When deciding which criteria to use to determine which irrational beliefs you should keep (or whether any should be kept at all, or how to decide that), you need to start from first principles, and not work backwards from foregone conclusions. In this case, it seems to me that your foregone conclusions were “keeping religion is okay” and “approaches to rationality that allow me to keep religious beliefs are better than those that do not” to some premises that allow for those conclusions.
For example, taking your point (1), if “eschewing your religious beliefs makes you feel depressed and you are unable to work productively” is a valid justification, then “eschewing your Aryan Brotherhood beliefs makes you feel depressed and you are unable to work productively” should be an equally valid justification for some people.
If you really think that the 3 criteria of (1) are valid or can be made valid, try this: replace all references to religion and spiritual and God in the criteria in order to make them generic, and then try to derive some undesirable conclusions from the generic criteria. If you can’t, please report back the generic criteria. If you can, then it follows that they’re not valid in general, so they’re not valid for religion unless you are making an exception for religion (in which case you don’t need to waste time trying to justify the conclusion at all, since it’s assumed to be true).
I didn’t mean to imply that working back from a conclusion is not a perfectly valid proof technique. It’s used all the time in math. The problem is that in real-life, due to various cognitive biases, it’s easy to use it as a form of rationalization, where instead of creating a chain of statements from the conclusion back to the premises that deductively proves the conclusion, we end up creating a chain of rationalizations, each of which is sort of plausible, without verifying that the statements prove what they’re supposed to prove and don’t also have undesirable implications. It’s far easier to start from the generic, which invokes far fewer biases than starting from the specific.
Thank you enormously for this constructive feedback. Truthfully, I am making a sincere effort to join the group (in my typical antagonistic tack) but I am overwhelmed. It will take me some time (and mistakes) to learn how to communicate on this forum, and it helps to have one or two directions in which to optimize learning first.
The need for the arguments to work independent of their subject is something I probably forgot to apply rigorously. But arguments do need to work independently of their content and it is worth some extra effort to double-check that in the future (in posts and in life).
You’re correct that my forgone conclusion was “keeping religion is OK” and then I worked backwards from there to locate premises. While I think it is fine to work backwards from a conclusion in principle … I was dismayed even at the time of my posting that (2) appeared in the list. This is the kind of thing that a mathematician would include only because it is an example, without any concern with the relevance of that example. (In real life no one would have these powers and then expect us to care if they were tolerated well enough.)
… I have thought about whether my arguments work independent of religion as a subject. I think that (1) and (2) are definitely independent of the subject—it could be any irrational belief. (In each example there is a trade-off between the benefits of keeping the irrational belief and letting it go, we need only assume that the benefits of keeping it outweigh.) However, (4) more or less falls apart if you change the content; in any case, I now see that whether this argument is true or not for the specific case of religion, I have to proceed much more carefully because my thoughts here are indeed steeped in bias. (And clues me in very dramatically to my motivation in writing these posts … while I had some rational reasons to write them, it was my biases in (4) that gave me the energy to write them.)
When deciding which criteria to use to determine which irrational beliefs you should keep (or whether any should be kept at all, or how to decide that), you need to start from first principles, and not work backwards from foregone conclusions. In this case, it seems to me that your foregone conclusions were “keeping religion is okay” and “approaches to rationality that allow me to keep religious beliefs are better than those that do not” to some premises that allow for those conclusions.
For example, taking your point (1), if “eschewing your religious beliefs makes you feel depressed and you are unable to work productively” is a valid justification, then “eschewing your Aryan Brotherhood beliefs makes you feel depressed and you are unable to work productively” should be an equally valid justification for some people.
If you really think that the 3 criteria of (1) are valid or can be made valid, try this: replace all references to religion and spiritual and God in the criteria in order to make them generic, and then try to derive some undesirable conclusions from the generic criteria. If you can’t, please report back the generic criteria. If you can, then it follows that they’re not valid in general, so they’re not valid for religion unless you are making an exception for religion (in which case you don’t need to waste time trying to justify the conclusion at all, since it’s assumed to be true).
I didn’t mean to imply that working back from a conclusion is not a perfectly valid proof technique. It’s used all the time in math. The problem is that in real-life, due to various cognitive biases, it’s easy to use it as a form of rationalization, where instead of creating a chain of statements from the conclusion back to the premises that deductively proves the conclusion, we end up creating a chain of rationalizations, each of which is sort of plausible, without verifying that the statements prove what they’re supposed to prove and don’t also have undesirable implications. It’s far easier to start from the generic, which invokes far fewer biases than starting from the specific.
Thank you enormously for this constructive feedback. Truthfully, I am making a sincere effort to join the group (in my typical antagonistic tack) but I am overwhelmed. It will take me some time (and mistakes) to learn how to communicate on this forum, and it helps to have one or two directions in which to optimize learning first.
The need for the arguments to work independent of their subject is something I probably forgot to apply rigorously. But arguments do need to work independently of their content and it is worth some extra effort to double-check that in the future (in posts and in life).
You’re correct that my forgone conclusion was “keeping religion is OK” and then I worked backwards from there to locate premises. While I think it is fine to work backwards from a conclusion in principle … I was dismayed even at the time of my posting that (2) appeared in the list. This is the kind of thing that a mathematician would include only because it is an example, without any concern with the relevance of that example. (In real life no one would have these powers and then expect us to care if they were tolerated well enough.)
… I have thought about whether my arguments work independent of religion as a subject. I think that (1) and (2) are definitely independent of the subject—it could be any irrational belief. (In each example there is a trade-off between the benefits of keeping the irrational belief and letting it go, we need only assume that the benefits of keeping it outweigh.) However, (4) more or less falls apart if you change the content; in any case, I now see that whether this argument is true or not for the specific case of religion, I have to proceed much more carefully because my thoughts here are indeed steeped in bias. (And clues me in very dramatically to my motivation in writing these posts … while I had some rational reasons to write them, it was my biases in (4) that gave me the energy to write them.)