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.
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
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 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
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.
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
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”.
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.
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?