Based Camp - Early Christian Growth： Was it Actually More Moral？ (Scott Alexander & Rodney Stark)

00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be doing an episode

00:00:05.880 where we continue exploring how did Christianity outcompete other religious cultures and grow as

00:00:14.860 fast as it did. This is going to build on another podcast that we did on this subject, but it's

00:00:19.960 totally okay to watch as a standalone. The subjects that we're going to focus on most here are the

00:00:25.260 topic of martyrs as a conversion mechanism, plagues, and did Christianity actually have a more

00:00:33.700 moral system than the systems it was competing against in the mind of the average person?

00:00:39.820 The last time we went on this, I mean, certainly when you look at the exposure of babies being a

00:00:44.740 common thing, and we mentioned that some famous Roman philosophers complained about how and saw

00:00:52.000 it as one of the evils of the Jewish people that they tried to get people to not drown their babies 1.00

00:00:56.320 because they're like, you shouldn't expose or kill newborns. And they're like, no, what? That's such

00:01:02.300 a Jewish, what a Jewish nefarious thing to complain about. I'll take care of this. Hey, Clara, there's 1.00

00:01:09.880 a Jew outside trying to poison a well. Oh my God! Get away from that well, Hebrew. What? I'm putting in 1.00

00:01:18.660 a lot of purification tablets. Spanky tricked me! Which is one of the holdovers that came into

00:01:23.880 Christianity, but let's start with martyrs. And I just want to be clear, this is Scott Alexander's

00:01:29.260 book review on The Rides of Christianity by Rodney Stark, in case you want to look at it yourself.

00:01:35.360 Martyrs. Martyrdom not only occurred in public, often before a large audience, but it was often the

00:01:40.900 culmination of a long period of preparation during which those faced with martyrdom were the object of

00:01:46.300 intense face-to-face adulation. Consider the case of Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius was condemned to

00:01:53.360 death as a Christian, but instead of being executed in Antioch, he was sent off to Rome in the custody 0.79

00:01:58.840 of 10 Roman soldiers. Thus began a long leisurely journey during which local Christians came out to 0.51

00:02:05.680 meet him all along the route, which passed through many of the more important sites of early Christianity

00:02:10.760 in Asia Minor, on its way to the West. At each stop, Ignatius was allowed to preach and meet with

00:02:17.000 those who gathered, none of whom was in any apparent danger, though their Christian identity was obvious.

00:02:23.480 Moreover, his guards allowed Ignatius to write letters to many Christian congregations and cities

00:02:28.940 bypassed along the way, such as Ephesians in Philadelphia, as William Schnodel remarked,

00:02:33.820 quote, hold on, hold on, hold on, before we go further with this. This is insane. How fucking 0.91

00:02:38.800 insane is this? So you, I killed you, but you get to go on tour first, so don't worry. No, he's like a 1.00

00:02:44.020 famous musician or something, like, yeah, it's like, we're gonna have you fed to the lions, but, you know,

00:02:49.920 on the way, like, imagine, okay, so this is basically what happened here. You know the guy who killed the,

00:02:55.920 like, in, in UNH, the, the United States. Luigi Mangione, yeah. Like, imagine if the U.S. arrested

00:03:04.560 him, but then had him do public speaking events in every major U.S. city, while also, like, brought,

00:03:12.360 with the cities he didn't get to, he created, like, podcast recordings for, so he could, he could do the

00:03:18.080 rounds in the media as well. Like, are you insane? And the guards apparently were like, cool, is it? 0.94

00:03:25.000 So they were like, yeah, sure. Well, and also then he had the social proof of being flanked by

00:03:29.260 10 Roman guards, so he looked important. Yes, that he would have looked like a rapper,

00:03:36.440 like, walking into these cities. Well, and this actually, this, this shows up in some press

00:03:39.980 coverage of Luigi Mangione. He looks super badass, surrounded by all these, these policemen.

00:03:45.440 Yeah, no, no, it shows, like, it shows that Rome, and this is what's so great about this,

00:03:51.300 right? So it shows that Rome, from all these guards around him, saw him as a threat, but he

00:03:55.860 had done nothing to attack Rome. He had done nothing to threaten Rome. He just wanted to share

00:04:01.040 his ideas. Now, if I knew that the state saw this guy as a threat for just his ideas, and I can go to

00:04:06.700 one of these speeches, I'm gonna go. I'm not even Christian. I feel like Christian curious at this

00:04:11.340 point. I'm like, yeah. What are these ideas that are scaring Rome so much? Yeah. Yes.

00:04:16.420 He's a subversive speaker on tour coming to my town soon. This is great. Before he gets fed to

00:04:21.240 the lions, you know, you don't want to miss this speech. Yeah, I'm gonna watch the lions, him in

00:04:25.820 Rome, you know, you know. Yeah. I get, you get the whole thing here, like, the level of, I think,

00:04:32.880 rock star status that these individuals would have had in the Christian community. I was going to talk

00:04:38.060 about this later, but, like, they knew that, like, the other people who had done this before, people,

00:04:42.240 like, kept their bones in, like, giant reliquaries, or, like, their, their toe bone would be, have,

00:04:48.460 like, magical powers, and people would pray to it, and, like, all of this, like, you're gonna be, 0.89

00:04:53.420 like, oh, shit, like, and in a world that's bad, I mean, you don't know, these people could be living 0.92

00:04:57.140 with chronic pain, these people could be living with, you know, the world of Rome was pretty 0.99

00:05:01.620 horrifying, right? That you could get this kind of status is huge. Yeah. And he talked before this in a

00:05:10.600 bit I cut out about how previous people acted like the martyrs were, like, these big masochists.

00:05:15.480 Not true. They were not big masochists. You can see that there is other reasons to want to be a

00:05:22.100 martyr. I probably even would have liked being a martyr in this environment. Like, it's just so

00:05:26.960 pro-martyr. And actually, as a negative result of this, early Christian culture grew up to be so 0.76

00:05:32.620 pro-martyr that there was a huge problem when the Roman Empire legalized Christianity.

00:05:38.520 Like, apparently when this first happened, they were, they were almost, like, sort of broken for

00:05:44.460 a second, where they kept trying to get themselves martyred by doing, like, escalating things.

00:05:48.760 And they couldn't. And it was out of this that the monastic movement formed, where some of the

00:05:54.280 people who previously would have gone to do, like, martyrdom, they just, like, went out into the

00:05:58.700 desert or the wilderness. And there were so many of these people who did this sort of self-martyrdom

00:06:04.260 of, like, walking out into the wilderness that they just, like, kept riding into each other in the

00:06:07.900 wilderness. And they're like, oh, like, I guess we're starting a thing here. Or, like, one of

00:06:12.740 them would go out into the wilderness and be like, oh, me, philosopher, I'm gonna go, you know, like,

00:06:17.480 you know, live this incredibly hard life in the deserts of, like, Egypt or whatever. And then he's

00:06:22.620 out there for a bit. And then a couple months later, like, more people come and they're like,

00:06:25.600 hey, we're big fans. We're gonna do the same thing. And then you end up getting this, like, big

00:06:30.140 community doing this. And it's like, well, I guess we'll build a monastery, okay? But no. And this is how

00:06:35.420 you end up with these monasteries on, like, the tops of mountains and everything like that,

00:06:38.800 which you've seen from pictures. If they kept trying to get further and further away from

00:06:42.460 people, but the further away they get from people, the more popular they'd become. So the more people

00:06:47.320 would come to try to follow them and do this. Oh, goodness gracious. Well, if we had some kind of

00:06:54.220 system whereby we could get egotistical, self-important attention horrors to just all go

00:07:01.500 somewhere together. Oh, side note, by the way, which is also worth noting here, is how did

00:07:06.520 Constantine, like, first, why did Constantine convert to Christianity? It may have been a genuine

