loquacius posted:

New Atheists aren't as strong a faction on the Internet as they were 10 years ago, but I always hated to hear them talk about Judaism because they were always extremely confident in their assumption that it was, more or less, exactly like whatever brand of evangelical Protestantism their parents had tried to force them into.

Srice posted:

Srice posted:

Casey Finnigan posted:

it's really depressing yes. pretty relatable if you have a miserable suburban jewish family

i don't think the dybbuk scene at the beginning of the movie is supposed to specifically tie into the plot of the movie other than being an example of a yiddish folk tale.

I've seen people on like, reddit say that the absolute faith of the wife (that the rabbi is a dybbuk) allows her to act with clarity without being burdened by the uncertainty of the situation and that's a contrast to Larry who never knows what to do and whose faith wavers throughout the movie

quote:

Clive Park : If I receive failing grade I lose my scholarship, and feel shame. I understand the physics. I understand the dead cat.

Larry Gopnik : You understand the dead cat? But... you... you can't really understand the physics without understanding the math. The math tells how it really works. That's the real thing; the stories I give you in class are just illustrative; they're like, fables, say, to help give you a picture. An imperfect model. I mean - even I don't understand the dead cat. The math is how it really works.

Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:

what is judaism if not the oldest known form of Posting

Miss Lonelyhearts posted:

The point of the Dybbuk scene in my estimation is just that, you won't ever really know the truth, but you certainly might be hosed. This parallels the ending, which happens directly after the aforementioned head rabbi's only advice be a good boy.

Xaris posted:

he couldn't save skyfall tho

Frosted Flake posted:

They’re exactly the same about Catholicism and make arguments based on the Five Solae which is pretty hilarious.

loquacius posted:

I don't dispute that biblical literalism also isn't universal to evangelicalism, btw, which itself makes it even more infuriating that New Atheism treated biblical literalism as the defining feature of religion in general. Like, this supports my main point.

loquacius posted:

Oh I know Christians have been reading the Hebrew Bible for a long time, it's just that they stole it from us, claimed it for themselves, and are reading it wrong

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

lol

https://twitter.com/DEADLINE/status/1555288918689464334

Frosted Flake posted:

I understand it’s parodying the portrayal of Christ in Ben Hur, but I thought both the film and particularly the novel were a fair treatment of religion. Ben Hur’s opening chapter in particular links the search for meaning in India, Greece and Egypt which I thought was pretty open minded for the time.

Atrocious Joe posted:

Let's return to the Coens to figure out the differences between these faiths.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJEiDRi4Itc

galagazombie posted:

Again I’m sorry this gets into the no-win territory of us accusing each other of heresy, but Christianity can’t have stolen the Bible as it always had it. The religion was literally founded by and of Jews. Christianity has an unbroken chain all the way back to Genesis. It’s not as if some gentile found a bible lying on the ground and made up a theology around it ex-nihilo. Both religions are equally successors to Second Temple era Judaism. They simply branched off in different, mutually heretical, directions.

Antonymous posted:

the book of job ends with god showing up as a whirlwind and saying more or less "what the gently caress do you know?" to Jop and the 3 people who tried to give him answers

A Serious Man ends with, well

Yadoppsi posted:

Job is the best book of the bible hands down. Ecclesiastes can give it a run for its money though.

wiki posted:

In 1950s London, Mrs. Ada Harris, a widowed cleaning lady, becomes obsessed with a haute couture Dior dress of one of her clients; it inspires her to buy her own Dior dress. After suddenly receiving a war-widow's pension, she embarks on an adventure to Paris to do so.

loquacius posted:

I don't dispute that biblical literalism also isn't universal to evangelicalism, btw, which itself makes it even more infuriating that New Atheism treated biblical literalism as the defining feature of religion in general. Like, this supports my main point.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

New Atheism seems mostly a bunch of at least mildly traumatised survivors of evangelical cultural dominance who probably could all use therapy but instead they became white supremacists

Ghost Leviathan posted:

New Atheism seems mostly a bunch of at least mildly traumatised survivors of evangelical cultural dominance who probably could all use therapy but instead they became white supremacists

quote:

The first thing I ever wrote that got more than a couple dozen views, the piece that made the rounds in the blogosphere and in so doing kickstarted my writing career, was a piece of the type “I’m an atheist who can’t stand New Atheism.” Pieces in that vein became quite common over the years, but in 2008 it was still novel enough to attract all of that attention. This was an era in which the New Atheists still enjoyed a degree of cultural cachet, before the pomposity and shrill tone of so many in the movement curdled its public reputation, to say nothing of the accusations of Islamophobia. It was a different time. The basic contours of the piece still seem correct to me - atheism is almost certain factually true, and I am an atheist, but I have no interest in browbeating believers. I have no interest in converting believers into atheists, and atheism is not a movement. But not only would I not write that piece today, it’s one of very few pieces that I sometimes genuinely wish I had never published at all. Because the ground changed underneath us to such an extent that, well, millions of functioning adults proudly endorse astrology and other hooey in public.

