Like so many of my posts, this one starts with a personal anecdote.
A few weeks ago, my boyfriend was invited to a community event through Meetup.com. The purpose of the meetup was to watch the movie The Elegant Universe and follow up with a discussion. As it turns out, this particular meetup was run by a man who I’ll call ‘Charlie’, the leader of some local Ottawa group designed to help new immigrants to Canada find a social support net. Which, in my mind, is an excellent goal.
Charlie turned out to be a pretty neat guy, too: charismatic, funny, friendly, encouraging everyone to share his or her opinion. Criticizing or shutting out other people’s views was explicitly forbidden. It was a diverse group, as he obviously wanted it to be, and by the end everyone seemed to feel pretty comfortable.
My boyfriend, an extremely social being whose main goal in life is networking, was raving by the end about what a neat idea it was to start this kind of group, and how Charlie was a really cool guy. I was the one who should have had fun, since I’m about 100 times more interested in physics than he is, but I was fuming silently.
Why? Because, at various points in the evening, Charlie talked about his own interest in the paranormal and the spiritual, and the books he’d written about it. When we were discussing string theory and its extra dimensions, he made a comment, the gist of which was ‘if people’s souls go to other dimensions when they die, Grandma could be communicating with you right now from another dimension by tapping spoons.’
Final straw. I bit my tongue and didn’t say anything and tried not to show how irritated I was. Which is strange, because I’ve always been fairly tolerant, fairly agreeable, and very eager to please others. Which is why, when my brain responded ‘because he’s WRONG and I can’t call him out on it because of the no criticism rule!’ to the query of ‘why are you pissed off?’, I was a bit suspicious of that answer.
I do think that Charlie is wrong. I would have thought he was wrong a long time ago. But it wouldn’t have bothered me; I know that because I managed to attend various churches for years, even though I thought a lot of their beliefs were wrong, because it didn’t matter. They had certain goals in common with me, like wanting to make the world a better place, and there were certain things I could get out of being a community member, like incredibly peaceful experiences of bliss that would reset my always-high stress levels to zero and allow me to survive the rest of the week. Some of the sub-goals they had planned to make the world a better place, like converting people in Third World countries to Christianity, were ones that I thought were sub-optimal or even damaging. But overall, there were more goals we had in common than goals we didn’t have in common, and I could, I judged, accomplish those goals we had in common more effectively with them than on my own. And anyway, the church would still be there whether or not I went; if I did go, at least I could talk about stuff like physics with awe and joy (no faking required, thinking about physics does make me feel awe and joy), and increase some of the congregation’s scientific literacy a little bit.
Then I stopped going to church, and I started spending more time on Less Wrong, and if I were to try to go back, I’m worried it would be exactly the same as the community meetup. I would sit there fuming because they were wrong and it was socially unacceptable for me to tell them that.
I’m worried because I don’t think those feelings are the result of a clearheaded, logical value calculation. Yeah, churches and people who believe in the paranormal waste a lot of money and energy, which could be spent on really useful things otherwise. Yes, that could be a valid reason to reject them, to refuse to be their allies even if some of your goals are the same. But it’s not my true rejection. My true rejection is that them being wrong is too annoying for me to want to cooperate. Why? I haven’t changed my mind, really, about how much damage versus good I think churches do for the world.
I’m worried that the same process which normalized religion for me is now operating in the opposite direction. I’m worried that a lot of Less Wrong memes, ideas that show membership to the ‘rationalist’ or ‘skeptic’ cultures, such as atheism itself, or the idea that religion is bad for humanity...I’m worried that they’re sneaking into my head and becoming virulent, that I'm becoming an undiscriminating skeptic. Not because I’ve been presented with way more evidence for them, and updated on my beliefs (although I have updated on some beliefs based on things I read here), but because that agreeable, eager-to-please subset of my brains sees the Less Wrong community and wants to fit in. There’s a part of me that evaluates what I read, or hear people say, or find myself thinking, and imagines Eliezer’s response to it. And if that response is negative...ooh, mine had better be negative too.
And that’s not strategic, optimal, or rational. In fact, it’s preventing me from doing something that might otherwise be a goal for me: joining and volunteering and becoming active in a group that does good things for the Ottawa community. And this transformation has managed to happen without me even noticing, which is a bit scary. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who was aware of my own thoughts, but apparently not.
Anyone else have the same experience?
OK. These are the reasons why I don't think religion is a horrible thing. (I don't necessarily think we should always have religion, just that for the moment I don't find it to be enormously bad.)
Yeah, some people have done bad things in the name of religion (i.e. Crusades). People have done bad things in the name of pretty much everything. Some people don't need a reason to do bad things. Yeah, there are other people who might not have done bad things otherwise, who just followed along because they were a member of the community. That's not common to religion, either. People in the Stanford Prison experiment and the Milgram experiment went along with doing bad things because they thought they were expected to, no religion needed. If we took religion out of the world, it wouldn't do much to solve those flaws in human nature.
Religion often advocates a weird morality, i.e. by spending more time talking about abortion than starving kids...but at least it advocates morality at all. This is mostly based on people I actually know, but most of my religious friends have thought quite deeply about what they think of as right versus wrong, and most of my non-religious friends haven't thought it about it at all. Involvement in many religious groups encourages people to become more empathetic, more generous, and more open and welcoming to community members in need. I was a better person, in those ways, when I hung out with Christians.
Religion genuinely makes a lot of people happier, including people I've known who had very screwed-up lives previously. Yeah, maybe they could have become happier by studying happiness like Lukeprog, but it happens no one was around to guide them through that process, and there were people in local churches lining up to have a chance to be helpful and kind and teach them to pray and reflect, and invite them into close-knit communities. Yeah, I would cheer if something replaced religion in this role. I'm pretty foggy on how to design a replacement, and I have nothing near the leadership skills required to actually run one. I didn't get nearly the same pleasure out of LW meetups as I did out of going to church. (No offense.)
I would've had a lot more problems with religion back when it controlled everything, including intellectual thought. I like being able to study whatever I want and fulfill my curiosity with knowledge that wouldn't have been discovered if religion had been allowed to keep its iron hold. I'm glad religious groups don't have as much political power now. But as it stands, I don't think religion slows the rate of scientific progress enough to blot out all the good things it does do.
Religion cements people together into groups that stay motivated and get stuff done, including some stuff I think is misguided (like convincing people Jesus is the solution to everything), but also some stuff I want to help them with, like building schools in the Canadian North. Like I said, I'm a follower, not a leader. I would be incredibly excited about a LW "mission" to somewhere to build a school and buy kids books, but I doubt my ability to organize it.
That's true, but IMO religion makes it a lot easier for people to do bad things, and a lot harder for other people to stop them. It does this by emphasizing faith over critical thinking, and by inventing all kinds of new reasons for doing bad things. Thus, for example, the statement "we should go and wipe out our neighbours because they believe in different gods than we do, and we know that our gods are the only true gods because we h... (read more)