The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
This past Sunday, I received baptism into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
As some of you may be aware, I have been passively orbiting this church with various degrees of interest over the course of my entire life, as a result of family connections and several very close friends. Like most non-Mormons, I found various reasons not to pursue any active interest in the church: the total lack of anthropological/scientific evidence for historicity of its central religious text; the concerning signs of Joseph Smith’s charlatanry and general strategy of “making it up as he went”; the onerous lifestyle restrictions; the financial burden which tithing imposes, etc.
Furthermore, I’m occasionally cited here as an able critic of Christian ideas about theodicy, the efficacy of prayer, and the apparent contradictions between the idea of a loving and omnipotent God on the one hand, and the sheer amount of random and wanton suffering present in our world on the other. People have linked to my somewhat recent discussion with @FCfromSSC regarding this matter as an example.) Thus, it may strike many users here (and does seem to have struck at least some people in my IRL life) as surprising to see me commit myself to this church.
However, about eight weeks ago I was approached by a pair of pleasant-looking young sister missionaries at the mall while leaving the gym. Although I was sore and tired and just wanted to go home, I couldn’t resist stopping to speak with them. We had a conversation about what I believed about the Book of Mormon, and about my research into, and interest in, the church. They invited me to attend services with the local Young Single Adults ward that upcoming Sunday, and I accepted. I decided that this would probably be my last opportunity to sincerely immerse myself into the church, at least on a provisional basis, and see what my experience would be. I also, for reasons I’ll keep personal, saw this as at least possibly an answer to prayers I’d offered not too long ago. Since that day, I have consistently attended Sunday church services (both the sacrament meeting and the subsequent scripture discussion sessions, where I’ve been an active participant even since my first week of attendance as an “investigator” of the faith) and plan to continue doing so. I have successfully given up coffee (not caffeine entirely, although I’m actively working to reduce my daily caffeine consumption and dependence) and pornography. (I had already drastically decreased my alcohol consumption, so reducing it even further to zero has been trivially easy.) I’ve attended various social events organized by the ward, which has allowed me to ensconce myself into a community of bright, wholesome, surprisingly-mature and well-grounded young people. I finally decided that baptism is the next important step — a costly signal of my escalating commitment.
It is difficult for me to articulate the reasons for my decision in a way that would meet the intellectual standards of this forum. I still have many of the same doubts I did before accepting baptism; I still don’t believe that the Book of Mormon is a historically-accurate description of real events that took place in the pre-Columbian Americas. (Rather, I currently believe that it is an allegorical text, intended by God to usher in a new dispensation by providing a scriptural text which would be narratively and intellectually compelling to the specific audience to which He intended it to be presented, given their particular interests, level of historical understanding, and literary/religious frame of reference.) I still have a lot of questions about Joseph Smith’s character, intentions, and leadership qualities. I’m still working on wrapping my mind around what it actually means to aspire to live a Christ-like existence; toward what political/philosophical positions and actions does this obligate me? There are, however, many elements of Mormon theology and the Mormon lifestyle which appeal very strongly to me. (Ideas about the Plan of Salvation and the nature of the afterlife being chief among the theological appeals, and the sexual conservatism being the primary secular/lifestyle appeal.) I was strongly influenced and encouraged by a post a few months ago by @2rafa — arguably my favorite poster here, and the one with whom I probably feel the greatest degree of intellectual and personality kinship — in which she implored people here to embrace the benefits of a loving and welcoming religious community and to try hard not to ruin the experience by thinking too deeply and skeptically about the inner workings of the theology. I decided that if she could do it, I should probably try to see if I could as well. So far it has been more enriching than I could have imagined.
Over the coming weeks I will undergo the rites of the lay priesthood common to all male members of the church, set myself up to begin automatically tithing, and begin working towards obtaining a “temple recommend” allowing me to enter LDS temple buildings. I am actively working on finding a spouse with whom I can raise a family; I’ve already been on a lovely date with an intelligent and creative woman (one of the few female members of the ward somewhat close to my age, as most are closer to 18-20) and have another one already arranged. I expect at least a few of these people to become long-term friends. I don’t know what else to expect in terms of how this will affect my life trajectory, what will be asked of me, etc. All I know is that right now I am finally beginning to taste what it might be like to truly believe that I have a Heavenly Father who loves me, that my Redeemer lives, and that he has provided me with a way to dwell with Him eternally along with my loved ones.
Congratulations on finding a faith, it makes me happy to know I played some (very) small part in it, and I wish you all the best on that journey.
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Uh, okay.
I mean, you do you and I hope this gives you whatever you are looking for, but for myself, I have occasionally considered joining a church (again) for the community and such, but I am just fundamentally incapable of lying to myself, and also fundamentally incapable of believing in mythology. So to attend a church knowing that I consider all their beliefs (at least on the spiritual and metaphysical and cosmological level) to be bullshit would just feel like I'm being an insincere actor. To say nothing of the LDS's ... well... utterly nonsensical prehistory.
Yeah, I'm aware most churches (including the LDS) would be happy to have me in the congregation even as a disbeliever. I can see the pull it has for you personally (hot, chaste young girls eager for marriage and babies). But for me personally it would still feel deeply dishonest.
@self_made_human made some good points. Most missionary churches are geared towards picking up young disaffected people like you. And I don't underestimate the power to "fake it til you make it." Eventually you may come to sincerely believe.
I will say all the Mormons I know are very pleasant people and if I were to consider a church and could overlook not having a speck of faith in me, I'd consider the LDS strongly. (Honestly the greatest trial for me in terms of adhering to their rules would be giving up coffee.)
But the lack of faith and the requirement to at least pretend to believe a lot of bullshit things would be a dealbreaker for me.
I kind of feel like you're someone entering a cult, eyes wide open, saying "Sure, I see their game, but it won't work on me," even as the bait is perfectly obvious. But there are worse cults to fall in with, I guess.
Good luck.
Is it that, or "Sure, I see their game, and honestly? I wanna be taken in. It's mostly upside compared the status quo."
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A paragraph I could've written myself. Never been a smoker and giving up alcohol wasn't too bad, but my morning coffee is often the best part of the day.
I’ve switched to Yerba Mate (which is fully permitted under current doctrine) and it has not been a major step down. Eventually I might try and find some sort of caffeine powder (I know there are caffeine pills, but the ones I’ve seen are like 200mg, which is a massive amount to consume all at once) to mix into water or something, to reduce my sugar consumption.
Big fan of caffeine pills. I agree about 200mg being too big. You can buy 100mg or even 40-50mg. Pills exist in many sizes, though at the smaller end, there's more of strips/mints/gums. It's also not hard to cut pills, or even to buy powder and diy some gel caps.
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I swear I've thought you were married with kids for years.
Ha, you must have missed my first and only post to the main site.
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I am increasingly happy to have turned down invitations from two pairs of hot bubbly blonde Mormon missionary girls in a row, I had an intrusive thought pop into my head, perhaps I should attend their sermon that Sunday, I wasn't doing anything important and it would be funny. I'm glad I didn't, because I look at this and think "there but for the grace of
Godmyself go I".I find the invocation of @2rafa's advice particularly interesting. Her argument, as you present it, is to "embrace the benefits of a loving and welcoming religious community and to try hard not to ruin the experience by thinking too deeply and skeptically." This is a known strategy, but coming after a discussion on the downsides of wireheading, it creates a certain cognitive dissonance.
