Daniel LaPointe

Largely composed piecemeal from January of 2022 to that April, this comes fresh off the heels of “A Discourse on Atheism” and deals with similar themes. The ultra-granular look at the mechanics of Christian belief bears a passing resemblance to one of Smerdyakov’s arguments from The Brothers Karamazov – the one with Fyodor and Gregory about making a mountain crush Muslim tormenters. The polemics about Reddit, meanwhile, showcase an immense annoyance with a site that had become a major distraction and time sink.

Note that while everything after “And what if this check never occurs in the first place?” was written just now to finish the piece off, the general thrust of the final argument had been worked out in my head at around the time of the original composition.

To learn is to efface oneself before a master. It is to say, here and now, “I do not know, but I can know.” It is to ready oneself for a complete reshaping of the mind, in which previously inconceivable landscapes are unveiled, peak-in-Darien-like, to the learner’s amazement. Such a posturing requires no shortage of faith in one’s teacher. To lack this faith, in fact, is to abandon learning entirely.

There’s a reason we educate the young and not the old. Those new to the world possess a natural ignorance. They have no choice but to glean information from those around them – hence the steady stream of “Why is the sky blue?” questions which springs forth, perennially, at our nation’s playgrounds. For a good many children, this curiosity stops sometime in elementary school. For the academically inclined, however, it can continue even into adulthood. One’s educational attainment, I posit, owes largely to when one decides to exempt themselves from this mode of existence. When is enough enough? When do you say to yourself, “Alright, I’m up to snuff with the adults. It’s about time we conversed as equals”? If a child’s parents exempted themselves from this process early on – at the age of 10, say – it is only natural that the child will do the same. But what if the child exempts themselves independent of parental approval? What if something in the child’s environment precipitates this?

I argue that no website in the world more effectively catalyzes this exemption process than Reddit.com. Let’s take a look at the facts.

  • Reddit’s user-base is relatively young – mostly teenagers and young adults. Unlike the known boomer-haven Facebook, Reddit is dominated by people who can still be exempted from the traditional learning process.
  • Reddit’s user-base takes pride in its intelligence. As Urban Dictionary puts it, Reddit is “Social media for people who think they are too good for social media.” Visit the site and there is no shortage of complaints about Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. As the Redditors see it, folks who use these apps are vapid and vain (unlike them). Hence the site’s reputation for intellectual arrogance. It is a honey pot, then, for academically inclined teenagers.
  • The front page is littered with educational tidbits. Unlike your average piece of TikTok spam – the purpose of which is plainly to divert and amuse – these Reddit posts evince a startling sincerity. The Wikipedia addicts of r/TIL, the non-lawyers of r/LegalAdvice, the randos of r/LifeProTips and r/YouShouldKnow, the armchair psychologists of r/raisedbynarcissists, the quantum-physics-explaining-high-schoolers of r/ELI5 – all of these people genuinely think they are making the world a better place with their subpar advice. And those in the comments tend to eat it right up. The general attitude, it seems, is an unironic “we’re all in this together.” On Reddit, everyone is capable of educating everyone.
  • Reddit is virulently anti-religion. While this does not in itself imply the users are incapable of learning (and while I myself have defended atheism on this very blog), it suggests the user-base is extremely hesitant to take leaps of faith. But faith in one’s teacher is essential to proper learning. Indeed, treat your teacher as an equal and you won’t be learning from them so much as you’ll be arguing with them.
  • When arguments do break out, Reddit’s culturally enforced anonymity levels the playing field. As a result, we find thirteen-year-olds arguing with day traders arguing with professional historians arguing with depressed coders, etc. This is all fine and dandy, except one hardly ever knows who’s who. And when an expert does out himself, such an admission hardly conveys authority. Having myself browsed the site regularly for over five years, I can say that expertise doesn’t imply authority on Reddit so much as it suggests it. Past success, then, means nothing on Reddit. Posts and comments succeed on merit and on merit alone.
  • Reddit has a populist culture more broadly. Recall the anti-Wall-Street sentiment driving the GameStop short squeeze, or the recent ascendency of r/antiwork. This is no surprise, given the egalitarian design of the site itself. When everybody’s a nobody, you might as well identify as a member of a collective.

