Isn't that the whole point of religions... they offer something timeless, transcendent, or divinely revealed that stands above whatever the current culture happens to celebrate or condemn this decade.

The current, past, and future values and norms that are decided by societies are fleeting, old tomorrow, always changing.

No? Christianity, for example, has changed massively over time. You can pick any denomination, and it’s true.

You can also look at new religions, denominations, or sects popping up. The purpose of religion is at its core supposed to be spirituality.

yes, a quote from June Singer, a prominent Jungian analyst and author, has always stuck out for me.. Something about a stone, tumbled in a river over many, many.. many years.. specifically, passing through generations of people. If the content survives the fads and fashions, then it is an indicator of something with a deeper root.

No. This is being aimed, one assumes, at US evangelical Christians (as I mention semi-jokingly elsewhere, it blocking catechism 239 might be an issue for Catholics). That is, being very generous, only about 250 years old at most, but realistically the current version's only about a century old.

Religions generally stick to the standard “the old ways are whatever the last few generations taught, and the modern/liberal religions will be the old ways in a few generations”. Very few parts are not influenced by culture.

They are structurally at odds so there is no resolution to your request because you’re implicitly asking for a universal value function that is primary above all other epistemological frameworks.

This is explicitly what every epistemological framework is intending to compress, and is precisely the reason why these affinity groups exist.

If a group of people have fundamental unshakable belief that is so different than someone else’s fundamental overarching belief and they require different sets of actions in order to realize them, then there is no possible way to align them.

If I act based on my belief that Zeus creates thunder and lightning and I should do sacrifices in order to prevent my house from being burnt down from lightning, and you have an anemometer and a weathervane and forecasting and predicting models for wildfires and lightning and do preventative maintenance based on experimental results…

Those are two completely incompatible lifestyles and there is no coexistene between them. If there’s a storm coming and there’s only one goat left in the neighborhood and I believe that sacrifice in that goat is absolutely necessary for us to survive then I’m gonna do whatever it takes to sacrifice that goat. That’s the situation you find yourself in in the world.

You may be able to avoid each other long enough to not have conflict, or even collaborate temporarily to manage some kind of shared threat, but there’s never been a historical example of long term cooperation between two groups that embody functionally different world models.

There will eventually be a point where one will dominate the other, Universal vector alignment, what you’re asking for, is impossible.

Many people don't agree with the current and future societal values and norms. Why can't people be left alone in peace?

Because they won't leave others alone in peace. Because they work to enshrine their religious dogma into law and enforce it with violence.

Sure but in the case of this article, seems like it doesn’t affect anyone else but the consumers of this product.

If you don't think MAGA parents wouldn't force this on their children, you need to look up the history of MAGA and MAGA-types

Helicopter parenting is at an all time high. The same parents are loading Life360 onto their kids' phones and expecting them to keep it installed after turning 18.

And no one is stopping them. But they don't have the right not to be ridiculed, and I suspect a lot of people ridiculing them are fellow Christians.

It's not as if anyone is going to chain them by their ankles to the back of a truck and drag them to death for being straight over it.

The right to ridicule all religion is important. Just like the right to ridicule anti-religion is also important.

You didn't answer my question and went around it with a politically correct socially acceptable platitude. Like how when people asked "if they think black lives matter" and they answered "I think all lives matter".

Because I'm not for or against religion, so I think it's equally important to be able to ridicule all aspects of the discussion.

To directly answer your question - yes, a very strong yes. But that also applies to all religions, and all of anti-religion. Anything else is disingenuous and hypocritical

Not only religion. Some countries spread their dogma with violences to other countries too.

Christians are not being victimized by other people calling them stupid or whatever. We have religious freedom, people are allowed to believe whatever they want. That doesn't mean that everyone has to keep silent, though.

Ironically, the only people victimizing Christians are grifters like this dude, who promise and sell them something they don't need and that won't work. This phone network grift is no different than those TV pastors who own private jets.

There are plenty of progressive Christians who remember that Jesus’s most important command was to love your neighbor.

