Filial Gum Flapping and Fustian Fallacies

The bros go toe to toe over credo

Jul 15, 2025

Set up

First: I love my brother. He’s kind and smart and weird and thoughtful and giving and passionate and curious and he deeply cares about people and their well being (myself included). He’s a good man. We also share what lucky siblings share – a lifelong contextual connection whereby no one understands us the way we understand each other. It’s admittedly a particular form of knowing. His wife, for instance, knows him better in ways I do not as does his daughter and his work colleagues and friends. But he and I share an origin story and that’s something no one else has access to in quite the same way. In that light, he’s my rock, a foundational figure who gives me surety, balance, and ballast. My life has more meaning because of him.

Second: My brother and I recently had a intellectual disagreement that really stuck in his proverbial craw. He’d been nibbling on it for weeks, arguing with me in his head about it and getting frustrated by the answers he answered for me. So the other night we took the arguments out of his head and put them onto our lips. It was a good discussion. Good enough that I want to ruminate on it here.

Context 1: I, as any regular reader of this slop knows, am a pedantic, smug, preachy atheist. I eat and sleep biblical studies and I defecate all over Christian apologetics. As I’ve explained in the past, I do this because I was indoctrinated into the Christian religion as a child and its worldview had a dramatic impact on my sense of self. Rejecting that worldview and building a new one has required a lot of work. The fear of God’s wrath and vindictiveness grows deep roots requiring a backhoe of rationalism fed by the hydraulic fluids of philosophy, history, logic and scientific truth to clear.

Context 2: One of my brother’s best friends – we’ll call him Mark – is a former pastor with a PhD from a seminary (I believe…I’m not entirely sure what his degree is in or where it’s from. I know he got a doctorate and I know it was connected to religion.) Mark is also an incredibly kind, incredibly smart guy. A really lovely man, a good friend, and a good hang.

The Nuts

So a few weeks/months back, my brother and I were talking about religious belief, in particular Christian belief, and I, in my punctilious way, declared that if Mark didn’t believe in the literal bodily resurrection of Christ, the ascension to heaven and the forgiveness of sin through a belief in the risen Christ, then he was not a “real” Christian.

My brother found that line of argument suspect and that’s what he’s been debating in his head - the concept of identity as it relates to religious affiliation, or, more succinctly, what does the meaning of “real christian” even mean?

And my brother was right to be ill at ease with my reasoning because in questioning Mark’s christian identity, I had committed a very common logical fallacy. The No True Scotsman fallacy: If I were to say, “No Scotsman eats sausages with a knife and fork” and you were to say “Actually, my cousin Angus was born in Scotland and I’ve seen him eat a sausage with a knife and fork” and I replied “Sure. But that’s because Angus is not a true Scotsman” I’ve committed a fallacy. I’ve adjusted my definition of Scotsman (moved the goalposts) so that my claim remains “true” but only because I’m excluding the counter evidence that proves it wrong.

This is the thing about definitions. They can be squirrelly, hard to pin down, slick as sauna limbs. We often presume we share common definitions and we also presume that we have solid footing for the definitions we use. But, when tasked with actually clarifying what those definitions are, we discover they are actually harder to articulate than we thought. This is especially relevant to notions of identity. In groups police belonging. Look at colorism in the african american community or trans exclusionary radical feminists or denominationalism in religions.

[Sidenote #1: Perhaps the best and most biting example of this insider policing, is Emo Phillip’s brilliant Southern Baptist joke. This bit has lived rent free in my noggin for decades.]

All to say, it can be hard to define the genuine from the faux and it’s mad easy to disagree about the parameters. And my brother and I failed to clarify our parameters. But I won’t make that mistake here. For me, when it comes to Christianity, my basic contention of what makes a Christian a Christian is acceptance of the Nicene Creed (or similar creeds).

A Little Background

The Nicene Creed was adopted at the First Council of Nicaea in 325. It has been amended since. The council was called by Emperor Constantine. Constantine, of course, was the roman emperor who converted to Christianity and made it the official religion of the empire. In order for Christianity to prove politically useful, it had to coalesce around a core belief so that the empire wouldn’t be split apart by religious factionalism. Notably, at the time, the church was indeed embroiled in a doctrinal controversy centered around the teachings of Arius (and others), a bishop in Alexandria, which promoted the notion that Jesus was not coeternal with God the Father, but was rather created by God the Father. Basically, Arius espoused a non-trinitarian theology (The father, the son, and the holy spirit were not three-in-one/one-in-three).

