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gjm comments on The Problem Of Apostasy - Less Wrong
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We probably could distance ourselves from atheism very easily. We just have someone who is high status post about how "religious/anti-religious discussion is the mindkiller" and encourage people not to talk about it.
We've already done this with a topic. At risk of breaking the taboo (I'll try to stay meta), I would like to remind people that that for the vast majority of LW readers there are at least two major political parties they can support and choose from. These parties do not base their platforms on reality equally nor do their platforms give equal expected utility towards LWers should they be voted into power. A sequence saying "<x> political party is the rational choice and this is why" could be done, yet we choose not to. Not only that, but we actively prevent discussion on it.
We could do it for religion as well if we really wanted to. I don't think the trade-off would be worth it and I think our current system of 'not talk about politics, talk about athiesm' is fine. However, we shouldn't pretend it's something immutable. These things are within our control. We choose the trade-offs we make, and we accept this trade-off.
We (for some value of "we") could do that. But it wouldn't erase all the past discussions on LW (and OB before that) that have touched on religious topics, and in practice it probably wouldn't stop LWers discussing religious topics, still less casually assuming things that are incompatible with conventional religious beliefs. (Even if explicitly religious discussion were strictly forbidden somehow, LWers would still be looking for natural causes and simple explanations, treating evolution as an important fact rather than an anti-God conspiracy, etc., etc., etc.) So it wouldn't do much to make LW readers in oppressively religious regimes safer or happier.
Actually, we could be detected as atheists just by never saying that we "pray for someone's rationality" or "hope that God will help us create a Friendly AI" etc. Speaking about important topics and never mentioning religion, especially when we speak a lot about morality, is suspicious enough.
It's just a matter of how much we're willing to give up for it. If it was decided to be truly worth it, we could use regular expressions to wipe out any post or comment with theism/religion/god/jesus/allah in it.
The question isn't if it's possible or not. It's always possible. The question is "do we want this bad enough to be willing to use regular expressions?"
Just kidding, I mean censorship.
Even further off-topic: even better regular expressions link.