The better question is, why are these fundamentalists so successful at co-opting the word “Christian”? Why does “Christian phone network” mean one that blocks homosexual content rather than one that donates 10% of revenue to feed the poor?

Ideally a Christian cell phone network would do both. It would also provide only healthy foods in the office and encourage fitness (gluttony and sloth are sinful), prohibit working on Sundays, and encourage policies to steward our world. It would control off-hours demands for those who are married and have children, and therefore have family obligations to which they must see, and might hold mixers for its singles to encourage family formation. It would expect humility and servant-leadership from its executives and patience from its managers.

I would prefer to do business with such a network but one does not exist. Apparently, people do not believe there's much market demand for any but the first of these.

This is similar to the church itself, which tends increasingly towards alignment with one faction or another. In turn, it becomes blind to the sins of its own and focused wholly on the sins of its schmittian enemy. The conservative church will tell you of the sins of homosexuality but not obesity nor wrath; the liberal will tell you that insufficient love is sinful while ignoring transsexuality. I find neither particularly Christian.

Perhaps the Benedictines could run an MVNO. I am no catholic but they'd probably do a much better job.

> the liberal will tell you that insufficient love is sinful while ignoring transsexuality

What does this mean?

One doesn't seek the good of the other by pretending that sinful behavior isn't.

Jesus didn't have a whole lot to say about homosexuality or transsexuality. I really have to question your both-sides narrative here.

Why would a properly Christian cell phone network block homosexual content? Even if we take it as given that Christianity forbids homosexuality, that's a prohibition on behavior, not observation. There's nothing in there which says you're not allowed to read about gay people, any more than you're not allowed to read about Hindus.

He had plenty to say about sleeping with anyone outside of marriage between man and woman, notably in Matthew chapter 19. While direct mention is relegated to Paul, Christ operated by whitelisting, so complaining that something isn't blacklisted is categorically wrong. Transsexuality wasn't a thing in that world but is plainly a rejection of His creation.

It presumably blocks it for the same reason it should block traffic concerning first-person shooter games, or content adjacent to self-harm and violence; the latter two were mentioned in the article as additional targets. It is not good to put certain things in one's brain. I along with others don't believe in reading certain things, watching certain things, and listening to certain music for the same reasons. I view it as best as intellectual junk food and at worst as corrosive; we should seek things that glorify Him and content pertaining to violence, homosexuality, and self-harm plainly don't.

The beginning of Matthew 19 seems to be about divorce, not where you put your wiener in general.

Matthew 19 is interesting to bring up, though. The end is all about how rich people don’t get into heaven. Would you say that this service should block depictions of wealth? It can be very tempting, after all.

In Matthew 19, Christ explicitly affirms the definition of marriage given in Genesis. As I said, this is an affirmative definition, i.e. it says what it is. Implicit is what it isn't, that is, anything else. He is answering by affirming marriage as a thing grounded in creation, in the nature of man and woman cleaving to one another in a lifelong covenant.

I think things like "flexing" influencers who idolize material wealth are pretty toxic and blocking them would be good, yes.

Funny that your go-to bad rich person is influencers and not, say, the president.

I wasn't particularly aware of President Trump until he went for political power. I barely knew of him. I recall having seen him exactly once, in some documentary on the History Channel. He's mentally categorized to me as "politician" more than "rich guy", which is the wrong type of corruption for this case. I had much more exposure growing up to the "flexer" types as the archetypal idolizer of wealth.

You should engage with what I'm saying, rather than nitpicking, or say nothing.

As a prominent figure who has corrupted tens of millions of Christians, I'd hope he'd be more in mind in this sort of discussion.

This isn't just a random aside. My point is that you're focusing on the wrong things. For what I'd see as proper Christians, homosexuality and influencers just aren't very important. Homosexuality has zero temptation for the vast majority, and influencers are just jesters for the modern age. If the goal is to stop Christians from straying, there are much more important things to look at.

I think fewer Christians than you believe take their cues on right living from that man. Maybe I'm biased as a zoomer but I see the influence of "flexers" and tate and fuentes-style ingrates as vastly more harmful, because they function as perverse role models for young men in particular. You may think they are just jesters; that is not so. I wish that were true but it's like saying that "instagram beauty" doesn't affect young women's self-image. It shouldn't, but it does.

