That photo is nauseating. Elon Musk is not at all pious — he’s blatantly pandering to conservatives who are often religious. Now he’s calling himself a “cultural Christian,” a phrase I’ve heard a few times before, and never fails to make my stomach churn.
Describing himself as “cultural Christian,” Musk indicated his guiding belief goes back to that of seeking greater understanding. “That is my religion, for the lack of a better way to describe it, it’s really a religion of curiosity,” he said. “The religion of greater enlightenment.”
And then applying his First Principles mindset, Musk extrapolated that what follows from that goal is to have “consciousness expand in scale and scope” by increasing population and allowing differing perspectives. Or put differently, more babies and free speech.
Yeah, that’s short for “white nationalist”. He’s also claiming to have been a thoughtful scholar of religion…until he discovered that science fiction was a better fit.
As he grew older, Musk has said, he turned to the great religious books—the Bible, Quran, Torah, some Hindu texts—to deal with an existential crisis of meaning. And he looked to philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.
But not until the boy discovered science fiction, he says, did he begin to find what he was looking for. In particular, he says, it was the lesson he took away from the “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” that the purpose of life wasn’t so much about finding the big answers but asking the right questions.
I don’t believe he ever read those religious texts or those philosophers, making him similar to Donald Trump. But I can believe he read Douglas Adams, although he didn’t understand him.
Elon is a perfect example of a real-life Otto.
X says it’s closing operations in Brazil
One fewer country that needs to deal with Musk’s self-obsession
Ethiopians are “cultural Christians” since their society was Christian before most European ones were. I wonder if Musk would consider Ethiopians to be his “cultural brethren.”
I don’t believe he ever read those religious texts or those philosophers…
Musk may have read Art and Fred. Both those named cultivated the ground from which Fascism grew.
So he calls himself a “Cultural Christian,” and then goes on to describe a belief that has absolutely nothing to do with any actual teachings of Christianity.
The only people he’s fooling are Christian bigots who want to believe the uber-rich hatemonger they look up to actually cares enough about them to pander to them.
Grifters will grift. Fools will get fooled. Sagan’s “bullshit-detection kit” has only reached a tiny minority.
Cultural xians don’t even exist.
It’s a meaningless classification.
Xianity is split into 42,000 sects that don’t agree on anything. Including such basic beliefs as to how many gods there are. One? Three? Five? Nearly infinite?
That would be the Apostolics, Trinitarians, Catholics (Trinity, Mary, Satan), Mormons.
The various sects used to fight wars among themselves until we took away their heavy weapons.
In Realityland, there are huge numbers of xian cultures that have some similarities and many differences.
My former Social Justice Mainline sect has nothing in common with what Elon Musk believes or the fundie xians/GOP for that matter.
It says right on their website that they don’t have a problem with evolution.
He can’t have read Adams without realizing that he is exactly the type that will be the first ones against the wall when the revolution comes.
This is exactly bonkers. The philosophers who wanted Deep Thought to design the computer that would calculate the Great Question were far more interested in making money than anything else. To the extent that they wanted the Earth to provide the Great Question it was more about score-settling amongst philosophers who thought other philosophers were full of shit than it was about improving humanity.
It’s a terrible view of philosophers, and one can argue that it’s an unfair view, but since it’s in a book with missiles that become whales and petunias as they approach unshielded infinite improbability fields and men who learn to fly by throwing themselves at the ground and missing, I think we can just call it silly and dismiss the idea that it’s serious social critique altogether.
In other words, if Musk took anything of his worldview from THG besides an acceptance of the obvious and universal difficulty that sentient beings have with getting the hang of Thursdays, he’s even more of an idiot that I previously believed.
@7: Only if he manages to avoid being eaten by the Ravening Bugbladder Beast of Trall. Which will happen because he doesn’t know where his towel is.
I will say that Muskrat seems to have original thoughts about as frequently as the average Vogon.
@8 I’d say Adams’ view of philosophers here is just that they are people, and in his view all people are full of silly foibles. In this specific case, their foible is petty academic politics, blown up to a galactic scale.
