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Oligopsony comments on [Link] Belief in religion considered harmful? - Less Wrong
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Educated people have referred to complexes of ideas they dislike as "religions" for hundreds of years; it's the foundational ad hominem of Enlightenment discourse. As has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, having a specific category for supernaturally-justified complexes of beliefs is a pretty good filtering heuristic. Having a term for complexes of beliefs that one dislikes, and then everybody using it as though it weren't indexical - which is already true to an extent for "religion" and "ideology" - is just a recipe for mindkilling and other discussion failure modes.
The non-indexical meaning of "ideology" serves perfectly well as a term for Nazism, Marxism, The Completely Rational Stuff That You Believe, &c.
In other words, you would agree that tagging a memeplex a religion or ideology would affect, perhaps significantly, its fitness in various circles and circumstances?
Regardless of whether it does or dosen't include a supernaturally-justified component.
Shouldn't we then expect memeplexes to adapt to this, and try and get people to tag them a certain way? I think intelligent design is arguably an example of this.
I think that this sort of tagging, on and off, is something that people try to do all the time, and I don't think it's particularly effective for altering memeplex fitness except as part of a broader and otherwise effective strategy to portray memeplex hosts as stupid, insular, and low-status. It works great for signalling that you're a host to an opposing memeplex, though.
Like, consider the widespread practice of referring to Confucianism as a religion. Excluding the term itself it doesn't seem that people reason and think about it as something other than a political ideology or even political disposition.