Did Christians Outbreed the Competition? Scott Alexander & Rodney Stark's Rise of Christianity

In this episode, Malcolm and Simone discuss Scott Alexander's review of 'The Rise of Christianity.' They explore how Christianity spread rapidly in its early days, challenging common beliefs about widespread conversions driven by miracles. Instead, factors such as higher fertility rates among Christians, effective social networks, and the appeal of Christianity's treatment of women played crucial roles. The episode delves into the socio-cultural context of ancient Rome, comparisons with modern cult movements, and the implications for both historical understanding and contemporary religious dynamics.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! Today we are going to be discussing a very interesting piece, Scott Alexander's review of The Rise of Christianity.

And in it, he goes through how Christianity spread as fast as it did, it is astounding how quickly Christianity was able to spread in its early days. And it was not through the, tactic that most people think, which is widespread conversions based on either miracles or just the logic of what was in the text.

Instead, it appears to have mostly been downstream of Christians having more children, having more surviving children. And having an ability to convert women at a much higher rate in the early days.

But the children, childbirth appears to be the core of this. Also, their plague surviving rates appear to have been quite different. So we're going to go over each of these in turn.

Speaker: [00:01:00] In ancient Rome, where altars shone, the pagan gods once ruled alone. But quietly came a faithful breed Not through big signs, but with small seed They gathered in humble prayer No sweeping crowds or mass fanfare They built their homes with children glad More babes they bore than pagans had

Malcolm Collins: The challenge Well, Andy,

Simone Collins: even the Christianity seemed to have spread through the kindling of Judaism, which had already spread, which is also fascinating.

It's just such a cool

Malcolm Collins: overview. Yeah. The challenge with any Scott Alexander piece is he writes In a way, we're typically when we're reading a piece, we are throwing out 90 percent of it. This time we're keeping probably well over 80 percent of it with a number of factual and textual additions because there's a few minor errors [00:02:00] he makes.

And there are a few areas where I just happen to for whatever reason know additional information that helps flesh things out a lot.

Simone Collins: Oh, that's fun. Because what I love most about Scott Alexander's book reviews is you get a great summary of the book, then you get additional research and annotation from Scott Alexander, and now I'm getting layer three from Malcolm.

This is like tiramisu now, you know, first you start with the muffin and then you get a cupcake and now I'm getting, whoa, man, this is great. Let's

Malcolm Collins: go

Simone Collins: into it.

Malcolm Collins: All right, dive in.

Simone Collins: Scott Alexander writes, 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, they were 40 million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history. Imagine taking a time machine to the year 2300 AD, and everyone is a Scientologist. The United States is over 99 percent [00:03:00] Scientologist. So is Latin America and most of Europe. The Middle East follows some heretical pseudo Scientology that thinks L.

Ron Hubbard was a great prophet, but maybe not the greatest prophet. This can only begin to capture how surprised the early Imperial Romans would be to learn of the triumph of Christianity. At least Scientology has a lot of money and cutthroat recruitment arm. At least they fight back when you persecute them.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, so I think that this is all really important to note because a lot of people do not realize how quickly Christianity basically came out of nowhere from a small persecuted group that was not seen as particularly different during Jesus's lifetime than other small, roaming Thaumatological Performing Rabbis. So, quick note here if you don't know what I'm talking about. Thaumatological performances is a type of magical performance, which is like a miracle working as a magic trick. It was [00:04:00] really common for random rabbis to roam around and perform these types of miracles.

You know, you have like the circle drawer, you have the, I'll add a few in post here.

You have Hani bond. Doza. , who performed numerous miracles, including making vinegar burn like oil for Shabbat candles. When his daughter mistakenly use vinegar instead of oil. He also extended the links of beams for a woman's house through blessing. Additionally, he was known for controlling rain with his prayers. He wants prayed for rain to stop while he was traveling and it ceased immediately. You have Honi the circle drawer. He is famous for his miracle of praying for rain during a severe drought in Israel, he drew a circle and the dust stood inside it and vowed not to leave until God sent rain. Initially only I liked drizzle fell, prompting him to pray again for more substantial rain.

Ultimately God answered his prayers with a heavy downpour Shimon bar Yochai., he. Performed healing miracles. And.

It was said that he could burn people with his gaze. One notable miracle involved the emperor's daughter who was possessed and he was called to help her. Additionally, [00:05:00] during this time in a cave, He and his son were miraculously sustained by carob tree and a Sprig of water. After emerging from the cave, it was reported that everything looked at a world burnt to ashes. Indicating his extraordinary spiritual. Power.

I say this because I think it actually undermines the amazing growth of the early Christian community. To overstate how unique Jesus would have appeared to people of his time.

