LESSWRONG
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All of aumfer's Comments + Replies

Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?
aumfer00

That religions tend to confuse a factual issue (the existence or non-existence of various divine superbeings and their various characteristics) with moral issues, is one of the problems that I'd like to see solved, not contribute to its confusion.

That's precisely what I was hoping to do. Analysis could show the relationship between users' identification as atheist/religious and their surveyed moral attitudes. Presumably this relationship might not be nearly as strong as people think.

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Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?
aumfer00

So you're saying that irrational beliefs aren't harmful?

I thought the point of this site was to help people develop a system to reduce exactly such non-predicting "beliefs."

One of the things that I feel discourages non-atheists from even questioning their belief is that they see atheists as "non-moral." That is, morality doesn't enter into the equation of atheism (it's only belief/non-belief), but it is intimately tied to religion. Codifying the moral beliefs of atheists and believers could help to promote atheism as an alternative to religion. Not to mention the interesting data that could be obtained about moral values as related to self-described religious identity.

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2ArisKatsaris
I believe them to be harmful in general, yes. They can even be catastrophically harmful. Human-extinction level harmful. On the other hand placebo effects exist, so untruth and irrationality isn't required to be harmful in every single specific case and every single specific incident. I don't see how you went from what I actually said to what you thought I said. Please try to make as few inferential leaps as possible when evaluating the words of a stranger. On my part I tend to be precise in what I mean, and I certainly didn't mean what you thought I meant. Among other things. It's not just about epistemic rationality but also about instrumental rationality. Personally I don't want atheism to be an alternative to religion. I want the absence of God to be treated as much a factual matter as the absence of fairies or unicorns or mermaids. There's no inherent "morality" in atheism, nor any inherent immorality either -- same way there's no inherent morality or immorality in lacking belief in mermaids. I'm sure that most evil people nowadays and most good people also, both lack such belief in mermaids. That religions tend to confuse a factual issue (the existence or non-existence of various divine superbeings and their various characteristics) with moral issues, is one of the problems that I'd like to see solved, not contribute to its confusion.
0PrometheanFaun
The Carcenogen is already doing all it can to demolish any grand central church of atheism that might or might not exist, For example, this kind of antimeme spreads like wildfire. There is no need for us to do anything to encourage dispersal and mutation, it is already underway. And, I'm not sure about this, but doesn't humanity already have swarm intelligence setups for generating new concepts, new categories for people? I wouldn't expect we'd need a machine to do that for us. Second, there is absolutely no reason for us to settle for an idea that is not profitable.
6ArisKatsaris
Most of us aren't disbelieving in God in order to "reduce the harmful power of religion", we are disbelieving in God because the evidence has led us to the conclusion that no such being exists.