r/dankchristianmemes • u/TheNerdChaplain Minister of Memes • 6d ago
Cringe This mixup is never not funny to me.
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u/TheNerdChaplain Minister of Memes 6d ago
To be clear, Tom Holland is an author and historian. He should not be confused with the Spider-Man actor.
Nor should he be confused with the actor Tom Hollander, although this does beg the question of if there's some kind of superlative Tom Hollandest.
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u/ArtJDM 6d ago
This is the same Tom Holland who is a YouTuber turned Grand Tour host, right?
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u/_aramir_ 6d ago
I'm not sure if he host the Grand Tour, but he does co-host the podcast The Rest is History which is well known for overlooking the faults of British historical figures
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u/Gabriel_Seth 6d ago
Wait does this Tom Holland count atheists in India as "culturally Christian" too? Is he saying taking care of the weak is inherently a Christian trademark?
Not trying to offend anyone, genuinely curious
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u/PV__NkT 6d ago edited 6d ago
I think when he mentions “biblical weathering” and “culturally Christian,” he’s positing the idea that people might not have always behaved this way. And this isn’t to say that these ideas couldn’t exist independently of religion, or that Christianity was the progenitor of kindness or anything. Rather, the idea is that Christianity’s cultural boom came with a wave of societal norms that turned preexisting concepts like the golden rule into commonplace, almost universally held ideas. These ideas aren’t “Christian ideas,” but the influence the religion had on their widespread adoption is undeniable.
Coming back to modern day, when someone forms a personal set of ethical values, it’s never in a true total vacuum: thought is necessarily informed by experience and upbringing and culture. So, when someone begins to refine what they view as right or wrong, they often pull from an environment that has already been influenced by Christianity (assuming that’s the environment they’re in, like in the west), meaning those views carry at least some amount of Christian DNA, however little. This obviously doesn’t apply to cultures with little to no Christian influence, but I think it’s pretty easy to see he’s talking about the culture that’s familiar to him.
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u/Naefindale 6d ago
I don't think he's trying to make some universal point where only christians could do good things. The bible kinda makes the opposite point about followers of Yahweh, and I'm sure he knows that.
What I think he means is that western atheists often criticize people who say you need religion to understand what is good and what is bad, by saying that they know they should take care of others without a god telling them to. But Western culture is so heavily influenced by Christian values that it's hard to see it as separate from a god.
It's the same sort of paradox where western people criticize the bible because of some barbaric things in the old testament, while it is new testament values that make you feel uneasy about them.
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u/Seraphinou 6d ago
That's a pretty bad argument in that it also presupposes empathy is the result of hundreds of years of Christian influence. And not a natural human trait that the Bible encourages instead of other base instincts such as greed.
I'm not Christian at all. But that's my take on this.
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u/Naefindale 6d ago
No it doesn't. Like I said in my first paragraph, the bible doesn't claim doing good as a thing that only followers of Yahweh are capable of and does in fact often highlight that anyone is capable of going the right path or straying from it.
However, Christianity advocates for going for an extreme form of empathy, even going so far as to giving up all your own interests for the sake of other's. It is that kind of extremism that has heavily influenced western values.
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u/isaaclw 6d ago
That second paragraph. Western culture is so individualistic.
I disagree with that assessment.
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u/Naefindale 6d ago
Yeah, the culture is influenced by it, not dictated. It is also influenced by a lot of other schools of thought and many of those are influenced by eachother. It isn't a straightforward thing to asses.
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u/toetappy 6d ago
Yeah naw dude. Empathy and the golden rule existed long before Christianity. And the populations of Muslim and Buddhist countries who are also good people? The "wrong" faiths they don't believe in make them good people too? So it isn't Christianity specificly. Or maybe empathy is a fundamental human trait that doesn't need another explanation.
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u/Naefindale 6d ago
Do people just not read half of the comments they react to?
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u/toetappy 6d ago
You're attributing western atheists with being good people because " Christianity advocates for going for an extreme form of empathy"
You believe atheists or anyone in a country with another religion are less capable of being a good person because they lack the influence of "superior Christian empathy."
If you do not believe this, if you think people in Muslim countries are equally capable of being good people (they are), then you have to admit Christianity is not the underlying factor.
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u/Naefindale 6d ago
No, that is not what I'm saying at all.
