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fubarobfusco comments on Open Thread, November 8 - 14, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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There is an atheist argument, "Religious people are only religious because they want to control other people or are controlled by them. Religion is a system of authoritarian control."
There is a religious argument, "Atheists are only atheists because they want to rebel against God. Atheism is an act of rebellion."
Are these extensionally equivalent?
Are there other common arguments from opposed viewpoints that pair up like this?
The "control" argument predicts more specific things than the "rebellion" argument, and so is a more useful hypothesis. But then again, it's not the whole story at all (desire for community, actual belief, glaring cognitive biases), and once you start inserting caveats the testability goes way down. So I'd say neither argument is worth making.
Actually a rebellion argument also predicts something. It would predict that atheists also rebel against other social norms.
Because the competing hypothesis ("atheists are willing to state a true thing even when most of society disagrees") also predicts some degree of general rebelliousness, I think the prediction is more about pointless and self-destructive behaviors.
And if atheists are just allowed to be tricked by the devil, then I don't know how that pans out into other behaviors.
I don't think its accurate to describe them as an opposite pair, more that they both share the same premise (people consider control important/motivating) and derive different conclusions.
You could generate an arbitrarily large number of other predictions from that premise, e.g. Greens support geen policies because they want to control people, blues support blue policies because they don't like the idea of being controlled.
I think a lot of disagreement about religion isn't really about the metaphysical claims, but rather about whether pastors/priests should have more or less influence on people compared to teachers, scientists, writers ... so the people who tend to agree with the pastors' values worry about those values getting lost, and so fret about atheism and rebellion. Seen like that, the disagreement is about authoritarian control vs. rebellion, and the "does god exist" thing is just tribal flag-waving.