The Skeptic Community's Blind Spot for Gender Theory

[Mermoose]

One of the most disappointing aspects of the gender debate has been the response of the skeptic community. Apart from a few - Maria MacLachlan, Andy Lewis, Gia Milinovich - prominent skeptics have either been silent or supportive of gender theory. Which would be fine, if they could offer cogent arguments for it, but they can't. Robin Ince, who scoffs at people believing in homeopathy, disappears off Twitter when asked to explain his belief in gender essence.
I have a theory as to how this has happened.
I think I'm a skeptic but it's fairly common (and it's always annoyed me) to find skeptics not only debunking fallacies but sneering at those who believe them. One reason it annoys me is that I once believed in a lot of that stuff, and even though I've now changed my mind, I remember how it felt and why I believed in it. I don't think I was stupid, and likewise I don't think people who still believe in it are stupid. Also because I was wrong once, I know I will probably be wrong again, so I'm never 100% sure of my opinions.
Do a lot of skeptics - skeptics like Robin Ince, who can be quite condescending (albeit in a funny way) - believe that only stupid people get things wrong? That they, being clever, are sure to be right? Is that why they haven't put gender theory - something they want to believe in - to the same test they'd put some quack medicine?

It's true a lot of people don't realise that it's specifically a rejection of dualism. Though the resurrection thing is pretty prominent people say it every mass in the Creed. I've wondered why so many never notice. That you can think about them separately doesn't make it dualism though.

I think the term ‘Manichaean’ sums up TRA’s belief in absolute good and absolute evil as much as Cartesian duality.

Though the resurrection thing is pretty prominent people say it every mass in the Creed.

It might as well be in Latin for all the attention people pay to the words.

Most Catholics I know believe in an independent spirit. That’s why they say of the departed ‘She’s up there now, watching over us’. They don’t say ‘She’s down there, but one day she’ll dig her way out.’

They don’t say ‘She’s down there, but one day she’ll dig her way out.’
I was at a funeral a while ago and the priest was talking about how the guy who died was in heaven. This was while we were sitting there looking at the coffin. So, I really don't know how this whole indivisible soul and body thing is supposed to work.

Actually Goosefoot, I assume you are a practising Catholic who does believe that bodies and souls are inseparable? If so, what does that mean? What happens when you die? Are you unconscious until Judgement Day and then you wake up and you have your physical body? And if that's the case, given that the earth will eventually be swallowed up by the sun, but before that we're looking at stuff like the seas buringing up and general nastiness - does the after life only last while the earth is still pleasant to live in? Or do we go to another planet? I'm not joking, I'm serious, I'm really interested to know how this works.

Sorry, I just have so many questions. I mean, the church likes to avoid conflicts with scientific knowledge. So, we know that bodies decay. And atoms get recycled. So the carbon etc that makes up one person's body will, eventually, make up the bodies of other animals. Given that the atoms disperse, how is it possible for a soul to remain with the body? Do souls disperse too?

Catholic churches will often have relics. So again, if I have, for example, the heart of St Valentine (it's in a church in Dublin) does that mean I have a bit of the soul of St Valentine, but not all of it?

Also, if our physical form comes from our soul, but people show inherited traits, does that mean that souls are the product of your parents' souls? is there some sort of soul-sex going on? And if so, then how come God is the one who creates your soul?

(I was going to spend the evening watching Blake's 7 but this is just weirder then anything that's going to happen in that).

There's plenty of secular dualism to go around tbh. I know plenty of people who scoff at the thought of a soul but can't bring themselves to believe that consciousness/ "the mind" is (as far as we know) just an emergent brain state that will cease when our brains stop working. You hear it all the time with death - her body's there, but she's gone. It's not necessarily that they believe in an after life, but the idea that we are our bodies and nothing more is quite unbearable to many people.

ByGrabtharsHammarWhatASaving yeah, I completely agree.
I'm just genuinely interested in Goosefoot's take on the implications of an eternal soul that's indivisible from a physical body.

Bygrabthars that's a good point about secular versions of duellism.

You see the same kind of dualism in transhumanism and their belief that you can someday ‘upload’ your consciousness as if you can somehow decant the mind into a machine.

Mermoose

I am not in fact Catholic but I can try and answer your questions. They're pretty good thoughts really you've put together a lot of theologically related ideas.

Maybe the most basic thing that you have to understand in order to see how it's meant to fit together is the relation of the physical world and time to the eternal or spiritual. If you remember your physics, time and space belong together, there is no such thing as time before the universe started, or presumably after it ends, or outside of the edges of the universe however that works. Christianity like platonism sees God as the first cause of the universe, so not in it, and pre-existing it, and not a physical body. You could think of it as a sort of mathematical, self-existent pattern. So you would not say that God is in a place or in time, but exists outside of time.

