"If you're sent to Hell for that, you wouldn't have liked it in Heaven anyway." 

This phrase inspired in me the idea of a Slice of Life IN HELL story. Basically, the strictest interpretation of the Abrahamic God turns out to be true, and, after Judgment Day, all the sinners (again, by the strictest standards), the pagans, the atheists, the gays, the heretics and so on end up in Hell, which is to say, most of humanity. Rather than a Fire and Brimstone torture chamber, this Hell is very much like earthly life, except it runs on Murphy's Law turned Up To Eleven ("everything that can go wrong, will go wrong"), and you can't die permanently, and it goes on forever. It's basically Life as a videogame, set to Maximum Difficulty, and real pain and suffering.

Our stories would focus actually decent, sympathetic people, who are there for things like following the wrong religion, or having sex outside missionary-man-on-woman, lack of observance of the daily little rituals, or even just being lazy. They manage to live more-or-less decently because they're extremely cautious, rational, and methodical. Given that reality is out to get them, this is a constant uphill battle, and even the slightest negligence can have a terrible cost. Thankfully, they have all the time in eternity to learn from their mistakes.

This could be an interesting way to showcase rationalist principles, especially those regarding safety and planning, in a perpetual Worst Case Scenario environment. There's ample potential for constant conflict, and sympathetic characters whom the audience can feel they really didn't deserve their fate. The central concept also seems classically strong to me: defying Status Quo and cruel authorities by striving to be as excellent as one can be, even in the face of certain doom.

What do you guys think? There's lots of little details to specify, and there are many things that I believe should be marked as "must NOT be specified". Any help, ideas, thoughts are very welcome.

Max Abrahms, "The Credibility Paradox: Violence as a Double-Edged Sword in International Politics," International Studies Quarterly 2013.

Abstract: Implicit in the rationalist literature on bargaining over the last half-century is the political utility of violence. Given our anarchical international system populated with egoistic actors, violence is thought to promote concessions by lending credibility to their threats. From the vantage of bargaining theory, then, empirical research on terrorism poses a puzzle. For non-state actors, terrorism signals a credible threat in comparison to less extreme tactical alternatives. In recent years, however, a spate of studies across disciplines and methodologies has nonetheless found that neither escalating to terrorism nor with terrorism encourages government concessions. In fact, perpetrating terrorist acts reportedly lowers the likelihood of government compliance, particularly as the civilian casualties rise. The apparent tendency for this extreme form of violence to impede concessions challenges the external validity of bargaining theory, as traditionally understood. In this study, I propose and test an important psychological refinement to the standard rationalist narrative. Via an experiment on a national sample of adults, I find evidence of a newfound cognitive heuristic undermining the coercive logic of escalation enshrined in bargaining theory. Due to this oversight, mainstream bargaining theory overestimates the political utility of violence, particularly as an instrument of coercion.

I found this via Bruce Schneier's blog, which frequently features very valuable analysis clustered around societal and computer security.

I have recently been thinking about this question, "what is it exactly that helps install religious software so deeply and dogmatically into the brain?" Often those who are strongly religious fall into a few categories: (1) They were trained to believe in specific aspects of religion as children; (2) They entered into a very destitute part of their lives (i.e. severe depression, midlife crisis, loss of a job, death in the family, cancer, alcoholism, or other existential problems).

What strikes me about these situations is that emotion generally dominates the decision-making process. I remember when I was a child and attended church camp at the encouragement of my family I was heavily pressured by the camp counselors to "accept Christ" and I saw that there was a positive correlation between my willingness to accept Christ, memorize Bible verses, and say certain statements about behavior in the context of Christian morals and the way that the camp counselors, my extended family, and other adults would treat me. As a result, it was not until many years later that my preference for rationalism and science was able to fully crack that emotionally-founded religious belief installed in me as a child. I know many people for whom a similar narrative is true regarding experiences with alcohol, etc., though it seems to be rare for someone to completely dismiss deeply and emotionally held beliefs from their youth.

Emotion is something we have evolved to utilize. Generally speaking, we need emotion because we have to make split-second decisions sometimes in life and we don't have the opportunity to integrate our decision process on data. If someone attacks me I will become angry because anger will raise my adrenaline levels, temporarily reduce other biological needs like hunger or waste removal, and enable me to fight for survival. Essentially emotion is just a recorded previous decision that works on stereotypical data, or in probabilistic terms it is like basing a quick decision on solely the first moment of a bunch of previously experienced data. The first moment might not be the best descriptor of the data... but if you're in a computational bind you might not be able to do a whole lot better and you'll be biologically penalized for spending your CPU time trying to compute better descriptors of the data. But it is undeniable that decisions we all make based upon emotion are often some of the most powerful and deepest-seated beliefs that we have.

With religion this is especially true. Very religious people, in my view, have this software installed emotionally and then spend years practicing the art of pushing the installed software ever closer to the very act of perception itself, until at some point it is almost the case that sensory data is literally passed through a religious filter before it is even processed and presented for perception. A sunset becomes a symbol of God's love so much so that there is (almost) no physical distinction between the literal viewing of photons depicting the sunset scene and the thinking of the thought "This shows that God loves me." Emotionally installed software presents a very difficult problem. Depending on how close to the act of perception that it has been pushed, it implies there is a remarkably tiny window of opportunity for the presentation of data that could convincingly demonstrate that rational alternatives are better in a number of important senses.  

I'm sure many of you have had debates where you've run into circular logic and unavoidable walls that stifle all useful discussion. Can we as a community come up with a good theory on how sensory data can help to uninstall deep emotionally installed software in someone's brain? I really feel that this is an area that deserves some philosophical attention. Is it the case that if software is installed in someone's brain in conjunction with emotion (and by this I literally mean that the cyclic AMP cycles and other biological processes used for memory formation are made stronger and synaptic connections related to the library of belief concepts (e.g. religious) are reinforced by chemicals released in conjunction with the emotive force of the experience in which they are formed) can only be uninstalled by a similarly impactful emotional experience? It appears that slow-moving rationality and logical discussion are almost physically powerless to succeed as convincing mechanisms. And if this is the case, what should rationalists do to promote their ideas (aside from the obvious social pressure to stop installing religious software in the minds of children, etc.)

Note that in the discussion above I use 'religion' as a specific example, but any irrationally held belief that derives from an emotionally impactful experience would serve the same purpose. And also, here we can assume 'religious' refers to ontological claims unsupported by any evidence and then purported to have day-to-day impacts on life and decision-making. I would be very grateful for any thoughts the community has and hopefully we can generate some useful techniques for understanding how to appropriately uninstall emotional software (in the instances when it's useful to do so)... even the kinds of emotional software that we ourselves (rationalists) often fall victim to in our own imperfect understanding of the world.

So... while investigating Wikipedia I found out about an actual Cult. Of Reason. Revolutionary France. From the description, it sounds pretty awesome. Here's he link. Is this denomination usable? Is it useful? Can it be resurrected? Should it be? Is it compatible with what we stand for? Discuss. Also, note that in French "Culte" does not mean "Sect", it means "the act of worshipping".