posted on July 05, 2022 04:47 AM by
u/PMMeYourJerkyRecipes
97
u/SuppaCoup49 pointsat 1656998267.000000
as someone raised prot, in a rather plain sect that pandered a lot to
the soft rock and corniness side of youth ministry, the somber exoticism
of catholicism has a strong aesthetic appeal that works on a deeply
irrational part of my brain. i wonder if that tendency is largely what
drove leah into conversion, wrapped in numerous layers of
rationalization?
You want the Christianity of knights and kings waving around swords instead of the Christianity of strip malls and cringy cable TV.
It's a perfectly normal and common impulse, and also one that prolly causes a shitload of our problems.
A lot of converts end up disappointed and either find other LARPers to hang out with or convert to Orthodoxy like Rod Dreher. They usually end up disappointed in that too. Turns out a lot of people who are Catholic or Orthodox are just Italian or Greek, not trads.
My mom was an Evangelical to Catholicism convert and was disappointed. A lot of my Evangelical friends also converted.
When it turns out that atomizing people into individuals that just consume leads to them wanting more and then sadly seeking community in places that are really more derived around population and moral control.
Although most of those are going for Orthodox Christianity now because they think Pope Francis is too woke. (I am, sadly, not joking about any of this.)
As a majority-Catholic country dweller that seems like such a weird-ass tendency on part of bored Americans. To me Catholicism feels tacky, backward and basically like a state-sanctioned mafia. Then again some ex-Catholics from my country are in love with Protestantism, they think it's sensible and rational compared with Catholicism. I myself am glad to be an euphoric atheist.
[My reaction to people calling that christianity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDNCkcC47eQ)
E: [lol what a pos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Popoff)
> In 1985, Popoff began soliciting donations for a program to provide Bibles to citizens of the Soviet Union by attaching them to helium-filled balloons and floating them into the country.[13] When skeptics asked him to prove that the money he had collected had in fact been spent on Bibles and balloons, Popoff staged a burglary at his own headquarters.[14] On subsequent broadcasts, he tearfully begged for additional donations to help repair the damage
Is American Roman Catholicism particularly somber or exotic? I was under the impression it was mostly an outgrowth of Irish/British Catholicism, which is more or less aesthetically indistinguishable from Anglicanism, just with acoustic easy listening instead of soft rock. I'd think americans looking for exotica would go for the Byzantine Rite, like the girl from Red Scare, or for one of the antisemetic post-V2 schismatic sects .
Are Aquinas and Augustine particularly relevant to the american analytic tradition? (Asking this out of genuine ignorance and laziness, not because I want to discuss the more general, well-established canonicity and importance of their work.)
More British than American, but yes, definitely! Anscombe, Anthony Kenny, and PMS Hacker are all fans of Aquinas. If memory serves Kenny has a funny bit where he reveals in a footnote that he's been quoting Aquinas verbatim for the past three pages and there's just no way one could have known. Aquinas is gold. I don't know much about Augustine though
/u/mokuba_b1tch is overstating their case that Aquinas is important to the analytic tradition.
Anscombe is the only one of Anscombe, Kenny, and Hacker who can be considered a central figure in analytic philosophy in terms of expansive influence, whose work is read across the analytic tradition. The other two I don’t know so well, but this is the limited amount I think I do:
1. Kenny is/was a Catholic whose influence at least begins with analytic thomism, which is itself a very much contested sub-tradition within analytic philosophy, and not influential in this fashion.
2. Hacker is influential in his areas of interest, but not as a proponent of Aquinas.
Against this you have huge swathes of analytic philosophers who simply reject the premises of scholastic or Thomist philosophy on basic conceptual grounds. Perhaps they should be more congenial! But nonetheless, there they are.
I think that's largely fair. I guess I take it as a given that analytic thomism is a part of analytic philosophy, for historical reasons, but one needn't look at things through that lens. And my interest is mostly in Wittgenstein, whose influence on analytical philosophy is also contested, so this has colored my answer. I'll make a few corrective comments.
Unless things have changed greatly, Kenny is certainly no longer a Catholic and has even been excommunicated. I don't think his faith is relevant to his the question "How influential is he?", though. I do not understand the point of mentioning it. Anyway I think he is more famous than you give him credit for: his work on tense and aspect is very important and has reached many pure linguists. He is also well-known in Wittgensteinian circles, though I believe his star is fading.
