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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1630 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for October 8, 2025

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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  • 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).

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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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

There is no panacea for delusion and bad decisions, just actions and traits that make succumbing to them less likely.

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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