In general, Musk has a very surface-level understanding of Adams, which I didn’t previously think was possible. The entire series is about grand, sweeping ideas running headlong into tiny, fallible people. From the Earth being destroyed not in a war of conquest but in a petty bureaucratic dispute, to the Ruler of the Universe being the person in all of existence least interested in the job. I somewhat suspect he didn’t even read the books, he just absorbed the jokes from nerdy friends.
From “Musk is an idiot” to “Cultural xians don’t even exist” is a big stretch.
It is very definitely the Catholic God that I don’t believe in. I celebrate Christmas using all the Catholic-appropriated heathen symbols for Christmas; and Easter with all the Catholic-appropriated heathen symbols for Easter. But I don’t set up a Seder plate or serve Nowruz recipes, and I don’t fast for Ramadan nor even really am aware of it when it happens. I grew up imagining knights in shining armour on the glorious crusades; we honour the early texts in my native language which are all about kicking Muslim butt and saving the cross. We use the Gregorian calendar. Half the towns around me are Saint-this-or-that or otherwise named after Christian things. The hospital a couple blocks away is dedicated to Notre-Dame-Des-Sept-Douleurs (which is creepy as fuck).
Christianity had a stranglehold on the cultures that preceded my current culture for a thousand years or so. It’s very definitely left its mark.
Sure there’s a bunch of variations. That is also true of Chinese Culture or French Culture or any other culture we walk about.
I could very well be wrong but I have a feeling he is dreaming about running for US president.
microraptor @ #10 — Yes, I was thinking Musk is a Vogon. And Trump bears a striking resemblance to Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. A fitting pair.
numerobis: I’m a “cultural Christian” in pretty much the same way you are: I grew up and was educated in a society whose people were predominantly Christian, and a culture that included, and was partly shaped by, Christianity; and I was taught Christian principles and not Jewish or Muslim principles. That’s basically all “cultural Christian” means: it’s literally nothing more than a cultural marker kinda-sorta-maybe disguised as a statement of religious affiliation, without having to actually show compliance with the religion’s teachings.
So I guess we should all be grateful Trump hasn’t read us any of his poetry yet…
Seconded. Though I would like to read, “Some more of god’s greatest mistakes,” and “The Big Bang Theory: A Personal View.”
Which makes you a cultural Pagan.
The Gregorian calendar is based on much older calendars.
The names of the months were invented by Roman Pagans and 4 of them are named after Roman and Greek gods.
The 7 day week was invented by the Babylonians.
The hour and second time keeping system is Sumerian and Babylonian.
The days of the week are all named from Northern European Pagan sources. Tomorrow is Tiw’s day, named after a Nordic god.
If you are living in a democracy and like to vote, you are also a cutural Pagan. Democracy was thought up by the Greeks long before xianity existed and the xians adopted it very late.
Anyone can call themselves cultural xians if they want to.
It’s a free country and there is no such thing as the Cultural Identity Police. (Yet, wait until Project 2025 decides there should be.)
I was a xian for 50 years and would find it insulting to be called a cultural xian.
I don’t have a lot in common with cultural xians like Musk or Dawkins and that is by deliberate choice.
In the world of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, Musk would be on Ark Fleet Ship B.
Vogon poetry would be a nice change from what’s coming out of the mouths of DJT or his worshippers.
Ugh, that photo is AI generated crap in the style of Shepard Fairey. Muskrat has zero imagination, he just co-opts others work.
I don’t believe that Musk has ever prayed, or that he is anything but a nepo-baby white supremacist from Apartheid SA.
The weird obsession with breeding babies is particularly disturbing. He clearly has no interest in raising or nurturing those babies, but claims that this over populated planet needs more people to expand consciousness. As long as it isn’t Vivian, his actual daughter. Maybe he should pray for expanded consciousness in order to be less of an asshole to that poor child?
numerobis @ #12: yeah my first exposure to the phrasing “cultural Christian” was (iirc Jewish in that particular instance) folks using it to point out to a… Particular Sort… of atheist that, y’know, it’s helpful to keep in mind that you were (probably) raised in a very Christian culture, whatever you believe, and you probably have some deeply ingrained assumptions about, e.g., what religion is and where the lines between ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ are that may not be actually, universally true. And that occasioned… an incredible number of skirmishes over the term.