Hacker is not known as a thomist and indeed is not, but writes about his appreciation for thomism in his *Human Nature* books, which he considers the capstone of his career. (Perhaps few will agree with this though.)
The point of mentioning that Kenny is a Catholic is to point out that his fondness for Aquinas has a well-spring outside analytic philosophy, and that in this sense if Aquinas reaches analytic philosophy via Kenny, it does not do so because people in analytic philosophy more generally are reading and discussing Thomist insights as their bread and butter.
By contrast I do not mention Anscombe’s Catholicism because it is so integral to views which she then personally made *central* to analytic philosophy. They’re indisputably part of the bread and butter. I will give Kenny the credit for his work on tense and aspect, but point out that Anscombe is certainly the more widely read, disputed, and agreed with - and one of only a handful of analytic philosophers of any such standing with an explicit Catholic or Thomist influence.
Disclaimer: I don’t think it’s fair to criticize the (very pro-life)
Leah for getting an abortion to treat a life-threatening ectopic
pregnancy; what’s sneerable here is her refusal to admit she had one at
all because she and the doctor want to pretend otherwise.
Yeah in principle I have no problem with the needle she threads in this article, but in practice the pro-life movement would deny this delicacy to anyone. In this precise case, an ectopic pregnancy, hospitals are forced to wait until the mother's vital signs fall before they can lift a finger in red states now. All sensitivity and care on paper, persecution and judgement in reality.
The very supportive and very catholic doctor. While the ultrasound technician and a previous surgeon ordered her to stop crying or not to refer to it as a baby, in a blatant lack of empathy typical of godless democrat medical personnel. Because that happened.
I was using "jesuitical" in the old sense of Motivated Reasoning. My dad and sister went to a Jesuit college and had nothing but good things to say about them. As recently as 100-150 years ago I'm told they weren't quite so enlightened
It is the official position of the Catholic Church; you can remove an ectopic pregnancy. I know a couple of states have outlawed that, but they're now contradicting Catholic teaching in the other direction. She's not being a hypocrite.
Official catholic teaching is also that the entire Fallopian tube needs to be removed with the embryo; you shouldn’t just take out the embryo itself, right?
The last time I looked into this, the Catholic church allowed the removal of the fallopian tube because it wasn't "directly" effecting the embryo. Distinction without a difference, but the angels on the pinheads care, apparently.
In non-Catholic hospitals, ectopic pregnancies are usually treated with methotrexate, a cancer drug, unless contraindicated. Surgical intervention wouldn't be the preferred method of treatment, unless necessary.
Yes, but ...
I'd argue that this kind of distinction without a difference, a religious splitting of hairs, is the result of a strain of religious philosophy that takes the theological claims of the religion seriously. The end result is a kind of incoherence, but it's a kind of incoherence that results from the reality of the world colliding with serious, but ungrounded, religious claims.
In other words, when "sanctity of life" becomes a religious tenet, but comes face-to-face with the reality of ectopic pregnancies, you can find philosophical arguments to save the mother without violating the religious tenet.
That we have never seen a serious charge within the Catholics priesthood to deny communion to politicians who support the death penalty is, of course, also an indication that none of this is actually principled, but rather political. Nonetheless, that we see these kinds of distinctions in the Catholic Church is a measure of its history of serious philosophical argument, when compared with the newer offshoots of Protestantism.
You misunderstand my point.
This kind of bullshittery, comee when you disappear up your own navel trying to rationalize your way into a supernatural position. Something this sub is quite familiar with. That's all I'm saying.
That's not official Catholic teaching, but that is the advice you would find on the Catholic subreddit. If you call the National Catholic Bioethics hotline they'd tell you to take the methotrexate.
I don’t know why there are people here dunking or at least giving the appearance of wanting to dunk on Catholic converts as just assumedly irrational or deluded, it’s a very common path to Catholicism in particular, often from atheism. Certainly they have lots of reasons for framing the conversion as rational.
This should be unsurprising! Of the various Christianities available, Catholicism is arguably the tradition which has most committed itself to the rational philosophical justification of Christian belief!
