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Strong societies tend to require multiple ideologies to be successful.

For example, Imperial china had Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism which combined to give their society multiple modes of thinking for different situations. Without multiple modes of thinking, the flaws of one ideology end up hamstringing the civilization.

Christianity started in the Middle East and North Africa. It was the dominant religion throughout a large portion of the world at the time prior to the 9th century. The thing is, Christianity is a religion largely based around peace and understanding. Jesus's core message is about forgiving those who trespass against you. When Islam, created by a warlord, came in and started conquering, they had no choice but to submit and turn the other cheek, as Jesus commanded. By contrast, Western Europe combined Christianity with the warrior ethos of the Germanic tribes and remnants of the Roman imperial warrior ethos, and that combination of contradictory ideologies led to a society that had the capacity for tremendous good but also tremendous violence. That's why it continued to exist while North African Christianity was conquered. The softer side of Christianity needed to be tempered by the harder side of Germanic and Roman warrior culture.

A lot of people think that humans ought to be only good and reject evil, but reality is that we are built with the capacity for both good and evil because there are situations where to survive we must sometimes be good and sometimes be evil and the people without capacity for both tend to go extinct. If one cannot make war, then they will not be able to make peace.

In this sense, people claim the fruit of the tree of knowledge is forbidden and that's what got us kicked out of paradise, but it was in fact the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Of course eating that fruit would mean we get kicked out of paradise, because in that moment we'd understand we weren't always doing the right thing and sometimes we were doing evil to others and in the same way Adam and Eve realized they were naked and they tried to cover their nakedness, the natural state of things is sometimes evil and there's nothing that can be done about it. We will all need to be naked at some point in our lives, no matter how pious we are. Whether it's when we were born, when we're in the bathroom, while we are producing children, when we bathe, or something else we're always going to be naked at some point, to be imperfect is inevitable in a material world.

Many of the post-Christian ideologies in the postmodern world take on the characteristics of the new testament and lack not only a warrior element, but even the old testament brutal honesty about the nature of the world.

Having the post Christian ideologies wouldn't be a problem in and out of themselves if we still had other ideologies to balance them out, but part of those ideologies is working towards the extinction of all other ideologies, and as a result we are arguably already at the point of monoculture. The problem is that the monoculture lacks a lot of fundamental reality. The Old testament tells us that even a king who deviates from doing the right thing and then later repents will harm their children to the extent that they will no longer be the Kings of the promised land, contrast that with post Christian ideology which doesn't want anyone to be responsible for anything, and considers judging anyone to any standard to be deontologically evil.

This new value system cannot exist in a world where evil exists, and just as evil existed before Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, evil will continue to exist if you have an ideology that claims the only thing that is evil is to call out evil. It seems more or less inevitable that these new value systems that only consider judging others to be evil will eventually be overrun by something else that is if not objectively, then certainly subjectively evil.

I was watching a video recently, where they were claiming the demons in freiren weren't evil because they were just following their nature to deceive and kill. I think that this is a good example of that absurd postmodern ideology in action. If someone's sole motivation is to lie to you in order to kill you, then of course at least to you that person is evil. Just as evil existed before Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, the fact that the demons don't realize what they're doing is evil doesn't make them not evil. It means that they are unthinkingly evil, committing reprehensible Acts without either knowledge or care of whether those acts are evil or not.

Such an ideology can only exist in a Time that is quickly fading, a Time of unprecedented World Peace. And as such ideologies allow for evil to fester and grow, eventually there will need to be a reckoning, and either postmodernists are forced to change their ideology to account for the fact that there's evil without just being misunderstandings, or they will become extinct.

There is a contradiction in my way of thinking here, because the the necessity of the objective reality of the existence of evil stands against the subjectivity of evil which is also undeniable. A rock smashing against another rock so far away from any inhabited planet that no life of any kind could ever be affected likely has no moral component of good or evil, and what is good and what is evil may be quite different between different species -- In The Graysonian Ethic I imagine a sentient black widow spider and how its values may be different than a human in ways we can't imagine. It's a paradox that exists but I don't think can be easily reconciled because objectively evil does exist, regardless of the specific subjective standard being used to measure it, and to ignore that fact will mean reality chooses to destroy you showing that it is real and objective, despite its subjective measurement and nature.

Part of the inherent contradictions in the universe are between the fact that the world is better if we can work together and be social as human beings, but the inherent dangers of being social. For this reason there is a legitimate argument to be made that we ought to try to allow people in because it makes our lives much better having good people in our lives, but there's an equally legitimate argument to be made is that we ought to protect ourselves from others because they can try to harm us to make their lives better. The reconciliation of this contradiction lies in the previous contradiction, the objective reality that you must have subjective standards and they exist and matter regardless of you realize it or not.

@sj_zero The turn the other cheek command was perfectly reasonable when Jesus was preaching to a small group of wandering evangelists. Getting into a fight would have no upside for them.

Once Christianity had a civilization to preserve, it had to adopt tit-for-tat ethics like everyone else.

New Age-ism is back to the turn the other cheek mentality. It never ceases to amaze me that the far-Left hates Christianity for being anti-women and racist, but loves Islamism which is 10X worse on both.

@sj_zero Another way to look at it is, if you are totally pacifist, eventually an evil neighbor takes you over.

If you are totally warlike, eventually all your neighbors get their fill and gang up on you.

The surviving civilizations have to be somewhere in between. Where exactly depends on how vulnerable they are to attack.

The USA had the chance to be pretty far on the benevolent side. Too bad it got taken over by warmongers.

Christianity only weakens societies

Yes, in terms of being brutal and having everyone team up on you, the Assyrians are an early example. They were brutal, leaving behind for example a stone carving showing them forcing a father from a conquered people to grind the bones of his wife and child. Exactly what you say happened, and the rest of Mesopotamia ganged up on the Assyrians. As I recall they were by far the post powerful in the region but it didn't matter -- they were a risk that could not be left alone for anyone else.

I think that the same sort of dichotomy exists not just within Nation states, but within individuals. You have to find a balance between being charitable and giving him good to those around you, and not getting walked all over by those around you. In today's culture, we often point out that not every poor person deserves to be where they are in life, but it is equally true that many poor people do deserve to be where they are in life, and while the former type of poor person maybe elevated by helping them out a little bit with some resources at a critical time, the latter will take virtually unlimited resources and squander them and ask why you haven't given them more yet.

In this case I've set out two examples, one where a person is poor completely outside of their control, and another person who would be poor completely inside of their control no matter how many resources they are given, but of course the world isn't that black and white most of the time and most people live somewhere in between, sharing authorship themselves with the world as to their own fate.

But as I said before, that's where most people do need different ideologies that work in different ways to help people look at things from different points of view. Most single ideologies even if they paid lip service to multiple viewpoints will ultimately pick one or the other as primary, for the benefit of having multiple ideologies with multiple standpoints is that each one can be built from the ground up to be internally consistent.
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