At the end of the day, humans are very prone to rationalization. You are clearly benefiting to some degree from compromising your epistemics. You've landed a date, and it might lead to marriage. You've found a sense of community. Is the cost of lying to yourself worth it? That's for you to decide. My concern is that you will likely succumb to the deep pressure to suppress your doubts, to fall in line and parrot the party line so hard you forget that you once didn't believe it.
Maybe you're the exception. Maybe you've found a way to have your cake and eat it too. Or maybe in a year or two you'll be writing posts about how you used to think the Book of Mormon was allegorical but then you prayed about it and received personal revelation that it was literally true, and I'll be reading them through my fingers like a horror movie.
The part that really gets me is how perfectly optimized the whole system is. The missionaries approaching you at the mall when you're tired and vulnerable. The Young Single Adults ward (which I'm convinced was invented by someone who read about PUA tactics and thought "what if we made this... holy?"). The way every social incentive pushes toward deeper commitment. It's like watching a chess grandmaster play against someone who's only just learned how the pieces move. Someone who, deep down, doesn't want to win, and would benefit in obvious ways from throwing the game.
If you had been capable of living a lie, of snatching all the benefits of their community without compromising yourself (leaving aside the virtue of not being a liar), then I'd be marginally less concerned. Good luck, I can't really find it in me to condemn you, but I wish you hadn't gone down this rabbit hole even if it has hot blondes and fun, family-friendly activities along the way.
Oh no, you could have had lots of babies with a beautiful blonde wife. The horror, the horror. So glad you escaped that tragic fate.
I forget when I heard this, could have been 12 years ago, maybe 15. But it was an episode of Radio Lab about telling yourself a lie to beat addiction. I remember two segments from it, one where two women quit smoking together, and decided that if either one of them starts smoking again, they'd give the other $10,000 or something like that.
The other was about this Russian treatment for alcoholism. They take the alcoholic, and they put a medical implant in his arm, and tell him the first time he drinks after this, he'll get horrifically sick. The second time he'll die. The doctor is laying it on incredibly thick. Then in the back half of the episode, after all this build up, he breaks kayfabe and is incredibly jovial. Admits the whole procedure is a hoax, and the pill they implant in the arm dissolves after a week or two. But it will make them incredibly sick if they drink with it in (which they always do), but it could never kill them. Still, believing it will grants the procedure a pretty good success rate.
If it were easy to Just Be A Good Persontm then we wouldn't have nearly the problems we have, nor would the self help section at book stores be so over flowing. If there were one lie you could believe, and it would make you nicer, give you hope, give you purpose, and generally make every conceivable facet of your life infinitely better and more rewarding, and it might not even be a lie, why not?
Well... I guess for that last part I'm more speaking about my own personal dalliances with Catholicism. The Book of Mormon is still bad bible fan fiction, but I can't judge too harshly these days.
This is Scotland. I'm convinced that natural blondes are a myth.
That sounds like a disulfiram depot or implant. Which is a real thing. That particular story about Russian doctors is not something I can source, but they're Russians, so I'll believe it.
Unfortunately, disulfiram depot and implants don't work. They don't beat placebo, or beat it by a pointlessly small. margin.
Oral disulfiram? That works well. It works even better when the patient is motivated and is supervised by a doctor or someone they trust. Current guidelines stress the latter.
(By motivation, I mean wants to get off the booze, not scared of dying)
Either way, it works by giving you a case of Asian Flush. Your body can't break the alcohol down properly, which screws you over with even a small drink. It doesn't matter much if you "believe" it will work, since it still beat placebo. Your disbelief will sort itself out quickly when a chug of beer leaves you wishing you were dead. The scare tactics are both uniquely Russian and uniquely pointless.
Skill issue, I'm afraid. It's not like self-help books actually do anything, with narrow exceptions for things like targeted CBT books and checklists. People should actually read scientific literature and look for things that usually work. Don't read books on dieting if you can get Ozempic.
That is a really, really big if. And the "might not be a lie" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It depends on how strong the might not is, and how honest you're being about it. I am not categorically against such a tradeoff, but I don't see myself making them. Even the more speculative things I believe (and which also give me hope) like the feasibility of mind uploading or AGI, those are probabilistic estimates and not things I intentionally delude myself into believing to avoid dealing with mortality. I genuinely believe they are more likely than not in my lifetime, and I engage deeply with the counter-arguments.
You Will Know Them By Their Fruits.
Mormons have produced a High Quality Civilization, even by Anglo standards (compare to the native English working class, beset by various issues).
Their tribe, their identity, their mode of being and living works, by an objective, scientific measure, indeed according to the only measures by which a civilization should be judged.
You, dear friend, are the one making the emotional argument. I am not emotional about it. I agree that this is a faith founded on a ridiculous story by a charlatan. But, by Jove, it works.
I genuinely expect less sloppy use of terminology from you.
Firstly, I think it's clear that this is a values difference, or at least weighting different values differently. I am not categorically against potentially trading a bit of epistemic clarity for more mundane wellbeing. Mormonism simply asks too much of the former. That does not make this an "emotional argument".
We're not living in the Expanse, the Mormons are a small clade that's barely been around for a hundred and fifty years, they're not the rulers of the stars. It is far from clear how long their ability to maintain their community and way of life will hold. Finally, what's objective about it? In the strict sense? Do you seriously think that GDP per capita, indexes of mental health and TFR are such robust metrics that they overshadow everything else? Do you not care about anything else?
Imagine a very benevolent alien parasite. If you accept it, it will perfectly manage your life to maximize your health, social success, and contribution to a harmonious society. Your measurable outputs, your "fruits," will be spectacular. You will be happy and productive. The only catch is that you, the conscious entity reading this now, will be gone. The parasite will be piloting your body, living a life that is, by all objective measures, better than the one you are living now. Few of us would take that deal. We seem to value something like authenticity or self-sovereignty, even at the cost of being less "objectively" successful. For me, deliberately adopting a belief system I consider false, even for its wonderful benefits, feels too much like accepting the parasite.
Finally, you're on the AGI hype/doom train. It would confound me beyond belief if the Mormon memeplex was the dominant one even in the near future. That's really unlikely, to say the least. In other words, a choice like that is to tell myself I have compromised my values, and for what? Something I can get anyway?
A recipe for an existence spent in the lobby of life, constantly waiting for something big to happen. Even if you agree with Yud that extinction is probably inevitable, there is nothing for it but to live as if it isn’t. (Speaking of that kind of ‘lie’ to the self…)
I believe the average Mormon in Utah lives a better life than the average person with a similar genetic makeup in almost every sense. This is backed up by metrics but is also backed up by vibes, aesthetics, and my personal experience.
How should we determine human flourishing? That’s a big question, but questions like “would I rather live in a slum in Kinshasa or a slum in Copenhagen?” or “is quality of life higher in Singapore or South Sudan?” can help up determine the baseline correlations if we can find it within ourselves to approach an answer.
Semantic babble. Will the parasite have my memories, personalities and genetics? Will my children be genetically identical to my children if it doesn’t exist? Will ‘I’ love them the same way? Will my family not notice any difference? Will I be the same person in every conceivable non-magic sense? Will I act within the bounds of my own personality, developing naturally according to the genetic and environmental destiny with which I would otherwise have been aligned? If a comprehensive scan of brain and body were performed, would I be entirely identical to my current self?
If the answer to all of the above was ‘yes’, then sure, you’re just talking about a magic, better version of me. This is just a ‘brain upload’, something you yourself have expressed interest in.