00:07:11.060 conversion, but there was an alternate reason for him to convert, which I think a lot of the modern

00:07:17.200 or Christian audience doesn't seem aware of, which explains Christianity's rapid rise. Well, so Constantine

00:07:23.160 had a major problem with the existing bureaucratic apparatus of Rome because it had become incredibly

00:07:28.860 corrupt, specifically like the Praetorian guard who was supposed to guard the emperor, but instead

00:07:33.460 kept, like, massacring the emperor. They were so bad to the emperor that they would, like, in one 0.67

00:07:39.520 instance, they killed the emperor. They put another guy in charge. There was no money to pay them the

00:07:45.180 bribe that they demanded of him because the guy before him had done such a bad job as emperor that

00:07:49.380 they had no money. He's like, look, I got no money. Like, through no fault of my own, he took the head of the

00:07:53.860 Praetorian guard there. He's like, there is no money. This is the vault. I have nothing to pay you the

00:07:58.100 bribe was that you demanded. Like, I didn't even, like, and so they kill him, right? And then they try to sell

00:08:03.580 the emperorship to the highest bidder. What did I tell you, huh? The world. She's the worst in the world. 1.00

00:08:13.460 Like, they were just the biggest douche canoes in history, but, like, that is how bad the deep state 0.96

00:08:18.560 has gotten. The Praetorian guard is, like, the personification of deep state. So, normally the

00:08:23.920 Praetorian guard is mentioned in a positive context, like, this person's Praetorian guard,

00:08:29.160 blah, blah, blah. Not, not as in, like... No, the Praetorian guard are the worst ever.

00:08:34.220 She is the worst! She is the worst person in the world. Huge, skank, terrible. 1.00

00:08:40.340 Classic.

00:08:41.460 I would put the, the scene from Dabadi's Unbiased Room, which everyone should watch if they haven't

00:08:46.540 watched it, about the killing of the Praetorian guard. But, unfortunately, he puts music behind the

00:08:50.500 things, which gets things copyright stricken, which really frustrates me. The time had finally come.

00:08:56.360 The time for a new age. The time for revenge. And so, Constantine proclaimed that the Praetorian

00:09:04.400 guard would be... a ballast! 0.98

00:09:09.640 But, anyway, Constantine, absolute goat. And so, Constantine is like, well, how do I fight this 0.81

00:09:24.840 deep state network, right? I need some alternate network that has no real allegiance to the old

00:09:30.680 deep state or Rome and might even have a degree of animosity to it, which is operating with a degree

00:09:35.720 of hierarchy in pretty much every major Roman city. Oh, the Christians. Perfect counter-deep 1.00

00:09:42.320 state. I can just replace all of the deep state networks with the Christian networks. And so, 0.91

00:09:47.180 he came in and he... Now, of course, we believe this was partially divinely inspired. I'm not saying

00:09:51.720 it wasn't divinely inspired. But sometimes the thing can be both logical, like Christianity spread,

00:09:56.580 and divinely inspired. Or Constantine's use of Christianity as a counter-deep state force.

00:10:02.080 Yeah, why would God not align the incentives in favor of that which must happen?

00:10:08.680 And when you really think about it, if he was going to try to destroy and replace the Roman deep 0.99

00:10:13.380 state, what other force could he use to do that? There literally was no one else he could use. There

00:10:20.700 was no other large cult. When I say cult, I don't mean that in like a modern way where it's like

00:10:25.500 derogatory. In Rome, cult was just meant to describe any large religious organization. There was none that

00:10:31.600 existed in almost every city. All of the ones were fairly region-locked or tied to regional

00:10:36.340 deities. Christians were the only one that was really this big and this organized and this 1.00

00:10:42.240 hierarchical. Except, of course, for the mystery cults. But the last thing you want to do if you're

00:10:46.920 looking for a counter-deep state is put in place a secret society. But anyway, continue.

00:10:52.640 Oh. And this is as William Schoedler remarked. Yeah, sorry. Are you moving the document around?

00:11:00.700 No. Sorry. Okay, that's weird. Oh, I know what's going on. I fixed it. As William Schoedler

00:11:07.860 remarked, it is no doubt as a conquering hero that Ignatius thinks of himself as he looks back on a part

00:11:13.940 of his journey and says that the churches who received him dealt with him not as a transient

00:11:19.460 traveler, noting that even churches that do not lie in my way, according to the flesh, went before

00:11:25.920 me city by city, unquote. What Ignatius feared was not death in the arena, but that well-meaning

00:11:31.960 Christians might gain him a pardon. He expected to be remembered through the ages and compares

00:11:38.160 himself to martyrs gone before him, including Paul, quote, in whose footsteps I wish to be found

00:11:43.900 when I come to meet God, unquote. Yeah, this man had a clear agenda. Can you imagine being like,

00:11:49.560 please don't pardon me? No, no, no, no, no, no. Please don't pardon me. You don't understand.

00:11:52.480 This is my ticket straight to the highest rung of heaven, like, and being remembered forever and

00:11:58.040 living a life of value. And like, this is a full sec. Collect the whole sec. It's not confusing why

00:12:06.100 early Christianity was so martyr crazy. Yeah. Well, Scott Alexander continues, 0.98

00:12:10.860 it soon was clear to all Christians that extraordinary fame and honor attached to

00:12:16.060 modern martyrdom. Nothing illustrates this better than the description of the martyrdom of Polycarp

00:12:21.360 contained in a letter sent by the church in Smyrna to the church in Philomilidium. Polycarp was the

00:12:29.140 bishop of Smyrna who burned alive in about 156. After the execution, his bones were retrieved by some of

00:12:35.860 his followers, an act witnessed by Roman officials who took no action against them. The letter

00:12:40.840 spoke of, quote, his sacred flesh, unquote, and described his bones as, quote, being of more

00:12:47.060 value than precious stones and more esteemed than gold, unquote. The letter writer reported that the

00:12:53.340 Christians in Smyrna would gather at the burial place of Polycarp's bones every year to, quote,

00:12:58.760 celebrate with great gladness and joy the birthday of this martyrdom, unquote. The letter concluded,

00:13:04.880 quote, the blessed Polycarp, to whom be glory, honor, majesty, and a throne eternal from generation to

00:13:13.160 generation, amen, unquote. It also included the instruction, quote, on receiving this, send to the

00:13:19.440 letter to the more distant brethren that they may glorify the Lord who makes the choice of his own

00:13:26.320 servants, unquote. In fact, today, we actually know the names of nearly all Christian martyrs because

00:13:31.280 their contemporaries took pains that they should be remembered for all their great holiness.

00:13:36.760 I'd point out here that this is not just a then thing. Every time there was a new opportunity for

00:13:41.420 martyrdom, Christians were pretty big on it. Like, the college I went to, St. Andrews, there was a spot 1.00

00:13:45.900 on campus where one person had been burned alive by the Catholics. So for some context here, Hamilton

00:13:51.320 returned to St. Andrews in early 1528 to meet with the archbishop, and while there, he was arrested,

00:13:56.620 tried, and burned at the stake outside St. Salvador's Chapel. He was only 24. It is said that

00:14:01.920 he burned for six hours, and that he died so bravely that the archbishop started to discourage

00:14:06.600 public executions because, quote, the reek of Maester Patrick Hamilton has infected as many as it

00:14:13.060 blew upon, end quote. So, uh, as you can see, at least the Catholics had the common sense to stop it 0.89

00:14:19.120 after they realized how effective the martyrs were at converting people and braiding sympathy for their

00:14:25.040 causes in this one instance. Oh, yeah. Even in our house, we have at least three or four copies of

00:14:32.240 the Book of Martyrs in our house. The people who don't know the Book of Martyrs, these are people

00:14:36.260 who fought against... But then Catholics have their own martyrs that were killed by Protestants, and they,

00:14:44.840 I guess, didn't... I don't know if there's, like, a central collection of them, like the Book of Martyrs

00:14:49.240 in the same way, but the... Whenever there was a chance to martyr themselves, Christians were really 1.00

00:14:54.440 big on this, and I think it's a much more central theme to the real Christian tradition than many

00:15:00.020 people realize, and I think one of the weakening facets of Christianity today is there just haven't

00:15:05.020 been many opportunities to be a good martyr in a while. Yeah. Well... Continue. We may be entering a new

00:15:11.000 martyr status. People are literally using AI to make art of him in the style of a Catholic saint.

