EA and rationalism certainly have an intense moral component. Both are fairly evangelical.
What do you have in mind for rationality here? It’s clear to me with EA, which has poured tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars into growth programs, especially amongst students and young people, but I’m interested in what you’re thinking about for rationality, which doesn’t immediately strike me as having attempted to undergo massive growth (e.g. HPMOR is very popular but mostly grew because it was a well-written story and ppl loved it, not due to much in the way of active programs and propaganda).
Implicit or explicit in an enormous amount of rationalist text is the idea that people ought to be more rational and that we ought to make society more rational. Contrast that with a genuinely non-evangelistic religion like Judaism, which truly has no project of trying to make non-Jews into Jews and, by default, questions why gentiles would wish to convert.
What’s the delta between this and mormonism? Surely mormons believe & have many texts about how everyone should be mormon & are ignoring obvious truths if they’re not. Is it just a PR difference? A difference between the number of people who read the founding documents?
Not that this is directly relevant to your thesis comparing different groups today; but I do assume that Judaism had a massive evangelical period in its early growth (e.g. 2,000 years ago) that let it get so big that it could afford to pivot to being less evangelical today.
What do you have in mind for rationality here? It’s clear to me with EA, which has poured tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars into growth programs, especially amongst students and young people, but I’m interested in what you’re thinking about for rationality, which doesn’t immediately strike me as having attempted to undergo massive growth (e.g. HPMOR is very popular but mostly grew because it was a well-written story and ppl loved it, not due to much in the way of active programs and propaganda).
Implicit or explicit in an enormous amount of rationalist text is the idea that people ought to be more rational and that we ought to make society more rational. Contrast that with a genuinely non-evangelistic religion like Judaism, which truly has no project of trying to make non-Jews into Jews and, by default, questions why gentiles would wish to convert.
What’s the delta between this and mormonism? Surely mormons believe & have many texts about how everyone should be mormon & are ignoring obvious truths if they’re not. Is it just a PR difference? A difference between the number of people who read the founding documents?
Not that this is directly relevant to your thesis comparing different groups today; but I do assume that Judaism had a massive evangelical period in its early growth (e.g. 2,000 years ago) that let it get so big that it could afford to pivot to being less evangelical today.