A Talk With Dawk
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FS: There’s a book by Tom Holland called Dominion, which has been very influential in suggesting that a lot of what we consider to be secular Western ways of thinking on morality is still drenched in Christian thinking. So perhaps, although people aren’t describing themselves as religious in the census, they’ve just moved those religious intuitions into other realms?
RD: Yes, I think that’s very likely true. You can make a good religious case for the trans debate. I make an analogy with the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby the wine in the Aristotelian accidentals remains wine but, in its true substance, becomes blood. Similarly, the trans person: he has a penis, but that’s a mere accidental, and in true substance he’s a woman. I mean, that’s a perfect analogy to transubstantiation. It even begins with the same prefix.
FS: So which is better, then? We’ve gone through this whole process, we’ve had a whole generation who’ve now been brought up reading your books, and Christopher Hitchens, who are now ardent and proud atheists, and then they end up believing things like you just described. And that has all sorts of societal repercussions. Should we now look back on the New Atheist movement with regret?
RD: No, I don’t get that at all. It’s just an interesting analogy to point out that there is a strong religious element to a current political fad. So what?
FS: The question is: empirically speaking, between conventional religion and what appears to be its successor ideology, which will be proven by history to be better for the flourishing of the species? Early signs are that this new kind of religion, which thinks it’s secular, has some major problems.
RD: Well, if you care about the flourishing of the species, yes, but I care about truth.
FS: So you don’t care about the flourishing of the species?
RD: Well I do care about it as a human being, but more deeply I care about truth.
FS: And if your sense of truth would lead to the annihilation of the species, would you be content with that?
RD: No I would not be content with that. But I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t happen. I think that truth actually is a genuine value. I believe that a true scientific outlook on the world would actually be best for the flourishing of humankind.
After one develops a fuller understanding of our Darwinian mind, and its incompatibility and indeed contempt for truth, when truth conflicts with some other basic motivations, such as mobbing up with our tribes and defeating our disgusting, other-ized, subhman enemies, one develops a better appreciation for Christianity and its teachings. It's a good fit for our deeply flawed psyches. Our secular nonsense going on these days, not so much. But as the interviewer notes, it does come down to whether you care more about truth, or the flourishing of the species.
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Considering most of the least truthful ideas of the left originated and are supported within academia, I would submit that our new priests are our academics, specifically the progressive ones, which is almost all of them, at least in the humanities. The respect we've always paid to top-tier educated people, is perfectly analogous to the respect religious people have for their clergy. Clergy are bound by the books they teach from, but our new priests are bound by fuck all, other than the leftist proto-marxist whims of the day. And our new priests are neither legitimately intelligent, nor legitimately educated. They are what has floated up in the muck of low academic standards, and adolescent politics that they never grow out of.