“consistent with my position above I’d bet that in the longer term we’d do best to hit a button that ended all religions today, and then eat the costs and spend the decades/centuries required to build better things in their stead.”
Would you have pressed this button at every other point throughout history too? If not, when’s the earliest you would have pressed it?
For me the answer is “roughly the beginning of the 20th century?”
Like, seems to me that around that time humanity had enough of the pieces figured out to make a more naturalistic worldview work pretty well.
It’s kind of hard to specify what it would have meant to press that button some centuries earlier, since like, I think a non-trivial chunk of religion was people genuinely trying to figure out what reality is made out of, and what the cosmology of the world is, etc. Depending on the details of this specification I would have done it earlier.
“consistent with my position above I’d bet that in the longer term we’d do best to hit a button that ended all religions today, and then eat the costs and spend the decades/centuries required to build better things in their stead.”
Would you have pressed this button at every other point throughout history too? If not, when’s the earliest you would have pressed it?
For me the answer is “roughly the beginning of the 20th century?”
Like, seems to me that around that time humanity had enough of the pieces figured out to make a more naturalistic worldview work pretty well.
It’s kind of hard to specify what it would have meant to press that button some centuries earlier, since like, I think a non-trivial chunk of religion was people genuinely trying to figure out what reality is made out of, and what the cosmology of the world is, etc. Depending on the details of this specification I would have done it earlier.