#To clarify we do not know our origin but either way this rhetoric is harmful and we won’t tolerate it.

[speedysoda]

Everybody’s chill until the “kintypes” start fucking talking to each other.

[starfieldcanvas]

While I see what you're going for with "Christian is coherent because it's self-claimed," I'm not sure I agree that it's always silly to call someone Christian when they themselves deny the label. Haven't you ever run into those insufferable doorknobs who say shit like "I'm not a Christian, I'm a follower of Jesus" or "I'm not religious, I have a personal relationship with Christ"? Or that evangelical group "Jews for Jesus"? (They're definitely Christian, not Jewish.) Or hell, for that matter, Catholics - I've known Catholics who either don't agree, or genuinely don't know, that Catholic is a kind of Christian.

But that's beside the point.

If I recall my own journey through atheism correctly, I encountered the term "culturally Christian" primarily in the context of secular progressives complaining to each other about bigoted atheists within or around the freethought movement (ye old blogosphere!) who were thoughtlessly regurgitating and justifying Christian prejudices. And subsequently in the "check yourself before you wreck yourself" sense I mentioned - "if this kind of thing drives us nuts when Richard Dawkins does it, we should probably keep an eye out for similar, more subtle shit in our own worldviews." And then later I saw it come up a lot in discussions of secular anti-semitism in North America and Europe, and then a bit in English discussions of French state secularism.

The fact that the definition could stretch to include different facets of Christian culture just reflected the fact that Christianity touches a lot of different parts of a lot of different cultures. "Culturally Christian" referred to different things in different discussions and that was fine, because people were unpacking systemic issues or intra-movement trends, not assigning random strangers the Mark of Cain. So yeah, I agree on some level it's a community problem. Clearly I've been spared a lot of tumblr bullshit because I worked through most of my religious trauma on different websites a long time ago.

I really do appreciate the desire for more precise language, and would thus be perfectly willing to start saying "non-Christians whose cultural identity has been somehow shaped by Christian culture, frequently without their knowledge" every single time I have conversations about that specific phenomenon. It just seems like given the way English works, "culturally Christian" ought to be reasonable shorthand for what I said in my last sentence, even if I need to clarify my intended meaning a bit when I bring it up for the first time in a given conversation.

I suppose my first real issue here is that I think most terms invented to grapple with social phenomena can also be insulting or harmful. "Mixed race" or "woman" or "lesbian" or "atheist" (itself once a term of abuse against Christians, because the universe loves irony) or any number of useful terms can become harmful or insulting if wielded in bad faith by people committed to misunderstanding each other, never mind more controversial academic concepts like "critical race theory" or "lateral violence" or "internalized homophobia" or "intersectional feminism."

You have a lot of great examples of people using the term bizarrely or in mutually exclusive ways, and I get the exhaustion and frustration. I'm just not sure that the terminology in question is really the problem here, except to the extent that knowing that particular phrase makes some real clowns feel brave enough to clown on you.

If I invent another term like "Christian-normative acculturation" or "Christosecularism" or "hypochristian identity-echo syndrome", will that not be subject to the same natural broadening and then to the same bad-faith euphemism treadmill as the original terminology? Couldn't "non-Christians whose cultural identity has been somehow shaped by Christian culture, frequently without their knowledge" be warped by bad-faith discussion too?

Seems to me the problem is that (1) people are shitty at rhetoric in general (2) their positions are bad and (3) they're harassing you. None of the problems you're talking about strike me as especially unique to the term "culturally Christian", nor even especially linked to the term being inherently too broad - "passing privilege" is a bad underlying concept no matter what you mix it with! "being culturally Christian means you're still basically Christian because look it says Christian in it" is a major linguistics AND logic fail! "you still believe x religion despite saying you don't believe x religion" is unspeakably moronic and insulting!

Gifting these clowns a better vocabulary is far more than they deserve!

Anyway.

I think what I'm still curious about is how much of your objection is to the misuse of the terminology, how much to the motivations that drive people to misuse it, and how much to the underlying concepts it's groping towards.

Assume for the sake of argument that the term "culturally Christian" vanishes from everyone's memory overnight. Which conversations will we still need to have?

i think if “culturally christian” was a helpful or useful term the people who used it would be able to come up with a coherent definition that was generally agreed upon and made sense, which nobody has ever managed to do. even on the “education posts” people wildly disagree every other reply and everyone just … takes it as reasonable because a) they don’t think about what they reblog or believe and b) they just want to win discourse points.

