As alway some interesting views and thinking get found here. Some of the statements I think I would push back on are: The median is confused. Well, I think it would be more accurate to say EVERYONE is confused if only because we're so limited in both our knowledge and any ability to observe so much of our reality on earth. Forget the metaphysical and philosophical/religous elements. Also, when suggesting confusion about somethings as complex as "the world" I'm not entirely sure there is a good common denominator to define not confused.
I think the characterization of most religous people as above -- and I'll cast it in the worst interprestation here -- as blindly hoping something will save them from bad shit and give them good things is just wrong. I've personally known a bunch of very religous people who are as rational or more rational than most athiests I've met. And, given that we simply don't know, strict atheism (as in a rejection of the monogod concept as reality) is as much a statementof faith and any belief in such an entity. But at least the religious will own their posistion as one of faith. Too many atheists will rebell against the acusation they, in the end, are makes statement based on the faith in their logic. Now, to be fair, more than a few "ateists" are really agnostics who simply say they don't find the arugements for a god convincing and use that as their day-to-day but acept they could be wrong. Why bring up this? It goes back to the assumption about who is and is not confused about the world.
What assumptions are loaded into the overal story here?
I'm not sure if this is insightful enough to share here, but I'll try anyway.
A fair amount of wondering has been done about how FAI could figure out what humans actually want. A school of thought says persuasively that what we say we want is not what we actually want, so what we really want has to be extrapolated.
If we take the end-game promises of popular religions at face value, it occurs to me that Buddhism promises something between non-existence and wireheading (nirvana - "to blow out"), while Christianity promises wireheading (eternal bliss - heaven). I am not familiar enough with other religions to make statements about them.
In my anecdotal experience, it seems to me rationalists are quick to dismiss wireheading and non-existence as desirable possibilities. We experience this grasping desire to live, create, discover, and experience. We're not sure to what end, but we feel this indescribable zest, and we're convinced it's going to be great.
Look at people getting mental orgasms from Elon Musk launching a car into space. Whatever problems you have, space exploration is not going to solve them, and if your life is in harmony, you don't need space exploration. And yet there's this palpable zest about an unspoken implication... That perhaps an age of discovery is dawning, an age of adventure, an age of transcending our present problems and tackling larger ones. An age of being awesome.
There's a type of person that feels this zest, and this type is not a majority. The median person on Earth is confused by the world. They believe in things like Jesus Christ, and they press on in hope that adhering to divine guidance while they attempt to survive the trials and tribulations of life will be rewarded with not having to do this again. To such a person, the sight of two metal meteors descending from the sky with loud sonic booms, igniting engines and landing in synchrony does not necessarily inspire awe or enthusiasm as much as confusion and terror.
We, the few, are the seekers of something we cannot describe, and most of us find it hard to identify with the mindset of the median individual. The median individual does not want the excitement we seek, they just want an end... a release.