And I would note here, the point I am not making is that all of these other miracle workers actually performed their miracles. But what I am saying is that it was widely believed that they had, so if me a random person around this time had a group of people come to me and say, Hey, there was this rabbinic miracle worker, and here are some of the miracles he performed.

I'd be like, yeah, a guy told me about another one yesterday. And a guy told me about a different one the day before., Like it wouldn't have been unique.

and people can be like, well, you know, he raised people from the dead. That was totally unique. And it's like, well, not really.

[00:06:00] If you go to the old Testament, for example, the widow of Zarephath son raised by Elijah, the prophet, the shin termite woman's son raised by

Elijah successor. , and then from the new Testament you have Thomasa Dorcas raised by the apostle Peter. , you have YouTube Chris raised by the apostle Paul. , so that again, if you over emphasize, like, if Abe, if Jesus was just this amazing guy that nobody could possibly deny in everyone who saw him was immediately like, yeah, I'm on board with this, you've changed everything. , this story actually becomes a little less remarkable because it's like, oh, well, that's why it's spread.

But when you realize that. Within the context of his time, Jesus would not have been that different for many of the other people in the region who had followings. , it becomes absolutely amazing how quickly it grew and a miracle that is. In fact, I think a bigger miracle than many of the miracles that Jesus has reported to have, Carried out and a miracle that it is much harder for a secular [00:07:00] person to deny.

But to give you an idea of.

How undifferentiated Jesus was from other walking you know, random Thaumatological performances we have recorded in the Bible pretty miraculously What a random traveling magician would think of Jesus, in the story of Simon Magos Whereas Simon Magos sees Jesus. He is a sorcerer a a basically I mean unless you think that there were random like actual sorcerers in the area at the time he was a magician And he saw what Jesus was doing and he said, Hey, can I buy that trick from you?

And Jesus got really mad about it. You know, but the point being is that we know we have, we have the answer to the question. If a random magician saw Jesus, what would he think? He would think he was a magician.

To put it. In other words, the types of.

Belmont to logical beat Jesus was performing. We're not seen as uniquely spectacular or out of place when contrasted with the type of feeds performed by traveling magicians.

Of that time period in that region it's actually incredibly [00:08:00] important from a theological perspective because it removes any validation given to Jesus's claims by his miracle work and the claims and the growth of the movement have to provide the validity themselves, which I think is a higher form of validity than I believe it because the guy performed miracles. , also here.

I would note if you haven't read the infancy gospel of Thomas or studied it. ,

it's a non-canonical gospel where it's like, well, what if you had all the magical powers of Jesus, but you were a kid and didn't have a lot of self-control. How might he have used them during that time period?

, and it comes off a lot, like this, get.

Speaker 4: No, David Blaine, no. I'm

Speaker 2: what'd you buy?

Speaker 4: Uh, I bought a green sweater, if you want to know. Okay, I bought a green sweater.

Speaker 5: Interesting. Are you sure you didn't buy a teddy bear?

Speaker 4: Yes, I'm sure I didn't. Teddy bear? What the eff? How did you? How? Where's my sweater?

David Blaine. David Blaine. He bought a green sweater, okay? You're being mean. You're being stupid. Where is it? Look at your effing [00:09:00] body right now, Peter.

What the eff, how the hell? I was holding things! Did you feel anything? Thanks, you stretched it out probably, thank you. Please, please, stop it. I don't want to wear it right now. Please stop. I don't even want to wear it yet.

Speaker 3: Hey, what are you drinking? I'm drinking orange soda. Ooh, big whoop.

Speaker 4: Hey, what else is orange? What else is orange? I don't know. Cheez Its? Cheez Its! What the? Cheez Its! F**k! What the? Where's my orange soda?

It's orange soda in my mouth! What the F? You put it in my mouth! What the F? How did you get it in my mouth? Please stop, you demon!

Malcolm Collins: And he, so, so the, Oh, and he was, there

Simone Collins: was a type. It was, it was, He was a common, the, the Great Courses series on the historical Jesus aka Wonderium describes Jesus as an apocalyptic Jew in an age where there were lots of apocalyptic Jews just kind of walking around and preaching.

It might be akin [00:10:00] to like seeing a life coach today.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we know this because of like the Dead Sea Scrolls community, which was around the same time period a bit before, but was also, a group of apocalyptic Jews. Sorry, apocalyptic Jews means Jews who think the world is about to end not end exactly, but enter the next phase of existence and that they are coming to bring this.

And many of Christ's early followers believed that his second coming was going to happen soon. Within their lifetimes. We can see this in the letters. Where I think it's Paul writing to a group who's like, some of our members are dying before the Messiah comes. Like, what are we supposed to do?

