If the disability stuff is as reported* then obviously it needs to be stopped-- but without using that as an excuse to shut down disability benefits wholesale-- and yes, there is chatter about that these days.
* I am not accusing Aaron himself of any dubious reporting, but outrage tales are prone to exaggeration, or even confection from whole cloth. A certain (not invinceable!) skepticism is in order.
On "negative world" I (a church goer-- often twice a week) have yet to run into anything particularly negative other than online trollery which abounds on every topic under the sun. Some people do regard me as a bit of an eccentric for my church habits, but in a acceptable way, like someone with six cats or a passion for collecting My Little Pony memorabilia.
Re: Yarvin “seems to know his way around a curry house,” suggesting a high level of personal comfort with diversity.
Meh. Appreciating ethnic cuisines (especially in the UK with its notoriously bland native English gastronomy) is no real bar to nativist sentiment, and even outright xenophobia.
Re: This piece arguing against the use of profanity is very in line with my call to reject vice.
Well, nasty language has a place and a purpose, else it would not have evolved in every known human language. But IMO, such words should be kept for spoken language only, and reserved for serious occasions. Hitting your thumb with a hammer- sure. Having a parking place taken by someone else before you can get to it, no, not such an occasion. Ordinary speech shouldn't be peppered with F bombs, though I am OK with using the "s" word for its literal meaning (e.g., "I just stepped in dog s***") since I dislike wordy Greek and Latinate euphemisms when we have a perfectly good Anglosaxon word at hand). But such terms should almost never be used in writing, except when quoting the speech of others. There are clever ways to get the point across in polite company without using the bare words: "Taurine byproduct" for "bulls***" is one of mine.
>I find it interesting that it is disproportionately women raised Catholic who are interested in this kind of thing.
Seeing as how this is a story from the UK, I'm wondering if there's something specific to Roman Catholicism here, or if the real story is that witchcraft appeals more to apostates than the never-religious, and Roman Catholicism is supplying apostates while the CoE is not because England's post-Protestant population barely grew up with religion in the first place.
One of my recurring observations is that established Protestant churches are the most degenerate form of church polity. My current thesis is that Protestantism requires a spirit of Semper Reformanda in order to function, and Semper Reformanda can't operate in the context of an established church. RCC and EO rely on inertia rather than Semper Reformanda to refrain from declining into total degeneracy, so they outperformed Protestantism in post-WW2 Europe. See, for example, the Netherlands becoming in practice more Catholic than Protestant in the late 20th.
If "Catholic inertia" really insulated Catholic societies from moral collapse Europe would look a lot different. For example Portugal wouldn’t look like it does. On the hard numbers, Portugal’s crude divorce rate sits at about 1.6 per 1,000 people in 2023, after 1.8 in 2022. England and Wales in 2023 roughly 1.69 per 1,000. The Netherlands was about 1.36 per 1,000 in 2023. None of this suggests Catholic societies are uniquely buffered; these are all in the same ballpark.
On the temperament point: I do think ex-Catholics often carry a bitterness you don’t see as much in ex-Anglicans. Formation matters; if you’re raised inside an experientially oppressive moral world, the later rejection can feel like it must be a visceral break, with a total denial. By contrast a lot of floaty Anglicans were barely catechised, so there’s less heat in the exit. Ex-Scottish Presbyterians often turn militantly secular; that looks like recoil from their experience of austerity and discipline rather than boredom with a thin nominal church.
For what it’s worth, I'm an English Presbyterian whose whole denomination disappeared into the URC not because it was established, but because it stopped believing anything worth guarding. That, to me, is the real lesson of the 20th C. It's not really Catholic versus Protestant or established versus free; it's something real versus mushy words. Where the ordinary means of grace (preaching, sacraments, etc) and discipline are kept, a church endures; where they are abandoned, it drifts, whatever the label.
I appreciate the perspective from England. I'm curious about and have tried to piece together the situation for European Protestantism for years, but I've spent a grand total of about 2 weeks of my life in Europe over the years, so I admit I engage in a lot more theorizing than on-the-ground observing.
>If "Catholic inertia" really insulated Catholic societies from moral collapse Europe would look a lot different.
