i remember a conversation with a guy who was like
‘i think christians are better than buddhists because they tend to be married and have happy children’
‘oh, so you think christianity is better because it better upholds christian values?’
this is a common issue...
whatever criteria you evaluate a religion on, it reveals your default religion
if you evaluate on beliefs and their correspondence with ‘reality’, your religion is scientific materialism
if you evaluate on how happy it makes people, your religion is individualistic humanism
there’s nothing wrong with simply finding the practices that best instantiate your current religion, but i think there’s another way
evaluating religion on whether it can show you things that take you OUTSIDE of your current frame, rather than keeping you inside it
of course, you still run into the fact that you have some criteria—but you’re coming from a place where you’re actually OPEN to being fundamentally wrong about that religion, and searching for a deeper truth
riffing off of this tweet:
i remember a conversation with a guy who was like ‘i think christians are better than buddhists because they tend to be married and have happy children’ ‘oh, so you think christianity is better because it better upholds christian values?’ this is a common issue...
whatever criteria you evaluate a religion on, it reveals your default religion
if you evaluate on beliefs and their correspondence with ‘reality’, your religion is scientific materialism
if you evaluate on how happy it makes people, your religion is individualistic humanism
there’s nothing wrong with simply finding the practices that best instantiate your current religion, but i think there’s another way
evaluating religion on whether it can show you things that take you OUTSIDE of your current frame, rather than keeping you inside it
of course, you still run into the fact that you have some criteria—but you’re coming from a place where you’re actually OPEN to being fundamentally wrong about that religion, and searching for a deeper truth
Silly humans… Clearly the MostCorrect religion is that which produces the most paperclips