[trentteti]

Getting Through Brutally Difficult Reading Comp Passages About Science

If you’ve done any LSAT from the last five or so years, you’ve certainly realized that the Reading Comprehension section can be brutally difficult. The LSAT as a whole has gotten slightly more difficult in the last few years, but neither the Logical Reasoning nor Logic Games sections have become quite as fearsome as Reading Comprehension. And three types of passages almost always give their readers the most trouble: passages about science, the law, and the arts. Unfortunately for us all, basically every LSAT has at least one passage on science, at least one passage about the law, and at least one passage about the arts.

If you’ve been recently tearing out your hair as you attempt to read through dozens of these seemingly impenetrable passages, you’ve read enough lately, so I’ll just cut straight to the point: in a three-part series, we’re going to discuss what makes these passages so difficult, and what we can do to make them a little less formidable. We’ll begin this series today by focusing on passages about science.

We who set our gazes on law school are typically not the most science-adept people. If we were, perhaps we would have chosen a career in the medical field, with its broken business model and fast-approaching reckoning with AI, rather than … um … the field we chose. Instead, we dutifully took the science GEs everyone told us were the easiest and learned the bare minimum about astronomy or physiology or whatever-it-was-it’s-so-hard-to-remember-now-maybe-it-had-to-do-with-rocks? And then that was about it for our less-than-illustrious science education. Any advances in science we would, like Arthur C. Clarke, chalk up to magic.

OK, maybe I should use “I” statements rather than project my aspersions onto you. I don’t really understand science. Like at all. But in my extensive experience working with people preparing to tackle the LSAT, I recognize that most test takers aren’t terribly science-fluent either. So with our plainly deficient scientific knowledge, it can seem a little cruel that we will certainly get a passage about science on the LSAT. It can feel especially cruel when the topics of these passages can run the gamut from dormant pathogens to entropy in the multiverse to plate tectonics to how brain scans work. So what can we do to make our reading of these passages a little more comprehensible?

Three rhetorical devices can help us understand these seemingly incomprehnsible science passages. These three devices are frequently employed in scientific passages, and can help you understand the subject matter and the point the author wants to drive home. These rhetorical devices are truly a venerable triumvirate. They are our lodestars helping us navigate the dark night these passages present … OK, I’m waxing rhapsodic now. It’s not very appropriate for the neutral, fact-based science passages. So let’s get to those three devices.

The first device you should always look out for in these passages are questions posed by the author, especially those posed early in the passage. These passages frequently inundate you with a dense morass of unfamiliar concepts and theories, but there’s almost always only one important point at hand. Whenever the author of the passage poses a question, you can cut through all the excess info thrown at you, and get straight to the point of the passage — which is simply answering that question. Just track the answers that the passage provides to uncover the main idea the passage. Sometimes you only get one answer, and the author agrees that it is, indeed, the answer. That’s great — the main point of the passage is simply that answer. Other times there will more than one answer. In that case, the main point is either the one answer the author agrees with, or a summary of each answer, if the author has no stated or implied preference. So figuring out the questions posed and answers provided can help you at the very least understand the subject matter and main point of the passage, which is certainly a useful starting point.

The second device to look out for are analogies. You may not know a ton about science, and the embittered souls who compile these passages know this and will usually exploit it for their nefarious ends. Occasionally, however, they’ll throw you a bone in the form of an analogy. An analogy will take some scientific concept — which, remember, you probably don’t know anything about — and relate it to something you already understand. Recent passages have analogized entropy to the arrangement of furniture in a living room, the subduction in plate tectonics to an oar bending into water, and the improbability of life in our universe to the improbable survival of an action movie hero. Hold onto these analogies — use them to help you understand what they’re even talking about in the passage. By relating the arcane subject matter to something we can all picture, these analogies clarify either the central subject matter or some supporting piece of evidence. If you don’t even understand how the analogy relates to the subject matter, take a moment. Re-read that paragraph, and don’t proceed without getting a better understanding of the passage. These analogies are carefully placed — if we don’t understand the analogy, we’re going to have a very hard time understanding anything that follows.

(Note: There’s a common misconception about analogies in RC — many people think that you’ll definitely get questions about analogies. Although many questions ask you to find an answer choice that is analogous to something mentioned in the passage, the questions almost never ask about analogies made by the passage. Instead, use these analogies to help you make sense the subject matter and supporting evidence in the passage).

