but it seems that according to lesswrong doctrine, they are above the sanity waterline while my first friend group is below.

No. Having religous beliefs places an upper bound on how rational a person could be, past a certain level of rationality, a person will necessarily discard religion. But this does not mean that any particular atheist became an atheist by achieving that level of rationality. Most have not.

The article Raising the Sanity Waterline proposes not directly arguing against religion, but to instead teach the skills that would enable people to level up to the point where they systematically reject religion on their own, in part because just getting someone to reject religion does not actually make them more rational.

I think you're talking about two different things here.

One is the "supportive positive social groups are beneficial, and church is the only one around"

and the other is "atheists are a grumpy lot but religious people are all happier from their religion"

I won't comment on the latter for now.

I can, however, attest that it is perfectly possible to find non-religious supportive social groups. Not just self-help groups - and I really think you should rethink your idea of stigma... a "single parents" group or an "ethnic expats" group has (or should have) zero stigma attached. There are also many other socially supportive groups.

I, personally, am not only a geek, but also a bit of a nerd. I belong to a group called the Society for Creative Anachronism. We're a bunch of people that use "medieval recreation" as an excuse for dressing up nice, eating feasts and learning ancient forms of crafts and/or sport. It's a hell of a lot of fun... it's also quite a thriving community. Totally non-religious.

With the principles of "Honour, chivalry, and service" it's also got its own morality...while I personally have never done a midnight rent-... (read more)

Swimmer963:

I wouldn’t describe many of them [my non-believer friends] as rationalists, particularly, but it seems that according to lesswrong doctrine, they are above the sanity waterline while my first friend group is below.

Am I the only one who thinks that this "sanity waterline" model is wildly inaccurate? The model assumes that false beliefs can be somehow ordered by the level of insanity, so that people who have achieved a given level of sanity are immunized against everything below that. This, however, seems to me completely remote from reality. Even if we can agree on some standardized "insanity ranking" for false beliefs -- already an unrealistic assumption -- there's no way people's actual sets of beliefs will conform to the "waterline" rule according to this ranking, not even as the roughest first approximation.

One essential reason for this is the signaling role of beliefs. When it comes to issues that don't have significant instrumental implications, people are drawn to beliefs with the highest signaling value rather than accuracy. High-status beliefs can be anywhere from completely correct to downright crazy, and outside of strictly technical topics, there is typically nothing that would systematically push them towards the former. And indeed, in practice we usually see people with an eclectic mix of correct and ridiculously false beliefs (and everything in-between), with nothing resembling a systematic "sanity waterline."

This recalls some of Dennett's thoughts on religion from "Breaking the Spell". He wonders if there is something in religion that can't be replaced by secular institutions, and whether those are on net more helpful than the harms that seem to come along with it.

My intuition is that many newly converted atheists are just guilty of applying reversed stupidity to their social lives, and that a bit more practice in things like luminosity might go a long way once they start to get over their initial disillusionment.

I am not from the southern US (I presume you are, given the content of your post), but I would think this is especially true there, where a very huge majority of the atheists will be "new" ones.

human beings need roughly value homogenous peer groups in order to activate the part of the brain that says "these are my allies". If that part of the brain pretty much never fires it will lead to the ennui, apathy, negativity and judgment mentioned here. We've been brainwashed to think diversity good, and it is, but it is not a monotonic good. There are lots of negative connotations around communities that share and reinforce strong values. They are often perceived to be xenophobic, and of course they sometimes are, but it is not a fair universal judgement.

Atheists are a small minority in the United States, where society tends to give religious irrationality a pass. That alone is enough to make a person critical, judgmental, and sarcastic. It's not necessarily productive in changing society; it's a way for atheists to feel like at least they're not standing idly by.

Self-directed negativeness is not, in my experience, a trend among atheists. It may be a consequence of the atheists you know not having found their own coherent philosophies after rejecting religious ones, or maybe they haven't realized there's n... (read more)

Recently, I had a look around the internet's atheist/skeptic blogging community, which was new to me. I noticed that there tended to be a distinctive attitude among posts and comments: nice, for the most part, but embattled. There was an unspoken ideal of being the sort of person who faces tough truths, not being weak enough to seek comfort in delusions. There was a lot of snark and a tendency to feud. And the internet atheists/skeptics seemed to think it was really important to have the right opinions and win arguments.

This is all in contrast to the a... (read more)

I totally endorse tight-knit communities, ones in which bonds of friendship are formed and nurtured, ones that foster hope, ones whose members help one another out when needed.

And I certainly endorse the choice of being mindful about how you respond to criticism, how you respond to other people's behavior, how you respond to other people's emotions.

For my own part, I have been lucky enough to find such a community in my own life, and I value it enormously. I've seen that community help one another pay rent, take care of one another's children, help one an... (read more)

Despite my protestations, my girlfriend recently caught "The Secret" - a ridiculous flight from realism bordering on cultish, based on the believe that that quantum-mechanics proves we create our universe and wishes come true through messages sent out to it.

She has become significantly happier, more positive, and better at dealing with life, with no apparent negative effects or wacky bad decicions.

Studies indicate that practicing religious people on average are happier than nonbelievers or nonpracticing religious people, and that the relevant variable is the church attendance. That's what motivated me to create this thread. More than having any particular set of positive beliefs, participating in a community that encourages prosocial behavior seems to account for the lifestyle difference; not particularly surprising when you look at the impact church attendance has on you despite the fact that you don't believe.