You are not adopting it, you are suspending disbelief, no differently to when you watch a movie or play a video game and don’t obsess over plot holes. As others noted, we do this thousands of times a day, tell ourselves, friends and family thousands of little lies, just so stories. It is only your sentimental attachment to this specific narrative about religion and God that makes it harder for you to understand the same applies.
I want to push back on this characterization, because I think it misunderstands both my beliefs and their practical implications.
I have been quite vocal about the fact that I don't agree with Yudkowsky's >99% p(doom). At that level of confidence, the rational move is to take out high-interest short-term loans, blow up data centers, or just do a lot of drugs. My estimate is closer to 20%, high enough to take seriously, low enough that planning for normal futures makes sense.
What does a 20% p(doom) actually look like in practice? I hedge against short-term unemployment risk. I should invest in index funds that will go brrt if nothing happens. I should worry slightly less about dementia and type-2 diabetes than I otherwise would. That's... pretty much it? My day-to-day life is not particularly different from the me who didn't care about AI x-risk at all.
(Also - and this is important - I think good outcomes from AGI are quite likely too, though I'm genuinely uncertain how they stack up against the 20% doom scenario. There's even a 10-30% chance that progress stalls well short of ASI within my lifetime.)
The Yudkowsky principle you're invoking - "live as if extinction isn't inevitable even if you think it is" - is about allocating agency and resources to timelines where they matter most. It would really suck to have no retirement fund if Nothing Happens, whereas I'm completely out of luck if I get paperclipped. This isn't a lie. It's just expected value calculations weighted by subjective probability.
I'm not sitting in the lobby of life. I'm living pretty normally while maintaining slightly different priors about the future than most people. If that's "waiting for something big to happen," then so is having any belief about anything that might occur later.
I think we're talking past each other on the parasite analogy. That's mostly my fault, I could have been more precise. Let me try again.
I meant something like: a sophisticated impersonator takes over your body and does a good-enough job fooling your friends and family. It's better at your job, takes better care of your health, makes you more successful by every external metric. But it's not a high-fidelity emulation preserving continuity of consciousness - it's more like a skilled actor who studied you for a while and does a convincing impression. The underlying substrate of "you" - whatever makes you you is gone.
If it were a perfect upload that preserved everything about your cognition, memory, and sense of self? Sure, I'd take that deal. That's not the scenario I was gesturing at.
The parallel to religious conversion: from the outside, Hoff joining the LDS church and becoming a better, happier, more successful version of himself looks great. From the inside, at least from where I'm standing - it looks like he's agreeing to gradually replace the parts of himself that care about certain kinds of truth with parts that care about different things. Maybe that's a good trade! But it's a real trade, not just a costume change.
I don't think the movie comparison or typical suspension of disbelief as applied to the consumption of fiction works.
When you watch a movie, you don't actually believe it's real.
I will caveat this by stating that the unconscious parts of your brain do believe it's all real but they're dumb and always do that, I'm more concerned about higher order functions that pay attention to fact checking.
The neuroscience here is genuinely interesting (and fucking complex): your theory-of-mind networks engage with fictional characters, your prediction-simulation systems model what might happen next, but your anterior and lateral prefrontal systems - the parts that handle "identifying reality" - are turned down, not off. Very few people have the phenomenological experience of believing a movie is literally happening in front of them, even while emotionally engaged.
This is why a punch thrown at your face makes you flinch even when you know your friend is joking, why walking on heights in VR makes you feel sick despite knowing you're on your bedroom floor. Different cognitive systems operating simultaneously at different levels of awareness, with different relationships to "truth."
But religious practice asks for something categorically different. It's not just engaging your simulation systems while keeping your reality-testing active. It's more like... deliberately training your reality-testing systems to mark certain propositions as true, or at least to stop flagging them as questionable. To move them from "entertaining possibility" to "thing I orient my life around."
You can attend a church service while maintaining private doubts, sure. Lots of people do. But the full program usually requires something more than just showing up and enjoying the vibes. At minimum it requires acting as if you believe, which means routing your major life decisions through a framework you privately think is false. At maximum it requires actually believing, or at least successfully forgetting that you don't. I don't think Hoff is psycho/sociopathic enough to do all of that without truly coming to believe.
On the "thousands of little lies" point: I think you're equivocating between different categories of things that aren't really comparable.
White lies to spare feelings ("No honey, your ass looks great in those jeans") are not the same as lying to yourself. I can tell my girlfriend something without believing it myself. The cognitive operations are completely different.
Social conventions and politeness rituals ("How are you?" "Fine, thanks!") are not the same as adopting a comprehensive metaphysical framework.
Suspension of disbelief in entertainment is not the same as restructuring your entire life around propositions you privately consider false.
The scope and stakes matter here. Joining a church isn't like doing a Renaissance faire LARP on weekends. It's signing up for a package deal that includes: how you spend 10% of your income, who you can marry, how you raise your children, what you can consume, how you spend your Sundays, what you teach your kids about the nature of reality. The stakes involved and rigor required are rather different.
I want to be clear: I'm genuinely not arguing that Hoff made the wrong choice for him. Maybe he has successfully threaded the needle of "get all the benefits while maintaining enough epistemic flexibility to avoid the worst failure modes." Maybe the Mormon community really is good enough that it's worth the tradeoffs. Maybe his particular brain is constituted such that he can hold contradictory beliefs in separate magisteria without it bothering him. Some people seem to be able to do this! I am not those people. I find such contortions somewhere between impossible and insane (and no, I'm not autistic).
But I don't think I can, and I'm not convinced it's just "sentimental attachment" that makes me think the tradeoffs are real and substantial rather than trivial. The Mormons have built something impressive, I genuinely agree with you on that. But "it works" and "you should do it" are different claims, and the gap between them is exactly the space where individual values, personality, and epistemic commitments live.
You seem to think I'm being precious about a distinction that doesn't matter. I think the distinction is load-bearing, and that treating it as precious is actually the correct response. We might just have different values here, which is fine - but let's not pretend it's obviously irrational to weight epistemic integrity heavily in this calculation.
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I'm increasingly skeptical about this whole "lying to yourself" business. The reason is, we lie to ourselves in so many ways. Sometimes because we are ignorant (and the reality being so vast, most people are ignorant in a real lot of subjects), sometimes because we are lazy, sometimes because it's too hard to face the unadorned truth, sometimes because the truth would be detrimental to what we want to achieve, or maybe because it's more profitable to believe something other than the truth. Is it really that huge a deal doing it one more or less time, or this is just an inflated ego speaking - "they may have fooled those idiots, but they are never fooling ME!". And then he goes and buys stuff and drinks stuff and eats stuff because the TV told him so (one of the ways, not a personal observation).
Really, if you think about it for a while, there's a lot of self-fooling involved, and probably necessary, for normal life. True, self-fooling about "is there a God and what does he want from me?" may be a bit bigger deal than self-fooling about "is eating this fast food meal really good for me?" but is the difference in kind or merely in degree?
I do not say it's necessarily always good to be fooled. I'm just saying maybe sometimes it's not that bad, if the beneficial outcome is worth it. And also maybe when people say "I just can't let myself be fooled" it's something else than the insatiable lust for truth is speaking. Because they must know they are letting themselves be fooled already in so many ways - at least if they give themselves a time to think about it. I can imagine a person that goes radical "no fooling ever, for any reason, I'll always get to the ultimate absolute truth in every matter" and lives a life like that - but that would not be what one calls a normal life, and would likely be very unpleasant to be both in and around it.
