billswift comments on Tolerate Tolerance - Less Wrong
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I'm going to make a controversial suggestion: one useful target of tolerance might be religion.
I think we pretty much all understand that the supernatural is an open and shut case. Because of this, religion is a useful example of people getting things screamingly, disastrously wrong. And so we tend to use that as a pointer to more subtle ways of being wrong, which we can learn to avoid. This is good.
However, when we speak too frequently, and with too much naked disdain, of religion, these habits begin to have unintended negative effects.
It would be useful to have resources on general rationality to which to point our theist friends, in order to raise their overall level of sanity to the point where religion can fall away on its own. This is not going to work if these resources are blasting religion right from the get-go. Our friends are going to feel attacked, quickly close their browsers, and probably not be too well-disposed towards us the next time we speak (this may not be an entirely hypothetical example).
I'm not talking about respect. That would be far too much to ask. If we were to speak of religion as though it could genuinely be true, we would be spectacular liars. Still, not bringing up the topic when it's not necessary, using another example if there happens to be one available, would, I think, significantly increase the potential audience for our writing.
The problem with tolerating religion is that, as Dawkins pointed out, it has received too much tolerance already. One reason religion is so widespread and obnoxious is that it has been so off limits to criticism for so long.
A good solution to this is to have some diversity of rhetoric. Some people can be blunt, others openly contemptuous, and others more friendly and overtly tolerant. There's room enough for all of these.
The less tolerant people destroy the special immunity to criticism that religion has long enjoyed, and get to be seen as the "extremists". Meanwhile they make the sweetness-and-light folks look more moderate by comparison, which is a useful thing. A lot of people reflexively reject extremism, which they define as simply the most extreme views that they're hearing expressed on a contentious issue. Make the extremists more extreme, and more moderate versions of their viewpoint become more socially acceptable.
Someone has to play the villains in this story.