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Russell Hogg's avatar

It isn’t the main point of the article but the degree to which plea bargaining is permitted in the US system always disturbs me. Along with the savage sentences for crimes and often useless defence lawyers it seems like an engine for injustice. (It never used to be a thing in the UK but I believe that has changed in recent years).

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Resident Contrarian's avatar

One thing that's both difficult and interesting to me about this (and that I don't have a good solution for) is the separation of definitions of "christian" in ways that makes sense. On one hand we have what we can call "nominal" christians - people who would at minimum check a box indicating they identify most with christianity out of a list of a bunch of potential religions. On the other hand you have any definition you might want to set that makes any demands greater than that.

The atheist/agnostic thoughtsphere very, very rarely draws any distinction between the former and the latter. Surprisingly often I'll get into an argument where an atheist doesn't like some christien belief or another and relates that he or she has a friend, a very serious Christian, who in fact does not believe in any of the supernatural stuff and thinks that in all cases any rule or guideline of the bible can stand if an only if it doesn't disagree substantially with society. And they are legitimately confused when you point out that there's perhaps a substantial difference between a belief that has any practical implications at all and one that doesn't.

There's a comedian named Pete Holmes who runs a podcast that gets into various religious/spiritual topics a fair bit. He is a fairly apostate Christian - like his backstory is that he got married young, the marriage didn't go well, and in the fallout from that he stopped believing in most of the claims of Christianity. But he at least at some point during the era I listed to his podcast would have still described himself as Christian because he felt like he still sprang from that culture. His phrase for this was that he was "culturally christian", essentially that he still felt some resonance for the trappings of the thing while not substantially believing in it.

I want to have better tools for actually quantifying these differences, but it's harder than it sounds. "Fundamentalist" is mostly read (and broadly used) as a slur - one very common use of the word, despite it's technical definition, is to make Christians who believe any of the bible is binding sound like redneck terrorists. And mainline sounds enough like "mainstream" and is uncommon enough in use in christian/church circles that I'm really unconfident how confounded measurements using that term are.

One sort of imperfect, better-than-nothing solution is to actually deliniate by behavior - i.e. things like looking at church attendence. Famously when you define Christian as "actually shows up to church fairly often", you find Christians suddenly outperform the living hell out of everyone else on metrics like divorce, and stuff like that. I'd be curious to hear takes on other things that work this way - different ways of quantifying "is Christian" that paint different pictures, whether for the better or for the worse.

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