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Will_Newsome comments on Modest Superintelligences - Less Wrong
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That would take way too long to really explain; but the short version is, they have very good theology, very good philosophy, good traditions, good hermeneutics, very good architecture, very good spiritual practices, they're very widely accessible, and they have an absurdly good historical track record when it comes to doing good for humanity.
I'm upvoting you, because I think it's very bad practice when people get downvoted for answering honestly, clearly and politely a question they were directly asked.
Even if other people think said answer wrong.
I'd be very interested in a post on the subject, whether or not it was "the sort of thing" we're supposed to post about, if you'd like to write it sometime.
I don't have a deep enough understanding. I'm okay with talking semi-nonsense in the comments, but posts give me an air of authority that I don't deserve.
Well, I'm happy to hear nonsense in comment or PM as well. (No implied obligation if you wouldn't find typing it fun, obviously.)
The Inquisition and Crusades would seem to indicate otherwise.
Most of what you've heard about them is likely Protestant propaganda far removed from the truth.
You exaggerate slightly, but if anyone with more than a passing familiarity with the history of the Middle Ages were offered the choice between being tried by a civil court or an ecclesiastical court, then they would choose the later without hesitation.
Also, of particular interest to Less Wrongers, the manuals created by Church lawyers for use by Inquisitors are important to the later development of probability theory. They included such topics as how to calculate "grades of evidence" (which can be contrasted with the "proof" or "no proof" methods of earlier Roman law) and even how much to discount witness testimony (taking into account not only whether the witness saw a particular act directly or only heard it happen from a room away, but whether the witness had a grudge against the defendant or other motives for wanting them punished unjustly).
Who knows, perhaps people like Alicorn who "don't think in numbers" would be better served by using a (pre-Pascal) probability theory like the one the Inquisitors made use of that included rigorously defined verbal probabilities such as suspicion, presumption, indication, support, vehement support, and conjecture instead of floating point numbers.
You may want to tell my ancestors in the Rhineland killed during the First Crusade that. I'm not coming from a Protestant perspective. Anyone with passing familiarity with the history of Jews in the Middle Ages knows that pogroms and blood libels occurred in Catholic areas more than anywhere else. While some forms of Protestants were better, the groups who actually treated the Jews well were generally Muslims. The history of Spain is the most extreme example, where in Muslim Spain, Jews and Christians lived as taxed and legally disadvantaged minorities. When the Catholics took control, it didn't take them long to expel all the Jews from Spain, and set up an Inquisition in Spain.
Every single country which expelled the Jews in the Middle Ages (around 15 of them at one time or another) was Catholic, not a single Muslim did so. While some Orthodox and Protestant countries treated Jews very badly, they didn't generally go as far as the Catholics.
Moreover, it is in Catholic England where the blood libel originates, where the claimed victim became a saint with a feast day celebrated throughout England (thankfully no longer).
And focusing on Jewish and Muslim deaths from the Crusades itself is misleading, because there were other groups who the the Inquisition killed almost to the last person, thus making no one pay attention to them today. Few remember the Albigensian Crusade which resulted in the complete destruction of the Cathars.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not arguing that the Catholic Church has never done good, nor am I arguing that they were the most violent group in the Middle Ages, the problem is the claim that the Catholic Church has an "absurdly good historical track record when it comes to doing good for humanity" and in that context, the Crusades and Inquisition are pretty damning evidence.
From your first link:
So your ancestors were killed by stupid peasants, not the Church.
What? Everyone remembers the Albigensian Crusade. "Kill them all, God will know His own." And if heretics won't repent you should expel them or kill them. I agree with the Church on that one. There are demons who would mislead the people, you can't just let them get away with it. You know what happens when you don't kill the heretics? Communism. And communism killed way more people than the Church ever did.
I see you are fan of Marx and Weber. If Protestantism leads to capitalism and capitalism leads to communism, it makes sense to strike at the root of the evil.
Unfortunately, one fact kills the theory - in Catholic countries, communism was extremely strong and popular, while in Protestant ones communist parties were nearly nonexistent.
I've read little Marx or Weber; that's not really my model. My model is that rejection of politco-religious authority leads to democracy, liberalism, communism, atheism, fascism, uFAI, and a bunch of other evil things; the divine right of kings was the only defensible Schelling point, and when it fell chaos spread. Communism wouldn't have existed if the Catholic Kings had crushed the progenitors of the Reformation the same way they crushed the Cathars.
Actually communism only seems to have taken hold in monarchies and other right-wing tyrannies that attempted to stifle political speech. Countries like Russia and China and Cuba, as opposed to countries like England and France and the United States, or even countries like Canada and Sweden. Even countries recently threatened to fall under communist control were authoritarian monarchies like Nepal.
Not very paradoxically the power of communist regimes to slaughter and oppress tends to derive from the authoritarian mechanisms of the state they inherited.
So I think you have it the other way around.
You are arguing with a religious person about the value of an untestable counterfactual.
Peasants who were Catholics, taught by Catholic doctrine and engaged in a Crusade started by the Catholic Church. Yet you don't see such mobs systematically destroying entire Jewish villages in Protestant areas, and you don't see it in Russian Orthodox areas until the 1500s.
There may be an illusion of transparency here. Very few people remember where that phrase came from even if they've heard some version.
Somehow a lot of other religions have managed ok without doing that.
I'm wondering if I'm misreading what you are saying here.. Are you arguing that the Catholic Church should kill Catholic heretics and groups that disagree because otherwise other groups who will be more violent will arise?
Protestantism didn't even exist until the 1500s. I don't see why/how you're making the comparison.
A bunch of peasants got out of hand, directly went against the wishes of the Church, and killed some people. (Not very many, either, in the grand scheme of things.) When it comes to crimes against humanity, this is about a 1.1 on a scale of 1 to 10 for the Church, maybe about 3 for the peasants.
