth, maybe I would be interested in having heirs. Also I could afford so much hired help that we are not cooking, cleaning, changing nappies, and only spend time with out kids when we feel like doing and the rest is for the nanny. For elites kids are easy.
4) Thus elites can combine having kids with non-trad lifestyles. Leave the kids with the nanny on Saturday evening and go to some drug fueled BDSM or gay orgy.
5) Indeed even non-elites can do this. I am a divorced dad of one kid every second weekend, rest of the time I do whatever I want to. Kids and "degeneracy" can be combined.
6) Achievement can be composing music, researching science etc. do you seriously find an achievement that any rat can do - reproduction - the best achievement? In fact rats will do it better than you - so much more fertile.
7) Why would achievement matter more than happiness?
But I understand where you are coming from. Humans are a storytelling species and our terminal goals are usually aesthetic. Basically it is like "whatever would look cool on the movie screen is good" is the basis of all value instincts.
And that is why people like achievements. "Why did you climb the Mount Everest?" "Because it was there." That would make a cool movie, right? Heroism, suffering, overcoming, all vitality?
What a fucking cool movie it would be if humankind would breed the galaxy full!
Well I personally gave up on that achievement stuff, to be fair, not from the viewpoint of truly happy hedonism, but feeling like everything is futile and nothing really ever matters. The hedonism is just trying to sweeten this blackpill.
(BTW have you ever realized that if you look at the common features of conspiracy theories, so much liked by the alt-right, you basically get a recipe for writing cool movie scripts? And that is why they are not true.)
> It bears repeating here that “gay marriage” was mainstreamed by disguising itself as identical to actual marriage, simply with two men or two women instead. The common libtard understanding of LGBT is that they “are just like us” with this one small change and essentially want the same things in life. The actual alternative sexual behaviors engaged in by the “LGBT Community” not only never gained mainstream acceptance, they’re so toxic that you’re likely to be accused of “homophobia” if you point them out, in much the same way that it is “racist” to point out black crime rates.
I assume the “alternative sexual behaviors” you allude to involves promiscuous sex with multiple partners, and fetishes. Gay monogamous married people cannot answer for a largely non-overlapping group of promiscuous fetishists. Black people who adopt White/Asian norms of family formation likewise are not the same people who you see in shoplifting videos from Ross Dress for Less or in gangbanger violence.
If you believe that the Pete Buttigieg and Dave Rubin types are engaged in some behaviors that are incompatible with family formation, say it directly; but it doesn’t follow from pointing to a separate group (that is also by some broad definition “gay”).
What I am referring to here is the motte-and-bailey by which the average normie has come to think of Dave Rubin and Pete Buttigieg when they imagine what gay people are like, when in fact the “homophobic” stereotypes of the past were more accurate.
This sort of misperception has led to all kinds of wildly harmful policies and attitudes regarding, for instance, racial relations between blacks and the rest of society. Likewise, there are a range of harmful policies and attitudes regarding sexuality that have been laundered in by these means, one of which is “gay marriage.” Some are arguably much more harmful and not covered here, for instance transgenderism.
When Andrew Sullivan made the case for gay marriage, he was also trying to wishcast the idea that if gay people had the option to marry, that most would. (Like Talented Tenth idealists)
After running the experiment, we now know it was only true at the margins. Perhaps there was a “domino effect” that led to the current trans stuff that a lot of gays like Sullivan don’t like.
If politics is about coalition-building, family-oriented gay people can either be friend or enemy wrt reducing the harms of an antinatalist culture. That’s why precision matters here.
>After running the experiment, we now know it was only true at the margins. Perhaps there was a “domino effect” that led to the current trans stuff that a lot of gays like Sullivan don’t like.<
I think the path to normalization of transgenderism runs directly through "gay marriage." Do we really imagine that a world which rejected the "gay rights movement" would somehow be accepting of the even more disordered "transgender movement?" No, obviously not. There's probably a lot of discussion to be had about the exact mechanisms at play, but it seems self-evident that transgenderism could not have been mainstreamed without Gay having gone first.
