Ryan Stevenson, lately at vibechella NYC

I don’t really tweet,* λάθε βιώσας. If you want style advice or movie recommendations, send me a DM. @lauren_wilford’s other half if you know who that is

[Ryan Stevenson, lately at vibechella NYC @ryanstvnsn]

@QiaochuYuan Soteriology I think about a lot. Even nonreligious people feel an intense desire to be saved in some way, and they have felt senses of what it would mean to be saved, from what they must be saved, what saves them, by what means or mechanism.

[Ryan Stevenson, lately at vibechella NYC @ryanstvnsn]

@QiaochuYuan Yeah, we use these near-daily about some pretty far-flung stuff in our house. Psychology often lacks terms for key human preoccupations/worldviews/personal narratives—or the terms it uses are a little too weak for how intensely felt, pervasive, essentially religious these are

[Ryan Stevenson, lately at vibechella NYC @ryanstvnsn]

@QiaochuYuan Also obligatory shoutout to my old near-and-dear Cleveland Museum of Art which is actually one of the better “Met Junior” experiences I’ve found in the country, went there often as a kid. One of America’s “encyclopedic” or “survey” museums, with the whole ancient to modern arc

[Ryan Stevenson, lately at vibechella NYC @ryanstvnsn]

@QiaochuYuan SoCal is not much closer to you than Chicago but Getty Villa + Getty Center + Norton Simon + Huntington gives you something comparable to the Met in the aggregate.

[Ryan Stevenson, lately at vibechella NYC @ryanstvnsn]

@QiaochuYuan @Actualwebutante Seconding the National Gallery in particular

[Ryan Stevenson, lately at vibechella NYC @ryanstvnsn]

@QiaochuYuan @neats29 We had this mix at Vibecamp ‘26 and women’s input was valuable and I daresay sobering for some attendees

[Ryan Stevenson, lately at vibechella NYC @ryanstvnsn]

@QiaochuYuan @neats29 If true, indicates that the ideal workshop is some men who know menswear well (can troubleshoot what specifically to adjust to change the overall effect of the outfit) + women as panel of adjudicators/advisors so you get preferences (and harsh truth) straight from their mouths

[Ryan Stevenson, lately at vibechella NYC @ryanstvnsn]

@QiaochuYuan @neats29 Controversial take: many (not all) women don’t know menswear well enough to precisely describe what they prefer, but absolutely know it when they see it (and when they don’t). Woman says “just wear a nice shirt,” man tries to buy one, looks bad on him, no one can figure out why

[Ryan Stevenson, lately at vibechella NYC @ryanstvnsn]

@jaketropolis Adding “Rule, Britannia” and “Dixie” as clichéd musical scene-setters

[Ryan Stevenson, lately at vibechella NYC @ryanstvnsn]

@QiaochuYuan (Can Buddhist Modernists sneak away with nifty Buddhist psychotech without acknowledging the inextricable claims of Buddhist cosmology/ anthropology?)

[Ryan Stevenson, lately at vibechella NYC @ryanstvnsn]

But is “religion” chiefly a set of truth claims about material reality, or truth claims about something else? Rightness and wrongness, first and best things, ultimate purposes, ends? Deep foundational priors? Longstanding Lindy consenses? Hard-earned wisdom, institutionalized? 🧵

[Kelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc]

Oh are we having atheism fights again? I trained for this my whole life. Many religious people are lovely, but I think it's actually more respectful of their beliefs to treat them as truth claims about the world, and as truth claims about the world, they are not true.

[Ryan Stevenson, lately at vibechella NYC @ryanstvnsn]

@QiaochuYuan Can the ethical survive surgically removed from the metaphysical, or from the institution of the church. Is it ungrateful, wrong, futile, or foolish, is it a kind of stealing, to sneak away with Christianity’s ethics without answering Christianity’s theological demands on you

[Ryan Stevenson, lately at vibechella NYC @ryanstvnsn]

Put another way, though, I think skeptics underrate the extent to which people are drawn to religion because they have real phenomenological experiences that cry out for metaphysical explanation. (Hard to comment on if it didn’t/doesn’t happen to you.)

[Ryan Stevenson, lately at vibechella NYC @ryanstvnsn]

But overwhelmingly most people really do seem to prefer either the “religious metaphysics + religious ethics” package or the “neither” package.

And so functionally the battle over the bailey (the supernatural) is arguably a proxy for the whole conflict between theism and atheism

[Ryan Stevenson, lately at vibechella NYC @ryanstvnsn]

You can shake your fist at the Galilean, but your most fiercely held beliefs are rarely your own; he whispered and sang them to you when you were a child.

[Ryan Stevenson, lately at vibechella NYC @ryanstvnsn]

One could attempt (and at times our society has attempted) a novel, parallel construction that tries to arrive at these conclusions by another road, but historically Christianity was the route by which we did in fact arrive at them, and this can’t exactly be undone.