I generally believe Jesus existed. Most knowledge was carried in the oral tradition - often for centuries or more. A social movement clearly happened around that time; it left a giant impact on history. While the origin story could have been fabricated entirely, ie, patched together from other legends and myths (lots of evidence of this borrowing), it's more likely that a person of some fame and influence was mythologized, pre-existing patterns magnetizing to him in retellings.

There were many rebellious young men at the time claiming to be God fighting the Jewish and Roman establishments in Israel. We know a man called Jesus was crucified, but the others who claimed they were God would also have been crucified, as that was the standard penalty. It was a known crime with a known punishment.

It's quite possible the Jesus story is some sort of averaging of these people (and executions) spanning several decades, with other mythology attached. But it's more likely, in my opinion, that one of these figures stood out as particularly wise.

Someone had to weave those words. That *even he* (if this explanation holds) was crucified in brutal prejudice would have been striking, tragic, and strikingly tragic to his followers.

I see no reason to ignore the historical setting - the fact quite a few young men matched Jesus's broad description as heretic, prophet, and leader claiming to be God or hear from God directly - and insist NO such person existed. And, again, I see little reason to believe that the words of a particularly wise and memorable individual of this kind could not have been remembered for a few decades before they were written down. Oral tradition was the norm, not the exception.

By the time the words were written, it seems there was already a movement and religion. It isn't as if the words were written, sat in a book for some time, and slowly built a following with people who appreciated the book. It's more as if a religious leader created a movement and eventually followers recorded a mixture of fact and legend.

Still, he may be a sort of Everyman character representing a couple generations of rebels and heretics, the voice of the pure Jewish spirit under Roman domination before much (not most but a lot) of the population at the capital was slaughtered (a definitely real event, not long after, that would have been symbolized well by crucifixion, an iconically Roman punishment).

Whether it's true or not, I like the idea that some actual words of one of the rebels were remembered. And I don't find that at all implausible.

All this basically is what Reza Aslan says in his book Zealot, but I find it persuasive.

One thing that can happen when you grow up in an abusive environment is that you develop a sort of allergy to hostility. Even amounts that would be considered normal can set you off, spiking feelings of disgust. You may well end up being kind of a pushover, as you're good at adapting and you have an inner need to stay away from meanness.

You actually see this as a strength, but others will typically see it as a weakness, unless they happen to see the wisdom (or a benefit to them) in that instance. Now, their reception doesn't mean you are a total pushover. In some situations, you may be exactly the opposite. The abusive environment likely taught you survival and defense skills, yet you can navigate others' "drama" - inconveniences, ignorances, or hostilities - with a kind of aikido that makes it look like you aren't doing much, because you aren't doing the things people usually do that make situations worse (often these are attempts to fix things in ways that simply won't work). You may be very capable of holding your own in a fight. It's just that you are considerably less willing to go there even than most normal people raised well. You associate hostility with the badness of your upbringing. You don't want to be the bad guy. You want to be the opposite of the bad guy.

This temperament is, like so many things, a strength and a weakness. People around you often benefit from the strength without realizing it; or they may realize and compliment you on your balance, gentleness, etc. But they may not like it when the other shoe drops and you show some understanding toward someone they feel is their enemy (or in some important way opposing them), or when your matter-of-factness (you are so practiced at not trying to be hurtful that you know you are not trying that, but they may not know that even after knowing you for years) ends up hurting their feelings.

One of the best things you can do to maximize the strength and minimize the weakness is to read about assertiveness and work on that. You already have many of the elements of skillful assertiveness, but you probably aren't putting them quite in the right order. 

I could be mistaken, but I tend to think of "burden of proof" in a statistical sense, like Occam's Razor. Example... your friend says "Look out! There's a car coming!" Now, you could 1) Put the burden of proof on your friend and wait for more information, 2) Put the burden of proof on yourself and turn your head to look, or 3) Fucking jump.

All have their place.

I'm just saying that if you rely too heavily on burden of proof, sometimes you will get hit by a car that demonstrably doesn't exist because the person who claims so hasn't bothered to prove it to your satisfaction yet, while you waited upon their efforts as if they were a slave feeding you grapes in ancient Egypt.

Ya know? ;)

Gaslighting and disagreeing are two different things. Gaslighting is phony and unaccountable. It's playing a game of optics, saying something you don't actually believe in order to manipulate perceptions and suppress a true story. Disagreeing is simply countering because you genuinely believe otherwise. But there is some overlap when the disagreeing is unaccountable. In other words, you disagree, but you won't hear or consider or adapt to new information: that's the root of delusionality.

Now, sometimes a person does hear new information (or they actually heard it or thought it before), but they don't do a good job of making it clear, out loud, that they heard it. This is very common in discussions, but it's also very common that people simply brush information aside intentionally. One way they do the latter is by mockery, shaming, etc. They use emotional tactics to distract from the information they don't know how to respond to. This too is a root of delusionality. But they may actually believe they are arguing well, so in that sense they are not being phony or intentionally manipulative.

What I'm saying is that when you are not accountable in your reasoning - or even just when you aren't clear enough about what you have heard and understood from another person - it can come across as gaslighting, even though it's either garden variety delusionality (groupthink, lack of critical thinking, other biases) or failure to repeat back what's heard.

It's very common for someone to hear a line of argument, say basically nothing about it (or else throw in some words of mockery), and then provide a completely different line of argument to try to one-up the first.

One of the quickest ways to seem illogical - and become illogical - is to ignore other people's reasoning. If you aren't actually addressing someone's argument directly, you very likely are not one-upping it.

