Any time you go on Scott’s main blog or the Culture War thread, there are people always arguing in favor of the benefits of religion. But none of them believe in it! What’s the point of being an Atheist if you just want to bring back religion anyway?
To own the libs.
If you aren’t considering how much they dislike the libs, you aren’t modelling them correctly.
It’s a form of elitism. We, the high-IQ decouplers calmly reasoning out from first principles, might be able to handle the lack of a divine moral authority, but without religion to tranquilize them, the masses will destroy civilization with hypergamy or socialism or some other bête noire of choice.
Because Rationality can be a convenient way to take bog standard social conservatism and spin it into a superficially intellectualized form more palatable to these dorks. Basically what it comes down to is that dogmatic organized religion is good if you use big words to explain why it’s good.
Peterson does the same shit except with weird Jungian philosophy and floopy doopy self help spiritualism.
This is a long tradition among “rationalists”; in the nineteenth century, Auguste Comte created a Religion of Humanity to go along with Positivism.
I’ve personally never experienced any material benefit from church attendance despite going for decades so I try to offer some sort of alternative in the event someone takes that advice to heart. My theory is that the social benefits of church stem from strong, preexisting community bonds, not the other way around. In an era of atomization and alienation churches likewise suffer.
tbh I’d be miffed if a person’s main reason for attending church was to meet chicks and make friends. If you’re actually religious you’d know that isn’t the point. You should continue to attend church even if everyone else there is ignoring you because Jesus is supposed to be all that matters.
Some of them are religious eg hlynka
They never really got rid of religion. Most are running basic Christian epistemology but with the spooky shit cut out and replaced with a Scientism. As they hit the limits of science as a truth-delivering mechanism, they pivot. Most are somewhere in the pivot motion, which takes time.
If I were to (over?)generalize I’d say that lots of rationalists experience on some level lots of difficulties in socializing with ‘normal’ people, finding meaning in everyday life, etc etc. They aren’t religious and don’t want to be, but they see the alternative universe in which they were raised as such as one where they wouldn’t be so disconnected and listless.
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Honestly? I’m one of those people, and it’s because it has played a massive role in my life, my family, and my community, and had a complex web of positive and negative effects with a great deal of the positive coming in ways that I haven’t seen replicated since I stepped away. I write plenty of criticism towards faith as well, but I see it as important to distinguish truth claims of an ideology from its lived experience.
Also, it seems like a lot of them read http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religion/ and then just decided to do the opposite.
Because they feel atomized and nihilistic, and they see this as a failure mode of modern, secular society.
Choose your warrior:
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Agree, it’s bizarre. There’s a whole sub-current of, like, people converting to Catholicism or Mormonism so they can get access to the community infrastructure, and maybe/maybe not believing when they get in (thinking they can resist the memes??) but definitely believing after a while. And because the rationalsphere attracts people who take ideas super seriously, that means the religious believers inside it are super srs as well.