But seeing Dawkins, Musk, et al. repurposing the label as… not even a reminder to self-reflection, but an empty term of affiliation with actual regressive Christians is… wild. Depressing. In the same way that the claiming of… any number of actual meaningful sociological terms into so much culture war noise by conservatives has been, for… most of my life, now.
I do love ‘Hitchhikers’, but Elon needs to read some other science fiction. Some Iain M Banks, perhaps, or Harlan Ellison or Samuel R Delany or Ursula K Leguin or Octavia Butler.
lotharloo @ 13
Yeah, US presidential run is my reading too. That would also explain the current sucking up to Trump
strangerinastrangeland@19–
I don’t understand why so many people misunderstand Adams’ joke about ark ships. Musk would not be on Ark Ship B. He would be one of the Golgafrinchian leaders deciding which ‘useless idiots’ to put on Ark Ship B.
Early in HHGTTG, yes, the joke seems to be at the expense of redundant people and hangers-on…but the real payoff comes much later when it turns out that (1) the ‘useless idiots’ sent away on Ship B turn out to be the successful (albeit weird and silly) progenitors of humanity, and (2) the remaining Golgafrinchians are wiped out by a disease that would have been prevented if they had had not packed off the ‘useless idiots’ to a distant planet.
Far from being a joke about redundant people being useless (a highly unAdams-like joke btw), it is a joke about powerful groups destroying themselves through petty vanity and spite towards those they deem inferior. Even the seemingly punching-down of the joke about Ship B being full of ridiculous people is making the point that…we are them. Adams is punching at all humanity, himself included, and it never fails to astonish me how many people leap at the Ark Ship B story as a joke about how much better off we would be if we could just get rid of all the useless people in the world.
So the two science fiction authors we know he greatly admires are Iain M. Banks, an avowed socialist, and Douglas Adams, who while skeptical of all politicians, was an environmentalist and wrote: “It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.”
So yeah, Musk is oblivious to his core:
“I think my brain must be too highly trained…”
Seems to me Elon Musk is more of a cultural fascist / nazi than anything else. MediaWatch last night had a good segment on what he’s doing election & culture~wise. Dunno if he wnts to run huimself but he’s certainly pushing Trumpuism heavily. :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/musk/104244350
This is what the left and progressives and people generally are up against. The welathiest people in the world with the biggest media platforms in the world pushing literal fucking nazisim or stuff that’s not very far removed from that.
.* Source & wikibasics : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson_(activist)
PS. President Joe Biden is speaking right now at the DNC Convention :
Live Aussie ABC news coverage from link here
ifhope folks want :https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/07/06/infinite-thread-xxxii/comment-page-5/#comment-2232994
StevoR @#27 & 28
Please don’t refer to him as Tommy Robinson, he adopted the name because his real name – Stephen Yaxley Lennon – doesn’t sound like a man of the people By using his preferred I think you are helping perpetuate his fraud.
For anyone thinking “but how is this different to using the wrong name for a trans person”, it’s completely and absolutely different. Trans people aren’t changing their name to make themselves more appealing to white working class and unemployed Britons, in other words they aren’t faking being something they are not.
ardipithecus @20: Given how painful I find them, I’m pretty sure that Trump’s campaign speeches ARE Vogon poetry.
Donald Trump says he would be open to giving Musk a cabinet or advisory role.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-would-consider-ending-7500-electric-vehicle-credit-2024-08-19/
Since I prefer writing on paper instead of animal hide or papyrus, I am clearly a cultural Chinese. As I rarely use roman numerals, I am a cultural Indian.
I would argue the grifters are cultural disciples of Alkibiades, the greek opportunust who ruined Athens during rhe Peloponnesian war.
Jazzlet@30,
StevoR@27 and @28 was quoting or linking to articles referring to Yaxley-Lennon as “Tommy Robinson”.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden @ 17
“I would like to read [Trump’s], “Some more of god’s greatest mistakes,” and “The Big Bang Theory: A Personal View.””