00:15:26.240 Oh, really? Yeah. Look at Drudge Report's front page. It's right there. So, Scott Alexander continues,

00:15:32.160 I don't know. I'm not putting too much effort into writing up this section because it doesn't feel like

00:15:36.140 much of a mystery as some of the others. Maybe all of this was weird in 1996, but since then,

00:15:41.800 I've seen plenty of suicide bombers willing to die for their faith. I accept that the Christian 1.00

00:15:46.760 martyrs were more impressive. A slow death in the Colosseum takes more grit than the quick detonation

00:15:51.820 of an explosive vest, and dying for peace is more impressive than dying in war, but it hardly seems

00:15:57.680 like as much of a leap. However bad you imagine daily life in ancient Rome, it was worse. Historians

00:16:03.580 estimate that ancient Rome had a population density of 300 people per acre. That's almost

00:16:08.860 10 times denser than modern New York City. 2,000 years. Isn't that interesting? 10 times denser than

00:16:15.820 modern New York City. 2,000 years before anyone invented the skyscraper, too, because we also forget

00:16:20.460 how vertical New York City goes. How did they do it? By cramping people together in unbearable filth

00:16:26.160 and misery. Another source says 200 people per acre. Oh, so from a footnote, another source says 200

00:16:31.960 people per acre, which is only six times denser. These numbers are for New York City as a whole.

00:16:39.580 If we limit ourselves to Manhattan, Rome was only two to three times as dense.

00:16:42.960 Do you have any idea how insane that is? Well, what's worse is that people, they did have

00:16:48.800 multi-story buildings, but of course, these buildings didn't have plumbing, and they burned

00:16:53.320 down all the time, killing everyone inside, basically. Or fell over all the time. Yeah, we'll be getting

00:16:58.520 into that, but you've got to imagine, you didn't have plumbing, okay? That meant that the poo 0.97

00:17:04.960 that was coming out of these buildings was just going onto the streets every single day.

00:17:13.360 Yeah. Well, they talk about, I mean, this existed sort of all over the place, even in medieval

00:17:17.760 cities. That's why when we went on that tour in Edinburgh, in the muse, they talked about how they

00:17:22.900 would yell, like, all the time, because that was what you said when you were about to, like, 0.85

00:17:27.160 throw your poop. 0.99

00:17:29.340 The density, to be three exits biggest, that meant that basically, when people today are

00:17:34.500 like, I can't have kids because, like, I don't have a house for them. It's like, well, clearly,

00:17:38.760 even though they were, like, low fertility, they weren't that low fertility in Rome.

00:17:42.560 Well, and as Scott Alexander pointed out, we did this in the first episode of this, Scott

00:17:46.560 Alexander points out that there were many, many, many forms of contraception and abortion

00:17:52.260 used in ancient Rome. Plus, people were wise enough to know which hole to have sex with 1.00

00:17:58.880 if they didn't want to create a pregnancy. 0.98

00:18:00.200 I love the thing by Octavia, who was one of Octavian's, like, daughters or something,

00:18:04.720 where somebody was like...

00:18:05.500 Well, her sister, his sister was Octavia.

00:18:08.400 There were multiple Octavians. I forget which one this was. Where she was like, do you remember

00:18:13.040 the quote? It was something like, they're like, well, be careful. And she's like, oh...

00:18:18.040 Yeah, like, I know, like, when my ship is holding cargo. Like, only when my ship is holding cargo.

00:18:24.340 Yeah, only when my ship is holding cargo do I have fun.

00:18:28.100 Yeah, which is great.

00:18:29.860 Basically, only when she's pregnant. 0.65

00:18:31.780 Yeah. Because then, you know, it's safe. No problem.

00:18:36.560 Okay, but what ancient Romans got out to, pretty debauched, but anyway, continue.

00:18:41.500 Most people lived in tiny cubicles in multi-story tenements. Quote, there was only one private house

00:18:48.680 for every 26 blocks of apartments. Unquote. Within these tenements, the crowding was extreme.

00:18:54.880 The tenants rarely had more than one room in which, quote, entire families were herded together. Unquote.

00:19:00.940 Thus, as Stomberg tells us, privacy was a hard thing to find. Not only were people terribly crowded

00:19:06.980 within these buildings, the streets were so narrow that if people leaned out their windows,

00:19:11.040 they could chat with someone living across the street without having to raise their voices.

00:19:15.620 To make matters worse, Greco-Roman tenements lacked both furnaces and fireplaces. Cooking was done

00:19:21.360 over wood or charcoal braziers, which were also the only source of heat. Since tenements lacked chimneys,

00:19:27.760 the rooms were always smoky in winter. Because windows could be closed only by hanging clothes or

00:19:33.720 skins blown by rain, the tenements were sufficiently drafty to prevent frequent asphyxiation. But the

00:19:40.560 drafts increased the danger of rapidly spreading fires, and dread of fire was an obsession among the

00:19:46.280 rich and poor alike. And there were lots of big fires in ancient Rome. Yeah, well, yeah, not fun.

00:19:53.460 Cracker, in 1967, doubted that people could actually spend much time in quarters, so scrammed and squalid.

00:19:59.500 Thus, he concluded that the typical residents of a Greco-Roman city spent their lives mainly in public

00:20:04.960 spaces, and the average domicile must have served only as a place to sleep and store possessions,

00:20:10.060 which totally makes sense. Basically, it's the equivalent of a sleeping bag. Scott Alexander

00:20:15.380 continues, these tenements had no plumbing. Waste was eliminated by pouring it onto the street,

00:20:19.680 often to the detriment of people walking underneath. Water was brought home from public wells. If you were

00:20:26.340 out, you either walked back to the well or made do. The total public baths capacity of Rome was about

00:20:32.120 30,000. The total population of Rome was about a million. In practice, the upper classes used the

00:20:38.180 public baths, and the average citizen had never bathed in their life. Soap had been invented a

00:20:43.900 century or two earlier, but was limited to a small pool of early adopters. The cities buzzed with flies.

00:20:49.100 Early adopters of soap. I love this. Have you seen the new tech? Soap. Soap.

00:20:54.300 It's like, oh my god, you're always into the new fad. Like, yeah, it's great. It would be 1800 years

00:21:01.520 before anyone invented germ theory. Tenements were six stories high and frequently collapsed,

00:21:06.020 killing everyone inside. Fires consumed the city on a regular basis, giving rise to colorful legends

00:21:10.800 like Nero fiddling when Rome burnt. Police were limited, and it was understood that you would be

00:21:16.040 robbed immediately if you set foot outside at nighttime. How did people survive? Mostly they didn't.

00:21:21.060 Cities were destroyed regularly, multiple times within a single human lifetime, then rebuilt and

00:21:25.640 replenished with the rural population. Stark focuses on Antioch, a Syrian city, which was a center of

00:21:31.700 early Christianity. During 600 years of intermittent Roman rule, he finds it was conquered 11 times,

00:21:40.320 and burned to the ground four times, and devastated by riots six times. There were eight earthquakes large

00:21:45.520 enough that nearly everything was destroyed, and three plagues large enough to kill at least a quarter of

00:21:50.620 the population, and five really serious famines for an average of one catastrophe every 15 years.