Putting this all together, we find that Reddit has a profound tendency to attract academically promising youth and to undermine the very traits that made them academically promising in the first place. An ability to identify and discount the opinions of intellectual inferiors is replaced with a fetishization of the common man, and with a startlingly predictable acceptance of whatever the hivemind deems correct. An ability to consume long-form content is replaced with the compulsive hoarding of trivialities – a stuffing of the brain with “fun facts” desperately awaiting an opportunity to be loosed at the dinner table. An ability to take things on faith – to let go of one’s ego, temporarily, so as to optimize learning in the long run – is replaced with a myopic insistence that everything be reduced to logos at the drop of a hat.

I feel a Socratic dialogue coming on. We begin with the Redditor’s rebuttal.

R: I take issue with your claim that Reddit’s atheism is a problem. You yourself have argued for atheism in the past. If we are in agreement on this matter, how am I the inferior one?

D: As stated above, the atheism itself isn’t the problem. It’s the peculiar brand of militant atheism evinced on that page. The sheer unwillingness of the users to consider that maybe, just maybe, there’s merit to these millennia-old traditions.

R: Pick a religion, any religion, and explain to me its merits.

D: That’s getting us off topic. My point is that r/atheism doesn’t have a shred of respect for these institutions, despite their immense cultural and historical significance.

R: The default state with religion is one of non-belief. If you cannot explain to me the merits of religion, I have no reason to take it seriously. The burden of proof is on you.

D: Fine, fine. I wrote an essay about this a few months ago. It’s called “A Discourse on Atheism,” and it can be found elsewhere on this blog. In the essay, I advocate atheism. But I also do my best trying to defend Christianity. I recall being rather convinced by some of the imagined Christian rebuttals.

R: Ok. Provide some of the Christian rebuttals.

D: Here’s one. This isn’t directly from the essay, but the vibe is similar. Suppose you go to work at some office job. It’s early in the morning. You’re groggy and stressed, but your boss walks by and delivers a chipper “Good morning!” How do you respond?

R: I would say “good morning” back to him.

D: As would I. Now suppose he also asks how your day is going, but your day is going terribly. How would you respond then?

R: In the moment, I would lie to him. My response would be something along the lines of “Good, good. How you holding up?”

D: As would I. But why lie to your boss? Shouldn’t one strive to be truthful in one’s interactions?

R: I lie because to tell the truth would be to torpedo the interaction. My boss has neither the time nor the energy for me to open up about something intimate.

D: If that’s the case, why did he ask you the question in the first place? Shouldn’t he have been ready for any response that could have been provided?

R: Not necessarily. The goal of his question wasn’t to elicit information so much as it was to gauge my mood. The speed of the response, my tone of voice, the nature of my eye contact – this is what he really wanted to know.

D: So there exist utterances with meanings that are entirely subtextual?

R: Yes, such utterances do exist.

D: And what if the Bible is nothing but a string of such utterances?

R: Look, if you want to treat the Bible as a work of literature, you can go ahead and do that. I understand metaphors as well as the next guy. But that is not the same thing as being a Christian.

D: How would you define a Christian?

R: A Christian is someone who believes that Jesus Christ died for their sins. They also believe that their holding this belief will result in them going to Heaven when they die.

D: Good. Now suppose someone reads the Bible as they would a work of literature. As you and I would, they dismiss literal interpretations of ridiculous claims. Nevertheless, they walk away from this reading with a conviction to attend Church every Sunday and to partake in Christian rituals. Is such a person not effectively a Christian at that point?

R: Such a person would only be going through the motions. In the absence of genuine belief, they would not be Christian in the truest sense of the word.

D: How would you define “genuine belief” in this case?

R: At the very least this person would have to believe in the resurrection of Christ three days after his crucifixion. This, however, plainly counts as one of the “ridiculous claims” we have assumed to be rejected.

D: Alright. Now suppose this person lies and responds “yes” every time they are asked whether they believe in the resurrection. On what information can we base the claim that they do not truly believe in the resurrection?

