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MBlume comments on Tolerate Tolerance - Less Wrong
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It should be noted that if all goes according to plan, we won't have religion as a relevant example for too much longer. One day (I hope) we will need to teach rationality without being able to gesture out the window at a group of intelligent adults who think crackers turn into human flesh on the way down their gullets.
Why not plan ahead?
ETA: Now I think of it, crackers do, of course, turn into human flesh, it just happens a bit later.
It's not so much that I'm trying to hide my atheism, or that I worry about offending theists - then I wouldn't speak frankly online. The smart ones are going to notice, if you talk about fake explanations, that this applies to God; and they're going to know that you know it, and that you're an atheist. Admittedly, they may be much less personally offended if you never spell out the application - not sure why, but that probably is how it works.
And I don't plan far enough ahead for a day when religion is dead, because most of my utility-leverage comes before then.
But rationality is itself, not atheism or a-anything; and therefore, for aesthetic reasons, when I canonicalize (compile books or similar long works), I plan to try much harder to present what rationality is, and not let it be a reaction to or a refutation of anything.
Writing that way takes more effort, though.
they may be much less personally offended if you never spell out the application - not sure why, but that probably is how it works.
Once you connect the dots and make the application explicit, they feel honor-bound to take offense and to defend their theism, regardless of whether they personally want to take offense or not. In their mind, making the application explicit shifts the discussion from being about ideas to being about their core beliefs and thus about their person.
For me, this appears to be correct.
If all goes according to plan, by then we will be able to bring up more controversial examples without debate descending into nonsense. Let's cross that bridge when we come to it.