At some point in the 2010s, the backlash to New Atheism became so commonplace, particularly on the political left, that it seemed clear to me that we had communally missed the forest for the trees. That is to say, no matter how annoying some atheists must be, the most important question when it comes to atheism remains (and must remain) whether or not God is real. If God is real, that is the single most important fact in the universe. Issues of comity and messaging take a backseat to the existence of a divine creator, and there’s something strange about being more concerned with how we express our skepticism about such a divine creator than about its actual existence. And while many people who disdain New Atheists will admit to a casual atheism themselves, they’re far less animated and passionate about that atheism than about their hatred of the New Atheists. On a really basic level this seems to be a failure of priority.

Meanwhile, some of the more militant anti-New Atheists did turn to more overt religiosity, such as the whole “tradcath” thing, and perhaps worse the dimming of the light of generalist skepticism seemed to contribute to the ever-metastasizing cultural tumor of woo woo and irrationality. This is frequently chalked up to living in an increasingly stressful era; I have never seen satisfying proof that there’s anything more stressful about now as compared to, say, George W. Bush’s United States, but thus the story goes. One way or another, you have people role-playing as traditionalist Catholics and people getting really invested in witchcraft as a political tool and all manner of bizarre hokum about seed oils or heavy metals in food or similar. It all worries me.

I have come to believe that there’s a certain level of ambient attraction to the irrational, and I do think that the (somewhat self-inflicted) demise of New Atheism as a progressive-coded tendency has helped leave space for all kinds of irrationalism to flourish. The trouble is that attachment to the irrational is too varied and opportunistic to fit comfortably into the 21st-century culture war frame; I sometimes have to remind people that being anti-vaxx was once left-coded rather than right-coded, a tendency of crunchy bobo/hippie types rather than of MAGA anti-government types. Astrology has cropped up a lot in identitarian left circles recently but it’s far broader of a phenomenon and is still largely the domain of generally apolitical normies. Fighting against this tide is thus more difficult, as it’s always easier to activate people against the other side in culture war-branded issues. Your Dem loyalist wine-drinking yoga-loving aunt pays a professional astrologer but so does your Republican boss’s bored soccer mom wife and your cousin from Long Island who doesn’t vote.

Talking about astrology in current popular culture is frustrating because many people will rush to insist that the people who consume it are all aware that it isn’t real, that they’re just looking for fun and a sense of community, etc. Surely some are. But it’s also trivially easy to find people on Reddit or Tik Tok or whatever who very clearly do indeed believe that their destinies are influenced by ancient and erroneous beliefs about the movement of celestial bodies relative to the Earth’s sky. And that’s not great! It’s not great because there is no relationship between when Mercury’s in retrograde and your fate, and it’s always a bad idea to create crutches for denying your own responsibility for your behavior. It’s also unclear to me how not really believing in the magic protects you from the negative consequences of endorsing it. (If you’re not changing your decisions based on the horoscopes you read every day… why are you reading them?) Broadening out, we would do well to remember that organized religion actually does a lot of evil in the world - abusing children and covering it up, taking money from those believers who can’t spare it, influencing policy based on morals derived from ancient books written in dead languages. This stuff is bad. The fact that I don’t appreciate Richard Dawkins’s rhetorical style doesn’t change that.

You can chalk a lot of the failures of the social movement of the 1960s up to the way that the material political radicalism of the early-to-mid 60s devolved into the empty spectacle of the hippie lifestyle of the late 60s and 70s. That’s what happens when things get bent too far in the direction of unreality - you stop organizing and start pretending that refusing to bathe is an act of resistance.

Ultimately, I think we should work to restore attention to the supernatural claims themselves rather than to the social ephemera that surround them. Of course we should want atheists to be circumspect and friendly and to avoid empty provocation. The question is when this concern about manners overwhelms our fixation on the central questions at hand; the fact that Reddit atheists are annoying can’t make God real. And for the record I think there’s a way to live life that avoids a cloying scientism and witless literalism while still not permitting any lazy mysticism to find its way into your day-to-day practices. There’s also a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to people believing things for no reason. I’m perfectly happy to say that I think we should restore a little stigma towards entertaining the idea that the date that you’re born (based on a largely arbitrary and human-made calendar system) dictates your mood, your love life, and your professional success. Maybe sometimes a little stigma is the healthiest option available to us.

RandolphCarter posted:

summer goths are for sure the top tier of gothness