I recently learned that a friend of mine, and a long-time atheist (and atheist blogger), is planning to convert to Catholicism. It seems the impetus for her conversion was increasing frustration that she had no good naturalistic account for objective morality in the form of virtue ethics; that upon reflection, she decided she felt like morality "loved" her; that this feeling implied God; and that she had sufficient "if God, then Catholicism" priors to point toward Catholicism, even though she's bisexual (!) and purports to still feel uncertain about the Church's views on sexuality. (Side note: all of this information is material she's blogged about herself, so it's not as if I'm sharing personal details she would prefer to be kept private.)
First, I want to state the rationality lesson I learned from this episode: atheists who spend a great deal of their time analyzing and even critiquing the views of a particular religion are at-risk atheists. Eliezer's spoken about this sort of issue before ("Someone who spends all day thinking about whether the Trinity does or does not exist, rather than Allah or Thor or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is more than halfway to Christianity."), but I guess it took a personal experience to really drive the point home. When I first read my friend's post, I had a major "I notice that I am confused" moment, because it just seemed so implausible that someone who understood actual atheist arguments (as opposed to dead little sister Hollywood Atheism) could convert to religion, and Catholicism of all things. I seriously considered (and investigated) the possibility that her post was some kind of prank or experiment or otherwise not sincere, or that her account had been hijacked by a very good impersonator (both of these seem quite unlikely at this point).
But then I remembered how I had been frustrated in the past by her tolerance for what seemed like rank religious bigotry and how often I thought she was taking seriously theological positions that seemed about as likely as the 9/11 attacks being genuinely inspired and ordained by Allah. I remembered how I thought she had a confused conception of meta-ethics and that she often seemed skeptical of reductionism, which in retrospect should have been a major red flag for purported atheists. So yeah, spending all your time arguing about Catholic doctrine really is a warning sign, no matter how strongly you seem to champion the "atheist" side of the debate. Seriously.
But second, and more immediately, I wonder if anybody has advice on how to handle this, or if they've had similar experiences with their friends. I do care about this person, and I was devastated to hear this news, so if there's something I can do to help her, I want to. Of course, I would prefer most that she stop worrying about religion entirely and just grok the math that makes religious hypotheses so unlikely as to not be worth your time. But in the short term I'd settle for her not becoming a Catholic, and not immersing herself further in Dark Side Epistemology or surrounding herself with people trying to convince her that she needs to "repent" of her sexuality.
I think I have a pretty good understanding of the theoretical concepts at stake here, but I'm not sure where to start or what style of argument is likely to have the best effect at this point. My tentative plan is to express my concern, try to get more information about what she's thinking, and get a dialogue going (I expect she'll be open to this), but I wanted to see if you all had more specific suggestions, especially if you've been through similar experiences yourself. Thanks!
(A meta remark: The usual way to quote another person's post here is to prefix lines with the > character, not to use quotation marks.)
Of which I am very glad.
Tribalism is powerful and problematic indeed. But I'm not convinced that tribalism alone is sufficient to create eliminationism — here borrowing Daniel Goldhagen's term for the belief that it is morally right and necessary to exterminate the Other. There are lots of places in the world where distinct tribes coexist, maintaining us/them distinctions, without massacring each other constantly.
So there must be something else involved.
It isn't really clear to me that all the things that we might label "fundamentalism" are really the same social phenomena. Sociologically, there may be different things going on in Fundamentalist Protestantism (the trope namer); in theocratic regimes such as Iranian Shia or Saudi Wahhabism; in medieval Catholicism in its persecution of the Cathars, Albigensians, and conversos — and for that matter in the Stalinist purges or other "secular" "fundamentalisms".
Tribalism may be part of it; but doctrinal intolerance — the notion that people who believe differently should get bullet — seems to be another; and authoritarian loyalty seems to be another still.
We could talk about intolerance in general, rather than "fundamentalism"; but even this raises the difficulty that some people take peaceful disagreement with their beliefs to be a form of "intolerance". There's not a word for this idea that isn't fraught with political conflict.
This is actually an area where I suspect the LW-cluster is much more universalist than most religionists expect secularists to be. The whole concept of "the coherent extrapolated volition of mankind" explicitly takes in all human experience as significant — thus including religious experience. Religious claims don't have to be true in order for religious experience to be significant as an element of human value; after all, Hamlet isn't true either ....
(Mind you, I also think that most secularists are more universalist than religionists expect secularists to be.)
Here I wonder if we (by which I mean the LW-cluster) have been failing to communicate what we mean by "rationalist" and "rationality". One iteration of our Litany of Tarski goes as follows:
If there is a God who loves me,
I desire to believe there is a God who loves me.
If there is not a God who loves me,
I desire to believe there is not a God who loves me.
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
This is a position of profound submission to the universe. When we say "rationalist" here, we primarily don't mean someone who has a commitment to a particular set of beliefs. We mean someone who wants their beliefs to be caused by the facts of the universe, whatever those might turn out to be.
One might then ask, what sort of world is most likely to cultivate and promote the kind of diversity you're advocating here?
I, personally, don't spend any particular effort on deconverting anyone. Not much point: anyone who can be deconverted by less than sufficient evidence can probably be reconverted by less than sufficient evidence.
I would like, however, to find ways to offer more comfort to people who have deconverted and lost their religious social support structure, e.g. been rejected by family. That sort of thing strikes me as acutely unfortunate. But then, my own Christian family didn't give me any particularly acute trouble through my migration from Christian to pagan to atheist.
Thank you for re-clarifying this (yes, I was aware that this was the LW position). But, do most LW'ers think that it should be everyone's position?
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