I find my mind tends to wander when I read dead-tree books.
Interesting. I have the opposite problem My mind tends to wander when reading stuff on the internet. To truly comprehend what I see on my computer screen, I have to print it and read it from a piece of paper.
Perhaps this is because I need to highlight passages and make notes in the margins. If it was easy to do this with anything I read on the internet, maybe my ability to comprehend from the computer screen would be just as good?
Roko said "do you have any reason or evidence pointing your conclusion?"
First of all, I wasn't concluding anything. As I said, it's just a suspicion. Is there a rule that all speculation on this web site is downvoted?
My suspicion comes from being impressed by the work of Ken Wilber. He is a case in point that I am thinking of. Here is a brief introduction to his work:
Eliezer said: "Even the surveys are comparing the average religious person to the average atheist, not the most advanced theologians to the most advanced rationalists."
Very true. Wouldn't it be a kicker if that was done and we found out that the most advanced theologians ARE the most advanced rationalists? I suspect the chances of something like this being true are higher than most of us think.
logi's comments are in quotes.
"Emotional manipulation is like propaganda".
I'm not talking about emotional manipulation. I'm talking about a healthy emotional life, one that provides authentic happiness. Emotions are wonderful so long as they're guided by reason.
"Can't we just tell people the truth?" Yes, absolutely!
Apparently logi has given up on the idea the transformation, meaning, and willpower are achievable without doing long-term damage to oneself. I totally disagree, it is possible if we just open up our thinking a little bit.
"I'm here for the truth" So am I!
logi said, "Do we really need to simulate drugs to be taken seriously?"
Yes, so long as the competition offers something like it. I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior at age 12, and it was a lasting emotional high that only recently have I been able to reproduce (at age 50). At age 12, my behavior and life really did improve considerably (as well as those around me) for a long period of time, until I finally backslid. I become rational at age 20 (and was quite ashamed of the personal Lord and Savior thing), and wasn't able to ...
Great article. However, there’s one more item that needs to be added to the list to really differentiate us from religious institutions, and that item needs to become the new #1: Offer Transformation that actually works. That is, make being alive a significantly more meaningful experience for people who participate. Do this as well as items #1 thru #10 and we’ll be more popular than any existing religion. The kind of transformation religion offers used to work OK, but not so much anymore because the religious world-view hasn't been updated to reflect ...
pre, if we are to be successful, there needs to be some attitude adjustment on our part. We need to gain some humility, and some respect for what religion has accomplished in the past several thousand years.
We wouldn't be infiltrating, we would be transforming, in the spirit of Martin Luther and Paul the Apostle.
There are many Christian churches that are dying because their theology doesn't speak to people today, and they know it. Mainline Protestants are the most obvious examples, but the evangelicals now realize they are in trouble too:
The idea of rationalist taskforces has its appeal, but given the rate of accelerating change we simply don’t have time to develop a sense of community from scratch which can replace the millennia of development that’s gone into religious institutions. Our best shot is to TRANSFORM existing religious institutions into something that is compatible with rationality (and this requires some transformation on our part too – I’ll talk about this below). The Protestant reformation happened in about a dozen or so decades. Given the trouble that churches are havi...
Motivation doesn't come mainly from fear of eternal damnation, or even from meeting with people that have a common cause (although that is closer to the truth). I think the main reason people are religious is because they have a desire to live in integrity, rather than caving in to the insticts of the reptilian and paleomammalian parts of our brain, instincts which are usually conter-productive in our current social environment. Of course, religious people don't talk like this. They call it "sinning" instead. But it means the same thing. Peo...
Rather than ourselves making the drastic cultural changes that Eli talks about, perhaps it would be more efficient to piggyback on to another movement which is further down that path of culture change, so long as that movement isn't irrational. See this URL:
http://www.thankgodforevolution.com/node/1711
Check out the rest of the web site if you have time, or better yet, buy and read the book the web site is promoting. As you can see from the URL above, cooperation is an important value in the group.
I have been observing the spiritual practices promoted by ...
I agree with ciphergoth that LW is inpenetrable to a newcomer. Even if they could penetrate, the whole downvoting thing is about as unwelcoming as you can get.
I can only conclude that LW is not meant to increase the number of rationalists, it's meant to get ideas on how to increase the number of rationalists.