00:21:58.460 The Romans rebuilt the city each time because it was a strategically important place.

00:22:03.080 Now, start to hear how horrifying this is, right? Given the number of people in these cities,

00:22:07.960 the number of bodies we're talking about here in these ultra-dense cities.

00:22:11.580 You know, a quarter of a population like that is dying. Those are people just never found,

00:22:19.220 left rotting as buildings are built on top of other buildings. You know, this is how cities back then

00:22:23.720 got built on top and built on top and built on top of the city. It really reminds me, one of the

00:22:28.920 things I noticed about when we were in Morocco, which is so interesting, so you can see these older

00:22:32.860 style city designs, is you could climb to a high building and look down at the structure of the way

00:22:40.560 that the houses and the various properties intertwined with each other. Because in Morocco, 0.96

00:22:43.680 you're super, super old, goes back a really long way.

00:22:45.400 And you could see some that looked like they may have actually been forgotten. Like maybe nobody

00:22:50.300 owned them anymore. That they were like encapsulated by other buildings and that the ownership structure

00:22:56.840 may not know or have a way to track who this building belonged to anymore. And it just got sort

00:23:02.580 of built over and around because who knows the family died there in a plague in Roman times or

00:23:07.040 something like that. Which is absolutely wild how horrifying these conditions were. But also how,

00:23:14.880 you know, after earthquake happens, okay, everyone's just going back.

00:23:19.780 Yeah. Start building a threat. Oh, gosh.

00:23:23.420 And every 15 years, every 15 years. What was happening 15 years ago, Simone? Was that when like

00:23:28.880 Lady Ghostbusters was coming out? Was like their version of Lady Ghostbusters, everyone dies?

00:23:34.440 Yeah.

00:23:35.180 This lady burns to the ground and everyone dies and we resettle it? 1.00

00:23:39.840 Yeah. So to Scott Alexander's point, yeah, it is way worse than you could even imagine. Death

00:23:45.360 really wasn't that bad currently. It just, just end it. End it. Besides, Christians can't commit 1.00

00:23:52.580 suicide. So this was one of the easiest ways to actually end it if you wanted to. All right, 0.94

00:23:58.520 I continue reading. Stark focuses on one of these disasters, plague. The Roman Empire suffered two

00:24:05.660 major plagues during this era, the Antonine Plague of 165 AD and the Cyprian Plague of 251 AD.

00:24:12.980 He theorizes that Christians made it through these plagues much better than pagans, 1.00

00:24:17.200 gaining an additional population boost. Time for some game theory. When a plague comes,

00:24:22.000 you can either defect, flee, isolate, or hide, or cooperate, enthusiastically try to help or nurse

00:24:28.800 other victims. An individual does better by defecting, but a community does better if all

00:24:33.660 its members cooperate. Stark thinks the pagans defected and the Christians cooperated. Here is 0.91

00:24:39.420 Thucydides' description of a plague in pagan Athens, admittedly 500 years before the time we're

00:24:45.220 studying. People quickly got an instinctive proto-knowledge of how contagion worked, after which,

00:24:50.480 quote, people died with no one to look after them. Indeed, there were many houses in which all the

00:24:56.760 inhabitants perished through lack of any attention. The bodies of the dying were heaped one on top of

00:25:02.020 the other, and half-dead creatures could be seen staggering about in the streets or flocking around

00:25:07.080 the fountains in the desire for water. The temples in which they took up their quarters were full of

00:25:12.840 dead bodies of people who had died inside them, for the catastrophe was so overwhelming that men,

00:25:18.340 not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law.

00:25:24.720 Compare the Christian writer Dionysius' description of a plague afflicting his own community.

00:25:29.940 Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and

00:25:34.360 thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their

00:25:38.920 every need and ministering to them in Christ. And with them departed this life serenely happy,

00:25:44.300 for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their

00:25:50.140 neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains. Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred their

00:25:56.060 death to themselves and died in their stead. The best of our brothers lost lives in this manner,

00:26:01.860 a number of presbyters, deacons, and laymen, winning high commendation so that death in this form,

00:26:09.520 the result of great piety and strong faith, seems in every way the equal of martyrdom. The heathen

00:26:15.500 behaved in the very opposite way. At the first onset of disease, they pushed the sufferers away and

00:26:21.280 fled from their dearest, throwing them in the roads before they were dead, and treated unburied corpses

00:26:27.920 at dirt, hoping thereby to avert the spread and contagion of the fatal disease.

00:26:32.780 So before you go further here, I would note that you see here the love of martyrdom. These people

00:26:41.500 were really looking for, he said, in every way, the equal of martyrdom. They were looking for an

00:26:46.580 opportunity to martyr themselves. And that was really big in early and in most of the vitalist

00:26:52.560 periods of Christianity is the desire for martyrdom. That is what drove this behavior. A, 0.94

00:27:01.320 I don't care if I die, if I die doing the right thing. And I think that that's something that we

00:27:07.380 need to rekindle within the new iterations of Christianity. I mean, if you look at 0.96

00:27:12.320 techno-Pyritanism, which takes the martyrdom of man as one of its founding texts, you know,

00:27:16.020 we've focused a lot on this concept of martyrdom. Live your life as a sacrifice for future generations.

00:27:22.860 That is what these Christians were doing again and again and again. And so many Christians today 0.97

00:27:28.080 do not understand. Your life is a sacrifice. When you live your life as a martyr for the future,

00:27:37.080 you live a life like these early Christians. When you live a life for yourself or moderated or like, 1.00

00:27:44.560 oh, I want to be part of a community and blah, blah, blah. It's like, that's not what Christianity was

00:27:50.040 originally or in its periods of great fertility. And when I say fertility, I mean like, like,

00:27:55.960 like intellectual fertility about. Could Dionysius be embellishing matters to make his friends look

00:28:01.740 good and his enemies bad? Maybe, but, and this is from the book that Scott Alexander is quoting,

00:28:08.420 there was compelling evidence from pagan sources that this was characteristic Christian behavior.

00:28:13.340 Thus, a century later, the Emperor Julian launched a campaign to institute pagan charities in an effort to

00:28:18.300 match the Christians. Julian complained in a letter to the high priest of Galatia in 362,

00:28:25.240 that the pagans needed to equal the virtues of the Christians. For recent Christians' growth was 0.98

00:28:30.720 caused by their, quote, moral character, even if pretended, unquote, and by their, quote, benevolence

00:28:37.260 towards strangers and care for the graves of the dead, unquote. In a letter to another priest,

00:28:42.200 Julian wrote, quote, I think that when the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests,

00:28:48.140 the impious Galileans observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence, unquote. And then he wrote,

00:28:54.240 quote, quote, the impious Galileans support not only their poor, but ours as well. Everyone can see 0.95

00:29:00.640 that our people lack and lack aid from us, unquote. Okay, hold on. I want to say, this is a Roman

00:29:08.040 emperor who didn't like Christians. Like, they're only pretending to be nice. Yeah. But like, they keep 1.00

00:29:13.240 helping our poor. Yeah. They keep helping, like, protect the graves of our dead. They keep doing

00:29:19.260 all of this moral shit. Like, why aren't our own people doing this? Like, why are they the ones out 0.99

00:29:25.360 there doing all the nice stuff? And there is a parallel that he draws later in this and in the

00:29:31.080 video before, which is early Christians and Mormons today. And if you don't understand how you can both

00:29:36.420 think that somebody is in a way more morally strict, but also in a way, like, you're disgusted by them

00:29:42.560 and they do all sorts of weird practices where people are like, oh, yeah, well, I mean, I know

00:29:46.660 Mormons are, like, unusually nice and, like, may exhibit unusual amounts of charity, but they're still 0.98

00:29:53.540 a disgusting cult. Like, that's the way that people saw the early Christians. You, I think, can see on the 1.00

00:30:00.760 wall here already who's going to win in the long term. The ones who the people are complaining

00:30:06.500 about, hey, we need to, like, up government donations to this because these Mormons keep 1.00

00:30:12.140 giving more money than our government is giving or our local churches are giving. They keep helping

00:30:17.140 the poor more than even we're helping our own poor. I love that they point that out. The Christians 1.00

00:30:21.200 are helping the pagan poor more than the pagan authorities are, and they're helping their own poor. 0.84

00:30:28.340 Why would you not convert? That's crazy, yeah. They didn't win, and I think what people miss here 0.93

00:30:33.820 is they think that Christians won the moral battle by a margin or by an argument, not by a preponderance,

00:30:43.060 but they won it by a preponderance. Like, you had to be kind of crazy or, like, invested in some 0.60

00:30:49.460 weird status game to not be like, oh, these are the good guys. Anyway, continue. All right.