And he goes, oh, well, their bodies will be raised. But the fact that they were worried about dying before the Messiah comes showed that they, like, Rose from the dead again shows that they saw that as an anathema. That as a weird thing.

That this was a common belief in the early church. You can see in things like Paul's letter to the Thessaloniki. , where he says, [00:11:00] quote, for this, we declare to you by the word of the Lord that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord by no means precede. Those who have died for the Lord himself with a cry or. Of command with arc angels call and was the sounds of God's trumpet will descend from heaven and the dead in Christ will rise first.

Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet with the Lord in the air. Therefore, encourage one another with these words in quote.

So you can see very clearly here. He says, that we who are alive. And he's talking about the people who are listening to him or reading this letter are going to experience the second coming of Christ. , as to why he would think this, well, you just need to look at Christ's own words. Matthew 24 30 to 31, mark 13, 26, 27. And Luke 2127 to 28. , where Jesus states quote, truly, I tell you this generation in quote, meaning his contemporaries will not pass away [00:12:00] until all these things have come to take place in quote Matthew 24 34, mark. 1330 Luke, 2132.

I am here. Not trying to point out that the Bible is wrong or something. I think that they misinterpreted these words that said, I don't think that they were stupid for misinterpreting these words. And I'm just pointing out here that it was a common belief in the early church that Jesus was going to come back before. Within their generation and they weren't stupid for having this belief.

And this becomes even more powerful when you look at the spread of Christianity, because it makes even less sense. It becomes even more miraculous when you see that. Early wrong beliefs in the early Christian Church did not invalidate its rapid growth.

So you've got to think about what Jesus's group was. The followers of Jesus who keep in mind, we believe we're actually true and correct and everything like that.

But I don't think that they were I'm very different from your average modern Christian who thinks that like anyone who saw what Jesus was doing would immediately have known he was the [00:13:00] Messiah. I don't think that there's other times in the Bible when we see people raise people from the dead, everything like that.

I think that. Only a, a, a truly because he just didn't have a big crowd when he died. He didn't have a ton of followers when he died. If you saw somebody perform these like absolutely undeniable feats of magic and you're like, okay, this person is definitely the son of God. You're not going to turn your back on them just because the government is prosecuting them.

And you can be like, oh, well, you know, it was Rome. Like, what would people really go through for the Messiah against Rome? And we're going to get to that in a second. People were willing to be devoured by lions for Jesus. People were willing to have horrible things happen to them under the Roman Empire for Jesus.

And yet, the crowd that Jesus had built around him, who actually saw the things that he did during his life, weren't Willing to rebuke him almost immediately the moment he came under fire of the empire. So the point that I'm saying is that this was originally a very sort of small [00:14:00] group a, a group that was not particularly differentiated from other groups in, in the period.

And that's true differentiation came from it. Super fast, gross. And I also love the, the crazy L Ron Hubbard thing when he's like, imagine not only are like 99 percent of America, North America, Scientologists, but the Middle East is like, well, you know, L Ron Hubbard was wrong, but he was one of the greatest prophets in human history.

And you're like, what, how did that happen in just 300 years?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and again, Scientologists have it so much easier slash are doing so much better than early Christians, right? They're, they're not being fed to lions, for example. They have lawyers that, that scare people. It's it's, it's very different.

Malcolm Collins: So very interesting. Yeah, my read is

that

when Jesus died, he may have had 50 followers. Like really?

Simone Collins: Maybe more. I mean, there were crowd issues. You know, when he came to certain cities, I think Roman officials were a little concerned about [00:15:00] him.

Malcolm Collins: There were crowd issues, but here is my read on the 50 followers thing.

Okay. If you had a traveling miracle worker and healer of which we know there were many during that period You would likely get crowd issues when they went to a random town or something like that That doesn't mean that they all followed him They may have wanted healing and they went to the last miracle worker for healing.

And they went to him for healing. They may have liked it. This guy was handing out bread and fish and wine in his event. I'm sure

Simone Collins: like if Greta Thunberg walked into Berlin or something, you know, she would form dangerous crowds as well.

Malcolm Collins: People came to the moment the government turned against him, the fact that he didn't have some big crowd, like speak out or prevent this or even just go remove him from the freaking cross.

To me, that's, that's always been pretty He must not have had a really sizable community.

Speaker 6: Your family arrived then. , I have been asked to read the following prepared statement are we, do hereby convey our sincere greetings on this, the occasion of your martyrdom.

What?

Simone Collins: Well, the rules are the [00:16:00] rules. I don't know what to tell you.

Malcolm Collins: That's like Jesus. I see you're on the cross. I know like probably bit a group and get you down. But I don't want to risk it.