I dunno. I can't speak for every other human alive, but I think I go through my days with a negligible amount of fooling myself involved.
When I do, it's more of a "just one more turn of Civ before I go to bed" thing rather than true self-delusion. I knew I wasn't particularly likely to stick with going to the gym, but it was still positive expected value to try.
I eat fast-food despite knowing it's bad for me. I am not lying to myself at all, if I choose to interrogate that impulse, I recognize it's because I like some fast food on occasion, and I can handle the downsides. Which is all true, at least for me. I'm not crying while pigging out and then telling myself it won't happen again.
Is that really so hard to go through life without lying to yourself? I don't think so. If there is some kind of lie that's load-bearing for me to lead my life, it's not at all obvious to me. I have meaning, I have hobbies and friends. I might not always say the truth, but that's not the same as not being aware of the truth.
Acting against one's idealized self-interest is not lying. Having moral failures and being a flawed human being is not lying. Being ignorant is not lying. To lie requires you to know the truth and then deny it.
How much research did you do on the downsides before you ate that meal? Did you spend a considerable time to be sure you know all of them, assign proper probabilities and weights to every single one, and properly value each and every single one of them according to the best of current scientific knowledge, and then also assign a proper probability and weight to the fact that the current scientific knowledge may be imperfect or plain out false, and add that risk to the calculation too? Or did you just think "yolo, one burger won't kill me, here I properly evaluated the risk and step into this with my eyes fully open now!"? If you did the latter, you are like about 100% of other people and you are fooling yourself. If you did the former, you are like about, within any reasonable rounding, 0% of other people and all other people would call you "weird" if they knew. And that's just a puny burger which, yes, most likely won't kill you (unless the luck selected you to be the random victim of the Burger Serial Killer, which is also a possibility - did you account for it in your evaluation of risks?)
Of course it isn't obvious to you. That's the whole point.
Do you think that you are actually aware of The Truth? I mean, that all statements you believe in are objectively true, and for every statement you can determine (if it's logically possible, let's not get into paradoxes here) whether it is true or not, and that determination would be the objective Truth? If you think so, you are either an avatar of God, or have a giant ego and are fooling yourself. If not, then there must be statements that aren't true and yet you think they are true. But you probably don't spend each available moment of time to find out which those are and correct them. You are fine with it being, more or less, as it is. For some people, one of such statements may be "What is written in the book of Mormon is a literal description of events that actually happened". For you, it may be a completely different statement.
I think you're conflating two very different things here: "lying to yourself" versus "being a computationally bounded agent operating under uncertainty."
Nothing you've described about the burger scenario is a lie. Seriously, none of it. The only way it might be is if I had a strong suspicion burgers were far more unhealthy than I was acknowledging, but refused to do the research because I was afraid of the results. That would be lying. Not doing exhaustive research isn't.
Information comes at a cost. You also have to spend the opportunity cost of time spent processing that information. Taken to its limit: are you sure that opening your eyes isn't bad for you? With arbitrary confidence? What if rolling out of bed gives you a stroke? Did you read the literature on the link between sedentary lifestyles and DVT risk? If you did, did you run a replication? Did you pre-register your claims?
We are, unfortunately, computationally bounded entities. We have to prioritize. You recognize that, which makes it all the more absurd that you even raise it in the first place. The topic we were debating was lying, which is not the same as failure to instantiate the idealized form of perfect rationality.
This is profoundly unhelpful. If you're postulating that there must be some kind of lie lurking in my worldview that I'm willfully or accidentally blind to, and that it's effectively unfalsifiable from both of our perspectives, why bother asking? You can't trust my answer either way.
But fine, I actually did something about this, even before I swe your comment. I fed several hundred of my comments into two LLMs and asked them to carefully review them for evidence of lies I'm blind to. The best candidate they found was that I hadn't signed up for cryonics without doing my own cost-benefit analysis, just reading other people's. Fair enough, though I'd call that laziness rather than self-deception, and I'll probably fix it at some point. Nothing else stood out. If you have a better method for interrogating myself for falsehood, I'm all ears.
When have I ever claimed to be a universal Truth detector? I'm a goddamn Bayesian (or trying to be), so of course I'm aware of the importance of accounting for uncertainty. It's entirely possible that I hold false beliefs. In fact, it's practically guaranteed.
The thing is, if I knew where I was wrong, I would just correct myself. And spending "each available moment of time" self-scrutinizing is daft and counterproductive for agents that want to do other things with their time. I'm such an entity. But I do spend a ridiculous amount of time intentionally trying to learn things and examining my understanding. I'm the kind of person who enjoys learning for the sake of learning, and appreciates having my errors shown to me. Why else do you think I'm hanging out on this forum?
What I do is consider the value of truth, accounting for the unavoidable tradeoff between accuracy and relevance. Does it matter if the 12th digit of Pi is odd or even? Not in the least to me. Even five post-decimal digits are enough to calculate the circumference of the universe down to a hydrogen atom.
Does it matter what the risk of AI extinction is? Or the evidence for HBD? On the most appropriate antipsychotic for the obese? Believe it or not, I try to do my due diligence on things that actually matter.
Those people are engaging in far more motivated reasoning than I am (assuming I am). The difference between having unknown blind spots and knowingly adopting a belief system you privately reject is not one of degree, it's one of kind.
Hoffmeister explicitly stated he doesn't believe the Book of Mormon is historically true, then got baptized into a church whose central truth-claim is that it is historically true. That's not computational boundedness. That's not rational resource allocation. That's not honest uncertainty. That's adopting a belief system you privately reject for instrumental benefits, or at least acknowledging that the process might turn you into a person who cares less about the truth. That's what I'm calling lying to oneself, and it's genuinely different from the everyday epistemic compromises we all make.
Everyone has some motivated reasoning, sure. I believe I do much less of it than most, and when I do, it's by accident. But there's a difference between "I round off my exercise benefits slightly because I want to feel good about myself" and "I'm joining a high-demand religion whose foundational claims I think are false because I want community and a trad wife." The magnitude and stakes matter.
Do you think there's any belief system someone could join that you'd consider epistemically irresponsible? If Hoffmeister had said 'I don't believe the earth is flat, but I'm joining a Flat Earth society because they seem nice and I want friends,' would you defend that the same way? If not, what's the relevant difference?
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As I recall, my objection to wireheading was largely that it seemed unaesthetic and depressing, that I don’t want to be the human version of a mouse in a dopamine button experiment, etc, and that I think it is probably inherently unfulfilling. I even included a personal example of what I think that kind of life leads to among the very rich, which you refuted by implying they probably just need to recalibrate their own measures of life satisfaction.
By contrast, looking at the happy, stable, prosperous, fecund, clean, healthy and attractive Mormon community and concluding that it would be a smart move to join them is precisely the opposite philosophical choice, the equivalent of taking up the hard work of, say, going to the gym or forcing yourself onto 20 first dates in a year because you know the outcome of a healthier body or an eventual happy marriage and family are things that will fulfil you more than your present existence.
That is not to disagree completely. I won’t speak for @Hoffmeister25, but I think it would be hard for me, or most of us here, to truly convincingly become Mormons in the religious sense. There are some very smart born Mormons here who have indeed, despite being part of this largely (post-)rationalist and atheist community, resisted the urge to look behind the curtain, and I respect them for that, but I have looked behind the curtain and read the catastrophically persuasive takedown of the entire structural basis for the faith written by that one guy and widely shared online and I think I would find it hard to overcome that.
