Religion for Rationalists
At Less Online, I ran a well-attended session titled “Religion for Rationalists” to help me work out how I could write a post (this one!) about one of my more controversial beliefs without getting downvoted to hell. Let’s see how I do!
My thesis is that most people, including the overwhelmingly atheist and non-religious rationalist crowd, would be better off if they actively participated in an organized religion.
My argument is roughly that religions uniquely provide a source of meaning, community, and life guidance not available elsewhere, and to the extent anything that doesn’t consider itself a religion provides these, it’s because it’s imitating the package of things that makes something a religion. Not participating in a religion is obviously fine, but I think it leaves people missing out on a straightforward way they can make their lives better.
The session was a lot more peaceful than you might expect. I think it helped that my religion is Zen Buddhism, which is a lot less offensive to rationalist sensibilities than, say, Evangelical Christianity. And just to be clear, because many Western “Buddists” are not clearly religious (they’re more Buddhist philosophy enjoyers and meditation dabblers), I am: I meet with my sangha in person twice a week, I engage in ritual practices like chanting, bowing, and making offerings to altars, and I have taken the Bodhisattva precepts and been ordained with the dharma name “Seidoh”, meaning “sincere way”.
But I didn’t start out that way. Ten years ago I was committedly areligious. I’ve talk a little bit about what changed elsewhere, but in summary I realized that practicing Buddhism would probably be good for me, the tradition within Buddhism that called to me was Zen, and once I started practicing I quickly realized that Zen, at least as it exists in the West, is quite different from what I expected a religion to be. I’m still an atheist; I still don’t believe in the supernatural; and I’m still committed to honestly seeking truth. Zen has asked me to make no compromises on my core values in ways that the me of 10 or even 20 years ago would not, upon reflection, endorse.
But not all religions are created equal. I didn’t end up practicing Zen entirely by accident. In fact, I made a bit of a search to find traditions which might help me live my life better (and to be clear the rationalist tradition was inadequate in this regard!), and although I found Zen to be the right fit for me, I found a couple other traditions—all religions—that seemed similarly beneficial if I had been shaped to fit into them.
First up there are obviously other traditions of Buddhism. All the ones that seem potentially beneficial for rationalist-like people are forms of Western convert Buddhism, meaning traditions that are now largely made up of Westerners who converted to Buddhism as adults. You can find these across all three of the major branches of Buddhism, and you can generally use your good sense to sniff out which might be good. If a group seems to demand you believe impossible things about supernatural beings or make extreme, cult-like commitments you aren’t willing to make, then stay away (though note that your cult-detection abilities are likely too sensitive and you need to think carefully if normal and safe religious expression is triggering a false positive).
Another option is Quakerism, specifically folks who call themselves the Society of Friends (this gets confusing because most modern Quakers are part of Evangelical denominations that descended from the original Quakers and have similar sounding names like Friends United Meeting). Their practice (“worship”) is defined by unplanned services of sitting in silence with someone occasionally talking if they are “moved by the Spirit” to do so. But there’s no preaching and no religious authority other than personal experience of “God”, which can be understood however metaphorically you want. I know several rationalists who have found the Quaker community supporting, and they don’t see it as conflicting with their rationality.
The final option I’ll mention is Reform Judaism. This one’s a bit weird as it’s not really for you unless you want to go through the rather complex process of converting, but it’s more an option for people who were raised Jewish or have Jewish ancestry and thus are already considered Jews. The benefit of Reform Judaism is that it’s liberal and most rabbis are, from what I can tell, basically fine with you being an atheist and not taking everything literally. And from what I can tell, there’s a decent number of observantly Jewish rationalists, and most of those who I’ve asked about it have been members of Reform temples.
Unitarian Universalism and humanist churches perhaps deserve an honorable mention, but these seem to be poor choices. They ask for too little commitment to be effective religions, and are more like religion for people who grew up Christian, left the church, and now want something of church back in their lives without all the false beliefs. If that’s you, great, but from what I can tell these groups struggle with both attendance and offering useful life advice.