Just to stay on theme:- unlikely to happen: Oolon Colluphid he ain’t.
I wish all we heard from this guy was “Hodor”.
@30. Jazzlet : Agreed and fair points. As KG noted, its a bit hard when youare citing other sources – I did not e there that hewas born Stephen Yaxley in brackets.
@18 Raven Hmm. Sunday – literally the sun. Monday, literally the moon. Tuesday??? not sure, Wednesday – Woden’s days/Odin’s day, Thursday – Thor’s day, Friday – Fria’s day, Saturday – Saturn’s day. At least that is what I have heard, so yeah, if the Greeks/Romans had adopted Norse gods, then sure, but otherwise, near as I can tell its only actually one, or maybe two of them, but since I have literally no clue at all what Tuesday referenced, its really only “Saturn’s day”. Still, yeah, we are “culturally” a lot of things, though, since Christianity is a massive thief, which has been known to steal even the stuff that someone else thought well nailed down, its still “cultural Christian”. Though, I am sure there was some sort of attempt to rename them all, by at least one sub-cult, to get rid of the “paganisms”, it just didn’t stick, so they did what they always did – change it enough that future generations will have no idea what is going on, and/or think it was a saint of some kind, then claim it was part of their religion all along.
@32 Zeckenschwarm But, of course, and this bugs me too no end, no one, on either side, will touch the blatant free hand outs called “subsidies” to oil companies. Those are sacred, or something… lol I guess its because its being given to the companies, rather than actual people that want to buy their products, so isn’t “commie”, or something, somehow… “Free hand outs to billionaires! What, you poor people want something? How dare you!!!”
I’ve been spending half of my existence trying to purge Christian culture from my life. The rest of the filthy superstitious fuck-wits in this shithole country have made that impossible, creating more yet more anger in my life.
We could discuss extensively what exactly is or isn’t cultural Christianity, but I think what counts is what Musk and his ilk (oh hey, hello, Richard) mean by it: sexism, racism, and illiberalism.
For me the awkward bit, linguistically, is the fact that “Christian” is being used here as a noun. That implies some stronger sense of belonging and allegiance than just saying “my culture has been influenced by Christian ideas”.
The other issue is that “Christian” cultures have themselves been strongly influenced, even based upon, earlier, non-Christian cultures. Most specifically Greek and Roman cultures, with a bit of Middle Eastern Jewish culture on top. Choosing to call European culture a “Christian” culture is to give the “Christian” elements some kind of supremacy they don’t deserve (indeed, if we can extract distinctly “Christian” elements, given that Christianity is just one small part of a wider cultural and intellectual phenomenon). Christian thought and practice is steeped in Classical culture – the liturgical language of the Medieval church was Latin, the great Christian theologians took their philosophical ideas from Greek philosophy, the culture of Christian sermonising comes out of Greek and Roman oratorical culture (indeed, some of its founding figures like Augustine and Libanius were professors of Greek and Latin rhetoric). Christian folk traditions like Christmas and Easter come from pre-Christian festivals like Saturnalia, Yule and the cult of Eostre. There is a reason that schools across Europe and its cultural outgrowths like the USA still teach the languages and literature of the Greek and Roman past – they are just as foundational to European culture as anything distinctively “Christian”. Probably more foundational.
By calling oneself a “cultural Christian”, rather than, say, “culturally European”, one is making an assertion that “Christian” is the most important and special part of one’s culture and one’s identity. Because that’s how religion works – it’s not taxonomy, it’s branding. Of course, to a white South African living in the USA like Musk “culturally European” would have a rather different slant than it would to someone born and living in Europe like Richard Dawkins, what with the legacy of European colonialism. To a Musk it could well mean “I am of the identified superior culture of the colonisers, not the inferior culture of the colonised”.
@Kagehi, #38: Tuesday is named for Tiw / Tyr (as mentioned in the comment you are replying to), so Germanic / Norse.
Isn’t this what Dawkins claims he is…?
Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya (when it was part of the British Empire – I wonder whether this influenced his reversion to reactionary views).