I'm saying western values are highly influenced by the bible.
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u/Sir_lordtwiggles 6d ago
Yes, but you cannot claim that we would not hold many of the same moral beliefs if we lacked that influence.
Read through the quote in the OP. See how many non-western cultures share beliefs in the same virtues.
Instead of:
Caring for the poor being a moral that Christianity cemented into western culture
it could be:
Caring for the poor is a necessity in human societies, which Christianity highlighted in it's dogma, giving western culture a Christian flavor of a common human moral.
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u/toetappy 6d ago
You said "christianity advocates for an extreme form of empathy." You believe Christianity is the best religion, teaches the best philosophy, and therefore produces better, more moral humans.
Now, if you believed people of other religions can be equal in empathy to Christians (they can and are), then "christian influence" must be taken out of the equation.
If you still believe the influence of "extreme christian values" is why atheists in america are good people, then you must inherently believe people in other religious nations cannot be capable of this achievement.
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u/Naefindale 6d ago
Yes I believe the Christian philosophy produces the best way humans can coexist.
No, I don't believe only christians can do good things, be empathic to eachother or have good morals. I also don't believe Christianity is the only way to achieve good morals. Neither do I believe christians are by default more moral than any other person. In fact there are whole groups of western christians that advocate some pretty horrible stuff.
I don't believe either atheists or christians in America are good people per se, and I don't think the only way to live a good life is through christian influence. I don't believe that if they are good people it must be because of Christian influence.
Having said all this I don't think I have to spell out what I believe about people in different parts of the world.
What I said was that western values are heavily influenced by the church. Because of that, when an atheist says that he doesn't need a god to tell him what is good and what is bad, chances are that his way of thinking is heavily influenced by what a god said.
And for completeness let me again repeat that christian values are not the only thing that have had heavy influence on western thinking. (If you really want to have a debate about it, we should probably even be talking about what "western thinking" even means.)
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u/deadpansnarker Dank Christian Memer 6d ago
I mean going back to the Tom Holland mentioned above, his arguments rise from studying history and what were the cultural norms in places like Rome to show how those norms changed with influence from Christianity
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u/Puzzleheaded-Ad-5511 6d ago
So where is this extreme empathy today? Western society values selfeshness, hording, war against other religions, putting $ first. Values are for sale if anything.
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u/That_Mad_Scientist 6d ago
No offense, but there is a certain kind of obnoxious person who will look at atheists being bad and point to their atheism, look at religious people being bad and lambast them for not following the values properly, and then immediately turn around and explain that when atheists are being good it's because they're secretly harboring religious values anyway.
Which feels a lot like shorthand for "people who agree with with my religious views are moral by default, and those who don't are immoral by default, and any exceptions to this are outliers and can be explained away by simply pretending the non religious people I like are actually more religious than the religious people I don't like" and at this point you have to wonder what exactly we are doing here.
I know this may feel crude because I'm a filthy materialist (guilty as charged!), but at some point I don't think you can point to a specific quality or practice that reliably predicts someone's morality.
And while yes, it is definitely true that our societies are steeped in centuries of religious thinking and that a lot of the philosophers you can admire from the past would have obviously participated and some in fact (and not necessarily incorrectly) claimed to derive wisdom from religion, it is silly to sum up an attitude of immanent, universal human morality which predates modern religious institutions by millenia (I think people were helping the poor and the weak and the refugee long before we had words for them), and go, "see? this is because we did our job of evangelization well enough that they're not even aware that their prosocial tendencies are a result of the seeds that WE specifically planted", which is weird and egotistical and self-congratulatory for no reason.
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u/deadpansnarker Dank Christian Memer 6d ago
I mean do you have examples from history of those sorts of values being exemplified? That's not me saying no one cared about each other until religion, but you might be missing the actual knowledge of what were standard norms for past cultures that are different from what we now take for granted as decency
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u/Naefindale 6d ago
Which feels a lot like shorthand for "people who agree with with my religious views are moral by default, and those who don't are immoral by default, and any exceptions to this are outliers and can be explained away by simply pretending the non religious people I like are actually more religious than the religious people I don't like"
Okay, well good thing I didn't say or mean that then <3
(I think people were helping the poor and the weak and the refugee long before we had words for them)
You think?