Once, when another of our friends couldn’t pay her rent, my Christian friend and I got up at four, took out five hundred dollars in cash at a convenience store, and biked to her house to leave it anonymously in her mailbox before I left for my six am shift at work. The high lasted all day. I can’t think of any other community where this would happen, where it would even be socially acceptable.

I've seen people on the Internet ask for money when in trouble and get it.

I think all cities benefit from some kind of commonly shared activity: a festival or a carnival, a public concert, or an art show. Something that has very broad appeal. It seems to me what you are saying is that churches fulfill that need in communities (often by default) and therefore should be kept and/or celebrated.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of garbage that comes with the church community, namely religion. It seems a much better investment would be in actual culture (see above examples: art, music, games, etc...). If we stop accepting churches as default community centers, other more profitable (culture-wise) avenues will be explored.

I don't think that rationality and Christianity occupy the same place in one's life -- rationality in itself is only a means to an end, not an end in itself, while following the principles of Christianity does seem to be an end in itself for Christians.

Rationality is an art which one follows to acquire true beliefs and take effective action, regardless of one's utility function. The question 'Could the principles of rationality prompt a group of people to form this kind of community?' feels like it's asking something of rationality that is completely tange... (read more)

Do you find it plausible that if your atheist friends took up religion, they would become less negative? Perhaps to the degree obtainable by associating with those with a more positive outlook, but I don't think that's the predominant cause of the corresponding attitudes.

It sound to me that what you describe as a positive attitude is being high on the Agreeableness Big Five trait, which happens to be the strongest predictor of religiosity of the five:

"Kosek (1999), MacDonald (2000;0, and Taylor and MacDonald (1999) found that measures of Agreebalenes ... (read more)

Are your nonreligious friends really above the sanity waterline? There are a variety of common insane delusions, and all that we clearly know is that they don't have one specific one.

By this question, I mean to cast doubt on the premise that, by the standards of this blog, your religious friends are less sane than your nonreligious friends.

Communities built on a shared delusion are one thing, ones built on a delusion that entails harming others are another. I'd be a lot more okay with Christianity if it didn't so often imply such noxious positions about human rights or whatever.

I went to church without being convinced that god existed for years, so I can kind of see where you are coming from with this. What made me actually decide to become openly atheist was probably that I got involved in competitive gaming, and met a large enough group of friends who were interested in rationality that I no longer felt it was necessary to be in a church to have that kind of tight knit community. I like seeing groups of people and having interesting discussions regularly, but it makes me even happier when the ideas we share are non contradictor... (read more)

This occasionally involves a tricky kind of doublethink, for example a person who denounces homosexuality when asked directly but who holds nothing against their homosexual friends.

That combination isn't especially hard to do even without doublethink. But there are plenty of other examples (including other more incoherent combinations of beliefs related to homosexuality) that would demonstrate your point!

As always, generalising from anecdotes can be dangerous. I am married to a christian, and have occasion to meet both non-religious and religious people. I see a wide variety of mental behaviours in them, with depressive and positive in both communities. In most cases these behaviours actually have their root in (I suspect) other parts of their background.

What I will agree with is that religousity can encourage people to be more altruistic than they might be otherwise. While a rationalist might carefully reach the same results, it is a more difficult course... (read more)

If I were to take all of my friends and divide them into two groups, there are plenty of criteria I could choose, but probably the most relevant slice would be between my friends who believe in God, and my friends who don’t...I find it so refreshing to be with a group of people who are relentlessly positive about life, who constantly remind one another to be positive, and who offer concrete help rather than judgement.

It seems that by "relevant" you meant something like "best at dividing my friends into distinct groups". However, the ... (read more)

The way your post more or less conflates the need for a community, the need for 'positive thinking', and the need for self-deception feels like grade A Dark Arts to me, especially because you've managed to slip in a suggestion that there's something bad about condemning self-deception.

The belief that complaining, casting blame, and making excuses are the preferred ways to deal with problems is probably less (instrumentally) sane than belief in god. But I don't see why a person without one must have the other.

I applaud you on your willingness to share this experience. I might even call it brave, because there is a strong sort of stigma against anything religious in most "rationalist" circles. I also congratulate you on finding a workable solution in spite of those stigmas, rather than sticking to absurd, self-contrived constraints on being Rational(TM). I hardly think that church-going is the best long-term solution to a chronic negativity problem, but when supposedly ideal methods are shown to consistently fail in some way or another.. Well, there's ... (read more)

I wouldn’t describe many of them as rationalists, particularly, but it seems that according to lesswrong doctrine, they are above the sanity waterline while my first friend group is below.

Woah there! I never signed up to any doctrine like that! Where is that one written down? (So that I can reject it explicitly in the right context!)

For a start, a lot of those non-believers that you know I would almost certainly consider below the sanity waterline. And some of your Christian friends probably come in above. My immediate family members, for example, are s... (read more)

I think the idea that religion is "irrational" is overly simplistic. The disagreement between atheists and religious people is really over values. Eliezer often says that rationalists win. But rationalists are nearly the opposite - they are the people who would rather be right than win. The people who would rather win, than be right, are usually religious.