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Hopefully_Anonymous2 comments on Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable - Less Wrong
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Eliezer, it's a good point, and hopefully writings like these will get the skeptic community (much larger than the reduce existential risk community) buzzing about "bayesian reasoning" as the proper contrast to religion. But it seems to me that religion has already been slayed many, many times by public intellectuals. The cutting edge areas to address, the "hard" areas, are things like universal adult enfranchisement to select policy makers and juries as finders of fact.
We have slain religion in the minds of intellectuals. But we have not slain it in the minds of ordinary people, and for better or worse ordinary people have a lot of power in modern democratic societies. So it seems to me rather imperative to find ways to improve the rationality of ordinary folk, and one very good start would be getting rid of religion.
By outlawing religion? Or by some other means?
Outlawing religion outright in a religious society would cause some serious problems and would probably require a very authoritarian government.
I'd say that's just the kind of thing that would define a government as "very authoritarian".
"Probably"? Are you (and pnrjulius, and JD19) entirely ignorant of the history of the 20th century?
I say probably because it might not require an authoritarian government to enact such a policy. I can imagine realistic scenarios.
Who are you and why are you a cartoon villain?!
Um, seriously though, I think you're confusing cause and effect there.
Lack of rationality causes religion causes lack of rationality causes religion causes lack of rationality --
Thus, if we destroy religion irrationality will resurrect it, and if we improve rationality religion will drag it down again. Depressing.
I dunno -- I can think of many more important things; focussing on religion of all things sounds somewhat arbitrary to me.
Getting rid of religion is a bit like getting rid of the economy or government. Yes, the whole business of ritual (and most other cultural stuff religion claims) can be changed, eliminating religion as we know it today, but simply declaring one day that "religion doesn't exist" will lead to other problems, which may actually be WORSE than some people holding a usually non-harmful belief, or belief-in-belief. Cults, of personality and otherwise, come up as a terrifying option...
Changing religion is a Long Game.
A far more constructive use of one's time, to increase rationality in the population, is to encourage rational thinking among the majority of mankind (who are religious, anyway, so you give them the option of thinking about religion better, thus playing the Long Game).
Uncomfortable truth warning:
Atheists have to concede that religions is widespread because people are in some sense wired up for it. Getting rid of religion, therefore, does not get rid of religious thinking, feeling and behaviour. This can be seen in the prevalence of quaisi-religious rituals, such as going to concerts to worship "rock gods", regarding charismatic politicians as "saviours of the nation", and various other phenomena hiding in plain sight.
A further step, and one that is rarely taken, is realising that atheists and ratiinalists aren't immune. People who identify as atheists don't want to concede that they might still have some baggage of religious behaviour because that means they no longer firmly in the Tribe of Good People..but that is itself a religious pattern.
Exactly. As I said, the best we can hope for is to slowly eliminate religion as we know it today. Not to eliminate religion, period.