Simone Collins: We're outnumbered.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Okay. Did not go for a few tables.

Simone Collins: So,

Speaker 6: And I'd just like to add my own admiration for what you're doing , at what must be, after all, for you, a very difficult time.

Speaker 7: You

b******s!

Simone Collins: He continues, previous authorities assumed Christianity spread through giant mass conversions may be fueled by miracles. Partly they thought this because the biblical book of Acts describes some of these, but partly they thought it because how else do you go from a thousand people to forty million people in less than four hundred years?

Stark answers. Steady, exponential growth. 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, [00:17:00] before Constantine, they were a sizable enough faction of the empire that some historians have tentatively suggested a 10 percent population share.

That would be about 6 million people. From 260 years implies a 40 percent growth rate per decade.

Stark finds this plausible because it's the same growth rate as the Mormons, 1880 to 1980. If you look at the Mormons entire history since 1830, they actually grew a little faster than the early Christians.

Malcolm Collins: That is, I think, absolutely a fascinating point. That is, because it shows that,

Simone Collins: like, it could be. It could very well be. I mean, their growth rate still isn't great right now, but if Mormons managed to pass through, as you put it, the Trial of the Lotus Eaters. They could be the next main faction of Christians.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, actually and that they're growing faster than the early Christians. Exactly. We say that, like, when I'm looking at, like, why do I believe Christ had a divinely inspired message. It is because of the efficaciousness of his [00:18:00] message and the speed of growth of his message. And a lot of people I think are surprised that we consider the Mormons as one of the true face.

We believe there's multiple sort of like in a four dimensional space, like you, you can't try to reconcile them on this earth, but in some way, if you had a broader understanding, you could reconcile them. And we consider Mormons as one of them, and a lot of people are very surprised at that given how small a community they are right now.

But given that we're very forwards looking it makes a lot of sense that we would do that if you look at their growth rate and other similarities that he's going to point out to the Mormons today of the early Christian community. But I also find it interesting that this, as we wrote in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, can mostly be explained by higher fertility rates and not by conversions.

Conversions are, in a historic context, fairly rare.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker: Each brand new life, a living call. That soon outgrew. The pagan, [00:19:00] no grand crusade in streets of stone, no golden flags or trumpets blown yet countless children won the fight and pagan ways. Soon lost their mind, they didn't conquer hearts by force, or cast the shrines in sudden course.

They simply grew in numbers, see, the cradle was their victory.

Simone Collins: Instead of being forced to attribute the Christian's growth to miracles, we can pin down a specific growth rate and find that it falls within the range of the most successful modern cults. Indeed, if we look at this, as each existing Christian having to convert 0.

4 new people on average per decade, it starts to sound downright doable. Still, how did the early Christians maintain this conversion rate over [00:20:00] so many generations? Through the social graph! This is another of Stark's findings, from his work with the Moonies. That's so interesting. The first Moonie in America was a Korean missionary named Jung Un Kim, who arrived in 1959.

Her first convert was her landlady. The next two were the Landlady's friends. Then came the Landlady's friends husbands, and the Landlady's friends, husband's, coworkers. That was when Stark showed up. Quote, at the time I arrived, dot, dot, dot, to study them, the group had never succeeded in attracting a stranger, end quote.

Stark theorized that, quote, the only people who joined were those whose interpersonal attachments to members overbalanced their attachments to non members, end quote. I don't think this can be literally correct. Taken seriously, this implies that the second convert would have no other friends except the first, which would prevent her from spreading the religion further.

But something like Quote, your odds of converting are your number of moony friends divided by your number of non [00:21:00] moony friends, unquote, seems to fit his evidence. History confirms this story. Muhammad's first convert was his wife, followed by his cousin, servant, and friend. Joseph Smith's first converts were his brothers, friends, and lodgers.

Indeed, in spite of the Mormons celebrated door knocking campaign, their internal data shows that only one in a thousand door knocks results in a conversion, but quote, when missionaries make their first contact with a person in the home of a Mormon friend or relative of that person, This results in conversion 50 percent of the time end quote people sometimes accused

Malcolm Collins: one before we go further here I will know we actually did further data on this in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion I'd say that it's much lower than one in a thousand results in a convert The way that they mark conversion is pretty shady.

They're like do a And keep in mind, when you're in other countries, sometimes people will convert to like, use the Mormon facilities because they basically got like YMCA setups in other countries, where it's like, oh, I want to play soccer at the Mormon facility, I just say I'm a convert. But if you actually look at the [00:22:00] increase in tithing members, it is completely trivial, that Mormons are not converting large populations.