R: I’m not sure why you’re asking this. We have assumed at the outset that this person does not truly believe in the resurrection. Hence your usage of the word “lie.”

D: Yes, we did. But suppose we were given a group of random people and asked to sort them into those who truly believe in the resurrection and those who do not. How would we go about sorting those people?

R: If a practicing Christian has never stated that they do not actually believe in the resurrection, we would have no choice but to place them among the believers, regardless of their true stance on the matter.

D: Right. But if that’s the case, how can we be sure that the Christian religion is not full to the brim with people like this? What if the Pope, the bishops, the Protestant pastors – what if they’re all just a bunch of liars who’ve never slipped up?

R: Impossible. Though I disagree with the clergy’s philosophical positions, I do not in any way doubt their sincerity.

D: Suppose you could crack open the minds of these people. Given complete, God-like access to the thoughts of the Pope, say, how could you tell whether his belief in the resurrection is genuine? On a cognitive level, what would you be looking for?

R: Well, we can start with his internal monologue. If he finds himself thinking “I don’t believe what I’m saying” the moment he verbalizes belief in the resurrection, then that would suffice as proof of his non-belief.

D: Just to be crystal clear, you’re referring to the part of the Pope’s brain responsible for producing internalized speech, whatever it may be?

R: Yes, I am.

D: And you’re implying, in this example, that that part of the brain, in that moment, must internally voice the exact sentence “I don’t believe what I’m saying”?

R: Or something equivalent to that, yes. For example: “I’m lying,” “This is false,” “The resurrection never occurred.”

D: What if the Pope just went about his business with no internal monologue whatsoever? Could you imagine a scenario in which we would still be able to pin down nonbelief?

R: In theory, I suppose, the Pope could nonverbally bring to mind the idea that the resurrection did not occur. Though I’m not sure how this would be done on the cognitive level, there’s precedent of mathematicians doing this sort of thing when evaluating the truth or falsehood of propositions. That is, they make use of a visuo-spatial intuition that exists independent of language.

D: But would this on its own imply that the Pope does not believe in the resurrection? It is possible to bring an idea to mind – internally voiced or not – without endorsing it. Indeed, one can imagine the Pope viewing the idea “from a distance.” That is, he could recognize the idea, classify it as an impulsive thought, and separate it from the self.

R: Correct. And in that moment, he would be replacing the thought with an updated thought. Since the new thought clarifies that the resurrection did, in fact, occur, it would follow that the Pope is not lying.

D: But what about that brief moment in time when he entertained the thought that the resurrection never occurred? Are we to take that thought as representative of the Pope’s true self?

R: No, we are not. If the Pope recognizes this thought as impulsive and chooses to replace it with another thought, then we would say that it is not representative of his true self.

D: But recall that we are thinking about this on the cognitive level. If the Pope replaces the internally voiced sentence “The resurrection did not occur” with the internally voiced sentence the “The resurrection did occur,” is there anything we’d be able to detect in the brain that would distinguish these two thoughts?

R: Though I am no expert on such matters, I believe the latter statement would be made following increased activity in the pre-frontal cortex.

D: So a thought which is brought to mind is only taken to be representative of one’s true self if it survives a check from the rational part of the brain?

R: That is correct.

D: And what if this check never occurs in the first place?

R: What?

D: What if the Pope voices belief in the resurrection through sheer force of habit? What if there’s nothing going through his mind when he does this?

R: Well now we’re back to where we were before. He’s going through the motions and it’s hard to say what he actually believes.

D: And what’s wrong with that?

R: Huh?

D: If he’s partaking in all the Christian rituals with no contradictory thoughts in his head, then we would say that he’s a perfectly operating Christian at that point, would we not?

R: But he’s not independently affirming the belief.

D: And this is my problem with the Reddit mindset. At some point you just have to shut up and put yourself out there, you know? Arbitrarily stake a claim because it’s what your upbringing handed you; take up a spot in the world as a flesh-and-blood human being situated in a network of other flesh-and-blood human beings and do what your social intuition tells you is necessary.

R: Alright, so you’ve given up on being rational at this point.

D: No I haven’t. I’ve just laid down an extra axiom.

R: You can’t do that.

D: Why not?