So, keeping that in mind, the idea with physical death for animals is that when the body dies, the soul, or the immaterial pattern element of the creature, also is lost, as they are a complete unity. But with human beings, they have a connection to something a little more robust, rationality, logic, and so there is something which remains. It's not quite like a person anymore though because you can't be yourself without your body.
There are some Christian groups, many of the American Evangelicals, who do believe that the soul sleeps until the end of time. None of the older Christian groups teaches that, they believe that the soul is with God, in Heaven, outside of time but conscious, although without their bodies God through love makes them more themselves than they would be under natural circumstances (this is related to the role of Jesus but that would be a much longer post.)
Their bodies on Earth decay normally of course, although this teaching is part of the reason it used to be forbidden to have cremations, though it was symbolic not because people weren't aware of how things rot. The end of time is mostly described in pretty symbolic terms but seems to mean the end of the physical universe. But because the universe is both innately good, and loved, it isn't just let disappear - it's then remade without the problems that beset it before, in an immortal form that is meant to be final. Including people's bodies, the land and so on.

I hope that answers some of your questions, it's a long post so I'll leave it there for now.

The Bina48 is a good example of that Always, it was designed by a TW tech billionaire to "upload" his wife's memory banks - it's named after her and also modelled to look like her and constantly says things to her like "I'm the real Bina, you're just my early prototype". Creepy as hell (and also how I actually expect society to go at some point).

You see the same kind of dualism in transhumanism and their belief that you can someday ‘upload’ your consciousness as if you can somehow decant the mind into a machine.
Yes! It's really interesting how futurists have recreated the same beliefs in eternal life and a separate consciousness. There's also Aubrey de Grey who believes that eternal youth is just around the corner.

ByGrabtharsHammarWhatASaving that is so freaky.

Goosefoot Thanks! This bit they believe that the soul is with God, in Heaven, outside of time but conscious, although without their bodies sounds like souls and bodies are separable though, doesn't it? Anyway I'm happy to leave it there too. I am honestly interested though. You probably already know this, but some alchemists worked on the same premise of soul giving form to matter - they tried to isolate the 'soul' of gold. Which is a lovely poetic idea.

sounds like souls and bodies are separable though, doesn't it?

Sort of. I find the best way to get a sense of this for me is the poetic imagery around it. The idea that before the resurrection of Christ, people were "shades" in a kind of Limbo like state. Like a shadow of what they were, because you really can't be yourself without your flesh. In icons of the harrowing of Hell you see Christ having broken down the gates, with death under his feet, and he is pulling Adam and Eve by their wrists out of their coffins, so they will be able to await the end of time in Heaven.
So while death is seen as coming through an interruption of the relationship to the source of life, God, in the Fall, it's through that connection with the first principle being re-established through Christ that death is overcome. Christ is kind of like a program that repairs a computer system being destroyed by a virus by re-establishing the original programming. The "being yourself without a body in Heaven" is in a sense only possible because they will be reunited with their bodies in the end.

Alchemy is very much based on a lot of the same ideas about form and matter, and it is very poetic I agree. A soul is just another word for form when it's in a living thing, be it a human or plant or mushroom. Most (all?) of the alchemists were platonists. A lot of the early scientists thought pretty much the same way, in their search for principles of matter they say themselves as trying to discern the forms and causes. I think even today among mathematicians and physicists you find a higher than average number of platonists, that's been my experience anyway.

I had a chat with my mother (who's a practising Catholic - she's actually a Eucharistic Minister) and asked her if she thought the soul leaves the body at death. She said yes, that she thinks the soul is immortal but the body isn't. Regarding the bit in the Creed, she looks at that as symbolic.

My mother and I have an unspoken agreement where I don't tease out her beliefs with questions - she gets an emotional support from her belief but she's said that thinking about it closely makes her uncomfortable these days because a lot of it doesn't make too much sense. She takes the feeling from it that helps her and anything that doesn't fit with her morals or her logic, she files under symbolism.

There is a similarity, I think, between Catholicism and trans issues. The discrepancy between what many Catholics believe (and think their religion holds as true) and what church teaching actually is, is similar to the difference between the opinions of everyday people supportive of trans rights, and what gender theory actually claims. Catholics (in my experience) don't know the church believes in the indivisibility of the soul and the body and in physical resurrection, and most people telling feminists they should be nicer don't know that they are meant to believe that trans women are literally female, and simultaneously that sex doesn't exist.

The people who do hold these beliefs are in one case theologians and in the other philosophers (I guess you could say one is a subset of the other anyway). And what they have is the ability to construct arguments which are worded in careful ways so as to give a veneer of plausibility to something which, if the average person tried to claim it, would sound like nonsense.

#irony

www.edinburghskeptics.co.uk/skepdayJan/Critical-Thinking?fbclid=IwAR3IrC7eCysized_WrQVE1cAoIaz1m3Fzr2P9CvuF_xz0O8Vc24FdYBsMkg

I think we are caught between an older generation who took their wives for granted and a younger generation who takes their rights for granted.

This. And post-modernism misunderstood by anglo-saxon academia.