If you want to dunk on Catholics for just being batshit and/or dogshit, do it that way!
Because it's extremely unlikely she was reading Aquinas. The Catholic philosophical tradition seems a less likely route from militant Rationalist™ atheism, when pseudo-Protestant "trad-cath" views are so in vogue.
Edit: I might be completely wrong, since I didn't read the article after the paywall hit me, and I see Aquinas and Augustine mentioned in other comments. Regardless, I've noticed that (in the US at least) devout Catholics tend to read a lot of pop-catholic or pop-christian crap which is heavily influenced by American protestantism.
Happy to be proven wrong. 😁
Although I can see why religion in America would put people off, I'm exasperated by atheists who completely write off religious thinkers.
She talked about her conversion [here](https://the-toast.net/2015/11/12/convert-series-leah-libresco/), she read MacIntyre along with Lewis and Chesterton but wasn't convinced to become Christian yet, it seems like the final step was deciding she needed God to ground an objective morality, and she thought the source of morality needed to be an agent that would take an active role in shaping her moral intuitions her rather than her mind having access to a passive world of platonic-style moral truths.
>The big question I was worried atheism wasn’t going to handle was how I had access to moral law. If eyes respond to light, ears to sound, etc, what is it that conscience responds to? I didn’t think the answer was “nothing in particular” or “cultural norms, which are themselves arbitrary” or something like that. I’d been a moral realist for a long time, thinking of it as being something like math: transcendent, true, beautiful. And no one really goes after mathematicians, demanding they explain how they come to know math! (But math is much more obviously extractable from the physical world that ethics are).
>So I kept going round and round the tensions with my Lutheran friend, until he told me to stop summarizing the answers I’d discarded and to try to think about what the answer might be – to think something new, instead of continuing to pick over older ideas.
>And that’s when I blurted out, “I don’t know, I guess Morality just loves me or something.”
>And that was pretty much the answer I stuck with (though there was a fair amount of pausing and reexamination, because, as I told my friend “Just because I say something doesn’t mean it’s true”). I didn’t see how I managed to reach something transcendent, so the movement had to be coming from the other side. And that meant I wasn’t just talking about morality as some kind of big, floating rulebook, but as an agent, and one that offered itself to me.
Although I guess she would claim she was brought to this conclusion by some kind of reasoning, I don't know if she'd say the same about why she decided the source of morality had to be the Christian God, apart from her social circle consisting largely of Christians at the time.
This reads like you’re contrasting such an account of coming to believe in a (Roman Catholic) God with an account of doing so by the application of reason, but I don’t see why that should be the case.
There’s no obvious reason for me to think a static moral Platonism is more rationally satisfactory than a Christian God: once I have my moral realism, I may think this still requires a metaphysical explanation or structure. Catholicism certainly claims to offer me the full metaphysical picture I want to explain how a theretofore amorphous realism works and why. Indeed, the fact that Catholicism offers such a full and detailed picture is - I am told - one of the appealing things about Catholicism as compared to, say, Evangelical Christianity.
Now that would be unnecessary to the Humean who believes that reason is *productive* but does not demand this kind of rational closure and is happy with open-ended metaphysical questions. But that is only one account of rationality, and while appealing to those like myself who have sympathies with scepticism in general, it certainly isn’t for everyone.
> There’s no obvious reason for me to think a static moral Platonism is more rationally satisfactory than a Christian God
I'm not saying there is, I'm just saying that while she has a chain of reasoning (not one I agree with, but a chain of reasoning nonetheless) for believing a personal God gives a more satisfactory explanation for moral realism than an impersonal Platonic order, I haven't seen her give an argument for the further step of thinking such a personal God is more likely to be the Christian God than that of any other religion with a personal God, or a God that never revealed itself through divine revelation to a specific religious community.
>I may think this still requires a metaphysical explanation or structure. Catholicism certainly claims to offer me the full metaphysical picture I want to explain how a theretofore amorphous realism works and why.