Of course you’re free to ignore my advice on this. I would have for a long time. It took until I had gone far enough trying to live a full life to realize what I was missing and to be able to acknowledge that the missing thing was religion. I would have rejected the notion that I needed to be religious. I also would have been wrong, but then I’ve been wrong about a lot of things in my life. Maybe I still am.
Now, to a couple questions folks asked me.
A popular one was some version of “why not start a new religion?” My answer is because most new religions fail, either turning into cults or simply fizzling out. Religions also work, to some extent, because they can lean on tradition. I think you are better off getting involved with an existing religion than trying to create a new one. If you really want to start a religion, instead join an existing one, practice it diligently, and then if you rise to a position of authority, you might use that authority to enact some useful reforms, assuming you have understood what makes the religion work so that you don’t reform it towards dissolution.
I also got asked about how I feel about religions and truth seeking. My answer is that you shouldn’t think of religions as being about the truth as rationalists typically think of it because religions are doing something orthogonal. I understand why this might be confusing, though, because Christianity and Islam, the world’s two biggest religions, explicitly co-opt rational truth in most of their forms, calling their practitioners “believers” because they are expected to believe certain things. But to throw out religion because most religions you’ve encountered have this bad property is a mistake.
You can find religions you can practice without being asked to give up your honest search for truth with no need to even pretend to have already written the bottom line. I’ve suggested a few options above. There are likely others. It’s my honest belief that nearly everyone would be better off if they practiced a religion, and there’s enough religious diversity that almost everyone will find their fit if they look with an open heart and mind.
Cross-posted from my blog, Uncertain Updates.
It is bad to participate in organized religion, because you are thereby exposing yourself to intense social pressure to believe false things (and very harmful false things, at that). This is very straightforwardly a bad thing.
You claim:
And this may formally be true—you may not be officially asked to believe false things. But if your social context consists of people who all believe approximately the same false things, and if that social context is organized around those beliefs in false things, and if the social context valorizes those beliefs in false things… then the social pressure will be intense nonetheless. (And some of these false beliefs are fairly subtle; Eliezer discusses this at length in a number of Sequence posts.)
You say:
And here we have a perfect example of the damage done by religion. The claim that “you shouldn’t think of religions as being about the truth as rationalists typically think of it” is absolutely typical anti-epistemology.
Of course religion is about “the truth as rationalists typically think of it”. There is nothing but “the truth as rationalists typically think of it”, because there’s just “the truth”, and then there are things which aren’t truth claims at all, of any kind (like preferences, etc.). But get into religion, start relaxing your epistemic standards just a bit, and very quickly you descend into this sort of nebulous and vague “well there’s different things which are ‘true’ in different ways, and what even is ‘truth’, anyway”, etc. And then your ability to know what’s true and what’s false is gone, and nothing is left but “vibes”.
This is an uncharitable and unkind claim to make given you have about 1200 words worth of my position in this post. We’ve gotten into it over many years and at no time have I felt the better for you commenting on my posts. I welcome the criticism, but not the way you deliver it, and in all our years of debating I feel you have never engaged seriously in any way other than trying to hammer what you already believe, so effectively immediately using the ban feature to ban you from my posts.
I’m sorry it’s come to this. I’d like to engage with you as a critic. As you can see, I gladly do that with many of my other critics, and have spent hours doing it with you specifically for many years. But having you comment on my posts is net-negative for me and makes me want to use Less Wrong less, so I’m doing what I should have done a long time ago.
Sorry it had to come with so little warning and after such a long hiatus from us having interactions. I also wish it was on a less contentious and visible post, but that’s perhaps what has finally pushed me to do what I should have done before.