>If politics is about coalition-building, family-oriented gay people can either be friend or enemy wrt reducing the harms of an antinatalist culture. That’s why precision matters here.<
I find "family-oriented gay people" to be a bit of an oxymoron. A certain degree of anti-family sentiment is baked into the very identity of "gay" itself--a truly pro-family person, even if they had homosexual inclinations, would recognize that and reject that label. That being said, in theory, yes, "family-oriented gay people" *could* be allies if they were willing to acknowledge the obvious truths that homosexuality and family formation are naturally at odds with each other, that it is better generally speaking for people to be heterosexual than homosexual, and so forth and so on.
However, for obvious reasons, they are not generally willing to do so. I do not know if I have ever come across a single gay person who meets this criteria to my satisfaction (again, this may be due in part to those who are truly pro-family opting out of the "gay" identity entirely).
> If you rely on religious dogma to defend your values, people are now completely justified in characterizing you as an unthinking zealot.
The Bible contains an amazing depth of wisdom. If you are a Christian then you simply think "well duh it is the word of God".
However, even if you are not religious or are of a different religion if you have some wisdom of your own you can recognize the wisdom in the Bible.
A vitalist movement could take out the supernatural from biblical teachings and call it the "collective wisdom of our ancestors".
The people who can't acknowledge this either lack wisdom or have hate/animosity/malice in their heart. Neither should be treated the same way you would treat a wise man with different beliefs.
Ok, so what do you recommend to people who want to have kids but have no idea how to find a partner to do that with, then?
1. Church
2. Meetup.com
3. Yes, you can try the dreaded dating apps
If you haven't at least tried these three, you're really not trying very hard. If you are a man and still struggling, my rather unfortunate advice would be to make money. The hard truth is that being worth more money is the #1 way to make yourself more attractive as a marriage partner, assuming you aren't screwing up anything obvious such as being fat/not grooming/etc. If your earnings are significantly above the median and you're *still* having trouble, we'd probably have to look at individual-level factors at that point (i.e., are you socially retarded, do you have an addiction you need to get under control, etc.).
There were some posts recently about a guy who would literally just drive around in rural areas and ask out random young women working at gas stations or in other service positions. Shame I'm having trouble finding them. I imagine that if you take care of yourself and you have money, even this strategy would probably succeed.
LMAO I should try that guy's strategy in reverse: just drive around Sturgis during the festival and ask out any biker who looks attractive. I'll write about it afterwards if I try it. I think it would be hilarious to just be that straight forward about it.
after our seventh child was born my wife bled a real lot and I decided to stop having children, but damn looking back at my life before her, and my life since we our sex life became more pleasure sex - the beauty of the traditional sex ethic, with a wife open to children has become ever more clear.
and general idea that sin degrades us, the more I live life the more I see that, in my life, the old ethics weren't put there randomly
Some amount of abortion (not the abortion of pure convenience we currently know) is self evidently correct. Life is a struggle to survive. Sometimes women or families are ill prepared to raise a child, especially a disabled one. Medieval Christian Europe had plenty of instances of abortions and abandoned newborns where attempted cases did not result in hangings. Pro life maximalists who insist that every baby must be saved and compare abortion to child sacrifice have lib brains and are using lib arguments.
First off, I think you might have commented on the wrong post by accident. This one is not about abortion.
Second, yes, in the past, you might have been able to plausibly make the case that the child may very well literally starve, if the circumstances they were born into were dire enough. This is not the case in the modern world. In the United States of 2024, the poor have higher rates of obesity than the wealthy, and even the homeless and destitute do not starve.
I don't know what the reference to hangings is about.
Hanging as a punishment for abortion. Abortioners in the medieval times were often pardoned if caught.
I brought up abortion only as something that caught my eye as something called traditional even though it is modernist.
I suppose you could thus make the case that "some amount of abortion is self-evidently correct" in a world where starvation is a genuine threat that the average person might face at some point, but the fact that abortion can no longer be justified in a world of abundance demonstrates that the act is not actually "correct" in the sense of inherent right action, the sense in which having children is self-justifying--rather, as the hardship that may necessitate an occasional abortion wanes, we move away from the practice and towards the ideal of, y'know, *not* killing our children.