At least not anymore, maybe they were historically, but it seems to me now that the reason for this Particular Mormon ritual is that it makes it very hard for an individual who has gone through it to deconvert because they have sort of this sunk cost fallacy along with what's the word disassociation?

not disassociation when you, when, when, when something doesn't align with what you believe about the world. Like if you have to go and try to convince somebody dissonance, cognitive dissonance. Yeah. If you have to go and try to convince a bunch of random strangers about something you've pretty much made up your mind about that.

Like if you get through your mission trip and you're still a Mormon at the end of it, you're likely going to stay a Mormon throughout your entire life. Almost all of the Mormon de convert stories I hear, they started de converting during their mission trip or before. So it's more about actually maintaining [00:23:00] the existing members and reaffirming their dedication to the faith than it is about getting converts.

That is not me saying that mission trips are pointless. This is me saying that mission trips actually serve a different function.

Simone Collins: It kind of weeds out the religiously weak.

Malcolm Collins: Yes.

Simone Collins: Non committed. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But it also helps increase the status of individuals who are willing to put in more for their religion to the point where almost everyone goes on a mission trip.

Like you, you have sort of a what can I say, like a faithfulness inflation problem within Mormonism where you have increasing things like that that you need to do to be a successful candidate on the market for a spouse because many wives won't seriously consider you if you haven't been on a mission trip.

Which I find really fascinating. Now there are numbers about how easy it is to convince, convert a Mormon who has like one Mormon friend, that that works 50 percent of the time. That also seems laughable. There's no way, there's no way that if a Mormon relative or they're going to convert 50 percent of the time a Mormon talks to them, that they must mean like of all Mormons talk to them or [00:24:00] all Mormons hound them.

Mormonism would just be spreading way more fastly if that was happening.

Simone Collins: Yeah, maybe something's off there, but. I do think that being embedded in Mormon, Mormon culture is infectious. Like if my family weren't somehow resistant to cults, I'm sure I would be Mormon because they're so great. But we are,

Malcolm Collins: sorry, you mean resistant to cults and that her family likes going to when my favorite quotes from her dad, I was like, you know, this is a cult.

Like, why are you going to it? Like this could be like really dangerous to you because, Oh, don't worry about me joining a cult. I've joined tons over the course of my life and that doesn't make me feel better. So rather than resistant to cults, they dip into cults and dip out of cults.

Simone Collins: No, we just, no, but we never joined.

Like that's our problem. Yeah, he never

Malcolm Collins: officially joined. Yeah. Anyway, This next part is actually a footnote that he had here, but I thought it was pretty relevant.

Simone Collins: People sometimes accuse modern social movements like environmentalism, [00:25:00] MAGA, wokeness, rationalism, etc. of being cults. But as far as I know, this rule doesn't apply to them.

Most people in these movements get involved by stumbling across a philosophy online and finding that it rings true. It seems to me like these modern movements are more likely to make unique and interesting claims about the world that could attract or repel certain types of people, whereas most cults are pretty similar.

This one guy is God, he commands you to chant. a bunch and give him money, but there's a holy book saying we want world peace. I wonder if this should actually be a counter to cultishness accusations. Quote, we can't be a cult, cults always spread through the social graph, but we learned about this movement from a blog.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So first of all, that is not how EA spreads anymore. Mostly spreads through like honey pots and stuff like that. It's like, Oh, don't you want to go to this like sex party or something? That's how, like, I, like when I first [00:26:00] heard about EA, I actually remember it was less wrong the first time I heard about it.

And he's like, well, I'm inviting you to this party. At like scorpion tarantula house or something like that. It was called. You should probably read some like less wrong posts on this blog before you come so you have a broad idea of what's going on Oh,

Simone Collins: that sounds very

Malcolm Collins: cultish. Oh, no. Yeah. Oh, you know, you know who was running the house.

No Divya no way wow so, I was I was going to you know, one of these parties and it was Very clear that like A lot of people went because there were more women at these events than other Silicon Valley events.

Simone Collins: Oh, well, it's very hard to find events with more women at them in Silicon Valley.

So that is,

Malcolm Collins: And EA and Let's Wrongism mostly spread through Silicon Valley group houses first, which had a really tight knit social graph for spreading. So one, I'm going to say, I don't know if he's completely wrong about this, but I'd also note something that I think that he's missing in all of this.

[00:27:00] Christianity. Mormonism a lot of the major world religions actually did not spread because of their founding member. You typically had a founding member, whether it's Christianity or Mormonism, who Or even

Simone Collins: Confucianism, right? I mean, it wasn't him in the end.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, who started what was a fairly small movement that was seen as extreme and Plato, Socrates.

Yeah. Actually, this really, yeah. Maybe a little weird by the society around them. And then you have your Brigham Young type P figure

In Christianity, this would be Paul, the apostle.

who really actually did the mass conversions in the early days and set up something that could eventually become a mainstream religion.

