Cthulhoo comments on A few questions on International Rationality - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (86)
This is true, at least in Italy. Most of the concept of LW version of rationality are simply not known.
While Spain and Italy are nominally quite religious (i.e. most people would classify themselves as christian), the majority of people are definitely not fervent believers . Nothing to do with what I understood is the situation in the U.S.: most people never go to church if not for weddings and funeral, and even fewer people follow the (catholic) religious orthodoxy. It's usually a classic case of belief in belief/cached thought: it has happened to me more than once to have a discussion with a "religious" person, only for her to realize in the end that she was more likely agnostic or mildly theist.
Religion has still his enormous political and social weight, of course, but it's mostly inertia.
No, it's more than inertia. Think about lobbies instead.
At the higher levels, for sure, there's an intricate web of relationships that has to be balanced, and religion is still a powerful instrument for some power groups.
(You need to put a blank line after a quotation, otherwise the rest of the paragraph is shown as if it were part of the quotation too.)
Since the second-last paragraph of your post was indeed about such people, I assumed that the last (one-sentence) paragraph was about the higher levels for contrast.