Astral Codex Ten

Christians

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Christians

Article

Christians is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between May 10, 2021 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Christians proved they were wrong about God’s existence""; “Everyone will assume Christians have some sort of vague spiritual wisdom”; “For example, Christians and Republicans had no more Long COVID than people who said no religion or no political party”. It most often appears alongside America, Christianity, Israel.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 7
  • Issue count: 7
  • First seen: May 10, 2021
  • Last seen: January 16, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
New Atheism didn't fail because Christians proved they were wrong about God’s existence. It failed because a hipper generation of young people accepted all their premises but declared them uncool for caring about it too much. In the same way, social justice was able to easily fight off wave after wave of MRAs and redpillers and alt-righters trying to prove that they were wrong about factual issues. Heck, it even made a meme out of it - "Watch this YouTuber DESTROY SJWs using FACTS and LOGIC". Once the very idea of trying to use facts or logic to disprove a movement becomes cringeworthy, how can it fail? I think if it fails, it will be because every time they open their mouths, younger and cooler people will just roll their eyes and say "Woke!"
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
Religion will continue to retreat from US public life. As it becomes less important, mainstream society will treat it as less of an outgroup and more of a fargroup. Everyone will assume Christians have some sort of vague spiritual wisdom, much like Buddhists do. Everyone will agree evangelicals or anyone with a real religious opinion is just straight-out misinterpreting the Bible, the same way any Muslim who does something bad is misinterpreting the Koran. Christian mysticism will become more popular among intellectuals. Lots of people will talk about how real Christianity opposes capitalism. There may not literally be a black lesbian Pope, but everyone will agree that there should be, and people will become mildly surprised when you remind them that the Pope is white, male, and sexually inactive.
Highlights From The Comments On Long COVID And Bisexuality
May 11, 2023 · Original source
I checked to see if people who identified with other vague categories had more Long COVID. This was mostly true for left-leaning or weird categories, and mostly false for right-leaning or normal categories. For example, Christians and Republicans had no more Long COVID than people who said no religion or no political party, but polyamorous people and rationalists did. The strongest effect was for ambidextrous people, but ambidextrous people also have more mental illness.
There was no such effect among Democrats, Republicans, Christians, or vegetarians. I would expect someone who goes to church occasionally and thinks God might exist to have the same dilemma about whether to identify as Christian as someone with a few homosexual thoughts would have about whether to identify as bisexual. But we don’t see the same effect there.
This isn’t exactly the same as Peter’s comment. Peter’s comment was about likelihood of choosing any identity (which is rebutted by the data on Christians, Republicans, etc). This one is about choosing a “weird” identity.
Your Book Review: Dominion
June 28, 2024 · Original source
Not so fast, says Scully. Christians are supposed to be good stewards, only using animals as necessary and never being cruel. A careful reading of scripture reveals myriad instances where it’s either directly said or strongly implied that all creatures deserve kindness. In the Gospel of Mark, God says to “preach the gospel to every creature”. Moses is chosen in part because he was kind to a lamb: “You who have compassion for a lamb shall now be the shepherd of my people Israel.”
This current of thought also interests me because making any inroads with Christians has the potential to greatly reduce animal suffering. There are 2.4 billion Christians on the planet. Convincing even a small fraction of them that God wants them to be nicer to animals could have a hugely positive effect.
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity
November 12, 2024 · Original source
The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By 400, there were forty million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history.
Suppose you start with 1,000 Christians in 40 AD. It’s hard to number the first few centuries’ worth of early Christians - they’re too small to leave much evidence - but by 300 AD (before Constantine!) they’re a sizeable enough fraction of the empire that some historians have tentatively suggested a 10% population share. That would be about 6 million people.
From 1,000 to 6,000,000 in 260 years implies a 40% growth rate per decade. Stark finds this plausible, because it’s the same growth rate as the Mormons, 1880 - 1980 (if you look at the Mormons’ entire history since 1830, they actually grew a little faster than the early Christians!)