00:30:58.340 Did this matter? It might have. Modern medical experts believe conscientious nursing without any

00:31:04.600 medications could cut the mortality rate by two-thirds or even more. If this sounds implausible,

00:31:10.700 keep in mind that nursing here includes things like bringing water from the public well to bedridden

00:31:16.020 people who are too weak to get out of bed and get it themselves. That makes a lot of sense. 0.53

00:31:20.260 Stark believes that plagues helped Christians in multiple ways. One, the obvious way. 30% of pagans 0.96

00:31:26.320 died during the plague, but only 10% of Christians, making Christians proportionally more of the

00:31:31.380 population. Two, altering the social graph. Remember, Stark believes that you convert to Christianity

00:31:37.080 after your Christian friends outnumber your pagan friends. If all your pagan friends die and none of

00:31:43.080 your Christian friends do, this suddenly gets much easier. Three, moral testimony. Pagans saw their 0.61

00:31:49.900 priests and institutions fail the moral test of helping others while Christians succeeded. Four, even more 1.00

00:31:56.560 direct moral testimony. Many Christians nursed and helped their pagan neighbors. If you owed your life to the 0.73

00:32:02.080 Christians and all your pagan friends who could judge you were dead, it would be hard not to convert. Five,

00:32:09.660 supernatural testimony. If you didn't understand game theoretic logic above, then dramatically higher

00:32:15.400 Christian survival rates might seem like God's favor. Stark additionally speculates that since Christians 0.99

00:32:21.040 didn't flee the disease, they got it much earlier, therefore getting immunity much earlier and allowing them to 0.92

00:32:27.240 walk through hospital corridors full of plague victims with apparent miraculous invincibility. Six, search for

00:32:34.220 meaning. In some cities, 50% of the population died. The survivors must have been shell-shocked and looking for some

00:32:40.960 sort of meaning behind it all. Paganism had nothing for them. Sorry, we don't do that kind of thing. Would you like to hear

00:32:47.620 another story about Zeus raping women and turning her into an animal? Christians, who had wise words about how God tests the 0.94

00:32:55.140 faithful and sometimes brings people to heaven before their time, must have been a vastly superior alternative. No kidding.

00:33:02.140 Right? Like you, you hear these two explanations and you're like, these guys seem to buy a, when I point

00:33:09.200 this out in the last video on the subject that people don't realize how much Christianity was the first

00:33:14.340 real religion of this region in the way that we think of a religion. Right. Just was, people can be like,

00:33:21.880 what about Judaism? And I go, well, look at, look at the, the temple period Judaism scripts, which you can get

00:33:29.220 from things like, like what sort of ceremonies were going on there while they were ripping doves

00:33:34.100 apart, ripping their heads off while they were alive, then ripping them apart, spilling the blood

00:33:39.540 on the altar, letting it like blow as they were talking. It would have looked like Mogaram Shugaram. 0.99

00:33:44.360 Like they were, they were transferring their sins to goats and then other is sacrificing them in

00:34:02.960 front of a crowd and then another goat they'd send in the wilderness. And it's like all of this stuff

00:34:07.500 did, it seemed very pagan. And I think some Jews take a lot of offense when I argue that the religion

00:34:14.040 that they're practicing now is not fundamentally the same religion that was practiced, you know,

00:34:20.180 pre second temple or, you know, when the temple was standing as Judaism. And I really do not mean 0.52

00:34:26.520 that insulting. It's only insulting because it goes against a lot of Jewish theology today because that

00:34:32.660 religion was quite, I think by modern standards, barbaric. And I've realized that a lot of Jews have 1.00

00:34:39.420 this sort of like mental filter on things that happened during that period. And not just the,

00:34:46.640 you know, rampant animal sacrifice, the worship of Baal in the central temple, et cetera, that was

00:34:53.740 removed during the Josiah reforms, but also things like the caste system. I remember once I was at a

00:35:00.620 party and I made some joke about like how barbaric caste systems are. And I realized that one of the people 0.98

00:35:06.600 there was a friend of mine who is a very jingoistic Jew. I don't know if that's a, what do you call a 1.00

00:35:13.800 Jew who's super pro-Jewish? Anyway, he, I turned him immediately because I realized I, in my mind,

00:35:18.960 I had just made a major faux pas. I'm like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. And he was very confused. And I was

00:35:23.580 like, well, I mean, you do come from a culture that has a strict caste system, or at least traditionally

00:35:29.520 had a strict caste system. And it had never occurred to him that Judaism used to have a really strict

00:35:35.400 caste system, or that he came from a culture based on a caste system. That the Kohan, the Levites, 1.00

00:35:41.740 the Mazarin, the Isha-Tucky, the, the people with convert backgrounds, that these people all would 1.00

00:35:47.860 have been treated differently, would have had different ways of related to jobs, would have

00:35:50.620 had different ways of relating to society, all ruled over by a hereditary king, the type of king

00:35:55.420 that would have had 700 wives and 300 concubines in some instances. You know, as much as I give

00:36:01.880 Catholics shit about things, at least when they were building the management system for their 1.00

00:36:08.060 religion, even in the earliest days, there was not even talk about making it hereditary. 1.00

00:36:14.260 And yeah, their system picked some real stinkers over the time, but they never, it's never like,

00:36:19.400 oh yeah, the Christianity at its very inception was like, well, obviously it's going to be based 0.79

00:36:25.540 on a voting system and that everyone is born equal. That's wild that we don't even talk about

00:36:30.340 like how crazy that is. And this is not a bad thing. If you look at our video on slavery,

00:36:35.160 we point out that the Jewish system was a league above any of the pagan systems in terms of its

00:36:41.880 morality, in terms of its level of civilization, in terms of all of that. But it was not what we

00:36:47.860 would think of as a modern religion, whether you go to the caste system or the animal sacrifices or the

00:36:53.080 sin transference or the blood rituals, we would not think of it as being very much like a modern

00:36:59.300 religion. Like Christianity really kind of invented something new. And Judaism was a huge part of the 0.96

00:37:08.000 way there. Like the fact that the pagans would always complain about the nefarious Jews trying to 0.96

00:37:14.200 stop them from drowning their babies. Like they saw this as like a nefarious and evil thing or

00:37:19.980 the nefarious Jews who had rules where you could lose your slave if you hurt them. 0.99

00:37:24.980 What? What insanity? Now, while Christianity built on a lot of these ideas, and Judaism did later as 0.99

00:37:32.940 well, it's important to contrast, which I think isn't fairly done today, early Christians with

00:37:39.920 Jews of their time period, not modern Jews, which are a much evolved religion from that time period.

00:37:46.660 But I think that when you do that, you can understand that Christianity was really the start 0.96

00:37:51.460 of something totally new in human history. Yeah. But continue because he goes into this as well.