And I think this is why Scientology isn't going to become a mainstream religion because the person who it passed the baton onto has been pretty much entirely let's say, Exploitative, like, just try to milk his position for all [00:28:00] it's worth and not really try to set up an intergenerational tradition.

So it's, yeah, it's

Simone Collins: the second, it's the second person to take the baton who needs to set up that 40 percent annual conversion rate. And it seems as though Scientology has not managed that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so like if the techno Puritan tradition ends up working out, which by the way, now is a legal religion in the United States, we got us registered with the Fed.

We have converts now as well. With the IRS,

Simone Collins: with the IRS.

Malcolm Collins: Sorry, the IRS we have converts now, which is fun as well in the EA community, of course and that is really exciting to me because if we can spread, I think within the EA community is like we're, we're, we're going to spread the most similar to like how the Jews went out and got people ready.

And then the The, the which you'll hear here and then the Christians did a job sort of hitting it home and converting it. But I found this to be a very interesting point that I think can be elucidated with the idea that typically you have a [00:29:00] founder of a religion and then you have the person who really solidifies it and begins the mass conversions.

All right, continue.

Simone Collins: All right. This theory of social graph based conversion was controversial when Stark proposed it, because if you ask cultists retrospectively, they'll usually say they were awed by the beauty of the sacred teachings, but Stark says

quote, I knew better, because we had met them well before they had learned to appreciate the doctrines, before they had learned how to testify to their faith, back when they were not seeking faith at all. Indeed, we could remember, When most of them regarded the religious beliefs of their new set of friends is quite odd.

I recall one who told me that he was puzzled that such nice people could get so worked up about some guy in Korea, then one day he got worked up about this guy too.

Malcolm Collins: That's wild. But I, I like this. I mean, I think it shows that this thing where you're like, I just [00:30:00] converted because I saw the light.

That's not really the way it works. It's like you're in a community and the community talks about it. And then that ends up converting you over time.

Simone Collins: Yeah, you join for the lifestyle and then you start drinking the Kool Aid. And you see this even with brands. Maybe you get an iPhone and then five years later you're obsessed.

You buy a ton of Apple stock. This happens a lot with, I think, With Tesla related stuff then suddenly you have Starlink, then suddenly, you know, it just, it goes, there are these, these deepenings of affiliation and faith that people fall into, not just with regard to religion, but with regards to brands and other things as well, social communities too, you know, being goth, whatever, right?

Okay, so Scott Alexander continues from here. Jews were scattered across the Mediterranean even before the fall of the Temple. I don't know why. We Jews tell ourselves that we left Israel only after the Romans kicked us out, but Stark cites plenty of historians who argue that no, it was well before that.

Around the time of [00:31:00] Christ, there were a million Jews in Israel and five million in the Diaspora, especially Alexandria, Antioch, Anatolia and Rome. What were these Jews spiritual views like? Without hard evidence, Stark supposes they were marginal.

Throughout history, Jews have succeeded at keeping the law only within tight knit communities. If you want to keep kosher, it helps to have everyone around you keeping kosher and a local kosher butcher. If you want to keep the Sabbath, it helps to have an eruv and a synagogue within walking distance. But even more than that, the law is strange and complicated, and unless everyone around you follows it too, you are likely to slip.

Thus, when Jews were first emancipated and allowed to live among Gentiles in the 18th and 19th centuries, a split emerged in the Jewish community. Those Jews who stayed in the ghettos and shuttles or who founded new self imposed quasi ghettos like Crown Heights remained Orthodox. Those Jews who mingled with the Gentiles and cast off the more difficult rules became [00:32:00] Reform.

Only a sliver of modern Orthodox remained in the middle, often with abysmal attrition rates.

Malcolm Collins: This I think is a very good point about this form of religion, which is typically why we design techno puritanism to be a clan based religion instead of the form of religion, which is to say it's something that is practiced internally was in families, which a large degree of variation.

So that your family is the core unit of your tradition and not your church, not your synagogue, not your community. While that leads to lower amounts of conversions, it leads to a higher fertility rate as you can see was clan based versus non clan based traditions. And it allows for more ideological diversity within the movement, which makes it more rich in terms of conversations and stuff like that.

Well, I think this also

Simone Collins: exemplifies how hard it is to maintain a hard culture when hard culture requires [00:33:00] a ton of amenities and not family based. Systems, so you can't be a hard culture Jew and just move to some random city in Switzerland, you know, it has to be, it has to meet all these requirements and that makes it very tough to maintain a hard culture, but also deal with a rapidly evolving and adapting world job market, etc.