My point isn't that RCC/EO are immune to drift, but their main tool to avoid drift is inertia, which they are much better at than we Protestants due to their very old and slow-moving institutions. The chief problem with them that I see, as a Protestant, is they are not very good at purging errors. They are stuck with certain extrabiblical and probably late Marian teachings as core dogma forever now.
When Protestantism is determined to fight and purge errors, using Scripture as its ultimate guide (even if supported by traditions or historic confessions), it generally remains faithful. When it doesn't do this, it declines into irrelevance. There is more than one way for a church to fail here -- your church seems to resemble the path of our Mainline churches -- but established churches appear to have ALWAYS failed in this regard.
In much of the postwar era, especially pre-Vatican II but even to some degree afterwards, the RCC's inertia seemed to be holding up better than a mainstream Protestantism that was completely reluctant to purge errors, on both sides of the Atlantic. But as the 21st century has progressed, the Roman Catholic regions seem to be converging towards Protestant ones.
But also, for various reasons, the US has a much more potent faithful Protestant community than in Europe. As far as I can tell there's more than one reason for this, but I think the bottom line is that Europe's established churches sucked a lot of oxygen out of the room, and so the community of faithful churches never had the same self-sustaining competitive energy as in the US.
>By contrast a lot of floaty Anglicans were barely catechised, so there’s less heat in the exit.
This makes sense and comes across to me as another way of phrasing my basic point -- the "floaty" Anglican apostate can barely be called an apostate, and the apostasy isn't nearly as personally meaningful to him as it is to the RCC apostate.
I don't think that's it. Rather I would say it's tradition-- both churches have very deep roots, and they do not owe their existence to some notion that they were restoring some pristine (but rather mythical) "perfect" Christianity. Protestantism, whether of the Magisterial or later sort, got its start by dumping overboard a whole lot of beliefs and practices that had been solidly established. Hence the tendency to think "Hey, maybe the higher ups are wrong" is present at the outset.
That seems right, but the contrast would be a lot stronger if the main historical religious tradition in England were Baptist instead of the highly liturgical CoE.
If the disability stuff is as reported* then obviously it needs to be stopped-- but without using that as an excuse to shut down disability benefits wholesale-- and yes, there is chatter about that these days.
* I am not accusing Aaron himself of any dubious reporting, but outrage tales are prone to exaggeration, or even confection from whole cloth. A certain (not invinceable!) skepticism is in order.
On "negative world" I (a church goer-- often twice a week) have yet to run into anything particularly negative other than online trollery which abounds on every topic under the sun. Some people do regard me as a bit of an eccentric for my church habits, but in a acceptable way, like someone with six cats or a passion for collecting My Little Pony memorabilia.
Re: Yarvin “seems to know his way around a curry house,” suggesting a high level of personal comfort with diversity.
Meh. Appreciating ethnic cuisines (especially in the UK with its notoriously bland native English gastronomy) is no real bar to nativist sentiment, and even outright xenophobia.
Re: This piece arguing against the use of profanity is very in line with my call to reject vice.
Well, nasty language has a place and a purpose, else it would not have evolved in every known human language. But IMO, such words should be kept for spoken language only, and reserved for serious occasions. Hitting your thumb with a hammer- sure. Having a parking place taken by someone else before you can get to it, no, not such an occasion. Ordinary speech shouldn't be peppered with F bombs, though I am OK with using the "s" word for its literal meaning (e.g., "I just stepped in dog s***") since I dislike wordy Greek and Latinate euphemisms when we have a perfectly good Anglosaxon word at hand). But such terms should almost never be used in writing, except when quoting the speech of others. There are clever ways to get the point across in polite company without using the bare words: "Taurine byproduct" for "bulls***" is one of mine.
>I find it interesting that it is disproportionately women raised Catholic who are interested in this kind of thing.
Seeing as how this is a story from the UK, I'm wondering if there's something specific to Roman Catholicism here, or if the real story is that witchcraft appeals more to apostates than the never-religious, and Roman Catholicism is supplying apostates while the CoE is not because England's post-Protestant population barely grew up with religion in the first place.
