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SpaceFrank comments on Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story - Less Wrong
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I am a scientist. The truth has always held aesthetic value for me. Nonetheless, I was for many years a religionist as well. This was pretty much purely through the force of wishful thinking -- the idea of annihilation after death scared the crap out of me, and so I avoided it. A few particularly excellent posts on that other blog we all read (along with some other helpful nudges) finally broke me of my childhood religion. In February 2008, out of a concern purely for the aesthetic value of truth, I renounced the Dark Side, and all its works.
And so, the Dark Side retaliated by taking from me that which I held most dear.
Would it be ... too petty of me to say that I have sworn vengeance? That I hold a grudge against religion in general for one harm done to me?
I think it's not. If I held a grudge against theme parks in full generality because she ran off with a guy she met working at one, that would be petty. There's no reason to expect theme parks in particular to cause significantly more harm to others along those lines than other working environments. Religion is different.
The Dark Side encourages isolation. A false belief which you feel you must protect means you also have to protect yourself from anyone who can explain to you why it's wrong. It's no accident that the rules of kosher are insanely complicated and difficult to keep. The point is to make it hard for a Jew to break bread with a gentile -- to isolate the religious memes from anything that might challenge them.
And so religion gives us one more reason not to come together. It gives us one more reason not to find the people who could make us happy.
It gives us one more reason to be alone.
And it hardly needs pointing out that the way we are currently wired, we need reasons to be alone like we need holes in our heads.
So, this is what I fight, and why. I don't know how, but I wish to see the end of religion's sway over this world.
Not to dispute your main point here (that emotionally-protected false beliefs discourage contact with reality), but do you really think that many religious practices were developed consciously and explicitly for the purpose of preventing contact with outside ideas? It seems to me that something like kosher law was more likely the combination of traditional practice and the desire to forge a sense of social identity than a structure explicitly designed to stop interactions. Group differences hinder interaction between groups, but that doesn't mean that the purpose of group differences is to do so.
I don't disagree with you on the point that religion often explicitly discourages contact with nonbelievers, either, but that seems to me to be more easily explained by honest belief than Dark Side practices. If you believe something is true (and important to know the truth of) but that someone can be easily persuaded otherwise by sophistic arguments, then it's reasonable to try to prevent them from hearing them. If someone believes in global warming but doesn't have a firm grasp on the science, then you shouldn't let them wander into a skeptics' convention if you value valid beliefs.
(I'm neither a theology scholar nor an anthropologist, so I may lack some important background on this.)
I agree that the idea of early church leaders isolating members in order to explicitly limit the introduction of new ideas sounds far-fetched. It strikes me as the kind of thing that would only be said after the fact, by a historian looking for meaning in the details. But attributing those member-isolating rules to something like "preserving group identity" seems like the same thing.
I find myself wondering if something like the anthropic principle is at work here, i.e. the only religious groups to survive that long are the ones who historically isolated their members from outside ideas. There's probably a more general term for what I'm getting at.
Survivorship bias?
Now that I think about it, "natural selection" seems more appropriate.