00:37:57.420 And you might have some thoughts on this. New section. I think this is a very interesting way

00:38:03.060 for it to end, right? But is Christianity just better? Paganism was framed as a business relationship

00:38:10.120 with the gods. You perform the rites and sacrifices. They give you supernatural aid. You didn't have to

00:38:15.940 like them any more than you liked your supply chain for any other commodity. They certainly didn't like

00:38:21.740 you. At its absolute most touchy-feely, paganism might posit a special relationship between a god

00:38:28.620 and a city like Athena and Athens. But even this is maxed out at the sort of relationship between a

00:38:34.560 shopkeeper and a favorite recurring customer who we always remember to greet by name. Judaism did better. 0.98

00:38:40.540 God has a sort of love-hate relationship with his people, Israel. But at least there are clearly 1.00

00:38:48.660 strong emotions involved. Now, hold on. Before you go further, I want to point out here that the

00:38:52.920 person writing this is Jewish in background. Yeah. Continue. Still, Stark thinks it was Christianity

00:38:58.260 that really pioneered the idea that God loves individuals. From that, everything else flows. You should

00:39:04.040 love your fellow man and nurse him during plague. You should love your children and not committed

00:39:08.880 fantasize or abortion. You should love God back and be willing to die a martyr for him. For God's love

00:39:15.100 flows naturally, the promise of heaven, instead of a shadowy, semi-naturally forming underworlds of the

00:39:20.960 Greek and early Jews. Pagan priests were people who were skilled at the relevant rituals. Christian

00:39:27.940 bishops slash priests slash deacons were people who loved God especially much. Aside from all the

00:39:34.360 individual ways that Christian love provided an advantage, Stark thinks that paganism just couldn't

00:39:40.320 compete. So here I'd like to, because I think that this is something people don't understand. If you

00:39:45.740 imagine you're a pagan living during these times, right? And you see this one group acting more 0.92

00:39:52.000 morally. They don't have like some sort of contract with their God. Their God loves them, right? Like you

00:39:58.740 are just not going to be able to compete with this message. Even if you think it's weird, the moment

00:40:05.220 somebody starts to engage with this. And if you watch the first episode where we're going over this,

00:40:09.860 you hear about how cults work, which at first you're like, because a lot of people will be like,

00:40:15.220 oh, I was just so compelled by like the message of the cult, but that's not really what it is.

00:40:18.480 It starts with a lot of my friends are in it and blah, blah, blah. And I think it's pretty weird,

00:40:23.220 but whatever. But then you begin to accept parts of the message. And all of a sudden you're like,

00:40:28.740 God, like, this is great. Like this, so much of the world makes sense now that didn't make sense

00:40:33.220 before. And you see these big C shifts here. And I think C shifts in religion and building

00:40:40.920 civilization. So you look at something like paganism. Paganism says, do it because you will

00:40:45.680 be rewarded for doing it. And Christianity says, do it because God loves you. And while this is a huge

00:40:55.060 jump, there still is a dramatic moral flaw to this jump, which is you didn't consent to God loving

00:41:02.260 you. You know, God loves you like a stalker. He's like, I love you. Therefore do what I say. Right.

00:41:06.500 Like you didn't, you didn't say, oh, like God, I, I, I, it's God's like, I love you. So do what I want.

00:41:12.220 Whereas we reinterpret. And I think more accurately interpret what's actually written in the Bible

00:41:18.000 to argue that as techno puritanism, it says, do it without guilt or expectation of a reward

00:41:24.640 because it is the right thing to do. And in techno puritanism, you're doing it because of the impact

00:41:33.360 it will have on future people and God, which you will never be personally rewarded for,

00:41:39.160 which is just like a strictly more moral way to act than the way the older interpretations of

00:41:44.760 Christianity would act, or at least that's the way we see it. I mean, obviously we're putting this 0.52

00:41:48.100 together for our kids and stuff like that, but I see reacting, you know, and we, we have people

00:41:53.100 ask us and we've had Christians ask us, they go, why are you working to create a better future 0.95

00:41:58.200 that you are never going to get experience and that you're not going to be rewarded for creating?

00:42:04.080 And it's like, well, because we have a religious duty to do so. And they're like, well, I don't

00:42:07.500 understand how you could have a religious duty to do something that doesn't personally benefit you in some

00:42:11.420 way. And it's like, well, that's where the moral superiority comes from was in this context.

00:42:17.620 And, you know, the, the old Greek philosophy here, which is a society grows great when old man

00:42:23.240 plate trees whose shade they shall never sit in. And Christianity found a way to motivate this. 0.98

00:42:32.400 Unfortunately, it, it, it was better than the pagan traditions, early Christianity, I should say. 0.99

00:42:37.640 Uh, but it still lacked because it still was either promising to reward them in the afterlife or it

00:42:43.300 was promising to reward them with adulation was in this world. Whereas we have removed those two

00:42:48.320 rewards while still maintaining the moral mandate. The question is, is can people really motivate

00:42:54.580 themselves with that? We'll see. I mean, I find it to be very motivating, but I am a crazy person.

00:43:01.840 People are always like Malcolm, other people don't think like you stop assuming that other people

00:43:05.000 think like you. And I'm like, well, then I'll breed a generation that does just like the early 0.98

00:43:08.540 Christians did. Right. I mean, yeah, works. It apparently worked very well for them. And I do

00:43:17.020 appreciate this. Posit of this is maybe just a stronger meme. And I think that that's a huge part

00:43:26.640 of it, but I do think that these other factors like birth rate, like plague management, like martyrdom

00:43:32.060 play a role too. And I'm, I, it's so cool seeing Scott Alexander's annotation of another author's

00:43:38.940 breakdown of these dynamics, because this is totally core in culture crafting. This is,

00:43:44.240 this is essential. If you want to build a sustainable religion or see if your nascent

00:43:49.680 religion that you want to hitch your cart to is doing well. And by these metrics, EA is doing all right. 0.99

00:43:56.740 I guess Mormonism is doing great. I guess the Amish are doing all right. Some Mennonites are doing 1.00

00:44:02.080 all right. So yeah, he points out here, which I find really compelling is that if you look at the

00:44:07.280 way these early Christians look, they look the way a lot of people talk about Mormons today,

00:44:11.280 which is to say a weird cult that's like weirdly nice for whatever reason.

00:44:16.400 They're so nice, but they're so weird. No one takes them really seriously, but look at them go,

00:44:21.480 you know?

00:44:21.940 And he pointed out in the first one that they are actually growing at a rate faster than early

00:44:25.960 Christianity. So as long as they figure out how to get through this little birth rate problem, 0.90

00:44:32.680 they seem to be having right now, but it's still a less problem in their neighbors. I mean, look,

00:44:37.360 when we are talking about the plagues of our generation, when future authors are writing about

00:44:41.200 this, they're going to be talking about the plague of sexual degeneracy as it related to fertility rates.

00:44:48.440 And you can look at the techno Puritan hypothesis here, which is to say that we need to completely

00:44:52.860 disentangle the desire to have kids from the desire to achieve sexual release. You need to say

00:45:00.660 these two things have nothing in common. I want to have kids because I want to have kids and kids

00:45:06.420 are a moral good and kids make the future a better place. And I will create kids for that reason,

00:45:10.900 not because I denied myself pornography or I denied myself birth control. And then some other groups are

00:45:18.220 taking the hypothesis basically saying, no, we need to go back to older ways of doing this. And I always

00:45:22.940 mention in Rome, when their society was collapsing, there was two hypotheses. There was one group of

00:45:28.840 people that were like, let's experiment with new ways of doing things, ways of building a stronger

00:45:32.840 culture. And there was another group that said, we need to go back to the old ways of doing things.

