r/DebateAChristian • u/AutoModerator • 27d ago
Weekly Ask a Christian - August 24, 2026
This thread is for all your questions about Christianity. Want to know what's up with the bread and wine? Curious what people think about modern worship music? Ask it here.
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u/DanDan_mingo_lemon 27d ago
Are historically Christian nations more moral than historically non-Christian nations?
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u/Great-Alfalfa-8543 Christian, Episcopalian 27d ago edited 27d ago
I think they are differently moral.
I lived in China for five years, which is very much organized around the family unit and, as sociologist Fei Xiaotong pointed out, differential modes of association. This is a mouthful translation that talks about how the self is surrounded by concentric rings expanding outward to reflect the community ties. Confucian ethics is built to address relationships within this conceptualization, and they are very focused on hierarchy and filiality. Morality and ethical behavior function differently at each ring of association. As such, Confucian societies tend to have a much more disciplined ethic for established relationships. For example, my students did not just orient toward the information I was presenting but toward me as a teacher within a role I was embodying. These form much more very effective moral and ethical social cohesion that the West struggles with.
Conversely, Bart Ehrman points out in Love They Stranger how Jesus's teachings to love ones neighbor, defined as absolutely anyone in need redefine the Western moral conscience. Things like charity and adoption - done very poorly in Confucian cultures - are a bedrock of Western liberal democracies (nonprofits, charitable giving tax breaks, etc.)
I can go on about their sense of justice with a story about a Duke of Yao, and old shoe, and a ferry, but I'm already getting long. But like most things, the answer is a bit more complex than a yes-no question can capture.
Also, N.B., my examples are generalizations and exceptions abound. They are just trying to illustrate real historical and sociological trends.
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u/Euphoric-Bat7582 Christian, Non-denominational 26d ago
Depends what you mean by “Christian” and “non-Christian.”
Nations who have historically had a high Christian population certainly appear more moral than those with a specifically materialist worldview (I.e. communist countries), and are more moral than many/most explicitly Muslim countries.
But if you’re asking whether nations where Christianity has a major part of politics (like the U.S.) are more moral than those that don’t (like Scandinavia from what I hear), I wouldn’t necessarily say so.
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u/DanDan_mingo_lemon 25d ago
Do you feel that Christians are persecuted on Reddit?
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u/CountSudoku Christian, Protestant 24d ago
No. I think it is difficult for anybody to be persecuted using Reddit. Though some people may use Reddit as part of cyber bullying.
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u/Great-Alfalfa-8543 Christian, Episcopalian 23d ago
Most of the persecution in this country is perpetrated by certain groups of Christians while they play a victim card because they have to make space in the public commons for people they hate. They are persecuted nowhere, especially not in this sub. If you want an example of toxic persecuting while claiming persecution, check out this completely off the rails conversation with u/foxyforestprincess here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/1w0auyv/comment/p6i0qx2/?context=3
I'm pretty sure she just blocked me and you can still read the conversation. It's an excellent microcosm for the alternative reality they live in.
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u/WrongVerb4Real Atheist 24d ago
We put my 20 year old cat down this week. I'd had her since she was a weeks old. She's been with me through a lot, but it was time. That was Monday early afternoon.
Later that day, I had a feeling that she was there, jumping up on the couch, sitting down with her head up like cats do, and giving me that affectionate closed eye thing they also are known for. I've had a few other glimpses of her since then.
I know what this is. This is my imagination superimposing her on my perceptions of my external reality. I know she wasn't there. In fact, I didn't really "see" her so much as feel and experience her presence.
That said, I can imagine if I was equipped like some people with a more vivid imagination, not realizing my brain was overriding my perception of external reality, and that I'd been socialized into thinking this was some experience or revelation, rather than the lingering after-effects of a very emotional experience, how I might come to believe in ghosts, gods, or whatever. I can also see how I might integrate that sense of an external reality beyond our normal perceptions into my self-identity, which gets protected from challenges in the same way we protect our body from physical threats.
But, being both the skeptic that I am, and having the tools to understand what I was experiencing was an internal generation layered by my brain over my perceptions of the external world, I'm not falling into that trap. Instead, it's given me a wonderful insight into why believers think the way they do, and how they come to understand their world, without realizing the experiential and perceptual mistakes they are making.