[Sidenote #2: Interestingly, Christianity would be far easier to believe in if the Arian notion of God had been maintained. Because the doctrines Jesus espoused were, for the most part, radically kinder than the God of the Torah. So if Jesus were a separate entity sharing new insights from God, well God would be turning over a new leaf. But if Jesus was God in the flesh AND ALSO God Almighty, then all the smoting and genocide and rape that he condoned is Jesus’ responsibility as much as God Almighty’s.

Also, interesting to note that some historians of early Islam hypothesize that Islam was a response to trinitarianism, a doubling down on the notion of one god and the claim that Jesus was not divine and that the soup from which Mohammed’s claims arose included a number of the Gospels rejected from the Church Canon. But I digress.]

So the First Council of Nicaea was called to cement the trinitarian worldview as the core tenet of christian belief — they invented the orthodox position — thus making Arian theology ipso facto heretical. No true Christian would be allowed to believe that Arian shite anymore – the delineation between insiders and outsiders was firmly set in place.

What does the Nicene Creed say? Well anyone who’s spent anytime in the christian church will know it in one form or another. But here’s the one from 315. It’s a lot pettier than the current Apostle’s Creed that i was raised with, as you’ll see:

Original Nicene Creed

We believe in one God, the Father almighty,
maker of all things visible and invisible;
And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
begotten from the Father, only-begotten,
that is, from the substance of the Father,
God from God, light from light, true God from true God,
begotten not made, of one substance with the Father,
through Whom all things came into being,
things in heaven and things on earth,
Who because of us men and because of our salvation came down,
and became incarnate and became man, and suffered,
and rose again on the third day, and ascended to the heavens,
and will come to judge the living and dead,
And in the Holy Spirit.

But as for those who say, There was when He was not,
and, Before being born He was not,
and that He came into existence out of nothing,
or who assert that the Son of God
is of a different hypostasis or substance, or created,
or is subject to alteration or change
- these the Catholic and apostolic Church anathematizes.

Back to the Beat

Okay, enough historical dilly-dallying. Back to the story at hand:

For me, in my quest to alleviate myself of the christian belief system, I set about rejecting the central tenets of the Nicene Creed – I felt compelled to justify my lack belief in these claims because they represented the core foundation of the Christian cosmology I’d been taught. Thus, if one doesn’t believe these claims, in my book, they don’t practice the type of Christianity I’ve been trying to shed myself of. This is the source of my “not a true christian” claim about Mark.

My brother’s point came from a more post-modernist concept of identity which, at it’s most basic level, asserts that if you identify yourself as a Christian, you are a Christian. The nature of your belief is not particularly relevant, rather all people are free to label themselves as whatever they want based on their particular worldview. Any practice rooted in a Jesus story qualifies as Christianity. In essence, my brother doesn’t believe in heretics (which is in and of itself a heretical thought, but who’s keeping tabs).

His notion of identity makes a tremendous amount of sense. After all, Arian would most certainly have believed himself to be a Christian, even after the other bishops rejected his “form” of Christianity. Christianity left him, as the saying goes, he didn’t leave Christianity. When it comes to people’s personal faith, I generally agree that I’m in no position to deny their self identification. People’s spirituality is their own business and they are free to label themselves however they want without pedantic blowhards like me yelling at them about creeds contrived by Roman era bishops. And I tried to make this point to my brother stating that I would never tell Mark to his face that he wasn’t a “real” christian because I’m not an asshole and I don’t have that authority.

What we discovered in our second discussion was that, in order to talk about Christianity, we had to agree on what qualifies as Christianity. Definitions matter, especially when bickering over terms.

Definitions Aren’t Definitive

And here’s where the post modern problem really raises its head – definitions are almost impossible to construct for highly conceptual subjects. When it comes to defining human constructions like religion, most of us fall into the wishy-washy definition made famous by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart when ruling on a pornography case: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”

We can make definitive claims about categories in the natural world. That’s what biological taxonomy is all about – Kingdoms, phyllums, classes, etc. Humans are good at grouping like with like. In fact, all of human knowledge falls into these sorts of defined categories. But when it comes to concepts, things get a little more blurry. This is why the distinction between sexes (male/female) and gender (man/woman) is both valid and controversial. But that’s the story for another pulpit.