00:45:35.800 And that was a mystery cult. I mean, in many ways, the trad Christians today represent the mystery 1.00

00:45:42.500 cults of our time. And we represent the early Christians saying, hey, no, there's a new system.

00:45:47.060 We need to upgrade our morality. We need to expect more for ourselves and people of the past.

00:45:51.200 And they're like, no, what we need to do is go back to just the way the people in the past did

00:45:54.540 things. And we're like, those systems won't work in this context. Like more is expected of us. More

00:45:59.520 morality is expected of us. More civic virtue is expected of us. Being able to resist even a higher

00:46:06.980 level of debauchery and degeneracy is expected of us. And if you can't do that, if you try to attempt

00:46:12.780 that by saying, just ignore this stuff, just, you know, as we can see by the statistics, you're

00:46:18.960 losing the next generation. And, and, and don't tell me like, everyone's like, oh, join our side.

00:46:25.160 Like, clearly we're doing well. And I'm like, yeah, the ones who stay in the faith are doing well. And

00:46:28.680 they're like, well, why do you care about the ones who aren't? I'm like, because they're leaving

00:46:31.640 record numbers. That's like saying only the people who got shot died. It's like, well, yeah, duh.

00:46:38.960 Yeah. That's what we're afraid of for our kids. We're afraid of them falling to the urban monoculture

00:46:43.400 and they just don't seem very resistant solutions. So I think that we're at this great turning point

00:46:48.660 in human civilization where we get this opportunity to build and innovate in the same way the early

00:46:55.460 Christians did, because we have new plagues, mimetic plagues, which humanity hadn't had to face 1.00

00:47:00.500 before. Exactly. Any, any thoughts or you want to go straight into this last point here?

00:47:06.180 Last point. Cause I need to make dinner. So he finishes with, is this all there is? I'm not

00:47:13.620 sure. I'll also talk about Jesus is cheap, but I still don't understand how they managed

00:47:18.900 to be so virtuous and loving in a way that so few modern Christians, even the ones who 0.88

00:47:23.400 really believe in Jesus are. I'm not making boring, liberal complaint that Christians are

00:47:28.640 hypocritical and evil. Although of course many are, I'm making the equally boring, but hopefully 0.99

00:47:33.380 less inflammatory complaint that many Christians are perfectly decent people, upstanding citizens,

00:47:38.380 but don't really seem like the type who would gladly die in a plague just so they could help

00:47:42.940 nurse their worst enemy. I'm not complaining or blaming Christians for this. Almost nobody is that

00:47:48.480 person. I just wonder what the early Christians had, which modern Christians have lost. Very 0.76

00:47:53.660 interesting question. Early Christians weren't doing this. They were doing, they weren't doing this 0.94

00:47:59.780 because they were good people. They were doing this because they were giddy about becoming

00:48:03.300 martyrs. As you can see from their own writings, they were giddy about dying for a better future.

00:48:10.160 The concept of martyrdom of making, as we say within Technopuritan, your entire life needs to be lived

00:48:16.020 as a martyr for future generations. And every moment you spend on yourself is a moment where you are not

00:48:21.820 living within God's plan. And we should all understand, we all fall short of a perfect person. We are all

00:48:27.700 going to indulge to some extent, but the other iterations of Christianity have completely abandoned

00:48:34.760 the concept of genuine martyrdom, of genuinely saying, I am going to live every moment I can

00:48:44.380 as much on the edge as I can. Like you need to be basically edging your life in terms of how difficult

00:48:51.740 you're making it for yourself. You know, why would you pay for, for, for one additional thing? Why

00:48:57.520 would you pay for one additional out of heating? If you can handle the cold, why would you pay for

00:49:03.220 one additional meal out? If you can motivate yourself without that, why would you pay for,

00:49:10.220 and we fail, we fit like, I fail all the time at this. Like I am not trying to be the perfect

00:49:16.580 Christian within this iteration of Christianity. There are people who will do better than me, 0.96

00:49:23.040 but I think having the one, the humility to admit that about yourself and to not pretend,

00:49:28.620 which I think is one of the biggest problems that modern Christians face is to pretend that your

00:49:32.720 sins, your indulgences, whether they are indulgences in your ego, indulgences in how you are signaling

00:49:38.580 to other people, indulgences in whatever are virtues. You know, one of the things I was talking to

00:49:42.800 somebody about the discord server about is he's like, why don't you attack gay people more? Like 1.00

00:49:46.860 in our family, like, I wouldn't want my sons to be gay. I wouldn't approve of that, but I approve of 1.00

00:49:51.420 somebody else who's living a gay lifestyle. Right. And they're like, so then why don't you attack them? 1.00

00:49:55.280 And I go, because that would be a complete personal indulgence. They are a large and powerful

00:50:01.360 community today. If you go out and attack them, if you say that they shouldn't be living this lifestyle,

00:50:07.660 that is going to completely derail something like the pernatalist movement, which we're trying to

00:50:13.240 grow. Like you are picking a fight with a group that we need to win election cycles out of personal

00:50:20.520 pride. That is an indulgence. That is a sin. And Christians today, I'll frame that like, 1.00

00:50:27.440 you know, there's many Christians who have these misogynistic framings, who will have these homophobic

00:50:31.720 framings, who have these anti-Semitic framings. You need Jews on your side if you're going to win in the

00:50:36.540 future. And when you attack groups that are more powerful than your own, when I say more powerful,

00:50:42.720 I mean, doing better than your own are obviously going to matter more than your own. I mean,

00:50:45.780 look at something like the Catholics with their abysmal fertility rate. That's like a lower than 1.00

00:50:49.640 the secular fertility rate in the United States if you don't include immigrants. Like that they would 1.00

00:50:54.100 like be like, who, who, who, like, for example, like, it's either the Catholics or the Jews pick a side,

00:51:00.500 do not performatively attack potential allies. That is sinful and indulgent in a world where we

00:51:10.400 are entering one of the hardest of timelines. And we need as many allies as you can have,

00:51:15.740 even if you might disagree with them from your own families and cultures perspective.

00:51:19.220 You can say, oh, I don't want my own kids doing this, but I'm open to allying and working with other

00:51:26.840 people who do this. And, and I especially am not interested in antagonizing them.

00:51:32.980 Yeah.

00:51:34.280 I think it's important that we see individuals who indulgently or performatively attack other groups

00:51:41.920 the way we see any other form of intemperance and look at them with the same level of disgust in

00:51:49.340 those moments as the drunkard stumbling down the streets, barely able to hold themselves together,

00:51:55.320 because this is an individual who puts all of us at risk. If they are seen as part of your community

00:52:02.460 and they are regularly going out and shooting at other communities with words, they make alliance

00:52:09.220 with those communities harder and they make those communities more likely to retaliate.

00:52:13.760 You know, back in the days of the American clan system and like the Appalachian region or

00:52:17.520 something like that, if you had one person who would pick too many fights with outsiders,

00:52:22.360 the clan would, you know, take them out back and beat them to death. Like that's what you had to do

00:52:27.160 because people needed to know you don't act that way because you put everyone else at risk when

00:52:32.160 you act with this level of intemperance and personal indulgence. If the people you're attacking

00:52:37.740 aren't an active and ever-present threat to you, not just not aligned with you, if they aren't an

00:52:42.960 active threat to you, then leave them alone. Anyway, any final thoughts, Simone?