The Early Christian Strategy
November 14, 2024 · Original source
Then do whatever your opponent did last round. This was so boring that Axelrod sponsored a second tournament specifically for strategies that could displace TIT-FOR-TAT. When the dust cleared, TIT-FOR-TAT still won - although some strategies could beat it in head-to-head matches, they did worst against each other, and when all the points were added up TIT-FOR-TAT remained on top. In certain situations, this strategy is dominated by a slight variant, TIT-FOR-TAT-WITH-FORGIVENESS. That is, in situations where a bot can “make mistakes” (eg “my finger slipped”), two copies of TIT-FOR-TAT can get stuck in an eternal DEFECT-DEFECT equilibrium against each other; the forgiveness-enabled version will try cooperating again after a while to see if its opponent follows. Otherwise, it’s still state-of-the-art. The tournament became famous because - well, you can see how you can sort of round it off to morality. In a wide world of people trying every sort of con, the winning strategy is to be nice to people who help you out and punish people who hurt you. But in some situations, it’s also worth forgiving someone who harmed you once to see if they’ve become a better person. I find the occasional claims to have successfully grounded morality in self-interest to be facile, but you can at least see where they’re coming from here. And pragmatically, this is good, common-sense advice. For example, compare it to one of the losers in Axelrod’s tournament. COOPERATE-BOT always cooperates. A world full of COOPERATE-BOTS would be near-utopian. But add a single instance of its evil twin, DEFECT-BOT, and it folds immediately. A smart human player, too, will easily defeat COOPERATE-BOT: the human will start by testing its boundaries, find that it has none, and play DEFECT thereafter (whereas a human playing against TIT-FOR-TAT would soon learn not to mess with it). Again, all of this seems natural and common-sensical. Infinitely-trusting people, who will always be nice to everyone no matter what, are easily exploited by the first sociopath to come around. You don’t want to be a sociopath yourself, but prudence dictates being less-than-infinitely nice, and reserving your good nature for people who deserve it. Reality is more complicated than a game theory tournament. In Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma, everyone can either benefit you or harm you an equal amount. In the real world, we have edge cases like poor people, who haven’t done anything evil but may not be able to reciprocate your generosity. Does TIT-FOR-TAT help the poor? Stand up for the downtrodden? Care for the sick? Domain error; the question never comes up. Still, even if you can’t solve every moral problem, it’s at least suggestive that, in those domains where the question comes up, you should be TIT-FOR-TAT and not COOPERATE-BOT. This is why I’m so fascinated by the early Christians. They played the doomed COOPERATE-BOT strategy and took over the world. II. Matthew 5: You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you . . . If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Talk is cheap, but The Rise Of Christianity suggests the early Christians pulled it off. For example, even though pagan institutions would not help indigent Christians, Christians tried to give charity to Christian and pagan alike, even going so far as to help nurse pagans during the plague (when nursing a victim conferred a high risk of contagion and death). Even Emperor Julian, an enemy of Christianity, admitted it lived up to its own standards: When the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests, the impious Galileans observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence . . . [they] support not only their poor, but ours as well, [when] everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.” In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul is asked whether it is acceptable for one Christian to pursue a lawsuit against another Christian in a pagan court. He answers: The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated? We get a similar picture from the stories of the martyrs. Many of them prayed for the Romans while the Romans were in the process of torturing and killing them; Polycarp even cooked them a meal. If the Christians had merely been TIT-FOR-TAT, it would be easy to tell a story of their victory. The Roman Empire was corrupt and decadent to the core. People were looking for a community they could trust. Christianity offered access to a better class of friends who wouldn’t immediately rob or betray you when your guard was down. By providing a superior alternative to the low-trust pagan world, it was irresistible on a purely rational economic basis. But this story sounds more worthy of the mystery cults. Mystery cults are a great structure for mutual aid; we see this today in groups like the Freemasons (cf. Backscratcher Clubs). Everybody knows who’s on the inside (and needs to be mutually aided) and who’s on the outside (and can be ignored). The initiatory structure holds off