Resolutions

Last Saturday Bret Weinstein asked a question. He asked this question in good faith, because that is how Weinstein asks questions, but people who don't know Weinstein attacked him.

Some of history’s darkest chapters involved brutal coercion of people because they didn’t accept that “Jesus is the son of God”. Assuming Christians have outgrown that inclination, they’d be wise to quit broadcasting this exclusionary claim. Seems obvious. What am I missing?

One such attacker was NN Taleb: who is a jerk, whom I don't follow.

Another jerk, whom I do follow, is Theodore Beale. This one issued a series of responses in a short post. To whit: that what Weinstein is missing is, flatly, that Jesus is the Son of God. That "Judaeo-Christianity" is a lie (this is a strawman which knockdown, anyway, Weinstein himself might accept). That the whole "Intellectual Dark Web" of liberal free-thought intellectuals is, also, a lie.

Nobody brought this up in that "Vox Populi" blog's commentary yet, and they won't, because Beale is a jealous Deus who brooketh no Vox but his own. But for what it is worth, Weinstein has returned to his original post and explained things.

I would love to own the assurance that Jesus is, in fact, the hypostatic Word Of Our Lord. But I don't have this assurance, so I daren't argue for it here. Except to work around the edges: that Neolithic and post-Neolithic peoples share a dying-and-resurrected god as their central myth. That as a civilisation we might even need this myth, as Rene Girard has argued (and as his cultists in Michigan State keep publishing). I am further approaching the notion that Jesus, crucified under Pilate, is the most-viable such candidate. But I've never been impressed with bald statements that assume the proposition we're aiming to agree upon.

Weinstein also brings up, to his credit, not the Jewish experience with Christianity, but the Bolivian experience. This isn't even the "indigenous" experience. The Mesoamericans especially around Mexico City had a more nuanced experience with the Church; the Church has a case that they freed the people both from the tyranny of the Aztecs and from that of the Spaniards. And by now most non-Maya Mesoamericans are mixed-race anyway. But there are some First Nations whose interface with the Church was more brutal. And then there's the Japanese experience which was just to ban it (which is it, Teddy? is the Gospel just for Native Americans or is it for Asians too?).

This is, I think, why the Right needs to listen to honest liberals.

And the way to listen is not to blurt out debatable axioms of our own, nor to state comments irrelevant to the original post, nor to insult the liberals.