For the benefit of other readers, I deny that I am taking some kind of anti-epistemology position. Instead, I take a view that most people do epistemology in ways that overreach and makes metaphysical claims when none need be made, and am writing a book about that. I also can say that, in my experience practicing Zen, there is no culture of subtly pulling me towards obviously false beliefs. I’m sure this happens in many religious communities, but not in mine. If I am pulled towards any false beliefs, it’s within the same degree of error to which I am pulled towards false beliefs by my entire life, including the part of it that’s on Less Wrong.
Well I am not sure what conception of truth do you buy into, but the lesswrongian theory of truth is fairly deflationist. Tarskii’s semantic theory of truth requires two different language one meta language which is open-ended, and other one being object language. So you could have different things which are true between two pair of languages, so things can be “true” in different ways in that sense.
The simple one.
I think that sort of truth is something everyone in practice buys into, due to usefulness but I think someone could have different notions of truth, like in maths or morality.
I would have liked to see the post focus more on the second paragraph. I feel like the post very minimally focused on it and instead, the majority of the post was on related topics like which religion one should choose.
Fair enough, but I don’t have much to say here beyond what I’ve sketched above. I could write a lot of words expanding it, but I don’t think it would help, because it’s ultimately something best proven or disproven through experience by actually engaging with religion in a non-antagonistic way. So I understand why you and a lot of people want this, I just don’t think it’d actually teach you anything because you’d come away from what I wrote knowing as much as you do based off this single paragraph.
In my limited experience of religion (brought up Church of Scotland but never took it seriously; attended Buddhist meditation classes on and off over a period of about 6 years; have attended a few Christian wedding ceremonies), I have never witnessed these things. At a church service there are bible readings, hymns, and a sermon, and … that’s it. Whatever community there is around it is at most just people using the regular services as a Schelling point to meet everyone else.
This surely varies from place to place, but that is what I have seen.
Yes, sadly, not all religion provides the level of community and meaning it’s capable of. It took me a while to find the right group even after I found that Zen was right for me, and without the right group I’d probably be less of an adocate because I know what’s possible and how good it can be.
I would suggest an opposite approach: to adopt the parts of religions that work, especially if we already have a rational explanation why they work. And if some people don’t like it, no big deal: they don’t have to participate.
For example: we could meet regularly once a week, get regularly reminded of some fundamental facts that we believe (but are likely to forget), express thanks for the good things that happened to us recently, declare our wishes, do some emotional-connection-building activities such as singing together...
I repeat: only for those people who want to do that. If someone is opposed to wasting time on regular meetings, or is not interested in connecting emotionally, that is a perfectly valid choice; the point is to provide such opportunity for those who might like such things, because now the default option is the no one can have that (unless they join a group of irrational people who meet for specifically irrational purposes).
But I would prefer to keep that group unattached to the epistemic baggage of various religions, lest we end up worrying about possession by (metaphoric, I swear!) demons, etc.
This is what humanist churches try to do. Best I can tell, it doesn’t work.
I’d just like to say I think this is unnecessarily uncharitable. I happily agree that many people who practice religion are less rational than would be ideal, but those people are not “irrational” they are instead people who sometimes, perhaps often, use irrational reasoning procedures, nor are their purposes irrational, since that isn’t really semantically sensible: purposes are just what they are, it’s only the reason why someone chooses to adopt a purpose that may be irrational, and there may well be rational reasons to adopt what seem to you foolish purposes given their circumstances.
I agree.
I suspect the problem is that they try to provide a watered down (sometimes to homeopathic levels) version of religion. Well, if you take the thing that is supposed to be the pillar, and weaken it, then weaker results should not come as a surprise.
If the group is not strongly religious, it needs to be strongly <something else>. Otherwise it is a waste of time. Strongly atheistic might work in a country where the atheists are a small minority, but where people can be openly atheists, even that is not enough. It should be something that you feel that you can get in the church, but not otherwise (or at least: not consistently enough, not concentrated enough).