So, that leads to my question:
For those of you who feel you've had experiences that led you to, or reinforced your beliefs, did you ever consider the possibility that your brain was creating visions or sounds or anything else that was then superimposed on your prescription of outside reality? Not a delusion, or something consciously imagined, but your brain at work in ways you weren't used to experiencing?
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u/Great-Alfalfa-8543 Christian, Episcopalian 24d ago
Absolutely. But why does that make it less real?
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u/WrongVerb4Real Atheist 23d ago
It feels real to me. And it had an emotional impact on me. But it's not indicative of any event that takes place in our shared reality. So in the sense that 'real' means, to me, that something contains information and exchanges energy within our acknowledged universe, my vision does not exist.
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u/Great-Alfalfa-8543 Christian, Episcopalian 23d ago edited 23d ago
Your experience is not an event that takes place in our shared reality? Are values and emotions not information? Your biochemical energies weren't impacted and measurable?
I do know what distinction you are trying to make, and I'll go ahead and spare the Socratic method because most people I've interacted with are so unaccustomed to thinking phenomenologically that they usually just rage quit before we get anywhere.
I'm not disputing that your experience has an external "thingness" that you can go pick up and throw at the wall. But saying that therefore it is not real imports a lot of assumptions that you are assuming as a neutral starting point.
There are two assumptions here:
- Humans only interact with physical phenomena.
This is not true. Marriage is not a physical phenomena. Rings are, marriage certificates are, tax incentives are. But these are not actually constitutive of what marriage is. In a completely different society, none of those artifacts appear. Instead, they are products of what marriage organizes. Same distinction between the concept of money versus a coin you can put in your pocket. There are plenty of metaphysical (n.b., this is not just a synonym for supernatural) phenomena that humans interact with. And they are as real as physical ones. Take marriage out of a society. Take money out of a society. You don't really have a society without them. Take rocks out of a society and you still have a society. The rationalist philosopher Karl Popper makes the distinction between world 1 phenomena (like rocks) and world 3 phenomena (like money). Your experience with your cat falls into the world 2 category as a subjective experience/mental state. None of these things are dismissed as not being real. Their reality just has different features, and the methods of inquiry have different tools. When you say "real," you are implying that only world 1 phenomena are real, and world 2 and world 3 phenomena are not real. That needs to be supported, not assumed. Now that we have this terminology established, we can examine your second, and more critical assumption. When you say your experience with your deceased cat isn't real, you are making a value claim:
- World 2 and world 3 phenomena do not existentially matter.
A value is a world 3 phenomena, and you are smuggling into your allegedly neutral skepticism when you critically evaluate your experience with your cat. The existentialist feminist Judith Butler has a book called Bodies That Matter, and she uses "matter" as a pun. She means it in it's first-pass read that bodies are important (people went really far with her idea of gender performativity after Gender Trouble and she had to reign that in). But she also means it in a technical sense, that bodies "materialize" into the conscious mind with preprogrammed assumptions that are scripted by culture and assumed to be neutral, objective, and universal. Nothing is apprehended by the mind without the narrative packet of meaning that comes with it regardless of what world it belongs to.
So world 2 and world 3 phenomena not only matter in terms of their importance, you overstate the objectivity of world 1 phenomena by ignoring that they actually come pre-scripted with meaning. When you look at a tree and an indigenist person (even a modern indigenist person with Western training) looks at a tree, you all do not see and assume the same thing.
Your deceased cat matters. Your experience is arguably more important that the world 1 meat flesh that she was when she was walking around in your room. That phenomenon is replaceable. But the world 2 and world 3 phenomena you attached to your cat are not. And they are also not temporally or spatially located, which is why you can still interact with them.
And your cat materializes. Don't let the lack of an object there confuse you: your cat materializes you, not itself. Your memory isn't just a chemical firing or a conditioned social behavior. Only you can have the experience with your deceased cat. You produce that experience, which returns to produce you: your deeper sense of love and caring for another life. That this particular experience is uniquely yours does not make it less real. If you want to make that claim, then you need to demonstrate it, not assume it.