Hm, fair enough, but I was under the impression that most intelligent people at least knew that the Church had killed all the Cathars, and that's why Cathars don't exist anymore.
Managed what okay? No religion has managed to be as awesome as Catholicism, either. Catholics are responsible for universities.
Well, they shouldn't do it anymore, for obvious reasons. But at that time it was a good idea. The Reformation led to a shift in values and political structures that reached one climax with the French revolution, heights never before seen with the Nazi camps and Soviet gulags, and will likely reach yet another climax with uFAI. The rise of atheism was the rise of sheer unadulterated Evil. It might have been better had the Church just killed all the protesters when they had the chance. But this is idle political speculation about counterfactual histories, so I mean, I'm probably horrifically wrong. But I could be horrifically right. It's hard to tell.
(ETA: By the way, I basically never get into "my side is better than your side" fights, and this fight is clearly inconsequential, so I'm mostly just having fun with it. Apologies if you were expecting me to be serious.)
So the Protestants had 500 years to do so and they didn't do it. But the really relevant group above is the Russian Orthodox who didn't start heavy persecution of Jews until later, and did so generally after absorbing memes from Catholics.
While most people who know about Cathars probably know that they were wiped out by the Catholic Church, you are likely overestimating how many people know about them at all.
Actually, similar institutions existed elsewhere, especially in the Islamic world. The House of Wisdom functioned in many ways very similar to a university. By many accounts, Al-Karouine is the oldest university in existence, and clearly predates the European universities. There's a serious argument that Islamic schools played a vital role in influencing the establishment of universities in Christendom (although I think the influence here is probably often overstated).
What obvious reasons? Question: if you somehow time traveled back to 1491 and the pope asked you whether he should endorse a new Inquisition in Spain, would you tell him yes?
Responding to your ETA remark, I think you really don't get the problem. Aside from the potential problem of projection. Essentially you made an extremely positive remark about the Catholic Church and then aren't apparently seriously defending it while claiming that criticism is somehow a "fight' between which "side" is better. But that's not the issue here. The issue here is that you said that the Catholic Church had an "absurdly good" track record. You didn't say that it was better than some others or that on balance it has done more good than harm (both of which are not unreasonable claims), but rather you made a much stronger claim. And that claim simply doesn't hold ground. The Catholic Church like most other religions and long-term institutions is a mixed bag. There's been good and there's been bad. They've helped preserve learning and they've burned books, they've saved lives and they've taken them. That's not "absurdly good" by any reasonable notion of that term.
So in my head I was comparing the Church to, say, communism, which is where I got the "absurdly good" idea. Communists killed roughly 5,000 times as many people as the various Catholic inquisitions. But in retrospect that wasn't a very fair comparison, and so I repent of it. Mea culpa.
If the Catholic Church tried to kill heretics in modern times, it would first have to declare war on the entirety of the United Nations. ...Surely it is clear why this would not accomplish anything useful.
Reservedly but emphatically yes. I suspect the Church's involvement in the Spanish Inquisition, however limited, saved many lives and prevented costly wars.
I'm curious if you've read Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature". A major part of how humans have become less peaceful is that we're less willing to kill over ideas, whether those ideas are religious or ideological in nature.
What do you see as the causal connection here?
That part seems less controversial than the others--no Reformation and no Enlightenment means no science, which means no GAI, which means no uFAI. Although I'm sure there's multiple disjunctive ways science might have come about, it is rather strange that it took humanity so long.
As it is, LW--or at least Yudkowsky--believes uFAI is more likely than FAI, and is the most concerning current existential risk.
I don't really see how retaining the divine right of kings would have forestalled all the other existential risks, though.
It's worth noting that none of these revolutions happened in protestant countries, with the partial exception of the Nazis, and even there the movement started in the Catholic parts of the country.
That is worth noting, but of course looking at the proximate cause can only tell us so much. It's true that Catholics took a (IMO minor) part in the German reaction, but the underlying cause of that was the popular disillusionmnent with American-Marxist mimicry and policy, and the cause of that was the United States' leftist meddling in World War 1 and the armistice that followed.
As far as revolutions in Catholic countries, the Catholics should have more violently put down all threats to politico-religious authority. For that they can be blamed. Even so, it was a sin of omission, and there's little they could have done after the Reformation. The plague of chaos had already begun to spread.
That's my narrative, anyway. I'm not trying very hard to make it accurate, and so I don't trust in it much. I only started thinking about politics like three months ago.
And yet Protestant countries don't seem to have this problem despite being even less inclined to put rebellions down violently.
This is a counter-factual but I'm pretty sure the world would be a much better place had the US not intervened in the First World War.
This is the reason why the French revolution happened in Catholic country that followed your advice and extirpated all heresy without mercy.
But the revolution happened after a second round of religious toleration, no? If the French government had kept up its reputation as able to put down threats of politco-religious unorthodoxy then the revolution might never have gotten traction. Or is that not accurate?
What about the pedophilia scandal?
From what I heard the pedophilia rates are less in the church than secular institutions that regularly deal with children. It's just that for various reasons the church gets more media attention.
It wouldn't matter if the priesthood had ten times the expected rate of child abusers. That would just mean that pedophiles were attracted to the job, it wouldn't be the fault of the church as an institution. The problem is that the hierarchy is doing everything it can to protect the abusers from the consequences of their actions, up to and including lying to police, and doing nothing to keep known abusers away from children.
ETA: Here's a good article.
So do a lot of the secular institutions.
A lot of secular institutions fought unjust wars and tortured innocents, too. What does this have to do with the church's track record of doing good for humanity?
Displacing organizations that would have done even worse for humanity?
What's your source?