Andrew Sullivan: Politics has Become Religion

For my first 18 years of life, religion was shoved down my throat. My father was the well-intentioned aggressor. He wanted to protect me from the hot fires of hell and he repeatedly expressed disappointment in me for questioning such things as virgin birth and dead people who later became alive. Based on many discussions with my father (and many others) over the years, I learned to recognize religion whenever I saw it. I became an atheist because I took the time to read the Bible and because I listened carefully and with an open mind to religious apologists as they put their best feet forward.

One of the first things I notice about religions is that it is inappropriate (sometimes blasphemous) to ask certain questions, even obvious questions. Another thing that shouts "Religion" is that one is asked to believe things that don't make any sense. Here's my favorite. According to many religious folks, "everything has to have a cause." Most importantly, they will tell you, the universe had to have a cause, and thus (ergo, therefore) the cause of the universe was "God." They tell you that this principle of First Cause "proves" the existence of "God." When you ask what caused "God" (a question that would instantly occur to any half-alert 8 year old), believers tell you that God does not need to have a cause. This is the sort of thing that religion does to brains. It allows you to violate all of your most important principles in good conscience. It also attacks science whenever science becomes inconvenient. It excuses the use of undefined and ill-defined concepts, even foundational concepts. Religion excels at cherry picking, avoiding the discussion of the parts of the Bible where "God" commits mass killings. Believers will believe, no matter what the evidence is. Theology is "tennis without a net, as Sam Harris says at min 5 in this video:

As Harris says (Min 8):

This to me is is the true horror: Perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own.

Wokeness is also tennis without a net. Wokeness apologists engage in the same shoddy thinking as many theologians and ordinary believers. Yet it is spreading through society like wildfire, ruining careers and celebrating censorship and setting fire to Enlightenment values whenever those become inconvenient to the cause.

I support Andrew Sullivan at Substack. I consider him wise, good-hearted and highly articulate. He is also a gay man who is religious. In this recent article, "Religion and the Decline of Democracy," Sullivan announces that he is about to start attending Catholic Mass again, and he is going despite many strong reasons for not going. The Catholic Church has been unkind, even cruel, to Sullivan (and many others, including innocent children), yet so powerful is the pull of the church that Sullivan is about to march back to his religious tribe where it might reasonably be expected that he will receive even more abuse. As he sees it, he has stayed with the church because of his "need to transcend, to find meaning, and purpose." Again, that is how powerful tribes can be despite intellectual, factual, scientific and social incoherence.

Today's irony is that this article by Sullivan expresses his grave concern about Wokeness. In this, he and I agree completely. The Woke are a tribe with a "need to transcend, to find meaning, and purpose."  The Woke are a tribe that proudly acts like a mob, like a religion that will stop at nothing to "save" the rest of us.

I will end with Sullivan's description of the Woke mob:

The transcendent has been banished in favor of a profoundly atheist view of the world as merely the arrangement of power structures. But the zeal of religious faith propels the ideology. It is Manichean — seeing the world only as good or evil, antiracist or racist, with virtue attached, horrifyingly, to skin color or gender. It can brook no compromise. It denies the individual soul. It seeks to punish and banish sinners as zealously as it insists on a total psychological re-birth for everyone who joins up. It demands confessions of sin; it requires the renunciation of the self in favor of the identity group; it urges, as so many sermons do, that people “do the work” every day to bring about the Kingdom of Anti-Racism. These pseudo-religions will fail. They are too worldly, too rooted in contemporary culture wars, too baldly tribal, and too shallow in their understanding of the world to have much staying power. But they can do immense damage to souls and our society in the meantime.

Continue ReadingAndrew Sullivan: Politics has Become Religion

Should We Look to Biology or Ideology When Trying to Answer Biological Questions about Transwomen?