00:52:50.640 I'm gonna have to chew on this for a long time and I'm really grateful this really great summary

00:52:55.480 exists. Probably need to read the book too. So thanks for going over this with me. It was fun to

00:53:01.980 read the original. It was fun to talk about it with you. And I think it's all about the birth rates

00:53:06.640 in the end. So there you go. I think it's, well, it's about the birth rates and creating a great

00:53:11.120 life. And the Christianity offered both of those. They offered a better way of living that was more

00:53:17.400 fun for all people involved. And that's, I think your big point about pernatalism, it's not about

00:53:22.700 coercing anyone. It's just about providing a better way of living, loving your kids better, giving them

00:53:26.900 such a great experience that they want to pass that on and that they're capable of passing it on because

00:53:30.720 they're thriving. And that's what Christianity did. And that's what any good religion that's going to 0.98

00:53:34.920 survive into the future or culture should be doing. I completely agree. We've got a Madagascar in. 1.00

00:53:42.780 There's room on the fun side for one more. No, thanks. Look, I've been thinking maybe if you gave

00:53:50.360 this place a chance, you might even enjoy yourself.

00:54:02.940 It's him. Can I come to the fun side?

00:54:08.640 You know, as I've said before, you need to have a more fun, when people come in, they need to enjoy

00:54:13.480 the vitalism that they're experiencing here more with other communities. Don't be in some

00:54:18.160 circle jerk about who's being more virtuous or who's being more, that destroys the vibe when 0.98

00:54:25.360 people come in. They need to come in and be like, oh yeah, this is cool. The core of Christianity, 0.99

00:54:30.820 the reactor that makes it work and so powerful, is not a set of rules or hierarchy. It's martyrdom

00:54:40.620 itself. That is what Jesus represented. That is what all of the early Christians focused on.

00:54:48.020 It is to martyrs that we look to with respect, not the fuddy-duddy who's following all of the rules 1.00

00:54:56.880 as strictly as they can and trying to enforce them on other people. That doesn't make other people want

00:55:02.640 to join your group. What does make other people want to join your group is seeing people live their

00:55:08.200 lives as martyrs. Because as I pointed out, it's not really your death that makes you a martyr.

00:55:13.160 Everyone dies. What makes you a good martyr is how you choose to spend this one short existence you

00:55:20.980 get on earth. That's what makes you a martyr. So you don't need to go out and get yourself killed to

00:55:27.100 be a martyr. And in many ways, I'd argue that you are more of a martyr if you spend a long life in

00:55:32.880 martyrdom than if you spend only a few moments in a showy martyrdom, which in a way can be kind of

00:55:40.240 indulgent to martyr yourself too fast and in too showy a way. In a lot of our religious stuff around

00:55:45.780 the book The Martyrdom of Man or in our tract series, we contextualize humanity as an intergenerational

00:55:51.500 cycle of martyrdom where every generation's duty is to martyr themselves for the sake of the next

00:55:58.200 generation to help improve their lot. And it's funny that a anti-natalist might hear that and be

00:56:03.800 like, yes, we agree we need to stop the cycle of martyrdom. But because we have this very Christian

00:56:09.900 infused ideology, we're like, no, the martyrdom is good. The martyrdom is what gives life meaning and

00:56:15.360 value. And by the way, are you seeing the snow? It's actually beginning to build up. First real snow

00:56:19.080 of the year. Yeah, it's really pretty. And what are we making for dinner tonight? I was thinking for you

00:56:24.740 grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup perhaps, or I can make vegetables gyoza, or I can make more

00:56:30.660 teriyaki chicken. This time, if you'd want vegetable stir fry, I can add that, or I can make

00:56:35.780 just egg fried rice. I'll let you choose between teriyaki chicken and grilled cheese sandwiches. I

00:56:42.100 really could do either. If you do make teriyaki chicken, cut it into smaller pieces this time. That

00:56:47.720 was like huge and weird last time. I don't know what was weird about that pack. It was very different

00:56:52.820 from the other packs that you've cooked. Yeah, I'll just I'll saute the chicken first and chop it up

00:56:56.860 then put it back in. Yeah, and then serve it separately because all the sauce from that moved

00:57:01.380 into the rice and that created a situation. Oh, you don't want saucy rice? Because the other day

00:57:06.920 you asked me to pour your curry over your rice. I do that myself or I'd ask you to do it. But with

00:57:12.660 the teriyaki, I want to do it one bite of teriyaki and then the right bite of plain rice. Okay,

00:57:18.860 sorry. I didn't realize you're eating procedure.

00:57:23.620 You're shut up. You're weirder than I am. Oh, yeah, I am. I'm very aware. I'm very aware of 0.99

00:57:30.040 the fact because a copy of me now comments about his mouth getting wet when he eats strawberries.

00:57:36.360 And that's a problem. They can't keep eating. My mouth is getting wet. It's like your mouth is

00:57:41.660 already wet. My mouth is dirty. No, there's food in it. Torsten. Torsten, Torsten, Torsten, Torsten. 0.89

00:57:53.660 All right. Well, I love you. I'll get started on dinner. I love you too. Will you get the kids?

00:57:57.080 Yeah? Absolutely. Thank you, gorgeous. I love you so much. Happy to be married to you.

00:58:03.060 You're perfect. Sorry. There it clicks. Okay, everyone. In March, there is natal con. This is

00:58:11.380 the second inaugural pro natalist convention. You should be there. We're going to be there. It's

00:58:16.460 in Austin. And if you want a 10% discount, you can enter the code Collins at checkout.

00:58:22.100 And it's being run by Kevin Dolan, our good friend. Very spicy. Very spicy. Yes. Love him.

00:58:27.700 All right. So for those unfamiliar with the tradition that we're going to show in this

00:58:33.180 family video, in America, it is common on the night before Christmas to leave out milk

00:58:38.900 and cookies or brownies or something like that for Santa Claus. We did that. The kids knocked

00:58:44.020 over the glass of milk and here they are cleaning it up. And then one of them, breaking my wife's

00:58:49.340 mind, decides to start wringing the napkins that they're using to clean the milk off the

00:58:54.900 floor into Santa's cup.

00:58:57.160 Going into the top. There we go. That was very careful. Now I'm just going to dry right

00:59:02.780 here. There we go. I'm cleaning the mess. Good job, buddies. Oh. Don't. Get them off

00:59:11.340 there. Yes. Or else it will get ruined. There we go. It's drying. Drying. I'll make sure

00:59:20.580 they don't get wet. Yes. Okay. Dry that. There we go. I think that's it. There we go. I'm going

00:59:31.460 to put it. Oh, just a little bit of milk on the table. There you go. We're going to be,

00:59:37.840 we're going to be on a narcissist. I'm squeezing in the cup. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

00:59:44.720 no. I'm going to punch your phone. You don't want to do that to us. I punched it. All right, 0.97

00:59:52.720 buddies. All right, let's go to bed so Santa doesn't miss our house because we are awake.

00:59:57.400 You got it? Oh, dear. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Santa's

01:00:05.580 drinking that. Toasty Santa's drinking that. Is Santa's drinking it? I think we need to

01:00:12.400 replace that milk because that's, you don't. Oh, you're trying to get more milk for Santa?

01:00:32.300 Yeah.

01:00:33.140 Where is the more milk?

01:00:37.080 Where is the more milk?

01:00:42.080 You're worried that Santa's not going to have enough milk?

01:00:50.260 Let me go. Hey.

01:00:53.300 I've already just cleaned it all. All right. High five, buddy. Thank you.

01:00:59.140 And I, I just, I just squeezed it in Santa. I just squeezed it in here.

01:01:05.260 So that he wouldn't have enough milk? Look, there's milk on the bottom.

01:01:11.700 Oh, dear. Oh, it's okay, Toasty. Oh, dear. I think Santa's gonna come in. I think, hey, guys,

01:01:22.920 let's go to bed before Santa's coming. That's a good idea. High five, buddy.

01:01:27.460 We're gonna go to bed fast. High five. High five. High five. 0.83

01:01:31.100 High five.

01:01:32.280 High five.

01:01:40.400 High five.

01:01:45.020 High five.

Based Camp - December 25, 2024

Early Christian Growth： Was it Actually More Moral？ (Scott Alexander & Rodney Stark)

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript