Does anybody in your group have children? It doesn’t seem to me that what you have in your ritual book would serve them very well. Even ignoring any possible desire to “recruit” the children themselves, that means that adults who have kids will have an incentive to leave the community.
Maybe it’s just that I personally was raised with zero attendance at anything remotely that structured, but it’s hard for me to imagine kids sitting through all those highly abstract stories, many of which rely on lots of background concepts, and being anything but bored stiff (and probably annoyed). Am I wrong?
Even if they could sit through it happily, there’s the question of whether having them chant things they don’t understand respects their agency or promotes their own growth toward reasoned examination of the world and their beliefs about it. Especially when, as somebody else has mentioned, the ritual includes stuff that’s not just “rationalism”. Could there be more to help them understand how to get to the concepts, so that they could have a reasonable claim not to just be repeating “scripture”?
Or am I just worrying about something unreal?
Actually, “relativist” isn’t a lot better, because it’s still pretty clear who’s meant, and it’s a very charged term in some political discussions.
I think it’s a bad rhetorical strategy to mock the cognitive style of a particular academic discipline, or of a particular school within a discipline, even if you know all about that discipline. That’s not because you’ll convert people who are steeped in the way of thinking you’re trying to counter, but because you can end up pushing the “undecided” to their side.
Let’s say we have a bright young student who is, to oversimplify, on the cusp of going down either the path of Good (“parsimony counts”, “there’s an objective way to determine what hypothesis is simpler”, “it looks like there’s an exterior, shared reality”, “we can improve our maps”...) or the path of Evil (“all concepts start out equal”, “we can make arbitrary maps”, “truth is determined by politics” …). Well, that bright young student isn’t a perfectly rational being. If the advocates for Good look like they’re being jerks and mocking the advocates for Evil, that may be enough to push that person down the path of Evil.
Wulky Wilkinson is the mind killer. Or so it seems to me.