Speaking from my own personal history with religion, the thing I objected to was not actually religion in general, but Protestant Christianity and specifically its attempt to control beliefs and thoughts.
It took a while though to figure out this was not a general religion thing and that most religions actually don’t care that much if you disagree with their myths, stories, explanations, etc. and instead focus on what you do. As best I can tell, in most religions the expectation is that the thing that comes first and that most people will do is carry out certain behaviors, whether they be rituals or observed practices. Personally, I don’t chafe against this much, since it’s not too much different from the non-religious expectations of behavior as part of my culture. I know some people dislike this a lot and it’s a different reason to reject religion than the one I’m pointing at.
So, back to Protestant Christianity. There’s this big focus on faith and belief. There’s an insistence that you must think the right thoughts to be in God’s good graces and thus for good stuff to happen to you. If you grow up in an environment that treats this collection of beliefs about God having power in the world to affect things, and especially if you’re scrupulous, then this can be quite painful when you notice that some of the things you’re being asked to believe don’t match what you observe. Some people lean into the conflict as a test of faith; I leaned into the conflict as a test of my skill as a proto-rationalist.
Given that LW’s audience is largely seeded with culturally Anglo people, and culture that is predominantly Protestant Christian, I then propose that a decent about of the aversion to religion comes from a similar story to my own: people grew up with religion (which, again, meant Protestant Christianity) trying to control their thoughts and convince them to believe things that didn’t match their observations, they rejected that, and because there was social pressure to conform found themselves not just opting out of but forced to stand in opposition to religion in order to navigate their local social circumstances. Eventually this gets internalized as an aversion.
Speaking from my own personal history with religion, the thing I objected to was not actually religion in general, but Protestant Christianity and specifically its attempt to control beliefs and thoughts.
Thank you. This makes sense and I had not thought of it.
I, too, find social pressure around what to believe abhorrent, while social pressure around how to act seems basically fine.
Do you (or anyone else who wants to answer this) think religion is basically un-alarming when it avoids social pressure around what to believe?
How do you feel about social pressures (in mainstream, non-religious society) to e.g. appear to like and to feel peaceful toward the people around you, appear to trust school to be about education and healthcare to be about health, etc.? Are these similar to or far from your experiences in Protestant Christianity?
A further comment about the religious history of people involved with Less Wrong, it also was heavily seeded by the 2000s decade internet atheist movement, which was itself largely a reaction to evangelical Christianity attempting to gain power politically in the US, and the reaction of young Christians of rationalist dispositions to realizing that we were confidently being ordered to believe stupid things, while at the same time also being told that noticing it was stupid was failing your religious duty.
I’d also emphasize what another comment said, that there has been a lot of interest in the community in creating secular rituals that replace the community rituals of religion without committing anyone to believing false facts (or really any facts at all).
It definitely is the case that there has been discussion of ways that parts of religion can be good for people, despite the underlying truth claims being false.
I am curious what the control elements consist of. I have plenty of protestant christianity exposure but I don’t concieve of it having those structural properties.
Speaking from my own personal history with religion, the thing I objected to was not actually religion in general, but Protestant Christianity and specifically its attempt to control beliefs and thoughts.
It took a while though to figure out this was not a general religion thing and that most religions actually don’t care that much if you disagree with their myths, stories, explanations, etc. and instead focus on what you do. As best I can tell, in most religions the expectation is that the thing that comes first and that most people will do is carry out certain behaviors, whether they be rituals or observed practices. Personally, I don’t chafe against this much, since it’s not too much different from the non-religious expectations of behavior as part of my culture. I know some people dislike this a lot and it’s a different reason to reject religion than the one I’m pointing at.
So, back to Protestant Christianity. There’s this big focus on faith and belief. There’s an insistence that you must think the right thoughts to be in God’s good graces and thus for good stuff to happen to you. If you grow up in an environment that treats this collection of beliefs about God having power in the world to affect things, and especially if you’re scrupulous, then this can be quite painful when you notice that some of the things you’re being asked to believe don’t match what you observe. Some people lean into the conflict as a test of faith; I leaned into the conflict as a test of my skill as a proto-rationalist.
Given that LW’s audience is largely seeded with culturally Anglo people, and culture that is predominantly Protestant Christian, I then propose that a decent about of the aversion to religion comes from a similar story to my own: people grew up with religion (which, again, meant Protestant Christianity) trying to control their thoughts and convince them to believe things that didn’t match their observations, they rejected that, and because there was social pressure to conform found themselves not just opting out of but forced to stand in opposition to religion in order to navigate their local social circumstances. Eventually this gets internalized as an aversion.
Thank you. This makes sense and I had not thought of it.
I, too, find social pressure around what to believe abhorrent, while social pressure around how to act seems basically fine.
Do you (or anyone else who wants to answer this) think religion is basically un-alarming when it avoids social pressure around what to believe?
How do you feel about social pressures (in mainstream, non-religious society) to e.g. appear to like and to feel peaceful toward the people around you, appear to trust school to be about education and healthcare to be about health, etc.? Are these similar to or far from your experiences in Protestant Christianity?
A further comment about the religious history of people involved with Less Wrong, it also was heavily seeded by the 2000s decade internet atheist movement, which was itself largely a reaction to evangelical Christianity attempting to gain power politically in the US, and the reaction of young Christians of rationalist dispositions to realizing that we were confidently being ordered to believe stupid things, while at the same time also being told that noticing it was stupid was failing your religious duty.
I’d also emphasize what another comment said, that there has been a lot of interest in the community in creating secular rituals that replace the community rituals of religion without committing anyone to believing false facts (or really any facts at all).
It definitely is the case that there has been discussion of ways that parts of religion can be good for people, despite the underlying truth claims being false.
I am curious what the control elements consist of. I have plenty of protestant christianity exposure but I don’t concieve of it having those structural properties.