My preferred choice would be a strongly rationalist, Read-the-Sequences fundamentalist church. Read a chapter from the Sequences or some other approved text. Think about how it applies to your life. Split into smaller working groups, and discuss whatever you want, but the recommended template is: express gratitude for the things you have succeeded at recently, express regret about things that didn’t go well, state your hopes and desires… after everyone had enough space to talk, start providing feedback and advice to each other. At some point, various community announcements are made, e.g. “there is a rationality meetup on day X in city Y”. Then the official part is over, and everyone is free to stay talking, or go away, or take a walk together...
That would require someone to take the role of the “priest”, i.e. select the text to read, remind people of the rules, etc. The responsibility could be shared by multiple people, but we can’t expect it to just happen spontaneously.
I may be wrong, but I think that with the right people, this could work. If there is a specific program (e.g. reading a chapter) each week, then people who skipped the meeting will feel like they have missed something specific (as opposed to when people only chat or sit in silence, which is the same thing every time). You can’t get “people discussing a chapter of the Sequences” outside the church.
Now I just need to find enough followers willing to meet every week and follow these rules...
I think this approach wouldn’t work for rationalists, for two reasons:
The rationality community is based around disputation, not canonicalization, of texts. That is, the litmus test for being a rationalist is not “Do you agree with this list of propositions?” (I have tried many times to draw up such a list, but this always just leads to even more debate), but rather “Are you familiar with this body of literature and do you know how to respond to it?” The kind of person who goes to LW meetups isn’t going to enjoy simply being “talked at” and told what to believe—they want to be down in the arena, getting their hands dirty.
Your “recommended template” is essentially individualistic—participants come with their hopes and desires already in-hand, and the only question is “How can I use this community to help me achieve my goals?” Just as a gut feeling I don’t think this is going to work well in building a community or meaningful relationships (seeing others not merely as means, but as ends in themselves—or something like that). Instead, there needs to be some shared purpose for which involvement in the community is essential and not just an afterthought. Now, this isn’t easy. “Solving AI alignment” might be a tall order. But I think the rationality community is doing a passable job at one thing at least—creating a culture of high epistemic standards that will be essential (for both ourselves and the wider world) in navigating the unprecedented challenges our civilization faces.
Is Judaism not also based around disputation of texts?
To warp the quotations somewhat to focus on something:
Specifically, it seems to me like not immediately making that first part overt, salient common knowledge would be load-bearing for acquiring the kind of social cohesion attributed to religious groups. The stickiness of mutual anticipation is a lot of the point.
This is a utilitarian argument for either believing or pretending to believe poorly-supported superstitions for social benefits. Do you value the truth that little?
My favorite counter-thought-experiment to this comes from Sam Harris:
A man believes there is gold buried in his very large backyard. Every Sunday morning he wakes up, grabs his shovel, and starts digging. There is no gold. But the digging is good exercise. There are no substantial negative consequences of his belief.
Is his activity justified on the basis of its utility? How much do we figure in the value of truth here? If people want to either delude themselves or pretend to delude themselves in order to benefit tangibly, I’d say they’re doing a disservice to truth. You don’t particularly seem to care about that. Or do you?
This is not my position. I have made no claim that you should believe poorly supported superstitions. I specifically believe you can engage in religion without doing this, which is part of what I’m pointing at in this post.
I also added ‘pretending to believe’. I see your position as wanting to have your cake and eat it too. You’re encouraging people to join the most watered-down religions that make the smallest epistemological demands on followers, so that they can enjoy the benefits of community and mental well-being.
You say:
I’d tend to agree with you. But how is it that religions are able to uniquely provide a source of meaning, community and life guidance, if not through shared belief? You’re arguing we can reap the benefits of the effects without the cause. I’m most familiar with christianity. Where do you think the source of meaning and guidance on how to live your life come from, if not in a shared belief that jesus is the son of god, that he died for your sins, and was resurrected?
I’m less familiar with buddhism, but every religion requires some commitment of belief, and that’s the whole point.
