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eli_sennesh comments on Robert Aumann on Judaism - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's really not that hard, especially in countries with institutionalized religions. Just keep going to mosque, saying the prayers, obeying the norms, and you've got everything most believers actually do, minus the belief.
But lying your entire life, even to your children (you can't risk teaching them anything other than the official truth) can be mentally exhausting.
Add the fact that core religious ideas seem intuitively appealing to most people, to the point that even ostensibly atheist people often end up believing in variants of them, and you get why religion is so popular.
I don't think David was saying that lying is hard - but that lying convincingly is hard. There's a whole bunch of non-verbal, unconscious signals we send out, that at the very least, make it seem like "something is off" when we lie.
Yes, but Islamic societies don't actually have a Thought Police. They care about the public affectations and the obedience to norms associated with religion, not about private convictions. Honestly, do people in the West really think Arabs actually believe 100% of the nonsense they spout?
I'm talking out of my ass now (I'm not sure if you are, have you lived in or studied the culture?) but I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle.
If you truly came to resent the culture and beliefs of those around you, and didn't compartmentalize, I suspect two things would happen:
You would be incredibly unhappy.
Others would be pick up on your contempt, and it would be harder to make friends.
Yes, both of these happen. Also, it's harder to be friends even with the people you already know because you feel dishonest all the time (obviously because you are in fact being dishonest with them.)
Well, they do compartmentalize. They're also fairly unhappy, but not to a level where they're going to disrupt their entire social sphere and be ostracized (at best) from polite society for speaking up.
(Knowledge level: have talked to an n > 7 number of Arabs from the Arab world, usually Jordanians, Palestinians and Egyptians.)
Yes. Maybe not 100%, but 75-95%.
Let me attempt to phrase this well: people in the West believe that one shows status through high-handedness, by concealing emotions and not getting riled-up. People in the Middle East believe that one shows status through bombast and braggadocio.
They mostly know the nonsense they're spouting is nonsense, but in their minds, they'd be weak and low-status not to spout it, even in the expectation that nobody would really believe it (because it's nonsense).