But does it matter? Hundreds of generations of extremely intelligent people lived and died as true believers of the absolute sort, could not even conceive of an atheism in the way we do today. Hoff’s children will be believers, will (or had least may) resist looking behind the curtain they have known their whole lives, and so at ‘worst’ he is making a sacrifice for their happy and prosocial future.
At some point, and I think a few ‘sacred cows’ of liberalism are like this, you have to look around you and determine that actually maybe I’m the one who believes something that makes for a worse, less fulfilled society, no matter how “objectively true” it is (and often it isn’t, even, objectively true, although I think on religion it might be). Better that my children should be happy believers than unhappy philosophers.
That is a poor analogy. As far as I'm aware, while hitting the gym or going on first dates are difficult and uncomfortable, they do not necessarily include lying to yourself. Sure, maybe it might be instrumentally helpful to overestimate the gains, or project self-confidence you lack. If you're getting 20 first dates at all, you likely don't need that.
Friends, family and community do not necessarily require lies either. Though it might be occasionally helpful to claim you believe your team will win or that the casserole was delicious.
Even wireheading doesn't necessitate lying either. It well might in practice, but I'm sure there are people who would enter of their own volition and without delusion regarding the implications or consequences of their actions.
As much as I would like to claim otherwise, being smart, thoughtful and a fan of the tenets of rationality isn't a guarantee that you'll succeed at the process. It doesn't even guarantee you'll be happier. Even from a values perspective, many people just don't care about truth and internal-coherence as much as I do. There is no panacea for delusion and bad decisions, just actions and traits that make succumbing to them less likely.
It matters to me. That is not the same as me saying it should matter to him, or you. For what it's worth, I have plenty of respect for all the atheists who came before, who lived in a time of much greater ignorance, who still figured out the truth without the same tools at hand.
But, as I've replied to Hoff:
Indeed, and the problem is that it’s possible bad decisions are often a consequence of truth-seeking and an obsession with internal coherence. It may be that deep, personal introspection, and in particular a willingness to face the cold, hard emptiness of the universe with a grand disdain for spirituality and superstition is bad for us. Rationalism has no real answer to this beyond ‘nuh-uh’, ‘you’re doing it wrong’ and ‘maybe, but it doesn’t matter’, all of which I find profoundly unsatisfying.
When I think about the most fulfilling and happy moments of my life, none of them had to do with my (lifelong, since I was perhaps three or four years old, and really I have no recollection of ever having any belief in god) atheism. There were no euphoric moments, was no enlightenment by my intelligence. Instead I think of simple company, family and friends, the feeling of being part of bigger and greater things, being at peace with my life, my past, my future, and in time with my passing.
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See the semi-recent post by @WhiningCoil about realizing he was raised incorrectly, or even that substack post by Bismarck where he realizes he, in fact, is the rootless cosmopolitan.
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I’ll combine my response to you with my response to @Amadan, since you’re both basically making the same point here.
So, let’s take epistemics totally out of the equation for a second (since that’s all just stuff happening within my own head) and focus on the material tradeoffs here. Cost-benefit analysis. Supposing for a moment that the theology is all total bunk, let’s assess what I’m likely to get out of it, versus what I will be asked to sacrifice.
I’ll start with the sacrifices, as they are substantial. Obviously I will have to give up alcohol, coffee and tea; those are all things which have featured heavily in my social life at various points in my life, and all things which I enjoy consuming. (Others would probably also struggle with giving up tobacco, vaping, or drugs, although fortunately I never got seriously into any of those.) Tithing ten percent of my income will be a significant financial outlay, and will likely considerably reduce my discretionary spending, at least in the short term. I will likely be asked (although not forced) to take on duties to support church functions, including things like periodically performing baptisms for the dead. I will likely lose some friends who will be outraged by my joining a church whose stance on homosexuality and transgender issues they find repellent/offensive. Probably most notably, I am removing from my potential pool of romantic partners any woman who would not be comfortable converting to the church in order to be with me; this means closing off a great many possibilities and massively reduces my options. (There are also epistemic questions in terms of how I will explain/justify my beliefs to others, including my future children, but I’ll put those aside for now.)
Okay, so what do I get in return, materially speaking? As you’ve both noted, I get access to a pool of chaste young women with good values, who come pre-selected for being interested in children and family. (This is not actually the primary reason I’ve made this decision, although given my complaints about dating on the Motte in the past, I can understand why you both zeroed in on this topic.) I become enmeshed into a social network of upwardly-mobile people who may provide employment opportunities. I get to be around people — women, even! — who haven’t elected to make their entire personality about how queer they are and how much they hate anybody to the right of Hasan Piker. I get to feel (and to be perceived by others as) useful, respected, and necessary as I’m guided toward a position within the church that can utilize my talents. I get a good, airtight excuse not to even be asked to engage in behaviors that could be harmful or addictive to me. And, if necessary, I even get access to the church’s housing assistance program and other pieces of the famous “Mormon welfare”.
Again, this is all leaving aside questions of whether or not any of the religious claims of the church are true. I’m becoming far more comfortable with the proposition that at least the stuff about the afterlife (and the pre-mortal life, which is another cool aspect of LDS theology) is true. As for my other concerns about the church? I’ve been very transparent with the missionaries about those, including the guy who did my “baptism interview”, and it hasn’t been a problem.
The thing is, religious practice, for the vast majority of human beings who have ever existed, has probably always involved a delicate dance between public and private beliefs. It’s not like I’m getting constantly grilled to make sure that I really super seriously believe and know that ancient Levantine Jews sailed to America and built a continent-spanning civilization that lasted for centuries. That’s not actually very important to me, and doesn’t have any tangible effect on my behavior in the here and now. It could potentially pose an issue later on when I have to be a proper paterfamilias and spiritual teacher and guide to my future children. This is something I’ve already thought a lot about and will continue to figure out how to navigate.
You’ve both expressed horror and consternation at the thought that at some point I might actually convince myself that it’s true. As if this would be some catastrophic loss for me. But I honestly have to ask both of you: why would this be bad? What actual bad effects would that have on my life? I wouldn’t get to win any more arguments against sincerely-believing Christians/Mormons? Okay, what am I actually getting out of participating in those arguments now? I’ll have a flawed/incomplete model of the cosmos? Okay, how is that actually going to negatively impact my actions? Like, I agree that epistemic hygiene is a virtue, and that reducing cognitive dissonance is good, but clearly these things are not the only terminal values a person can have. What other concerns do you actually have about this decision? Do you just find it yucky? What would you have me do instead?
Will it harm you to believe in an ancient Levantine civilization that spread across the Americas without leaving behind any archeological or anthropological traces? No, not in itself. Nor would believing that the Archangel Gabriel dictated the Quran to an illiterate 7th century Arab goatherd. Nor would believing that the sun revolves around the Earth.
For me, anyway, epistemic hygiene is pretty close to my terminal value. Truth is the highest virtue. Without truth, no other principles are meaningful. Yes, I know, no one can ever know the truth, we're all fumbling towards the closest approximation of the truth we can perceive, but you should be striving towards it, not averting your eyes from it. You and @2rafa are basically saying "Truth is less important than other things, like living in a nice community with people who make life pleasant even if they believe silly things."
I cannot adequately express how strongly I disagree with that.
I could live in that community. I could agree to follow their rules. I could tolerate their silly beliefs. I could not lie about what I believe. (I mean, if my life depended on it, I guess I would pretend. I'd feel dirty about it, and murderously resentful.)