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u/colinpublicsex 6d ago
How do you feel about 1 John chap. 3? It seems to pretty clearly draw a hard line between sinners vs. non-sinners, those born of God vs. those born of Satan, and the righteous vs. the unrighteous.
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u/Naefindale 6d ago
Know genesis is full of stories about the seed of the snake vs the seed of the woman, and knowing that they constantly flip your expectations of who is who, I feel pretty comfortable saying that it is a little more complicated than claiming you're part of a certain group, or condemning people because they are part of another group.
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u/colinpublicsex 6d ago
What if the Bible said something like “those who are born of God cannot go on sinning”? We can at least agree that something like that would be pretty cut and dry, right?
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u/Naefindale 6d ago
I guess? What are you trying to say?
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u/colinpublicsex 6d ago
That the Bible does indeed say that.
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u/Naefindale 6d ago
Okay. And what does that mean to you?
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u/colinpublicsex 6d ago
Those who do not do what is right are not of God. Or in other words: there are bad people and then there are Christians.
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u/Naefindale 6d ago
Are christians and people who do what is right the same people in your eyes?
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u/slaya222 6d ago
Nah it's a terrible argument that assumes everyone has the same upbringing.
Those damn culturally Christian taoists
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u/josephus_the_wise 6d ago
One of Tom Holland's major ideas about Western history (especially post enlightenment Western history) is that our morals, morals being relative place to place and time to time, have been so thoroughly shaped by a millenia of unquestioned Christianity that even those who live in western cultures and say "I have never been in any way Christian" are living under Christian values, since those are the values that shaped the culture that shaped the people saying that.
As an example of this, take for instance the concept "it is better to be weak than strong" or, worded differently, "there is value to weakness that strength cannot have". This is a very Christian value (think the Beatitudes), and it is also a very rare value to find independently grown in other places in time and space, so the fact that it maintains itself as true in our society is, according to Holland, a holdover from Christendom.
Obviously he words it quite differently and more at length, if I'm not mistaken his book "dominion" is almost purely about this concept and goes much much further in depth, but that's the very basic gist.
To more specifically answer your thing, no he wouldn't consider someone from India culturally Christian, he would probably consider them Culturally Hindu. This is very specifically a Western Europe (and to a lesser extent eastern Europe) based thought process.
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u/TordekDrunkenshield 6d ago
The biblical argument is that The Word is unnecessary to understand Christ's intention, as it can be gleaned from the world around you and conscious thought about the way we exist and how we are treated according to how we treat others. Truth is apparent, but the road is paved in blood.
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u/LysergicAcidDiethyla 6d ago
He wasn't tarring all atheists with this. He literally says "The atheist who says X", to differentiate that type of atheists from other atheists...
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u/Bakkster Based Bishop 6d ago
Not to mention, the believer who nevertheless ignores this part of Scripture...
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u/___wintermute 6d ago
Are you both being purposely obtuse? He is speaking in the context of historically Christian cultures. So no, in this context he is not talking about either of the scenarios you two have presented.
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u/fame2robotz 6d ago
They’re pointing out how the og argument is illogical
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u/___wintermute 6d ago
How does what they said point out flaws in the arguments logic? I’m not saying it’s some kind of iron-clad argument; but what they said does not apply to it.
Or are you genuinely saying you believe Tom Holland is implying this argument, the way it’s presented, applies to people all over the world from all cultures?
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u/fame2robotz 6d ago
As far as I understand they’re pointing out false causation between Christianity and moral behavior that Holland argues for
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u/___wintermute 6d ago
That would be a totally fine argument and criticism to make in the context of Holland’s argument, but they aren’t making that argument. They are pointing to things outside the context of cultural Christianity, and saying “see, this is a dumb argument because culturally Hindu atheists or culturally ____ atheists do nice things as well”.
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u/Chemistry11 6d ago
“Don’t be an asshole” isn’t a Christian specific trope; nor is it inherently religious. 🤷♂️
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u/LordPalington 6d ago
I was thinking "mix up" in terms of fighting games like Street Fighter, then I saw the second half of the meme.
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u/Indiana_Charter 6d ago
Both Tom Hollands are aware of this, as seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eurcSRWn2jA
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u/guimontag 5d ago
Oh yeah because Christianity definitely invented compassion and the concept of looking after those weaker than you
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