The pro-atheism camp said that, given that religion is so overwhelmingly wrong on the merits, we shouldn’t allow it any special pleading—it’s just as wrong as any other wrong belief, and we’d lose our value as a rationalist group if we began to put status above truth.
In an important way, religions do not exist at all. Which two people agree on all aspects of metaphysics? Which people’s beliefs of what it is permissible to believe form an exclusive network? (I.e. most believers believe slightly more or less liberal beliefs are valid, but only a bit.)
Religious people, that is, people of their own somewhat unique religion, are usually able to see what is wrong with others’. If someone is unable to see where others are wrong, it is unlikely they will be able to admit what is wrong in themselves.
In the West, a multilateral soft agreement not to attack the false metaphysical beliefs of others lest conflict arise has deluded many into thinking that conflicting beliefs needn’t be false, because conflict is wrong, yet conflict would be a natural outgrowth of a reality in which the others’ beliefs are actually wrong. This has allowed religion to be seen as a single group, and made it a single group—the set of beliefs it is taboo to criticize. Breaking up this construct will isolate the believers’ halo and other biases to their religion alone.
I think that the way to dissolve religion as a monolith is to promote specificity. E.g. replace “Is theism valid?” with “What are common bad reasons behind Americans’ belief in their specific Christianity.” Specificity defuses spats in which people accuse each other of being irrational. E.g. replace “You are irrational for believing in god,” with “You are irrational for mistaking ‘belief in belief’ for ‘belief’,” etc. Specificity ensures people can’t just socially adopt the language of the rationality community. E.g. replace “He was irrational,” with “He was using belief as attire and also committing the reification fallacy and being biased by the idea’s availability.”
Specificity isn’t binary. For every situation and person, there is a specific amount of it that is given and a possibly similar specific amount of it that would have best fulfilled that person’s goals.
I rarely believe too much specificity is given, and believe that because people mistakenly infer smaller conceptual distances than exist, too little is given. In general, people should try to be more specific as 1) people tend to generalize too much ;), 2) the cost of not doing so is often a total lack of communication, but the cost of doing so is usually linear, only a bit more time, and 3) specificity can solve this problem that is at hand.
Specificity is the true bane of both the cohesiveness of any leaky categorization, from “religion” as a group to be defended (in which arguments are soldiers—you know the drill) to “dualism” and “god” as a concept/hypothesis amenable to being shown true or false.
I think it best to simply heighten the communal demand for specificity, and shunt any wariness against a hypothesis (valid prejudice to be sure, akin to the patent office’s not accepting designs for perpetual motion machines) from “god” to “dualism”. Religion is a subset of dualist beliefs, so by making a stand there any confronted theist is among a larger and truly mainstream societal group and on theoretically firmer grounds as the anti-dualist argues against more positions than the anti-theist. This should be much less threatening.
In an important way, religions do not exist at all. Which two people agree on all aspects of metaphysics? Which people’s beliefs of what it is permissible to believe form an exclusive network? (I.e. most believers believe slightly more or less liberal beliefs are valid, but only a bit.)
Religious people, that is, people of their own somewhat unique religion, are usually able to see what is wrong with others’. If someone is unable to see where others are wrong, it is unlikely they will be able to admit what is wrong in themselves.
In the West, a multilateral soft agreement not to attack the false metaphysical beliefs of others lest conflict arise has deluded many into thinking that conflicting beliefs needn’t be false, because conflict is wrong, yet conflict would be a natural outgrowth of a reality in which the others’ beliefs are actually wrong. This has allowed religion to be seen as a single group, and made it a single group—the set of beliefs it is taboo to criticize. Breaking up this construct will isolate the believers’ halo and other biases to their religion alone.
I think that the way to dissolve religion as a monolith is to promote specificity. E.g. replace “Is theism valid?” with “What are common bad reasons behind Americans’ belief in their specific Christianity.” Specificity defuses spats in which people accuse each other of being irrational. E.g. replace “You are irrational for believing in god,” with “You are irrational for mistaking ‘belief in belief’ for ‘belief’,” etc. Specificity ensures people can’t just socially adopt the language of the rationality community. E.g. replace “He was irrational,” with “He was using belief as attire and also committing the reification fallacy and being biased by the idea’s availability.”
Specificity isn’t binary. For every situation and person, there is a specific amount of it that is given and a possibly similar specific amount of it that would have best fulfilled that person’s goals.
I rarely believe too much specificity is given, and believe that because people mistakenly infer smaller conceptual distances than exist, too little is given. In general, people should try to be more specific as 1) people tend to generalize too much ;), 2) the cost of not doing so is often a total lack of communication, but the cost of doing so is usually linear, only a bit more time, and 3) specificity can solve this problem that is at hand.
Specificity is the true bane of both the cohesiveness of any leaky categorization, from “religion” as a group to be defended (in which arguments are soldiers—you know the drill) to “dualism” and “god” as a concept/hypothesis amenable to being shown true or false.
I think it best to simply heighten the communal demand for specificity, and shunt any wariness against a hypothesis (valid prejudice to be sure, akin to the patent office’s not accepting designs for perpetual motion machines) from “god” to “dualism”. Religion is a subset of dualist beliefs, so by making a stand there any confronted theist is among a larger and truly mainstream societal group and on theoretically firmer grounds as the anti-dualist argues against more positions than the anti-theist. This should be much less threatening.
Specificity.