In a debate there is an unspoken expectation that you actually respond to what others say, that you don't just ignore it when it's convenient to ignore it. Anyone of course is free not to meet that expectation, but they should be aware that a tendency to ignore others' points strikes some people as very far from subtle and as an indication of incompetence.

I don't trust what someone says because they say it firmly. I trust what they say because they can handle disagreement and respond to it directly without cheap tactics like shaming, ridicule, etc (I'd make an exception for comedians or moments of comic relief, but laughing at a thought, or getting others to laugh at it, is extremely far from a reliable way to address it).

If you show off that your thought process is unreliable in its core strategy, then you give me less reason to trust what you say.

If you show off that your thought process is scrupulously accountable, then you give me reason to trust what you say.

It has nothing to do with how bold or certain someone sounds. And it isn't about gaslighting or not gaslighting, usually - though the former certainly puts someone in the "unreliable thought process" category. 

Not too many people get to the core of it, but there's been a public attitude shift about capitalism and money. It happened after I started getting very critical vocally - years after (I know, probably a silly hipster attitude). For me, harm to the biosphere was the central proof that something is wrong with the system. There's a lot of analysis, but I don't think you can get around that. This system the free marketeers believe in so strongly seems inextricably linked with degradation of the habitability of Earth for most of its species, including humans.

That was in the public consciousness, but many voices denied the link, even though when you look at the data, it punches you in the face over and over and over. You can't miss the connection if you look with an open mind, and it's difficult to refute in clear intellectual/scientific conscience. Even countries that are doing really well (it seems, environmentally) show this same link between money flow and degradation.

Then some studies came out. A different kind of study. Results that had been lurking in smaller studies got citations and more attention.

There's a link between having a less understanding, more mean-spirited personality and making money. And on the other hand, there's a link between empathy and making less money. Maybe we all kind of knew this in the backs of our minds, but it's easy to half-know something and move on. Maybe it wasn't true. Maybe it was a trick of the light. Maybe we were flattering ourselves, or on the other side of the fence, maybe people were just jealous or weak.

Except that's a robust finding. Agreeableness is closely linked with empathy, helping professions, lower income, etc. And low agreeableness is linked with higher income.

A spate of articles came out declaring capitalism to be the most empathetic of all systems. Some might have been fooled by the pleas, but to someone aware of this research thread, the motivation behind - and the sophistry used in - the articles was crystal clear. This was apologism and a subtle form of gaslighting, or else it was just plain delusional projection from people who were good at arguing and writing, and could make these maneuvers and contortions seem legitimate and reasonable. No, free market capitalism is not ultra-empathetic. Face evidence, don't contort it.

Other findings were coming out around the same time about hubris syndrome - what one might call the toxic overconfidence of many leaders - and its close relative and likely its main underlying mechanism, a tendency for humans to lose empathy as they rise through the ranks of social hierarchy.

Not only was making lots of money associated with being a comparatively mean person, but gaining social status tended to make people meaner, or at least more insensitive.

These are associations, not unavoidable fates - it's possible to be a good person in a position of leadership, or to accumulate wealth in good ways - but experiments show there's a mechanism. It's something deep in human nature that we have to work to counteract.

It just doesn't make the traditional hierarchy look very good, does it? Any of it? Throw in the fact its ways seem deeply patriarchal and colonial. I may have just shot the notion of "the best of all possible systems" in the head, and it wasn't difficult (except it was, because scientists spend careers asking questions and figuring out how to answer them reliably, and this little chat is a brief, breezy consolidation of many careers' worth of work).

But we still aren't all on the same page yet, nor are we clear on how to fix the fundamental interactions of capitalism, ie, of economic life.

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There were other events and forces. The Great Recession, the popularity of Bernie Sanders, the election of Trump, and the pandemic all put arrows in the chest of the traditional creed - the idea that freewheeling capitalism is wonderful and we all just need to suck it up, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and go from rags to riches if we don't like what we see or experience.

But as with full acceptance of LGBTQIA+ people (definitively a natural variation, not a choice), legal cannabis (much less harmful than believed, enforcement was ineffective and racist), etc, science worked in the background to update what was known, and then public opinion slowly caught on.

You can know before other people if you take an interest in new science.

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I do have some thoughts about how to fix the basic interactions, and I wish I were part of a community working on this. 

The problem with controversy is that people think you're a bad person for making an argument on any side that isn't theirs. You're automatically suspicious for not simply falling in line and making arguments that ADVANCE their cause. If you aren't ADVANCING whatever a person feels their cause is, they will likely see you as the OPPOSITION.

Most people even think this is the right way to be. This is how you get things done. You pick a side and argue for that side. That's the game you play.

Except it's the game that makes people groupthinky and eventually prejudicial. Fight hate with hate? Fight prejudice with prejudice? That seems to be the usual thinking.

If you're the kind of person who makes arguments for (and against) every side or idea in a debate, you quickly notice this weird neuroticism that causes people to be unable to argue for anything but their chosen cause.

That isn't how you think well. That's a way to get delusional.

There are few things stranger than being called presumptuous or conceited for saying what's true.

Of course, I think we have to agree that not everything that's true is appropriate, useful, or even safe to say at all times to all people. But I really try to give everyone truth points. If it's true, it doesn't matter how much I don't like it or wish you could have said it better or at a better time - you get points for saying something true.

I'll even give you some points for spouting utter bullshit, as long as it really seems to me that you believe what you're saying.

I'm not sure what's difficult or weird about this. If you try it, you might like it.