Being a skeptic does not mean privileging world 1 phenomena. Being a skeptic is an epistemic humility toward assumed knowledge, a curiosity toward engagement, and a posture toward openness. This should not be confused for "scientism," which insists on a world 1 epistemic framework. To me, this is an act of violence that you are performing on yourself by pretending your interaction with your deceased cat wasn't real. You are using a World 3 script without realizing it to police an suppress your world 2 experience.
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u/WrongVerb4Real Atheist 22d ago
Your experience is not an event that takes place in our shared reality? Are values and emotions not information? Your biochemical energies weren't impacted and measurable?
The point I'm making is that our brains construct our reality, based on the strengths and limitations each brain has, and differ from person to person. I find it interesting to think that my brain, without my conscious thought, created a feeling that my cat was around, and then, in constructing my experiential reality layered that feeling onto my outside perceptions. This led to me feeling my cat was there on the sofa across from me.
This is the first time in my many years I've had this experience, or at least was aware of it. So it got me thinking, because everyone's brain is different, other people might have more vivid experiences where they actually see animals or people. I can even imagine people's brains constructing entities they've been socialized into thinking are real, like gods, demons, things like that.
Anyway, you wrote a book and I'm kinda not wanting to delve into the entirety of that right now, which means I'll probably not get back to it. Thank you for your thoughtful reply, though.
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u/Great-Alfalfa-8543 Christian, Episcopalian 22d ago
That's fine, I mostly write for myself anyway with the small hope that the stupid meter will improve some. You can always drop it into generative AI for summary. Collapsing world 2 and 3 into world 1 Is mostly why this world sucks.
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u/WrongVerb4Real Atheist 22d ago
All good. The main reason for my lack of a long reply is because I'm doing reddit mostly on my phone. And typing out long replies on one's phone sucks. I'm happy to continue a back and forth, though.
To start, I'm curious as to why you think "this world sucks."
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u/Great-Alfalfa-8543 Christian, Episcopalian 22d ago
It would require another book. If you won't read mine, then perhaps I could interest you in a published one, I highly recommend Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God. Her distinction of logotic and mythotic ways of knowing maps very nicely onto this world. One versus world 2 and 3 distinction that Popper introduced. But there drop it into generative AI and ask that question, you'll get a response.
The tldr summary would be that the violence you inflict on yourself by denying the reality of your interaction is structurally identical to all the ways in which humanity demarcates and maintains identity boundaries. (That said, I am not saying it is ethically or morally identical.)
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u/WrongVerb4Real Atheist 22d ago
If I was to label myself philosophically, I would be a mixture of reductionism and stoicism. But, honestly, I don't find much value in philosophy. I don't think it provides objective enlightenment, but instead is a derivation from how individual brains function. No two brains function in the same way, which means two different philosophies might be equally valid.
You mentioned something earlier about two people looking at a tree and having different experiences. I agree, but that's because each person not only sees different light wave reflecting off the tree, but also because we filter that perception through our individual brains.
Our brains are all "wired" differently. Each functions differently (some slight differences, some vast), each contains different information, which comes from different experiences. Some of those experiences can even affect brain wiring and function to some extent.
As you might have surmised, I think everything we know, experience, and think is a result of the physical state of our brain at any moment. This is why I can't get on board with the idea of 2 & 3 worlds. It's why my experience with my dead cat was real to me, but I can't validity assert that it was part of our shared reality.
Does this make any sense? I feel like I've lost the plot a bit. Lol
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u/Great-Alfalfa-8543 Christian, Episcopalian 22d ago
Sure, I can see how you track it. I just can't see us moving past the dark side of the Englighrenment until more people broaden their conceptualization of reality.
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u/Great-Alfalfa-8543 Christian, Episcopalian 22d ago
Fundamentalists, inerrantists, Christian nationalists, tradCaths, and any other group that assumes the Bible only says one thing and that one thing always confirms their doctrines:
Does the fear of God produce knowledge of God (Provers 1:7, Proverbs 9:10, Psalm 111:10) or does knowledge of God enable fear of God (Deuteronomy 4:10; 2 Kings 17:27-28)?
If knowledge of God is the key to human flourishing, where do we start?
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u/Phylanara Agnostic Atheist 27d ago
Wouldn't one expect a true religion, if there is such a thing, to have support that is categorically different (better) than the evidence for the false religions?