Giff Lasta
There are two main points in @Devon_Eriksen_'s post. The first is that if Christianity is true, then it's responsible for EVERYTHING, and there's no making excuses for any of the failures of the church and the faith, or any civilization where the faith is present. Given my belief in extreme ownership, he's got me there. Fine. We are Christ's body, and Christ takes it all on. Sure, the buck stops with us. In response to the prospect that Christians like me are salivating at the thought of converting him, Devon replied "numbered, numbered, weighed, divided"---using a biblical reference of God's judgment against a kingdom coming to its end, implying that Christ's kingdom has played out it's two thousand year reign and the jig is up. We'll see about that. Resurrection from the dead is his specialty, after all. I poked at him a bit in response, that perhaps he protests too much. He's holding our faith to a standard far beyond a mere philosophy, and demanding that we prove ourselves to be the very hands and feet of God in the world. In that sense, his diatribe left respectful debate in the dust and felt more like a full on "shit test." What do I mean? That Devon wouldn't hit that hard if some part of him didn't really wish we were the genuine article. He's giving us the respect of taking our claims more seriously than we often do ourselves. OK Devon, fair enough. Bring it. Tell us all your problems with life, the universe, and everything. I'll handle what I can, and pass the rest up the chain to the Almighty himself. (HOWEVER, when you adopt this frame, it casts THE CHURCH as the man in the arena, and you as the girl waiting at the finish line to throw herself at the winner. That's a different framing than just co-belligerents concerned about the fate of the West.) Now, the second point is his actual complaints. What's really wrong with the world today that the Church has been ignoring? 1. Young men cannot get married if they cannot earn a stable, reliable income that can support a family, without having to be exceptionally talented, well-connected, or lucky. 2. Young men cannot get married if their entire society is telling young women that men are their equals at best, and probably their inferiors. These are big questions, and pretty insightful. I don't have the answers. I'd point out that NOBODY in the modern world has the answers either, except that that's no excuse, because I'm a member of the body of Christ, and saving the world is our business regardless of anyone else. Anyway, I grant that a young man needs to have a way to support his family economically, AND that a woman needs to admire him to feel sustainable attraction. Devon says that "Wall Street" took that away from him. Maybe. But I take a page from @NancyRPearcey here and blame something else. The Industrial Revolution itself. That's what set the stage for feminism and then the mess we have now. That's what took fathers out of the home and into the factories and wrecked the natural rhythm of family life that gave him the opportunity to command respect and build attraction. It also gave tremendous benefits that involve half our children not dying, so I'd really like to not lose the good parts if I can help it. The best immediate solution I have is, in the face of the age of abundance coming our way with AI and robotics, is we need to explicitly and voluntarily adopt constraints that build attraction in family life. We need to have a science of masculine/feminine polarity and fitness routines around it, as developed as our routines of physical fitness are. I'm working on this at the micro level now with Reforged Marriage---giving men in marriages the tools they need to lead their families and cultivate desire in their wives. It's a small effort, but I've seen impressive results with about 100 men at this point. I'm pretty excited about the impact of scaling what I'm seeing. My little effort is not enough. I don't know how to solve the status questions or those of meaningful work, in a world where machines are smarter than we are. But it's a start. As I said before, Devon, I'm all ears for your suggestions of concrete solutions and goals.
Devon Eriksen
Christian institutions have always been responsible for sex. I largely agree with Giff that something needs to be done, but Christendom, as a body of people, need to understand this first so they can do it. Sex is not some abandoned portfolio that the church must pick up merely because somebody else dropped it in the gutter. Sex has been the responsibility of the church all along. Because power and responsibility go together. The church, whether it wielded political authority or not, has never presented itself as a mere psychological counselor or life coach, dispensing healthy advice to a voluntary audience. The church has always, instead, claimed to speak the with the authority of the one true god, king of the universe, transmitting his commands to his kingdom. When you claim to speak in the name of god, you surrender all right to make excuses. That's the deal. You cannot say "Christians failed, not Christianity," because Christianity is what Christians do, and if they failed, then so did it. You cannot say "People did not follow us," because if they didn't, that's your fault for not inspiring their trust. You cannot say "we were subverted," because it's your fault you allowed that to happen. If you claim to the humanity sole conduit to infallible moral authority, then you are not merely responsible for a good-faith effort, you are responsible for results. The church has always built fences around the human libido, so it has always been the church's responsibility to make sure there are green pastures inside those fences. This has nothing to do with "teaching young men how to talk to girls". Because if the church, or anyone else, is having to channel a bunch of "pickup artists" to teach "game", then this is an indication that the church is following women's sexual tastes rather than defining, for women, which men are high-status and desirable. Which means the church has already failed. The church isn't supposed to teach you "game". It's supposed to create a society where women's notion of an attractive man is the same as society's notion of a useful citizen. And it is also the church's responsibility is make sure that men have the resources, support, mentors, and opportunities to actually be that useful man. I hear a lot of Christians saying that Christianity created Western civilization, and expecting us all to applaud. What I don't see is a lot of taking responsibility for reversing the decline. Everybody wanna be a pillar of civilization until it's time to do pillar of civilization shit. I saw the church making a lot of noise about abortion, but I didn't see it helping young women not to be afraid of motherhood by making sure they were provided for. I saw the church lecturing a lot of young men about pornography and promiscuity, but I didn't see it taking on Wall Street to make sure the price of labor was high enough so young men could afford to get married instead. In short, throughout my entire life, I have seen the church focus all of its disapprobation on young people who had no power to harm it, and none upon those who were harming those young people. That is how and why Christianity is failing, and not one priest in a hundred has the courage and humility to admit it. They'd rather whine about how people stopped following, about how modernity lured them away, instead of facing up to the cold, hard reality that the church failed of its own accord, and modern secular leftism did nothing but step into the power vacuum that religion left behind. The secular leftism that turned into gay race communism was always just as stupid as it is today. The younger generations would never have turned to it if the Christian faith, personified in its institutions, had not first abandoned them. And I'm not keen on a return to Christianity, myself. Not because I have any particular hatred for it, but because I'm not seeing how there's anything left to save. I've not seen one church, Prod, Catholic, Orthodox, or whatever, that has any answers to problems the West actually has. They just seem to think that if they roll the clock back far enough, they can stick the same fork in the same light socket and get different results. It wasn't feminism or communism or abortions or birth control pills or atheism that made marriage unavailable to young men. It was the economic and technological incentives that Wall Street acted on with utter impunity and not a peep of criticism. And of all the priests I've seen spilling oceans of ink onto the internet, not one of them has even displayed an understanding that this is the real problem, much less an understanding of why it happened, and you can forget about them having any ideas for solving it. So before I listen to any claptrap about a "retvrn" to "traditional Christian values", I want to hear something else first. 1. Young men cannot get married if they cannot earn a stable, reliable income that can support a family, without having to be exceptionally talented, well-connected, or lucky. 2. Young men cannot get married if their entire society is telling young women that men are their equals at best, and probably their inferiors. If you don't have a concrete, realistic, and actionable plan for how to fix these two trends, then as far as I'm concerned, the rest of your religion is just historical baggage.