Nick_Tarleton comments on Religion, Mystery, and Warm, Soft Fuzzies - Less Wrong

17 Post author: Psychohistorian 14 May 2009 11:41PM

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Comment author: steven0461 15 May 2009 06:20:58AM *  2 points [-]

The position, as far as I can see, isn't that warm fuzziness is itself mysterious; it's that some mysterious phenomena cause warm fuzziness, possibly because they leave room for the imagination to fill in things more wonderful than the reality. We seem to mostly have run out of such things in the modern world, so maybe the solution is to create more things to be ignorant about.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 17 May 2009 06:02:00PM 5 points [-]

I think there's also an intuitive (naive-realist) view that anything that produces a sufficient level of warm fuzzies must be mysterious: if an experience is strange, powerful, and wonderful, then its cause must be strange, powerful, and wonderful as well. (Think of the amount of magical nonsense said about love, for instance.) It seems plausible that religion exists in the first place largely because of this line of reasoning applied to 'mystical' experience by people who had no way to know better.