Finally, we should always try to simply these passages to the underlying cause and effect being described. These science passages will cover all manner of topics, but at their heart, they almost always attempt to prove that some cause and effect relationship exists. Almost every recent published science passage has argued that some cause and effect relationship exists. The last four have claimed, respectively, that changes in sea water temp or salinity might cause cholera to reproduce in humans; that fish farming may cause as much harm to the environment as line or net fishing; that random fluctuations can cause a high entropy system to become, briefly, a low entropy system; and that the lateral movements of plates of the Earth’s crust against each other cause earthquakes. All cause and effect. If you can simplify the the passage to a short description of the cause and effect relationship, you’ll know enough about the passage. And because most details in the passage will merely support that central cause and effect relationship, you’ll even be able to answer questions about those picayune details.

The recent November 2018 passage about entropy and the Big Bang — my pick for the most difficult recent RC passage — illustrates how these three rhetorical devices can help us answer all the questions. We begin the passage with a veritable onslaught of murky terms — “infinitesimally” “entropy,” “thermodynamics,” “multiverse,” “cosmic bubble” — designed to scare us off. But then, a question is implicitly posed: How did the Big Bang occur, and our universe begin, in an improbably low entropy state? An analogy is then used to clarify why low entropy states are unlikely — if you were to randomly reconfigure items in your living room, the room would probably get more disordered (i.e., entropic) over time; the universe works, by analogy, in similar ways. Finally, we get the answer, which is expressed to us as cause and effect: random fluctuations of energy on a subatomic scale can cause a momentarily low entropy universe from which the Big Bang could have banged. Now, I don’t really understand what “random fluctuations of energy on a subatomic scale” means, but by focusing on the question and analogy I understood the subject matter, and by simplifying the answer to a cause and effect relationship, I understood the main point well enough. With just this information, I answered all the questions correctly, despite being resolutely not a Science Guy (or even a Big Bang viewer).

So focus on these three rhetorical devices to simplify these unfamiliar and frequently over-complicated science passages. If they work for me — a genuine science dum dum — they can surely work for you.

Stay tuned next week for a post on how to handle passages about the law, and later for a post on how to handle passages about the arts.

Getting Through Brutally Difficult Reading Comp Passages About Science was originally published on Blueprint LSAT Blog

[kindabraveandlittlestupid]

This is a moral/political concept I been thinking about recently. It’s been in my head for some time and I am not sure if its something I carried over from a philosophy or sociology book I read in the past or an original thought of my own. Likely the former over the latter but I think my argument is sound none the less and wanted to pose it to anyone who comes across these writings during your adventures on the web. Feel free to let me know what you think.

The Intent - Harm - Remorse concept is supposed to be a lens for social statements made by politicians, social figures or even people in your life could be measured. I consider it one of the most important rules of discourse I created for myself in regards to handling anyone in my life or how I handle statements from famous individuals. There are caveats I will get into later which might be important to reflect on but let’s start with the broader concept.

General Concept Any inflammatory statement from the lips of a President, tweet from a celebrity or the joke from a friend in a bar should be measured by three basic steps to dictate how you should react to their statement (in my opinion). The first is always to measure their Intent which is the how or why they are saying this thing. Intent can range from general ignorance, misunderstanding, statement of belief, or even humor. It’s hard to measure which of these is really what was going thru their head but almost always the default escape from the burden of intent is to say it was a joke. Humor serves an important purpose in society but it often acts as an “emergency exit” or social scapegoat for some pretty fucked up comments made by political figures.

The next step is Harm this is also hard to measure and should always be reflective of what is most likely the persons intent. It is impossible these days to say any statement without some group or individual taking offense. This is true for both for Men and Women, Left and Right, Gay or Straight, and literally every other social group you might have. I know the word Snowflake is thrown around a lot these days but the truth is no one is above the sting of a sharp statement (EVERYONE is a ‘Snowflake’). Even if you agree with someone’s beliefs and views they might say something that cuts at you personally for fitting into a different group. The statement that “White Males are the problem” cuts at me personally because I am both white and male but I certainly don’t see myself as the problem. I can take offense to that comment or I can recognize that most people who say that aren’t harping on ALL white males but rather the power structure of modern society which is mostly well old white men. This is just one way of measuring harm but it’s important to be reflective of what is being said and why (intent).