Not all religions require much in the way of shared beliefs. Many require only that you do. It’s your duty to, say, carry out some rituals and practices, but what meaning you find in them and what you believe about them is up to you to decide. This is the way it is in Zen and among old-line Quakers.
It’d be unfair to say there’s no shared beliefs, of course. If you don’t believe in the Four Nobel Truths, it’s hard to be a Buddhist, but you can take them more as claims that you either agree with or don’t. If you don’t agree with them, Buddhism is probably not for you. If you do, then it might be.
I’ll just also say that commitment to a belief being the whole point is a very Abrahamic view and less common in other religions.
It seems to me that Anglo-American atheists often have a Protestant (or even specifically Lutheran) ontology of religion; they implicitly expect that “religion” must mean something creedal, evangelical, often sola scriptura, and various other things that aren’t even universal among denominations of Christianity.
That’s an excellent thought experiment!
Piggybacking off of it, suppose the man is struggling in life and otherwise doesn’t get any exercise. Suppose that Sunday morning digging really improves his health and quality of life a lot. Is the activity justified?
How about if he’s depressed? What if he isn’t digging by himself but is instead digging with a tight nit community of other gold believers? The digging provides him with feelings of warmth and connection that make life worth living. Is it justified then?
Where I’m coming from is that, supposing we view truth as an end in-and-of-itself, I want to question how much weight we give to truth relative to other ends we are interested in. I think that regardless of whether you are a consequentialist or virtue ethicist or deontologist or whatever, non-naive versions of these philosophies will weigh different considerations against one another.[1]
And so I don’t think OP’s position here indicates that he assigns a low value to truth. I moreso suspect that he is weighing truth against other important considerations and feels that the calculus comes out in favor of sacrificing some truth in favor of other important things.
Thanks to Gordon for helping me understand this in this dialogue!
Just to be clear, I don’t think you have to sacrifice any truth at all and that it’s possible to engage with religion, assuming the right religion, that actually aids in your pursuit of truth by helping you develop greater psychological safety to have to courage to face what is so.
That said, if you really wanted to practice, say, Pentecostalism, you would in fact have to give up some truth to get benefits from it. I would not advocate that rationalists become Pentecostalist on this basis, and instead suggestion religions where engagement need not involve a truth tradeoff.
I’m not sure things like religion should be treated with a consumer mindset. For example, would it make sense to follow EA because it’s a source of meaning and community? No, the point of following EA is to do good. With religion it’s often similar, for example the early Christians were the first to build orphanages. The New Testament says a person is good or bad depending on what they do, not what they receive, so if someone said they were joining Christianity to receive something, they’d get very strange looks.
Fair point.
This is one of those things that’s weird about the modern world. Many of us are no longer part of a religion we grew up with, probably because we didn’t like it and actively chose to reject it. And so if we later want to come to religion, it necessarily means “shopping” for one in a certain sense that you have to pick one by some criteria.
I generally wouldn’t endorse someone deciding to become religious because they read this post and now want to optimize their life by becoming religious. I’d instead endorse them being open to seeing if some religious participation is right for them, and finding a group where they are able to participate in a way that feels wholesome.
Why is it good to obtain a source of meaning, if it is not based on sound epistemic foundations? Is obtaining an arbitrary “meaning” better than living without one or going with an “interim meaning of life” like “maximize option value while looking for a philosophically sound source of normativity”?
It would, in theory, be nice if meaning was grounded in epistemic, rational truth. But such truth isn’t and can’t be grounded in itself, and so even if you find meaning that can be rationalized via sound epistemic reasoning, its foundation will not itself be ultimately epistemically sound because it exists prior to epistemic reasoning.
Now this doesn’t mean that we can’t look for sources of meaning that comport with our epistemic understanding. In fact, I think we should! We should rightly reject sources of meaning that invite us to believe provably false things.