Both my brother and my definition’s of what makes a Christian are reasonable. Self identifying and having one’s own mish-mash of Judeo-Christian beliefs is qualifying in a very broad sense. As is actual belief in the Creed.

Why Orthodoxy Frightens Me

That said, my concerns with Christianity fall more into two categories:

1. The primary one comes from my skeptical worldview. If you make claim, I ask for your evidence and if you can’t convince me on the basis of your evidence, I refuse to accept your claim. This is why I don’t just reject Christianity, but also Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Scientology and all the rest. They have simply not met their burden of proof so I don’t believe them to be true. I believe they can contain wisdom and deep insight into the human condition, they can help people build community and feel cosmically secure, they can have utility that improves lives. But that utility doesn’t rise to the level of factual truth.

2. This one is more practical. People who hold belief systems that don’t align with conventional beliefs are unlikely to command political movements. They might start cults (which is a problem of course), but they aren’t gonna elect the next president. But when large groups of people hold beliefs that do not hold up under rigorous investigation, then I find those people to be threatening. Those are the people I’ve written about here before. Christians who support Israel because they need an Israel to exist so that Jesus can come back and kill all the Jews and who then unironically accuse other’s of being anti-semitic are a problem. Religious people who practice honor killings in the name of their god are a problem. Religious people who deny healthcare to women based on specious passages in old books are a problem. Religious people who pass laws to deny trans folk and gay folk basic human rights are a problem.

Interpretation: Specificity

And this is the issue and where my brother and I have our biggest disagreement. The simplest and most straightforward interpretations of canonical books (and i’m speaking here of Abrahamic religious books: Torah, Bible, Quran) lead to an acceptance of immoral practices as moral because of divine command theory (Actions are deemed right or wrong based on whether they are commanded or forbidden by God).

So the bible, for instance, doesn’t just accept slavery as a social practice, it provides the rules for owning slaves. It says that any woman whose hymen doesn’t break on her wedding night as proof of virginity can be stoned to death, despite that fact 40% of women break their hymen from activities not related to penetrative intercourse. The biblical God doesn’t just condone genocide, in the case of the Amalekites, He demanded it.

For me, the fact that the simplest reading of the text condones clearly awful behavior in specific detail besmirches any notion of a higher power being behind the writing.

Interpretation: Vagueness

But interpreting these books also has the opposite problem. For instance, in the Quran the condoning of violence against non-believers is so ambiguous it can be easily justified to anyone’s whim.

One of the more famous quotes used to show that Islam is a religion of peace is Al-Qur’an 5:32: “If any one slew a person…it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people.” But here’s what that ellipsis is hiding: “unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land ” Power structures and/or mobs could have (have had?) a field day with how to interpret “spreading mischief in the land.” That sort of vagueness allows people to use God’s authority to commit all manner of horrible acts in God’s name. Also, the death penalty for “mischief” seems a bit overbearing, but I quibble. And, yes, I’m sure there’s been hundreds of years of debate about how to understand that divine command and most folk come out on the side of kindness and peace. But because of how poorly rendered the command is - how open to wide interpretation - it enables those who want to use it for ill to do so with divine justification.

The End: You’re Welcome

Alright, this has clearly gone on too long. Suffice to say - definitions are tricky and interpretation can be used as an emergency brake on bad ideas. But it can also be used as a gas peddle, depending on the nature of one’s belief. My brother and I cleared the air only after he understood my definition of Christian (I challenge the orthodoxy) and I acknowledged that I had wantonly committed a logical fallacy by moving the goalposts on Mark. Mea culpa.