I don't see homosexuality as a particularly important issue, as I'm not a member of a denomination that believes it constitutes a Godly relationship. I am, for example, less concerned with it than I am with widespread gluttony and resultant obesity. However that doesn't mean that it's not of any concern, and Christian ethics don't easily accommodate a utilitarian-style ranking of units-harm-done. It was, however, the topic of this particular company and the article about it.

Because the MIT Technology Review would not, upon hearing about a phone network that donates 10% of revenue to feed the poor, contact T-Mobile and request comment on whether such donations from a bandwidth reseller "violate any of its policies". Everyone agrees that you should be allowed to be charitable if you'd like. So there's no polarization pressure in that direction; Christians who want their phone network to be more charitable simply pressure their existing network.

That's not quite what I meant. I'm not asking why this network exists rather than the other one. My point is that when we read the phrase "Christian phone network," we all immediately know that it's going to be something that blocks homosexual content rather than something that donates to feed the hungry, just from those three words. The rhetorical question is, why is that what the word "Christian" means now?

Because if it were a charity phone network,

1. It wouldn't be posted here or anywhere else, it wouldn't even be reported on.

2. It would just be called a charity phone network.

3. Generally you don't need to self-segregate unless the outer world is opposed to certain values you have. When something is a Christian alternative, it's an alternative against some societal trend (porn being common). If it isn't incompatible with society, it doesn't need to segregate, so wouldn't; it would just be a phone network that donates to charity and it would attract all kinds. So an X phone network is automatically about the parts of X that are not commonly shared values among society, not about any arbitrary value X holds.

It's the same answer. Polarization pressure causes us to hear the word "Christian" and think only of the controversial parts of Christianity. Notice how you yourself are focusing on their block of LGBT content, even though the source article makes it clear their primary focus is blocking pornography.

You could define the product according its proponents' values, rather than focusing on where they disagree with yours. Then it'd be less polarizing. But I suspect you'd argue that it's less informative to do that, perhaps even outright misleading.

So actually, every one of the four things they list (Jesus-centric, void of pornography, void of LGBT, void of trans) disagrees with my values. I’m not focusing on where they disagree, I’m just taking a shortcut in my writing.

Because the more moderate Christians have mostly left, leaving (and attracting) very fringe elements to the churches.

It's not exactly a new thing. People we would describe in the modern day as "religious extremists" or outright authoritarians have been using he name of Christianity in this way for... Well, since Christianity was invented.

Same for Islam and Judaism, though the last one has the roles reversed.

The problem you're trying to identify here is how the public and historic narrative almost completely ignores any positive aspects of these religions and focuses exclusively on the actions of terrible people using religion as cover and justification for terrible acts.

In large part it's relative to location and culture. In the US, if you ask any random person their opinion of Islam, it will be overwhelmingly negative. Vice versa in Islamic societies about Christianity.

There's also a lot to be said of the last era of colonialism wreaking unthinkable damage and actual literal genocides under the name of Christianity, and the damage that Christian "missionaries" still do in the modern day. In recent history, a lot of very, very bad things have been done very loudly in the name of Christianity. Under that banner, Europeans destabilized and destroyed huge swaths of the world. The consequences of which will still be around for generations yet to come. That kind of thing leaks into public and historic sentiment, no matter what. Turns out that the public doesn't really like genocides.

Before I get replies, yes, other people have used other religions to also do terrible conquest and genocide. European Christian colonialism is just the largest and most recent example relevant to Western common knowledge. You should study foreign religions and form your own opinion, it's quite enlightening.

On the other hand, the narrative of the modern era is completely and totally dominated by sensationalism and all the problems that capitalist media bring. Stories about Christian groups donating money don't sell news subscriptions or ad time. Ragebait does, and many religious groups of all flavors are happy to oblige.

There's barely anything in the bible about all the societal stuff relgious people freak out about. The bible isn't the problem.