A good definition of religion is Harari’s “an idea that supports social harmony”, it explains why religions often become monotheistic/totalizing; new ideas that promote new kinds of social order may threaten an existing social order, it also explains why a religion doesn’t need to become totalizing; many organising principles are orthogonal or symbiotic, for instance, bayesianism partly resolves the long perceived tension between rationalism-classic (the principle that people should sometimes action novel arguments) and empiricism (the principle that people should go out and check things before acting) (it does this by explaining how to appraise complicated arguments about the balance of evidence), it (via FDT) also supports a synthesis of consequentialist individualism and kantianism (explaining that it can be egoistically rational to be the kind of person who would conform with moral policies even in situations where the immediate consequences don’t benefit them), to some extent it even rescues healthy forms of woo by telling us when it’s okay (or not) to follow the advice of heuristics or approximations.
Although I’d say bayratism is only a 7 on the religiousity scale due to its consequentialist origins underpreparing it to build the kind of accountability mechanisms that could ever make a religious community actually support coordination/being more moral. It loves its illegible contrarians too much. I’m not sure what to do about that.
(Agreed)
A good definition of religion is Harari’s “an idea that supports social harmony”, it explains why religions often become monotheistic/totalizing; new ideas that promote new kinds of social order may threaten an existing social order, it also explains why a religion doesn’t need to become totalizing; many organising principles are orthogonal or symbiotic, for instance, bayesianism partly resolves the long perceived tension between rationalism-classic (the principle that people should sometimes action novel arguments) and empiricism (the principle that people should go out and check things before acting) (it does this by explaining how to appraise complicated arguments about the balance of evidence), it (via FDT) also supports a synthesis of consequentialist individualism and kantianism (explaining that it can be egoistically rational to be the kind of person who would conform with moral policies even in situations where the immediate consequences don’t benefit them), to some extent it even rescues healthy forms of woo by telling us when it’s okay (or not) to follow the advice of heuristics or approximations.
Although I’d say bayratism is only a 7 on the religiousity scale due to its consequentialist origins underpreparing it to build the kind of accountability mechanisms that could ever make a religious community actually support coordination/being more moral. It loves its illegible contrarians too much. I’m not sure what to do about that.