To the extent the Catholic metaphysical framework is supposed to be based on reasoned philosophical arguments like the ones Aquinas presented, sure, you could claim to decide you agree with those aspects of the framework by use of reason alone. But reason alone wouldn't be enough justify a belief in the aspects of Catholicism that are supposed to be matters of divine revelation or historical miracles, like the belief in Jesus Christ as incarnation of God, or Catholic teachings about the afterlife, or about the Catholic church being guided and protected by God in a way that other religions are not.
Well I think we can certainly agree that whether or not she’s posted about it, there’s at least a chance she has a reason we’re not fully availed of. Maybe even an explicit reason not explicated in our sources. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so open-minded our brains fall out: there are certainly gaps a more satisfying account of her conversion would fill.
I am, however, ever less satisfied with the “but which personal God” point about the rationality of religious conversion: I am tempted to say “but which string theory?”. Certainly we do not expect anyone who claims to have *the most rational available* account of their beliefs to have even their own *final* rational account. Indeed the bar is very low when it comes to rationally justified personal beliefs: the average atheist is rarely better than the average Christian at explicating even good implicit reasons that they have for their particular worldview.
(For me, the way out is often to worry less about how good one’s explicit reasoning is and to begin worrying about whether explicit reasons are *ever* doing much of the work *at all* for *anyone*.)
On your final point (or explication), I think you are going beyond the bounds of what’s fair even to our hypothetical ideally reasoning Libresco. We’ve drummed up a hypothetical person who arrived at her religious beliefs by reason alone, and that’s our construct which renders it a bit unfair to the Libresco who didn’t actually make any claims about pure reason, but even then the expectation of our hypothetical person should be that they reason things out to the best of their ability and choose what to put in and what to leave out according to balancing things out against their natural limits. They do not need ideal explanations for the miraculous if their overall world picture has rational appeal in leaving room for miracles.
> I am, however, ever less satisfied with the “but which personal God” point about the rationality of religious conversion: I am tempted to say “but which string theory?”. Certainly we do not expect anyone who claims to have the most rational available account of their beliefs to have even their own final rational account.
I don't think adherents to more "orthodox" brands of religion (those which see it as important to believe in certain doctrines as divine revelation and not just some sort of human spiritual intuitions) typically would see their belief as just a kind of working hypothesis in the manner of tentative views about the most promising leads to pursue in developing future scientific theories..
>On your final point (or explication), I think you are going beyond the bounds of what’s fair even to our hypothetical ideally reasoning Libresco. We’ve drummed up a hypothetical person who arrived at her religious beliefs by reason alone, and that’s our construct which renders it a bit unfair to the Libresco who didn’t actually make any claims about pure reason
I didn't say that she had, I was just responding to the beginning of this comments which asked the question "Does anyone have a link to her talking about her conversion to Catholicism? I'm morbidly curious about how she frames that as a rational choice", and I commented that she didn't in fact claim that every aspect of her conversion was a matter of rational analysis, only the part about a personal God as a source of morality.
>but even then the expectation of our hypothetical person should be that they reason things out to the best of their ability and choose what to put in and what to leave out according to balancing things out against their natural limits.
OK, if we are talking about a hypothetical person (not Libresco) who claims their religious conversion was arrived at by "reason alone", are you saying we somehow shouldn't criticize them if they don't in fact have an answer to the "which personal God" question based on reason alone? It's not as if this criticism is based on the normative idea that all religious believers *should* be able to justify their beliefs on reason alone, it's just a criticism of someone who has already made that claim for themselves, on the grounds that they can't actually justify it when it comes to this step in their conversion.
I must be reading past you somewhere here. I agree with you about what Libresco says, and indeed all I did in the comment you originally replied to was point out that MacIntyre and therefore some kind of philosophical reasoning were involved in her conversion. So when you appeared to disagree with my pointing that out, I took it to be the case that you thought Libresco’s reasoning was unsatisfactory, and so I started pointing out ways in which I think it’s unfair to make certain demands of Libresco’s reasoning.
You seemed, to me, throughout to be registering complaints that Libresco’s account of her conversion had gaps where you thought there should be reasons.
On the hypothetical person case, my point is that they’re still a person: I never said that this hypothetical claimed to have all the reasons, just the best ones within personal limits *given* that they’re balancing a lot of spinning metaphysical plates. Nor did I say we shouldn’t criticise them for doing that balance wrong. Rather, I gave a reason of my own why the bare criticism read as unsatisfactory or unfair to me.
