I agree that this is the case in some religious communities, and that this is not necessarily the direction a rationalist community should go. (On the other hand, I have a hard time agreeing with the proposition that social pressure in favor of rationality is a bad thing, but I have yet to reach a definite conclusion on the subject.) However, I happen to be familiar with several religious communities where direct and violent pressure to conform is not the case, and it is those communities I wish to emulate.
I feel that the cohesiveness of a community and its effectiveness at maintaining its norms is directly and strongly correlated to the disincentives that it provides for deviating from these norms. Just presence of symbols is not enough.
Of course things like self-selection and evaporative cooling are major factors as well.
Yesterday I attended church service in Romania where I had visited my sister and the sermon was about the four things a (christian) community has to follow to persevere and grow.
I first considered just posting the quote from the Acts of the Apostles (reproduced below) in the Rationality Quotes Thread but I fear without explanation the inferential gap of the quote is too large.
The LessWrong Meetups, the EA community and other rationalist communities probably can learn from the experience of long established orders (I once asked for lessons from free masonry).
So I drew the following connections:
According to the the sermon and the below verse the four pillars of a christian community are:
Other analogies that I drew from the quote:
And what I just right now notice is that embedding the rules in the scripture is essentially self-reference. As the scripture is canon this structure perpetuates itself. Clearly a meme that ensures its reproduction.
Does this sound convincing and plausible or did I fell trap to some bias in (over)interpreting the sermon?
I hope this is upvoted for the lessons we might draw from this - despite the quote clearly being theistic in origin.