Malcolm Collins: Absolutely. Techno puritanism is at its core, a frontier religion.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that's interesting. There are frontier religions and there are civilization religions. And I'm sure part of the, the, the, the cumbersome requirements of maintaining Jewish law are a feature, not a bug in that it's easier to maintain

Malcolm Collins: urban centers.

It

Simone Collins: also forces them to state, to stick together rather than spread out into the diaspora, because They'll sort of fall off and not continue, you know? Yeah. [00:34:00] You want me to keep going? Okay Reform Judaism is unstable. The law of Moses is central to the Jewish faith. Relax it too much, and believers can justly wonder what's left.

In America, Reform Jews are overrepresented not only among atheists and agnostics, but among every cult under the sun. 33 percent of American Buddhists come from a Jewish background.

Malcolm Collins: Keep going, 2. 5 percent of the American population is Jewish as you read these stats. Keep going.

Simone Collins: And even the Moonies were 30 percent Jewish at one point.

They're now down to 6%. As the Jews were assimilating into Greeks, Some Greeks were assimilating into Judaism. They were impressed enough with monotheism and the Jews upright behavior to adopt some of the rituals, but they couldn't take the final step and circumcise themselves. Instead, they hung around the fringes of Jewish society, admiring it from without.

The Bible and the historical record call them God fearers, but by analogy, I can't help but thinking, [00:35:00] thinking of them as we are Jews. This is similar to

Malcolm Collins: weeaboos

Simone Collins: from Japanese admirers. Yeah, I love this. These weird Jews would have been very easy prey for the first semi Jewish sect to shed the circumcision requirement and explicitly pivot away from being an ethnic religion.

The apostles and any other early Christians leaving Palestine to minister to the wider world. Wait, hold on,

Malcolm Collins: we'll do a quick, I want to, talk about this last thing here.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So I find this interesting in a few areas here. One is, is I was unaware that, that reformed Jews just did these deconversions so much.

Or that they were so well

Simone Collins: represented in cults, but no, come on, you did, because they are a soft culture and soft culture is basically not culture. You know,

Malcolm Collins: apparently they're like the softest of all soft cultures. Well, no, they're just uniquely well, I think we can learn a few things from this, right?

Okay. Which is one Judaism doesn't work. If you don't do it a hundred percent, [00:36:00] you cannot do 50 percent Judaism. You cannot do 75 percent Judaism. You have to do a hundred percent Judaism and that means living in a Jewish community. That's what he's pointing out here. You need to get a wise yourself. If you want to maintain your traditions, number two, if we, as a techno Puritan tradition are looking for early converts, you can look to reform Jewish communities.

Because apparently they're much easier to convert than other traditions. And I think that honestly, our religion is really appealing to somebody from one of those communities. As people know, like, early on, I was, like, much more Jewish leaning in my beliefs, like, oh, maybe some of my kids could convert to Judaism, because they're technically Jews, because of Simone's background and everything like that, and go through all the traditions in regards to that.

But as I begin to dive more into religious history I came more and more to the position that, unfortunately, Christianity is just such a [00:37:00] Evolution above Judaism. That you, it really makes very little sense to go back to Judaism unless you're just looking for something that has a really long history.

Or you have a very strong ethnic or cultural, our family connection to the religion.

Like if that's the core thing you're looking for, then fine. But outside of that it lacks a lot of the features that Christianity has.

To word it differently. Well, it is a more complicated religion. By complicated. I mean, it's like the amount of texts and rules in history that you have is definitely larger within the Jewish Canon.

It's complicated in the same way. A very bloated, a source code might be complicated. , where you could almost argue that Christianity and Judaism. , written using two different programming languages and the programming language that Christianity uses is much simpler and requires far fewer words or lines to create the [00:38:00] same outcome as the source code that Judaism is using. , which makes me gravitate really strongly to Christianity. , and many of you add a techno Puritan framing on it.

It even. Lighter as a source code, because basically everything boils down to the question of what would people in the future want me to be doing today, , which is just such a simple question to ask yourself when deciding on moral framings.

Well also being a very easy to argue. Why would you be basing your moral framings around this mindset instead of having to brace your mole framing around giant lists of rules? Or. A God that can sometimes be difficult to interpret.

And we're going to get to a point here, which Scott Alexander misses.

But that I point out, it is clear to the Jewish community that it lacks all of this which is when Christ like figures appear throughout history Judaism has had a big problem with like all of a sudden all the Jews want to leave. And we're going to talk about a time in the 1700s when this [00:39:00] happens.

Sorry. I meant the 16 hundreds. I was thinking of Shabbaton Zebbie and we go into this. , great detail later in this particular episode. , but to put it another way, the particular source code update that Christ was trying to push to Judaism.