Sorry for the confusion, I didn't mean my comment to be an objection to yours, more expanding on your comment and with the additional info I was adding mainly being for sake of addressing the original comment that you were responding to as well.
Apart from that, it's basically just a tangent to the topic of this thread, but I think we may still disagree a bit on the question of the hypothetical person who says their religious beliefs come from reason alone--I agree everyone has limits, but if they don't even attempt to derive all their main beliefs from premises/facts which might be accepted by a significant number of those who don't already believe the same religion (whatever the quality of their arguments), then I wouldn't characterize that as "reason alone". But perhaps you would use "reason" more broadly than me--I don't think there's any precise definition of what it means, it's more of a [family resemblance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance) style term.
I'm mainly skeptical of militant-atheist converts. To use one of their favorite expressions, "you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into".
I doubt her current position is entirely Rational™ because that's what she said about her previous position, which she staunchly defended and has now abandoned. It's not so much about the content of her beliefs (like which denomination she's chosen) but about the form of her justification.
I can't take seriously someone who expresses complete confidence in their reason when it has already led them to two wildly contradictory stances. If you can swap out the ultimate conclusion without fundamentally changing or rejecting your methods of rationality, then don't your methods remain suspect?
I share your scepticism. People who get really into Catholicism are very like people who get really into Hegel. However, I mostly also doubt the degree to which “rationality” applies to anything - religious belief included - beyond the bare fact of being a style of thought which has x and y properties we tend to think are good as go styles of thought, and religious newborn belief tends to have less to with religion’s subject matter than the subject of the sentence “x is a Catholic now”.
The most reasonable assumption is that they're aware that a theocratic takeover is on the horizon and believe getting in good with the murderous regime is the best personal choice.
Classic Catholicism; the only moral abortion is my abortion.
(Last time I checked, Catholics and evangelicals have abortions at
higher rates than the population average, largely due to the substandard
sex ed they get. )
Touching article, shame about the odious subtext in which all women -
and nurses, doctors, presumably legislators - are, per Libresco,
personally obliged to consider their abortion a “baby” from now on
Yeah, she was a Rational Atheist ®️™️ blogger in the aughts and early 2010s, when Dawkins was fashionable. She and a bunch of other people in that circle drifted right about 10 years ago. I knew a few of them (met Leah once), and to a person they're all batshit insane now.
This is something you see a lot in these circles of self-important people who always need to feel like the smartest person in the room - some of them will bounce wildly around the political/ideological spectrum because for them ideology is just an identity they wear and not based on any real personal principles or reasoned conclusions.
She either worked at CFAR or was highly CFAR aligned. Then she was all "And now I am a Catholic!" and made a lot of that, and grew a whole "Thought Leader" out of this notion, everyone at reason ate it up.
And now apparently NYT.
Dunno, never heard of her before as far as I can recall. She does follow tylercowden and scottalexander (among 500 others so no proof there). Could just be Rationalitycurious.
Related to this rationalization (but not to Rationalism), an old
article about talking about anti abortion women justifying their (or
their kids) abortions from the perspective of the doctors and nurses.
https://joycearthur.com/abortion/the-only-moral-abortion-is-my-abortion/
I saw the link and immediately recognised [the Shirley Exception](https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1004400861865488384). Then I read through the stories and while some of them match that picture, I was surprised by how many were just brazenly going I am the main character, I am an exception. While the line of thought described in that Twitter thread is dumb, I can at least see how an otherwise empathetic person could be lead to think that way, but this is something else.
Leah has a baby now and seems like a really great mom. I thought this
article was mostly sad… doctors were treating her love and sadness for
her miscarried babies as basically stupid. But miscarriages are really
sad. She doesn’t argue anywhere in the article against abortions, so it
doesn’t seem sneer worthy.
Personally I think everybody has a right to choose whether or not to
be pregnant, but also I think parents should get bereavement leave etc
if they have a miscarriage. Imagine wanting a baby so badly, setting up
a nursery, picking a name, telling your friend and family you’re
pregnant, then being told the baby has died inside you and you’re silly
for crying about it. Terrible.
>She doesn’t argue anywhere in the article against abortions, so it doesn’t seem sneer worthy.