I understand why some people choose to believe things that are beneficial to them, or at least go through the motions of believing and studiously avoid looking behind the curtain. But I can't do it and I kind of look down on people who do, to be honest.
To take this slightly out of the religious context: I live in a very blue bubble and most of my friends and family are very woke. Despite being pretty liberal compared to the average Mottizen, I'm basically a dissident now. I have never lied about what I believe, but I do frequently stay silent when certain topics come up, because it's not worth the fight. Recently, even my silence has occasionally been noted and my inability to make convincing sounds of affirmation is probably going to lose me some friends.
I resent this, and I don't see it as being a lot different than pretending to believe in the Angel Moroni and Joseph Smith's golden tablets, if my social relationships depended on pretending to take them seriously.
On the subject of "Believing things that are convenient, or at least pretending to believe them because they are pro-social," I'm going to bring up a more pertinent example for you. I have made the point before that if HBD is true, it's going to be a very hard sell to, for example, black people, that they should just accept their lot in life (specifically, the lot that white supremacists would like to assign to them). I got downvoted and scolded for that on the mistaken assumption that I was advocating the Noble Lie, that we should pretend HBD isn't true even if it is. But that is never what I said. What I did say is that I can sympathize with people who are unwilling to believe something that might be true but which has brutal implications for them and their loved ones, and that whatever social contract we negotiate based on that is going to have to take that into account. But other people would absolutely embrace the Noble Lie. Indeed, I personally think a lot of liberals have–on HBD issues, on trans issues, on immigration–in other words, they know the truth but pretend not to, and will actively attack those who speak it. This is, from their perspective, pro-social. You, I am pretty sure, would disagree. But in the realm of religious beliefs, the Noble Lie is what you are advocating. "Even if Joseph Smith never discovered any golden tablets and the Lammanites didn't exist, pretending to believe it gives me access to a great community." Well, okay then. I understand why you would make that decision. But I don't respect it.
But I already told you that I don’t believe that. It’s actually not required for me to express that belief! At least, nobody has required me to thus far. As I said, the missionaries who spearheaded the process of my baptism are aware that I don’t believe that! It was part of the very first conversation I had with them, before I even went to church with them!
Now, there are things I was asked to affirm in my baptism interview to which I could only answer “yes” given a non-literal interpretation of the question. An example would be, “Do you believe that the Church and gospel of Jesus Christ have been restored through the Prophet Joseph Smith? Do you believe that [current church president] is a prophet of God? What does this mean to you?” Now, the Church does have an official stance on what it means that “the gospel was restored”: because of the Great Apostasy, God revoked the keys of the Holy Priesthood from all earthly churches, until finally providing several otherworldly visions to Joseph Smith in the 1820s and then leading him to discover and translate the plates containing a historical account of Christ’s true teachings to the Nephites. This account shows humanity how to return to the pure gospel and worship practices given to Adam and promulgated among the first generations of human prophets.
I don’t take this account literally. I don’t believe that Adam was real, which means I don’t believe that he was the first prophet of the “true gospel”. Because I don’t believe this part of the claim, the rest of it can only be interpreted symbolically or esoterically. The way I approach the idea of a “restored gospel” is informed by conversations I have had with intelligent Catholics and Orthodox, in which their account of what they actually believe about God and creation and the nature of the cosmos is so wrapped up in mysticism and symbolic reinterpretation and thousands of years of commentary by church leaders that it becomes totally impenetrable and incomprehensible. I do not want to have to sift through 2,000+ years of biblical hermeneutics in order to even begin to grasp God’s plan for my salvation. By clearing away those millennia of cruft and theological rabbit-holes, the LDS church can return to a reading of the Bible which embraces plain language and concepts that normal people can work with, while also building a High Church structure similar to Catholicism without all the historical baggage. It’s a sort of “post-Protestantism” that takes what works about Catholicism and Orthodoxy, discards what clearly doesn’t work, and allows for a 21st-century reinterpretation of Christianity.
The church’s concept of “continuing revelation” and its relative youth mean that its theology is still very much being built and codified and refined as we speak. It can respond in a more agile way to emerging scientific disciplines such as genomics, archaeology, and astronomy. It’s not beholden to millennia-old canon. To me, all of that is what I mean when I say that this church is “the restored gospel of Jesus Christ”. Whether or not the golden plates were literally written by ancient Hebrews is irrelevant to me.
When we’re assessing the value of a particular Noble Lie, we have to assess what belief in that lie actually demands of its believers in the here and now. I would argue (and have argued) that the belief in universal human cognitive homogeneity is bad not simply because it’s false, but far more importantly because of the specific object-level beliefs and political actions which it obligates. If somebody agreed with all of my political positions, but did so basically by accident as a result of false-but-useful beliefs, it would be counterproductive for me to try and reason him out of those beliefs.
Furthermore, many Noble Lies have a neutral or even unambiguously positive effect on their believers. For example, let’s say I was actually adopted at birth, but raised to believe that my adoptive parents were my biological parents. Now, we can come up with reasons why knowing the truth might be (or might at some point become) instrumentally valuable for me: perhaps I have some hereditary predispositions toward certain conditions, and knowing my true parentage may help me more effectively navigate my medical decisions; also, if there is some not-insignificant chance that my true parentage will be revealed to me later in life against my will, it would have been better for me to have been made aware of it early and in a gentle way, so as to reduce the feelings of betrayal and identity crisis. That being said, for most adopted individuals, it’s actually far more adaptive and identity-affirming to go their whole lives believing the “lie” rather than to be confronted with the truth.
So, is any given religious belief more like a lie that makes its believers stupider and more evil? Or is it more like a harmless lie that is, on average, equally as — or more adaptive than —knowing the truth? Certainly the religion to which I’m converting does demand some pretty specific object-level beliefs and actions. I happen to think that, with the exception of the prohibition on coffee and tea, the demands it makes of its members all have very clear benefits from a consequentialist perspective, and generally make its believers into better people, with better political beliefs and a better lifestyle, than the alternative. Go peruse /r/Mormon, and especially /r/ExMormon, and you’ll get an idea of the sorts of people who hate the church: the most cynical, MSNBC-brained, Reddit-poisoned people in existence. If those are the church’s enemies, I have to say that I prefer those who have figured out how to live with the Noble Lie.
I mean the problem with this approach is that the church fathers have written down things from the beginning. We have a pretty good idea of what they believed about the gospel, Christ, sacraments, church structure and so on. It does not match with Smith’s restoration. Ignatius of Antioch refers to Christ as God before we have a codified New Testament. There are references to bishops in early Christian texts, there are references to sacraments. The earliest known Christian catechism is the Didache, it’s pretty short and you can read it online. It’s not Mormon. There’s no mention of preexisting souls, God once being a physical being, or Christ and Lucifer being related, etc. it’s not present in the early church.
This makes even a metaphorical restoration nonsense.
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Your Mormon apologia isn't of much interest to me–I can get similar superficially convincing treatises on why Catholicism or Protestantism or Islam is Actually Very Sound and Rational and The Best Way to Understand God from their adherents. You've chosen to believe, and it looks to me very much like you wanted a religion and went shopping and chose the one that suited your goals and lifestyle. Cool. But choosing which things you believe ala carte is very much against the spirit of most religious practices. That is of course between you and your faith. Whatever.
But your defense of the Noble Lie is profoundly unconvincing and even amoral. Adopting a false belief system and pretending to believe in it is wrong even if you find it instrumentally useful.
