Well, yes, I understand that various commands, preferences, etc. are ascribed to gods, and that followers of those gods attempt to obey those commands and satisfy those preferences.
I've just never understood what morality has to do with any of that.
I mean, sure, presumably a suitably knowledgable (let alone omniscient) god is capable of giving moral commands, in that it would know what the moral things to do are, in the same sense that it is capable of telling me what stocks to purchase in order to maximize my earnings, or how most efficiently to breed cows. But to conclude that therefore wealth, morality, or cow-breeding is grounded on god (in a way that poverty, immorality, and cow-genocide, for example, are not) has always seemed odd to me.
(Divine command theory, where you obey God because He's God as such (and not because He's God and He commands things because they're good), is not the most popular way to tie God into your meta-ethics, and it has various semantic problems. In better-justified meta-ethics God is useful as a necessary final cause of existence but it's not immediately derivable what properties He has that make Him a justified final cause, nor how we as creatures should orient our actions towards Him—these are matters of ethics that are somewhat decoupled from "grounding&...
I recognize the title could be more informative. At the same time I believe it says what is important.
I believe in a deity, I believe in mathematical entities in the same way.
The community of LessWrong (from whenceforth: LessWrong) is deeply interesting to me, appearing as a semi-organized atheist, reductionist community.
LessWrong seems very interested in promoting rationality, which I applaud. The effort does seem scattered, though, and this is the reason I post.
One has Eliezer's website with some interesting posts. The same of this community. The community links to some posts when you are coming for the first time into it, and you also have a filter for top posts. One has the blog. And recently, the center for modern rationality (in the same page as harrypoter fanfiction about rationality).
The point being there is no defined roadmap to go from AIC (average irrational chump to make an analogy to Game - which also seems to come up around quite a bit) to RA (again, rationality artist).
I write this post as to maybe generate a discussion on how the efforts could be concentrated and a new direction taken.
Should the creation of the Center for Modern Rationality envision this same concentration, this post may and should be disregard.
If it does not, then I leave it to your consideration.
Hang.