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MrHen comments on Epistemic Luck - Less Wrong
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I don't understand what you are saying.
Here's some metaphors I use; if it's bogus, someone please crush them.
Imagine a city with a slum. People ask why the police don't clean up the slum. The police know that if they come in and break up the slum, they'll decentralize the crime - better to keep it fenced in, under watchful eyes, than run wild.
I see a lot of people working roughly with the model that religion is an infection. Sometimes atheism is presented as antibiotics, but regardless of what the prescription is, there seems to be an impression that religion is some kind of foreign force, where once religious belief is removed, there has been clean removal, like surgically removing a boil, instead of getting some of the boil while the infection spreads through the bloodstream.
Religion is an easy target, but removing it, I think, has a tendency to take an army in a fortress and turn it into an army of nomadic assassins, everywhere and nowhere, decentralized and pervasive.
If religion is an infection, than removing the infection would solve the problem.
What you are describing is that something is causing the infection of religion. In this case, cure the cause and the infection goes away. Rationality is making the promise of curing the cause of infection, not just dressing up the infection and sending the diseased on their way.
To drift this backward into your police analogy, if you could get rid of the crime than the slum would disappear. If this doesn't make perfect sense than the analogy is broken.
It does make sense. I think it's as likely to get rid of crime as it is to get rid of the cause of religion.
Then when you ask the police to clean up the slums they will respond by saying, "We are," instead of, "But that will make it harder to fight the disease!"
And if I was a medieval commander then I'd certainly prefer to fight a tribe of nomads to fighting an army in a castle.
CronoDAS expressed some self-concern about his POV. Contrasting to that I notice that a lot of atheists have a self-righteous, arrogant attitude. I have already heard one suggesting that we would make the world a better place by removing religion. I think the problem here is that religion is more of a symptom, a product of irrationality and if you are an atheist that doesn't necessarily mean that you are more rational.
So the solution would rather be increasing rationality instead of attacking particular beliefs.
Okay. That makes sense. I read your first comment as strongly implying that atheists (or possibly atheists that criticize religious people) are irrational. This isn't even close to what you meant, so I am glad I asked.
Hmmm. Did you really mean to say that atheists are rational?
No, but nevermind. The point is that I am glad I asked what you meant because I wasn't even close to guessing correctly.