If you're not picking up on the subtext, her twitter feed has plenty of examples of her equating abortion to infanticide.
My girlfriend suffered a miscarriage a few years ago and I can confirm that, in her case, hospital staff were not particularly sympathetic or comforting.
One nurse even left her in severe pain for like 40 minutes because he never came in to check up on her like he was supposed to. After some prying, it was *heavily implied* to us that he was a very conservative fellow who was "uncomfortable" being in the room with my girlfriend. So Libresco will have to forgive me if I don't see the proliferation of pro-life medical staff leading to better outcomes for women who suffer miscarriages.
That’s really awful. That nurse should be fired :(
I agree that I don’t think the pro-life movement will actually result in better treatment of women or babies. (See: criminal investigations into moms who have miscarriages in countries where abortion is illegal????)
But from this article I got the sense Leah is just saying the world would be better if people valued unborn babies at least a little; support for parents who lose children could be so much better than it is now. I didn’t get the sense she was advocating for anti-woman policies (which many pro-lifers do advocate for).
in the us we have people screaming bloody murder at the idea of expanding maternity or paternity leave as being creeping socialism, much less bereavement leave at miscarriages. shit is fucked yo.
Fun fact, if you live in California and your baby is born early, california SDI pays for an extended maternity leave. None of this is nearly enough, but its better than the exactly 0 most people get in many states.
>I thought this article was mostly sad… doctors were treating her love and sadness for her miscarried babies as basically stupid.
I see a concerned and caring ultrasound technician who is dealing with one of the hardest situations in her job. I wonder if the technician would agree with the contention that she was treating her patient's feelings as "basically stupid."
>“It’s not a baby, don’t talk like that,” she told me, as I lay on the table. Her voice softened a little, “You don’t have to think of it that way.”
Let's not confuse sub-standard medical care for some sort of societal level belief about the validity of the feelings of expectant mothers who miscarry.
Certainly the mental health of patients, in general, is an area which has lagged behind in western medicine. However, I don't believe that currently extends to discounting the bereavement of those miscarry.
as someone raised prot, in a rather plain sect that pandered a lot to the soft rock and corniness side of youth ministry, the somber exoticism of catholicism has a strong aesthetic appeal that works on a deeply irrational part of my brain. i wonder if that tendency is largely what drove leah into conversion, wrapped in numerous layers of rationalization?
Disclaimer: I don’t think it’s fair to criticize the (very pro-life) Leah for getting an abortion to treat a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy; what’s sneerable here is her refusal to admit she had one at all because she and the doctor want to pretend otherwise.
Conservative with lots of options lectures people who are having their options systematically stripped away from them: News at 11
[deleted]
Classic Catholicism; the only moral abortion is my abortion.
(Last time I checked, Catholics and evangelicals have abortions at higher rates than the population average, largely due to the substandard sex ed they get. )
Touching article, shame about the odious subtext in which all women - and nurses, doctors, presumably legislators - are, per Libresco, personally obliged to consider their abortion a “baby” from now on
I’ve heard about this piece, because of the claim that ‘ectopic pregnancies’ are viable and could be a baby, when that is never the case.
And of course, it’s written by Leah of rationalist fame. I am disappointed and unsurprised.
Why does the “grey tribe” keep wearing red?
Was she a rationalist blogger? I’ve been following her for a while and never got that impression; I just knew she was a Catholic convert
Related to this rationalization (but not to Rationalism), an old article about talking about anti abortion women justifying their (or their kids) abortions from the perspective of the doctors and nurses. https://joycearthur.com/abortion/the-only-moral-abortion-is-my-abortion/
Leah has a baby now and seems like a really great mom. I thought this article was mostly sad… doctors were treating her love and sadness for her miscarried babies as basically stupid. But miscarriages are really sad. She doesn’t argue anywhere in the article against abortions, so it doesn’t seem sneer worthy.
Personally I think everybody has a right to choose whether or not to be pregnant, but also I think parents should get bereavement leave etc if they have a miscarriage. Imagine wanting a baby so badly, setting up a nursery, picking a name, telling your friend and family you’re pregnant, then being told the baby has died inside you and you’re silly for crying about it. Terrible.