Arguing online: you can do it, but you gotta be Superjesus

There should be a code you can adhere to in order to signal "I am sincere, and probably not going to make things worse." Something like this:

The Code of Superjesus
- I might be wrong.
- I am not trying to win an argument; I am either trying to educate or trying to get to a further shared truth. (if I am trying to educate, I will be very careful that I'm not being a jerk and offering unwanted advice.)
- I realize that all the people involved in this argument are real people, and I will make an effort to imagine that each of them is a person I respect.
- I will give everyone involved as much benefit of the doubt as possible.
- I will make every effort to avoid a common set of logical fallacies. (Maybe we could use the Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments for starters.)
- I will not offer unfalsifiable claims.
- I realize that I must be even kinder online than I would be if I were having this argument in real life.

I wonder if this has been done. Recurse Center's manual comes to mind ("no feigning surprise", "no well-actuallying", "no subtle isms", etc). I bet the Lesswrong folks or some other online rationalists have done this too. I mean, to be clear, probably every successful subreddit or other online community has something like this (and I bet I know some online-community researchers, so if you know this, shout it out). I think I'd want it to be one step less connected to any one community - so I could say "Code of Superjesus in effect" and link to it and people could know what this means.

(Of course, that would then make it one more (unofficial) community and in-crowd. Oh well.)

It's the end of the world, and I feel fine?

Starting soon after the Trump election, I started posting, then curating/coordinating, a daily email list of advocacy things. I also subscribed to a bunch of podcasts and news sites (NYT, Economist, Pod Save America and then Pod Save the People, More Perfect, 538 Politics, and a bunch of email newsletters I'm still trying to get out of.) And I tried to get involved with some political organizations, most actively Indivisible and then Sister District.

Starting about 3 months ago, I haven't been doing any of that. (Except the podcasts. Some of them.) And I have two main feelings about this:

1. happy to have so much time and brain space back
2. vague feeling of dread that I'm not addressing something that I should be, as if my doctor said I have cancer and I'm just ignoring it

I keep seeing worrying signs of slides into fascism in the news. Trump flouting norms and then laws (Russia sanctions, Mueller investigation meddling) and his congress buddies just going along with him. Onetime anti-Trumpers (Lindsay Graham, John McCain, Jeff Flake) making big speeches and then just voting with him all the time anyway. It's not Trump that worries me; he's an idiot. It's the fact that all his boys are content to let him take whatever power he wants.

At the same time, I kiiinda can't do anything about it. My experience over the past year has done... nothing? I mean, I got some nice form letters from Pelosi Feinstein and Harris, so I guess some intern tallied my calls/emails. I gave some money to some small candidates in close races across the country. I guess I'm doing my part and that's ok? Like, if Trump becomes Hitler*, I guess I'll look back and say "why wasn't I out in the streets every day?" but otherwise in the meantime I've got to live my life.

I don't have anything smart to say about this. Just, it's a bit tiring to live like this.

*what would this even mean? would this be "when we have concentration camps, gestapo, and laws banning ethnicities"? I mean, Guantanamo, ICE, and Muslim Ban, right? Sure, they're smaller in scope, but Hitler didn't show up on day 1 and say "let's kill all the Jews;" it happened slowly.

What if Christianity didn't depend on magic?

Christianity has a lot of good things about it, a lot of Christians are wonderful, etc. As a highschoolman, I talked to some teachers (some of whom were priests) and tried to figure out if I should do this Christianity thing. Ultimately, they insisted that to be Christian you kinda have to believe in some of the base theology, mostly that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.

Believing that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven appears to me to be totally nuts. For comparison (and forgive me if I'm (ahem) preaching to the choir): imagine I told you "There's this guy Zorgo, who was a really great guy, and he could levitate in midair. Therefore, he is a supernatural being and you should worship him. We know this because Zorgo's followers wrote down in a book, 2000 years ago, that Zorgo could levitate in midair. Plus, Zorgo has lots of followers now and they all believe it. Some of them even had visions of Zorgo levitating."

(If there's an epistemological subtlety that I'm missing, honestly, let me know! I see no way you could be someone who wants to see the world clearly, and also believes that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. But I do pride myself on being openminded, so if you have a case that suggests that I wouldn't be a fool to believe in Jesus, while I would still be a fool to believe in Zorgo, I would honestly love to hear it.)

Naturally, this kind of turns off a lot of people. (Especially nerdy people, who tend to move to big cities and work in thinky office jobs and get rich and etc, and here's your urban/rural divide, etc.)

Could Christianity exist without it? Like, why not just have a religion that's something like:
- love thy neighbor as thyself
- here are some stories about the Israelites and stuff, they are mostly some good lessons about how to be good
- here are some stories about this guy Jesus, he was a very good guy, you should be like him
- here are some mystics throughout the ages, they have some more reasons that it's good to be like Jesus
- being in a community of equal people all seeking meaning and virtue is good, you should probably do that

(... does this exist? is it Unitarian Universalism or something?)