The last step is Remorse. If upon examining a statement if we find their intent came from a place of ignorance, prejudice or even immoral belief with a measured harm to a person or people then it is not unfair to demand an apology. We are all accountable for what we say and what we believe. Remorse is a hard thing to come by as there a handful of modern options to feign remorse and make people believe it is authentic. There is the Public Statement often well-orchestrated letter read from a podium to a dozen cameras often favored by Politicians, the Hibernation in which that person disappears to resort to ‘receive help’ but it is really keeping their head down until social attention shifts elsewhere, or Denial which is becoming a quick favorite for the Trump Administration which suggests whatever evidence you have is wrong or never happened. Truth is we decide if that remorse is authentic or not. There are people who have said things that were misinterpreted and had no real harm factor but they still decided to make the step to apologize and clarify their views. This step is essential for discourse as forgiveness for honest/sincere apologies is needed for reconciliation. We have all said things in anger, misunderstanding or falsely held beliefs but recognizing that we have done wrong and being remorseful of those things should be an avenue back into society.

Reflection on Progressives and Conservatives Believe it or not, both sides fail at recognizing one of the first two steps for different reasons which has lead to some of the tribalism we see today. It should be noted I tend to lean strongly into the progressive side of politics which I feel gives me some license to be critical of the PC Culture which has their heart in the right place but poorly executed in their outrage (occasionally).

The Progressive and PC Culture have started to skip step one, which is Intent and solely focus their attention on step two, Harm. This is why we started to see some social attacks on comedians who often fringe on edgy subjects and are attacked by Progressives for not adhering to these new standards. By ignoring intent we skip over important concepts like discourse, humor, social narratives or even practicality of statements. An example away from comedy is the reaction to Amazons of the Justice League Movies having less armor on during the movie which resulted in an outcry that it was sexualization of women. Upon response those Amazon actresses pointed out A) they liked the armor B) allowed them to be more comfortable while riding horses and performing stunts C) the director was nothing boy respectful to them even with the wardrobe change. It was a skipping the intent going straight to ‘harm’ which is why the conservatives like to point out we cry foul when there was none which they aren’t wrong in those specific cases.

The Conservative and emerging Alt Right Culture fail at recognizing intent, harm, and remorse in their own unique way. Collectively I have noticed two things that make them fail at public discourse. The first is letting the narrative of intent be dictated by individuals who were usually stating beliefs and not humor. The second is a complete disregard to harm UNLESS it affects them specifically. Progressives have a deeper level of empathy these days and are able to put ourselves in the shoes of other people who do not share our culture, gender, sexuality or ethnicity. Which sadly leaves many Conservatives on a low road where decency isn’t a feature of the Republican Party. Trump (as an easy example) has said things about Mexican Immigrants, Gold Star Families, Women, African Americans, and Veterans over the past two years. Each time those two failings appeared after his remark in the Conservative Base. In regards to the intent, they simply say he was joking and in regards to the harm they simply didn’t care his comments marginalized vast groups of people.

You might have noted that remorse was not listed above for Conservatives or Progressives but the truth it both groups fail in the same way on this last aspect. We tend to be only forgiving to those who on ‘our side’ and less forgiving to individuals who are apart from us. I am no different in the sense that if two men said the same horrible thing I am likely to forgive a liberal over a conservative. Its something I am working on and it’s important we try to remain fair, we either forgive both or neither. I have always been an advocate of forgiveness, so long as it’s authentic and there is a real change in the narrative in regards to that offending individual then forgiveness should be available to them.

Caveats While the Intent - Harm - Remorse is a good foundation for measuring public statements or poorly executed jokes. There are other ‘tools’ to help us cut to the core of intent and the harm its caused. The first I might point out is Repetition of Rhetoric which is a good indicator that something might be going on beneath the surface of a person’s views. The use of “Just Kidding” works only for so long before it loses merit and the veil of humor can erode rather fast if you’re not careful. If a stand-up comedian says she loves African Americans but her whole set is about how she is afraid of black men, no matter how much of a laugh she might get for jokes it is not unreasonable to walk away from the experience and feel like something more is going on in her beliefs. Another measure for politicians is Policy; this caveat is easier to measure as if you want to know what a politician really thinks then look at the laws he or she passes. Using Donald Trump again he claims that he fights for low/middle-class workers but his tax plan gives them a small boost in what their tax return while removing child care programs/maternity/healthcare/after school for kids/etc which adds up for way more than what they see on their tax return. A policy is an excellent caveat for finding those offenders who often fall beliefs instead of the rhetoric they display to the public. Closing Using the words of Jim Jefferies “We can all do a little better” and I think it starts by measuring the intent, harm, and remorse by our public figures, friends, family, community and even ourselves. I love to hear your thoughts if you have them.

Regards Michael California