Has been pushed by a few other people throughout Judaism's history.

And every time somebody tries to push a source code update that looks like this, it gains a lot of fanfare.

Wow.

Yeah, I think that Jews today see Christ as a more antithetical figure to actual Judaism than a natural evolution to Judaism, which has happened a few times throughout Judaism's history. And I'd actually argue that the founder of Hasidic Judaism basically a Christ like figure who didn't claim to be the Messiah, but made very similar updates to older Jewish systems.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Okay. Very interesting.

Okay. The apostles and other early Christians leaving Palestine to minister to the [00:40:00] wider world would have made use of existing Jewish networks and connections. They would have found themselves in the middle of the spiritually disaffected half assimilated pseudo reform Jewish communities of the Roman world.

Plus they're half assimilated the other direction. Greek hangers on. They would have preached that Judaism was basically true, but that you can drop the restrictive law of Moses and avoid getting circumcised. They would have sliced through the cultural angst of these in between communities, saying that Jews would join together with the Gentiles in a big friendly tent under the leadership of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Here, says Stark, were the early Christians first a few million converts. And that, that, I think, to me, is Underrated than the things you mentioned in the beginning, how there was basically kindling lying all throughout the area that the spark of Jesus was able to light a fire, you know, that there was a lot [00:41:00] of groundwork already done and you have to, when you're looking at how an early culture or religion is going to spread, consider whether or not there will be a receptive substrate surrounding its original, original ignition or catalyst.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that people may misunderstand how. Weak paganism was as a tradition. And we can actually see this with the creation of the soul and victus God by the Roman emperor. That was coming for a period. Or the elevation of the soul and victus God, which is to say that. Paganism isn't really a religion in the way that we think of religion today.

You can't really like love and form a relationship with these gods. They are not all powerful gods. They are like, like there is a market demand or they product market fit for monotheism that people want. And a lot of people living alongside Jews, a lot of Pagans who did would have said, Oh, they have a real religion.

We don't have a real religion.

Which [00:42:00] is where, for people who don't know Sol Invictus this was a god made by I'll add the Roman Emperor's name in post, where he really elevated it and he Asclebius, I want to say

Emperor a Rulien. If I were thinking of, and they should note here that

He didn't popularize the Sol Invictus celebration. Until around 270 to 275 80, which was well after the dates for Christ's birth had been determined

Slash made up. It was mostly based on symbolism.

by early Christian theologians. A lot of people got angry at that video when I pointed that out and they're like, no, Christmas. Definitely got it to date from a Roman holiday.

And I'm like, which one? And they're like, well, the Sol Invictus is the one that had the same one. And I'm like, that was set after. , we have the first inscriptions of when people thought crisis birth date was. And then they were like, oh, well, what about Saturdays? And I'm like, Saturday nearly has a different date.

You can't just claim any group that had a holiday that was vaguely in the winter where the predecessor to any [00:43:00] other holiday, vaguely in the, in the winter, you know, there were

Roman

holidays that were vaguely in every season.

And they're like, well, , this Saturnalia has some of the same practices, like a present giving and I'm like present giving didn't start until like the 18 hundreds and Christmas. Are you saying that people in the 18 hundreds had memories of Saturnalia. No, obviously not.

And in fact we'd happen to know exactly why the tradition of gift-giving started for Christmas. It was taken from a different Christian holiday, which used to be celebrated on January 6th. Again, not the date of any Roman celebration called Saint Nicholas Day. Which was combined with the Christmas day to convert a kind of a new holiday. , in the 19th century,

so weird. That's such like a religiously ingrained belief that people got so mad when I pointed out that Christmas. Has very little connection to any of the pagan stuff.

If you're unaware of this and you still believe this urban legend,

Because it is actually one that I used to believe.

, so I [00:44:00] understand how an educated person could come to believe. it. If they hadn't gone into researching it.

you should check out that video.

The receipts are in numerous.

But anyway, topic at hand back to Seoul, Invictus, the God that was introduced in around, , 270 CE to the Roman empire.

and it's a combination of multiple Roman gods, but also, like, a borrowed Persian god where it is a mostly A monotheism

God that you have to pray to before you're praying to any other God.

And then the other gods are treated of the Roman or Greek pantheon more like you would treat saints today. Or angels today, you know, not full gods. So this is to say that I think that there was a natural desire for a quote unquote real religion.

Simone Collins: Or for monotheism. I mean, Zeus was always daddy God, you know, I don't,

Malcolm Collins: I feel like there's a speck.

If you look at our three face video which I'd suggest people check out, it's like probably like a thousand views because it was one of our early videos, but [00:45:00] it is by far, I think on