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MarkusRamikin 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.
I'm very much in favor of what you wrote there. I've been thinking to start a separate thread about this some time. Though feel free to beat me to it, I won't be ready to do so very soon anyway. But here's a stab at what I'm thinking.
This is from the welcome thread:
This is fair. I could, in principle, sit down and discuss rationality with a group having such a disclaimer, except in favor of religion, assuming they got promoted to my attention for some unrelated good reason (like I've been linked to an article and read that one and two more and I found them all impressive). Not going to happen in practice, probably, but you get my drift.
Except that's not the vibe of what Less Wrong is actually like, IMO, that we're "happy to have" these people. Atheism strikes me as a belief that's necessary for acceptance to the tribe. This is not a Good Thing, for many reasons, the simplest of which is that atheism is not rationality. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence; people can be atheists for stupid reasons, too. So seeing that atheism seems to be necessary here in order to follow our arguments and see our point, people will be suspicious of those arguments and points. If you can't make your case about something that in principle isn't about religion, without using religion in the reasoning, it's probably not a good case.
What I'd advocate would be not using religion as examples of obvious inanity, in support of some other point, like in this, otherwise great, post:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1j7/the_amanda_knox_test_how_an_hour_on_the_internet/
Now I'm not in favor of censoring religion out and pretending we're not 99% atheists here or whatever the figure is. If the topic of some article is tied to religion, then sure, anything goes - you'll need good arguments anyway or you won't have a post and people will call you on using applause lights instead of argumentation.
But, more subtly: if the topic is some bias or rationality tool, and religion is a good example of how that bias operates/tool fails to be applied, then go ahead and show that example after the bias/tool has already been convincingly established in more neutral terms. It's one of the reasons why we explain Bayes' theorem in terms of mammographies, not religion.
Feedback would be welcome.
I think this is a good analysis.
However, in some areas, it is particularly difficult to keep things separate. The two cultures are simply very different; discussions have a way of finding the largest differences.
To be more specific: a recent conversation about rationalism came to the point of whether we could depend on the universe not to kill us. (To put it as it was in the conversation: there must be justice in the universe.)
Well, I think you're absolutely right except, perhaps, regarding the claim that "Atheism strikes me as a belief that's necessary for acceptance to the tribe." I'm not an atheist, and while when I mention this fact I get mobbed by people asking me to refute arguments I've heard a thousand times before, I've never found myself or seen others be rejected as members of the tribe for admitting to religious beliefs.