So I have been checking laws around the world regarding Apostasy. And I have found extremely troubling data on the approach Muslims take to dealing with apostates. In most cases, publicly stating that you do not, in fact, love Big Brother (specifically, that you do not believe in God, the Prophet, or Islam), after having professed the Profession of Faith being adult and sane (otherwise, you were never a Muslim in the first place), will get you killed.
Yes, killed. It's one of the only three things traditional Islamic tribunals hand out death penalties for, the others being murder and adultery.
However, interestingly enough, you are often given three days of detainment to "think it over" and "accept the faith".
Some other countries, though, are more forgiving: you are allowed to be a public apostate. But you are still not allowed to proselytize: that remains a crime (in Morocco it's 15 years of prison, and a flogging). Though proselytism is also a crime if you are not a Muslim. I leave to your imagination how precarious the situation of religious minorities is, in this context.
How little sense all of this makes, from a theological perspective. Forcing someone to "accept the faith" at knife point? Forbidding you from arguing against the Lord's (reputedly) absolutely self-evident and miraculously beautiful Word?
No. These are the patterns of sedition and treason laws. The crime of the Apostate is not one against the Lord (He can take care of Himself, and He certainly can take care of the Apostate) but against the State (existence of a human lord contingent on political regime).
And the lesswronger asks himself: "How is that my concern? Please, get to the point." The point is that the promotion of rationalism faces a terrible obstacle there. We're not talking "God Hates You" placards, or getting fired from your job. We're talking fire range and electric chair.
"Sure," you say, "but rationalism is not about atheism." And you'd be right. It isn't. It's just a very likely conclusion for the rationalist mind to reach, and, also, our cult leader (:P) is a raging, bitter, passionate atheist. That is enough. If word spreads and authorities find out, just peddling HPMOR might get people jailed. And that's not accounting for the hypothetical (cough) case of a young adult reading the Sequences and getting all hotheaded about it and doing something stupid. Like trying to promote our brand of rationality in such hostile terrain.
So, let's take this hypothetical (harrumph) youth. They see irrationality around them, obvious and immense, they see the waste and the pain it causes. They'd like to do something about it. How would you advise them to go about it? Would you advise them to, in fact, do nothing at all?
More importantly, concerning Less Wrong itself, should we try to distance ourselves from atheism and anti-religiousness as such? Is this baggage too inconvenient, or is it too much a part of what we stand for?
That's not very surprising. "Democracy" isn't about democracy to begin with. The correct technical term for our political systems is "representative government". Today, that means choosing your next leaders among a select few that pass a number of filters, such as media exposure. The intention of such a system is to select an elite that is genuinely better at ruling us all than laypeople. Whether it actually works is another matter, especially if you look at the conflict of interest that went on in most constitutional processes: rulers writing the laws of ruling.
Democracy, on the other hand, is when the people rule directly. The most famous example of this it antique Athens (if we count women, slaves, and strangers as non-people). To be actually democratic, a political system's decisions must be sufficiently close to the (non-extrapolated) Coherent Volition of the set of people that live under it. Under this definition, representative government could very well be democratic. However, our western governments do quite differently. For instance, I'm sure there are a number of referendums that were subsequently not respected by the relevant governments. And I'm not even counting the times where there was no referendum in the first place.
By the way, I'm not even sure actual democracy would be very good. But it's the best I can think of, short of a Friendly AI.
You mean that "actual democracy" would be better than "representative government"?