If someone accidentally agrees with all of your political positions because he thinks God told him you're a prophet, you might appreciate his support, but it would still be wrong of you to encourage him to believe you are a prophet. Telling an adopted child he's an actual biological child? In fact, I do believe you should tell an adopted child the truth (at an age-appropriate time and in an age-appropriate manner), and that not doing so is, in some sense, evil. There was another thread recently about Santa Claus. I don't have strong beliefs about letting little kids believe in imaginary things, but I will say there is definitely a point at which you should stop encouraging it. I am not saying telling a lie is never, ever justified under any circumstances, but in my opinion, those circumstances are extremely limited, both in situation and time.
If you think religious Noble Lies are good because it makes believers behave in an appropriate manner, I wonder why they can't be persuaded to behave without those beliefs. I am sure you are familiar with the old dialog between a Christian and an atheist: the Christian tells the atheist he's scary because without belief in God, the atheist can just decide that murder is good. The atheist responds that the Christian is scary, because he's saying it's only his belief in God that keeps him from murdering.
Needless to say, I find the atheist position more convincing. I think people should be convinced murder is bad without resorting to "Because God says so." If you want people to live a Mormon-ish lifestyle, you should be able to sell them on the virtues of that lifestyle without fables about Lamanites and golden tablets.
As for measuring them by who hates them, that seems a particularly poor way to choose who's right. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. In my blacker moments I won't say the thought of voting to make wokes cry hasn't occurred to me, but I've never considered joining a church to own the libs.
Then you have clearly missed what I have said, both here and elsewhere, about this church specifically. My mother was born into, and baptized into, the LDS church, before leaving it as a teenager. I come from several generations of Mormons, going all the way back to one of the earliest waves of Scottish converts. It is the only extant religious tradition to which I can claim to have an authentic ancestral connection; my dad’s side of the family, so far as I can tell, has not had any serious religious convictions for several generations now. Mormonism is all I’ve got in terms of an inherited faith.
One of the primary things that attracts me to this church is precisely the fact that I’m not just choosing it a la carte from a menu of options. If I was, this isn’t the one I would pick! I would just pick one that still allowed me to drink coffee and beer and a nice glass of white wine. I would pick one that didn’t have such an improbable origin story and didn’t require so much epistemic legwork to accept. The fact that I’m instead twisting myself into some knots epistemically in order to make sense of this church’s claims should be evidence to you that I’m not just opening up a menu of religions and picking the one that suits me the best.
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Everyone is at liberty to value truth and internal coherence as much as they care to, or not at all.
At the end of the day, the cost-benefit analysis is your own. I can only lay out the reasons I faced what seems like a very similar choice, down to the church and cutesy missionary girls ambushing me on a bridge back from work, and still turned them down.
The costs are honestly not awful, at least the material ones. Giving up drinking? That's just plain healthy for you. Coffee and tea? Stupid to rule out really, but not that big a deal. 10% of your money? It also buys you a strong social-safety net.
My last driving instructor was a Mormon. Very pleasant person, hardworking, open-minded and patient with my foibles. I was a bit concerned when I learned that he didn't believe in health or home insurance, trusting the church would have his back, but that seems to work out for him. Honestly, Mormons seem decent enough, even if I sincerely believe they're crazy, more so for believing in a religion that is even more of an obvious fraud than the rest. You could do much worse by becoming a Scientologist or joining the Nation of Islam.
No, really, that's about it. I wouldn't do what you're doing precisely because I value epistemic hygiene that strongly. I am a big fan of having true beliefs about the world, as true as I can make them as imperfect, computationally bounded entity in an uncertain world. Truth doesn't have to comfortable, and it often isn't. It is hardly the only thing I value myself, but the primary reason I see little appeal in Mormonism or any other religion is because they're false.
That's enough for me.
I suppose it is easier if you're on the fence, epistemically speaking. I have no idea how you got there, and honestly, there's no point talking about it. We know how debates about religion end on the margin. As I've said, you could do worse. You're selling your soul for a relatively low price, and getting quite a lot for it.
Your beliefs are the map by which you navigate the territory of reality. Willfully accepting a major inaccuracy in one part of the map, even a part that seems purely metaphysical, creates a kind of intellectual vulnerability. It sets a precedent that comfort, community, or spiritual fulfillment can override the process of evidence-based reasoning. The problem is not that believing ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America will cause you to miscalculate your taxes. The problem is that it requires you to build and maintain a cognitive partition, a special zone where different rules of evidence apply. Over time, it becomes very difficult to keep that partition perfectly sealed. It creates a pressure to harmonize your other beliefs with the core tenets you've accepted, which can lead to further distortions down the line.
You might not win arguments against Christians anymore, which you correctly identify as a low-stakes loss. But you might be asked to make decisions about your children's education, about medical care, or about political issues based on principles derived from a flawed foundation. A worldview is not a collection of independent propositions; it is an interconnected system. Introducing a known falsehood is like introducing a single line of buggy code into a complex operating system. It might not cause a crash today, but you have created a systemic instability that may manifest in unexpected ways later.
Unfortunately, as your nod to your future status as paterfamilias suggests, you're not just selling your soul. You're selling those of your future children.
That? Beyond the pale for me. I think religion is bad enough as is, but it's even harder to shake off when it's drilled into you from birth, and just about all of your social status and community hinges on staying within its framework. My understanding is that while Mormons aren't as hard on apostates as, for example, Muslims beheading heathens, it's still social death to deconvert. If your children wanted to leave, they'd likely lose you. And then you'd face the choice of being with them, or keeping your own standing.
Every incentive, from the Young Single Adults ward to the social pressure against apostasy, is optimized to keep people within the fold. From a systems-design perspective, it's a very neat trick.
By raising children in this environment, you are choosing to place them in a system where leaving the faith often means losing their entire social world, and potentially their family. You are trading their future intellectual autonomy for their present (and likely future) social stability and happiness. This might even be a good trade. But it is a trade you are making on their behalf.
What would I have you do instead? The honest answer is that the alternative is much harder. It involves the difficult, atomized work of building a community from scratch, of navigating a dating market full of misaligned incentives, and of finding meaning without a prefabricated script. It offers no guarantees. It is easy for me to sit here and champion the virtues of a difficult and uncertain path that I have chosen.
So I cannot tell you that your decision is wrong according to your own values. I can only report that, from my perspective, you are accepting a deal that I would have to refuse. That I recently refused. You are trading a commitment to accuracy for a suite of tangible and powerful social benefits. You may even be correct that, for the average human, this is a utility-maximizing strategy. My concern is that the price is higher than it appears, and that the bill will be paid not just by you, but by the family you hope to build.
Good luck. I genuinely respect that you are going into this with a level of self-awareness that is uncommon. I hope the trade-offs prove to be worth it for you.
But it very likely means he's having a family and children. The LDS attorneys I know are out-reproducing the non-LDS ones by a ratio of 3:1 or 4:1 (actually more given all the ones I know with zero children, such as myself). At what cost epistemic hygiene if it means no children?
Being an atheist doesn't make you infertile, so that's a questionable question in the first place. I really doubt that that's the tradeoff he's facing, if it is, I'd recommend getting a mail order bride or becoming a sperm donor.
I agree it doesn't cause it, but the correlation is present.
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Probably very little to none, as you've stated before.
The cost would be eternal damnation in the afterlife. Pascal will take your bet, and I'll offer him some default swaps on the side.