freeloaders and makes sure the people on the inside are of approximately equal rank (so that you get as many benefits as you give) and can be held accountable if they don’t contribute. Since Christianity did better than the mystery cults, there must have been some reason that COOPERATE-BOT beat TIT-FOR-TAT in the particular environment of Roman religion, defying all normal game theoretic logic. III. Is this a consistent feature of COOPERATE-BOT strategies, or was it just luck? This is hard to say, because in all normal cases it’s impossible to follow a COOPERATE-BOT strategy at scale and for any period of time. Consider the Quakers, who gave it a better try than most. They were persecuted by the British and fled to America (is this kosher? it sort of seems like resisting evil). There they founded the colony of Pennsylvania, intended to be a utopia of pacifism and benevolence. They were very serious about this; history records many Quakers who were arrested or even killed rather than compromise their principles, and the British Crown seized Pennsylvania from the Quakers a few times because they wouldn’t make extremely cheap gestures like pay taxes or swear oaths. But in the end, the Crown frog-boiled the Quakers into compliance. They promised to return self-government if the Quakers would budge an inch - in one compromise, if they agreed to pay taxes that could go to non-combat functions of the military. The Quakers eventually agreed, and the British ratcheted up their demands the next time. Finally, in 1755, some Indians launched a major assault on Pennsylvania, and all the Quakers voluntarily resigned from government to let the non-Quaker Pennsylvanians (who by this time outnumbered them) conduct the war without restraint. The Quakers performed better than most COOPERATE-BOTs. They stuck to their principles most of the time, and in the end their religion survived. But look deeper, and you see a gradual process of surrender to reality. First was the flight to America, an implicit admission that living was better than being martyred for the faith. Then came the various compromises; an implicit admission that getting to keep self-government while being 99% pure was better than being subjects while 100% pure. Finally, they gave up Pennsylvania itself rather than be wiped out, again choosing the practical option over martyrdom. My point isn’t to knock the Quakers, who may come in a close 2nd in “historical groups that stuck to their cooperative principles despite all odds” and were certainly more ethical than I am. My point is that even very committed groups of religious fanatics fail the non-violent COOPERATE-BOT strategy eventually. Or maybe the ones who didn’t fail were wiped out? I hear good things about the Cathars, but we can’t know for sure because they were very thoroughly killed off - unrepentant to the last. Are there any other groups who deserve mention in this section besides early Christians, Quakers, and Cathars? I think some German and Russian sects have tried similar strategies, though they mostly failed and I don’t know much about them. Not exactly the same, but maybe rhyming: what about modern liberalism? To the monarchs and dictators of the past, free speech might seem kind of like COOPERATE-BOT in a limited domain: the idea that elites shouldn’t make any forceful/legal effort to protect their ideological and spiritual position must sound almost as crazy as them not making any forceful/legal effort to protect themselves if attacked, or to prevent themselves from getting cheated. It is, in some sense, a unilateral surrender in the war of ideas; fascists and communists will do their best to crush liberalism, but liberals cannot ban discussion of fascism or communism. The fact that this, too, has worked, makes me think early Christianity wasn’t just a one-off, but suggests some larger point. IV. Still, I don’t really know what it is. Here are some weak theories: Advertisement: Being kind to outsiders is good PR and encourages those outsiders to join you. This effect is stronger than the corresponding disincentive (that they won’t get much better treatment than they’re getting already, and they will have to be nice to other outsiders in their turn).
Inline links: The Rise Of Christianity, cf. Backscratcher Clubs, eventually agreed
Epiphenomenal: COOPERATE-BOT isn’t really a good strategy, but is an unavoidable side effect of something else valuable. For example, maybe you couldn’t have Christians who loved God so much without having them be extremely loving and charitable people. The most dramatic version of this hypothesis is that God is real, and loving thy enemy is an epiphenomenon of following the actual Divine Law.
The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
The book is a novel (a real novel this time, with plot and everything) meant to dramatize the lessons of its predecessor. In the near future, the Muslims and Christians are on the verge of global war. Adams’ self-insert character, the Avatar, goes around hypnotizing and mind hacking everyone into cooperating with his hare-brained scheme for world peace.