Case closed.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Good:

– Dumbocrats: Zorhan Mamdani appears to be beating the pants off Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary race for Mayor of New York City. If you haven’t seen clips of Mamdani, they are worth a watch. He’s smart, concise, clear-eyed, and goal oriented. I like him (so far). However, apparently because he refers to himself as a Democratic Socialist, some members of the Democratic party are freaking out. According to the AP, “...the party’s more pragmatic wing cast the outcome as a serious setback in their quest to broaden Democrats’ appeal and move past the more controversial policies that alienated would-be voters in recent elections.” Allow me to throw some cool cold water on that claim. The democrats have failed for two reasons: 1. They have been ineffectual at improving people’s lives by reducing the wealth gap and owning the policies that have worked in such a way that voters give them credit. 2. The right has done a fantastic job of demonizing the far left with scare tactics (all liberals are communists, all boys will be forced to become girls and all brown immigrants are violent rapists etc. and anon) and taking ownership of policies they voted against. Remember, voters are by and large low information folk. They vote by vibe. And both republicans and democrats have failed them (again as the cost of living has risen, median income has remained stagnant).

This is why we went from Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump. In terms of policy, these are wild swings. Voters are seeking the person/party/policy suite that will actually their problems. Mamdani’s entire pitch is that the cost of living in NYC is too high and he’s laid out policy to address it. He’s a fucking populist! His solutions lean on more taxation of the rich, but to the benefit of the middle and working class - you know the majority of people. That’s populism. Any democrat who thinks that making life more liveable and less stressful will shrink the party’s appeal is a fucking madhatter of misguided memes. Let this guy cook, you dingleberries. Oh and he was running against a typical politician (democrat or republican)- Cuomo comes from a political family, is a sexist asshole and was run out of town for corruption. That kind of candidate should never get close to the democratic ballot if you want to claim things are going to change for the better. Christ it makes my head spin how circle jerky these political minions think.

– Books: I am decidedly cheap, what the more erudite among us might to refer to as a skinflint. Spending money unnecessarily seems wasteful and it’s truly amazing what we can do without in this world. My car is old, my clothes are old, my furniture is old, my phone is ancient. I shop at Goodwill and at Marshals. I pick through stuff left on the street. I prefer to fix the broken thing before buying a new thing. All that said, long ago I decided that one thing I would spend money on was books. Why? Because I love them and I love writers and I love publishing houses and I know it’s a dying industry beset by all manner of death rattles. So I buy new books from my local bookstore. It’s one of the few non-food shops where the employees know me. I love a book and I have piles of them in my house to prove it. And bookcases of them in my parents basement. Perhaps my favorite thing in the world is taking a very hot bath with a good book, some yoga retreat-esque music and a lit scented candle and, if i’m feeling particularly indulgent, a whisky on the rocks. Woof!

The Bad:

– Joe Rogan: Allow me to snob out. Once upon a time, our media world was dominated by gatekeepers. Someone, somewhere had to deem you worthy to give you precious time on the limited resource that was mass communication. These folk included book editors, casting directors, newspaper editors, showrunners, and the like. The process enabled a level of quality control so that crackpots and derivative hacks were not amplified. Of course, the old system wasn’t perfect. A lot of marginalized folk found it hard to tell their stories in the mainstream. I’m glad that media has been democratized, largely because there’s a greater diversity of topics, styles, and personalities available to me and they are easier to access. I don’t want anyone to get off my lawn and I’m huge consumer of new media. But I miss certain aspects of our old system in large part because it turns out that the gatekeepers’ skillset was a critical component of keeping hucksters out of our media feed.

Skepticism at its most basic level is the refusal to believe truth claims unless those truth claims have good evidence for their veracity. We have far more proof of mental illness than we do of demons for instance, and thus psychiatric treatment is a better course of action than exorcism for people suffering cognitive issues. But for skepticism to work it requires a methodology for discerning good evidence from bad evidence.

And this is where we get to Joe Rogan. I recently saw some clips of him with Bernie Sanders and I commend Sanders on going on Joe’s podcast because its an audience that could use a good dose of Bernie’s straight shooting, old man anger.

The Ugly:

– Injustice: I’m feeling particularly powerless at the moment. I mean there’s a lot going on that I can’t wrap my head around, but the two issues that I’m struggling to even read about include the ongoing wanton killings in Gaza and the fact that masked americans are disappearing off the streets without due process. The first isn’t all that surprising - humans are very good at killing other humans - but the sheer relentlessness of it just breaks my brain. It is a level of overwhelming cruelty that I don’t know what to do with. And the second just feels like the bandaid of belief I had that the USA had learned the lessons of its own history of injustice has been ripped off. We are them. We are the slave holders, the lynch mobs, the indian killers, the coal bosses, the sweatshop owners, the corrupt political machines. We are them.

43rd Degree

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