Choosing to get baptized into a transcendental faith, especially (a nominally) Christian one, after or because of creating a list of temporal pros and cons is wildly contrary to the faith itself. The whole point is to "hate the world" and constantly seek to prepare for the afterlife.
I don't know enough about Mormon theology to offer any specific guidance or raise any ideas for you here. Personally, I consider it to be basically a multilevel marketing cult.
I don't think this is what Christian faith is about (obligatory note: I am not a Christian and have no authority to speak for them). There are some people in it that do that, but it's in no way an universal requirement, at least to my extent of observing many Christians.
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This sounds more like Gnosticism than Christianity.
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I didn’t say that this list is why I got baptized. But if I’m trying to justify/explain the decision to people who are totally uninterested in any non-secular reasons, it makes sense to actually take stock of what is happening on a secular level.
That being said, I will openly admit that I have no interest in “hating the world”, nor in spending my every waking hour preparing for the afterlife. I don’t actually believe that this is what Jesus demands of me, and if it is, then I’m going to fail to live up to his demands. I do think the things of the world, including the works of man in the material world, are beautiful and important and meaningful and worth preserving. I’m not especially concerned with the prospect of a rapture that will sweep away the civilizations of men and totally remake the world; I will leave that for future people who will be around for it to consider more closely. I think there are benefits to trying to check my own animal instincts by weighing them against the example of Christ-like charity and temperance, but I certainly do not plan to sell all of my possessions and forsake all material desire, as seemingly demanded by the Jesus of the Gospels.
(also @sarker and @JarJarJedi)
Here's a post from Catholic Answers that is already more fleshed out than what I could scribble into a comment: LINK
@Hoffmeister25, specifically:
We'll probably just hard disagree here, but there is no "weigh against." It isn't okay to be just the right amount of selfish. In the Imitation of Christ, we continually make hard attempts towards sanctification. We can make progress but will always fall short of his perfect example. That's the inevitability of sin. The good news (Good News?) is that through grace we can be forgiven our inevitable sins. But they remain sins nonetheless. I get worried when I see things like your phrasing "weighing against" -- because this can easily become an obstinate habit towards sin paired with a self-forgiveness.
Yeah so my problem with the idea of Christ as the “perfect example which all of us must try to emulate” is that Christ was basically exempt from a lot of our terrestrial concerns, on account of being a divine being with magic powers. I obviously cannot emulate Christ’s supernatural healing powers, nor can I emulate his ability to rise from the dead. If I attempt to emulate those, I will actually just make my life worse, and look very stupid in the process. Furthermore, there are aspects of Christ’s life which I actively wish not to emulate: the whole “being tortured and then martyred” thing, obviously, but also the part where he died unmarried, childless, and penniless. Things like material resources and a familial posterity were unimportant to Christ because they were distractions from his mission (which he knew to be fairly short-lived in a temporal sense), but they are (and should be) extremely important to humans. Taken to its logical extreme, a world in which every human tries to live the most “Christ-like” life possible is an anarcho-primitivist proto-Communist world, devoid of the concentrations of wealth and power that allow for anything resembling higher civilization to take shape. This is a world to which we can aspire only if we truly believe that Christ’s return is literally imminent within our lifetimes, rendering any need to build for the future irrelevant.
So, which elements of Christ’s life and personality should I, or can I, seek to emulate? I can emulate his kind-heartedness, his boundless self-control and resistance to temptation, and his leadership qualities. I can strive to extend grace and the benefit of the doubt to those around me, and I can strive to eliminate within myself passions and temptations which lead me to harm myself and others. I can imbue my actions with a greater import because I know that I am being watched and that there is a higher plan toward which I should focus my efforts. This, to me, is the most a religion can really demand of its adherents. That’s also what, to me, separated something like Mormonism from a “cult” in the way modern people use the term. A literal reading of the Biblical Christ’s imprecations would lead an adherent to give up all material possessions, to abandon his or her family and loved ones, and to eagerly await the rapidly-approaching end times. Since the end times did not actually occur during the lifetimes of the church’s early converts, I think it’s safe to say that not everything Jesus said was meant to be interpreted totally literally.
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Excellent post.
Just wanted you to know that in spite of (or because of*) our stringent disagreements on certain issues, you remain one of my favorite posters here and you're one of the posters who continues to make TheMotte worthwhile, so I really appreciate what you do.
(* Ilforte once told me that my "value system deserves oblivion", and I still cherish that as the nicest compliment I've ever received on the internet. You don't want an interlocutor who's just going through the motions of nitpicking this or that argument. You want an interlocutor who opposes you on a deep spiritual level. That's where the good stuff is.)
Thank you. That's a very kind thing to say. For what it's worth, I am far happier debating you, as a sincere and charitable interlocutor, than I am with many others I strongly disagree with.
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Wow what a surprising turn of events. I wish the best of luck! I converted to catholicism almost three years ago now, and I have let my theological doubts get the better of me, and haven't been to church since February. My godfather did call me last night out of the blue to let me know that he and my godmother are having a second child, which did briefly remind me why I joined the church in the first place (same with a wedding I attended a few weeks ago). Unfortunately, mass seems to continue to be very spiritually empty for me, and a lot of the apparent benefits of the church (spouse, community) haven't been very prominent in my parish recently.
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Congratulations on finding a faith my friend. I converted to Eastern Orthodoxy a few years back myself, though I had more direct religious experience than you share here. Of course, as you probably know, it can often be hard to put into words the way God speaks to us.
I hope things work out for you, and I encourage you to be honest about this with your priest or whatever the Mormon equivalent is. Before coming in I wrestled with my faith and belief quite a bit, and continue to. It's a normal process for intelligent religious people in the modern world, and I wish I had known that during my atheist years.
I'm curious to see how this may change certain political stances or perhaps cultural stances you've espoused here in the past. One of my friends always says, Christ demands that we sacrifice our cynicism. Which has been true for me!
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I know a number of devout LDS members, and they're all over the place on the caffeine issue. Coffee is a clear no, but opinions diverge widely on caffeinated sodas and energy drinks. I'd say that's a lower priority than the big steps you've made in other areas.
And the Jews get a bad rep for being rules-lawyers. What exactly is so condemnable in coffee or tea that isn't caffeine? Is it all the tannin? I sincerely doubt that John Smith would have given chugging Monsters a pass if they'd been a thing back then.
As I understand it, the prohibition comes from Words of Wisdom from Joseph Smith, not the Book of Mormon. It wasn't until 1921 that following it because a prerequisite for temple admission, so the history of following it is different than the history of following the Book of Mormon, hence some divergence on the issue.
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The specific prohibition is against “hot drinks”. Coffee and tea are brewed hot. Monster (as far as I know) isn’t.
Cold coffee? Soup?
What kind of soup are you brewing?
I'd hope most soup would count as hot, and preferably a drink.
I think the point was that soup is cooked, not brewed.
You can make a soup by frying, say, various raw ingredients and then pouring water over them in a big pot and bringing it to the boil and then eventually after some time consuming it. There are ways of making coffee that are mechanically extremely similar.
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Every person in the church with whom I’ve discussed it has been very clear that caffeinated drinks, other than coffee and tea, are unambiguously permitted. They believe that eliminating addiction from your life is pretty much always an unalloyed good, since it allows a fuller use of your agency and self-control, but that to a certain extent the church is willing to meet people where they’re at and to allow some leeway, particularly for things like caffeine which have clear benefits alongside their drawbacks.
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