Tricky question. For many people, I think the answer is yes, they would be better off with some arbitrary meaning. They would simply live better, happier lives if they had a strong sense of meaning, even if that sense of meaning was wrong, because they aren’t doing the work to have good epistemics anyway, and so they are currently getting the worst of both words: they don’t have meaning and they aren’t even taking actions that would result in them knowing what’s true. I contend that this is why there’s a level of discontent with life itself in the modern era that largely seems absent in the past.
The idea of an interim source of meaning is interesting, because arguably all sources of meaning are interim. There’s nothing fixed about where we find meaning, and most people find that it changes throughout their life. Some people spend time finding meaning in something explicit like “the search for truth” or “worshiping God” or similar. Perhaps later they find it in something less explicit, like friends and family and sensory experiences. Perhaps yet later they find it in the sublime joy of merely existing.
When I say that religion uniquely provides a source of meaning and other things, perhaps what I mean more precisely is that it uniquely provides a door through which meaning can be found. The meaning is not in the religion itself, but in living with the guidance of a religion to help in finding meaning for oneself.
Libertarianism teaches that when one wants an economic outcome, one may be tempted to use government to get that outcome; but one should use private-sector tools instead, even if it means inventing a new kind of institution.
When one craves meaning and community, one’s first thought is to reach for religion. But one should look for other sources of meaning and community first, including inventing one’s own meaning and inventing new kinds of communities.
Out of curiosity, does this have any relation with zhukeepa’s views?
Sort of. I feel generally positive about his views on religion, but we came to somewhat similar positions independently.
In what sense does the Society of Friends require more commitment than Unitarian Universalist or humanist churches do?
The act of sitting through 1-hour of unplanned service. It’s actually quite hard for most people, especially if they are used to being entertained. UU and humanist services provide a lot of entertainment, even if you think it’s boring entertainment. The simple act of sitting together in silence for an hour bonds the people who do it because they understand the level of comitment it takes not to get up a leave.
Additionally, if you keep attending Quaker services, you’ll eventually get sucked into volunteering and you’ll have to show up because that’s the only way the service happens.
“I did this difficult thing, therefore it must have been worth it” is standard cultish anti-epistemology.
Uh, sure, but that misses the point.
I’m not saying it’s worth doing because it’s difficult, except insofar as doing difficult things together facilitate social bonding.
There are plenty of other reasons to think sitting together in silence for an hour is good, and the difficulty of doing it is only a little related to what makes it good.
Rationality/EA basically is a religion already, no?
No, or so say I.
I prefer not to adjudicate this on some formal basis. There are several attempts by academics to define religion, but I think it’s better to ask “does rationality or EA look sufficiently like other things that are definitely religions that we should call them religions”.
I say “no” on the basis of a few factors:
rationality and EA lack sacred ritualized acts (though there are some things that are near this, they fail to set apart some actions as sacred, so they are instead just rituals) (an exception might be the winter Secular Solstice service like we have in Berkeley each year, but I’d argue the lack of a sustained creation of shared secular rituals means rationalists don’t keep in touch with a sacred framing as one would in a religion)
rationality and EA isn’t high commitment in the right way (might feel strange if you gave up eating meet to be EA or believing false things to be rationalist, but it’s missing commitment at the level of “show up at the same place at the same time every week to do the same thing with the same people”, because even if you regularly attend a meetup, no one much thinks you are less committed to EA or rationality if you skip a few meetings)
rationalists and EAs lack strong consensus on what is the best life advice for everyone
Rationality and EA are more like ideologies, which share some traits with religions, but not all of them. Only occasionally have ideologies become religions, as arguably Communism briefly did in 1910s Russia, and it wasn’t stable enough to persist in its religious form.
All of this is also true of non centralized religions, imo, e.g. things outside the various Abrahamic religions, which, for the broad range of religions, are very unusually canonized and centralized.
I’m a Hindu and these would apply to me and my family as well. I’d also say that the amount of exceptions you needed to make is pretty telling.