This fascinating exchange starts with a Tweet by Gloria Steinem, to which biologist Heather Heying responds with a science lesson. Some legislatures are bringing this issue to a head and it remains unclear whether we will (as a society) resolve this debate with biology or ideology. Perhaps the battleground will be the dictionary. As Heying says,

Transwomen are transwomen.
Women are women.

Somehow, writing these two sentences is being construed by the Woke as bigotry, with no end in sight as to how or whether this dispute can be resolved.

And as I review this thread, I keep shaking my head, given that a Tweet by Gloria Steinem started this discussion. For many of us, one of the most important parts of feminism is the tenet that the things that you like to do (whether climbing trees or cooking or fixing cars) don't determine whether you are a fully man or woman. These things are irrelevant to your sex. You can be fully a woman even though you like to engage in activities typically associated with men. Yet I keep seeing writings by TRA's that a girl who likes "boy" things is dysphoric, potentially meaning that she should take testosterone and cut off her breasts. Jesus! This is from the same types of people who, 15 and 20 years ago railed at cultures who practiced clitorectomies because it because it is so grotesque to massacre a healthy female body. The TRA's argue that even young teenagers (who are too young to vote or drive) should be granted total deference when social pressures are appearing to be the main thing convincing them to make permanent changes to their bodies that will likely result in sterility. That that is where we are . . .

And the fringe left has pushed its ideology so hard that we are now supposed to think that there is no difference between a woman and a transwoman. There is a clear factual difference, as Heying explains.

None of what I am writing suggests that transwomen aren't entitled to legally and socially present themselves as women in most situations (though I would make exceptions for women's shelters, prisons and sports participation). Transwomen are entitled to our respect. They are human beings every bit as much as the rest of us. Because they are fully human, we owe them the respect of disagreeing with them when their claims violate basic principles of biology.

Here's the beginning of the Twitter Thread:

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Kate Julian: Coddling is Causing the Dramatic Anxiety Spike We See in Children

Kate Julian has gathered the evidence and there is only one conclusion the draw.  That is why she has issued her earnest warning for parents: "What Happened to American Childhood?: Too many kids show worrying signs of fragility from a very young age. Here’s what we can do about it." Julian's article is the perfect sequel to a 2015 Atlantic article written by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff: "The Coddling of the American Mind: In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health."

I highly recommend a slow reading of her statistics and conclusions. As well-intentioned parents, we will need to do a lot of work to do in order to turn this around. Here are a few excerpts from Julian's article:

A study published in 2018, the most recent effort at such a tabulation, found that in just five years, anxiety-disorder diagnoses among young people had increased 17 percent. Children’s emergency-room visits for suicide attempts or suicidal ideation rose from 580,000 in 2007 to 1.1 million in 2015; 43 percent of those visits were by children younger than 11.

Accommodation has become a focus of anxiety research. We now know that about 95 percent of parents of anxious children engage in accommodation. We also know that higher degrees of accommodation are associated with more severe anxiety symptoms, more severe impairment, and worse treatment outcomes. These findings have potential implications even for children who are not (yet) clinically anxious: The everyday efforts we make to prevent kids’ distress—minimizing things that worry them or scare them, assisting with difficult tasks rather than letting them struggle—may not help them manage it in the long term. When my daughter is in tears because she hasn’t finished a school project that’s due the next morning, I sometimes stop her crying by coaching her through the rest of it. But when I do, she doesn’t learn to handle deadline jitters. When she asks me whether anyone in our family will die of COVID-19, an unequivocal “No, don’t worry” may reassure her now, but a longer, harder conversation about life’s uncertainties might do more to help her in the future

Despite more than a decade’s evidence that helicopter parenting is counterproductive, kids today are perhaps more overprotected, more leery of adulthood, more in need of therapy. To be very clear, this is not a cure-all for mental illness. What we need to recognize, though, is that our current approach to childhood doesn’t reduce basic human vulnerabilities. It exacerbates them."

Continue ReadingKate Julian: Coddling is Causing the Dramatic Anxiety Spike We See in Children