@ numerobis , Notre Dame de Sept Doleurs , I know I misspelled that but it’s been too long since I took French in high school ( over 50 years) . I lived close to Our Lady of Sorrows for years and even though I’m not Catholic the name creeped me out. It ultimately made me think that a lot of Christian practices are self hating even though I’m Protestant. I started looking for healthier behaviors as a teen than the misogyny , suppression and purity culture nonsense I was raised with .
bravus@23: Well, we know Musk read some Iain M. Banks, he named some of the early Space X test vehicles after Culture ships. Whether he understood any of it is another matter. One of the sad things about losing Banks is that I’m sure if he was around he would be calling Musk out now. Maybe pointing out his similarity to Joiler Veppers.
KG
That’s what square brackets are for, well one of the things.
StevoR
Cheers.
@Kagehi #38,
The influence was mostly in the other direction, from Greco-Roman to Germanic/Norse..
Our names of the week go back to the Imperial Roman system, which was based on the seven classical planets and ordered according to astrological rules: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter (Jove), Venus, Saturn.
Most Romance languages inherited these names, but Christianized the weekend by making Sunday the “Lord’s day,” and Saturday the (Jewish) “Sabbath day.” So, in Spanish for instance: Domingo, Lunes, Martes, Miércoles, Jueves, Viernes, Sábado.
Germanic languages, on the other hand, changed the names of Tuesday through Friday to match Germanic equivalents of the Roman deities. Mars became Tyr/Tiw, Mercury became Woden/Odin, Jove/Jupiter became Thor, and Venus became Frigg. The god Saturn had no widely recognized Germanic equivalent, so the names for Saturday in Germanic languages are very diverse; in English, we just kept the Roman name.
(And in the interest of pedantism, I should have said that we Germanized the names of Sunday and Monday as well, since the words “sun” and “moon” themselves are connected to Sunna and Máni, the Germanic gods of those celestial bodies.)
@Prax – I’ve heard that the Romans had an eight-day week before Christianity became mainstream. What happened to the eighth day?
@48.Jazzlet : “That’s what square brackets are for, well one of the things.StevoR. Cheers.”
Ah. Okay, thanks – will try to remember that.
@rietplum #51,
Well, the individual days of the eight-day week were not culturally significant, and were simply labeled A through H when they needed to be. The only day that really mattered in the cycle was the nundina, when large markets were held and patricians took a rest day.
The eight-day and seven-day weeks coexisted within the Empire for over three centuries before Constantine formally established the seven-day week as a calendar unit. The Senate would often move nundinae forward or backward by a day so they wouldn’t conflict with public events and holidays, so by Constantine’s time the Romans weren’t wedded to an exact eight-day cycle anyway. (Some local markets may have continued to follow an eight-day cycle for another century or two, though.)
Also, while Christianity helped to popularize the seven-day week in the western empire, it was already adopted across much of the Hellenistic world before Christianity arose, and it was understood to be a Jewish invention. Its early popularity probably came from its adoption by the Babylonians, who already treated every seventh day of the month as holy, and from the fact that it matches a quarter of the lunar month almost perfectly. As Babylonian astrology spread around the Mediterranean and the Middle East, the seven-day week went with it.
IIRC the argument of the folks initially proposing “cultural Christian” was less about individual signifiers (Thursday/Thor’s Day) and more about unquestioned assumptions; one that specifically came up a lot when I saw it discussed was a sort of hot swappable ‘religion’, distinguished from ‘culture’, module, and how that relates to Christian attitudes about their Great Commission (“You can keep your culture, you just believe in our god now.” (funnily enough, c.f. how well that worked for Rome wrt Judea))
IDK, personally, being queer and having grown up around a lot of people who, subtly or not, tried to induce me to swap that bit of my brain for the ‘cis/het’ module, as though that wouldn’t make me fundamentally a different person and wouldn’t be a sort of death, that argument resonated a bit.
(clarifying note: I’m talking about origins of the term and interesting nuances I found in that; which at this point has nothing to do with the flattened team-affiliation-declaring term that Musk/Dawkins &c are using)
They’ve been being saved up ever since the switch – so at some point, we can have whole centuries of efesemdays :-p