This is not a bad thing, in my opinion—I think religion should be a very personalized thing and it’s very useful when that’s true. E.g. the specific way that my family practices Hinduism has some vague strokes in similarity to my cousin’s family, but is quite different and the way they practice it is similar vaguely to a family a couple streets over, but also quite different, etc.
Also, EA is much more stable than Communism, I’d say—survived lots of scisms and is still growing.
It even has ‘extremists’ (which should really be called ‘perverts’, imo, since they’re people who pervert the religion, not faithfully follow it to the extreme), detractors who badly misunderstand it, detractors who kind of understand it and detractors who understand it well enough to essentially be in it.
It has festivals, arguments about which text is actually the most holy, which specific versions/interpretations of the holy words are the best, sacrifices, it’s own particular culture, cultural language, even the very early beginnings of cultural food.
Saying one practices Hinduism is more like saying EA is part of western enlightenment tradition. It’s an entirely different cultural frame, which has many different philosophical worldviws from atheistic to theistic within it. Hindus even claim buddha as one of their own. The word hindu itself comes from river located in North West of India, so they clustered bunch of philosophical positions together which were reminiscent of that place.
Besides labelling one thing as religion and doing away with it is a lazy thing to do, there are various practices within it which may or may not be good or accurate which can be tested for.
I personally don’t buy into a lot of hindu rituals, astrology etc. Personally I treat their claims as either metaphorical or testable. I think a lot of ancient “hindu” philosophers would be in the same camp as me, I just think a lot of their disciples didn’t take their epistemology to their logical conclusion but got misguided by other cultural memes like absolutism,mysticism etc.
I do the same and so do many Hindus.
As an outsider, Hinduism’s various divisions seem to have a very strong sense of the sacred that seems lacking in EA to me.
It depends how you define hinduism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_philosophy
In broadest sense people just try to claim everything on here, it just becomes a second word for “culture but Indian” .
There are narrow sense of the term.
EA is; “rationality” clearly isn’t.
It’s sort of true that there are ritual observances and holy texts… but nah, not really. “Rationality” is not some particular practice or some defined ritual; it’s just doing whatever wins. Thus speak the holy texts.
Research consistently shows that religious communities outperform secular ones on all sorts of desirable metrics—they are happier, live longer, have less poverty, antisocial dysfunction etc etc. To the extent that “rationalists” haven’t yet shown their ability to surpass, or at least match religionists there, they don’t get to claim the high ground on this.
But I do agree with you that mainstream religions aren’t a good fit for self-identified rationalists. There are good reasons for why they are on the retreat worldwide despite their clear benefits, and dogmatic attachment to sacred nonsense patently incompatible with contemporary understanding of the world is prominent among those.
Then religious people are simply more instrumentally rational than the “Rationalists” , the “rationality as winning” is a definition which doesn’t restrict itself to superiority of a group which calls itself “Rationalists”.
Why do you think EA is a religion? I disagree in a sibling comment.
Hmm… that’s quite a big topic. Are you sure that you want to have this discussion in this comment thread? I don’t object, mind you, and it’s your post, so I’ll follow your preference here. It’s not a “couple of comments and done” sort of thing, though.
For now I will just note that the view is hardly unique to me, nor even original to me; “EA is a religion” is something that I’ve seen quite a few people opine. Haven’t you encountered this view before? I am surprised, if that’s the case.
Most of the time when I hear people say “EA is a religion” it’s because they are trying to discredit EA without actually engaging with EA, so I was honestly curious what you could mean here since it seems, to me, a claim on par with people calling rationalists a cult.
Alas, I banned you already for your other comment on this post, so I guess we won’t be getting into it.
The referencing of the holy texts to say why there aren’t holy texts, is quite funny, lol. I assume that was intentional.
If the text says that it is not holy, then who are we to disagree?
lmao, i dont think this is a joke, right?