One of my recurring observations is that established Protestant churches are the most degenerate form of church polity. My current thesis is that Protestantism requires a spirit of Semper Reformanda in order to function, and Semper Reformanda can't operate in the context of an established church. RCC and EO rely on inertia rather than Semper Reformanda to refrain from declining into total degeneracy, so they outperformed Protestantism in post-WW2 Europe. See, for example, the Netherlands becoming in practice more Catholic than Protestant in the late 20th.
If "Catholic inertia" really insulated Catholic societies from moral collapse Europe would look a lot different. For example Portugal wouldn’t look like it does. On the hard numbers, Portugal’s crude divorce rate sits at about 1.6 per 1,000 people in 2023, after 1.8 in 2022. England and Wales in 2023 roughly 1.69 per 1,000. The Netherlands was about 1.36 per 1,000 in 2023. None of this suggests Catholic societies are uniquely buffered; these are all in the same ballpark.
On the temperament point: I do think ex-Catholics often carry a bitterness you don’t see as much in ex-Anglicans. Formation matters; if you’re raised inside an experientially oppressive moral world, the later rejection can feel like it must be a visceral break, with a total denial. By contrast a lot of floaty Anglicans were barely catechised, so there’s less heat in the exit. Ex-Scottish Presbyterians often turn militantly secular; that looks like recoil from their experience of austerity and discipline rather than boredom with a thin nominal church.
For what it’s worth, I'm an English Presbyterian whose whole denomination disappeared into the URC not because it was established, but because it stopped believing anything worth guarding. That, to me, is the real lesson of the 20th C. It's not really Catholic versus Protestant or established versus free; it's something real versus mushy words. Where the ordinary means of grace (preaching, sacraments, etc) and discipline are kept, a church endures; where they are abandoned, it drifts, whatever the label.
I appreciate the perspective from England. I'm curious about and have tried to piece together the situation for European Protestantism for years, but I've spent a grand total of about 2 weeks of my life in Europe over the years, so I admit I engage in a lot more theorizing than on-the-ground observing.
>If "Catholic inertia" really insulated Catholic societies from moral collapse Europe would look a lot different.
My point isn't that RCC/EO are immune to drift, but their main tool to avoid drift is inertia, which they are much better at than we Protestants due to their very old and slow-moving institutions. The chief problem with them that I see, as a Protestant, is they are not very good at purging errors. They are stuck with certain extrabiblical and probably late Marian teachings as core dogma forever now.
When Protestantism is determined to fight and purge errors, using Scripture as its ultimate guide (even if supported by traditions or historic confessions), it generally remains faithful. When it doesn't do this, it declines into irrelevance. There is more than one way for a church to fail here -- your church seems to resemble the path of our Mainline churches -- but established churches appear to have ALWAYS failed in this regard.
In much of the postwar era, especially pre-Vatican II but even to some degree afterwards, the RCC's inertia seemed to be holding up better than a mainstream Protestantism that was completely reluctant to purge errors, on both sides of the Atlantic. But as the 21st century has progressed, the Roman Catholic regions seem to be converging towards Protestant ones.
But also, for various reasons, the US has a much more potent faithful Protestant community than in Europe. As far as I can tell there's more than one reason for this, but I think the bottom line is that Europe's established churches sucked a lot of oxygen out of the room, and so the community of faithful churches never had the same self-sustaining competitive energy as in the US.
>By contrast a lot of floaty Anglicans were barely catechised, so there’s less heat in the exit.
This makes sense and comes across to me as another way of phrasing my basic point -- the "floaty" Anglican apostate can barely be called an apostate, and the apostasy isn't nearly as personally meaningful to him as it is to the RCC apostate.
Re: their main tool to avoid drift is inertia
I don't think that's it. Rather I would say it's tradition-- both churches have very deep roots, and they do not owe their existence to some notion that they were restoring some pristine (but rather mythical) "perfect" Christianity. Protestantism, whether of the Magisterial or later sort, got its start by dumping overboard a whole lot of beliefs and practices that had been solidly established. Hence the tendency to think "Hey, maybe the higher ups are wrong" is present at the outset.
Goth aethestics take heavy inspiration from Catholic aethetics (goths even wear the cross), so it was an easy change.
That seems right, but the contrast would be a lot stronger if the main historical religious tradition in England were Baptist instead of the highly liturgical CoE.